Jeremy Harding writes:

The Narrow Foothold is yet more anecdotal evidence in favour of Henny Gurland’s testimony, the only intimate testimony until now that Walter Benjamin committed suicide. It also enables us to look more coldly at the notion that Benjamin had been specially targeted by the Nazis and that this fact was connected with the detention of the refugees in Portbou: simply, once Benjamin was out of the picture, killed perhaps, dead in any case, there was no longer a reason to return the others to France. But if so, why was Birman, who tells us her name was 'nearly topping' a German hit list, permitted to go on her way? Conspiracy theory gets one large truth more or less right, but only inadvertently: what happened to Walter Benjamin was essentially a kind of execution, even if he'd decided to serve as delegate executioner. Cloak and dagger plots in which low-level killers administer lethal doses of contingency detract from this point.

(LRB 19 July 2007)

Hearing Eye | paperback 29 pp. |ISBN: 9781905082100