1 Lost Paradise - Armin Kerber

Lost Paradise – “Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima”
cording to which innumerable new angels are continuously created, but
cease to exist and slip into nothingness once they have sung their hymn to
God. As Eberlein has written, the Scholem-inspired Jewish theological
interpretation of Angelus novus was the well-spring of all of Benjamin’s
subsequent concerns with Klee’s work. There is no doubt that Klee did
not refer to this tradition; and so it was Scholem who turned Angelus
novus into his own Jewish angel, thereby inciting and firing up Benjamin’s
imagination in the mirror of Klee’s small masterpiece.
Death from above — Angels play a particular role in Klee’s oeuvre even
though this is most likely related not to Scholem’s and Benjamin’s projections,
but much more crucially to the fact that they are mysterious flying
creatures. In a key passage of his Diaries from the period of the First World
War, Klee writes about himself: “I dealt with this war within myself a long
time ago. Therefore I am not inwardly concerned with it. The struggle to
emerge from my own ruins required me to fly. And I did fly. In that ruined
world I only dwell in memory, as one occasionally casts one’s mind back.
And so I am abstract with memory.” War, a ruined world, flying, memory:
this is not too dissimilar from Benjamin’s description of Angelus novus.
As regards Klee’s flying self-representation, Oskar Bätschmann reminds
us of a fact already pointed out by Klee expert Otto K. Werckmeister,
which is that during the 1910s and 1920s, Klee considered flying as an
ambivalent metaphor for the triumph and failure of artistic imagination,
going on to say that an early document of this ambivalence is Klee’s tragicomical
allegory, Der Held mit dem Flügel (The Hero With the Wing),
who tirelessly attempts to fly even though nature only equipped him with
one angel’s wing.
Flying and crashing are strong metaphorical motifs, and closely related
even in Klee’s real life: during World War One, Klee served at Schleissheim
military airfield before being transferred to the aviation school
at Gersthofen, where he had to photograph the crashes of inexperienced
trainee pilots: “This week we had three casualties; one of them mauled by
a propeller; two others had ripped themselves to shreds. A fourth one
plummeted onto the wharf’s roof with a crash and a rip and abrasions.
Flew too low; snagged by a telegraph pole; skipped once on the rooftop;
somersaulted; and came to rest upside down – a puny heap of wreckage.
People running from all sides; the roof immediately black with engineer’s
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