Benjamin a Portbou

Benjamin was born into a Jewish family and studied at the universities of Berlin, Freiburg, and Munich, where he took part in anti-war student movements. In 1915, he befriended Gershom Scholem, a scholar of Jewish mysticism, and in 1918, in Bern, he met Ernst Bloch, the theorist of utopia. In 1917, he married Dora Sophie Pollack and, after the war, returned to Berlin, where he wrote Critique of Violence and The Task of the Translator. In 1923, in Frankfurt, he befriended Theodor W. Adorno and Gretel Karplus, his wife, with whom he would maintain a rich correspondence over the years, though one of his strongest friendships would be with Bertolt Brecht.

With the rise of Nazism in 1933, Benjamin was forced into exile, first to Ibiza and then to Paris, later to Svendborg (Denmark)—together with Brecht—and subsequently to San Remo. When war broke out, he declined Adorno’s invitation to move to California, arguing that “there are still positions to defend in Europe,” and was interned for three months in the Nevers camp, until a visa obtained by Horkheimer allowed him to plan a move to the United States.

During those months, he worked on the Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940). Stripped of German citizenship since February 1939 and without an exit permit from France—while German forces advanced across French territory—he sought freedom by crossing the Pyrenees on foot with a group of refugees. But in Portbou, they were met with the threat of being handed over to the Gestapo. On the night of September 26, he took a lethal dose of morphine in a small border hotel in Portbou and died, as if he had lost the game, in the early hours of the following morning—thus sparing his fellow exiles. His remains rest in the Portbou cemetery. 

A semi-staged production directed by Anna Ponces, featuring the participation of Playmodes, the audiovisual research studio from the Girona region. Through their creative, immersive work—projection mapping, lighting, digital scenography, and sound design—they will help visually narrate the final chapter in the life of this distinguished philosopher, literary critic, translator, and essayist: a sensitive idealist and a fighter for a free Europe, yet also a victim of a world that pursued him with hostility.