It is by far one of the most fantastic and most beautiful spots I have ever seen in my life.” “It is carved in stone in terraces the coffins are also pushed into such stone walls. “The cemetery faces a small bay directly looking over the Mediterranean,” wrote Arendt. Yet name or no name, the place was overwhelming.

“He had enough morphine on him to take his life several times over,” writes Lisa Fittko, who took him over the mountains into Spain. “It was not to be found,” she wrote Gershom Scholem shortly afterwards, “his name was not written anywhere.” Yet according to the records provided by the town hall of Port Bou, one of Benjamin’s traveling companions, Frau Gurland, had paid out seventy-five pesetas for the rental of a “niche” for five years on September 28, 1940, two days after Benjamin died from what was diagnosed by the local doctor, Ramón Vila Moreno, as cerebral apoplexy, but is generally understood to have been suicide by a massive overdose of morphine tablets. Nothing, that is, other than one of the most beautiful places she had ever seen. When she came looking for Walter Benjamin’s grave a few months after he died in the Hotel de Francia in Port Bou on the border between Spain and France, Hannah Arendt found nothing. The wind blows the matches out, but the harder the wind blows, the more the fuse glows.”

“In a boat,” he says, “that is the best way. And when today he lights up his cigarette, he uses a flintstone and a fuse, like everyone else.

Walter benjamin