The Jews are dying in Europe and are being buried like dogs, Hannah Arendt concluded in a letter she wrote to the philosopher and historian Gershom Scholem in October of 1940. She was writing to tell him about the death of their mutual friend, the so brilliant, so hopeless, Walter Benjamin (“Benji”), who had just taken his own life in Portbou on the Spanish border, having been told that the papers he had obtained in Marseilles may have been the right ones when he left, but the visa rules had now changed, and he was going nowhere except back over the mountains.
