I remember reading passionately, ready to be published in Spanish, I was walking through the Pirineos (1985), de Lisa Fittko (Muchnik, 1988). This Hungarian-born anti-fascist activist is described as a guide to refugees who lived among the Nazis.
She also led him on foot along an alternative route to the one controlled by the Germans, from Banyuls-sur-mer to Portbou on the Spanish border. It was she who accompanied Walter Benjamin, who rose to his feet and walked along the path at a very slow pace, leaving every ten minutes, and holding a black purse in which he carried a manuscript, which by the way “More important than my own person”.
From this book, I suggested that one day I would return to Benjamin’s path, to a project that one should know about after a long time, the next step. Certainly because of what Cortázar said about life, “always on the verge of a leap that we don’t take”. The case is entretanto “Camino de Walter Benjamin”, As we know, it is a heavily signposted route with a mountain of tourists and Benjamin admirers passing by as they make their way to the imposing monument to the Portbou-raised writer.
In 2024, an Argentinian developer Jacobo Sucari I studied this journey in a documentary Walter Benjamin, Aura of the Hearthtraining historical memory with a reflection on the exile of multiple calamities in Benjamin’s work. Antes, Chilean photojournalist and writer Patricio Salinas was published in 2018 The Last Days of Walter Benjamin (Saposcat), a beautiful photographic account of the journey preceded by three remarkable approaches to Benjamin, emanating from the same.
The same Patricio Salinas is ready for publication 563: Walter Benjamin and the derrumbe aesthetic (Björkö Project, 2025), a valuable volume – bilingual, like the previous one (English-Spanish) – in which he delves into his approach to the author One direction. On this occasion, it is not a mountain road to Portbou, up to the same place as Portbou, which became the “terminus” of Benjamin. A handful of extreme black-and-white photographs are baked from it, and in that Salinas’s art seems to have passed through time, it could be said that it is imbued with a tragic view of the Angel of History, who, according to Benjamin, saw only ruins.
From this book, I proposed that I would one day return to Benjamin’s journey, a project that would continue long into the future.
What Salinas proposes is now a type of “photographic study”, as each photograph is presented together with an essay that recalls, explores and emphasizes some elements of Benjamin’s thought, of which Salinas is a deep connoisseur. The result of e.g a book surprisingly similar to Benjamin’s poetryand an excellent presentation – as well as stimulating commentary – of some of his key ideas, taken from a factual perspective.
563Of course, it is the number of the man from the Portbou cement factory, where Benjamin was buried in 1940, until five years later, when no one came forward to claim him, the remains were brought to a common place.
Benjamin’s journey to Portbou is one of the stories you remember Uwe Wittsock in another book published by: Marsella 1940. Artists who embraced Nazism (Galaxia Gutenberg), an interesting and well-documented collection of this French city during the months it became a collection of people from all over the world trying to escape to America.
Wittsock reads about the personality of the American journalist Varian Fry, employed in save as many intellectuals as possible, artists and writers, including Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Mann and his wife, Anna Seghers, André Breton, Max Ernst, Lion Feuchtwanger, Alma Mahler and Franz Werfel.
A death that Walter Benjamin ultimately did not count among us.
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