Angel of History
[Please take the time to read this reflection. In memory of Walter Benjamin.]
As we end this series looking at life in death at the Melbourne General Cemetery, I have focused on three impressive statues. In my previous photograph "Precious Angel" I mentioned one Jewish genius. In this one I wish to discuss another, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940).
Early in the series I showed you some memories of Shoah (the Holocaust), in which 6 million Jews were put to death in a singularly evil genocide. In history, what meaning is left to life after this event?
The great Italian writer and Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi (1919-1987) was so haunted by it all he took his own life in Turin. Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) also a Jewish scholar, is regarded by many as a prophet of post-modernism, and strongly anti-foundationalist (i.e. there is no ultimate ground of meaning), and yet late in his career he took a distinctly mystical turn as he tried to recapture a sense of purpose in the face of loss. For those scholars among you, try reading John Caputo's "The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion" (Indiana University Press, 1997).
But back to Walter Benjamin. "(He) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin
Benjamin's collection of essays, "Illuminations" had an immediate impression on me when I discovered them in 1990. I was moved immediately by his phenomenological piece called, "Unpacking my Library". But there was more, much more. You see Benjamin was a marked man as soon as the Nazis rolled into Paris. His scholarship was well known in Germany, and was the very antithesis of Nazi doctrine itself. In January 1940 he wrote his seminal "Theses on the Philosophy of History". On June 13 he and his sister escaped to Lourdes as the Nazi tanks rolled into the city. Sure enough, they raided his Parisian flat, but he was gone.
In August he was able to obtain a US visa as a refugee and had plans of travelling to neutral Portugal, and at Lisbon to embark for the safety of America (yes, the movie "Casablanca" was based on facts). The Gestapo were everywhere. When Benjamin arrived in the Catalonian town of Portbou (then controlled by Francoist Spain), he was stopped by the border police. Orders were made to return all refugees to France, and Benjamin knew this would mean into the hands of the Gestapo. Benjamin killed himself with an overdose of morphine tablets on the night of September 26, 1940. His brother Georg was killed at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1942. The details are numbing. How could rational humanity be reduced to such barbarism?
So what did Walter Benjamin make of this development as the world marched headlong into an abyss? Well, let's just focus on his "Ninth Thesis of History" as Benjamin struggles with the notion of Progress and the ensuing chaos:
"A (Paul) 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, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. 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. The 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."
You can see immediately where my inspiration came from for this photograph. The Angelus Novus is the angel of history who surveys the wreckage we leave behind, as Paradise after Paradise is lost. Even the missing left hand of this statue seems to have a very distinct meaning: The angel of history is himself injured by the catastrophe we leave behind us. If faith means anything at all after Auschwitz, then it must be because God also partakes of the universal suffering. All our neat conceptual images of God must go, and we are left with nothing but sheer Faith on which to rest our hopes. But the German mystic and priest Meister Eckhart was saying this in the early 14th century.
Another Jewish philosopher who fled the Nazis, Ernst Bloch (1885-1977), believed this and it formed the basis of his great work, "The Principle of Hope". In turn the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann (b.1926), made it the basis of his entire theological work. For Moltmann the meaning of history lies in a "Crucified God". But far from being an end, this is the true beginning of an eternal hope that lies beyond the vicissitudes of a failed universe. The death of Death is the beginning of New Life.
Angel of History
[Please take the time to read this reflection. In memory of Walter Benjamin.]
As we end this series looking at life in death at the Melbourne General Cemetery, I have focused on three impressive statues. In my previous photograph "Precious Angel" I mentioned one Jewish genius. In this one I wish to discuss another, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940).
Early in the series I showed you some memories of Shoah (the Holocaust), in which 6 million Jews were put to death in a singularly evil genocide. In history, what meaning is left to life after this event?
The great Italian writer and Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi (1919-1987) was so haunted by it all he took his own life in Turin. Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) also a Jewish scholar, is regarded by many as a prophet of post-modernism, and strongly anti-foundationalist (i.e. there is no ultimate ground of meaning), and yet late in his career he took a distinctly mystical turn as he tried to recapture a sense of purpose in the face of loss. For those scholars among you, try reading John Caputo's "The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion" (Indiana University Press, 1997).
But back to Walter Benjamin. "(He) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin
Benjamin's collection of essays, "Illuminations" had an immediate impression on me when I discovered them in 1990. I was moved immediately by his phenomenological piece called, "Unpacking my Library". But there was more, much more. You see Benjamin was a marked man as soon as the Nazis rolled into Paris. His scholarship was well known in Germany, and was the very antithesis of Nazi doctrine itself. In January 1940 he wrote his seminal "Theses on the Philosophy of History". On June 13 he and his sister escaped to Lourdes as the Nazi tanks rolled into the city. Sure enough, they raided his Parisian flat, but he was gone.
In August he was able to obtain a US visa as a refugee and had plans of travelling to neutral Portugal, and at Lisbon to embark for the safety of America (yes, the movie "Casablanca" was based on facts). The Gestapo were everywhere. When Benjamin arrived in the Catalonian town of Portbou (then controlled by Francoist Spain), he was stopped by the border police. Orders were made to return all refugees to France, and Benjamin knew this would mean into the hands of the Gestapo. Benjamin killed himself with an overdose of morphine tablets on the night of September 26, 1940. His brother Georg was killed at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1942. The details are numbing. How could rational humanity be reduced to such barbarism?
So what did Walter Benjamin make of this development as the world marched headlong into an abyss? Well, let's just focus on his "Ninth Thesis of History" as Benjamin struggles with the notion of Progress and the ensuing chaos:
"A (Paul) 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, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. 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. The 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."
You can see immediately where my inspiration came from for this photograph. The Angelus Novus is the angel of history who surveys the wreckage we leave behind, as Paradise after Paradise is lost. Even the missing left hand of this statue seems to have a very distinct meaning: The angel of history is himself injured by the catastrophe we leave behind us. If faith means anything at all after Auschwitz, then it must be because God also partakes of the universal suffering. All our neat conceptual images of God must go, and we are left with nothing but sheer Faith on which to rest our hopes. But the German mystic and priest Meister Eckhart was saying this in the early 14th century.
Another Jewish philosopher who fled the Nazis, Ernst Bloch (1885-1977), believed this and it formed the basis of his great work, "The Principle of Hope". In turn the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann (b.1926), made it the basis of his entire theological work. For Moltmann the meaning of history lies in a "Crucified God". But far from being an end, this is the true beginning of an eternal hope that lies beyond the vicissitudes of a failed universe. The death of Death is the beginning of New Life.