From Enlightment,
Through the Angel of History,
into the Symbolic Winged Messenger
In 1921, at the age of 28, Walter Benjamin purchased Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus for 1,000 marks from the gallery of the German art dealer Hans Goltz in Munich. The work, was created in 1920, would later become inseparable from Benjamin’s philosophy of history, and his famous conception of the ‘Angel of History’.
Paul Klee Angelus Novus New Angel 1920 monoprint
31.8 cm x 24.2 cm
Collection: Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Please note: Paul Klee, despite his Christian, German-Swiss background, was attacked by antisemitic, and anti-modernist critics. In 1919, he was referred to as ‘Paul Zion Klee’ - an antisemitic accusation linking his avant-garde art to Jewishness, a connection that would later become central to the Nazi denunciation of modern art as “degenerate.” After the Nazis came to power, the press began labeling Pau Klee a ‘Galician Jew’. On April 6, 1933, he wrote to his wife Lily, the following words: “It seems unworthy of me to undertake anything against such crude attacks. For even if it were true that I am a Jew and came from Galicia, that would not affect my values as a person or my achievement by an iota”.
In this context, however, another, more unsettling hidden layer has been unveiled underneath Angelus Novus - one that Benjamin absolutely could have known. In 2013, the artist Rebecca H. Quaytman examined the work closely, and noticed that the black margin surrounding Klee’s New Angel is more than a black margin: It revealed that Klee had consciously mounted his image over an old engraving by Friedrich Müller depicting Dr. Martin Luther, dated 1838. The image itself is based on a 1521 painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder portraying Martin Luther: The discovery introduces a striking historical irony - after all, in his book On the Jews and Their Lies (Von den Juden und ihren Lügen), published in 1543, Martin Luther called for the destruction of synagogues, and Jewish books, the confiscation of Jewish property, and other forms of persecution against Jews.
In other words, beneath the New Angel that Benjamin would come to visualize as a witness to the enduring catastrophe of the Jews, lies the image of a person whose anti-Jewish writings would, centuries later, be appropriated by Adolf Hitler, the founder of the Nazi regime - the very fascist movement that sought to murder Walter Benjamin simply because he was a Jew.
Hereafter, we shall learn that the image of the New Angel has emerged as a reality - namely, as the unveiled Angel of History: An image in which history, memory, catastrophe, and, ultimately, belated redemption converge.
Friedrich Müller, “Dr. Martin Luther” (1838), engraving, 33.40 x 27.20 centimeters based on Lucas Cranach painting
On the Jews and Their Lies (Von den Juden und ihren Lügen), published in 1543, Martin Luther Collection: Joseph Sassoon Semah & Linda Bouws
Many years later, in 1940, Walter Benjamin, at the age of forty-seven, deeply troubled, and fearful of being captured by the Gestapo as he attempted to escape from Vichy-controlled France, wrote what would become his final philosophical testament - Theses on the Philosophy of History - comprising twenty numbered theses. The work offers a critical reflection on, and in many respects constitutes a profound break with, the linear, and progressive conception of history underlying historicism. It is a treatise written in criticism of the idea of history as a continuous process towards ‘progress’. At the same time, Benjamin, who had become a fugitive Jew, was compelled to conceive of historical time as an expression of a hope he would never live to realize: A profoundly Jewish-messianic vision of history.
So, it is worth remembering that only a few months before his death by suicide - weak, exhausted, frightened, and fearing that he would be handed over to the Gestapo - Walter Benjamin concluded his twenty theses with the following words: “This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.”
In Jewish tradition, the Messiah is not a divine being but a mortal descendant of King David. He will arise to guide humanity toward the observance of God’s laws, and usher in an age of righteousness, and peace. In some later Jewish traditions, the Messiah is associated with Jerusalem’s Gate of Mercy, or Golden Gate, through which he is expected to enter the holy city.
Walter Benjamin - Theses on the Philosophy of History 1940
https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html
Moreover, at the moment of Walter Benjamin’s escape from Paris in 1940, he entrusted the Angel of History, together with some of his papers, to Georges Bataille, who hid them in the Bibliothèque Nationale. After the war, the drawing passed into the custody of Theodor W. Adorno, and following a prolonged dispute, eventually reached Gershom Scholem in Israel. After Scholem’s death, it was donated by his widow, Fania Scholem, to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
In what follows, I would like to concentrate my thought around Thesis IX:
IX.
My wing is ready for flight, I would like to turn back.
If I stayed timeless time, I would have little luck.
Gerherd Scholem, ‘Greeting from Angelus’
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. 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.
If we read the thesis as a Jewish text, the narrative of the Angel of History can be understood as a meditation on the strange way in which Jewish history exists in time. The angel looks toward the past, toward the ruins accumulating before his eyes, while a storm - from paradise, GaN EDeN Mi-KeDeM גן עדן מִקֶּדֶם, “the Garden of Eden from the East” or “the Garden from of old” - carries him backward into the future. Storms, moreover, can appear in biblical imagery as manifestations of divine judgment.
In Hebrew, the word KeDeM קֶדֶם evokes what is ancient and primordial - and hence what is “before” – while KeDeM קֶדֶם is also associated with the East, the direction of the rising sun. AChaRIT אַחֲרִית, meaning “the future” “the latter part” or “what comes afterward” is related in meaning to AChOR אָחוֹר “behind” or “backward.”
In this sense, the Hebrew language offers a striking conception of the past, KeDeM קֶדֶם, and the future, AChaRITאַחֲרִית. That is to say, we face what has already happened because it is visible to us: The past is before us, while the future remains behind our backs, for it is unseen. It is therefore important to note that the Hebrew expression Mi-KeDeM מִקֶּדֶם can mean both “from of old”, and “from the East”, thereby evoking simultaneously primordial time, and a particular direction toward the territory of Jerusalem. AChaRIT אַחֲרִית, in turn, suggests that the future is behind us. In Jewish eschatology, this temporal, and spatial imagery also resonates with the expectation that the resurrection of the dead will take place during the Messianic Age.
Returning, then, to the image of the Messiah entering through the Gate of Mercy, one of the most astonishing possibilities within Jewish thought is that he may enter the future [Jerusalem] with his face turned toward the past [Catastrophe].
The messianic future does not demand that we turn away from history, but precisely the opposite: It demands that we look back and remember the catastrophe. The future, therefore, is not simply what comes after the past, it is the possibility that the past itself might be redeemed. Therefore, the Jewish Messiah is understood primarily as one who restores, and completes what is rooted in the past, rather than introducing something entirely new. He does not erase history, but gathers its fragments, and brings what was broken toward fulfillment.
Perhaps this is what makes Benjamin’s Angel of History so evocative - and, at the same time, so real: The Angel, the symbolic Jew, gazes upon the ruins of the future, while the storm carries him through the past and towards what has yet to come.
The Mechanical Turk, or the Automaton Chess Player, was first created in 1769 by Wolfgang von Kempelen, an Hungarian inventor.
So let us point our finger back to Thesis I.:
| ||
| I. | |
| The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight. | |
To begin with, what is striking is Walter Benjamin’s apparent silence about Moses Mendelssohn throughout his writings.
And yet, as we know, Moses Mendelssohn published Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism in 1783, one of the foundational texts in the protracted modern debate over Jewish emancipation. Mendelssohn argued for freedom of conscience, religious toleration, and a separation between religious, and civil authority.
But somehow, at a most crucial moment in Walter Benjamin’s life -being himself the fugitive Jew in Paris - we find him breaking his silence about Moses Mendelssohn by invoking him, if deliberately, and speculatively, as the symbolic chess player hidden inside the automaton. In this surprising movement of thought, Moses Mendelssohn becomes the ugly, hunched figure concealed within the machine - not simply as a symbolic Jew, but perhaps as Benjamin’s deepest anxiety about the very idea of “historical materialism”: The frightened Jew within European culture, speaking its language, inhabiting its intellectual world, and believing there might be a MaKOM for him there, only to discover himself forced to hide inside the very machinery of a culture that is now trying to murder him. There he is, hidden inside the automaton, terrified to his bones, wondering whether the Gestapo will find him.
And yet, the connection with Mendelssohn becomes still more radical as we approach Karl Marx - himself born into a Jewish family and subsequently baptized as a Lutheran. It is therefore interesting to remember that, in 1843, at twenty-five, while living in Paris, Marx wrote On the Jewish Question, a critical response to Bruno Bauer’s arguments concerning Jewish emancipation. Critical of religion generally, including Judaism, as well as of bourgeois society, Marx’s argument can be read as exposing the limits of Moses Mendelssohn’s hope that emancipation might come through integration. So, according to Marx, Judaism and European reason cannot inhabit the same world without the former ultimately disappearing into the other.
Consequently, Walter Benjamin inherited something of Marx’s vocabulary, but encountered it in reverse at the very moment when history began to withdraw its promise of progress. And so the hidden chess player acquires another meaning. The hidden symbolic Jew inside the machine might almost be Mendelssohn’s thought returning through Benjamin’s shock: The shock of the Jew being forced to hide inside the machinery of European history, still hoping to touch the outstretched wings of the Angel of History somewhere within the mechanism itself.
Perhaps this is where Mendelssohn, Marx, and Benjamin meet: Three moments in the history of one question - the Jewish question: Can the Jew belong to Europe without having to veil himself?
Mendelssohn believed he could. Marx sought to transform the question. And Benjamin, in the end, found himself caught in the horrific history of the Shoah.
Joseph sassoon Semah
The Symbolic Winged Messenger 1978
Ink, paper A3
G+W Collection The Netherlands
Finally, I will name the Jewish Messiah - the angel of history - as the symbolic winged messenger - for it is, after all, an act of Reading, even if it is not a direct sound of my own making - and Reading already constitutes the condition of my own being, without which the gesture of Writing cannot be heard. In other words, what we see in Reading i.e., the symbolic winged messenger, is always already the mystery of Writing. The sacred sound of Reading intertwines with all the acts and movements of Writing [Humanity].
This is the secret of our fragmented Reading, and ultimately the purpose of our own temporary Writing: That Reading, and Writing alike are both confounded in a World abounding with the visible [Black] Words “THE BLACK FIRE”, and the veiled [White] Words - namely, the white space surrounding the black Words - “THE WHITE FIRE”. Each becomes what it is only through the visibility of the other: In the blackness of their ambiguity [the visible Writing], and in the whiteness they share [the veiled Writing].
Signed below, as one who bears witness
Joseph Sassoon Semah 24.2.1948
