Walter Benjamin's Crossing

This novel recreates the last years of the life of Walter Benjamin, one of the greatest philosophers and literary critics of the 20th century.

During the 1930s, German Jew Walter Benjamin wrote his main essays in a bookstore in Paris, the city he loved and where he had gone into exile after Hitler's rise to power in Germany. But in 1940, Nazi tanks rolled into the suburbs of the French capital, and Benjamin was forced to flee, carrying a suitcase containing hundreds of pages of precious manuscripts. After a failed attempt to escape through Marseille, he saw a chance to escape with Lisa Fittko, a young Nazi fighter who guided Jews and other refugees across the Pyrenees Mountains and toward Spain. From there, with luck, he would reach safety in Portugal or South America.

Jay Parini intersperses the moving story of the escape with sketches of Benjamin's complex and cosmopolitan past: his privileged childhood in Berlin, his years of activism in the Youth Movement, his university days. And his close friendship with Gershom Scholem, the eminent theorist of Jewish mysticism, is told in his own voice.

Another important thread is Benjamin's romantic relationship with Asja Lacis, a beautiful Marxist he met in Capri in 1926. The cast of characters in this story also includes playwright Bertolt Brecht, philosopher Theodor Adorno, and many other artists and intellectuals who were part of Benjamin's circle of close friends during the two wars.

With Walter Benjamin, we experience the anguish of exclusion, the fear of persecution; and with Scholem, the suffering of someone who has lost a brilliant friend. But this book is not only about the tragic events that marked his escape. In part, it is also a eulogy not only to Benjamin, but to the entire European intellectual tradition. Walter Benjamin's Journey is a surprising novel about war, cultural history, and the great divide of civilization in the 1940s.