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| Richard Pithouse |
And then, despite the fear, I set off
I put my cheek against death's cheek
− Roberto Bolaño, 'Self Portrait at Twenty
Years', The Romantic Dogs, 2006
On the 26th of September 1940 Walter Benjamin – a brilliant
writer struggling to the point of being short of paper, an intellectual acutely
attuned to the poetic, Jewish and, in his own way, communist – found himself,
for the second time in his life, in desperate flight from fascism. On the
border between Spain and France, with his library lost to the Gestapo in Paris
and his way through Spain blocked, he took his own life.
