The life of Walter Benjamin came to an end in late September 1940 in a small town called Portbou on the border between France and Spain. And it was Benjamin who decided to end it.
It is surely strange to think that one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century, and a man associated with two of the major capital cities of Europe, should find himself constrained to make such a choice, or rather to endure his destiny, in a place so marginal and remote.
When I write that he was one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century I am certainly not exaggerating, though I feel I should add another qualifying adjective to define him: European, because if there is a man who thought of himself as being so, in those years when Europe was only a geographical term, it was undoubtedly Benjamin; pushed to move from one nation to another, not only by events and because he was a Jew and therefore subject to persecution, but also on account of his interests and restless curiosity.
Born in Charlottenburg in Germany in 1892, Benjamin was forced to move to France after the Nazis came to power. Its capital city became a kind of second homeland for him, and the site of his intellectual passions – to the extent that one of his major works, the unfinished The Arcades Project, would be entirely devoted to 19th-century Paris.
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