The Politics of Angelus Novus’ Return to Berlin

2025 marks eighty years since the end of World War II, yet the historical memory of the war, and of the Holocaust, remains deeply contested in Germany. The Angel of History: Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee, and the Berlin Angels 80 Years After WWII, recently on view at Berlin’s Bode Museum, commemorated this anniversary. Walking into the small exhibition, visitors were immediately confronted with an iconic black-and-white photograph from postwar Germany. View from the City Hall Tower to the South (1945) by photojournalist Richard Peter captures a statue of a benevolent, angelic woman—the allegory of goodness—in the right foreground. Her concrete arms stretch toward the bombed-out ruins of Dresden below that expand beyond the edges of the frame. A key example of the Trümmerfotografie (ruin photography) genre, View from the City Hall Tower has become nearly synonymous with the Allied firebombing of Nazi Germany in 1945. It has been etched into national memory and is often mobilized to competing ideological ends: Despite the photographer’s communist and anti-fascist affiliations, for instance, twenty-first-century neo-Nazis have adopted the photograph as a symbol of their victimhood at the hands of the World War II Allies.1

That an exhibition on Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920) and German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin would open with Peter’s photograph might come as a surprise. The time seems out of joint. While Klee produced Angelus Novus in the wake of World War I, and Benjamin’s writings culminated in the context of exile and imminent annihilation under Nazism, the exhibition anchored its curatorial framing in the postwar period. Focusing on the wreckage of German cities and art, the exhibition subtly displaced the catastrophe of the early 1940s. The Bode Museum’s commemoration of the end of World War II appeared neither as a mourning for Holocaust victims, nor as a celebration of the liberation of Auschwitz or the defeat of fascism, but rather as a revisionist lament for the bombing of Germany by Allied forces. Moreover, by only looking toward the past, the exhibition neglected the heterogeneous temporality central to Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” a key object in the exhibition. In Benjamin’s philosophy of history, the past and present flash up in dialectical simultaneity, charged with revolutionary potential.

Moving past the entryway, viewers quickly spotted Angelus Novus hanging on a freestanding wall in the middle of the exhibition that divided its two sections. The first section surrounded Angelus Novus with traces of Benjamin, establishing the link between Klee’s watercolor and the critical theorist’s philosophy of history. Benjamin bought Klee’s watercolor for one thousand marks in Munich in 1921, and it became a throughline in Benjamin’s intellectual collaborations. Benjamin and the philosopher Gershom Scholem often discussed Angelus Novus together, as well as the broader significance of angels in the Talmud.2 With the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, they planned to coedit an interdisciplinary journal titled after the watercolor, though it never came to fruition.3 In Benjamin’s last writing, “On the Concept of History,” Angelus Novus inspired his allegory of the “Angel of History,” who looks forlornly upon the past as a collection of catastrophes. As the exhibition wall text explained, Benjamin hid Klee’s watercolor at the Bibliothèque Nationale before he fled Paris. After the war, the critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno held onto Angelus Novus until his death, when it was delivered to Scholem.

This first section of the exhibition painted a melancholic portrait of Benjamin, calling his life a “tragic destiny.” The wall text explained that he was unsuccessful in the academy, forced to flee Nazi Germany, and committed suicide when threatened with arrest by the Gestapo. On a wall adjacent to Angelus Novus hung German-Jewish photographer Gisèle Freund’s iconic portrait of the philosopher. Weary and pensive, he rests his right hand on his head and gazes at the camera. Across the room hung a small engraving of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514). With its head resting on its left hand, the winged personification of Melancholy mirrored Freund’s Benjamin. The accompanying wall text discussed Benjamin’s admiration for the engraving—he owned a reproduction of it. The Bode Museum also displayed Benjamin’s manuscript of “On the Concept of History” alongside a postcard from Scholem to Benjamin, both on loan from Berlin’s Academy of the Arts.

While the exhibition presented Benjamin’s personal experience of rising fascism, it did not foreground the utter violence of National Socialism. In 1941, the year after Benjamin took his life at the Franco-Spanish border, the Nazi regime initiated their “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” a systematic campaign that led to the extermination of six million European Jews. Many of Benjamin’s interlocutors, like Adorno, would subsequently grapple with the catastrophe that was the Holocaust. If modernity engendered the waning of experience, interiority, and narrative, the Holocaust was an irreparable rupture in history and thought. In 1944, while in exile in the United States, Adorno foresaw the pitfalls that would plague postwar German society. “The idea that after this war life will continue ‘normally’ or even that culture might be ‘rebuilt…’ is idiotic,” he wrote, “Millions of Jews have been murdered, and this is to be seen as an interlude and not the catastrophe itself. What more is this culture waiting for?”4

The second half of the exhibition seemed to enact what Adorno feared: a deflection from the catastrophe of the Holocaust toward a more generalized narrative of German suffering. Behind Angelus Novus hung a flatscreen presenting curated selections of Wim Wenders’s critically acclaimed film Wings of Desire (1987). The film follows two guardian angels around divided Berlin, as one trades his otherworldliness for human experience. The exhibition’s seven-minute selection of scenes included an experimental montage sequence featuring black-and-white archival footage of the bombing of Germany and Berlin in flames. Across the room hung another black-and-white rubble photograph by the German-Jewish photojournalist Fritz Eschen. Replete with leading lines, “Streetview with a Group of Children and the Ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church” (1945) pulls the viewer’s eyes toward the ruins of the landmark church in Charlottenburg, Berlin. The barren foreground evokes a profound sense of emptiness. Both works doubled as historical documents of postwar Germany, testifying to the desolation of Germany’s Stunde Null, or Zero Hour.

The other two works in the second section of the exhibition predate the postwar period, let alone the twentieth century. Giambattista Bregno’s marble sculpture Kneeling Angel (1510) and a full-size photographic reproduction of Caravaggio’s Saint Matthew and the Angel (1600) were brought together because of their angelic forms. More importantly, however, the sculpture and the original painting were seriously affected by the May 1945 firebombings in Berlin. As the exhibition wall text explained, Caravaggio’s Saint Matthew was one of almost 440 paintings from Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie that was lost to flames. Bregno’s Kneeling Angel was badly scorched and displaced to the Soviet Union before eventually returning to East Germany. These objects, like Wenders’s and Eschen’s, were framed not just as works of art, but as indexes of cultural ruin. By bringing them in conversation with Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” the exhibition recast the catastrophe in terms of German loss.

While most of the objects in The Angel of History came from Berlin collections, Klee’s Angelus Novus, the exhibition’s centerpiece, was on loan from Jerusalem’s Israel Museum. Like many of Klee’s works, Angelus Novus is marked by a childlike naivety. Ribbon-like curls adorn its inelegant, oversized head, as well as the tips of its wings and birdlike feet. Its body, composed of flat, linear forms, appears frail and insubstantial. The angel gazes to the left, its mouth agape with wonder. The watercolor has been part of the Israel Museum’s collection since around 1987. Fania Scholem, the wife of the Gershom Scholem, donated it to the museum after his death. The watercolor is considered one of the museum’s masterpieces, not least because of its provenance. Its rarefied status is compounded by its delicacy: the paper is light sensitive. The original is seldom loaned out, often replaced by a photographic facsimile.5 The Bode Museum exhibition thus emphasized the significance of its presence in the German capital; Angelus Novus was last in Berlin in 2008.

The Israel Museum’s obsessive safeguarding of the watercolor may make it seem like a timeless cultural artifact, revered for its historicity. But Benjamin’s interpretation of Angelus Novus offers a pointed contrast that can activate the watercolor in the present. Benjamin read the angel’s leftward gaze as a mournful allegory: “His face is turned toward the past… He sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” He wants to redeem the victims of history, the oppressed, but their number merely increases as he is swept away by a storm called progress. “The pile of debris before him grows skyward.”6 If we take Benjamin’s reading to heart while looking at the watercolor, we might notice that we ourselves become part of this wreckage. The winds carry Angelus Novus forward, and the debris he sees is us—here, and now.

Benjamin had a word for the here and now: Jetztzeit. Jetztzeit (now-time) is not merely the present, the Gegenwart. It is rather a time pregnant with revolutionary potential, an explosive to be detonated. Benjamin described it as a presentness that exists within the past: “To Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate.”7 Historical materialists know, Benjamin argues, that the past can only be accessed through a mediated present replete with its own antagonisms. Historicists conversely believe they can recover a pristine past—the way it really was—uninfluenced by current social conditions. The difference between these radical and reactionary understandings of history is at the core of “On the Concept of History.”

Despite the exhibition’s emphasis on Walter Benjamin, his life and writing, the question of the Jetztzeit is notably absent. The exhibition catalogue alludes to contemporary conflict but only half-heartedly. For instance, Bode Museum director Dr. Angela Scherner writes that Benjamin’s interpretation of Klee’s watercolor “fits Germany in 1945 and seems almost prophetic in view of the world situation 80 years later.”8 Exhibition curator Neville Rowley argues: “After the attacks of September 11, 2001, nobody would dare speak of the ‘End of History.’ The ‘Angel of History’ was back.”9 These gestures are ambiguous. They acknowledge the profound geopolitical shifts we’ve witnessed over the last several decades without taking a stance. This is what happens, perhaps, when Benjamin is aestheticized without being politicized.

It didn’t have to be this way. In 2015, the Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor took a different approach to Benjaminian history for the Venice Biennale. All the World’s Futures positioned the critical theorist’s interpretation of Klee’s watercolor as a conceptual anchor to unite artistic practices on current crises worldwide, their internal antagonisms, and their historical precedents. French-Cameroonian artist Barthélémy Toguo’s installation Urban Requiem (2015), for instance, memorialized Black victims of police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement. Referencing a derelict, imperial site in Delhi, Raqs Media Collective erected nine, distorted fiberglass statues of British monarchs and viceroys on wooden pedestals. Their installation Coronation Park (2015) reaches back to Indian colonial history to gesture toward the fragility of power today. At Enwezor’s biennale, Angelus Novus inspired a cacophony of artistic mediations on catastrophes, past and present.

The Venice Biennale and the Bode Museum are so dissimilar in purpose, infrastructure, and audience that comparison may seem inappropriate. While one aggressively showcases artistic innovation in today’s globalized world, the other boasts one of Europe’s largest sculpture collections and houses a wide variety of Byzantine art and coins. What might it mean, though, for the Bode Museum to adopt a concept of contemporaneity, not as a project of periodization, but, as art historian Claire Bishop calls it, a “non-presentist, multi-temporal” method?10 Benjaminian at its core, Bishop’s method of contemporaneity is applicable to all historical periods. It prompts institutions like the Bode Museum to reach into the past, and more specifically into their own pasts, to meet the moment. Urgent, present-day social and political struggles shape the excavation. In a world increasingly defined by catastrophe, such a method is imperative.

The question of catastrophe resonates in multiple registers in present-day Germany, all of which are deeply connected to World War II and its aftermath. On the one hand, the country has witnessed the ascendancy and consolidation of far-right nationalism in the upper echelons of electoral politics over the past decade. The anti-immigrant and xenophobic party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was founded in 2013 and has steadily grown since. During Germany’s snap election in early 2025, the AfD garnered twenty percent of parliamentary seats, making it the second largest political force after the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). It supports undercutting decarbonization efforts, defunding gender studies, closing Islamic schools, ending affirmative action, increased funding for border control, deregulating the labor market, and more.11 Some AfD party officials have openly supported “re-migration,” or the mass deportation of immigrants, and others have called for an end to Holocaust remembrance and education.12 Considering the party’s explicit historical revisionism—both of Nazi genocide and post-reunification neo-Nazi violence—the Bode Museum has a responsibility to critically interrogate connections between the German past and present.13

On the other hand, Israel’s twenty-one-month genocidal siege on Gaza has had massive reverberations in German politics and culture. From censoring artists, writers, and activists to cancelling exhibitions and prizes, from banning pro-Palestine demonstrations to unleashing violent police crackdowns, the German government has systematically suppressed the Palestine solidarity movement. This repression follows from the view that Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson, or reason of state, rooted in the country’s historical responsibility for the Holocaust. With the loan of Angelus Novus coming from Israel, the Bode Museum had an opportunity to reflect critically on Germany’s relationship with Israel and Palestine. Instead, in the exhibition catalogue, Dr. Jörg Völlnagel called the watercolor’s return to Berlin a “symbol of hope” marking sixty years of diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany.14  A recent, material manifestation of these relations has been the hundreds of millions of euros worth of arms that Germany has exported to Israel since October 2023.15 With German military support, over 55,000 Palestinians have been killed. The entire Gaza strip faces famine, malnutrition and disease, as Israel restricts food and aid flow to Gaza and attacks aid sites in a mass starvation campaign. Forced evictions and landgrabs continue unabated. The wreckage that Benjamin’s Angel of History sees today piling at his feet is the fifty-million-plus tons of rubble in Gaza, the vestiges of bodies, homes, and cultural heritage decimated by Israeli bombardment. Maintaining the status quo in Germany’s broader cultural landscape, the Bode Museum betrayed Benjamin, the very subject of its exhibition, who ruthlessly critiqued oppressive power. “All rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them…” Benjamin wrote, “…Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate.”16

1 Steven Hoelscher, “‘Dresden, a Camera Accuses’: Rubble Photography and the Politics of Memory in a Divided Germany,” History of Photography 36, no. 3 (2012): 288-305.

2 Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (Schocken Books, 1981).

3 Allen Dunn, “The Pleasures of the Text: Angelus Novus,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 84, no. ½/1(Spring/Summer 2001): 1-7.

4 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (Verso, 2005), 55.

5 Annie Bourneuf, Behind the Angel of History: The “Angelus Novus” and Its Interleaf (University of Chicago Press, 2022), 23.

6 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” accessed July 10, 2025, https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html.

7 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History.”

8 Antje Scherner, “Vorwort,” in Der Engel Der Geschichte: Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee und die Berliner Engel 80 Jahre nach Kriegsende (HART-Books, 2025), 7.

9 Neville Rowley, “Der Engel der Geschichte,” in Der Engel Der Geschichte: Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee und die Berliner Engel 80 Jahre nach Kriegsende (ART-Books, 2025), 19-20.

10 Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What's Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? (Koenig Books, 2014), 23.

11 In 2017, the AfD published a political program entitled Manifesto for Germany. Accessed July 10, 2025:  https://www.afd.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/2017-04-12_afd-grundsatzprogramm-englisch_web.pdf

12 Current co-chair AfD politician Alice Weidel publicly supported “re-migration” at an AfD conference in January, 2025. Chairman of the AfD in Thuringia Björn Höcke has notoriously used Nazi slogans, and has criticized the Berlin Holocaust memorial. The co-founder of the AfD Alexander Gauland has trivialized the Nazi period, calling it “just bird poo” in the greater and more triumphant arc of German history.   

13 The AfD chapter of Solingen has published a report titled 1993. Der Brandanschlag in Solingen. This report presents a revisionist perspective on the 1993 arson attack in Solingen, Germany, which resulted in the deaths of five members of a Turkish family. The document challenges the widely accepted view that the attack was a racially motivated hate crime carried out by neo-Nazi perpetrators. Accessed July 10, 2025: https://www.afd-solingen.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/1993-Der-Brandanschlag-in-Solingen.pdf.

14 Jörg Völlnagel, “Wenn Engel Reisen…,” in Der Engel Der Geschichte: Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee und die Berliner Engel 80 Jahre nach Kriegsende (ART-Books, 2025), 53.

15 Adil Ahmad Haque, “The Fall and Rise of German Arms Exports to Israel: Questions for the International Court of Justice,” Just Security, June 13, 2025, https://www.justsecurity.org/114479/german-arms-exports-israel-icj/.

16 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History.”

Lina Alam is a PhD Candidate in Art History at the University of Michigan. She is writing a dissertation on how documentarians and media practitioners reimagined critical moving image practices as they transitioned from film and broadcast media into the global contemporary art world. She has held positions at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the New Orleans Film Society, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Angelus Novus: Gift of Fania and Gershom Scholem, Jerusalem; John Herring, Marlene and Paul Herring, Jo Carole and Ronald Lauder, New York. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Elie Posner

Richard Peter: © Deutsche Fotothek / Peter, Richard sen. Datensatz 88950028. License: All rights reserverd - Free access.

Gisele Freund: Photo by the author.

Fritz Eschen: © Deutsche Fotothek / Eschen, Fritz. Datensatz 87509617. License: All rights reserverd - Free access. 

Bregno: © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst / Jörg P. Anders

Caravaggio: Reproduktion, Kriegsverlust (vermutlich im Mai 1945 im Bunker Friedrichshain

verbrannt), © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie / Jörg P. Anders

Atelier Charlotte Joël & Marie Heinzelmann: © bpk / Atelier Charlotte Joel - Marie Heinzelmann