The memorial
Passages: Hommage to Walter Benjamin
Passages, by the Israeli artist Dani Karavan, is a memorial in honour of the philosopher Walter Benjamin to mark the 50th anniversary of his death. Located beside Portbou's cemetery, where Walter Benjamin is buried, Passages is composed of elements of historical, cultural, environmental and symbolic significance.
The memorial is an initiative of the AsKi association in Bonn and was supported by several German Federal States and the Generalitat of Catalonia, the Catalan government. Richard von Weizsäcker (1920-2015), the President of the Federal Republic of Germany at the time, was personally interested in the project and visited Portbou.
Walter Benjamin, born in 15 July 1892 into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin, committed suicide on 26 September 1940 in Portbou, having arrived there a day earlier by foot from France. He had a visa, issued in Marseille, which was supposed to grant him safe passage through Spain to Portugal and from there on to the USA. Nazi Germany had stripped him of his German citizenship in February 1939 and France refused to grant him a residence permit, although he had settled in Paris in 1933. As a result, he did not have the necessary documents to leave France, thus forcing him, together with other refugees, to attempt the clandestine crossing of the Pyrenees Mountains by foot. This was particularly difficult for Benjamin because of his bad heart condition. Wanted by the Gestapo, Benjamin’s suicide can be attributed to him knowing that the Spanish authorities intended to send them back to France, and the fate that this inevitably entailed. Indeed, the previous year he had been interned for three months at the Nevers camp.
Passatges / A Walter Benjamin
Photography: Angelus Novus Foundation.