Entering the staircase, one is gripped with a sense of unease bordering on panic. The enclosed passageway leads straight down over the cliff and appears to open directly into the bay below. It is as if the artist wished to construct a three-dimensional photograph of the final image a suicidal person sees before jumping into the abyss. For those who know the story of Walter Benjamin’s flight out of Nazioccupied Paris, the monument located in the small Catalan town of Portbou promises to haunt forever. After a dangerous journey through the Pyrenees, Benjamin arrived at the Spanish border in September 1940, hoping to pass through Spain on his way to the United States. Owing to his ill health, authorities at the border allowed him to cross the frontier and spend the night at the Hotel de Francia in Portbou; as he lacked a French exit visa, however, they made it clear that in the morning he would be returned to France. Faced with this grim possibility, the weary traveler apparently took a lethal dose of morphine in his hotel room.1
