“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. This storm irresistibly propels 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.”

In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), written in Paris shortly before his attempt to flee Nazi-occupied France, Walter Benjamin describes Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus hanging in his workspace. In his interpretation, the angel faces the past as catastrophe piles wreckage upon wreckage at his feet. The winds of progress have caught his wings and blows the angel backwards, into the future. This is Benjamins’ famous image of the Angel of History.