Angel of History Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee and the Berlin Angels 80 Years After WWII

Giambattista Bregno, Kneeling Angel, ca. 1510 © Berlin, Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst / Jörg P. Anders

Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920), which was once owned by the Berlin-born philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), is one of the seminal artworks of the 20th century. The artwork, at the heart of this Berlin exhibition, accompanied him into exile when he fled Nazi Germany and was described by Benjamin in one of his final texts as an “angel of history”.

Borne aloft by a storm described as progress, the angel flies into the future, only to turn its back on it: its gaze is fixed on the past. In addition to this watercolour by Klee – which, as an exception, was able to be borrowed from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem – and the manuscripts of the aforementioned text by Benjamin, which are on loan from the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, the exhibition brings together angels from the Berlin Museums that were damaged or burned during the Second World War.

In addition to this, the exhibition features excerpts from Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987), a film in which two angels stand watch over a divided Berlin and in which explicit reference is made to Klee’s watercolour and Benjamin’s interpretation of the artwork.