*Walter Benjamin Memorial, in Portbou, Girona, Costa Brava, Catalonia
Dedicated to all intellectuals who, in Benjamin’s person, are caught at the borders…
From the books that were burned with applause during Kristallnacht to the universities that were burned and destroyed into ashes and stones, to the academics who were massacred and whose massacres were just ignored…
From the artists deprived of their right to express and create, to all intellectuals whose voices are suffocated in the spirals of silence, to journalists whose pens are broken, to politicians and activists imprisoned in isolation…
May that passage, where he was stranded in a warm part of the Mediterranean, be the home of his flaneur brothers and flaneuse sisters, who were being slaughtered in the same sea that has now turned into a human swamp…
“Die Tradition der Unterdrückten belehrt uns darüber, daß der Ausnahmezustands in dem wir leben, die Regel ist! (The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.)” W. Benjamin