KUNSTWELTEN
THE JOURNEY TO PORTBOU – DIARY EXCERPTS JEANINE MEERAPFEL
From 18 to 23 September 2021, the trip to Portbou – long planned by the Walter Benjamin Archive and KUNSTWELTEN and repeatedly postponed due to the pandemic – finally took place with school leavers from the Rosa Luxemburg Gymnasium in Berlin, the President of the Akademie der Künste, Jeanine Meerapfel, and the director of the Walter Benjamin Archive, Erdmut Wizisla. Their train journey via Paris and Perpignan took sixteen hours, and the return trip around twenty. In the months before, they had visited the Archive, read Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, his Moscow Diary, extracts from his Arcades Project, and reports by friends and contemporaries; they watched films about the events in the Spanish border town of Portbou and held Zoom conversations. In Portbou, they visited Dani Karavan’s Arcades memorial site, they saw the hotel where Walter Benjamin took his own life to prevent extradition back to France, and on 21 September, they walked the route in the Pyrenees from Banyuls in France to Portbou that Benjamin had to take on 24 and 25 September 1940, as described by Lisa Fittko who helped him flee. Film director Sophie Narr accompanied the group to film the trip, which was publicly screened at the Akademie der Künste on 2 May 2022.
The wind whips the hair in the stranger's face. The homecoming. Loud it whistles in the ears and rustles. Is it the sea? The blood? There the border. Then: borderless silence. No wind and not a word either. Just breath and the calm sea on the horizon. Close your eyes carefully. It's the blood. "In the Pyrenees", Florentine Osche, 21 September 2021
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