by Jay Parini
Still, whenever we argued about language he continued to make a distinction between God’s words and human words. This was, he maintained, the foundation of all linguistic theory. The difference between word and name remained alive in him, although he struggled with himself to keep his terms within the boundaries of Marxist, or pseudo-Marxist, thought. It was painful to listen to him, to watch him shift and squirm: the inevitable product of his disingenuous position.
After a particularly tortuous discussion, I took his hands in mine, and I said, “Come, Walter. To Jerusalem.”
His eyes, sequestered behind thick lenses, turned watery. “I cannot come with you, Gerhard,” he said. “But I would, were it possible. You must believe me.”
We had been sitting on a bench beneath a tulip tree, talking and watching the pedestrians stroll by. There was a bookstore behind us, and I led Benjamin to the broad window, now filled with a hundred copies of Céline’s new book, Bagatelles pour un massacre, a wild, anti-Semitic rant of six hundred pages. The book had seized the imagination of French intellectuals, and it was much respected, despite its vulgarity and racism.
“What do your friends say about this?” I asked him. “Do they think Céline means no harm?”
“They say, ‘But it’s a joke.’ ”
“Do you think it’s a joke, Walter?”
Benjamin shook his head. It was obviously not a joke. And it would never be a joke. The trahison des clercs that led to millions incinerated in the camps had only just begun.
We spent that evening in an obscure café on the Left Bank with Benjamin’s quarrelsome relative Hannah Arendt and the even more trying Heinrich Blücher, whom Hannah later married. Arendt was much obsessed with the show trials of Stalin and denounced them volubly. “Stalin is a monster!” she cried, drawing attention our way.
Benjamin said, “You overstate the case, Hannah. That is just like you.”
Blücher said, “Surely, Walter, you cannot defend what is happening in Russia!”
“The Soviet Union is a bold experiment,” he said. “It is perhaps a failed experiment…I will grant this.”
I began to laugh. “You take away my breath, Walter. How can you call it a failed experiment?” I considered the Stalinist regime a model of barbarism.
“It is sad, you know,” said Benjamin. “What began as such a noble attempt to make life better…has degenerated.” After a heavy pause, he continued: “Capitalism will not work, not ultimately. There is too much emphasis on short-term gain. It is bad economics, and bad for people.” He cracked his knuckles, then added: “The world will become a glittering trash heap, then blow away.”
Arendt was contemptuous of this attitude, although she managed to show considerable respect for Benjamin. She adored him, really. You could see it in her eyes.
And I adored him, too, despite his irritating stubborness, and his way of clinging to a worn-out ideology. He suffered the obsessive desire of many intellectuals to make the world whole by applying intelligent pressure of a specific kind, but human intelligence cannot make the world whole. Unchecked by compassion, humility, and a deep skepticism of its own virility, it can only destroy.
* * *
—
“He was a remarkable man,” said Madame Ruiz. She agreed to show me his “real grave,” as she put it.
The cemetery attendant, Pablo, had taken me down a gravel path to an unmarked grave the evening before. He claimed he had buried Benjamin himself in that particular place, and that Sergeant Consuelo, a local police officer, had personally overseen the burial. I can’t say why, but I doubted him. His eyes avoided mine: the mark of a liar.
“Pablo cannot be trusted,” Madame Ruiz said. “He is like the rest of them, thoroughly unreliable.” She took me to another site, although this grave was unmarked as well. “I am certain that this is the one,” she said. “I attended the funeral. It was very moving. There were no clouds in the sky, and a seagull landed right there, beside the stone.”
She was lying, too. Nobody would remember a seagull. There were seagulls all over the place, on every gravestone. But I decided it didn’t matter. He was here somewhere, in this cemetery, and it was an arresting place, one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. Fragrant smells drifted down the hillside, a mingling of floral scents and the faint odor of moss and mint. The cemetery grove itself hovered precipitously over the Mediterranean, its lawn like a flying carpet suspended in ice-blue air. The coffins were tucked neatly into stone walls, which seemed to defy gravity.
Madame Ruiz was clearly an intelligent, cultivated woman, however unreliable. Apparently she had done what she could to prevent this tragedy, but it was hopeless. Benjamin, for reasons of his own, had decided it was better to take his own life that day, ten years ago, than to push forward into Spain and Portugal with Frau Gurland and her son.
“Did you know him well, professor?” she asked.
“We met in Berlin, before the war…the Great War,” I said. I wanted her to know the length of our acquaintance, if not the depth. One cannot really suggest the depth of such a friendship. It is beyond description.
“Ah, the Great War,” she said. “My father was in that war.” After a long and boring bout of remembrance focused on her father, a minor official of Nice, she asked me about Benjamin. “Was he some kind of writer? A famous writer?”
I explained to her that his work was not well known but that I admired it. “One day he will be recognized as an important voice,” I said. “His philosophical viewpoint was…” I could not continue in this fashion, and lapsed into silence.
“Should I read one of his books?” she asked.
“There is only one book, a treatise on German drama,” I explained. “It is quite unreadable. And a collection of essays and fragments. Tantalizing but inadequate.”
I was tempted to launch into a critique of Benjamin’s life and work, but it seemed futile. Standing here, beside his grave, I realized that what is lost is lost. Madame Ruiz was simply pandering to me. I was a customer, nothing more. The longer I remained in Port-Bou, in mourning, the more cash I would spend at her hotel.
In spite of having come so far, I did not wish to remain at his grave for long. The guilty feelings that overwhelmed me there were unwelcome and baseless. It was not my fault that he was dead, after all. Benjamin was killed by Hitler, and by Karl Marx. He was killed by Asja Lacis, who never really loved him, and yes, by Dora, his wife, who had never learned how to love him properly. He was killed most certainly by the Angel of History, whom he could never satisfy. Most obviously, he was killed by Time, which often waits teasingly in the wings, but which always appears onstage at last, claiming full authorship of everything that has gone before, each mincing step and wince, each flicker of the eye, each heartfelt line and random gesture.
I keep thinking of that essay of his, the intractable yet provocative “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Benjamin wrote: “The messianic world is the world of all-sided and integral immediacy. Only there is universal history possible.” These words, written as Hitler’s troops moved darkly across the national boundaries of France, hung in memory with a strange white light. “It would not be written history,” Benjamin continued, “but a festively enacted history. This feast is purified of all solemnity. It knows no festival hymns. Its language is integrated prose, which has broken the shackles of writing and is understood by all human beings.”
The myth of Babel obsessed him, as it does me. Thick walls of unintelligibility loom between each of us who would lay claim to some measure of humanity, and we are unable to address one another except in crude signs and abstract gestures, in tongues far too idiosyncratic and private to be understood. This point is made often, and beautifully, in the Zohar.
“One day,” Benjamin wrote, “the confusion of tongues will end. And storytelling will come to an end, too, absorbed in the one integral prose.”
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br /> “Are you all right, professor?” Madame Ruiz asked, practically shouting in my face. “You are preoccupied.”
I shook my head. No, I was not all right. Walter Benjamin was dead, and his words had scattered like so many spores in the black winds that swept Europe in 1940. No, I was not all right, and I would never be all right again. Unless his words, invisible, were somehow to land in hospitable soil, find nourishment, break into roots, tremble, and flush with life.
There was truth in those words, and truth is one thing that cannot be murdered, though it must often be disguised, hidden craftily in places where nobody would care to look.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. As such, it lays no claim to the kinds of truth one expects to find in works of literary scholarship or conventional biography. Nevertheless, I have stuck close to the bare facts of Walter Benjamin’s life, which is to say that names, dates, and localities are accurately presented, and that the events described in this novel happened pretty much as described.
I began reading Benjamin in 1969, when a friend passed me a copy of Illuminations, which had just been published in the United States. The voice in these unimaginably compressed, enigmatic, suggestive essays stayed with me for years, and I eagerly read most of Benjamin throughout the 1970s, when his work became popular in academic circles. In the mid-1980s, in Italy, I came across a review of Lisa Fittko’s memoir of her wartime experiences in France, and her adventures in leading Benjamin and the Gurlands across the Pyrenees. Almost simultaneously, I discovered Gershom Scholem’s affecting memoir, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. From that point on, this novel seemed inevitable.
In 1989, in Jerusalem, I interviewed many friends and former students of Scholem’s, and began making notes for this novel. I was also lucky enough to meet and interview Lisa Fittko, who has been consistently friendly and helpful throughout the writing of this book; without her sympathy I would not have undertaken this project. Nevertheless, she made me promise that I would say boldly in this afterword that the “Lisa Fittko” who appears in my novel, while based on a real person, is a fictional character, the product of my imagination.
A few secondary sources were of special importance to me in the writing of this book, especially the memoirs of Asja Lacis as well as Benjamin’s own letters (as collected in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, edited by Gershom Scholem and Theodore W. Adorno, 1978) and his Moscow Diary (edited by Gary Smith, 1986). I am also grateful for the critical work on Benjamin by Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt, Gary Smith, Richard Wolin, Leo Lowenthal, Robert Alter, John McCole, Susan Buck-Morrs, Jeffrey Mehlman, and Bernd Witte.
All passages by Walter Benjamin that are quoted in this novel have been translated by me, in part to give a unity to his voice in English.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Devon Jersild, for her endless encouragement and intellectual companionship, and to express gratitude to Amos Oz and Sir Isaiah Berlin for many friendly conversations, which helped to shape my vision of Walter Benjamin and his world. I am also grateful to the staff of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris for making my time in their library productive and satisfying.
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