For a brief moment in 1940 the lives of a young Spanish militant and a reclusive academic of German and Jewish heritage are thrown together. Along with thousands of others across Europe, both men have fled their homeland in the face of fascist persecution. Yet, until the day their paths converge on a remote mountain pass between France and Spain, their experience of war has been vastly different. Based on true events of Benjamin's life, and ranging from Paris' Left Bank to the prison camps of southern France, "The Angel of History" explores how the history we think we know is not a series of events but rather a constellation of countless individual lives. And although every story is unique, each is founded on the same human desire - to be remembered.
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Editorial Reviews
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"Beautiful evocation of an improbable meeting, a tragic fresco of a time gone by." Telerama (France) "Arpaia magnificently reconstitutes the destiny of these two men." The World (Italy)
About the Author
Bruno Arpaia is an acclaimed editor and translator of Spanish and Latin American literature and the author of four novels. In its original Italian, The Angel of History won the Campiello Prize and was shortlisted for the Super Campiello. He lives in Milan.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Trapped by history,
By
This review is from: Angel of History (Paperback)
This is mainly a book about the last six or seven years of the German-Jewish philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin. He fled from Nazi Germany to Paris in 1933. He was then aged 41. He had been in France before: in 1932 he had come close to committing suicide in Nice, for no particular reason (at least none that we are given in this novel) other than that he had a depressive personality. He was altogether unsuited for the real world: he `limped through life, trying to mask his ineptitude at living'; the feeling of doom hanging over him was of course intensified by the doom that hung over Europe at the Nazis extended their power. Benjamin was frail and short of breath with heart-disease, anxious, clumsy, obsessionally regular in the daily little rituals of his life, easily driven to distraction by noise and ideally secluding himself in the National Library of Paris. in his thoughts and in his writing. But he also had friends, numbering among them Arthur Koestler and Hannah Arendt who were also in France at that time, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer who were at that time refugees in the United States, Berthold Brecht who was then in Denmark, Gershom Sholem who had gone to Palestine, and many other intellectuals who are less famous.
There was already a strong feeling against immigrants (métèques) in France; and in the month that the war broke out, the government rounded up foreigners, especially those of German origin (but also people like Koestler who was then Hungarian), whether they were refugees from Nazism or not. Benjamin was kept for ten days in the crudest conditions, graphically described, in a stadium, then sent them off to a labour camp near Nevers, where he stayed for three months. The way the internees were handled by the French was far worse than what happened to the aliens in Britain when they were interned in 1940. When he was eventually released, Benjamin returned to Paris and buried himself in the Library. Only when the Germans were on the outskirts of Paris did he take the last train out of the city, making for Marseilles where he expected to be able to pick up a visa for the United States. There, with thousands of other people (including Arendt and Koestler) desperateto leave France, he was caught up in a nightmarish bureaucracy - brilliantly described - only to find after weeks that he would need a French exit visa from the Vichy authorities who were now collaborating with the Germans. There was nothing for the frail `old' man (he is actually only 48) to do but to try to get across the Pyrenees. Amazingly, he made it to Port Bou on the Spanish side - only to find that the previous day the Spanish police had had orders to return stateless immigrants to France. The police allowed the exhausted man to stay the night at a local hotel under police guard. That night, exhausted and in pain, Walter Benjamin took an overdose of his medication and died. The story of Benjamin is told in the third person, sometimes in the form proper to fiction, at other times imparting information as a biographical dictionary might do. Arpaia assumes that we know who Koestler, Arendt, Scholem etc are, and, for that matter, also that we know why exactly Benjamin was famous. His personality is brought out well enough, but, though we are given the titles of some of his writings, his intellectual contributions are not explained. The only glimpse we get of any of his philosophical writings is a brief excerpt from his last, unfinished, essay, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in which he refers to Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus, which he owned and which had iconic importance for him. Benjamin somewhat idiosyncratically, interpreted the figure as the Angel of History who perceives History as `one single catastrophe' in which Benjamin felt himself caught up. The chapters on Benjamin are interspersed with other chapters, told in the first person, about a fictional Spaniard, Laureano Mahojo (it is not till the eighth chapter about him that we learn his first name, his surname not until chapter 42), who, at the age of 77 and in exile in Mexico, recalls his part as a fighter against Franco in the Spanish Civil war. (A map would have helped to follow his narrative). When the Republicans were defeated, thousands of them fled to France, to meet with a harsh reception there: they were as unpopular as `reds' as they were as foreigners. At first the French closed their borders, then they sent the refugees to the most primitive of camps. Then they, too, were sent as forced labour, to the area just behind the Maginot Line; and when the Germans broke through, he, too, managed with great difficulty to cross the Pyrenees back to Spain, to Port Bou, where the woman he was in love with was then living. In this way the author brings Walter Benjamin and Laureano briefly together near the end of the book. They had shared some experiences of imprisonment in France; but they are very different personalities: Walter shy and fearful, Laureano tough and robust; and these similarities and contrasts seem the main reason for introducing the story of Laureano. It is a very readable one, but is, I think, not really necessary: the story of Benjamin would have stood perfectly well all on its own, and this harrowing book would then, I think, have been even better.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Masterful Storytelling,
By
This review is from: Angel of History (Paperback)
In late September 1940, Walter Benjamin committed suicide in Port Bou, Spain. A Jew and a fierce anti-Nazi, the German critic had travelled from Marseilles through the Pyrenees in an attempt to flee Europe for the United States, only to learn that the local authorities planned to return him to France. If you know enough about Benjamin to have read "The Task of the Translator" or "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," you will also know the ironic tragedy of his death: his travelling companions were soon after granted passage to Lisbon, Portugal, from which point Benjamin may have made it to waiting friends in New York. Italian novelist Bruno Arpaia has imagined Benjamin's last years of life in The Angel of History, a story that contrasts the suffering of the philosopher with that of Laureano Mahojo, a fictional Spanish communist who takes arms against Franco's fascists.
The novel begins with Benjamin's arrival in Paris, chapters narrated from the third person, and the philosopher's meanderings through the city in the shadow of the German menace pale in comparison with juxtaposed scenes of combat. Arpaia's Spanish Civil War is vivid, and the Laureano chapters have the immediacy of a first-person account. Surely the point is that war is felt at home as well as at the front, but this point is sacrificed to illustrations of a scholar's inability to function effectively in a world beyond the dusty tomes of a library. It is not the inevitable war that hampers Benjamin as much as his own nature. Foreshadowing the anti-Semitism of Vichy France, The Angel of History is also unable to create sympathetic bystanders, initially, only indifferent ones, and Benjamin's friends are historical figures introduced to do little more than demonstrate how the whole world comes to inherit the philosopher's ineffectual mien. By following Laureano, however, the reader gets an opportunity to savor his feisty friendship with Mariano, another communist fighter, and the desperate lust of his passionate affair with Mercedes, a Spanish nurse. One could be forgiven for drawing the obvious parallel with the best of Hemingway's war writings as Arpaia here leads us throughout a war-torn Spain. He inherits from his American antecedent a real skill at situating characters on the landscape. Perhaps because Arpaia's Paris is limp and uninspired, foggy mornings along the Seine that belie a city of lights, Benjamin's sections do not really pick up until the philosopher is drawn ever-deeper into the corrupt bureaucracy of wartime government. Place is much less important as Kafka emerges as the primary influence for Arpaia's writing, though the author does an excellent job in describing Marseilles as a maze - or perhaps a trial! - that threatens to ensnare Benjamin until the Gestapo can catch up with him. As befuddled as ever, but crippled further by ill health, Benjamin grows more sympathetic as his fate is decided by the absence of a stamp no one will place on his travel papers. One of the great European minds of the modern period is ennobled as he is reduced to detritus - while a whole culture faces its extinction. The novel, ultimately, is about fate, about the forces - some external, some internal - that conspire against us. Both Benjamin and Laureano test their wills to live, and while readers may be surprised by that exhibited by the former, the latter does not disappoint in his ferocity. Though Benjamin imagines a hunchbacked dwarf who has accompanied him through his tragedy, a doppelganger from whom he cannot finally escape, Paul Klee's Angelus Novus remains after the philosopher's death the novel's most potent image: "the angel of history" who contemplates our horrific folly and fails to prevent further tragedy. While he is called to paradise, it remains to more worldly beings to tell our stories. Laureano is a fine storyteller, but Bruno Arpaia is a masterful one. From http://www.craigmonk.com
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