read1 of 2
discover
Renata Adler
by
People
Portbou1
Walking where Benjamin did
Portbou2
Inside the Benjamin memorial
Portbou3
The graveyard of Portbou

The End of the Story

Renata Adler
Georg Diez
27.04.16
60 min
share
60hertz

I went to Portbou to find Walter Benjamin, and I went with two friends, because, as one of them had said, we should not at the end of our lives be sad about all the things we had not done. We arrived on a cloudy evening by car from Barcelona. The first thing you notice about Portbou, where Benjamin killed himself in September 1940 after being told by the border police that he would be sent back the next morning, is the train station. It is huge and old and looks from the one side like a dam built of grey stone and from the inside like a small replica of something Parisian, something fin-de-siècle, something very European. And indeed, this is in all ambivalence of the word a truly European place, inhabited by a certain sad melancholia which is maybe kin to these kind of border towns and built in an ecclectical style in its purest fashion, if such a thing exists at all, pure ecclecticism. It is not a pretty village, but we came to like it, looking back, even to love it, for what it is and what it was: a place where you learn about what it was like to be a refugee.
We ate well the first night and had breakfast by the ocean the next morning. Then we climbed up the hill towards the French border, in the opposite direction from where Benjamin had come, carrying his heavy bag with, that is the rumor, a finished or almost finished manuscript inside, presumably another masterpiece, lost for ever. There were flowers in full bloom and a steady wind and a strikingly blue sky, and when we got to the top we came to the monument built there for the 500000 refugees who had fled in this direction, about 18 months before Benjamin had fled in the opposite direction: women, children, men who looked like Hemingway, all fleeing Spain after the victory of general Franco. This would be the testing ground for the following bigger war on a number of levels, the squashing of the liberal left between the right and the left totalitarians for one, but what struck me was the fact that the Spanish refugees had been put into camps once they got into France – presumably the same camps which were used for the Jews a little later.
What then are the forces of history? What do we know? We had come to look for a man and had discovered the legacy of hundreds of thousands of people. This is Europe. A place of perpetual displacement. Back in Barcelona for the night we walked by the city hall which is now run by a woman who came out of the people’s movement reclaiming the city from the capitalists. It is a constant struggle all over Europe these days. “Refugees Welcome” it said on a banner that was hanging from a balcony. The city was full ablaze with the celebration for the day of Saint Jorge. There were no refugees to be seen. And when I got back to Berlin on Monday morning, I got a call from my friend Renata Adler, author of “Speedboat” and “Pitch Dark”, legendary reporter and fierce essayist, the she was coming to Germany to write about the refugees. We have to talk about this, I said. And she said: Darling, of course we have to.

The End of the Story

Renata Adler
Georg Diez
27.04.16
60 min
share