Susan Sontag said that in Walter Benjamin’s writing, sentences did not originate ordinarily, do not progress into one another, and delineate no obvious line of reasoning, as if each sentence “had to say everything, before the inward gaze of total concentration dissolved the subject before his eyes”, a “freeze-frame baroque” style of writing and cogitation. “His major essays seem to end just in time, before they self-destruct”. The difficulty of Benjamin's writing style is essential to his philosophical project. Fascinated by notions of reference and constellation, his goal in later works was to use intertexts to reveal aspects of the past that cannot, and should not, be understood within greater, monolithic constructs of historical understanding.
Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou at the Spanish-French border while attempting to escape from the Nazis. The party he was with were told by the Spanish police that they would be deported back to France, which would have hampered Benjamin's plans to get to the United States. While staying in the Hotel de Francia, he apparently took some morphine pills and died on the night of 25/26 September 1940.
Yet the circumstances of his death remain obscure. It has been recently suggested by journalist Stephen Schwartz that Benjamin was murdered by Joseph Stalin's secret police.[12]
The fact that he was buried in the consecrated
Walter Benjamin's grave in Portbou
section of a Roman Catholic cemetery would indicate that his death was not announced as a suicide. The other persons in his party were allowed passage the next day, and safely reached Lisbon on 30 September. A manuscript of Benjamin's "On the Concept of History" was passed to Theodor Adorno by Hannah Arendt, who crossed the French-Spanish border at Portbou a few months later, and was subsequently published by the Institute for Social Research (temporarily relocated to New York) in 1942.
Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou at the Spanish-French border while attempting to escape from the Nazis. The party he was with were told by the Spanish police that they would be deported back to France, which would have hampered Benjamin's plans to get to the United States. While staying in the Hotel de Francia, he apparently took some morphine pills and died on the night of 25/26 September 1940.
Yet the circumstances of his death remain obscure. It has been recently suggested by journalist Stephen Schwartz that Benjamin was murdered by Joseph Stalin's secret police.[12]
The fact that he was buried in the consecrated
section of a Roman Catholic cemetery would indicate that his death was not announced as a suicide. The other persons in his party were allowed passage the next day, and safely reached Lisbon on 30 September. A manuscript of Benjamin's "On the Concept of History" was passed to Theodor Adorno by Hannah Arendt, who crossed the French-Spanish border at Portbou a few months later, and was subsequently published by the Institute for Social Research (temporarily relocated to New York) in 1942.
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