Ideas - How hashish may have helped a philosopher envision our future

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

What happens when original artworks become endless copies? German philosopher Walter Benjamin called it the death of "aura," and his concept predicted our digital age. He describes "aura" as the energy that encases an object. In the '20s, Benjamin experimented with hashish under medical supervision, and his thinking while on drugs evolved to a theory of art history. 

At Beneva, we know the right partner makes everything better, like hot cocoa and marshmallows. Our experts make life insurance simple and reassuring, with products that cover every chapter. With Beneva, life insurance is easier. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyid. I feel that when I go to a museum and I see a painting such as these, I feel united with the world. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. People have come to see a collection of avant-garde painters, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Suzanne Valadone.

For many, it's a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see paintings like these. You can sense the energy in the room. The feeling, you look to a painting that was done like 100 years ago, you feel that you're there in 1905. What is it about that feeling of standing in front of a really striking painting? It can transport you. That feeling? The German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin called it the aura.

Walter Benjamin believed painting had an aura, as did marble statues or live theater performances. But that newer art forms like film, radio, and photography had no aura. And that we lived in an age when the aura had withered away. Benjamine wrote about the aura in an essay he published in 1936 called The Work of Art in the Age. of mechanical reproduction. As ideas contributor Craig Desson discovered, Walter Benjamin foresaw in the 1930s

how fascism would be empowered by these new technologies. What's special about seeing the real thing? Benjamin saw our world coming, where copies replace originals and the masses replace elites as the arbiters of meaning. Walter Benjamin's essay, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, is a bona fide hit in academia, with over 20,000 citations on Google Scholar. It shows up in first-year university communications classes, English classes, and art history classes.

It's also popular in media studies and cultural studies. Yet it's only about 20 pages long and takes on an incredibly wide range of topics. It's about mass entertainment. The distracted mass absorbs the work of art. Nazi Germany. The logical result of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. Marxism. When Marx undertook his critique of the capitalist mode of production, this mode was in its infancy.

Film actors. The audience's identification. with the actor is really an identification with the camera. It's in this essay that Benjamin outlines his strange yet catchy concept called the aura. We define the aura as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. The concept was so out there that Benjamin had to struggle to get it published, and it's still kind of out there. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains.

So to understand what Benjamin's concept of the aura means, I'm going to start with who Benjamin was. What you're hearing now is from a children's reaffirm. radio show written by Walter Benjamin. From the late 1920s to the early 30s, Benjamin wrote radio plays. He needed the money. Even though he'd been born into a cultured upper-class Berlin home, he struggled to make a living.

He wanted to be an academic and earned his PhD, but failed to get a university job. So he turned to freelance journalism and making children's shows. for German radio. This is the only recording that exists of Benjamin's children's radio work. These shows were broadcast live. You can hear the energy,

the chaos, the fun of a live audience. If you read his lectures for children, the radio plays, that he did, the variety of forms he engaged with, they are so clever and so much thought went into them. Esther Leslie is a professor of political aesthetics at the University of London. She's written extensively about Benjamin. And the way in which he writes, the kind of voice he develops,

is full of joy and full of interest. And you can take things like one, He did a radio lecture on a catastrophic collapse of a bridge in Scotland over the River Tay. And you can see in there, in this lecture for children, a miniature model of his whole wider theory of technology as expressed in the artwork essay as expressed elsewhere. It's even been claimed you can hear Benjamin's voice in these recordings. Although that's only hearsay. But listen to this voice that comes near the end. I can't prove anything, but there is something in that voice.

An intensity, an irony, an intellect. And it makes me wonder, maybe that's him. And yes, it's a guess, but so much of understanding Benjamin is guesswork. This is the thing about Walter Benjamin. You think you found him, but you haven't, not fully. Even the way that there's no settled pronunciation of his name, is very Benjamin. Some say Benjamin, others, Benjamin, or even simply Benjamin.

All the scholars I spoke to said, it's like that with Walter Benjamin. And his essay about the aura is a perfect example of that. An essay like the artwork essay, do you put it in media studies, do you put it in philosophy, do you put it in political history, where does it go? Susan Buck Morris is a philosopher and visual theorist at City University. University of New York. So it's read all through literature and art and every department because it didn't belong to any of them.

It could be read all over. It's really, really, really effective. It could be read in anthropology, it could even be read in neuroscience. There's another reason Benjamin is so hard to pin down. He doesn't write like an academic. Take this line from the work of art essay. Then came the film and burst this prison world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second

so that now in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris we calmly and adventurously go traveling. Such an eclectic thinker, he drew on philosophy, literature, theology. He was really a poet in prose. He writes in fragments. He's an aphorist. Every one of his sentences is like a poem in itself. Things are only mannequins, and even the great world historical events, are only costumes, beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.

If this sounds trippy, maybe that's because it is trippy. In the 1920s, Benjamin would take Hashish under medical supervision. He had these two doctor friends who, basically were observing him while he was under the influence of drugs. Caroline Detlinger teaches German literature at Oxford University. And in that context, aura describes an ornamental halo in which the object or being is enclosed as in a case. So again, I think what we have with this notion of something being enclosed in an aura

is that sense of distance. But there's also, I think just importantly, this sense of, of mediation and encounter. So you're also encountering this object in your state of, you know, intoxication in a different way. Here's what Benjamin himself wrote in 1930, a work later published with the title on hashish. The characteristic feature of genuine aura is ornament,

an ornamental halo, in which the object or being is enclosed as in a case. Perhaps nothing gives such a clear idea of aura as Van Gogh's late paintings, in which one could say that the aura appears to have been painted together with the various objects. In his work of art essay,

Benjamin traces the concept of the aura to the beginning of art itself, when art objects were created for religious rituals. Jay Perini is an American writer, an academic, who's written a novel about Walter Benjamin. A work of art had, in say, the Renaissance, was, as Benjamin says, part of a cult

in the sense it was either a priestly cult or it was a secular cult. Some rich person was able to buy the original work of art which is which he commissioned and suddenly he could prop it up in his living room and therefore he could worship that work of art and could understand it and feel for it. But more importantly, say a painting of the Madonna would be hung in a chapel in a very particular place in a particular church somewhere. and it was often certain images of the Madonna were actually covered during the year and only uncovered during a very brief period around Christmas.

And so the work of art had a cultic basis. So standing before this unique piece of art, we are dumbstruck. We are in awe. We are in awe of the genius of Leonardo da Vinci. We take it in, we look at it, but from a distance. We cannot cross that distance. That distance is one of genius, the genius of the artist, the genius of the realm of art, this beautiful semblance that stands before us and outside of ourselves.

And we can just look at it in wonder. But that sense of wonder creates a distance. We can't actually touch genius, as in the Louvre. in Paris, staring at the Mona Lisa. It's, of course, protected by security guards and plexiglass. That's distance. Now, outside the museum, there are zillions of Mona Lisa posters for sale, that anyone can buy for a few euros and do whatever you want to them.

Draw on them, rip them up, draw a mustache on them. That's the proximity of art when it's the reproduction. We all get the same experience of a film. We can see photographs in any part of the world printed off of negatives and those photographs will look more or less the same. What that does is to democratise culture or to take it out of a sphere of privilege or seclusion or monitored access and sort of lets it.

loose in our worlds. He talks about the artwork now meeting the viewer halfway. So it comes towards us, we move towards it and thereby just expand our cultural realm, the visual and oral experiences that are open to us. We now have the capacity to have born reproducible art, born reproducible culture, of which there is no original, no single item that we have to go on a pilgrimage to visit. Yet Benjamin didn't mourn the loss of aura as transcendent and elevating as he found it, because he recognized the democratic potential in culture that's made in a factory. He saw how the mechanical reproduction of art could potentially open up culture to mass audiences. He says with the coming of film and photography, it's broken free to become multiples, to become additions.

It's also a capacity through automation that allows any person eventually. And this was emergent in Benimin's time with the coming of faster lens cameras and so on. Any person can make a photograph. Any person can write a short story. that's published in these newspapers and magazines that are burgeoning in his period. And so it is a shriveling of the elite status, both the divine status that comes in the Renaissance of the artist, who's almost commissioned by God to produce,

and the elite status of the owner or gatekeeper of culture. And this shift is about more than elite gatekeepers losing their power. It also transforms how we experience culture. A film, it's not just an optical experience. It's something to do with sitting, making yourself at home in the cinema approximate to all these other bodies jostling around you. Their attitude to what's on screen is not meant to be reverential. You're sat there, you know, partially thinking about what you're going to eat for dinner tonight.

But you're absorbing the film, you're chatting with your mates. And it's a very different relationship to what's happening. I mean, you're both, you are immersed in the, you know, you're caught up in stories. But at the same time, you're also being sort of thrown out and thrown back into yourself. I mean, here I think Benjamine's influence by Brecht sense of epic theatre and how that is watched in an episodic way. And he says, ideally, while you're smoking a cigarette. so you never forget yourself being in a theatre watching a play.

There's elements of that in Benimine's kind of casual and distracted relationship to cinema. When Benjamin was in Paris in the 1930s, it was the age of the movie palace. In Paris, cinemas like Le Grand Rex fit over 2,000 people. The screens were enormous, and the movies of the era were beautiful, seductive, and political. Thrillers from Hitchcock, Nazi propaganda by Lenny Riefenstahl, and Soviet filmmakers like Ziga Vertov were pushing film towards the avant-garde. People had never seen anything like these movies before. I wanted to get as close as I could to what Benjamin experienced in the movie palaces,

so I visited one in Montreal. I went to the Ultraman Theatre. It was built in the late 1920s and is one of Montreal's original movie palaces. The lobby features vibrant mosaic tile floors. The walls are done in warm golden brown wood. And a staircase with a brass railing invites you into the cinema itself. It was at the Ultraman Theater where I met Catherine Russell. Are you Catherine?

Yes, hi. A film studies professor at Concordia University who's written about Walter Benjamin. I've never seen this in Montreal. I really haven't. Beautiful arch doorways at the exits and entrances. Just a lot of, like, detail. Very beautiful woodworking, I would say,

but modern, not old-fashioned. The apex of Art Deco modernity, for sure. I asked Catherine to help me imagine what it would have been like to watch a movie in the theater back in the 1930s when Benjamin was writing about ORA. Well, it would have been very exciting because they would have had probably nitrate prints, so they would be glow in a spectacular way.

They'd be doing sound, so that's all new. And they would have probably shown a lot of double bills, so people would come for most of the day, I would imagine, or most of the afternoon, especially on the weekends. And they'd watch a couple of feature films, they'd watch a newsreel, they'd watch a cartoon. It wasn't like we go to the movies today to watch one film. It was you go to the movies to spend the evening or the afternoon or whatever. Movie attendance surged in the 1930s as everyday reality became harder to deal with.

And Benjamin saw how films helped people cope. For him, the audience of movies were workers in factories. He understood that watching a movie was to sort of be participating in the fragmentation of modernity, but in a good way. If the fragmentation of modernity is a sort of alienating, disorienting effect in the cinema, you can live through that. The films are very playful. They create humor. They create experiences that are shared. The work are in the factory who's getting shaken up as an individual can come to the movies in the evening and go through the machine, shall we say, but with everybody else.

But what kind of movies did Walter Benjamin really want to see on screen? The movies that he was most excited by were the Soviet films. So I think he was inspired by the work of Ziga Vertev, for example. It was bringing culture to the people. He liked the mass experience. He liked the fact that workers could see themselves. It was one of the things that he really appreciated about Verthoff's films, as that they used non-professional actors.

And that excited Ben Yomene. In Vertov's films, Walter Benjamin saw a filmmaker who struck cameras to locomotives and used extreme close-ups to capture the rhythms of the industrial era. He was very disaffected by the cult of the movie star. He thought that was the downside of cinema, the cult of celebrity, which would make it a capitalist tool. But he saw the potential of cinema as being more medium for the masses,

for the working class, that they could understand themselves as a group. But Benjamin didn't totally thumb his nose at Hollywood either. He even saw value in Mickey Mouse. The antics, the violence, the kind of playful destruction. He didn't see it as fascist violence. He saw it as playful violence and fake violent. And he liked the idea of somebody who challenges bourgeois norms. And cartoons did that.

They really threw the cover off any kind of polite bourgeois society. So he liked their inappropriateness. But he was aware of something else starting to appear on the big screen, something much more sinister. The Nazis were discovering just how powerful film was for propaganda. For Goebbels and the Nazis, it was the mass medium, so everybody would think alike. So it would promote consensus thinking and leave little room for criticism, for challenging, for any, opposing thoughts. And so they really kind of embraced it as a propaganda tool, which was really

kind of devastating to Benjamin for sure, because they, you know, thinking along the same lines, but they appropriated it for all the wrong reasons, but precisely along the same lines as Benjamin had been thinking. Benjamin's work of art essay can be read as a reaction to the rise of fascism in Europe. As the Third Reich was anything but an abstract concept, to Benjamin. Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933. Hitler gets a tremendous ovation when leaving for his first cabinet meeting. And another milestone is marked in Germany's political history.

Four weeks later, the German parliament burned to the ground, the Ritesag fire. Hitler, now Chancellor, has announced that the fire was the work of communists. and was intended to be the signal for a Bolshevist uprising throughout the country. In consequence, Germany has been placed under a system of martial law, a decree having been signed which aims at the total destruction of communism. The Nazis said it was a communist plot, and the radio stations where Benjamin worked were shut down. Freedom of the press ended.

And the rest is history. Thousands of political opponents were arrested and sent to the newly built concentration. camps. Walter Benjamin had to get it to Berlin. He had to leave Berlin not only because of the threat to Jewish people, but also because the Nazi use of film and radio became more sophisticated, more pervasive and more persuasive as time went on. You're listening to CBC Radio's ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed.

At Beneva, we know the right partner makes everything better, like hot cocoa and marshmallows. Our experts make life insurance simple and reassuring, with products that cover every chapter. With Beneva, life insurance is easier. What kind of person? takes on the law. Can they ever really know what they're getting into? A really tough looking guy came up to us and said, are you part of this gay

case? My family started getting death threats. I wasn't able to go outside alone anymore. I'm Phelan Johnson, host of See You in Court, a new podcast about the cases that changed Canada and the ordinary people who made history. This is David and Goliath we have

here. Find and follow See You in Court wherever you get your podcasts. We're surrounded everywhere today by copies, digital reproductions of art, music, and film that we can access instantly on our phones and tablets. But philosopher Walter Biniamen argued something essential is lost when we encounter art through reproductions rather than experiencing the real thing in person.

That essential something is what he called aura. Benjamine first articulated his concept in the 1930s as new technologies like film and photography were transforming mass culture. Benjamine's essay focused mostly on painting, film, and photography and left a lot of things out. So I wondered, do any of Benjamin's ideas apply the sound? Craig Deson brings us his documentary

about Walter Benjamine's multi-layered concept of ORA. To answer my own question, I've come to the basement of Concordia University's Lyola campus. I'm here to meet Owen Chapman. Hey, nice to meet you. Owens a professor in the communications department, as well as a composer and a DJ. The lab is full of vintage synthesis.

synthesizers, keyboards, record players, samplers, and stacks and stacks of records. Okay, so what are we standing in front here? And something called a theramine. Okay, so this is a theramine. An nucleus-looking wooden box with a metal rod sticking out of it. You play it without touching the instrument. This is a contemporary instrument. We bought this about 10 years ago, but the theremin was invented by Leon Theramen or Lev Therman.

really one of the first, if not the first electronic musical instrument. And where people encountered the theremin, spontaneous reactions of great shock, dismay, awe, celebration were multiple. When I read about Therman and his life, often he would show up and he would do a demonstration concert and people would like faint or they'd scream. It was almost like Betelmania. Owen tells me it's really hard to play, but he's going to try anyways. As I approach my hand on the right, we get that sound.

sound wave that starts. And at the very lowest level, we'll hear those repetitions that I was talking about as just little clicks almost, like, kind of like a bup-a-p-pup-pup-pup, right? So in order to get that sound, I'm having to hold my fingers at about a foot away from the antenna, but as I approach it, it'll get much faster, and you'll hear those bup-p-p-pup-pup-pup repetitions turn into like a continuous tone. One of the things I think that's fascinating about it is it's a device. which is all about reproduction. Basically, like a sine wave

is a tiny little ripple of energy that is repeated many, many, many, many, many, many times or an oscillation that's repeated many, many, many, many times. And the speed of the repetition of the oscillation is what provokes the pitch that we hear in terms of the sound. Let's see if I can play like happy birthday or something. I lost it.

There we go. Every time I show my students, they have a good laugh. So reproduction or repetition in this case is at the heart of what the theremin is. Benjamin was really moved by mechanical reproduction, but at the same time, electricity was really starting to have an impact in terms of, like, the technologies. You have to look pretty hard at Benjamin's work of art essay to get an idea of what he thought about sound.

I found a little footnote in where, Benjamin quotes Leonardo da Vinci, who said that music is inferior to painting because the act of applying a layer of varnish renders the art object eternal, whereas music is forever dying in the moments of its birth, and it has this kind of persistence over the centuries that's still there. When I was 18, I went on a visit, like, so many people to the Louvre, and I saw the Mona Lisa behind, like, bulletproof glass and with, like, hundreds of other people, I was in the presence of that work of art, and I wasn't so moved by that, but at the same time, the music that I was experiencing, being in Paris for the first time,

exploring the city, the sounds of the city, for instance, and the people, the language, everything else, was impacting me really profoundly. And so I was having a kind of aura-filled experience of the city of Paris, but actually going and visiting that singular art object was not. Owen believes we can experience aura in any kind of culture, no matter how the given artwork was produced. And he turns to Benjamin himself to back up his belief.

Benjamin Orr was about a type of essence that an art object can hold. and for me and others, if we're going to talk about ORA, let's talk about our relationship to that object and being inspired or moved by it and wanting to be in its presence. He tells me one of the records in his collection has a very special presence. We walk to the back of the lab

where Owen has his DJ gear set up. Two techniques, SL-1200s, the classic hip-hop DJ turntable. Great. Next to the churn table are stocks of records that go up to the ceiling. Owen picks one up. So I'm an avid record collector, spends a lot of time in Salvation Army-style thrift shops, often buying huge bins of records without knowing what I'm going to get.

And this record came to me on one of those days. So all we see on the surface of the record is like a general label on top of which somebody has handwritten in French, Le Fiencée and 78 RPM, you know, side one and side two. The fiancé, for your listeners who don't speak French, basically means the engagement. And often I think when you say les fiancée, you're referring to an engagement party. So I believe this recording is from the 50s.

It was probably done here in Montreal. It's all in French. I hesitate almost to play for your listeners because it's singular. It still has that type of magical significance that Benjamin was trying to articulate when he was speaking about Oras. That's why I thought I'd share it with you today.

Yeah, I'd love to hear it. Now, the only problem is that, as I noted at first, this record is at 78 RPM, and my turntables here only go up to 45. So what I had to do this morning before you got here was I recorded it at 45 RPM, and you can hear what it sounds like. It's, you know, you don't listen to it for very long. To hear it at the right speed, Owen records it into the computer

and speeds it up with editing software. The first side of the disc features speeches. Then you hear some singing. And then an interruption. That was just a spontaneous skip in the record that happened at the very end, which I retained to play for you because it highlights this feature of mechanically reproduced media, which is that it doesn't always act the way it's supposed to. It's not necessarily a transparent and perfect reproduction of the former thing.

The new object, this new record has its own life, its own essence, its own presence, its own physical kind of history. And in this case, there's this tiny scratch there, which means that when it gets to that part of the record, it just starts looping and skipping around and around, which, again, a turntableist or a sample-based producer might be inspired by when that happens to create their own loop at that moment or to go back to another moment and create a loop. In a way, I think that looping practices within beat making and sampling

come from some of those original listening experiences where a record starts to skip and you're like, hey, that actually sounds kind of good. And you had said that, like, before you were hesitant to play this record, because you'd only heard it. And now that you've kind of like shared it and it's going to play it on the radio to like hundreds of thousands of people,

like has it changed? Do you think it's changed something about this recording? Well, I think yes and no, you know, the moment that people hear it in their kitchens or their cars or wherever they happen to be, I think hopefully that experience will be like it was for you and me like it was for me the first time I heard it, kind of moving and trying to.

intriguing, a little bit noisy and uncomfortable, it'll be all of those wonderful things. The question is, will people go back to the archive, you know, online and, like, download their own version of it and then share it with their friends and spread it around the world and put it up on TikTok and make new videos to it and whatnot? In which case, I would start to feel a little bit uncomfortable. I'm guessing that's probably not going to happen. And for me, I guess that's the significance. It's like when this singular object is shared with others, it has its own kind of life, its own history, its own destiny, which I'm a part of. And once it's made digitally, ubiquitously available, that destiny changes.

And I'm no longer a part of it. The object itself is no longer a part of it. Maybe that's okay, but it is what it is. And in a way, you know, I've told myself that when you leave, I'm going to erase this digital file so that I no longer have a copy that I can share like this because I think it's really, For me, it's really part of the practice of sharing this record is actually having to play it for people on a turntable and have them be in their room with me. You can see why Benjamin's famous work of art essay still attracts so many different types of thinkers. It inspires us to find new dimensions in what's around us.

That's why it's crucial not to make a fetish out of aura or approach it with any kind of intellectual fundamentalism. One shouldn't try, I don't think, to just be loyal to what Benjamin meant. This is Susan Buck Morris again. The word aura is used in the Benyemin text very infrequently, and when it is, it has, it seems to have different meanings. In the artwork essay, it's clear that he considers the destruction of the aura of the artwork to be a consequence of modern media. The destruction caused by modern media may well be the analog to the, the destruction wrought by modern warfare. Benjamin began to write the work-of-art essay

shortly after he fled Nazi Germany for Paris. In his letters, he talks about having to leave and knowing he won't return, or at least not for some time, the air had become too hard to breathe. And he was terrified. Benjamin became one of the countless German refugees living in Paris, uprooted and broke. he went there and he got fairly low-level digs and he would have to make this choice

between going and spending the day in the library where he loved to be and it was also warm or going to another part of town where he knew there was some free food so you know he was in a pretty rough state at this period He usually worked inside the ornately decorated Grom Bibliotech. When I think of him going to the library, you know, there he is sort of surrounded by books and cartons and other people, nice, you know, beautifuls, wooden desks and so on. And he talks about the foliage patterns that are on the ceiling and he thinks about the leaves of books and the represented leaves on the ceiling. And it's like he's in a sort of forested. of dreams in a way. So I imagine him being in that space, you know, felt quite protected and

delightful. And there he could just go through hundreds and hundreds of books about the history of Paris and copy out, you know, the little bits that interested him and make reflections on them. It was there in 1935. that Benjamin started writing the work-of-art essay. It's clear in a somewhat roundabout way that he wanted it to be a tool to fight fascism. So Marx is mentioned right at the beginning in the preface,

in a sense explain where he's coming from. He's talking about Marxist theory of the relationship between the Basin, the superstructure and all of these arguments. And then, interestingly, the end of that introduction, he talks about fascism. And so the last sentence of this preface says that what is going to be developed in the following sections is a theory of art which is fundamentally unusable for fascist purposes. Completely useless for the purposes of fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.

Benjamin believed these new art forms, mass-produced and lacking aura, could be liberating, but they also pave the way for Hitler. But he's also thinking about the weight of aura that is put on the dictator, the charismatic leader, Hitler himself. He is bonding together with radio technologies and film. technologies to oratize himself and re-oratacize those technological means because it's all being directed towards the reproduction of the Third Reich. And one example of this is aerial photography of things like the Nuremberg

rally where the masses are rendered into swastika shapes. They take on the form of the regime rather than expressing or representing themselves in any way. The work of art essay ends of this chilling and cryptic line. This is the situation of politics, which fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art. Benjamin believed art and politics had collided.

He called this dynamic the aestheticization of politics. So the aestheticization of politics is something Benjamin talks about right at the end of the essay, and that's what he associates with fascism. So if you think of Lenny Riefenstahl's film about the Nuremberg Party, Congress. So this is her great film about sort of the Nazi spectacle of Nuremberg, the Party Congress. If you've seen it, it's got lots of aerial shots of great crowds of people sort of arranged almost ornamentally like, you know, in these geometrical sections.

And so that's what Benjamin is critical of. The way that fascism aestheticizes politics. and turns politics into a spectacle. And Benjamin turns that on its head and says, no, what we need to achieve is exactly the opposite. The fascists are trying to aestheticize politics. What we need to do is we need to try to politicize art,

which is exactly the opposite. It's about using the cinema to mobilize people politically. The million-dollar question, is, of course, what does he mean by that? I mean, one of his examples is Eisenstein, the great Russian film director and especially his film Battleship Potemkin. So Benjamin has this idea that Russian avant-garde cinema, which uses a lot of montage effects and so on, creates this particular mindset in the audience. And he's almost like a sort of training ground for people learning to look and think about reality in a different way.

Benjamin's work of art essay was eventually published in a French journal in 1936. He wanted it published in a journal run by his friends at the Frankfurt School, people like Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, but they rejected it. It was too out there and not academic enough. But getting rejected was the least of Benjamin's problems. There was a refugee crisis in Europe, from both the Spanish Civil War and Nazi Germany. When France declared war on Germany, German refugees like Benjamin were sent to an internment camp in rural France, before friends and colleagues pressured the French government into releasing him.

But after he got back to Paris, the Nazis invaded France. Alarms sound over Paris. Nazi bombers attack in earnest. And the Nazi-aligned government issued a new internment order. He saw the writing on the wall by this time. And his friends were saying to him, Walter, you've got to get out of town. You're going to be sent back to Germany and killed. They're serious. They're coming after you.

They're already arresting and deporting Jews. And believe me, when they send them back to Germany, it's not to a good fate. and I think Benjamin perfectly understood this. And so he left it a little bit too late. Many of his intellectual associates had already fled to New York City, but the American government had by then closed the door to almost all refugees. Yet his friends in the U.S. used their connections to get him a rare non-quote of visa. To escape Europe, he had to catch a ship from Portugal,

which meant traveling through southwest France and Spain. Benjamin was in bad health and didn't know if he would survive the journey or get caught. I think he left in a large panic. He carried drugs that could kill him on him for a while. So he had that option. He also brought a gas mask in a briefcase. That briefcase has captured the imagination of Benjamin scholars everywhere,

because some say it had an important manuscript inside. And all the way, he was lugging this monstrous briefcase, which contained a thousand-page manuscript, some version of his arcade project, which he had not finished. That's what we imagine it was, in any case. To get to Portugal, Benjamin would need to cross the Pyrenees, the wall of mountains between France and Spain. They engage someone who could show them a route through the mountains. As I understand, this same pass had people fleeing Franco's Spain coming in the opposite direction.

So an extraordinary sort of period of being on the move and making count. about where was the safer or safe enough place for you at this moment, given your circumstances? Benjamin was put in contact with a woman named Lisa Fitko, a 31-year-old political activist who was married to a man he'd man at the internment camp back in France. Lisa Fitko, who was herself a socialist, and she was a young socialist mountain climber. She was interested in mountain climbing. and she ultimately led over 100 Jews to safety along a very perilous route through the Pyrenees into Spain. And so her first customers, shall we call them, were Walter Benjamin and a middle-aged woman, Henny Gerland, and her son, Jose. And so the four of them, Lisa Fittgo, Henny Gerland, Jose Gerland, and Benjamin took off from France. from the French border, climbed through the mountains

of very perilous journey. The journey was so arduous for Benjamin that they did a trial run to the halfway point. He went very slowly, and he's dragging along with a little briefcase, and he even drinks sort of water, you know, from a puddle and so on. And it was also perilous because there were border guards constantly on patrol, looking out for escapees, and they could have been captured. So it was a very perilous, difficult, painful journey.

Benjamin eventually arrived at a town on the Spanish border. When they got to their hotel, Benjamin was arrested almost immediately. And when the police came to arrest him, they said, well, let me see your transit visa. And he didn't have one of those. He said, look, I've got a German passport. And they said, so you're a German. And he said, well, yes, but blah, blah, blah. So there was a real visa complication issue going on there.

And so people without a proper transit visa were being shipped right straight back at the border to France, where they would have been immediately, probably captured by the Vichy and sent back to Paris and then sent on to Berlin. Benjamin and the others returned to the rooms. Another refugee, Karina Berman, was at the hotel with Benjamin and the others.

She wrote this in her memoir. He told me that by no means was he willing to return to the border or to move out of this hotel. When I remarked that there was no alternative other than to leave, he declared that there was one for him. He hinted that he had some very effective, poisonous pills with him. Benjamin killed himself.

He was lying half naked in his bed and had his very beautiful big golden grandfather watch with open cover on a little board near him, observing the time constantly. I suspect he felt genuine terror and exhaustion at that point when he finally took the poison. The circumstances were so extreme, the future so uncertain. He was a man who loved literature, who had adopted France and French as his own, who knew German culture inside out,

the thought of going to America having to live within English, having in his late 40s to establish himself, I suspect was just too much. And in the chaos that followed his death, his briefcase went missing. This idea of Benjamin in taking these papers with him And we think that a lot of these papers were then lost, including some major projects he was working on at the time. So like with so many of this generation of Jewish intellectuals who lost their lives in the wake of fascism, I think it's just a huge loss to humanity to know that there were all these papers that Benjamin tried to save and didn't manage to save.

Benjamin, like millions of others during the war, died far from home, virtually anonymous. But in Port Bao, Spain, there's now a monument to him. On it is this excerpt from another of his writings entitled On the Concept of History. It is a more art. task to honor the memory of anonymous beings than that of famous persons. The construction of history is consecrated to the memory of those who have no name. The fact that decades after his death, this unknown person would have this huge influence he still exerts today is something of a miracle. It reminds Susan Buck Morris of something one of her

colleague said about Benjamin. He was an unknown person. He was put in a concentration camp after the Vichy regime came in, he tried to escape and got into Port Bu in Spain. And he committed suicide. So as Marty Jay used to say, if you want to be famous today, have no effect in the present, fail getting an academic position, and commit suicide by the time you're 48, and, you know, you will be read by everyone 80 years later. But in the period following Benjamin's death, he was unknown. His contemporaries like Fyodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt,

and the Jewish scholar Gershom Shalom, helped publish a collection of his writings after the war and have found traction among students. In Germany, I think it starts being used and issued in pirate copies by the same. student movement, who very much pick up on Benimin, the Marxist, and this is when they're putting out posters of caricature of Beniamen with a joint in one hand and a Kalashnikov in the other. They're seeing this almost as manuals to use, to develop a coming post-68, post-student

revolution culture based on film, photography, photocopies, and all of that. And Benjamin's appeal continues to this day. Benjamin is one of the first people to think about what does it mean to create mass society and what does it mean for the mass consumption of art. My God, if Benjamin were still alive, he'd be writing about the Internet and the proliferation of ideas through this astonishing means of reproduction. In many ways, he anticipates all of this.

So Benjamin just becomes endlessly relevant. And because he's so aphoristic and obscure at the same time, you can go back to that essay on the work of art and again and again find little bits and pieces that are stimulating that seem to connect to what's going on. We now live in Benjamin's world of endless reproductions. Good luck finding the original of any piece of digital culture. But what's refreshing about Benjamin is he isn't pessimistic about this new culture.

Benjamin believed in creating and recreating culture. He wanted us to see things, things we've never seen before, like the aura. And now we've had the opportunity. to also hear all about it. Thanks to contributor Craig Desson. Special thanks to Gabriel Ellison Skowcroft, Allison Northcott, Tom Howell, and Simon Nakaneshny. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of ideas.

Technical production, Sam McNulty. Nicola Luxchich is the senior producer. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyed. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.ca.com slash podcasts.