New York Times, June 30, 2001 A Daring Theory That Stalin Had Walter Benjamin Murdered By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN n 1940, in a small hotel in the coastal Catalan town of Port Bou, the German-Jewish philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin was found dead. He had just made his way across the Pyrenees Mountains, fleeing certain death in France at the hands of the Nazis. As the story goes, he was denied passage into Spain. And so he took his own life, overdosing on morphine.
This was a tragedy. But gradually it has become something else — a mystery. In The Weekly Standard (www.weeklystandard.com) of June 11, Stephen Schwartz, a journalist who has been studying Communism and intellectuals in the 1930's, has daringly suggested that Benjamin, a contemporary icon for much of academic criticism, might have been murdered by Stalin's agents. This hypothesis touches on one of the most controversial aspects of Benjamin's career: his wavering relationship with Communism, which included a visit to Moscow, and his close friendships with Bertolt Brecht and Theodor W. Adorno.
The assertion, though, is not easily proved. Mr. Schwartz does not offer many citations; he also relies on some evidence that lies outside the essay's bounds. And he is no stranger to controversy. In a 1988 essay on the high-brow "killerati" among Stalin's European agents, his arguments inspired both withering scholarly attacks and qualified support.
As far as Benjamin is concerned, the notion of his suicide will also not be easy to dislodge. Benjamin, after all, had contemplated killing himself at least once before, under far less distressing conditions. In addition, his suicide has come to have emblematic importance, with pilgrimages of the faithful making their way to Port Bou to pay homage. The suicide, however tragic, seemed to confirm both Benjamin's bleak view of history's tragedies and the importance of his intellectual attempts to confront them.
But the questions surrounding the death in Mr. Schwartz's account are considerable. A doctor's report attributed the death to a cerebral hemorrhage; supposedly, no drugs were found in his system. A woman who had accompanied Benjamin over the mountains, Henny Gurland, seems to have been the only source for declaring his death a suicide. Yet she destroyed two suicide notes she said Benjamin had given her, later conflating them into a brief missive, written in French. In addition, there is the question of a heavy briefcase containing a manuscript that Benjamin had carried over the mountains. That briefcase was "most important to me," Benjamin said to another traveler, "the manuscript must be saved." It has never been found.
Even if these inconsistencies are odd, though, why believe that Stalin had been involved? Partly because, Mr. Schwartz suggests, Benjamin's death occurred after the Hitler-Stalin pact had disillusioned onetime supporters and Soviet loyalists were regularly assassinating Communists who had turned anti-Stalinist. Benjamin, who had begun to attack Stalin obliquely, and may have gone much further in conversation, was at the very least swept about by this maelstrom, associating with some of its key players, ranging from the Comintern agent Otto Katz to the once-loyal Communist and later impassioned renegade Arthur Koestler. Mr. Schwartz, in a telephone interview from Montenegro, argued that "Benjamin was part of a subculture honeycombed with dangerous people — it was known not to be safe."
Of course, these are more suggestions than conclusive evidence. Moreover, Benjamin was never a member of the Communist party, as were victims of other assassinations. It is unlikely that he was eliminated for his rather eccentric brand of Marxism, which mixed materialism with theology and mysticism, creating a method Brecht found "ghastly." Historians and specialists will have to sift through Mr. Schwartz's assertions.
But Mr. Schwartz, in the interview, said he was "just asking questions that should be asked." By shifting the emphasis away from the martyrdom of suicide and more toward the internecine political battles on the Communist left, Mr. Schwartz's essay directs attention to the political ambiguities of Benjamin's work, particularly its mercurial and idiosyncratic relationship to Communism.
In a 1927 diary of his trip to Moscow, for example, Benjamin weighed whether to join the party, treating it almost as a social and professional club; if he joined he would have a "solid position" and "guaranteed contact with other people"; if he didn't, it might "adversely" affect his work. Even in 1934, when Benjamin crudely asserted that "politically correct" literature also had to be "artistically correct," he had very little interest in writers for their political positions.
Benjamin also hailed the possibility of a "proletarian revolution," yet wrote to his friend, the historian Gershom Scholem, that Marxism's main importance was just that it gave him a stable foundation for his thinking. He even expressed relief at the Hitler- Stalin pact because it freed him of any obligation to maintain advocacy for the Soviet Union. And he referred, with esoteric caution, to the "servile" positions of political leaders — i.e., those aligned with Stalin — who have betrayed the opposition to Fascism.
But Benjamin was often passive, shifting emphasis in the face of a friend's opposition or strong advocacy; it was unclear where he stood. His greatest weakness (and greatest strength) was his intoxication with ideas. Like many other intellectuals of his time, he never seemed to recognize fully that some of those ideas had baleful consequences.
Is it possible that his final experiences in Germany and in French exile shocked him out of ambivalence and complacent abstraction? Is it possible that the missing manuscript included a reconsideration of history's catastrophes? Is it possible that Benjamin's martyrdom involved not just a fear of the Nazis but a despair over the moral limitations of intellectual life? Even if Mr. Schwartz's speculations prove to be untenable, these are questions worth considering. At the very least, it is worth scrutinizing Benjamin's late writings, "blasting" them (as he might have put it) out of their received context, to see whether, among the shards, something different might be found.