other Berlin intellectuals gathered at the Romanisches Café. ‘Sitting there,’ Hans Sahl would write many years later, ‘like animals petrified in the moment, untethered, waiting to be blown away. It was as if they’d lost their identities and were waiting for new ones to come and save them. They scoured over train schedules, hunched over maps, and wrote letters to relatives long since emigrated to America who had made their fortunes it seemed.’ It was a long funeral for Weimar Germany, a timid ritual conducted to the rhythm of the word escape.
But Benjamin wasn’t on the run – at least not yet. He wasn’t well-known enough and his writing was too abstruse and esoteric to attract the attention of the Nazi censors or position him as an enemy of the state. And yet his life in Germany ended on January 30, 1933, with an ‘almost mathematical simultaneity’. Within just a few days’ time all his manuscripts were returned to him, his contacts disappeared, negotiations lapsed, all the letters he wrote asking for explanations were met with silence. Time was short. Benjamin never appeared to lose his calm during those weeks, even if what had befallen his friends should have filled him with terror. On January 20, the SA raided the houses of Horkheimer and Pollack. The night of February 27, Bloch, Brecht, Bentano, Dracauer and Speyer disappeared – all of them went abroad to escape. Ernst Schoen and Fritz Fränkel were captured and tortured.
Those last days he spent in Berlin were a constant attempt to distance himself from this inevitable end that had only just begun. He would be leaving his language and leaving himself. He crept on tiptoe while history was moving in on him like a locomotive. History begged him to follow his friend Gretel’s advice and run. There was nowhere else to go but Paris. Over the last twenty years, Benjamin had spent many months there. He spoke the language fluently; he had translated Proust and Baudelaire into German; he knew French literature better than most; and he’d been working on a book, Passagen-Werk, about Paris. Where else would he go? Although this time around he wouldn’t be making another trip to a city that he thought of, perhaps even more than Berlin, as his own. He would never be able to live there again as he had in 1913 – his first visit – when he’d experienced it ‘intensely, the way only children know how to live’.
And yet, he had to go. Benjamin didn’t believe that the Nazi spectre would eventually pass; he knew it would last. Nevertheless, all those weeks he spent shut up in his studio, he’d been waiting for something, ruminating on his doubts and apprehensions, until, at last, all of the indecision of the past years and months seemed to evaporate in a moment. He put his affairs in order, sublet the apartment for a year, and left quickly for France. He brought a couple of suitcases with him, filled with more books, manuscripts and notes than clothing. But he was forced to leave his library behind in Germany – the library that he needed for his work.
Benjamin left alone, because there was no one left who could bring him to the station. He arrived alone, because there was no one at the station to meet him. He stepped down from the train pale and exhausted. Sighing deeply, he looked out over the gentle rain, just barely liquid, falling over the Paris sky, and picked up his bags.
Chapter Four
You think it was easy to tell Mariano to his face that fighting was useless, that we had to get out before it was too late? Courage was what we needed back then. But lucky for us, he gave in just a couple of days later. German planes had downed a submarine and a destroyer in the port of Musel. They’d burned our stock houses. Gijón at night was like a scene from hell and it kept burning through the day. Our company abandoned the bridge we were defending and scattered: our front line had been eliminated. There we were, the two of us, at three in the afternoon, walking down the road that ran from Pedroso to Contriz. It wasn’t as if Mariano would ever admit that I’d been right. When he saw a car approaching, he abruptly said, ‘We’ll requisition that car, get to Gijón and head out from there.’
We didn’t really want to take the car, but we had to get out. The Musel wharf was in shambles, an obstacle course of shrapnel.You couldn’t tell who was in command in that stampede. People weren’t carrying permits; no one wore their stripes on their shoulders. Everyone – gunners, drivers, police and asaltos – was fighting to be the first on board a ship. But the few ships that were still seaworthy were already crowded with women and children. And the people on board were doing everything they could to keep anyone else off – otherwise they’d sink under all that excess weight.
I didn’t even have time to say goodbye to my brothers Marcial and Libertad. We drove right to the wharf, climbed out of the car and headed for an old fishing boat that must have been held together with spit. Three armed soldiers blocked our path.
‘You have to stop here, comrades.’
The boy pointing his rifle at my chest and staring me down was younger than me. I grabbed the barrel with my left hand and planted my 9-millimetre Star sub-machine gun into his gut and screamed, ‘I’ll blow you to bits!’
But as soon as we got on board, we joined the others keeping people off. The fact is there were hundreds of us crammed onto that boat, and not even a miracle would have made room for more. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t take it. I’d been on the battleground just a few hours before. I couldn’t count how many days it had been since I’d slept . . . or eaten. I heard some people in the distance agreeing to get off the boat as if in a dream, and then someone else said something about there being no more coal left. Then I realised that the boat was actually pulling away from the dock. Mariano was snoring next to me. Lucky him. He didn’t seem to mind the sweat, the stench, all those bodies packed in like cigarettes in an unopened pack, the weeping women who’d left their children behind. The sea was calm enough, fortunately, but then just a few miles out we ran smack into the Cervera. It was dark already and the boat circled ours, shining lights at us, and then suddenly their cannons fired, falling in the water not a hundred metres away. That was when Mariano woke up. ‘What the hell?’ he said. All around us people were vomiting, trying to eat their identification papers, trying to get the captain to gun the engine, while other people were screaming for him to stop.
The Cervera came closer and a voice called out ‘Who are you?’ The guy at the command kept cool. ‘Women and children,’ he answered. Someone shone a flashlight into the stern and we flattened ourselves against the deck as best we could. The light circled and then went away.
I could hear the order. ‘Head towards El Ferrol – we’ll follow you in.’
We all started breathing again. The motor rumbled back to life, the night was dark, the wind rushed against the portholes. The Cervera kept close behind us.After two hours, they communicated that we should change our course and that another ship would take us into port. They turned and disappeared – out on the hunt for more important prey. Once they left we didn’t know what to do. We argued about it. Some people wanted to follow the orders and others wanted to head north to France. We didn’t have any food and the Cervera had sequestered our water supply to keep us from escaping.
‘How long does it take to get to France?’ I asked.
‘Three days.’
‘Is there fishing equipment aboard?’
‘Do you see any? This old tub has been retired for more years than I can remember. There’s no equipment at all left on her.’
Mariano, who hadn’t said a word up to this point, suddenly tried to stand up, his rifle in his hand, but his head crashed into the ceiling. No one laughed. He dug his fingers into his hair and stared at the commander.
‘That’s enough talk,’ he said. ‘We’ll head to Bordeaux.Anyone who has a problem with that should tell me now.’
They fell as silent as carpets, every last one of them, except
