The Angel of History [Paperback]

A novel experienced in flashback, this is the tale of a Spanish militant and his chance meeting with philosopher Walter Benjamin on a remote mountain pass between France and Spain in 1940. It tells the differing stories of two men who have vastly contrasting experiences of World War II. Based on Benjamin's own life, this powerful and emotional story deals with the shifting perspective of history, where what we think we know is not necessarily what the world sees for itself. In keeping with Benjamin's own philosophy, and that of fan Cees Nooteboom, Arpaia illustrates with great humanity and a stylish characterisation that history isn't an easily digestible linear narrative, but rather a smorgasbord of individual actions and experiences that create a tapestry that is nearly impossible to take in in one glance. Historians are concerned with one area of the tapestry, and are in danger of missing (sorry for the cliche) the bigger picture.

This wonderful novel deals with the war years of a young Spanish militant called Laureano and the German philosopher Dr Walter Benjamin. The Spanish militant, now an elderly man, is relating his meeting with Walter Benjamin in a mountain pass between France and Spain, where Laureano is indulging in a little smuggling and Benjamin is attempting to flee the country to safety.

The parts with Laureano lead him from Spain to internment camps in France and finally to Argentina. I have to say that the most interesting section of the book for me dealt with Walter Benjamin, a man struggling with a situation that was so terrible he could hardly comprehend it. For a man of order and habit, he had to deal with leaving Berlin for Paris, only to found that he had still not found safety. Without enough money, living virtually hand to mouth, it seems life cannot get any worse for him - only, of course, it can. As Hitler invades Austria, then France, the net tightens. Benjamin is interned and is then swept into the horror of knowing he has to leave, but being unable to do so. As people clustered around the ports there was a never ending maze of passes, permits and visas needed and Benjamin begins to feel "a visitor in his own life."

The two men do not meet until near the end of the book, but the journey is worth taking and the ending extremely moving. A really intelligent, well written and interesting novel which makes you think and stays with after you have finished it.

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, Sholem 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.