IV
The Land of the Dead
Walter Benjamin
In a strange coincidence of history, he wrote, this
borderland where I spent much of my youth is also home to the remains of one of
time’s great explorers of fragmented labyrinths.
Walter Benjamin chose to
take his own life, here in the modest town of Port Bou, rather than to allow
the Spanish authorities to send him back across the border and into the hands
of the Gestapo.
He was one of many thousands that fled across this
frontier in the 30s and 40s, attempting to escape either Hitler from one
direction or Franco from the other. And he was also one of many that didn’t
make it, leaving their ghosts to roam the Catalan cemeteries.
This totalitarian shadow
from the past can also be found looming over the abandoned bunkers that litter
the coastline. Built by the Nazis to defend against any attempted Mediterranean
attack from the allies, they now lie broken in ruins, a sombre reminder of the
spectre of death.
I walk through these
discarded labyrinthine passages half expecting a minotaur in SS uniform to jump
out at me, and I mull over the immense cultural crime that was the eradication
of many of the world’s greatest creative thinkers, either executed or forced
into suicide.
I fight off vertigo when I look down the tunnel-like
monument built in memory of Benjamin at Port Bou. Is it an entrance into the
labyrinth, or to that famous land of the dead from Greek legend, the
underworld? Did Odysseus walk down these steps on his long journey back to
Ithaca?
At the bottom, our path is blocked by a slanted
plane of glass upon which is written the words of Benjamin: “It is more arduous
to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical
construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless.”
I turn to look back up the tunnel and am forced to shade
my eyes from the blinding light now shining down upon me. In this spiritual
moment of epiphany, I walk up toward the light, and am drawn back into the
world of the living.
On the other side of the
border is the desolate French town of Cerbère, tucked away in a secluded valley
at what feels like the edge of the world. Is it a coincidence, I wonder, that
it shares its name with Cerberus, bestial guardian of the underworld?
The internet refutes this
possibility; but reliably informs me that the town is also the setting for a
level in Battlefield 2142, a
post-apocalyptic computer game in which EU forces fight against a Pan-Asian
Coalition. But of course that level bares little resemblance to this most
peculiar town.
I laugh when I discover that the next settlement up the
coast, the old port of Banyuls, has been designated a Cité Odyssea.
