Walter Benjamin’s time in the town of Portbou, at the northern end of the Costa Brava, on the border between Catalonia and France, amounted to a little more than 12 hours. His memory, however, endures to this day.
The German Jewish thinker (Berlin, 1892), who on 26 September 1940 crossed the French-Spanish border in his attempt to escape the Nazis, in the hope of making his way to Portugal and a ship for America, died in this small town on the Catalan coast, and although the facts of his death were suppressed by the Franco regime for decades, since the restoration of democracy the truth has been recovered and dignified.
Portbou wishes to contribute to the recognition of one of the outstanding figures of twentieth-century thought with a portal that draws together the activities with which it remembers and celebrates Walter Benjamin each year The town is also seeking to stimulate reflection on the paths that Benjamin opened up in so many fields of contemporary thought and culture (visual, literary, sociological and philosophical…) by instituting an annual Walter Benjamin Conference in September, the month of his death. Portbou also wishes to publicize the extraordinary memorial sculpture Passages by Dani Karavan in the town cemetery, to promote the new Walter Benjamin Remembrance Centre and establish ties with the various research centres around the world devoted to the dissemination of Benjamin’s thought and work, and, last but not least, to contribute to an area in which Benjamin was a pioneer: contemporary thinking about the historical memory and exile.
