The Angel of History

"38 Lux!", I was told by my friend Knut. He had the honour of lighting the Angel of History at the Bode Museum in Berlin. Imagine, giving light to an angel! Even more so, Paul Klee's Angelus Novus, named  the Angel of History by Walter Benjamin in one of his last writings in 1940. Knut added: "maybe rather 'delit'? ["entleuchten"]" True. When an angel appears, it must be in mere light, as if we are looking into the sun. 

I went to see the Angel of History together with my former Professor of History who turned 80 last year. On the occasion, he published two tomes of his autobiography but now,  he told me, he is no longer able to write and he needs to write in order to think. We considered other options, like dictating instead of handwriting. Recently, also Anne Carson wrote about her current struggles with writing in The London Review, citing Catullus: "Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind." 

There is a portrait of Benjamin taken by Gisèle Freund, hanging next to Klee's Angelus Novus. This photograph was taken in Paris, where Benjamin was in exile. His hand is supporting his head - the classical posture of a writer. The accompanying exhibition label mentions that he is portrayed as “an author, but also as a melancholic”. It is not "but”, my professor commented; an author and a melancholic. To be a writer is to be a melancholic. 

In the exhibition, there is a photo of the Caravaggio painting The Inspiration of Saint Matthew, which was destroyed during World War II. Here, the angel is depicted most sensually, guiding effortlessly, with a minimum of touch, the hand of Saint Matthew that is writing. The eyes of Saint Matthew are wide open, startled. 

Instead, in Klee’s Angelus Novus, it's the angel who has its eyes wide, its mouth open, its wings outspread - also startled, but by what? Benjamin purchased the watercolour by Klee in 1921 and it was to him his most precious possession. I looked it up in the glossary of Walter Benjamin. A Critical Life, a detailed biography by Michael Jennings and Howard Eiland. In Benjamin's Grunewald study in Berlin, as described by Benjamin's friend Charlotte Wolff, “the walls of his room were made invisible through rows of books which reached from floor to ceiling. There was, however, one large space left on the back wall to house a picture Walter loved – the ‘Angelus Novus’ by Paul Klee. He had a personal relationship with this picture, as if it were part of his mind…" 

Later, it moved to Benjamin’s last residence in Berlin, a fifth-floor apartment at Prinzregentenstraße, with a large study and room for his 2000-volume library, presided over, once more, by Angelus Novus. His friend Scholem said: “It was the last time he had all his possessions together in one place.” Later, in Paris, Benjamin gave the painting, together with his papers, to Georges Bataille, who, as a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale, was able to keep it safe. 

The Angel of History is described by Benjamin in "On the Concept of History", an essay of rather, as Benjamin himself wrote in a letter to Gretel Adorno,  “a bouquet of whispering grasses, gathered on reflective walks.” At the end of these notes, Benjamin evokes the image of Paul Klee’s painting with which he lived for about 20 years: 

“A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. 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. This 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.”