The Angel of History

by Bruno Arpaia

  In the meantime he kept writing letter after letter to Scholem, to Gretel Adorno, to Horkheimer, to Ernst Morgenroth’s father. They were agitated letters, scrupulously describing the smallest details of his predicaments. He anxiously enquired as to what his friends were doing to help his cause, and he recounted details of the enervating queues at the prefect’s office and outside the American consulate, and of his useless encounter with Alexandre Koyré from whom he asked help, of tourist visas and official forms, of how the threat of war was growing in France and the anti-Semitism was sharpening its fangs, the difficulty he had paying his rent on rue Dombasle, the new ordinances against foreigners, and of how alone he felt. Somehow in the middle of the tempest, Benjamin managed to dredge up the concentration he needed to finish a revision of the much-contested Baudelaire, and the new version was received very well in New York. Friends like Hannah Arendt and Adrienne Monnier, who stayed by his side during those three months in 1939, could hardly believe that such a desperate man could work as if the whole world had suddenly disappeared around him, dropped away into the purest empty silence. It seemed that his angel, his Angelus Novus, was standing at his side, protecting him from the ruins around him. And yet those ruins just kept mounting.

  In late May, Hannah Arendt decided to write to Scholem, ‘I am very concerned about Benjamin,’ she confided. ‘I attempted to find some income for him here and failed miserably. By the same token I grow increasingly convinced of the importance of getting him the tranquillity he needs to pursue his work. I have the impression that his work has undergone a change, down to the smallest details of his style. Everything he writes is so much more definitive and less hesitant. I’m often struck with the notion that he is just coming to a turning point and it would be dreadful if he had to stop now.’

  But Scholem either didn’t want to or couldn’t respond to this explicit appeal. ‘I wonder if you should try to get to the United States, if it is still possible,’ he wrote to Benjamin, ‘Perhaps this would be the better solution for you.’

  He meant to say that Palestine was no longer an option. But it wasn’t going any better on the other front. The wooden benches and grey tiles of the waiting room in the American consulate had become as familiar to Walter as his table in the library – and yet he had little interest in the United States.

  In early August, a hot August that wrapped Paris in a suffocating heatwave, his chest pains grew worse. Doctor Abrami, who had agreed to see him for half his usual fee, gave a stony diagnosis: cardiac congestion and weakness. He would have to start being very careful. He would have to stop smoking and avoid exerting himself and not worry. Benjamin smiled bitterly.

  ‘If only that were up to me,’ he said as he left.

  He wasn’t the only one being tossed about by history, which was now prancing forward nervously. On August 23, Benjamin wasn’t the only person who opened the newspaper and blanched. That day, millions of people throughout Europe read with icy hearts the news that Germany and Russia had signed a non-aggression treaty. Koestler was travelling with Daphne in the south of France and he smacked himself on the head. ‘There is no death,’ he wrote, ‘sadder or more definitive than the death of an illusion.’ He helplessly tried to explain it to Daphne; ‘She couldn’t understand why a thirty-five-year-old man should make such a scene at the funeral of his illusions, for she belongs to a generation who never had any.’

  By the next morning, the news had moved from the third page to the first. Sitting on the bottom step in rue Dombasle, Benjamin read of Ribbentrop’s rush visit to Russia, the Hitler–Stalin pact and of the notorious paragraph three of the treaty that gave Germany carte blanche in Poland. The Red Army troops sang Horst Wessel Lied and a swastika blew over the Moscow airport. ‘The spirit of the time,’ he would write to Scholem, ‘has planted certain signs in the barren landscape of these past few days, that have unmistakable significance for old Bedouins like us.’

  He finished reading and folded the Paris soir carefully, handing it back to Madame Dubois.

  ‘Are you going out, monsieur?’

  ‘I have changed my mind,’ he answered.

  A week later the Luftwaffe attacked Polish air bases while the Führer’s armoured divisions moved into Warsaw from the north and south. On September 3, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany, but it was as if Paris didn’t notice. ‘War arrived without much fanfare,’ Hans Sahl would write many years later in his memoir. ‘It had been predicted too many times already and when it came it was as if it was trying to say, let me prove that I’m true. Men pull their uniforms from their closets, trim their nails and cover their mouths as they yawn. The sky over Paris darkens and at night the clubs use flashlights.’ That was all. Nothing happened for months and months on the Maginot line. The real war began on the internal front, first against the French communists and socialists, and then against the foreigners and émigrés, against the sales métèques. There wasn’t time enough to distinguish friend from enemy. It didn’t matter who was an anti-fascist and who was a persecuted Jew – they were paying for their political views with exile. It didn’t matter that the Gestapo had seized passports from many Germans and they couldn’t possibly belong to Hitler’s fifth column. Their origins made them suspect.And among the ressortissants, no one ever thought of fleeing ‘hospitable’ France. People often surrendered, believing that their arrest was a mistake that would be cleared up in a matter of time. Not one among them imagined that they had just stepped foot into one of the most merciless shredding machines of history.

  PART THREE

  Chapter Twenty

  What was I saying . . . Oh, yes! I was telling you about Septfonds, ‘camp’ in a manner a speaking. It wasn’t really ready until the end of March after the worst of the cold had passed. We built row upon row of barracks in that marsh – rather, frames with roofs, and then just one wall made out of wood scraps. The rest was open air – leaving us bare to the good graces of the rain, snow and north wind. I always wondered whether it was stupidity or meanness that made them order them built that way. How much would three more walls have cost? But those were our orders. Take them or leave them.

  In the beginning there were still some among us who hung on to the fantasy that the French were going to bring us to welcome centres and then send us off to arrange our lives in peace, the way they’d done with the evacuees of Aragon the year before. But now, after Hitler took Prague on April 1, and Madrid fell, we had to resign ourselves to the obvious.We must have been twenty or thirty thousand men in all. We were prisoners in a concentration camp and there was no hope of things getting better. Mud and filth and cold and hunger. We were allowed a trickle of dirty water from tubes down at the end of the camp to wash with for one hour a day. Lunch and dinner was bread and a plate of unsalted rice. Lucky for us, war had got us used to misery. Now the war had ended, and ended badly. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t go back to Spain.

  I had lost about twenty or twenty-five pounds. I only survived that pneumonia because I was young. Every morning when we woke, Mariano would look me up and down from his wet straw pallet and smile.

  ‘You know what, Laureano, you look good, slender. You’ve lost some weight.’

  ‘And you’re that much less of a wreck than me.’

  I don’t have the slightest idea where we found the energy to joke. It seemed like a century had passed since the last time Mercedes and I . . . but it had only been a couple of months. There was always the war, but war was better than that slow incipient miserly death, where you get eaten up little by little over days and weeks. The only news of invasion that we ever got in the camp was the attack of the fleas, or dysentery or the Garde mobile that came into the camp some nights to search a barrack leaving us out in the cold for hours waiting. Or the commander would wake up one morning and decide that everyone should line up in front of their barrack to salute the flag. It’s not that we had anything against those three colours, but considering how they treated us – tease and humiliate us and the
n tell us to stand at attention. Well, let’s just say that didn’t go down well. There’s only so much a man can swallow.

  Mariano and I were the chiefs and we organised everyone properly.

  ‘Attention!’ cried the lieutenant as the flag went up the pole. And all of us in barrack 36 stood as if nothing was going on.

  ‘Attention!’ he repeated.

  We didn’t leave anything out: whispering, chattering, some guys chewed on their fingernails, others whistled. So they suspended the little bit of rice that they gave us and closed us all up in the hippodrome, the rectangle of barbed wire, about five square metres in all, right in front of the commander’s tent. They left us there for days and days with no blankets out in the cold and rain – tough luck for us.

  But it didn’t end there. As far as the French were concerned, the refugees were not only Reds and contagious subversives but we were a dead weight, an expense, and that really made them angry.You get to them through their wallets, that’s how. So in the middle of May, the French police flooded the camp with spies trying to convince us to go home – that a Spanish jail would be preferable to living like a starving refugee. But that didn’t work. So then they sent in an officer’s commission that tried to convince us to volunteer in Africa – the Foreign Legion was waiting for us.

  ‘It’s either the Foreign Legion or we send you right back to Spain,’ they threatened.

  All that effort netted them about thirty volunteers. So they sent in the CTE, the Spanish Workers Association, which was led by our men but commanded by one of theirs. But even though we weren’t organised we knew what they wanted; cheap labour, slave labour, to compete with French workers – and we opposed that. A few guys signed up and they were beaten and taken down by the CTE leaders of Montauban. In the end the Garde mobile stormed our barracks trying to take us by force but we resisted and we protested and hid whoever they’d come in after. With all this, the nights were busy. When I did get the chance to sleep, I barely had time to conjure up an image or two of my Mercedes – she was usually naked with her face in the pillows and I was behind her – before crashing. I hardly ever had the strength to make a little deposit in the bottom of my socks. I thought about her and wondered whether María had got better and whether she was getting the letters I sent every week. That’s how I spent the summer. And at least we were philosophical about it all. We even laughed sometimes, as if it were all a farce gone wrong – a play we’d been forced to act out. Then Hitler invaded Poland and the music changed; it got really dismal.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  He saw the first poster when he was coming out of the métro. It was plastered on the wall of a building at the corner of Carrefour and Saint-Germaine des Prés. There was another on rue de l’Odéon. They were enormous white posters with brilliant red lettering. From the other side of the street, Benjamin squinted his eyes and tried to read but couldn’t make anything out from so far away. There was something, a sixth sense, a faint presentiment telling him that this poster was a harbinger of something – it was the gate through which the war was introducing itself.Walter stood on the pavement, melting in the sun. As always he was unsure whether he should pretend it was nothing or cross the street. A group of French people who seemed to be discussing the poster convinced him with their eyes that it would be better to leave and avoid any problems.

  ‘Well, it’s about time. I can’t take these damn boches any more,’ yelled a red-faced man, the hem of his white shirt hanging out of his trousers.

  Prudence. The man was being prudent with all his hollering – better not to leave his back open to cowardice. Benjamin kept on walking down the street, moving more slowly now and wobbling a little more. He stole glances at shop windows and stopped often to catch his breath in the hot, motionless air. Far away, beyond the square, on rue de Vaugirard, he saw a convoy of military trucks. Fortunately, rue de l’Odéon was a friendly street. Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop was at number seven. Adrienne was a writer and editor who collected many French and foreign intellectuals around her.Across from her, at number twelve, there was Shakespeare & Company, Sylvia Beach’s book-shop, another writer, slim and austere, who had come to Paris from Baltimore only to find herself at the heart of the European and American avant-garde. In 1922 she had published a cerebral novel by an almost unknown Irishman named James Joyce. A little further down the street, at the end, in number eighteen, lived the photographer Gisèle Freund, an independent and volatile lady with sharp eyes and high cheekbones like an Indian. Walter and she frequently went on car-trips through the Loire together and would talk late into the night about books and photography. Twice a week, in those days, Gisèle and Benjamin would meet at the Deux Magots to play chess.

  Of all his friends, only Helen Hessel lived quite a distance from rue de l’Odéon, in rue de Grenelle. Helen was married to Franz Hessel, who had worked with Walter on a Proust translation in the 1920s. Helen, Adrienne, Sylvia and Gisèle were Benjamin’s four muses – four women who respected him and looked after him in France. They were attracted to his manners and fragility, to the naïve way he moved through life, to his bright blue eyes, and the way his brain processed ideas never giving the impression that the way he thought was in any way out of the ordinary.

  Pale and rumpled, bags under his eyes hanging down to his cheeks as if he’d spent a night tossing in bad dreams, Walter ducked into the Maison des Amis des Livres with a great sigh of relief. He found Adrienne standing on a stepladder organising the books on the highest shelves.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said without turning around, ‘I’ll be right there.’

  ‘It’s me, Adrienne,’ Benjamin announced himself; he was still huffing.

  ‘Walter, what are you doing here?’

  Adrienne abandoned the books and rushed off the ladder, her round puffy face long with surprise.

  ‘Didn’t you see the posters? It’s utterly insane to be walking around as if nothing’s happened?’

  ‘Those posters, the white and red ones? Yes I saw them, but I didn’t read them. Why? What do they say?’

  ‘Sit down now.’

  Adrienne was so stern that she almost frightened Benjamin.

  ‘Meanwhile,’ she said, ‘can I get you something to drink. I’m going to call Gisèle, then I’ll close up and we can go to lunch. I’ll explain it all to you then, okay? Of course, you’ll be my guest.’

  Sitting behind the counter, his hand crossed over his black bag on his lap, Benjamin nodded. He had only wanted to catch his breath, rest, carve out a corner of life where it would be possible to exist as little as possible.Where could he go to disappear and avoid the blows that were coming his way? What was in store for him now? As Adrienne fussed in her office, Walter stared and waited for the desire to live to come back to him. Nothing. It didn’t work. He wearily watched his friend put the books away and lower the gate over the shopfront. It was with reluctance that he decided to stand and follow her. His eyes were downcast and the sun was punishing on his shoulders. But he saw the poster, stuck to the wall of the theatre, still gleaming with wet glue.

  ‘Adrienne,’ he called to her, as he read: ‘NOTICE TO ALL GERMAN RESSORTISSANTS FROM DANZICA AND SAAR AND TO ALL FOREIGNERS OF UNDETERMINED NATIONALITY OF GERMAN ORIGIN UNDER FIFTY YEARS OLD.’

  The poster was talking to him. His turn had come; they were going to intern him. He was to report to the Colombes stadium with a blanket, personal hygiene items and food for two days. The order was signed by the Military Governor of Paris.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said once he’d finished reading. He was pale and struggled to breath. He looked like a dead man emerged from the grave to haunt the living. Adrienne took him under the arm and supported him as they walked to the restaurant.

  ‘You’ll see,’ she comforted him. ‘It will all work out.’

  ‘Of course,’ answered Benjamin with barely any voice. ‘It must be a mistake.’

  But it wasn’t and Gisèle was the one who told him that. She was trying to
shake him up, make the blood come back into his face. She was already at the brasserie, waiting for them at a table, her eyes gleaming, tense, and flitting around the room.

  ‘It’s not a joke, Walter, they mean it this time.’

  ‘Would the ladies and gentleman like to order now,’ interrupted an elderly bent waiter with a deep crease in his forehead.

  ‘Wine, of course,’ said Adrienne Monnier. ‘And I’ll have a filet, rare, thank you.’

  ‘That will be fine for me too,’ said Gisèle in a rush. She was trembling and didn’t care what she ate.

  ‘And for the gentleman?’

  Ordering was a large undertaking. Walter read the menu, then he read it again. Then he asked about the soup of the day. He was sweating, lost among all the options. The waiter was standing over him, explaining and growing ever more bent and more wrinkled.

  ‘Fish? Do you have fresh fish? Or, perhaps I should have meat too. No. Just bring me the sole, but only if it’s fresh.’

  Benjamin suddenly seemed peculiarly imperturbable. His breath returned to normal and even the tightness in his chest had passed. He drank a little wine and stared at Gisèle, holding his glass aloft.

  ‘As you know,’ he explained as if he were giving a lesson, ‘I am no longer a German citizen, but a refugee. I am a Jew and an anti-Nazi. They can’t want to shut me up. Surely there must be an error.’