In late September , the German-Jewish intellectual, Walter Benjamin, embarked on a dangerous and ultimately ill-fated journey across the Pyrenees to escape the Nazis. As German columns rolled across the border with the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg on May 10, , 14 year old Arno Mayer climbed into a two-door Chevrolet with his parents, his sister, and his grandfather. They stayed ahead of the Wehrmacht and successfully avoided German aircraft, making it to France. After moving from town to town, they left France via Marseilles and arrived in Algeria.
In late winter of , the family sailed, separately, from Portugal, setting foot in New York City four weeks apart. They survived. Resisting pressure to evacuate Luxembourg, Mayer's maternal grandparents fared far worse. Both were later deported to Theresienstadt, where his grandfather perished in December One of the lucky ones, Arno Mayer, who later became a leading historian of modern Europe, coined the term "Judeocide" in the s to comprehend as best as humanly possible the annihilation of millions of Jews like his grandfather.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews in Western Europe were not nearly so fortunate. Conventional routes of escape closed quickly as Nazi Germany occupied much of France and all of the Low Countries. Four months after the German invasion, he embarked on a dangerous and ultimately ill-fated journey across the Pyrenees. Walter Benjamin was one of the seminal critics of modern cultural life literature, theater, philosophy, theology, the study of language, the metropolis and its temptations and perils, painting, architecture, photography, radio, and the motion picture.
While it is disgraceful that he was never offered an academic position, typical scholarly boundaries and territorialism could not contain him. Some of the most important Central European intellectuals of the twentieth century befriended Benjamin and attested to his brilliance.
Returning to his writings and his life, particularly, the awful end he met, I reflect on how fortunate I was to study Benjamin and his friend and interlocutor, Siegfried Kracauer, at the University of Chicago with Miriam Bratu Hansen in Hansen, whose mother, Ruth Bratu, escaped from Czechoslovakia in a Kindertransport in , had studied with Adorno at the University of Frankfurt. Miriam struggled with cancer for 13 years before passing away at the far too young age of 61 in Not content to investigate older literary schools and genres, Benjamin also produced analyses of Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Surrealism in his essay on Surrealism, he called, militantly, for a "radical concept of freedom" , and the Austrian critic, Karl Kraus, which are still widely read today.
