""Since there was almost no water to wash with," Hans Sahl, a friend and fellow-prisoner of Benjamin's, would say later, "the pâté clung to our faces and hair and penetrated every pore.""
""Never," Sahl wrote, "have I been so conscious of the painful failure of a method, which in sympathetic unworldly innocence thought it possible to 'change' reality, but which remained only an interpretation, limping behind.""
Shortly after Germany invaded Poland, French authorities declared German nationals of conscription age enemy aliens and interned many, including Walter Benjamin, at the Stade de Colombes. Prison conditions were miserable: valuables seized, meager rations of bread and tins of pâté, rain-soaked straw sleeping arrangements, and barrels serving as toilets. After ten days Benjamin was moved to a central France camp, where he gave lectures for cigarettes and held editorial meetings in a lean-to to establish a literary journal. A close friend later saw Benjamin's commitment to humanist intellectual work as a tragic, ultimately inadequate response to mounting atrocities. Benjamin was released after two and a half months, returned to Paris, renewed his Bibliothèque Nationale reader's card, and declined friends' urgings to flee to the United States.
Read at The New Yorker
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