How Walter Benjamin’s Iconic Antifascist Essay Escaped Europe

Portbou, a provincial Catalonian fishing village of only a thousand souls framed by steep hills descending towards the temperate Mediterranean, is situated where the eastern most part of Spain kisses France. That is where the German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin ingested a fatal dose of morphine tablets in a dingy room at the Hotel de Francia near the town’s gothic cathedral square, believing that the Falangists were about to deport him back to Vichy France where he’d be turned over to the Gestapo.

Benjamin, along with other German intellectual luminaries including Herman Hesse and Bertholt Brecht, had been struggling over the Pyrenees for months with the intent to make it to Portugal where they could then sail to the United States. On September 26th, however, the forty-eight-year-old Benjamin had learned that by Franco’s orders the border would be sealed beyond Portbou and refugees were to be returned to the Reich’s authority.

Contemplating the necessity of rational self-extinction, Benjamin understandably opted for the poppy. In that threadbare room, with its faded and chipped green paint, the philosopher may have thought about his contributions to critical theory—the adept readings of Goethe, Baudelaire, Kafka and Brecht, the pathbreaking analyses of how mechanical reproduction would alter the “aura” of artwork, the radical contributions to the theory of translation.

Perhaps in that last hour he thought of the abstracted, frenetic and slightly feral “angel of history” in a Paul Klee painting that he’d once owned; maybe Benjamin considered how such a being’s “face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet… while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.”

That passage, with its incantatory description of this angel buffeted by a storm “blowing in from Paradise,” is from his hallucinatory and oracular, prophetic and profound final essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” entrusted to his friend the philosopher Hannah Arendt before he committed suicide. She was able to escape Europe, supposedly reading passages from Benjamin’s final essay to her fellow Jewish exiles aboard the S.S. Guine as it made its way across the frigid north Atlantic towards New York.

Fortress Europe from which the refugees were fleeing was then in the process of being fully enslaved by Nazism. This is not just the obvious context of Benjamin’s suicide, but of his purpose in writing that final essay as well. Firmly a man of the left, Benjamin reserved some opprobrium for liberal politicians and their “stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their ‘mass basis’…their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus.”

Belief in unalloyed and guaranteed progress is Benjamin’s biggest target, a faith shared (in different ways) by both leftists and liberals. The former may contend that dialectics ensures an inevitable revolution while the latter content themselves in the faith that the arc of history, though it be long, must ever bend towards justice, but Benjamin mocks the naivete that finds “current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century.”

Something jarring in Benjamin’s language, for the middle of the twentieth-century, which gave us the Holocaust and Hiroshima, has since become the standard by which we measure contemporary barbarity, yet in 1940 there was still a sense among many that atrocities were only to be found in some brutal past.

Instead, Benjamin counsels an understanding of how the “tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live in not the exception but the rule.” Such observations about how flat-footed people can be to find themselves in the midst of a fascist counter-revolution could have been written in 2024.

Arendt is responsible for the popularization of Benjamin in the Anglophone world where he was largely unknown for at least a generation. Loosely affiliated with the Marxist theorizers of the Frankfurt School for Social Research, Benjamin was nonetheless never a permanent member of any faction or school (despite dalliances with joining the Communist Party).

His critical acumen was sharpened through journalism and radio broadcast, the latter of which included a now lost Weimar-era series entitled Enlightenment for Children (though the charming transcripts survive) on subjects ranging from Voltaire to Pompeii, just as how in his theoretical works he analyzed everything from Victorian shopping arcades to the Kabbalah.

As his contemporary editor Michael Jennings noted, Benjamin’s writings often abandoned “all semblance of linear narrative” by incorporating “jokes, dream protocols, cityscapes, landscapes and mindscapes; portion of writing manuals, trenchant contemporary political analysis… and time and time again, remarkable penetrations into the heart of everyday things.” Style is inseparable from argument for Benjamin.

An attraction to the esoteric was an organizing principle of his sentiments and his prose style, a figure who wasn’t serious like Arendt or censorious like Theodor Adorno, but rather wondrous, if naturally and understandably melancholic. “I would like to metamorphosize into a mouse-mountain” he writes in a personal essay about hashish, opium, and mescaline, a sentence that it’s impossible to imagine dour Max Horkheimer penning.

Before he was a philosopher, Benjamin was a writer, and that makes all the difference. Cataloguing and argument were less important to Benjamin than the turn-of-phrase—”Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is… the most praiseworthy method” or “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”—where the argument follows a poetic rather than a logical sensibility.

The result is gnomic and aphoristic, a writing that’s arguably speculative criticism more than the variety written according to the rigid dictates of scholarly convention.       

Despite his ostensible Marxism, of which Benjamin was most taken by the messianism, he was ironically never a materialist so much as a mystic, with his close friend the great scholar of Jewish Kabbalah Gershom Scholem remarking that his writing was a “kind of Holy Writ.” An adherent of crazy wisdom, a sort of trickster-deity of philosophy who was more Groucho than Karl (even in appearance, with his black mustache and curly hair).

Nowhere is Benjamin’s mysticism more obvious than in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” that short 2,500-word treatise of twenty fragmentary paragraphs where despite the work’s incredibly dry title Benjamin offers nothing less than a prescription of how one is to live during the ruptures of history, how one is to create meaning in the face of a fascist politics promising to grind your face into the dust, a totalizing regime where “even the dead won’t be safe.”

As occult as the work sometimes reads, this was estimably practical for a Jew escaping the Nazis, for in the seven years after Hitler’s rise to power, a Parisian exile was the setting for Benjamin’s reflections on despair and hope, fascism and liberation, so that “Theses on the Philosophy of History” was what he clutched as the Maginot Line collapsed and he had to flee the Wehrmacht. From his bedside in Portbou, from the stern side of the Guine, this strange and beautiful work calls out to us eight decades later.

Less theory than incantation, less criticism than conjuration, less scholarship than prophecy, Benjamin’s essay offers not historiography or detailed, cited references laboriously cross-checked and marked by rigor, but something closer to scripture. The immediacy of what Benjamin and others then faced, the gaping abyss of Nazism and the demonic malignancy infecting Europe necessitated nothing less than a work penned not in ink on paper than by pillars of fire on stone.

In the first fragment he describes a “Mechanical Turk” that entertained audiences in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century. A miniature and mustachioed automaton outfitted with a turban and hookah pipe, this Orientalist contraption of gears and levers was brought to the great capitals of Europe where it played games of chess that it won brilliantly.

This prodigious robot, who during his career beat both Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin, seemed to be a simulacrum of genius, an artificial intelligence predating the digital revolution by two centuries. It was a fantasy, however, for within the contraption was a diminutive chess master who unseen bested all of his opponents.

“One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device,” Benjamin allegorizes, the “puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.”

Unlike his Marxist comrades, Benjamin’s materialism was a chimera for something deeper and more transcendent, for both the angelic and the demonic. If others were surprised by fascism’s rise or thought that it could be explained away only by recourse to economic concerns, then it was because they had for too longed denied the existence of that wizard manipulating the puppet, of humanity’s capacity for evil.

The diagnosis of what ails culture and society is in some ways also its prescription. Once we identify these various gods of this world—capitalism, fascism—as the religions they are, a means of resistance becomes available. The irony is that the only means of resisting them is, of course, also religious.

Though Benjamin’s advice may sound hermetic, obscure, and occult, it nonetheless needs to be internalized, for if we hope for a “revolutionary change in the fight for the oppressed,” we must work towards a “Messianic cessation of happening,” that the present must be “shot through with chips of Messianic time.”

This is neither revolution nor mere metaphor. It’s an invitation towards that most crucial thing, only glancingly alluded to by Benjamin, but the basis of his entire piece—hope.

Benjamin was an acolyte of that kabbalistic belief in tikkun olam, that is to say that our universe is cracked and broken, but it’s the individual choice of each person to restore those shards, even while—especially because—salvation isn’t guaranteed. Millennium isn’t imposed, it’s collectively chosen—and it’s always possible. “For every second of time,” Benjamin concludes, is the “strait gate through which Messiah might enter.”

Revolution and redemption, reform and restoration are ever possible, even if distant. That hope, in the most perilous and dire of times, must always endure.

The day after Benjamin killed himself, Franco lifted the restriction on the refugees passing through to Portugal and then America. It’s possible that Benjamin’s death itself might have put pressure on the Spanish to do so. Following his burial in Portbou, the briefcase in which he’d once carried “Theses on the Philosophy of History” went missing.

His satchel contained one final essay, the actual last writing of Benjamin. It’s never been found. Maybe one day it will be.