1 Lost Paradise - Armin Kerber

Lost Paradise – “Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima”
in Switzerland. After complicated proceedings – in 1945 it was difficult
to contact Adorno from Europe as he lived in the U.S. – Benjamin’s socalled
“Parisian estate” or “First Parisian estate” was at last handed over
to Adorno in early 1947, together with Angelus novus, by the wife of a
member of the Paris U.S. embassy who had taken it to the U.S. with her.
It was through Adorno that Angelus novus finally came to Scholem. In
1982, after Scholem’s death, the watercolour drawing was exhibited for
the first time at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. In 1987 it came into the
museum’s possession as a gift by Fania and Gershom Scholem, John and
Paul Herring as well as Jo-Carole and Ronald Lauder.
The “Angel of History” — As Johann Konrad Eberlein and, more recently,
Oskar Bätschmann have pointed out, it is Walter Benjamin’s lifelong
historical, philosophical, aesthetic and political reflections on Klee’s watercolour
that have turned Angelus novus into an icon representing the
20th century’s sheer violence and unfettered brutality inflicted on the
powerless: according to some passages in Benjamin’s letters to his friend
Scholem, the philosoper appreciated Klee and his art from a very early
stage. To Benjamin, Klee was the modern artist incarnate, one who based
his art on technique and science, and whose “surrealist cross-fades” characterised
the sensual world while capturing the real, present-day world.
Benjamin read books about Klee and his letters frequently mention the
artist. So, although it was to be expected that he would dedicate much
thought to Angelus novus, it is nonetheless surprising to see how much
room he gave to interpretations of this work in his thinking, and how far
he was to go.
The angel’s wide-open button eyes see the one disaster, but they do
not reflect it. In its turn, the exhibition Lost paradise, using artefacts by
artists from the 20th and 21st centuries, attempts to reconstruct a rough
panorama of what the “Angel of History” can see, i.e. the firestorm and
naked survival of human beings erring about a world fraught with destruction.
Even before Benjamin’s interpretation of the angel, Scholem’s birthday
poem for Benjamin dated July 15, 1921, perceived the angel’s eyes as
black, describing him as a dark messenger – albeit not an explicitly sinister
one. However, Scholem’s influence on Benjamin’s reception of Angelus
does not end here. The Jewish scholar acquainted Benjamin with his theological
tradition and the Kabbalistic – or rather Talmudic – legend ac-
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