It is probably not by chance that , of these four individuals — to which it would be possible to add a few others , of course ( I am thinking in particular of Ernst Bloch and his magnificent political theory of “ wishful images ”)— two committed suicide out of political desperation . Both occurred in 1940 : on 5 July by Carl Einstein and on 26 September Walter Benjamin . Both sought to escape the Nazi yoke after having fought all forms of fascist ideology in Europe for years . Aby Warburg had died in 1929 , four years before Hitler came to power , but he had had plenty of time to sense the coming catastrophe , as evidenced in particular by the last plates of his Mnemosyne atlas of images , where the motives of theocracy converge with those of the fascist dictatorship against the backdrop of a long history of European anti-Semitism . As for Georges Bataille , he had feverishly sought a political path that was not one of fascism , bourgeois liberalism or Stalinism ( a communist and libertarian path , quite close to what Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre called “ revolutionary romanticism ”), but rather one between Nietzsche and surrealism .
4 . Walter Benjamin in a library . Picture by Helvetiafocca , CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
5 . Georges Bataille in 1943 . Unknown author , public domain , via Wikimedia Commons
6 . Carl Einstein in Ibiza , 1923 . Unknown author
Deep VIEW
21