04.02. to 11.02.2026: Excursion to Portbou and Banyuls-sur-Mer in the footsteps of Walter Benjamin (France/Spain)

After two preparatory block seminar dates, with walks around the campus and literature work on Benjamin's theory, we traveled to the Mediterranean for a week on the border between France and Spain. In 1942, Benjamin fled from the National Socialists with the aim of entering the USA. Thanks to the help of Lisa Fittko, hundreds of people made their way from France to Spain via the escape route between Banyuls-sur-Mer and Portbou. Walter Benjamin, however, died on the night of his arrival in the Spanish coastal town of Portbou. Since 1994, the memorial "Passages - Memorial to Walter Benjamin and the Exiles of the Years 1933-1945" by the artist Dani Karavan, which we also walked through, has been located in Portbou.

Kakigi Nobuyuki (2017) describes Benjamin's idea of the philosophy of history as follows: "In this polarized 'now', the present and the past come together 'in a flash to form a constellation'" (p.80)[1]. We have come a little closer to this state on our excursion. Benjamin's former escape route was already used in the opposite direction during the Spanish Civil War and is today both a tourist route and still a way for people to cross the border to France unseen. All these layers of history overlap on this one route.

Every day we walk from A to B without really being aware of it. In addition to the hike, we therefore visited other places and tried out walking methods: in Perpignan, we tried out the Situationist International's practice of wandering around, in Banyuls-sur-Mer we tested how listening to music while walking can change our perception and tried out walking meditation. We also explored the memorial to Lisa Fittko. We also visited an exhibition in Argelès-sur-Mer about a French internment camp on the beach there during the Spanish Civil War and the associated Mémorial du Camp d'Argelès-sur-Mer, a memorial and documentation center about the local history of the Retirada (1939), the escape movement of the Spanish Republicans.

Last but not least, we learned that university learning and lectures can take place outside of rigid seminar rooms. In student inputs, we dealt intensively with the biography of Walter Benjamin and Lisa Fittko, the psychology of walking, the Walkman effect, walking meditations, gender perspectives on walking and the aura of walking.

This excursion showed us first-hand the effects that walking can have on our thinking and how special it is to get a little closer to history spatially.

If university were always like this, we would love to study for another ten years.

[1] Kakigi, Nobuyuki (2017). History from Remembrance: Walter Benjamin's Philosophy of History. Tetsugaku,1 (73-90)