The Angel of History

The Angel of History is Benjamin's reading of Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus (1920), offered in the ninth of his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," written months before his death. The angel has wide eyes, an open mouth, and wings caught mid-spread. Benjamin saw in it the figure of history's witness: face turned toward the past, seeing not a chain of progressive events but a single accumulating catastrophe—the storm of progress, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage at the angel's feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, make whole what has been smashed. But the storm from Paradise is caught in his wings with such violence that he can no longer close them; he is propelled into the future to which his back is turned, seeing only what has been destroyed, never what is approaching. The concept is not a counsel of despair or a program of reaction. It is