Walter Benjamin (Berlin 1892 - Portbou 1940)

Benjamin wants to flee to the United States, and, after passing through Lourdes, he arrives to Marseilles in September and meets his friends Hannah Arendt, Hans Arthur Koestler and Hans Fittko. It was no longer possible to ship from Marseille to America, so Hans gives Benjamin his sister address in Portvendres, France, to help him. The plan was to reach the new continent by boat starting from Portugal. Benjamin takes the advice and heads there by train, accompanied by the photographer Henny Gurland (who years later, in America, married Erich Fromm) and her son, Joseph.

Scenic view ot the bay where Portbou lays, in Girona, Costa Brava

Portvendres contact, Lisa Fittko, is responsible for lead from Banyuls to Portbou by a difficult path, very steep and full of stones that Benjamin, sick at heart, can only make after breaks of 10 minutes. They finally reach the top of the last mountain, where Portbou sighted. According Fittko:

Finally we reached the top. I had moved on and I stopped to look. What I saw struck me as the result of a sort of hallucination: in an unexpected way I saw the sea back again, in a dark blue color. Portbou was down there.

From there on they will descent to the village. Fittko leaves him and returns to the starting point, where in later years she will continue to guide many other exiles. Benjamin and his two companions arrive to the police station in Portbou, a border village with evident traces of a Civil War bombings which had ended only a year earlier. But Spanish police denied him entry into Spanish territory and announce that they will be handed over to French authorities.

Walter Benjamin Memorial tomb, in Portbou cemetery

Controlled by police in the Hostal Francia, today closed, Benjamin spent his night in room number 3. After making a series of phone calls, he took a strong dose of morphine (which he got in Marseille), and his body is found the next morning on the bed. He died at 48 years.

Walter Benjamin spent just over 12 hours of his life in the village of Portbou, but the mark it has left in it still remains indelible. In our next article we will discover how.

Walter Benjamin Memorial, a Karavan monument in Portbou, just in face of the village cliffs