1 Lost Paradise - Armin Kerber

Lost Paradise – The Angel’s Gaze
seem to tell us that what remains after the catastrophe is the catastrophe.
But alongside this ultimate “end-of-the-world” gesture – and that is what
makes the painting so special – Guernica is also a great
beacon to resistance. Unlike many horror paintings,
Guernica not only releases a wrathful or mournful
impulse of despair, it demands that we side with the victims of murder and
slaughter without planting our hasty ideological signposts. The precise
and merciless depiction of disaster is an appeal to end it.
In many ways Paul Klee‘s Angelus novus may be interpreted as
Guernica‘s polar opposite. The two paint- ings are icons of the
20th century and intimately connected with its disastrous history.
While Picasso painted Guernica from an eye-witness point of view, the
horrors fresh in his mind and unwilling to forget them, it is not the painter‘s
eye, but the painting‘s reception history that has placed Angelus novus
where it now stands. In his famous Theses on the Philosophy of History
written in 1939, Walter Benjamin states:
“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though
he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His
eyes are staring, his mouth is open and his wings are spread. This is the
face of the angel of history. He has turned it toward the past. Where we
perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which heaps
wreckage upon wreckage, hurling it in front of his feet.” 3
As an impovierished refugee in Paris, Benjamin carried the jealously-guarded
Angelus novus in his suitcase. His words transformed Klee‘s angel into
a permanent, immediate eye-witness of the all-encompassing catastrophe.
The allegory rings like a prophetic statement concerning world history on
the eve of World War II and this is what the “chain of events” looked like:
National Socialism had reached the cusp of its power and in merciless and
ultimate consistency was about to realise the Holocaust. The Bolshevists
were staging show trials; the first Gulags had been established; the Hitler-
Stalin Pact was a sham peace accord with Fascism. Faced with this absolutely
disastrous scenario, Angelus novus stands not the slightest chance
of resembling a paradisal saviour and protector of humanity. On the contrary,
the angel has himself been driven out of Paradise, and is at the
cruel mercy of the wreckage of human history.
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