Walter Benjamin and His Angel

According to Benjamin in his first interpretations as described by Scholem, Angelus Novus strives after “true actuality”; comparing it to the throng of angels created every moment to sing God’s praise and then disappear into nothing. The heavenly part of every human sings God’s praise, and Benjamin saw Angelus Novus as the depiction of his angel. The Angel of History is Benjamin’s final comment on Klee’s Angel is a culmination of his life experience and philosophies.  He refers to the Angel in his essay on historical materialism. Even though the Angel is reflective of Benjamin’s personal view, it makes the switch from being his Angel to the Angel of all of History.  The Angel is now representative of all historical progress.  The essay was written in 1940, the last year of his life, after he had lived in exile and experienced the numbing terror that was Nazi Germany.   The Angel has made the switch from being a patient lover to a storm from paradise.  The Angel of History does not posses the previous hope of the other angels.  The angel is not even capable of looking toward the present; the catastrophe of the Holocaust requires its full gaze.  The Angel of History is one of melancholy, but at the same time it ties in the theological aspect of Benjamin’s work.

Benjamin's angel of history, his 'face ... turned towards the past', can only watch helplessly while the 'storm' that we call 'progress' blows him 'irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned'. The angel's gaze sees one 'single catastrophe', the 'smashed' past that he cannot redeem and make whole, a history that consists of 'wreckage upon wreckage ... [hurled] at his feet'. By contrast, the implied we of the text see history as a 'chain of events [that] appear before us', as a series of distinct but interconnected moments, Benjamin here critiquing a linear progress narrative, which he later characterizes as reading history 'like the beads of a rosary'. The historicist sees his own moment as one in which time has 'come to a standstill', a vantage point from which he can look back and see each historical event, as if it were a rosary bead. Each self-contained event has its place in the causal chain. Here, the continuum of progress is neatly broken into a series of individual 'beads', which are then available to the critic to be read. These historical moments, then, gain a belated clarity from the position of knowledge of the future, the critic analyzing the past through the lens of the present. By contrast, the angel cannot stand still, but is driven forward blind, by progress. Watching history 'hurled at his feet', he sees events as having no specific place along a causal chain, but as a cumulative ruin of fragmented moments that become one 'pile of debris'. The task, then, is to make 'whole' this ruin. The direction in which history must be read is reversed; instead of reading the past to predict a revolutionary future to come, the past is what must be redeemed, made 'citable in all its moments'. The angel looks back, seeing moments that must be salvaged, but is unable to do so, stuck between a catastrophic past he cannot save, and a future he cannot see.