Eli Zaretsky in LRB: ‘To understand Walter Benjamin’s life, it is best to begin with his death. Attempting to flee Nazi-occupied France, he died by suicide on 26 September 1940, in the village of Portbou, Catalonia. Born into a wealthy Berlin family in 1892, he had been a prodigious intellectual force.’

And: ‘A clue to the affinity among his three friends is Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, the oil-transfer watercolour monoprint that Benjamin bought for a thousand marks – about $30 in today’s money – in Munich in 1921.’

And: ‘“Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past,” he once wrote, “who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And the enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”’

The enemy will be utterly destroyed or never cease to be victorious. Maybe the latter is better.

(a sf 2138)