The Angel of History
Angelus Novus — monoprint, Paul Klee 1920. Israel Museum, Jerusalem
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Born in 1940, the same year Walter Benjamin wrote his reflections on history, the same year he took his own life, I experience these days as being in a suspense quite unlike experienced before. My gaze goes back to the horrors of the past which I thought had been overcome and cast aside for a better world. Instead I’m propelled by a wind that comes from the past. My experience invokes the image of the angel of history Benjamin talks about in his much-quoted essay, the angel who looks back – the angel he identifies with Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus.
Angelus Novus was created in 1920, and here – if we follow Benjamin’s vision – the angel would look back on the absolute horror’s of the First World War, fresh on everybody’s mind, and alive in everybody’s nightmares, which nobody would have believed could be surpassed.
Walter Benjamin, by Photo d’identité sans auteur, 1928 – Akademie der Künste, Berlin – Walter Benjamin Archiv, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17162035
Here is Section IX from Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/Theses_on_History.html)
My wing is ready to fly
I would rather turn back
For had I stayed mortal time
I would have had little luck.
– Gerhard Scholem, “Angelic Greetings”
There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.
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