was hardly prepared for that battle. Which is why (following the shadowy contortions of his complex temperament) he simply absented himself and avoided growing attached to anyone. He preferred to stay away from the in-fighting of the communist movement or the oblivious pettiness of the various émigré groups. He was reserved, yes, but he ended up alone, choosing isolation. And for years he wrote the saddest letters to his friends, who were by now scattered to all four corners of the world, regretting that loneliness. He wrote letters pretending that letter writing wasn’t anachronistic. Letters allowed him, as Adorno explained, ‘To reject the separation and remain no less far away, no less separated.’ He wrote confessions without revealing to himself that he felt profoundly more alone than ever before and that he still preferred not to join the other émigrés at the café. In the end, for someone like him, it was almost better to be lost in the anonymity of a giant foreign city.
It was difficult. Benjamin was really distressed by the conversations he had with his few, highly selected friends from Berlin. The number of people he associated with in Paris could be counted on one hand: Hans Sahl, the photographer Gisèle Freund, Hannah Arendt (philosopher and distant relative), Stephan Lackner and Fritz Lieb (Karl Barth’s student) whom he addressed almost immediately in intimate terms while it had taken him almost ten years to speak like that with Scholem, a bosom friend and companion since youth. Later on, Walter would become involved with Adrienne Monnier, Sylvia Beach, and Arthur Koestler – that was after he returned from Spain and left the Communist Party – and Pierre Klosowski and Georges Bataille. But it’s not possible to replace friends you’ve had for twenty years, the people you discovered the world with. Those friends were all out of reach. Scholem was in Palestine. His ex-wife Dora was in Italy, Jula Cohn, whom he’d loved in the years leading up to the divorce, was in Germany with her husband Felix Noeggerath. And Alfred Cohn was in Spain. This is another one of the blows that exile delivers – it takes everyone along the path of their own individual diaspora. It shatters the collective spirit. Not much remains afterward.You’re left alone to settle your accounts, ruminating over the same crop of thoughts every day, cultivating them in solitude. Perhaps the only thing left afterward is your work.
‘Until it was written,’ said Sahl in his memoir, ‘it was still being lived. Until it was written, Hitler hadn’t won yet.’ But what if you were like Benjamin, racked with such a pitiful vision of yourself that it’s almost suffocating? ‘Living among the émigrés is unbearable,’ he confessed to Scholem on the last day of 1933. ‘A solitary life is not more tolerable. Living in a French world is impossible. All that is left then is work. Although nothing is more threatening to work than the plain recognition that work is the entirety of your inner life.’
But that was what allowed him to keep going, to persist. In March 1934, Benjamin resumed work on his Parisian Passagen-Werk – threshold spaces, places where ancient myths and the merchandise of the modern world came together. And he felt like he could only work in Paris. That book full of quotations and images, built like an enormous kaleidoscope, took root in books that had already been written. This is how Paris was for Benjamin, ‘the great reading room of a library divided by the Seine.’ It was a library that Walter plundered without scruples, copying sentences, illustrations, notes and references with boundless energy into his notebooks. The material he accumulated became more and more cumbersome while the project began to seem perhaps interminable. Benjamin worked on Passagen-Werk almost ceaselessly during those years of exile, stopping only to work on some essay commissioned by the Horkheimer Institute – for Adorno, who was supplying the small grant he was living on. But it was his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age’ that seemed most promising. For years his allusive, esoteric projects had kept him out of fashionable conversation, but this essay led him to believe he might be influential in the debate over the future of Marxist aesthetics. Benjamin would be at the middle of a global discussion and wouldn’t feel so alone anymore. How wrong he was. That essay may be his most famous work today, but it had a catastrophic reception at the time – even from his staunch supporters: Scholem was non-committal, Adorno critical, Brecht was even offended and the audience – mostly Communist Party members – at the two evening panels organised by the association of exiled German writers where Benjamin and Hans Sahl discussed the essay listened as if in a silent bubble, almost a boycott. This was late June 1936.
‘That’s it. It’s all over,’ he said to Hans Sahl as they walked home together at the end of the evening. The moon was hidden behind a pitch-black cloud. Blustery wind rattled the lamps over the deserted streets. It was a peculiar wind for a humid June night – a grim wind, fat with rancour and rain. Leaving the station on the metro, the lights of the station were quickly swallowed by the dark tunnel.
‘What’s over?’ asked Sahl.
‘It’s over for them. You saw their faces? The comrades? And their leader, Müzenberg . . . they’re jackasses and I don’t mean just aesthetically speaking.’
In Weimar Germany Sahl had been an important theatre and film critic, among the first to believe in film as an art form. Benjamin’s essay brought new perspective to bear on his hunch and yet no one seemed to appreciate it.
‘You’ll see, Walter,’ he said as they stood on the steps of the station leading up to the road. ‘They’ll give it its due in the end.You’re too far ahead of your time.’
It was late by the time they reached the rue de Vaugirard, Benjamin’s pace was slow and uncertain and his head was bowed. He’d stop periodically but continue talking, shaking his head and never looking up at Sahl, who was having some difficulty following but couldn’t figure out how to interrupt.
‘I made a mistake, I made a mistake . . .’ he kept repeating in the grimy darkness of the night. He was worn out and panting. This was a man used to being in control of his feelings. He never liked to reveal too much and worried about saying the wrong thing. But that evening he seemed short of illusions. And was slowly pulling the white flag of surrender from his pocket.
Suddenly he burst out, ‘Enough of this,’ and embarrassed drops of rain began to fall. Sahl opened his umbrella and stood closer, trying to keep Benjamin from getting wet.
‘Maybe we should leave,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve already seen a couple of uniforms around. Are your papers in order?’
‘What does it matter?’
It was god only knows what time of night and they’d been standing there for a long time under the soundless rain shower. And then two policemen out on their rounds appeared from around the corner.
‘Bonsoir,’ said one, lifting his fingers to his cap. ‘You’ve been standing here for quite a while now.Who are you and what are you doing?’
Sahl didn’t have time to answer because Benjamin jumped in, ‘We are two German Jews standing under an umbrella talking,’ he said very seriously. Then he twirled his fingers in the air and made off alone through the rain that had begun to seem unending.
After that ill-fated evening in 1936, Benjamin made no further efforts to broaden his circle. Even though he missed intellectual companionship and his loneliness bothered him, he resigned himself to it. He began to concentrate on himself and his few friends whom he didn’t spare the smallest detail – not even his constant state of anxiety over his finances – in his letters and in rare encounters. Money became his central concern, his obsession.
After his German remittances were suspended, his only source of income was the money coming in from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Institute for Social Research. But that money never seemed enough. There isn’t a single letter from that extensive period that doesn’t hint at his hardships and deprivations, the difficulty of daily survival, the humiliation he suffered without any promise of remedy. In October 1935, for example, Benjamin wrote to Max Horkheimer, ‘Any help you give me will
