Benjamin’s suicide inadvertently enabled his fellow refugees to cross the border

Evidence

On the next day, the Spanish border guards, shaken by his suicide, allowed the rest of the party to pass through to safety. As a grim footnote to the story, Koestler, hearing the news, took some of the same pills, which Benjamin had given him in Marseilles. “But,” he wrote later, “Benjamin apparently had a better stomach, for I vomited the stuff out.” — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 595

Categorization

• CANDY: The Koestler vomiting footnote is a darkly memorable tidbit worth telling at a dinner table.
• XREF: connects to: Walter Benjamin’s resistance to exile in America led to his suicide — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 595