Benjamin’s suicide over the failed Pyrenees escape framed the Dialectic of Enlightenment’s co-authorship.

Evidence

This passage also made it clear once again under whose guiding star Adorno and Horkheimer’s decision to work together was to become a reality. That guiding star was Benjamin, who had resisted any escape from an Old World whose culture was fused with barbarism into a New World without culture or tradition. When his escape over the Pyrenees seemed to have failed, Benjamin committed suicide on 26 September 1940 in the Spanish border town of Port Bou. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1296