Paris enters the account as a site of intellectual labor and a point of departure in Walter Benjamin’s flight. The city’s significance rests on the manuscript he developed there: a work that the book presents as an extension of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” and whose disappearance becomes inseparable from the story of his death.

Research and the Manuscript

At the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, Benjamin had been working on a major manuscript elaborating the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written a few months before his death. The book describes the manuscript as a masterwork and makes Paris the place where this project took shape. It does not provide further details about the city or the manuscript’s contents.

Flight and Loss

As Benjamin fled through the mountains from France toward Spain, he carried the manuscript with him. Its briefcase was entrusted to a fellow refugee, who, according to the account, lost it on a train traveling from Barcelona to Madrid. Paris is thus linked to a work that left the city with Benjamin but did not survive the journey in his possession.

Place in the Book’s Account

The book advances the claim that Stalin’s agents killed Benjamin and connects the alleged motive to preventing the manuscript’s publication. Within that account, Paris is not a scene of the killing; its importance is earlier and more indirect. It is the research setting from which the manuscript emerged, and the beginning of a chain of flight, loss, and political suspicion.