Shortly after Germany invaded Poland, on September 1, 1939, France declared all German nationals living within its borders and between the ages of seventeen and fifty to be enemy aliens. Along with thousands of other men—including Austrians, Hungarians, Czechs, and Slovaks—the Berlin-born philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin, then forty-seven years old, was interned in the Stade de Colombes, an arena outside of Paris that had served as the main stadium for the 1924 Summer Olympics.
Conditions were miserable. The prisoners’ valuables were seized as they entered, and they were given nothing to eat but bread and tins of pork-liver pâté. Rain soaked through the straw on which they slept. Large open barrels served as toilets. “Since there was almost no water to wash with,” Hans Sahl, a friend and fellow-prisoner of Benjamin’s, would say later, “the pâté clung to our faces and hair and penetrated every pore.”
Ten days passed before the men were transferred to a prison camp in central France, where Benjamin gave lectures in exchange for Gauloises cigarettes. In a lean-to on the "floor next to a staircase, he held editorial meetings for the purpose of establishing a literary journal. For Sahl, Benjamin’s stubborn commitment to the life of the mind—his belief that humanism could counter crimes against humanity—was its own kind of tragedy. “Never,” Sahl wrote, “have I been so conscious of the painful failure of a method, which in sympathetic unworldly innocence thought it possible to ‘change’ reality, but which remained only an interpretation, limping behind.”
When Benjamin was released, two and a half months later, he went back to Paris, renewed his reader’s card for the Bibliothèque Nationale, and brushed off friends who urged him to escape to the United States; he insisted that he had to finish his second book, on the French poet Charles Baudelaire. (It would “not suffer being neglected,” he explained, “even to ensure the survival of its author.”) After France fell to Hitler, in June, 1940, he made a desperate attempt to "ee to Portugal, crossing the Pyrenees on foot despite severe asthma and a weak heart. He arrived in Spain only to !nd that he could not enter without an exit visa from the French government. That night, under arrest in a local hotel, he took an overdose of morphine tablets and died the next morning.
Given the circumstances of his death, Benjamin, who was raised in a mostly secular Jewish household, might easily be made a symbol of “the long and troubled history of German Jewry,” Peter E. Gordon writes—a cautionary tale of failed assimilation and bookish naïveté. But, in “Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver,” a short, serene volume published in Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series, Gordon avoids treating his subject in such allegorical terms, in part because Benjamin always resisted conscription into a story larger than his own. Despite being a Marxist, he never joined the Communist Party, and, though he described himself as a person who “sees Jewish values everywhere and works for them,” he consistently rejected political Zionism and its nation-building ambitions. He was, as Hannah Arendt put it in this magazine, in 1968, stubbornly “sui generis.”
The Benjamin who emerges from Gordon’s book is a sympathetic but often aggravating figure, the quintessential absent-minded professor who fumbles his romances, never works a real job, and, though he clearly recognizes the existential threat of Nazism, buries his head in his books as everything falls down around him. For all his apparent unworldliness, he was a stunningly prescient theorist of popular media, not to mention a prose stylist of exceptional beauty and vigor, whose name has attained a cult status on university campuses. (When I was in graduate school, a professor once asked a group of us doctoral students if we knew we were allowed to read things not written by Walter Benjamin.) Though he remained obscure in his own lifetime, those who knew his work recognized its power. On hearing of Benjamin’s death, Bertolt Brecht reportedly declared it the first real loss Hitler had dealt to German literature.
