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Did Stalin's killers liquidate Walter Benjamin?
The renowned German writer and critic may not have died at his own hands, reports
Stuart Jeffries from Paris
The Observer, Sunday 8 July 2001
Walter Benjamin, the Jewish intellectual long thought to have committed suicide, was
killed by Stalinist agents during his wartime flight from the Nazis, according to a new
theory.
Since his death in September 1940, it has been believed that the German writer and
critic - who posthumously became one of the most celebrated intellectuals of the
twentieth century - killed himself while on the run.
His body was found in a hotel room in the Catalan town of Port Bou and it is generally
thought he took a drug overdose. The myopic, weak-hearted, 48-year-old philosopher
had just crossed the Pyrenees to Franco's Spain with other Jewish refugees, fleeing
certain death in his adopted home of Paris.
But a new study suggests it is more likely that Benjamin, a renegade Marxist, was killed
by Stalinist agents.
Obscure during his lifetime, Benjamin achieved posthumous success when his writings
were published in the Sixties and Seventies. Essays such as The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction, as well as studies of Kafka, Brecht and book-collecting,
established him for many as a brilliant critic and social theorist.
Benjamin fled Berlin for Paris in 1933, but in 1940 Vichy France signed an armistice
with the Third Reich and refugees, especially Jews, from Hitler's Germany were in
danger of being sent to the death camps.
Fleeing to Marseille, Benjamin made an unsuccessful attempt at escape aboard a
freighter bound for Ceylon. He was discovered and put ashore. Later he decided to walk
across the Pyrenees to avoid border patrols. He had an American visa and hoped to join
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who had re-established the Frankfurt School in
the US.
But soon after his arrival in Spain he was betrayed by the hotel owner. Fearing the
Spanish would turn him over to the French border police, who would hand him to the
Nazis, Benjamin is said to have taken his life.
'Benjamin's famous fate,' wrote Lesley Chamberlain in the Times Literary Supplement
earlier this year, 'was to fall afoul of the Spanish police...who determined to put him on
a train to France the next day. Ill, exhausted and hearing that he was beginning a rail
journey that would surely lead to his death in a concentration camp, he overdosed on
morphine.'
But this account is challenged by Stephen Schwartz, a Montenegro-based journalist and
specialist in the study of communism and intellectuals in the Thirties. In an article
entitled - The Mysterious Death of Walter Benjamin, Schwartz says that Stalinist agents
were operating in the south of France and northern Spain during the early years of the
war, when the Nazi-Soviet pact was still in operation. The result was that two of the
most powerful secret police forces in Europe were working in close co-operation.
'Unquestionably the Soviet secret police was operating a chokepoint in southern France
- sifting through the wave of fleeing exiles for targets of liquidation,' says Schwartz.
Willi Münzenberg, a former Soviet agent who had organised front groups that wooed
Western liberals during the Twenties and Thirties, was held in an internment camp, but
after being released and walking away with two 'German socialists' he was found
hanging from a tree near Grenoble. Thus the man who knew most about Russian
disinformation operations was airbrushed from history.
'Walter Benjamin walked straight into this maelstrom of evil,' argues Schwartz. 'And,
although his acolytes have chosen to ignore it, he was eminently qualified to appear on
a Soviet hit list.'
A few months before he died, Benjamin wrote Theses on the Philosophy of History, one
of the most insightful analyses of the failure of Marxism ever produced. He died at a
time when many former Soviet loyalists were becoming disillusioned with Moscow
because of the Hitler-Stalin pact. In response Stalinist agents, often recruited from
socialist intellectuals - Schwartz called them 'killerati' - were carrying out
assassinations.
Benjamin had, perhaps unwittingly, associated with Comintern agents as well as Arthur
Koestler, the Hungarian writer and Soviet agent turned renegade. Schwartz says:
'Benjamin was part of a subculture honeycombed with dangerous people - it was known
not to be safe.'
In the late Thirties, argues Schwartz, Stalinist agents in Spain were assigned to track
down German-speaking anti-Stalinists and torture them into false confessions of
betraying the Republic. 'Moscow wanted a parallel, outside Soviet borders, to the
infamous purge trials, and the targets of attempts to realise such a judicial travesty
included George Orwell,' he writes.
Schwartz argues in his article for the American magazine The Weekly Standard that the
suicide theory is tenuous. Documentation by a Spanish judge shows no evidence of the
presence of drugs. A doctor's report states that a cerebral haemorrhage, perhaps
aggravated by the exertion of crossing the Pyrenees, killed him.
Henny Gurland, one of the refugees who accompanied Benjamin across the Pyrenees,
claimed that he gave her two suicide letters which she later destroyed. She then
reconstructed the notes, which were published in The Complete Correspondence of
Adorno and Benjamin two years ago.
Schwartz suggests this is not authentic, not least because Benjamin wrote in German,
not French, and because Port Bou is not a village but a seaside town.
One further mystery remains. As Benjamin fled he was hugging a manuscript. The
American writer Jay Parini has suggested this was the masterwork he had been working
on in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. But the briefcase was entrusted to a fellow
refugee who lost it on a train from Barcelona to Madrid.