Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) deserves a prime place in the Western canon of ‘geniuses who died too young.’ Benjamin was a German-Jewish philosopher and cultural critic, and he was 22 years old when the First World War began, tearing his social world to shreds. He was 41 when Hitler assumed absolute power in Germany (1933) and he committed suicide at the age of 48 after he failed to escape the Nazi regime in 1940; a period in which the Camps and the terrible fate they implied for Jews in Poland, Germany, Hungary, and more were beginning to be recognized for what they were.
One of the last things that Benjamin wrote before taking his own life was his Theses on the Concept of History1, a series of aphorisms that expressed (through his Hegelian-materialist method) the tragic recognition of trauma underlying our experience of historical meaning as it is felt and articulated in the present.
As is perhaps intuitive, these aphorisms are as intellectually rich as they are spiritually hardbitten - the core of Benjamin’s critique (along with Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno2) was that the vaunted European Enlightenment, which placed the state above God, extolled the universality and onmnipotence of science, and predicted the inevitable emancipation of the world’s population through intellectual autonomy, cultural freedom, and marketplace liberalism - had culminated instead in the depredations and apartheid of the Third Reich and fascist Italy under Mussolini.
It was a mass-scale case of what Carl Jung called entantiodromia, the tendency of a highly polarized and purified principle to move perversely and inexorably towards culmination in its opposite. For Benjamin, he had witnessed this transformation firsthand - he had watched Germany go from a monarchical Empire, to the communist-inflected Weimar Republic, to finally the state-capitalist fascism of the Third Reich.
Benjamin’s greatest critique of history however, is expressed in his ninth aphorism, known colloquially as ‘the Angel of History’. What he realized, earlier than anyone, is that this process of enantiodromia applies not just to specific moments and movements within the larger flow of human history, but actually underpins the structure of the whole, the entirety. History, which is the human narrative 5000 years in the making of collective struggle against the limits of the human condition, takes as its object the emancipation and empowerment of the human being as such, but tragically succeeds only in driving the species further and further into the dark alley of enslavement, confusion, and separation from God.
Benjamin begins Thesis IX by quoting Gerhard Scholem, the German-Israeli religious scholar who was almost single-handedly responsible for reviving and expositing the mystical tradition of Kabbalah in the 20th century, rescuing from cultural genocide the mystical core of esoteric Judaism:
My wing is ready for flight,
I would like to turn back.
If I stayed everliving time,
I'd still have little luck.-Gerhard Scholem, “Greetings from the Angelus”
It is clear that Benjamin is here preparing a discussion of inevitability, nostalgia, and regret. He moves on to the IX Thesis itself:
There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at 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 and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.
I often compare the experience of learning history to watching a freeway pileup. The scene beings with standing by the side of a road, when in a moment of insight you notice that the sun is glinting off a puddle in the road. It’s an oil slick. You don’t know how it got there, or what its chemical makeup is like. You don’t know how long it has been there.
Then a car comes, hits the oil slick, skids, flips, rolls and tumbles for five car lengths. Everyone dead inside. Then another car hits the first, which is lying on its side like a beached whale and the second car crumples. Then it’s a pileup: five cars, ten, twenty. Eventually the road is sealed off.
A moment later, the bulldozers come. They push the wreckage off the road and create a pile of twisted metal and blood, but off to the side. The road is unsealed, traffic resumes. After a moment of tragic and senseless interruption, things are at last back to normal.
That’s precisely when you notice that the oil slick is still there.
Marx said that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce.
What do you call it when history repeats a third time?
Part Two below.
For Adorno see The Culture Industry, for Adorno and Horkheimer together see Dialectic of Enlightenment, for Horkheimer alone see the little known but extremely interesting work Eclipse of Reason.