Dani Karavan’s memorial to the philosopher Walter Benjamin, Passatjes, has been here in Portbou since 1994. Benjamin died here in 1940. Although he had a safe conduct pass that should’ve allowed him to cross Spain and enter Portugal, the police refused him entry. Because he was in poor health, he was allowed to remain in Portbou overnight. In the Hotel Francia, he took his life. His despair is understandable. As a Marxist and a Jew, the Nazis would certainly have murdered him—his brother was killed in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1942—and he had already spent time in a French prison after the Nazis had revoked his citizenship, leaving him stateless. His plan was to join other emigré philosophers in the United States. One can imagine how he felt about discovering that his safe conduct (imagine what that had cost) was worthless, that he was being sent back to France to die. He’s as much a victim of the Holocaust as anyone else who the Nazis murdered.
Passatjes (the title refers to the German title of Benjamin’s unfinished masterpiece, The Arcades Project) is situated on a hill above the bay, next to the cemetery where Benjamin’s remains rested for five years before the local man who was covering the rent on the crypt stopped paying, and Benjamin was removed and reinterred in a common grave.
Passatjes works on many levels, literally and metaphorically. I first approached it, accidentally, from below (I missed the signs that point tourists in the right direction), where it looks like a chute, part of a mine or a smelter, poised to dump rock or molten metal onto the road (and onto me). The rusty steel of which it’s constructed (Core-10, I think, although it’s not quite rusty enough for that) adds to the impression. I turned toward the bay and looked across at the buildings and the green and rocky hills on the opposite side. My perspective was open, unchanneled, I could look wherever I liked.
Then I walked back through the village, climbed the stairs, and followed the road to the memorial. There it was: a line of rusted steel plates across the parking lot; a darker patch of stone in the wall on the other side, facing the monument; and the steel tunnel and stairs that lead down the cliff, the bottom closed off by a sheet of plate glass. The description on the official website says there’s an olive tree, too, but I didn’t notice it, or at least I wasn’t sure which tree it is meant.
The form imitates the neighbouring cemetery, which is also built around stairs on the hillside, but where it is colourful and light and open, Passatjes is dark, somber, and enclosed. As visitors descend, their feet create deep, echoing hollow thuds; when the roof of the tunnel opens to the sky, turning the work into a steel trench, I heard the ghostly echoes of the voices of people above in the parking lot, which were somehow caught between the rusty walls. It’s chilly. The glass reflects the people on the stairs, dimly, while allowing us to see the relative and unreachable freedom of the bay below. The stairs continue past the glass; if it weren’t there, we could continue to descend until we fell to our deaths.
The text etched into the glass is ghostly, too, its words hard to make out against the light streaming through from outside, even on this cloudy day. The text etched into the glass at the bottom of the memorial’s stairs alludes to Benjamin’s second burial. It’s a quotation from Thesis 7 of Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” an essay published not long after his death. (He was carrying a heavy manuscript in his suitcase, one he said was more valuable than his own life, but it went missing after his death and has never been found. The quotation is in four languages: Spanish, Catalan, French, and English. Notably, deliberately, not German, the language Benjamin spoke, the language of the country of his birth. In English, it reads,
It is more difficult to honour the memory of the anonymous than the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the anonymous.
Perhaps he wouldn’t have minded being placed among those who couldn’t afford a more noteworthy burial: the poor, refugees. Perhaps that’s a silly romantic notion.
I sat down at the bottom and thought about all the anonymous dead over the millennia, and the way that in a few years or short decades all of us will join Benjamin among them. It was all deeply moving.
Portbou is a cute little tourist village. Maybe Passatjes encourages more visitors; it’s hard to say. I did find a short pilgrimage of sorts, from the train station to the site of the Hotel Francia and the police station, and then the memorial. If I ever return to Barcelona, I’ll come to see Passatjes again.