Searching for Walter Benjamin's Grave
*When a Pilgrimage is Not a Cult of Remembrance*
/By Michael Taussig/
When she came looking for Walter Benjamin's grave a few months after he died in the Hotel de Francia in Port Bou on the border between Spain and France, Hannah Arendt found nothing. Nothing, that is, other than one of the most beautiful places she had ever seen. "It was not to be found," she wrote Gershom Scholem shortly afterwards, "his name was not written anywhere." Yet according to the records provided by the town hall of Port Bou, one of Benjamin's traveling companions, Frau Gurland, had paid out 75 pesetas for the rental of a "niche" for five years on September 28, 1940, two days after Benjamin died from what was diagnosed by the local doctor, Ramón Vila Moreno, as cerebral apoplexy, but is generally understood to have been suicide by a massive overdose of morphine tablets. "He had enough morphine on him to take his life several times over," writes Lisa Fittko, who took him over the mountains into Spain.
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