WALTER BENJAMIN

September 26, 2023 -Durt Fibo

Having fled Germany in 1933, then being held in an internment camp in France in 1939, Benjamin, lacking an exit visa, finally assayed an escape by crossing the Pyrenees. After an unsuccessful attempt, he committed suicide in the Spanish border town of Portbou on the night of September 26/27, 1940.

A philosophical critic whose unique perspective influenced the Frankfurt School, Gershom Sholem, Hannah Arendt, Georges Bataille and Adrienne Monnier, among countless others who were also dear friends, Benjamin witnessed the European direction and warned of a time when “even the dead won’t be safe.”

While alive and observing man and the world, Walter Benjamin published this incisive evaluation of the French Surrealists’ ontological integrity:

“…At the time when it broke over its founders as an inspiring dream wave, it seemed the most integral, conclusive, absolute of movements. Everything with which it came into contact was integrated. Life only seemed worth living where the threshold between waking and sleeping was worn away in everyone as by the steps of multitudinous flooding back and forth. Language only seemed itself where sound and image, image and sound interpenetrated with automatic precision and such felicity that no chink was left for the penny-in-the-slot called meanings.” –‘Surrealismus: Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europäischen Intelligenz (Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia)’, 1929.