From PRAGUE, CAPITAL OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: A Surrealist History by Derek Sayer
From PRAGUE, CAPITAL OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: A Surrealist History by Derek Sayer

Summary/Abstract: Walter Benjamin’s essay “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” exists in two versions, the first written in May 1935, the second in March 1939. Neither text was published until long after his death—at his own hand, by a morphine overdose, in the little Catalan border town of Port Bou on the night of 25 September 1940. The German-Jewish critic had fled France, where he had been living as a refugee since Adolf Hitlers rise to power in 1933, only to be informed on his arrival in Spain that he would be returned the next day to almost certain deportation to a Nazi concentration camp. Both versions of the expose (as Benjamin called it) were written to solicit support from American sources—the German emigres who had reestablished the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research at Columbia University in 1934, and the New York banker Frank Altschul—for the monumental project upon which he had been engaged since 1917.

• Details
• Contents