The Angel of History Looks Aghast.
Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee, and of course, Nazis, in passing.
Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920, monoprint on wove paper laid down on etching, 12 1/2 × 9 1/2 inches.Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
“The first one to mention the Nazis loses.”
I know now that it was a cliche maybe decades old by the time the rule reached my teenaged ears in the 1990s, but it was a clarifying lesson when I heard it for the first time. Nazis are the ultimate red button, the universal moral solvent—rhetorically, your argument doesn’t have much to it if you give up all the terrain between a reasoned critique and total evil; and just from a strategic standpoint, it’s a card you can only play once—wait until you have to.
The rule has fallen into disuse, to put it mildly.1 If the vibe before the election was “this Trump guy is going to be a Nazi,” we’ve only intensified that view with daily think-pieces offering this sage rhetorical question: “Fascism: are we there yet?”
I get that it’s activism not analysis, but I’m not sure what we get by asking the question. What was the solution to European fascism that we can transplant into 2025? Protracted global war? What insights does the Third Reich offer for better understanding this moment in history?2 Probably some, but I suspect that Donald and Elon are finding new ways to cook up something awful that we may not find in Martin Niemöller. For whatever leverage we gain from comparison to history’s most reviled vegetarian, we risk wearing out the trope. I suggest we put it down before we normalize Fascism entirely.
II. Piling wreckage.
There’s another way to write about our very dire times, and I pass the mic to Walter Benjamin:
“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating . . . 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.”3
The Staatliche Museen zu Berlin offers a rare chance to see just that painting in Walter Benjamin’s native Berlin (Klee was born in Switzerland, working in Germany until he was hounded back to Switzerland for his Jewishness and the Degeneracy of his art, in 1933)—and while I haven’t made the trip, it’s important that it’s being exhibited. It’s small, and faint, and thin. Annie Bourneuf summarized its slightness in The Times:
“Many artists at this time were trying to make new altarpieces. Klee tended to take a very skeptical distance from the sort of grandiose projects of many of his expressionist peers, so I think it’s actually kind of mocking those hopes.”
But beyond this, it’s not the picture you might imagine just from reading the text. How did Benjamin imagine the winds of history filling its crude, claw-like wings? It’s harder still to imagine that somehow this is what the artist intended.4
And yet—this is what art-writing should be like. When you see the picture itself, you can’t deny that all that Benjamin says is true—it’s in there somewhere—just as surely as you can’t deny that you never would have found it yourself. And look what’s left after Benjamin’s excavation: the painting itself remains, still brimming with meaning. Benjamin neither explained the picture away nor depleted it, but added to it, and left it there for us to discover again. Indeed, he owned the painting himself, one of Benjamin’s few effects.
Fleeing across the Pyrenees, Benjamin took his own life rather than be taken by the Nazis. I find Benjamin’s story, and Klee’s Angel, more immediate, more relevant than trying to parse the idiotic hand gestures of a bloviating maniac, so I leave you with the remainder of Benjamin’s brief remarks:
“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 propel 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.”
Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
I drafted this post before I learned of Kanye’s latest single, already scrubbed from all but the most vile of online platforms. There’s another good rule of thumb in here: Don’t feed the trolls. I do my best.
Entres nous, this was a big problem with the last chapters of Chris Hayes’s broadly-excellent The Sirens Call: if Trump is like Hitler, then should we be specifically concerned about the technology that Trump deploys that Hitler very explicitly did not have at his disposal? The tech seems to fall out of the analogy, but Hayes is determined to stuff it back in, in hopes that we can blame TikTok instead of the dark possibility that the country has democratically embraced this ding-dong. Tagging this to Hayes not because he’s the source of this line of thinking, but because his book withstands its own failures.
Bourneuf adds an additional layer of incredulity, observing that the work is laid down on another artwork—a print by Cranach of depicting Martin Luther. There is a lot of meaning to be plumbed from this semi-obscured backing—Luther was revered as a national hero before Hitler’s rise, and the early Nazi ideologues closed ranks around him as a nationalist and virulent anti-semite—but as the Reich rose, Luther was cast aside, along with many other Christian elements that couldn’t be pounded into the pagan nationalism, and prints of Luther prints like that backing Klee’s Angelus, were banned from public display (Relying here on Richard Steigmann-Gall’s The Holy Reich: Religious Dimensions of Nazi Ideology, 1919-1945 (1999)). That’s all baked in there somewhere, but it’s not clear that Benjamin had any of this in mind. Beourneuf’s efforts untangling these obscure relationships—Behind the Angel of History: The Angelus Novus and its Interleaf (2022) offers: “We might be tempted to say that, in contrast to Benjamin’s ‘angel of history,’ the drawn Angelus novus literally turns its back on catastrophe” (p. 9).