本雅明在Portbou
【发的fb，懒得翻译了】
Yesterday I hiked the famed Walter Benjamin Trail (Chemin Walter Benjamin) across the French-Spanish border from Banyuls-sur-mer to Portbou. Also known as the “Fittko Route” (or the “Lister Route“ at that time), this trail was travelled by Benjamin alongside a group of fellow Jews during their attempted flight from Nazi to America via Francoist Spain and then Portugal in September 1940, immediately prior to his suicide by morphine overdose after learning upon arrival in Portbou that they would be deported back to Germany the following day. (After Benjamin’s death, the others were allowed passage the next morning and many more would escape via this route.)
Stony and overgrown with thorny ferns in many places, this 13-km trail proved challenging even for two young people with reasonable hiking experience. One can only imagine the physical exhaustion Benjamin must have felt after traversing the Pyrenees, all the while dragging with him (albeit with help from his guide Lisa Fittko and others) a large suitcase that allegedly contained his most important manuscripts. (The suitcase, vividly remembered by Fittko, would later go missing after his suicide.)
A memorial named “Passages” (Passatges) now stands next to the Portbou cemetery, where Benjamin (mistakenly registered as “Benjamin Walter”) was buried. After the expiry of the five-year lease for the initial niche paid for by one of his fellow travelers, Frau Gurland, Benjamin’s remains were deposited in the cemetery’s common burial ground, alongside his obscure contemporaries deprived of name and memory. There is an inscription on the glass at the bottom of the tunnel before the passage abruptly ends halfway down the cliff. It is a quote from the paralipomena to “Theses on the Philosophy of History” written earlier that year, which befittingly reads:
It is more difficult to honor the memory of the anonymous than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of those without names.
I was reminded of an exam question submitted by Hannah Arendt that I came across a few years ago while flipping through past CST Fundamentals exam cards in Foster Hall. The question goes:
Thucydides and Trotsky, The Peloponnesian Wars and The History of the Russian Revolution, have often been compared. The similarities are obvious. Both authors write about events in which they had actually participated; both turned to writing after being deprived of participation and were living in exile; both emphasized their reliability in the usage of sources, documentary and otherwise; they stress the importance of their enterprise in very similar terms, the greatest war, ‘more worthy of relation than any preceding it,’ and the greatest revolution—‘You will not find another such sharp turn in history’—clearly ‘deserves study.’ Reading Trotsky’s Preface one has almost the impression that he had in mind Thucydides’ introductory paragraph, that he himself thought of his History in Thucydidean terms.
Assuming that he did, what do you think of the rights and/or wrongs of this proposition?
And I thought about her friendship with Benjamin. The question card was dated January 1969. Almost three decades earlier, weeks after Benjamin’s fateful crossover, Arendt arrived in Portbou shortly before crossing the Atlantic to New York, where she would pass the manuscript of “Theses” to Adorno. It is of course difficult to assess how much private weight the exam question carried for Arendt. It nevertheless invites reflections on the intricate relationship between historiography, embodiment, and subjectivity—a theme so close to Benjamin’s thinking—and on what it means, for the two authors at hand, but also for her and for yet others, to relate the “greatest war ever” which silenced some of the most brilliant voices that would otherwise have lived on to relate it, voices of those who didn’t make the trying passage. (It is a bit of a pity that the question was marked “used in exam but not answered.“)
In her letter to Gershom Scholem on October 21, 1940, however, Arendt chose to leave a record of beauty:
The cemetery faces a small bay directly looking over the Mediterranean. It is carved in stone in terraces; the coffins are also pushed into such stone walls. It is by far one of the most fantastic and most beautiful spots I have ever seen in my life.
