Adorno’s Path to Social Research 263undoubtedly justified, he found he could not wait to obtain an exit visa
from France and so he decided on an illegal frontier crossing. Together
with a group of refugees that included Henny Gurland and her young
son,^110 and guided by Lisa Fittko, a German on the anti-fascist left who
helped escaping refugees, Benjamin set out on the taxing journey on
foot across the Pyrenees from Banyuls-sur-Mer to Port Bou in Spain.^111
At the frontier town of Port Bou Benjamin learnt that a temporary
government decision had rendered his Spanish transit visa invalid. He
thus found himself faced with the desperate prospect of being sent back
to France, where he would once again be confined in an internment
camp. Benjamin, whose heart was troubling him once again and who
was now completely at the end of his tether and in despair, decided
to end his life with an overdose of morphine tablets. He died late in the
evening of 26 September 1940, at the age of forty-eight.^112 The previous
evening he had penned a few lines to Adorno, a copy of which Henny
Gurland delivered to him in New York in October.^113
Meanwhile, Adorno and Gretel were firmly expecting their friend
to arrive in New York and had already started to look for somewhere
for him to live. The news of his desperate last act must have come as a
shattering blow to both of them.^114 Adorno wrote to Scholem: ‘I cannot
express in words what it means to us. Our mental and empirical exist-
ence has been transformed through and through. Both Gretel and
I have been gripped by an inner torpor that will probably find its limits
only just before our own end.’^115 Through Benjamin’s death,^116 he wrote,
‘philosophy has been deprived of the best... that it might ever have
hoped for.’^117 In an obituary that appeared in the well-known exile
newspaper Aufbau on 18 October 1940, he found words that conveyed
some sense of the extent to which he saw himself mirrored in the friend
he had now lost forever: ‘He followed the compulsion of an incomparable
talent and did not seek shelter in existing situations, in philosophical
schools and recognized habits of thought.’^118
Adorno’s and Gretel’s pain was especially acute because they had
been convinced that Benjamin ‘would have been saved, if he had only
held out another twelve hours.... It is completely incomprehensible –
as if he had been gripped by a stupor and wished to obliterate himself
even though he was already rescued.’^119 The statements in Adorno’s
letters about such shattering events as Benjamin’s tragic death show
that he felt overcome by despair. Only by doing violence to himself was
he able to continue with the daily tasks of research. Adorno reckoned
with an ‘unending sequence of catastrophes, chaos and horror as far
as the eye can see’.^120 He could have few doubts about the realities of
political and historical events. Nevertheless, he was as reluctant to think
of them as destined by fate as he was to try and protect himself by
adopting an attitude of resigned acceptance or by seeking refuge in
an ivory tower. Instead, he invested time and energy in the projects
undertaken by the institute during the few years remaining until the