Paul Doolan writes: During an interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker, Ian McEwan remarked that for novelists ‘death is a bad career move’. For instance, few people today still read John Updike. It is a rare sighting to glimpse a Saul Bellow novel in a bookstore. It is unlikely that you will see someone reading Philip Roth in public. Yet all three novelists were at the top of their game not so terribly long ago. Then they died. And that proved to be a big problem for the marketing departments.
Nevertheless, death is not always the end of the world for writers. Take German cultural critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, for example. Benjamin died by suicide. At that time he was known exclusively to a tiny group of literati, mainly German speaking. His only original books to have appeared during his lifetime, The Origin of German Tragic Drama and One-Way Street, had been published twelve years earlier. Neither made much of a splash. Both were out of print when he died.
Benjamin, who was Jewish and a Marxist, was banned from publishing in Nazi Germany. He lived in exile from 1933. In 1936 he published a collection of letters from German authors with his own commentaries, Deutsche Menschen (German People). He used the ‘Aryan’ sounding pseudonym Detlef Holz. The name fooled the Nazi authorities for a while and the volume was smuggled from Switzerland into Germany, achieving moderate success before the Gestapo realised it was the work of a Marxist Jew. It was immediately banned. No other books by Benjamin appeared in his lifetime.
On the run from the Germans, Benjamin fled to the south of France with millions of other refugees. Desperate to reach Portugal and a ship that would take him to safety in the United States, he joined a small group who hiked over the Pyrenees and entered Spain. He died by suicide in a shabby hotel after being detained by Spanish customs officials. They had told him he would be returned to Vichy France the next day. He knew he would be handed over to the Germans. Instead, he chose to end his own life.
He wrote in his suicide note: ‘I am dying in a village where no one has ever heard of me.’ Now his portrait hangs over the entrance to the town hall in the Catalonian-Spanish border town of Portbou. A renovated old villa has been renamed ‘The Walter Benjamin House’. A Walter Benjamin street takes you up to the cemetery, where you’ll find Dani Karavan’s monumental memorial ‘Passages – Homage to Walter Benjamin’. There is even a Walter Benjamin grave in the cemetery, though his remains are not in it. They were lost a long time ago. Benjamin has become one of the town’s main tourist attractions. Trip Advisor ranks a visit to the Benjamin memorial as ‘#1 of five things to do in Portbou’.
Across the border in France, in pretty Banyuls-sur-Mer, remembrance culture is doing well and the tourist office does a brisk business promoting the Walter Benjamin hiking trail. The old smugglers route over the Pyrenees that Benjamin took on September 25th, 1940, used to be known as the ‘Líster Route’. It was named after the Republican general who led thousands of Spanish refugees over the border into France to escape Franco’s fascist army. The French imprisoned most of them in concentration camps. When the Germans arrived, the French handed them over to their new lords. Many of these Spaniards, who had hoped to find refuge in France, spent their final hours in the Nazi death camps in Poland. These days, not many visitors are curious about General Líster. It is all Walter Benjamin now. (Líster is remembered in Cuba, where he participated in the revolution in 1959 at the end of his life.)
Last month, on the anniversary of Benjamin’s ‘escape’ over the Pyrenees, I undertook to hike the Benjamin trail. I left Banyuls-sur-Mer just after dawn. A little before noon I crossed the border into Spain, at a spot now called Freedom Hill. It boasts not only a panoramic view of the French and Spanish coasts, but also a new information board on Benjamin. I descended a steep path, past thorn bushes and cacti, then followed a dried riverbed into Portbou. Information boards with photographs of Benjamin and quotations from his works in German, Spanish, Catalan, French and English punctuated the way. At the little beach park a large new sign welcoming visitors to the town features a portrait of Benjamin, a map with all the Benjamin sites in town, and information on the memorial monument built by Israeli artist Dani Karavan, though someone has scratched out the word “Israeli”. Nearby a poster advertised an international Benjamin colloquium featuring academic superstar Judith Butler.
In San Remo on the Italian Rivera, where Benjamin spent some time staying with his former wife during the 1930s, a plaque has been erected to his memory on the Via Hope. Paris has a newly named street called Walter Benjamin Passage and one of his former flats, on Rue de Dombasle, bears a prominent commemorative plaque. Berlin has a Walter Benjamin Platz and a memorial plaque decorates his last flat on the Prinzregentenstrasse, while a significant section of the city’s huge Archives and Library of the Arts is called The Walter Benjamin Archive.
Benjamin remained relatively unknown until the mid-1950s. It was then that a two-volume selection of his work, edited by his friends Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem, was published. The Swiss publisher Vita Nova Verlag had stored the remaining copies of the banned book Deutsche Menschen, the so-called ‘Dead Stock’, in their cellar. More than 25 years after publication, the Dead Stock was rediscovered in the cellar of the former publisher in Lucerne, each volume individually sealed and in pristine condition. They were passed on to the leftist bookseller in Zürich, Theo Pinkus. He used his network to ensure that copies found their way into important collections worldwide. The Benjamin industry had started. Picking up a second-hand copy from the original Dead Stock today will set you back quite a few hundred euros.
Hannah Arendt brought out a small selection of Benjamin’s essays in English translation in 1969, Illuminations. Susan Sontag wrote the foreword, ensuring the Anglophone world sat up and took notice. From then on, it was as if the Angel of History was blowing Benjamin into a future of intellectual celebrity. The present paperback boxset of his Collected Works in German, published by Suhrkamp, consists of 14 volumes, however ‘new’ work from the long dead author continues to appear. Suhrkamp is also the publisher of the critical edition of his collected works in German. It consists of 21 volumes and is still growing.
Dying was certainly not a bad career move for Benjamin. In fact, when it comes to popular as well as academic culture, Benjamin’s death seems to add a romantic lustre to his image. Take historical fiction, for instance. Jay Parini’s Benjamin’s Crossing from 1992 is a novel that focuses not so much on his life and work but on his ill-fated crossing of the mountains into Franco’s Spain and to his death. Mr Benjamin’s Suitcase of Secrets is a children’s picture book by Pei-Yu Chang that introduces children to Benjamin’s death. The first two episodes of the awful 2023 Netflix series Transatlantic features a grossly caricatured Benjamin character and a radically fictionalised version of his death. (Shouldn’t it be possible for the dead to sue for libel?) And last July the Catalonian Gran Teatre del Liceu premeried the opera Benjamin a Portbou in Barcelona. The opera ignores his life and instead, through 13 scenes, focuses on his death.
A cult of conspiracists has formed around Benjamin’s death. Some claim he was murdered by the Spanish Francoists, or maybe by the Spanish Falangists, or maybe by both. Others believe he was killed on orders of the Gestapo. There are a few who say it was Stalin’s henchmen who did the deed.
In 2007 Jeremy Harding published an article on Benjamin’s death in the London Review of Books, ‘Through the Trapdoor’. More recently Eli Zaretsky published an essay in the London Review of Books Blog that opened with the sentence: ‘To understand Walter Benjamin’s life, it is best to begin with his death.’ But why? Zaretsky put forward no justification for this assertion, and his piece is plagued with factual errors and seems to have been, in part, based on the fictionalised Netflix series Transatlantic ! (See my comments on the LRB’s blog and Zaretsky’s replies to my comments.) It is concerning that the LRB published such a shoddy piece, however it is more alarming when one considers that Zaretsky is the author of Oxford University Press’s forthcoming Walter Benjamin: A Very Short Introduction.
The most recent biography is Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver by Peter Gordon. It begins and ends with – you’ve guessed it – his death, which has come to haunt any consideration of his work. Mention of Benjamin these days unthinkingly leads to the knowing nod towards his death. Yet it was an entirely pointless death. A pointless death followed by another six million pointless deaths. But suicide makes for good marketing.
Benjamin took his own life at the age of 48. Had he survived and become an exile in New York, who knows? Perhaps the words ‘no one has ever heard of me’ would still ring true. Living might have proven to be a bad career move. However, at least in Benjamin’s case, death has been appropriated as the key marketing ploy in works of popular culture and in academia.