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The Storyteller: Tales Out of Lonelinessgathers for the rst time the ction of the legendary critic and
philosopher Walter Benjamin. Each text in the book is accompanied by a Paul Klee illustration. Below,
Stuart Jeffries examines the meaning that Klee's Angelus Novus held for Benjamin.
To celebrate the book's publication, The Storyteller is for sale at 40% off until Monday, August 8.Click here
to activate the 40% discount.

In 1921, Walter Benjamin bought Paul Klees Angelus Novus, an oil transfer drawing with watercolour, for

1,000 marks in Munich. His friend Charlotte Wolf then recalled how this gauche and inhibited man had
behaved as if something marvellous had been given to him."
What was so marvellous to Benjamin about this goofy, eternally hovering angel with hair that looks like
paper scrolls, aerodynamically hopeless wings and googly if rather melancholy eyes? This, he wrote in
one of his greatest essays, is how one pictures the angel of history.
The German-Jewish philosopher and critic hung Angelus Novus in every apartment he lived in, not quite as
a guardian angel but a suggestive presence that would keep making appearances in his writings until
Benjamins death in 1940. Today, after a torrid history, its home is Jerusalem, though until August 1 it can
be seen in Paris as part of the Pompidou Centres Klee retrospective.
In the same year Benjamin bought Angelus Novus, he set up a literary journal of the same name, in part,
as he put it
because of the attempt to draw a connection between the artistic avant-garde of the period and the
Talmudic legend about angels who are being constantly created and nd an abode in the fragments of
the present.
Klee was not Jewish and so his Angelus Novus was unlikely to be the visual representation of Talmudic
legend. No matter: in the eye of Benjamin the beholder, the young Swiss artists painting took on a new,
and profoundly inuential, resonance.
Ten years later, Benjamin cited the painting his essay on the Austrian writer and satirist Karl Kraus.
Angelus Novus, he wrote, makes it possible to understand a humanity that proves itself by destruction."
And then in 1933, the year in which the Nazis came to power and Benjamin ed Germany for the last time,
he left the painting behind. He wrote in an autobiographical essay called "Agesilaus Santander" that year
while in exile on Ibiza. The angel resembles all from which I had to part: persons and above all things.
But it was in his last great posthumously published essay, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," that
Benjamin reected most profoundly on the pictures signicance for him and his understanding of human
history. He described in thesis IX what he saw in Klees painting:

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 his turned, while the pile of debris
before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.

For a Marxist (and Benjamin was a Marxist, albeit of an oddball temper), this was heretical stuff. Indeed,
these words were part of a reconguration of Marxism that had arisen in the aftermath of the failure of the
1919 German Revolution to emulate the Russian one of two years earlier. It was a reconguration that had
gathered intellectual support by the publication in Moscow in the late 1920s of Marxs early Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts. It was there that Marx developed what he disdained later, a theory of alienation
whereby the working classes instead of changing the conditions under which it lived, became passive in
the face ofapparently autonomous exchanges of commodities.
In the era of consumerised monopoly capitalism in which Benjamin and the thinkers of the Frankfurt School
he inuenced lived, and in the wake of the failure of revolution in Germany and, later, enthusiasm among
German workers for the Third Reich, this was a resonant thought: the revolution was not coming, or at least
not according to the unfolding dialectical laws of historical materialism Marx set out in his mature work. If,
contrary to those whom Benjamin called vulgar Marxists," class struggle would not necessarily lead to a
happy future in which capitalism was destroyed and the proletariat able to lead fullled lies devoid of
economic exploitation, then, perhaps, all that remained was to survey the rubble of the past and to expose
the lie of progress as coterminous with human liberation.
This, to more straitlaced Marxists, reads like unacceptable political quietism, a disgraceful elitism in
response to the needs of the sufferings of the poor and needy under capitalism. And yet, understood
sympathetically, Benjamins approach to that suffering and Adornos gloss on his one-time masters
thinking, are important, perhaps even humane. Both effectively insist, counterintuitively, that the past can
be transformed, that injustice can be corrected by looking back on past sufferings.
It has been a stimulating thought to many. The critic British critic Terry Eagleton, a sophisticated and
politically engaged interpreter of Benjamin , for instance, wrote: In one of his shrewdest sayings, Benjamin
remarked that what drives men and women to revolt against injustice is not dreams of liberated
grandchildren, but memories of enslaved ancestors. It is by turning our gaze to the horrors of the past, in
the hope that we will not thereby be turned to stone, that we are impelled to move forward.Thus, the
enigmatic gure of the Angelus Novus, so captivating to Benjamin, has become an iconic emblem for the
left.Lets look more closely at Klees drawing. Can you see in it what Walter Benjamin did, a whole mystical
vision of human woe and eternal suffering? Some have struggled with that. The artist Ken Aptekar, for
instance, in 2000, made a painting rifng on Klees Angelus Novus and overlaid it with Benjamins text
quoted earlier from "Theses on the Philosophy History."The Detroit-born painter, who now lives and works
in New York and Paris, is himself Jewish, and hardly ignorant of the Talmudic legends about angels.
Indeed, he made his version of Angelus Novus for an exhibition called Angels in which he painted new
versions of historical works, bolting glass with sandblasted words to his painted panels. Like Benjamin,
Aptekars gaze is retrospective, time-travelling old paintings into the present, redeeming them from the past
or at least re-interpreting old art for new audiences.
Problem: Aptekar couldnt see Klees angel as bearing all the weight of suffering humanitys history, still
less as emblematic of shattered hopes in progress. A Klee painting named Angelus Novus, Benjamin

wrote in the ninth thesis, shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he
is xedly contemplating. You could look at Klees work for aeons without seeing the movement Benjamin
suggests is about to take place or at least, you could were you not to look at the image with eyes not
sympathetic to Benjamins interpretation.
Does the angel look as though poised to move from something hes contemplating? Or does Benjamin
projects on to this image a whole mystically infused, Talmudically inspired, heretically Marxist philosophy?
The latter seems more likely. Without that Benjamin projection, Angelus Novus is or at least Ken Aptekar
and I see him as being a rather jaunty gure, marked if anything by Klees abiding sense of irony (not for
nothing is the Pompidous Klee show called lIronie loeuvre;Irony at Work). To pin the angel down
eternally as representing anything in particular an inversion of the Hegelian onward dialectical march of
history seems reductive, though in Benjamins case fascinatingly so.
No matter. In order to make his retooled Angelus Novus seem effectually sinister and bear the weight of
signicance Benjamin imputed to it, Aptekar doubled the angel laying a negative image of the angel over
his reworking of Klees original. Over the resultant,compositeimage is a sheet of glass with sandblasted
text from Benjamins "Theses on the Philosophy of History."Aptekar told me that he had never seen in in
Klees drawing what Benjamin saw. But, he said, this is my attempt at visualising it.
We dont know, unfortunately, what Klee thought of Benjamins interpretation of his work. Perhaps, like Ken
Aptekar, he would have felt mystied by it. Perhaps Klee might have felt like Karl Kraus who, after reading
Benjamins great essay on his work, commented, in a mood of rather charmed mystication: [T]he author
appears to know a good many of things about me that I was previously ignorant of, things that even now I
dont clearly recognise; and I can only express the hope that others will understand it better than I.For all
that one was Jewish and the other not, nonetheless, Benjamin and Klee were sympathetic souls, whose
lives followed similar trajectories. In the early 1920s, they were both young men attempting to establish
themselves in the aftermath of Germanys catastrophic defeat in World War One in which humanity, indeed,
did seem to prove itself by destruction. I want to see a war fought, so badly, says one eager grunt in the
British sitcom Blackadder. Well, you've come to the right place, Bob, says Captain Blackadder. A war
hasn't been fought this badly since Olaf the Hairy, high chief of all the Vikings, accidentally ordered 80,000
battle helmets with the horns on the inside.
Fortunately, neither Klee nor Benjamin saw much action in that war. Despite being conscripted, Klee spent
much of his service away from the front, which allowed him to paint and draw throughout the conict. As for
Benjamin, in October 1915, the 23-year-old student and the great Jewish mystic thinker Gershom Scholem
cemented their friendship bystaying up all night drinking vast quantities of black coffee until 6am.
The coffee was part of a practice then followed by many young men prior to their military physicals,
Scholem wrote in his memoir, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. The trick was to simulate a weak
heart and it worked later that day Benjamin presented himself for a medical examination and his call-up
was deferred. After dodging the draft, he wrote to Scholem: At my last army physical, I was given a years
deferment and, in spite of having little hope that the war will be over in a year. I am planning to be able to
work in peace, at least for a few months, in Munich. Later he was to spend the remainder of the war in

Switzerland, studying for his doctorate at the University of Bern.


After the war, the former had a dream of becoming Germanys leading critic, the latter in 1921, would join
the faculty of the Bauhaus in Weimar and then Dessau. But the rise of Hitler radically undercut both mens
aspirations. Klee was dismissed from his teaching job in 1933, the year of Hitlers election as German
chancellor, and moved to Bern. Benjamin settled in Paris after some years of vagabond wandering
throughout Europe in the early 1930s in which he stayed away from Berlin to avoid the opening
ceremonies of the Third Reich.
After Hitlers accession to power, Benjamin, like Klee became person non grata in his homeland the
newspapers and radio stations on which he had relied for work, stopped returning his calls. The Nuremberg
Laws of 1935 redened what it was to be Jewish, as a result the man who once dreamed of becoming
Germanys leading critic became a stateless man. As the 1930s wore on, his work would only rarely be
printed in German, and then mostly under a pseudonym. His 1936 book Deutsche Menschen, for example,
was published under the pseudonym Detlev Holz and even then only because its theme (it consisted of 27
letters between Germans including Hlderlin, Kant, the Grimm brothers, Schlegel and Schleiermacher in
the hundred years after 1783, with commentaries by Benjamin) could be twisted to serve the patriotic
agenda of the Nazis. In 1938, though, even it was put on the censors list of bannedGerman books.
Both men died in 1940. Benjamin was eeing from Paris across the Pyrenees, hoping to reach Lisbon
where he could sail to New York and there be installed in an apartment set up for him by his already exiled
friends from the Frankfurt School. Instead, one night in a hotel in the Catalan seaside town of Port Bou,
fearing capture and falling into the clutches of the Nazis, he took a fatal dose of morphine pills.
Today,written in both Catalan and German on his tombstone in Port Bou is a quotation from section seven
of "Theses on the Philosophy of History": There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same
time a document of barbarism.
As for Klee, he died in his native Switzerland from the wasting disease scleroderma. On his tombstone is
the inscription "I cannot be grasped in the here and now, For my dwelling place is as much among the
dead, As the yet unborn, Slightly closer to the heart of creation than usual, But still not close enough.What
has become of Angelus Novus? It roamed vagabond for years, like Benjamin in the 1930s. Unlike him,
though, it found a safe new home. Shortly before leaving Paris for his doomed ight, Benjamin entrusted
his papers and Klees painting to author and Bibliothque Nationale librarian Georges Bataille. After the
war, Benjamins possessions were passed to Adorno in New York. Later, the painting came into the hands
of Benjamins friend, Gershom Scholem, in Jerusalem. Finally, Scholems widow gave Angelus Novus to
the Israel Museum in 1987.What did Klees work mean to Benjamin? In his book Benjamin and Brecht: The
Story of a Friendship, Erdmut Wizisla writes that he saw Klee like playwright Bertolt Brecht or architect
Adolf Loos as a modernist artist, a renewer of aesthetic means, perhaps even an ally in the communistic
project of politicising art that Benjamin described at the end of his great 1936 essay, "The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Like Brecht, Klee developed a new, positive concept of barbarism, but
means of which, no doubt, the true nature of civilisation, its intolerable ip side, was exposed. Its tting,

then, that in Versos recent publication of the rst major collection of Walter Benjamins ction, called The
Storyteller: Tales Out of Loneliness, each tale is delightfully prefaced with a picture by Klee. Remarkable
for their simplicity, humour and fantastical nature, Klees illustrations here bring to life Benjamins stories,
write the books editors. I particularly like the spooky, perhaps sheet-wearing gures who preface two of
Benjamins dream narratives in the book.
But its another Klee painting, not included in the book, that makes me think of Walter Benjamin. In
Arrogance (1939), a tightrope walker struggles to keep balance. Benjamin is always such a teetering gure.
A year before Klee made this lovely painting, Benjamin described himself in a letter as something like a
man who has made his home in a crocodiles jaws, which he keeps prised open with iron braces like so
many other Jews andcommunists of the time who throughout the 1930s wandered an increasingly
inhospitable Europe. Arrogance, of course, isnt really the right title at least for my interoperation of
Klees picture.
But back to the Angel. If you take a clifftop walk not far from Port Bous municipal cemetery Walter
Benjamin is buried, you may well nd yourself descending some steps towards the Mediterranean Sea.
Then youll nd your path blocked by a sheet of glass. This is a memorial to Benjaminby Israeli artist Dani
Karavanhe. It is called Passages thus commemorating both Benjamins attempted escape from the
Nazis and the great book Passagenwerk (The Arcades Project) he left unnished at his death. On the glass
are some more words from his "Theses on the Philosophy of History": "It is more arduous to honour the
memory of anonymous beings than that of the renowned. The construction of history is consecrated to the
memory of the nameless. The arduousness of that project of honouring the nameless is, of striving to
redeem past sufferings no doubt, what Walter Benjamin saw in Paul Klees angel as it hovered mid-air,
buffeted by the unbearable, inescapable storm of what we call progress.
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