(Thinking about) Walter Benjamin in Liguria: Part 1

     Having read a variety of books on Liguria - many of which explicitly focus themselves on foreign visitors to the region - I was curious to learn about the Bejaminian connection to Liguria in Pagani's book on Benjamin (as Benjamin rarely gets mentioned as a visitor to Liguria, although he spent considerable time there). Mainly to the Liguria of the Ponente (at least if we think about more long term stays)- but occasionally moving to the west. In the mid 1920s he would travel by freighter from Hamburg through the ports of the Mediterranean. It stopped off at very points. One of them being Genoa. He would write:

Now I’m lying on deck, the evening in Genoa before me, and the sounds of unloading freighters all around me as the modernized ‘music of the world’ .

    Eiland and Jennings' biography of Benjamin mentions that this longer stop in Genoa (compared to other ports) meant that he would visit the Riviera and the famous walk along the promontory from Rapallo to Portofino. In 1928 again he would travel from Lugano to Genoa and then on to Marseille where he would take hashish in solitude. The many references in Eiland and Jennings' biography to San Remo where he would stay in long periods from 1934 onwards, usually moving to and from Paris, would offer many prompts to further study. San Remo would seem to be both a safe haven as well as a sort of humiliation (or at least some accounts portray it as such). He had to accept the hospitality of his ex-wife, Dora Keller, who having 'won' the rather bitter divorce settlement managed to purchase a hotel in what Benjamin called: "the most favorable winter station on the Riviera". 

     Benjamin managed to conjure up the ambiguity of his situation in San Remo with these words:

What should I respond to a person who would tell me that I was lucky to be able to pursue my thoughts while strolling or writing without having to worry about my day- to- day existence and while living in the most splendid of areas— and San Remo is truly exceptionally beautiful? And if someone else were to rise up before me in order to tell me to my face that it was pitiful and a disgrace to nest, as it were, in the ruins of my own past, far from all tasks, friends, and means of production— confronted by that man, I would be all the more likely to fall into an embarrassed silence. 

    There are many more anecdotes regarding his time in (his various and frequent visits to) San Remo. Other places are mentioned- charmed by his surroundings, he visits Bussana Vecchia and Taggia in December 1934. His attempt to charm Kracauer into a visit seems not to be successful but there is a significant last meeting with the Adorno's there for the Christmas holidays in 1938 and the 1939 New Year before their journey to America. Adorno reads to Benjamin his draft of his Wagner book and then Benjamin's biographer mentions another nearby Ligurian locality as background to an important discussion between Benjamin and the Adorno's:

All three friends noted the importance for the Wagner project of one conversation that took place on a café terrace in the little town of Ospedaletti, a few kilometers to the west of San Remo along the Ligurian riviera. 

    One of the mysteries connected to San Remo is the fate of two suitcases containing (possibly) some of Benjamin's writings and letters. An attempt to locate these seems to have been unsuccessful and an Italian scholar, Giulio Schiavoni described in detail his own insistent search in 1977 to get to the bottom of this mystery. He mentions Gershom Scholem's doubts about Dora Keller's often contradictory story of these two suitcases and his failure to fully understand what they may have contained.