The Angel of History Read online

  ‘Get undressed,’ ordered the officer.

  After our shower they gave each of us two uniforms, two berets, a coat, a poncho, linens, even cigarettes and a pouch of American tobacco. Two thirty, in the middle of a downpour, a military train was heading out from the Francia station, destination unknown. Mariano and I were on that train. Ana María and Mercedes were down on the platform waving their handkerchiefs. There were no tears shed. I felt more angry, nostalgic and sick. It was like my stomach was eating itself. Mariano, on the other hand, was acting like he’d just come out of a long sleep. It didn’t take much. Maybe he could already smell combat and that excited him.

  ‘And we’re back in business,’ he said rubbing his hands together.

  I looked at him and then turned away to look out the window at the factory smokestacks getting smaller in the distance, the fields outside Barcelona reduced to swamps under the completely grey sky and the rain beating against the glass. I imagined myself back in the trenches – the cold, the cannon fire.

  ‘You’re out of your mind,’ I told him and then went to sit down.

  Chapter Seven

  Benjamin performed an about-face and completely abandoned his plan to take his own life in that little room at the Hôtel du Petit Parc in Nice. His reasons remain a mystery. Over the months that followed, he hunkered down and worked, taking full advantage of his incredible capacity for concentration and fishing through his ‘reservoir of profound serenity’ – nothing seemed to upset him. It was as if passing through death and looking it in the eyes, he’d passed some kind of initiation ritual. After that, life couldn’t present him with anything worse. In the meantime, living was worthwhile.

  And yet, a year later, after his escape from Berlin to Paris, he’d spent only a few days in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower before descending back into turmoil. In bed, at a hotel on rue de la Tour in the sixteenth arrondissement, Benjamin watched his pipe smoke curl up toward the sink and the cracked mirror on the wall in front of him; it filled the grimy room, spread greyly over the grey walls. He’d come back to Paris from Ibiza at the end of September 1933 tormented by a fever that came over him in waves. Malaria, claimed the doctor.A hearty quinine cure lowered his body temperature but his strength didn’t come back. He squandered the little energy he had writing letter after letter. ‘This illness,’ he wrote to his friend in Palestine, ‘has left me just enough strength to recognise the wretchedness of my situation – but not enough strength to extricate myself from it. I’m not even healthy enough to climb the stairs of the cheap hotel where I’ve been forced to take lodging.’

  Lying on that bed, covers pulled up to his nose, he listened carefully to the growl of the city beyond the closed blinds – snarling and ready to pounce. This wasn’t the same city that he’d once known. But then he wasn’t the curious carefree tourist of a few years before either. For a person like him, alone and without money or a home, without a country or a language, for a Jew running from the Nazis, Paris showed another face, a harsher, harder face. Benjamin didn’t even need to go to Ibiza and then come back to France in order to comprehend the situation. He’d already predicted it to Scholem two months earlier: ‘The Parisians are saying “Les émigrés sont pires que les boches,” and that should give you an accurate idea of the kind of society that awaits one there.’

  He wasn’t wrong.With the exception of a brief period under the Popular Front government, the émigré life in France just kept getting harder. There were expulsions and arrests; it was impossible to process any kind of paperwork. As if that weren’t enough, the group of exiles and intellectuals who had gathered in Paris so committed to proving that there was another ‘better’ Germany drew far too much attention from the Brownshirts. They were put under surveillance – terrorised, robbed, assassinated. The exile centres filled with spies compiling lists, watching activities, furnishing information and trying to discourage the leadership. It was dangerous to be too politically exposed and talking to anyone you didn’t already know very well was a risk seldom worth running.

  Benjamin was hardly prepared for that battle. Which is why (following the shadowy contortions of his complex temperament) he simply absented himself and avoided growing attached to anyone. He preferred to stay away from the in-fighting of the communist movement or the oblivious pettiness of the various émigré groups. He was reserved, yes, but he ended up alone, choosing isolation. And for years he wrote the saddest letters to his friends, who were by now scattered to all four corners of the world, regretting that loneliness. He wrote letters pretending that letter writing wasn’t anachronistic. Letters allowed him, as Adorno explained, ‘To reject the separation and remain no less far away, no less separated.’ He wrote confessions without revealing to himself that he felt profoundly more alone than ever before and that he still preferred not to join the other émigrés at the café. In the end, for someone like him, it was almost better to be lost in the anonymity of a giant foreign city.

  It was difficult. Benjamin was really distressed by the conversations he had with his few, highly selected friends from Berlin. The number of people he associated with in Paris could be counted on one hand: Hans Sahl, the photographer Gisèle Freund, Hannah Arendt (philosopher and distant relative), Stephan Lackner and Fritz Lieb (Karl Barth’s student) whom he addressed almost immediately in intimate terms while it had taken him almost ten years to speak like that with Scholem, a bosom friend and companion since youth. Later on, Walter would become involved with Adrienne Monnier, Sylvia Beach, and Arthur Koestler – that was after he returned from Spain and left the Communist Party – and Pierre Klosowski and Georges Bataille. But it’s not possible to replace friends you’ve had for twenty years, the people you discovered the world with. Those friends were all out of reach. Scholem was in Palestine. His ex-wife Dora was in Italy, Jula Cohn, whom he’d loved in the years leading up to the divorce, was in Germany with her husband Felix Noeggerath. And Alfred Cohn was in Spain. This is another one of the blows that exile delivers – it takes everyone along the path of their own individual diaspora. It shatters the collective spirit. Not much remains afterward.You’re left alone to settle your accounts, ruminating over the same crop of thoughts every day, cultivating them in solitude. Perhaps the only thing left afterward is your work.

  ‘Until it was written,’ said Sahl in his memoir, ‘it was still being lived. Until it was written, Hitler hadn’t won yet.’ But what if you were like Benjamin, racked with such a pitiful vision of yourself that it’s almost suffocating? ‘Living among the émigrés is unbearable,’ he confessed to Scholem on the last day of 1933. ‘A solitary life is not more tolerable. Living in a French world is impossible. All that is left then is work. Although nothing is more threatening to work than the plain recognition that work is the entirety of your inner life.’

  But that was what allowed him to keep going, to persist. In March 1934, Benjamin resumed work on his Parisian Passagen-Werk – threshold spaces, places where ancient myths and the merchandise of the modern world came together. And he felt like he could only work in Paris. That book full of quotations and images, built like an enormous kaleidoscope, took root in books that had already been written. This is how Paris was for Benjamin, ‘the great reading room of a library divided by the Seine.’ It was a library that Walter plundered without scruples, copying sentences, illustrations, notes and references with boundless energy into his notebooks. The material he accumulated became more and more cumbersome while the project began to seem perhaps interminable. Benjamin worked on Passagen-Werk almost ceaselessly during those years of exile, stopping only to work on some essay commissioned by the Horkheimer Institute – for Adorno, who was supplying the small grant he was living on. But it was his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age’ that seemed most promising. For years his allusive, esoteric projects had kept him out of fashionable conversation, but this essay led him to believe he might be influential in the debate over the future of Marxist aesthetics. Benjamin would be at the middle of a gl
obal discussion and wouldn’t feel so alone anymore. How wrong he was. That essay may be his most famous work today, but it had a catastrophic reception at the time – even from his staunch supporters: Scholem was non-committal, Adorno critical, Brecht was even offended and the audience – mostly Communist Party members – at the two evening panels organised by the association of exiled German writers where Benjamin and Hans Sahl discussed the essay listened as if in a silent bubble, almost a boycott. This was late June 1936.

  ‘That’s it. It’s all over,’ he said to Hans Sahl as they walked home together at the end of the evening. The moon was hidden behind a pitch-black cloud. Blustery wind rattled the lamps over the deserted streets. It was a peculiar wind for a humid June night – a grim wind, fat with rancour and rain. Leaving the station on the metro, the lights of the station were quickly swallowed by the dark tunnel.

  ‘What’s over?’ asked Sahl.

  ‘It’s over for them. You saw their faces? The comrades? And their leader, Müzenberg . . . they’re jackasses and I don’t mean just aesthetically speaking.’

  In Weimar Germany Sahl had been an important theatre and film critic, among the first to believe in film as an art form. Benjamin’s essay brought new perspective to bear on his hunch and yet no one seemed to appreciate it.

  ‘You’ll see, Walter,’ he said as they stood on the steps of the station leading up to the road. ‘They’ll give it its due in the end.You’re too far ahead of your time.’

  It was late by the time they reached the rue de Vaugirard, Benjamin’s pace was slow and uncertain and his head was bowed. He’d stop periodically but continue talking, shaking his head and never looking up at Sahl, who was having some difficulty following but couldn’t figure out how to interrupt.

  ‘I made a mistake, I made a mistake . . .’ he kept repeating in the grimy darkness of the night. He was worn out and panting. This was a man used to being in control of his feelings. He never liked to reveal too much and worried about saying the wrong thing. But that evening he seemed short of illusions. And was slowly pulling the white flag of surrender from his pocket.

  Suddenly he burst out, ‘Enough of this,’ and embarrassed drops of rain began to fall. Sahl opened his umbrella and stood closer, trying to keep Benjamin from getting wet.

  ‘Maybe we should leave,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve already seen a couple of uniforms around. Are your papers in order?’

  ‘What does it matter?’

  It was god only knows what time of night and they’d been standing there for a long time under the soundless rain shower. And then two policemen out on their rounds appeared from around the corner.

  ‘Bonsoir,’ said one, lifting his fingers to his cap. ‘You’ve been standing here for quite a while now.Who are you and what are you doing?’

  Sahl didn’t have time to answer because Benjamin jumped in, ‘We are two German Jews standing under an umbrella talking,’ he said very seriously. Then he twirled his fingers in the air and made off alone through the rain that had begun to seem unending.

  After that ill-fated evening in 1936, Benjamin made no further efforts to broaden his circle. Even though he missed intellectual companionship and his loneliness bothered him, he resigned himself to it. He began to concentrate on himself and his few friends whom he didn’t spare the smallest detail – not even his constant state of anxiety over his finances – in his letters and in rare encounters. Money became his central concern, his obsession.

  After his German remittances were suspended, his only source of income was the money coming in from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Institute for Social Research. But that money never seemed enough. There isn’t a single letter from that extensive period that doesn’t hint at his hardships and deprivations, the difficulty of daily survival, the humiliation he suffered without any promise of remedy. In October 1935, for example, Benjamin wrote to Max Horkheimer, ‘Any help you give me will produce immediate relief. I have reduced my living expenses enormously compared to what they were in April when I returned to Paris, consequently I am now living as a boarder with some émigrés. Beyond that, I have succeeded in obtaining permission to take my midday meal at a restaurant that has a special arrangement for French intellectuals. In the first place, however, this permission is temporary and, in the second place, I can make use of it only on those days I am not in the library, for the restaurant is very far from there. I will only mention in passing that I ought to renew my carte d’identité but do not have the one hundred francs this requires. Since it involves a fee of fifty francs, I have also not yet been able to join the Presse Étrangère, which I was urged to do for administrative reasons.’ To Scholem he wrote, ‘I don’t know how long my powers of resistance will last in view of all the circumstances, since I am provided with only the bare necessities for at most two weeks a month. The most trifling purchase depends on a miracle taking place.’

  Was he exaggerating? Possibly. Even Scholem, his very best friend, would admit years later that he’d had doubts and harboured suspicions. The truth might have been that when it came to money and other practical things – what it takes to put food on the table – Benjamin was like a man lost in the desert, a time-traveller who stumbled into the present.

  ‘You should have been born in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, like one of your flâneurs,’ Hannah Arendt told him once. It must have been at the Café de la Paix after she’d returned from one of her trips to Palestine. During that period Hannah was director of the Paris office of the Alijah Youth, which organised the emigration of children to Palestine. ‘Really you’re an homme de lettres and you don’t belong to any time,’ she sighed as she finished off her tea and tossed her mane of black hair over her shoulder. ‘You should have lived in a time when you could have been paid to write what you write without ever thinking about obligations.Wouldn’t you like a stipend that had no obligations attached?’

  She seemed to grow meaner as she spoke, meaner and more tired. It was as if she was going to tell him everything she thought this time, without weighing her words.

  ‘No, not at all . . .’ Walter spluttered.

  ‘Of course you remember that we no longer live in the age of Pascal and Montaigne. Things didn’t go in your favour at the university, and then they went badly with Scholem and the Zionists, and badly with your Marxist friend.Will you ever open your eyes?’

  She was off and running now. It was a bad sign when she knit her brows like that.

  ‘It’s useless to keep trying,’ she added sternly. ‘You will never find anyone who is willing to give you money so that you can live happily ever after as an homme de lettres, a revolutionary aristocrat. I am sorry to be the one to tell you, Walter, but there’s not much room left in the world for men like you.’

  He could only remember a very few occasions in which anyone had dared to speak so harshly with him. Benjamin looked at her, trying to fight against the onslaught of emotions that seemed to be pressing on him from all sides. The people sitting around them in the café seemed a muffled crowd in the distance, only concerned with what was going on at their table. He thought he should say something, but every sentence that came to mind deteriorated before he could open his mouth.

  ‘One becomes ever more what one is,’ he finally mumbled.

  Hannah didn’t answer. It would have been useless to continue the discussion. It would have been equally impossible to chat about something else.As they left, Benjamin took off his glasses, wiped them carefully, waved at her with some embarrassment and headed for the metro. The thoughts running through his head seemed false, they didn’t belong to him – these compact black masses like storm clouds, chaotic and powerful images – the threadbare suit, the wretched room where he lived, the meals made of a croissant and coffee, the nightmares and loneliness, everything that he’d forsaken, the thousand humiliations he’d suffered for the publication of an article, or an essay, even the translation of a novel. Anything to thwart his horoscope. How long could he go on like this?

 
And of course, over seven years of his exile in Paris, Benjamin had been forced to change house eighteen times, live in a sublet with strangers and fellow immigrants, in the fleapits of banlieue, in noisy little draughty rooms and all of this meant that until 1938 he couldn’t even keep his books with him or receive visitors. He could only work at the National Library or in a café on the Left Bank, where if you ordered a coffee the waiters would let you sit for hours. Except for the brief period when he visited Brecht in Denmark or took advantage of Dora’s hospitality in San Remo, Walter was always in the library or at one of those cafés, biding time as his life slowly crumbled around him.

  Chapter Eight

  The cold, my boy. It was four below zero centigrade when we got to the front. They brought us to Saragozza in Pina to relieve the soldiers stationed on the Ebro river. There was mud, coagulated mud and mud men – frozen and bundled up in that tangle of trenches. That was the front that winter. On the bright side, things were calm there – a burst of gunfire every so often, an isolated mortar shell – just so we felt useful. Further south, Teruel was a slaughter. Our side had launched the attack but now Franco’s forces were fighting back and Italian artillery alongside the Legione Condor were crushing the advance. By the end of February, they’d taken back Teruel and collected interest along the way. They got all the way to Alfambra. We lost ten thousand men; another fifteen thousand were taken prisoner. Mariano was seething. The news kept coming in and making him hungrier than ever for combat. At night he made us patrol the river in that cold that would turn your breath to ice, just to show that we were at war too.