Lost in Migration: Walter Benjamin’s Black Suitcase

The life of Walter Benjamin came to an end in late September 1940 in a small town called Portbou on the border between France and Spain. In order to survive, to leave the city, it was necessary to have document after document: in the first place a residence permit for France, then a permit to leave the country, then another to travel through Spain and Portugal, and finally one allowing entrance to the US. He had already experienced many instances of such misfortune: from his failure to get onto the first rung of the academic ladder with his work The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), a work nobody had understood, to the fact that, in order to escape the bombing of Paris he so feared, he had moved to the outlying districts of the city and unwittingly ended up in a small village that was one of the first to be destroyed.

Source: aeon.co