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Walter Benjamin in Fortress Europe: Refugees and the Ethics of Memory in an (Ex)Border Town

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Public Memory in the Context of Transnational Migration and Displacement

Part of the book series: Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies ((PMMS))

Abstract

This chapter considers the possibility for the memory of the Holocaust and the refugee crises during the Second World War as an analytical and ethical framework to inform responses to the contemporary refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. It does so by analysing the changing narratives around a memorial to Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), a German author and philosopher who died in Portbou (Spain) trying to cross the French-Spanish Border to flee the horrors of fascism. It is argued that the commissioning of the memorial could be seen as a celebratory gesture praising the dissolution of the European Union internal borders. The reference in Dani Karavan’s memorial to the ‘memory of the nameless’ however has recently drawn attention to the European external borders’ enactment of a very similar kind of violence, this time upon the bodies of irregularised migrants and refugees.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Memorial Democràtic de Catalunya is an institution created in 2007 by the Spanish autonomous community of Catalonia to safeguard and promote the ‘democratic memory’ of the Republican Government and the victims of state repression until the approval of the new Spanish constitution. Its inception occurred at a time when Spanish society was revisiting the Spanish ‘Pact of Forgetting’ sanctioned by the 1977 Amnesty Law (Vinyes 2004, 2009; Messenger 2017).

  2. 2.

    The change in the name, which went from ‘Portbou’ to ‘Port-bou’, was reverted 40 years later, during the long transition to a parliamentary democracy. Ironically, the English use of ‘Port Bou’, still widely used, borrows from this earlier act of linguistic violence carried out by the Francoist regime.

  3. 3.

    Benjamin’s remains were moved to niche 503 in the local cemetery, but it is believed they were moved to a mass grave in the same cemetery before the end of the lease (Scheurmann 1992; see also Taussig 2006).

  4. 4.

    The promises associated with Benjaminian tourism were met with increasing apathy by the residents after a multi-million project for a ‘casa Benjamin’ endorsed by star architect Norman Foster failed to secure the required funding. As one resident told Sonia and Alexander Alland, while: ‘[t]he monument to Benjamin is a wonderful work of art […] it does not really play a role in the community. It has been a bit of a disaster’ (Alland Jr. 2011, p. 97).

  5. 5.

    France has in fact temporarily introduced Border Controls on a number of occasions in the last years due to ‘terrorist threats and situation at the external border’. Only in 2017 they ‘intercepted’ 24 minors who were attempting to reach France. The network UNITED for Intercultural Action does an excellent work tracing these ‘estates of exception’ as well as the effects of ‘Fortress Europe’ (‘UNITED for Intercultural Action. The Fatal Policies of Fortress Europe,’).

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  1. University of Brighton, Brighton, UK

    Garikoitz Gómez Alfaro

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  1. Garikoitz Gómez Alfaro
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Correspondence to Garikoitz Gómez Alfaro .

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  1. School of Social Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

    Sabine Marschall

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Gómez Alfaro, G. (2020). Walter Benjamin in Fortress Europe: Refugees and the Ethics of Memory in an (Ex)Border Town. In: Marschall, S. (eds) Public Memory in the Context of Transnational Migration and Displacement. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41329-3_9

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