BENJAMIN’S CROSSING
By Jay Parini
Henry Holt, 308 pages, $23
Nineteen-forty was a very bad year. The Nazis were spreading across the map of Europe like a stain. Among the great European powers, the Soviet Union had earlier concluded a non-aggression pact with Hitler, who overwhelmed country after country while Britain and France watched passively, waiting. In France, crowds of refugees from Germany and the east waited as well for the decisive conflict, clinging desperately to a dream of European culture and life. The inevitable Nazi invasion routed the French, who ultimately surrendered Paris without a shot. British heroics consisted largely of ignominious flight via Dunkirk. In just six weeks, all dreams of European civilization, along with the individual hopes of refugees from across the continent, were swiftly extinguished. Nineteen-forty was the death of Europe, a very bad year indeed.
Jay Parini’s historical novel grippingly traces the last months of one exile, the German Jewish critic Walter Benjamin. As the French nation collapsed in defeat and shameful collaboration, refugee intellectuals, marked as “undesirables” even by the French government, again took flight, perhaps through Marseilles to Casablanca or over the Pyrenees into Spain. Many escaped. Benjamin, though, tarried too long in his dream of Europe, awoke too late to the nightmare reality, and ended as a suicide on the Spanish border.
Parini’s novel is on one level a thriller, a page-turning tale of courage and betrayal. Around these tragic but exciting events of 1940, Parini ingeniously weaves a history of Benjamin’s own ideas and involvement with the Frankfurt School and even Soviet Marxism. He details Benjamin’s relationships with the likes of the “talented monster” Bertolt Brecht, the Jewish scholar of mysticism Gershom Scholem, the courageous refugee Lisa Fittko, and numerous lovers from Berlin to Moscow and finally to Paris. The result is a vividly imagined reconstruction of prewar European culture and intellectual life.
The author tells his story through a series of first-person narratives, each reflecting a different view. From a Zionist and Jewish perspective, Scholem examines Benjamin’s intellectual development, the quality of his mind and the indecisiveness that doomed him. From the political Left, the Latvian Asja Lacis not only traces Benjamin’s involvement with Marxist dialectic but also describes Benjamin the lover. Lisa Fittko, the heroic woman who led Benjamin’s crossing over the Pyrenees to his fate, tells of the refugees’ desperate attempts to flee a crumbling France and of imprisonment in the infamous French concentration camp at Gurs. (Yes, the French had them too. See Arthur Koestler’s harrowing account of his own journey, “The Scum of the Earth.”)
The Walter Benjamin who emerges from the novel is fully human and oddly endearing, his unkempt appearance and physical awkwardness contrasting with his dazzling wit and Old World courtesy. Above all, Parini’s hero is an achingly lonely man withdrawing rapidly into the deep recesses of his mind as friends and loved ones disappear. On the arduous final journey, Benjamin’s companions are struck, even annoyed, by his relating all reality to the world of books: “Everything reminded him of a book, a character in a book, or the author of a book. On his deathbed he would shout, `I remember a scene in a book where it happens like this!’ ” Waiting in terror for a patrol to pass by, Fittko is astonished to watch Benjamin pull out a book of Goethe’s verse: “For me, Benjamin was the European Mind writ large. Indeed, as I later realized, Old Benjamin was everything the Nazi monsters wanted most to obliterate. . . .. Even that rueful laugh of his was part of the aura. Here before us was the last laughing man, I thought. The last man to laugh the laugh of the ages. From now on, history would be tears, and the work of intellectuals would be the work of grieving.”
In these passages, Parini shows well why seemingly effete people like Walter Benjamin–intellectuals!–were hunted down, for the indecisiveness born of tolerating complex, competing ideas rebuked the totalitarian drive to establish a single voice, not above all others, but in place of all others. As the personification of the European Mind, Benjamin’s life and death serve as an epitaph for the last age when the world of deeds and the world of words and ideas seemed connected. The enormous lies of the 1930s and 1940s have fractured our sense that the world can be captured or even described by words, and men and women who trade in language and ideas have become largely irrelevant, relegated to college campuses and public-broadcasting stations.
Benjamin’s fate is also a warning. Scholem’s reflections open and close the novel, a telling device. Scholem tried unsuccessfully to pry Benjamin from Europe to Jerusalem. The scene in which Benjamin reads Goethe while hiding from the border patrol is not only poignant but pointed, for Goethe was the archetype of the “Great Author,” the symbol of literate and tolerant German culture that Benjamin admires to the last and that proves cruelly false. While Benjamin retreats into Goethe, descendants of the “Great Author” are hunting him down like an animal. Disillusioned with Europe, Scholem goes to Jerusalem and survives. Still full of illusions, Benjamin stays in Europe and perishes.
Throughout the novel, Benjamin carries with him everywhere a briefcase containing a thousand-page manuscript examining the growth of the Parisian shopping arcades, or “passages,” which pitted capitalist consumerism against the rational designs of the Enlightenment. Benjamin believes this “private work against fascism” will “help to justify his existence, which otherwise amounted to fits and starts. . . .” His dying wish is for a companion to take the briefcase, to guarantee that the manuscript arrives safely in New York. Needless to say, it disappears. “Benjamin’s Crossing” warns us of the danger of the very intellectual absorption Benjamin represents. Despite admiring the Walter Benjamin that Jay Parini so vividly describes, we cannot forget that, in the awful year 1940, the European Mind died . . . by its own hand.
