Walter Benjamin´s Grave

In September 1940, Walter Benjamin committed suicide in Port Bou on the Spanish-French border when it appeared that he and his travelling partners would be denied passage into Spain in their attempt to escape the Nazis. In 2002, one of anthropology´s, and indeed today´s, most distinctive writers, Michael Taussig, visited Benjamin´s grave in Port Bou. The result is “Walter Benjamin´s Grave,” a moving essay about the cemetery, eyewitness accounts of Benjamin´s border travails, and the circumstances of his demise. It is the most recent of eight revelatory essays collected in this volume of the same name.