Who Killed Walter Benjamin?

That really is not the question. A better question is "Why Did Walter Benjamin die?"

Walter Benjamin, German/French/Jewish intellectual died in Port Bou, Spain, in September 1940, on his way from Vichy France to the United States (via Spain and Portugal). That much we know. But....

did he die of natural causes (he was in poor health and on an arduous journey), or

was he poisoned by Gestapo forces quartered in Port Bou, or collaborating Spanish Falangists, or

did he swallow the morphine tablets he was carrying and commit suicide?

These are the questions. Along with "does it really matter now"?

Forgetting this final question, it should be noted that from 1940 until very recently, Walter Benjamin's suicide was a given. But its only evidence is a suicide note reported by a companion, who said that she was unable to produce the note. Those who were there (we are talking 65 years ago) seem to doubt the suicide story. Some say that his lingering condition was not consistent with overdosing on morphine. Some say that as a suicide, he would not have been buried in a Catholic cemetery. Some say that the town's preferable doctor was out of town the day Benjamin got sick and he was replaced by a physician who was a fascist and German collaborator.

A documentary movie on the subject ("Who Killed Walter Benjamin?") was produced in Spain in 2005. It has been shown only sporadically, but it made the Jewish Film Festival and we saw it Sunday afternoon. I thought it was a terrific movie, not because it reached a conclusion, but because it took the point of view of a journalist, or investigator, trying to get to the bottom of the story, interviewing witnesses, their children, Port Bou residents today, scholars, and so forth, each with a somewhat different view of the situation.

It seems that nothing will ever been known definitively. But, after all, it was 1940 and this is 2006.

But what about the Litvinenko affair of 2006? Will we ever know what happened here??