The Arcades Project - Operi

Halmah Arendt has "Written about the "little hunchback" * whose threat Benjamin felt
throughout his life and against whom he took all precautions. Benjalnin's "system of pro­
visions against possible danger ... invariably disregarded the real danger," she says.3
But it seems to me now that the "real danger" was not disregarded by Walter Benjamin
during that night in Port-Bou; it was just that his real danger, his reality, differed from
ours. He must have met again the little hunchback in Port-Bou . . . his very own, the
Benjamin hunchback, alld he had to come to tenns widl him.
Perhaps I will go to Port-Bou and try to pick up some tracks, to retrace what happened
on that side of the mountains forty years ago, with the help of some of our old friends
down there,
Perhaps there will be allother ending to this story.
* A German fairy-tale figure who causes all of life's misfortunes; he trips you, he breaks your
favorite toy, he spills your soup.