Benjamin's Crossing

  Jay Parini

  Benjamin’s Crossing

  Jay Parini is a poet, novelist, and biographer who teaches at Middlebury College. His six books of poetry include New and Collected Poems, 1975–2015. He has written eight novels, including The Damascus Road, The Apprentice Lover, The Passages of H.M., and The Last Station, which was made into an Academy Award–nominated film starring Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer. His biographical subjects include John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, and, most recently, Gore Vidal. His nonfiction works include Jesus: The Human Face of God, Why Poetry Matters, and Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America.

  www.jayparini.com

  Also by Jay Parini

  Fiction

  The Damascus Road

  The Passages of H.M.

  The Apprentice Lover

  Bay of Arrows

  The Last Station

  The Patch Boys

  The Love Run

  Poetry

  New and Collected Poems: 1975–2015

  The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems

  House of Days

  Town Life

  Anthracite Country

  Singing in Time

  Nonfiction and Criticism

  Borges and Me: An Encounter

  The Way of Jesus: Living a Spiritual and Ethical Life

  Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal

  Jesus: The Human Face of God

  The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (editor)

  Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America

  Why Poetry Matters

  The Art of Teaching

  One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner

  Robert Frost: A Life

  Some Necessary Angels: Essays on Writing and Politics

  John Steinbeck: A Biography

  Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain (editor)

  An Invitation to Poetry

  Theodore Roethke: An American Romantic

  Copyright © 1997 by Jay Parini

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Henry Holt and Company, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Ltd., Markham, Ontario, in 1997.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Henry Holt edition as follows:

  Name: Parini, Jay.

  Title: Benjamin’s crossing : a novel / Jay Parini.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Henry Holt, 1996.

  Identifiers: lccn 96031959

  Subjects: lcsh: Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940—Fiction. | Authors—Fiction. | Germany—Fiction.

  gsafd: Biographical fiction. | Historical fiction.

  Classification: lcc ps3566.a65 b46 1996 | ddc 813/.54—dc23

  lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​96031959

  Anchor Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525562757

  Ebook ISBN 9780525562764

  Author photograph © Oliver Parini

  www.anchorbooks.com

  Cover design by Perry De La Vega

  Cover photograph courtesy of Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Walter Benjamin Archiv, Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur

  ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Jay Parini

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: Gershom Scholem

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3: Lisa Fittko

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5: Scholem

  Chapter 6: Lisa Fittko

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8: Asja Lacis

  Chapter 9: Lisa Fittko

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11: Lisa Fittko

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13: Madame Ruiz

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15: Madame Ruiz

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18: Gershom Scholem

  Author’s Note

  For Devon, every word of it

  WALTER BENJAMIN

  I came into this world under the sign of Saturn—star of the slowest revolution, planet of detours and delays.

  1

  GERSHOM SCHOLEM

  Port-Bou, Spain: 1950. Here I stand, a man who did not even weep at the death of his own parents, weeping for Walter Benjamin, my dear lost friend. The graveyard has a vertical pitch, suspended over a green-gold sea in the shadow of the Pyrenees.

  A decade or more has passed, but I still hear his voice shunting the dry grass, curling with the wind, caught in the boom and tingle of the surf. “If I were to join you in Palestine,” he said, “it is entirely possible that my situation would improve. Then again, who can say? I tend, as you see, to pause at the fork in every road, shifting my weight from foot to foot.” He wrote that in 1931, when the opportunity was still there. He could have come, you know, to Jerusalem, where he would have lived among like-minded people. There was no need for this destruction. I would eventually have found him a position in the university—or in a school, perhaps. Teachers are always in demand. Or a library. He would have made an excellent curator of manuscripts and objects d’art. Who knew more than Walter Benjamin?

  He never guessed the extreme turn things would take in Europe: Benjamin was simply not that sort of man. It is fair to say that he understood little about real life; he was—dare I say it?—an ignoramus when it came to politics. But what a literary mind! He could enter the labyrinth of a text and, like Theseus, unspool a thread from his heart that he could follow back to the light, having gone down so deep, having stood face-to-face with the Minotaur itself and slain it.

  The European mind has lost its champion, its dauphin, its sweetest prince, though nobody really knows it. Would they care if they knew? I doubt the world can produce another quite like Benjamin. Even if it does, the soil of this continent is no longer right for such a mind. It could never thrive in this befouled and selfish, soulless climate. I should don sackcloth, hike into the desert, mourn. I should cry out with Jeremiah: “And I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination.”

  But here I stand, on the Spanish border, where he died ten years ago. He was my friend, and I had to see this grave for myself. To visualize and confirm everything. And to see exactly what happened and where it happened, this tragedy that can still bring a good night’s sleep skidding to a halt.

  The surf breaks on rocky shingle below me, and bladder wrack lies exposed like intestines among driftwood and boulders, the anemones pulsing in little rock pools like yellow hearts, as if trying to keep the great beast of the sea alive. There is such struggle for life everywhere. But the entropic nature of the universe cannot be denied. Things fall apart, and that’s that.

  This is the place where Eva Ruiz, a French-born woman who runs the only hotel in the village, tells me he is buried, but I’m not sure which grave is his.

  “He was a polite man, your friend,” she said this morning, serving me coffee in the terraced garden behind her pink-faced hotel, which is perched on
a cliff overlooking the sea. “I liked him very much.”

  “That was a long time ago. You must have had so many guests,” I said. Her hands fluttered in her lap like a pair of white moths.

  “Oh no,” she insisted. “I remember him well, your Dr. Benjamin. A small and very sensitive man, and a Jew, as I recall. He had a bushy mustache and wore thick glasses and was kind to my daughter, you see. A mother remembers that sort of thing. Suzanne still refers to him.”

  “May I speak with your daughter?”

  “That is impossible, I’m afraid. She has been sent away to school, in Nice.” Her face grew rigid, and the mothlike hands flew to her neck, as if she might strangle herself before my very eyes.

  “The way he died,” she said, “it was too sad, really, and so ill-considered.”

  “Pardon?”

  “From my viewpoint, of course. Given my situation, you see. I am a widow. One has to take many things into account.”

  “I’m afraid you confuse me, madame,” I said.

  “Do I?” She leapt to her feet and looked out the window. “I have no gift for words, I’m afraid. I say the wrong things. It used to exasperate my husband, who was an officer…under General Franco. He met the general on two or three occasions.”

  I realized there was no point in interrogating her further, but it interested me that Benjamin had made such an impression on her. She could not have known him well. If my calculations are correct, he was only here in Port-Bou for a day or so, in early October 1940—the last day of his life. Nevertheless, Madame Ruiz had been able to shed impressive tears on his behalf when I first mentioned that he was my friend; mascara streaked her powdery cheeks, making black lines that followed and deepened the heavy creases in her skin. Her broad forehead was a plinth for the tall black statue of her hair. I supposed that in her youth she would have been a formidable beauty, but now she was appalling.

  “He had several friends with him, as I recall. They were all quite pleasant. A middle-aged woman and her son. And another man, I think. A Belgian teacher or accountant—I forget which. They had come a great distance on foot, over the mountains! The poor things were exhausted!”

  “It was a common route for Jews, was it not?”

  “For Jews, yes. And others. I did my best to make it easy for them, but it was never easy, you see. The border guards were vigilant, and the local police…you could never trust them.” She whispered under her breath that General Franco was not especially sympathetic to the Jews. This hardly surprised me. The history of the Jews in Spain has been an anguished one, going back to Isabella and Ferdinand, who did their best to scatter us to the ends of the earth. The fires of pogroms licked the night skies as shiploads of Jews cast off for Africa or the Middle East.

  “You are yourself a Jew?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I see from your passport that you live in Jerusalem.”

  “I do.”

  “It must be a lovely city,” she said. “One of my sisters married a Jew. A large fellow, with a purple birthmark on his forehead. He’s in the fur trade. Bernard Cohen, his name is.” She looked at me as if I should somehow know him.

  I chose not to interpret her remarks but accept them as a piece of unmediated personal history. Whether or not this Madame Ruiz approved of her sister’s marriage was not my business. That she was probably an anti-Semite was clear enough.

  She introduced me to a diminutive, wrinkled man called Pablo. In rapid Catalan, she explained to him what I wanted, and he seemed to understand. He led me to an unmarked grave—one of a dozen or so unmarked graves at the end of an allée of cedars. Wisteria, succulent and purple, dangled in the sea breeze from a stone wall. This was, I thought at once, an appropriate sort of place for one’s bones to meld into dirt: a little squint of heaven on earth.

  Pablo smelled of wine, and I did not trust him. Like Madame Ruiz, he did not look at me as we spoke.

  “Are you sure this is it?” I asked, testing my Spanish. The stone marker was pocked and mottled, with no initials on it, no date, nothing. It seemed much older than a decade.

  Pablo shrugged. “I buried him myself,” he said, or seemed to say, in Catalan. Though I am a linguist by training, Catalan defeats me.

  I did not believe him but tipped him anyway, indicating I would like to be alone at my friend’s grave, or supposed grave, under a hard, blue Spanish sky, rocking back and forth in prayer as a rabbi might have done that terrible day in 1940, had there been a rabbi. I wanted somehow to complete a circle I had begun to draw so many years before, and to make amends for something that can never be amended.

  * * *

  —

  Our correspondence of three decades ended abruptly in the late spring of 1940, and it was some time before I heard that he had died—by his own hand, apparently. For many reasons, this information did not surprise me. It would have surprised me more if he had actually made it to New York or Cuba or Casablanca; it would have suggested resources not obviously within his grasp.

  I first caught a glimpse of Benjamin in 1913, at the Café Tiergarten in Berlin. Those smoky establishments along the Kurfürstendamm have long passed out of existence, but in those days there was nothing like them, with their cool marble floors and high ceilings and potted plants that dangled and drooped like creatures from another world. One could sit and chatter about politics, philosophy, and literature until the morning star rose over Berlin without having to buy more than one cup of thick Turkish coffee. Young Berliners hoping to fashion themselves as intellectuals or artists flocked from all parts of the city, testing the quality of their minds and hearts on one another.

  Benjamin had not yet awakened to a sense of his own Jewishness then, in those innocent years before the Great War. He was a votary of Gustav Wyneken, that Pied Piper for rebellious sons of the haute bourgeoisie, who had been his schoolmaster at Haubinda, an elegant country boarding school in Thüringen, which two of my cousins also attended at roughly the same time. The bond between Benjamin and his teacher was famous in certain circles.

  I will not pretend otherwise: Benjamin and I were both well off, and perhaps a little spoiled by our circumstances; we had grown used to ridiculous luxury, a life cushioned by the labor of countless servants, to well-appointed houses or apartments crammed with handsome (if rather heavy and ornate) furniture. Our walls were hung with dreary landscape oils by minor Bavarian artists of the mid-nineteenth century, and our floors covered by Persian carpets. The truth is we both disliked, even resented, our circumstances; the sheer lack of spiritual or (as he would say) “dialectical” interest shown by our parents and their friends appalled us. “Their life is so thin,” Benjamin would say. “I pity them, and their souls.”

  It happened that Benjamin was making a well-publicized speech that evening in the Tiergarten, which is the reason I had come. An acquaintance had said to me, “Walter Benjamin is the new Kant,” thus enraging me. I wondered why on earth people said such things. Still, my curiosity was piqued, and I determined to see this “new Kant” for myself.

  There were two rival groups of students in Berlin at the time: the Wyneken band, who formed the Youth Movement and deployed rather pseudopatriotic arguments for the preservation and promotion of Germanic culture, and the Zionist group to which I belonged, known as the Jung Juda. My group understood only too well that Germany was no place for Jews, no matter how comfortable Jewish life in Berlin had grown. I don’t think Wyneken’s little friends even noticed they were Jewish, though most of them were. If they did, it meant nothing to them. You might ask them directly, “Are you Jewish?” and they would answer, “I am German. My family is Jewish by tradition, but I do not practice any faith.”

  Because of his reputation for uncompromising brilliance, Benjamin had been chosen by Wyneken to represent the Youth Movement that night. Eighty or so of us gathered in a large room over the main café: young men mos
tly, with a few women. Everyone was smoking and drinking coffee, misting the room with their presence; I can still hear the crackle of cups and laughter and loud debate typical of those gatherings.

  Of course, a hush fell as Wyneken himself stood to introduce Benjamin, whom he called “a young philosopher, poet, and literary scholar known to many of you already.” It was peculiar to hear a young man who had published nothing described in those exalted terms. I began to understand what everyone saw in Wyneken: He was a flatterer.

  Even Benjamin seemed embarrassed by his teacher’s epithets as he listened to the introduction. He crushed his cigarette into an ashtray on the table beside him, then rose slowly. He began with a quotation from Hegel clearly designed to frighten off the wrong sort of people. Much to my surprise, I saw that Benjamin was not the sort of man to make concessions to an audience. He did not even bother to mention which of Hegel’s works he was citing, assuming that his listeners would know it. If they didn’t, well—that was too bad. You shouldn’t be there if you didn’t know your Hegel.

  The speech itself was tortuous but—I had to admit it—brilliant. Benjamin’s voice had a strange but melodious quality: a subtonic aura, familiar in its way but still idiosyncratic. I later thought of it as a well-seasoned viola, though on rare occasions it squeaked like a cheap fiddle. The real melody was in the argument itself. It would have sounded reasonable if overheard through a wall so thick that the words themselves could not be made out, only the tune.

  Zionism, he proclaimed, had its merits, but educational reform was the most pressing issue before German-Jewish youth of the day. This raised my hackles, and I sat up tall, feeling my pulse quicken. I began to tap my fingers on my knees as Benjamin’s voice rose and fell, pulling the audience forward in their seats (especially when the sound level dropped to the merest whisper). As he talked, he kept his eyes fastened on the far left corner of the ceiling, as if there were something he strained to see. Only once, when he seemed to be struggling to regain his thoughts, did he interrupt this stare to face his listeners directly, and it was disconcerting—as if for the first time he realized other people were in the room! He recovered, however, locating his beloved corner of the ceiling once again. It was impressively odd.