Angel of History

Some weeks ago, in a book about the philosophers Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand, and Simone Weil, I ran across a quote from Walter Benjamin, a close friend of Arendt. It is the most concise and at the same time most poetic and intensely haunting metaphor on human history I’ve ever read.

His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

I could not get these lines out of my head. When I closed my eyes, I could see the Angel of History standing transfixed, leaning against the storm of time, horrified. – I had to try and draw what I saw.

As I learned only today, looking up where exactly the quote is taken from, Benjamin took his inspiration from a painting by Paul Klee that he had acquired: »Angelus Novus«.

P.S.: My German-speaking readers might like the in-depth article on the Deutschlandfunk website about the very special connection between Walter Benjamin and Klee's painting: »Ein Sturm weht vom Paradiese her«.

P.P.S.: Oh, the book I’ve read was »The Visionaries« by Wolfram Eilenberger (which, absurdly, I bought in the English version not knowing that the original is in my mother language, German …).