I long remembered lyrics with evocative imagery in Laurie Anderson’s 1989 song “The Dream Before,” in which Hansel and Gretel are living in Berlin, when their conversation takes a turn:
She said, What is history?
And he said, History is an angel
Being blown
Backwards
Into the future
He said: History is a pile of debris
And the angel wants to go back and fix things
To repair the things that have been broken
But there is a storm blowing from Paradise
And the storm keeps blowing the angel
Backwards
Into the future
And this storm, this storm
Is called
Progress
I’d no idea what this meant, or of any prior source to the imagery, and so was surprised to read, in a review copy of Paul Mason’s intriguing upcoming book Reds: A Global History of Communism: “On the eve of the German invasion of France in 1940, the philosopher Walter Benjamin conjured the metaphor of history as an angel, being blasted backward into the future, its eyes forced to witness events as ‘a single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet.’”
Benjamin’s essay On the Concept of History (also known as Nine Theses on the Philosophy of History) described a Paul Klee painting, which Benjamin had purchased in 1921:
There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.
Benjamin, left-wing and Jewish, killed himself via morphine overdose that September upon learning he was to be deported to Nazi-occupied France.
Mason is a left-wing British journalist who worries younger generations today don’t grasp how oppressive and dysfunctional Communism was during the 20th century. He wants a post-capitalist society but not one that repeats the crimes and blunders of past Communists. Nor does he want the Chinese Communist Party, celebrating its revolution’s centennial in 2049 while presiding over a largely capitalist economy, to get away with rewriting Communist history as a success story, deleting the Tiananmen Square massacre and other atrocities.
After stating that “the point about Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’ is that it does not judge: it simply records the catastrophe and understands it necessity,” Mason writes: “I no longer think that we have that luxury—because the rules-based order that was created in 1945 is falling apart. As it does so, the crimes of Stalinism have become live ammunition for the radical right, as it portrays all socialism—and indeed all social liberalism—as totalitarian. In response, leftists aligned with the People’s Republic of China and Putin’s Russia have begun to whitewash the Stalinist record in ways even dedicated communists did not during the Cold War.”
In an echo of Benjamin’s interest in Klee, and reflecting a similar pessimism, the back of the Novus Angelus painting is included in a collection of 100 black-and-white photos that have been etched onto a gold microchip and sent into space. This collection, called “The Last Pictures” and compiled by artist and geographer Trevor Paglen, is aboard a communications satellite, EchoStar XIV, that will reach the end of its 15-year operational lifespan in late-2027. The satellite will be placed in a higher “graveyard orbit,” where it could remain undisturbed for eons. The idea is that aliens or robots might retrieve the pictures someday, long after humanity is gone, perhaps self-destroyed by evil ideologies.
