Walter Benjamin's Last Work — Samantha Rose Hill

WHEN HANNAH ARENDT escaped the Gurs internment camp in the middle of June 1940, she did not go to Marseilles to find her husband Heinrich Blücher — she went to Lourdes to find Walter Benjamin. For nearly two weeks they played chess from morning to night, talked, and read whatever papers they could find.

Arendt and Benjamin met in exile in Paris in 1933 through her first husband, Günther Anders, who was a distant cousin of Benjamin’s. They would frequent a café on the rue Soufflot to talk politics and philosophy with Bertolt Brecht and Arnold Zweig. And while Arendt’s marriage to Anders didn’t last, her friendship with Benjamin grew and flourished during the war years.

Arendt hesitated leaving Benjamin in Lourdes. She knew he was in a wobbly state of mind, anxious about the future, talking about suicide. Benjamin feared being interned again, and he had difficulty imagining life in the United States. Arendt wrote to Gershom Scholem that the “war immediately terrified him beyond all measure” and “[h]is horror at America was indescribable.” His strained relationship with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer at the Institute for Social Research (also known as the Frankfurt School) left him in a state of financial precarity. The tenuous flow of correspondence conducted through networks of friends and letters (when they arrived) complicated matters more, leaving one dependent upon time itself. Benjamin, already an anxious man, stopped going out and “was living in constant panic.”

When Benjamin was released from the Clos St. Joseph internment camp in Nevers in the spring of 1940, he returned to Paris for a brief period before fleeing to Lourdes around June 14, en route to Marseilles. It was during this time that he wrote what would become his final work, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” or as it is also translated, “On the Concept of History.”

The “Theses,” a collection of philosophical fragments on historicism and historical materialism, were originally written on the backs of colorful envelopes — green, yellow, orange, blue, cream. The cramped passages in tiny script illustrate the conditions of exile: he is saving space because he is short on paper. As a text, the “Theses” marry Benjamin’s interests in Marxism and theology, reflecting on temporality and the possibility of a weak messianism to interrupt the flow of empty homogeneous, capitalist time. The most famous fragment, which lies at the heart of the work, was inspired by Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, which Benjamin purchased in 1921, and which inspired a birthday gift from Scholem: a poem titled “Greetings from the Angelus on July 15.” The painting accompanied Benjamin for some 20 years of his life, and, as he describes it, pictures the angel of history being blown backward into the future by the forces of progress piling ruins at his feet.

The stack of empty envelopes, now tucked away in a manila folder in Hannah Arendt’s archive at the Library of Congress, bear Benjamin’s last work and final Paris address — 10, rue Dombasle, Paris 15e. They were written for a future he would never know. As Benjamin writes in one thesis: There is no document of civilization, that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Theses 1–3. Photograph by Samantha Hill. Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

The documents of Walter Benjamin’s death are plural. What information we have about his final days comes from Lisa Fittko and Henny Gurland (Erich Fromm’s wife), who led a small group of refugees through the Pyrenees to Portbou, a common route of escape for refugees at the time. Fittko describes how Benjamin had to walk for 10 minutes, then rest for a minute, given his poor health. He carried only a leather attaché case, which contained his most valuable papers. Upon arriving in Portbou on the night of September 26, 1940, they were told at the police station that the Spanish border had been closed, and that without French exit papers they would be returned and sent to camps. That night, Walter Benjamin took a lethal dose of morphine. Gurland was the last person to see him alive, and this is important, because she wrote what essentially became his will. According to her, Benjamin died on September 27. The Spanish doctor’s death certificate declares that Benjamin died from a cerebral hemorrhage on September 26 (perhaps an attempt to cover up the suicide). The municipal certificate shows that he was buried on September 27. Another burial record is dated September 28. Hannah Arendt writes to Gershom Scholem that Benjamin died on September 29.

We will never know what happened to Walter Benjamin, or his leather attaché case, but we do know (in part) what happened with his final work, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”

See the full article here.