The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3),
Wednesday, 29 December 2010
Wednesday, 22 December 2010
The Storyteller
There is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis. And the more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story’s claim to a place in the memory of the listener, the more completely is it integrated into his own experience – the greater will be his inclination to repeat it to someone else someday, sooner or later. This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation which is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places—the activities that are intimately associated with boredom—are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeating stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained. It is lost because there is no more weaving and spinning to go on while they are being listened to. The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself. This, then, is the nature of the web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled. This is how today it is becoming unraveled at all its ends after being woven thousands of years ago in the ambience of the oldest forms of craftsmanship.
Walter Benjamin: The Storyteller (excerpt), from Orient und Okzident, 1936, translated by Harry Zohn in Illuminations, 1968
Walter Benjamin: The Storyteller (excerpt), from Orient und Okzident, 1936, translated by Harry Zohn in Illuminations, 1968
Walter Benjamin on Facebook
There are over 20 people on Facebook claiming to be our Walter (apart from all the people who share his name).
Futurists
Jesus, those Futurists:-
From Walters 'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction':-
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments. Still, Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war:
“For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as anti-aesthetic ... Accordingly we state:... War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others ... Poets and artists of Futurism! ... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art ... may be illumined by them!”
This manifesto has the virtue of clarity. Its formulations deserve to be accepted by dialecticians. To the latter, the aesthetics of today’s war appears as follows: If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production – in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of “human material,” the claims to which society has denied its natural materrial. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.
“Fiat ars – pereat mundus”, says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.
From Walters 'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction':-
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments. Still, Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war:
“For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as anti-aesthetic ... Accordingly we state:... War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others ... Poets and artists of Futurism! ... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art ... may be illumined by them!”
This manifesto has the virtue of clarity. Its formulations deserve to be accepted by dialecticians. To the latter, the aesthetics of today’s war appears as follows: If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production – in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of “human material,” the claims to which society has denied its natural materrial. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.
“Fiat ars – pereat mundus”, says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.
Koestler - the man who borrowed some of Walter's suicide pills
Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic
by Michael Scammell
Random House, 689 pp., $35.00
He began his education in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at an experimental kindergarten in Budapest. His mother was briefly a patient of Sigmund Freud’s. In interwar Vienna he wound up as the personal secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement. Traveling in Soviet Turkmenistan as a young and ardent Communist sympathizer, he ran into Langston Hughes. Fighting in the Spanish civil war, he met W.H. Auden at a “crazy party” in Valencia, before winding up in one of Franco’s prisons. In Weimar Berlin he fell into the circle of the infamous Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg, through whom he met the leading German Communists of the era: Johannes Becher, Hanns Eisler, Bertolt Brecht. Afraid of being caught by the Gestapo while fleeing France, he borrowed suicide pills from Walter Benjamin. He took them several weeks later when it seemed he would be unable to get out of Lisbon, but didn’t die (though Benjamin, denied passage into Spain at the French border, took them and did).
Along the way he had lunch with Thomas Mann, got drunk with Dylan Thomas, made friends with George Orwell, flirted with Mary McCarthy, and lived in Cyril Connolly’s London flat. In 1940, Koestler was released from a French detention camp, partly thanks to the intervention of Harold Nicholson and Noël Coward. In the 1950s, he helped found the Congress for Cultural Freedom, together with Mel Lasky and Sidney Hook. In the 1960s, he took LSD with Timothy Leary. In the 1970s, he was still giving lectures that impressed, among others, the young Salman Rushdie.
It is difficult, in other words, to think of a single important twentieth-century intellectual who did not cross paths with Arthur Koestler, or a single important twentieth-century intellectual movement that Koestler did not either join or oppose. From progressive education and Freudian psychoanalysis through Zionism, communism, and existentialism to psychedelic drugs, parapsychology, and euthanasia, Koestler was fascinated by every philosophical fad, serious and unserious, political and apolitical, of his era.
CUNY Writers' Institute
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Nor were these shallow passions. His belief in communism led him to fight in Spain and travel in the USSR. His Zionism led him to a kibbutz near Haifa. At different times, he advocated the use of violence, whether to bring about a Communist utopia or to create the state of Israel. Even when he turned against his previous causes (and against his previous friends who still believed in them) he did so with real fervor. He is, after all, best known as an anti-Communist, not as a Communist, largely because of his best and most influential book, Darkness at Noon, a fictional account of the interrogation of a leading member of an unnamed Communist party. His involvement with Revisionist Zionism is also probably less well known than The Thirteenth Tribe, a book that argues that modern European Jews are descended from the Central Asian Khazars, and not from the Jews who lived in the Palestine of antiquity—a thesis which, whatever its merits, is hugely popular among the enemies of Zionism. Even so, when in the grip of one particular mania he was incapable of seeing the counterarguments: in the face of all rational argument, he even stuck to his late passion for telepathy and ESP—so much so that he left most of his estate to fund a professorial chair in parapsychology.
Koestler was equally likely to succumb to extreme passions in his personal life—notoriously so. He was variously in thrall to Jabotinsky, to his analyst, and to an extraordinary series of women. He was also consumed by violent hatreds—starting with his mother—and pursued many vendettas, against fellow writers (he was fiercely jealous of Hemingway, loathed Bertrand Russell) as well as romantic rivals (including Edmund Wilson) and ex-husbands. Eventually, he offended almost everyone he knew, but only after getting drunk with them first.
Even his entertainments often went to extremes, as this superb new biography well illustrates. Far and away my favorite Koestler moment—in a book full of amazing Koestler moments—is Michael Scammell’s description of an evening in 1946, during which Koestler and his then girlfriend (and later wife) Mamaine Paget went out drinking with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Camus’s wife, Francine. The festivities began with dinner in an Algerian bistro, continued in a dance hall “lit with pink and blue neon lights,” and then, at Koestler’s insistence, progressed to Schéhérazade, a nightclub filled with “violinists wandering about playing soulful Russian music into the guests’ ears.” There were arguments about communism, and about friendship. “If only it were possible to tell the truth,” exclaimed Camus at one point.
At about 4 AM, Koestler was pried away from the nightclub, and the group “repaired to Chez Victor in Les Halles for onion soup, oysters, and white wine.” Roaring drunk, Koestler threw a crust of bread across the table and hit Mamaine in the eye; Sartre, equally drunk, poured salt and pepper into napkins that he put in his pocket and said he had to deliver a lecture at the Sorbonne in the morning on “The Responsibility of the Writer.” Camus said, “Well, you’ll have to speak without me” (“Alors, tu parleras sans moi “). Sartre said he wished he “could speak without me too” (“Je voudrais bien pouvoir parler sans moi “) and collapsed into giggles.
Scammell, whose fine-tuned sense of irony serves him well here, describes that evening’s conclusion:
They broke up at dawn. Alone with Sartre, Beauvoir sobbed “over the tragedy of the human condition,” then leaned on the parapet of a bridge over the Seine and said: “I don’t see why we don’t throw ourselves in the river.” “All right,” agreed Sartre, “let’s throw ourselves in,” and began to cry himself. In another part of the city, Koestler too burst into tears as he stared into the Seine. Then he disappeared into a pissoir and shouted to Mamaine, “Don’t leave me, I love you, I’ll always love you.” They got home at about eight o’clock and slept all day, except for Sartre, who stuffed himself with pep pills and dragged himself off to the Sorbonne to give his lecture. It wasn’t possible even for an existentialist to address the students “sans moi.”
Leaving aside its entertainment value, that particular passage raises some interesting questions. We are not so many years removed from 1946, in the grand scheme of things. Yet much has changed since then, starting with the rules of acceptable public behavior. It is simply not possible to imagine any three prominent contemporary American public intellectuals—say, Malcolm Gladwell, Niall Ferguson, and David Brooks—indulging in a night on the town such as that one, let alone weeping over the human condition and threatening to throw themselves into the Seine at the end of it. Hollywood starlets and pseudo-celebrities behave that way in our culture, not serious people.
More to the point, Koestler was, in our contemporary definition of these things, an alcoholic, as were many of the people around him. He was also, in our contemporary definition of these things, a sexual predator. He was blatantly unfaithful to all of his three wives, as well as to the other women he lived with. He flirted outrageously, and sometimes aggressively, with other men’s wives too. Just a few days before the evening at Schéhérazade and Chez Victor, Koestler actually went to bed with Simone de Beauvoir.
David Cesarani, a previous biographer of Koestler, has even described him as a “serial rapist.”1 Scammell disputes that accusation at some length. In the end, only one woman—Jill Craigie, the wife of the British Labour leader Michael Foot—ever actually accused him of rape, and there are some ambiguities about her story. She made the charge when she was in her eighties, and Koestler was dead. Others, including her husband, remembered the incident differently. Scammell notes these discrepancies, and convincingly dismisses some of Cesarani’s other accusations as unfounded. He also notes that the charge has nevertheless deeply tarnished Koestler’s posthumous reputation. This is not at all surprising. Even if “rape” is not the right word, some of the sexual behavior Scammell describes would, in the contemporary world, be considered absolutely beyond the pale—and probably illegal as well.
Nor are the rules of public behavior the only things that have changed. The professionalization of literary and intellectual life was underway even in Koestler’s lifetime, and he chafed against it. He disliked the lecture circuit and never had any real interest in teaching. He had very little time for universities in general. He also refused to be categorized as a simple “novelist” or “journalist,” and in the latter part of his career wrote books about science, philosophy, history, and psychology. He understood the term “intellectual” in a much broader sense than we do today, and felt comfortable ranging over a huge number of fields in which he had no professional expertise whatsoever. This approach to the life of the mind, perfectly acceptable in the Vienna of Koestler’s youth, simply looks amateurish from the perspective of the present. As a result, many of his later books have slipped off the radar and are long out of print. Others, notably The Thirteenth Tribe, are considered curiosities that appeal to conspiracy theorists, not scholars.
The most important change, however, is political. To put it bluntly, the deadly struggle between communism and anticommunism—the central moral issue of Koestler’s lifetime—not only no longer exists, it no longer evokes much interest. Thanks to the opening of archives, quite a few Western historians are, it is true, still investigating the history of the Soviet Union and of the international Communist movement. But outside of a few university comparative literature departments, Soviet-style Marxism itself is not a living political idea anywhere in the West. In the wake of the Lehman Brothers crash in the autumn of 2008, there were calls for a government bailout of the auto industry. No one—no major newspaper columnists, no leading politicians, no popular intellectual magazines—called upon the vanguard of the proletariat to rise up and overthrow the bourgeois capitalist exploiters. In the Europe of 1948, somebody would have done so.
What that means, though, is that the entire political context in which Koest- ler, Sartre, and Camus functioned—and in which Koestler’s most important works were written—is now gone. In the years following their debauched evening in Paris, Sartre and Koestler actually stopped speaking to each other. Partly this was personal: Sartre tried to seduce Mamaine, Koestler did seduce Beauvoir, and there were bad feelings all around. But the more important reason was political. After Darkness at Noon became a best seller in France, Sartre distanced himself from its author, on the grounds that Koestler, by publicizing the crimes of the repressive Soviet regime, was putting himself at the service of American imperialism and blocking the progress of the left. It was not that Sartre did not know about the horrors Koestler described—the prisons, the torture, and the labor camps of the Soviet Union—it was that he did not find them politically convenient. They gave too much encouragement to the bourgeoisie.
by Michael Scammell
Random House, 689 pp., $35.00
He began his education in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at an experimental kindergarten in Budapest. His mother was briefly a patient of Sigmund Freud’s. In interwar Vienna he wound up as the personal secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement. Traveling in Soviet Turkmenistan as a young and ardent Communist sympathizer, he ran into Langston Hughes. Fighting in the Spanish civil war, he met W.H. Auden at a “crazy party” in Valencia, before winding up in one of Franco’s prisons. In Weimar Berlin he fell into the circle of the infamous Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg, through whom he met the leading German Communists of the era: Johannes Becher, Hanns Eisler, Bertolt Brecht. Afraid of being caught by the Gestapo while fleeing France, he borrowed suicide pills from Walter Benjamin. He took them several weeks later when it seemed he would be unable to get out of Lisbon, but didn’t die (though Benjamin, denied passage into Spain at the French border, took them and did).
Along the way he had lunch with Thomas Mann, got drunk with Dylan Thomas, made friends with George Orwell, flirted with Mary McCarthy, and lived in Cyril Connolly’s London flat. In 1940, Koestler was released from a French detention camp, partly thanks to the intervention of Harold Nicholson and Noël Coward. In the 1950s, he helped found the Congress for Cultural Freedom, together with Mel Lasky and Sidney Hook. In the 1960s, he took LSD with Timothy Leary. In the 1970s, he was still giving lectures that impressed, among others, the young Salman Rushdie.
It is difficult, in other words, to think of a single important twentieth-century intellectual who did not cross paths with Arthur Koestler, or a single important twentieth-century intellectual movement that Koestler did not either join or oppose. From progressive education and Freudian psychoanalysis through Zionism, communism, and existentialism to psychedelic drugs, parapsychology, and euthanasia, Koestler was fascinated by every philosophical fad, serious and unserious, political and apolitical, of his era.
CUNY Writers' Institute
Advertisement
Nor were these shallow passions. His belief in communism led him to fight in Spain and travel in the USSR. His Zionism led him to a kibbutz near Haifa. At different times, he advocated the use of violence, whether to bring about a Communist utopia or to create the state of Israel. Even when he turned against his previous causes (and against his previous friends who still believed in them) he did so with real fervor. He is, after all, best known as an anti-Communist, not as a Communist, largely because of his best and most influential book, Darkness at Noon, a fictional account of the interrogation of a leading member of an unnamed Communist party. His involvement with Revisionist Zionism is also probably less well known than The Thirteenth Tribe, a book that argues that modern European Jews are descended from the Central Asian Khazars, and not from the Jews who lived in the Palestine of antiquity—a thesis which, whatever its merits, is hugely popular among the enemies of Zionism. Even so, when in the grip of one particular mania he was incapable of seeing the counterarguments: in the face of all rational argument, he even stuck to his late passion for telepathy and ESP—so much so that he left most of his estate to fund a professorial chair in parapsychology.
Koestler was equally likely to succumb to extreme passions in his personal life—notoriously so. He was variously in thrall to Jabotinsky, to his analyst, and to an extraordinary series of women. He was also consumed by violent hatreds—starting with his mother—and pursued many vendettas, against fellow writers (he was fiercely jealous of Hemingway, loathed Bertrand Russell) as well as romantic rivals (including Edmund Wilson) and ex-husbands. Eventually, he offended almost everyone he knew, but only after getting drunk with them first.
Even his entertainments often went to extremes, as this superb new biography well illustrates. Far and away my favorite Koestler moment—in a book full of amazing Koestler moments—is Michael Scammell’s description of an evening in 1946, during which Koestler and his then girlfriend (and later wife) Mamaine Paget went out drinking with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Camus’s wife, Francine. The festivities began with dinner in an Algerian bistro, continued in a dance hall “lit with pink and blue neon lights,” and then, at Koestler’s insistence, progressed to Schéhérazade, a nightclub filled with “violinists wandering about playing soulful Russian music into the guests’ ears.” There were arguments about communism, and about friendship. “If only it were possible to tell the truth,” exclaimed Camus at one point.
At about 4 AM, Koestler was pried away from the nightclub, and the group “repaired to Chez Victor in Les Halles for onion soup, oysters, and white wine.” Roaring drunk, Koestler threw a crust of bread across the table and hit Mamaine in the eye; Sartre, equally drunk, poured salt and pepper into napkins that he put in his pocket and said he had to deliver a lecture at the Sorbonne in the morning on “The Responsibility of the Writer.” Camus said, “Well, you’ll have to speak without me” (“Alors, tu parleras sans moi “). Sartre said he wished he “could speak without me too” (“Je voudrais bien pouvoir parler sans moi “) and collapsed into giggles.
Scammell, whose fine-tuned sense of irony serves him well here, describes that evening’s conclusion:
They broke up at dawn. Alone with Sartre, Beauvoir sobbed “over the tragedy of the human condition,” then leaned on the parapet of a bridge over the Seine and said: “I don’t see why we don’t throw ourselves in the river.” “All right,” agreed Sartre, “let’s throw ourselves in,” and began to cry himself. In another part of the city, Koestler too burst into tears as he stared into the Seine. Then he disappeared into a pissoir and shouted to Mamaine, “Don’t leave me, I love you, I’ll always love you.” They got home at about eight o’clock and slept all day, except for Sartre, who stuffed himself with pep pills and dragged himself off to the Sorbonne to give his lecture. It wasn’t possible even for an existentialist to address the students “sans moi.”
Leaving aside its entertainment value, that particular passage raises some interesting questions. We are not so many years removed from 1946, in the grand scheme of things. Yet much has changed since then, starting with the rules of acceptable public behavior. It is simply not possible to imagine any three prominent contemporary American public intellectuals—say, Malcolm Gladwell, Niall Ferguson, and David Brooks—indulging in a night on the town such as that one, let alone weeping over the human condition and threatening to throw themselves into the Seine at the end of it. Hollywood starlets and pseudo-celebrities behave that way in our culture, not serious people.
More to the point, Koestler was, in our contemporary definition of these things, an alcoholic, as were many of the people around him. He was also, in our contemporary definition of these things, a sexual predator. He was blatantly unfaithful to all of his three wives, as well as to the other women he lived with. He flirted outrageously, and sometimes aggressively, with other men’s wives too. Just a few days before the evening at Schéhérazade and Chez Victor, Koestler actually went to bed with Simone de Beauvoir.
David Cesarani, a previous biographer of Koestler, has even described him as a “serial rapist.”1 Scammell disputes that accusation at some length. In the end, only one woman—Jill Craigie, the wife of the British Labour leader Michael Foot—ever actually accused him of rape, and there are some ambiguities about her story. She made the charge when she was in her eighties, and Koestler was dead. Others, including her husband, remembered the incident differently. Scammell notes these discrepancies, and convincingly dismisses some of Cesarani’s other accusations as unfounded. He also notes that the charge has nevertheless deeply tarnished Koestler’s posthumous reputation. This is not at all surprising. Even if “rape” is not the right word, some of the sexual behavior Scammell describes would, in the contemporary world, be considered absolutely beyond the pale—and probably illegal as well.
Nor are the rules of public behavior the only things that have changed. The professionalization of literary and intellectual life was underway even in Koestler’s lifetime, and he chafed against it. He disliked the lecture circuit and never had any real interest in teaching. He had very little time for universities in general. He also refused to be categorized as a simple “novelist” or “journalist,” and in the latter part of his career wrote books about science, philosophy, history, and psychology. He understood the term “intellectual” in a much broader sense than we do today, and felt comfortable ranging over a huge number of fields in which he had no professional expertise whatsoever. This approach to the life of the mind, perfectly acceptable in the Vienna of Koestler’s youth, simply looks amateurish from the perspective of the present. As a result, many of his later books have slipped off the radar and are long out of print. Others, notably The Thirteenth Tribe, are considered curiosities that appeal to conspiracy theorists, not scholars.
The most important change, however, is political. To put it bluntly, the deadly struggle between communism and anticommunism—the central moral issue of Koestler’s lifetime—not only no longer exists, it no longer evokes much interest. Thanks to the opening of archives, quite a few Western historians are, it is true, still investigating the history of the Soviet Union and of the international Communist movement. But outside of a few university comparative literature departments, Soviet-style Marxism itself is not a living political idea anywhere in the West. In the wake of the Lehman Brothers crash in the autumn of 2008, there were calls for a government bailout of the auto industry. No one—no major newspaper columnists, no leading politicians, no popular intellectual magazines—called upon the vanguard of the proletariat to rise up and overthrow the bourgeois capitalist exploiters. In the Europe of 1948, somebody would have done so.
What that means, though, is that the entire political context in which Koest- ler, Sartre, and Camus functioned—and in which Koestler’s most important works were written—is now gone. In the years following their debauched evening in Paris, Sartre and Koestler actually stopped speaking to each other. Partly this was personal: Sartre tried to seduce Mamaine, Koestler did seduce Beauvoir, and there were bad feelings all around. But the more important reason was political. After Darkness at Noon became a best seller in France, Sartre distanced himself from its author, on the grounds that Koestler, by publicizing the crimes of the repressive Soviet regime, was putting himself at the service of American imperialism and blocking the progress of the left. It was not that Sartre did not know about the horrors Koestler described—the prisons, the torture, and the labor camps of the Soviet Union—it was that he did not find them politically convenient. They gave too much encouragement to the bourgeoisie.
Portbou
The quiet Catalan settlement of Portbou has traditionally been best known as the first stop on Spanish territory on the Mediterranean side after France. Its vast railway station, seemingly quite out of proportion to a population of 1500 souls, stands as testimony to Portbou's border status, rivalling its opposite number in the French village of Cerbère across the frontier. Today, crossing the Franco-Spanish border is no longer quite the experience of transition-in-action that it once was. In the wake of the Schengen agreement and the euro, border checks and currency exchange have been consigned to history, although, thanks to the persisting difference between Iberian and standard European gauges, those nostalgic for the past of closed nation-states can still enjoy the complex operation by which the wheels of express trains are changed between Cerbère and Portbou stations. The small Catalan municipality generously offers the visitor the freedom of its tree-lined avenues and the repose of its stunningly beautiful beach. Today's painless border crossing would, however, have seemed an impossible dream in 1940, in a Europe ravaged by war and fascism, a Spain only beginning to recover from its own civil war, and a captive Catalonia licking its wounds, its language and culture pulverised under the iron heel of Francoism. In that year, in a time marked by irreconcilable conflict between nations and ideologies, Portbou, quite unintendedly and paradoxically, received, for little more than twenty-four hours of his life, a passing visitor whose memory would, at the end of the twentieth century, in a strange twist of history, transform the town's identity and promote it to a permanent place on the cultural map of Europe.
On the afternoon of 25 September 1940, a group of three clandestine travellers arrived in Portbou, exhausted after a harrowing trek across the Pyrenees from Banyuls-sur-Mer in France (15 km distant as the crow flies). One of them was a stateless German Jew, who carried on his person a provisional American passport issued by the US Foreign Service in Marseille, stamped with a Spanish transit visa, also issued in Marseille and good for the land journey to Portugal. A fugitive from the Vichy regime, he now aimed to reach the safety of the US via Lisbon. He had once visited Ibiza, but spoke no Spanish, although he had an excellent command of French. The Spanish frontier guards accosted the group and demanded their documents. They told the bearer of the US passport that he could go no further: his presence on Spanish territory was illegal because he had no French exit visa. However, in view of the traveller's evident ill-health, the police agreed to postpone expelling him back to Pétain's France until the next day. Impelled, perhaps, by inexplicable generosity or covert republican sympathies, they allowed him to spend the night, not in a police cell but in the less undignified surroundings of a cheap room in the Hotel de Francia - at No 5 in Avenida del General Mola, a street in the town centre near the police station, recently renamed after a Francoist commander. At 10 p.m. the next day, in Room No 4 on the hotel's second floor, the traveller was found dead.
The stateless refugee whose life ended in Portbou on 26 September 1940 was Walter Benjamin, now recognised as one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. He had lived in exile in France since 1933. He had been deprived of his German nationality in July 1939, and later that year had suffered the indignity of an internment camp. After the Nazi occupation of Paris and the creation of the Vichy regime, to be returned to France would have meant certain deportation and death; the great critical thinker's US passport, obtained through the intercessions of his émigré friends, was his one and only lifeline, and the sole talisman that might allow the continuation of his work. In these circumstances, and carrying on his person as he did a substantial quality of morphine, to take his own life may have seemed the only dignified way out. It has been claimed that the Spanish border guards might have been willing to let him through after all the next day, subject to a 'small consideration', but the hotel owner, Juan Suñer Jonama, apparently had close connections with the Gestapo, and any notion of a police change of heart remains speculative. The death certificate, signed by the local judge Fernando Pastor Nieto, gives the cause of death as a brain haemorrhage. A heart attack cannot be ruled out, as Benjamin was known to suffer from cardiac problems. Nor is it impossible that he indeed swallowed morphine, but simply as a tranquilliser or a soporific, and that the efforts and stress of that terrible day may have turned an act of auto-sedation into an involuntary overdose. The experts now believe that the true cause of his death will never be established with certainty; meanwhile, for obvious symbolic reasons, the suicide story, true or not, remains the most potent. History was a little more merciful to Benjamin in the days following his death: the bundle of pesetas found on his person, together with the clement death certificate, sufficed to buy his remains a five-year rental in what is now Niche No 563 in Portbou's peaceful cemetery. Ironically, the authorities registered the deceased traveller not as Walter Benjamin but as 'Benjamin Walter', thus failing to identify his Jewish origins: thanks to this error, he was buried not in the 'outside' section reserved for non-Catholics and unbelievers, but in the cemetery proper, as the Christian and Catholic believer which, as a secular Jew and practitioner of materialist philosophy, he never was. In 1945, after the five years were up, his remains were moved to a common grave, and their exact location is now unknown.
The author of 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' might seem an unlikely candidate for the most-famous resident of a small coastal resort, far removed from the great intellectual centres, where he spent only the very last day of his life on earth. Certainly, at no point did Benjamin's work have anything to do with Catalonia or Spain. And yet it does seem appropriate that this most cosmopolitan of thinkers should have found his resting-place here in this border town, just after forging a passage across the mountains. His intellectual endeavours had always been marked by the crossing of disciplinary borders, and today it is difficult, indeed impossible to pigeon-hole him, whether as a philosopher proper, sociologist, literary critic, historian of aesthetics, or precursor of media studies: Walter Benjamin was all of those things and more. His analytic method was to seek out the hidden connections of things, to create links and passages between apparently unrelated phenomena. The vast, unfinished book which is his magnum opus (a tissue of French quotations and German commentary, drafted over the 1930s in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and finally published in 1982), is called Das Passagen-Werk [Le Livre des Passages; The Arcades Project], and is dedicated to the interpretation of the urban symbolism of nineteenth-century Paris, taking as its central symbol the glass-and-iron arcades which are, quite literally, passages between one street and another. Today, the author of that seminal work lies buried at the intersection point between two European nations, a place of passage par excellence.
On the afternoon of 25 September 1940, a group of three clandestine travellers arrived in Portbou, exhausted after a harrowing trek across the Pyrenees from Banyuls-sur-Mer in France (15 km distant as the crow flies). One of them was a stateless German Jew, who carried on his person a provisional American passport issued by the US Foreign Service in Marseille, stamped with a Spanish transit visa, also issued in Marseille and good for the land journey to Portugal. A fugitive from the Vichy regime, he now aimed to reach the safety of the US via Lisbon. He had once visited Ibiza, but spoke no Spanish, although he had an excellent command of French. The Spanish frontier guards accosted the group and demanded their documents. They told the bearer of the US passport that he could go no further: his presence on Spanish territory was illegal because he had no French exit visa. However, in view of the traveller's evident ill-health, the police agreed to postpone expelling him back to Pétain's France until the next day. Impelled, perhaps, by inexplicable generosity or covert republican sympathies, they allowed him to spend the night, not in a police cell but in the less undignified surroundings of a cheap room in the Hotel de Francia - at No 5 in Avenida del General Mola, a street in the town centre near the police station, recently renamed after a Francoist commander. At 10 p.m. the next day, in Room No 4 on the hotel's second floor, the traveller was found dead.
The stateless refugee whose life ended in Portbou on 26 September 1940 was Walter Benjamin, now recognised as one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. He had lived in exile in France since 1933. He had been deprived of his German nationality in July 1939, and later that year had suffered the indignity of an internment camp. After the Nazi occupation of Paris and the creation of the Vichy regime, to be returned to France would have meant certain deportation and death; the great critical thinker's US passport, obtained through the intercessions of his émigré friends, was his one and only lifeline, and the sole talisman that might allow the continuation of his work. In these circumstances, and carrying on his person as he did a substantial quality of morphine, to take his own life may have seemed the only dignified way out. It has been claimed that the Spanish border guards might have been willing to let him through after all the next day, subject to a 'small consideration', but the hotel owner, Juan Suñer Jonama, apparently had close connections with the Gestapo, and any notion of a police change of heart remains speculative. The death certificate, signed by the local judge Fernando Pastor Nieto, gives the cause of death as a brain haemorrhage. A heart attack cannot be ruled out, as Benjamin was known to suffer from cardiac problems. Nor is it impossible that he indeed swallowed morphine, but simply as a tranquilliser or a soporific, and that the efforts and stress of that terrible day may have turned an act of auto-sedation into an involuntary overdose. The experts now believe that the true cause of his death will never be established with certainty; meanwhile, for obvious symbolic reasons, the suicide story, true or not, remains the most potent. History was a little more merciful to Benjamin in the days following his death: the bundle of pesetas found on his person, together with the clement death certificate, sufficed to buy his remains a five-year rental in what is now Niche No 563 in Portbou's peaceful cemetery. Ironically, the authorities registered the deceased traveller not as Walter Benjamin but as 'Benjamin Walter', thus failing to identify his Jewish origins: thanks to this error, he was buried not in the 'outside' section reserved for non-Catholics and unbelievers, but in the cemetery proper, as the Christian and Catholic believer which, as a secular Jew and practitioner of materialist philosophy, he never was. In 1945, after the five years were up, his remains were moved to a common grave, and their exact location is now unknown.
The author of 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' might seem an unlikely candidate for the most-famous resident of a small coastal resort, far removed from the great intellectual centres, where he spent only the very last day of his life on earth. Certainly, at no point did Benjamin's work have anything to do with Catalonia or Spain. And yet it does seem appropriate that this most cosmopolitan of thinkers should have found his resting-place here in this border town, just after forging a passage across the mountains. His intellectual endeavours had always been marked by the crossing of disciplinary borders, and today it is difficult, indeed impossible to pigeon-hole him, whether as a philosopher proper, sociologist, literary critic, historian of aesthetics, or precursor of media studies: Walter Benjamin was all of those things and more. His analytic method was to seek out the hidden connections of things, to create links and passages between apparently unrelated phenomena. The vast, unfinished book which is his magnum opus (a tissue of French quotations and German commentary, drafted over the 1930s in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and finally published in 1982), is called Das Passagen-Werk [Le Livre des Passages; The Arcades Project], and is dedicated to the interpretation of the urban symbolism of nineteenth-century Paris, taking as its central symbol the glass-and-iron arcades which are, quite literally, passages between one street and another. Today, the author of that seminal work lies buried at the intersection point between two European nations, a place of passage par excellence.
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