ANGELS OF HISTORY

When Jonathan Garfinkel moved to Germany, he found a country which had seemingly learned from its past. But in the face of rising extremism and the popularity of far-right politicians, he now wonders: Can a nation truly change?

Iwas standing in line for a recent exhibition at the Bode Museum, “The Angel of History: Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee and the Berlin Angels 80 Years After WWII.” It was a perfect museum Saturday in Berlin: rains pelted the city from the east. My girlfriend and I dressed up in our weekend best, our phones put away, a ritual of quiet. These days I look for ways to forsake the hourly witnessing of the unravelling of our civilization. Art is a perfect balm and antidote. In this case, it was an aesthetic escape into the sculptures and paintings of the 18th century. As the line for the exhibit snaked through the museum’s permanent collection, a ding rang from the inside of my suit jacket pocket. My girlfriend raised an eyebrow. I’d forgotten to turn off the ringer.

“Are you sure?” she said. Without thinking, I found myself pulling out the phone. There was a link to an article that a friend insisted I read, “RIGHT NOW.”

“It’s just one message,” I said. “I can read it before we go inside.”

My girlfriend went off to look at Byzantine art. I understood my reasoning was not unlike the proverbial nicotine addict taking one “final” cigarette. But it was too late. I clicked the link. The headline: “In Eastern Germany, youths embrace nationalism, extremism.” Not new information. After all, one in five Germans had voted for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in this year’s election, a record for the populist group the German secret service has designated a rightwing extremist organization that undermines democracy. It’s also common knowledge that young men are their biggest contingent of supporters, in particular in the former German Democratic Republic.

What shocked me were the quotes from teenagers who said things like, “Hitler is glorified big time” and that the far right is “cool.” At techno dance parties, the article reported, they are said to shout, “Foreigners out!” above the wailing music. In the Saxon city of Dessau-Rosslau, teens have been seen spraying swastika graffiti on bridges alongside the lyrics of Kanye West’s banned song Heil Hitler. That Nazism has become “part of teenage pop culture,” according to Projekt GegenPart, a group that tries to educate and intervene with populist youth in rural Germany, is more than worrisome. It’s totally messed up. The question is: How did we get here? And where will this go?

I toggled my phone into airplane mode, wishing to undo what I’d just seen.

As I eyed the line of people snaking through the museum, I thought back to the nineties, when I first came to Berlin. My Polish-Jewish grandmother reprimanded me. “Why the hell would you go there of all places?! Why not New York or India?” I assured her Germany was different than it was in her time.

I told my grandmother stories of a man I’d befriended named Holly, whose father had been enlisted by the Hitler Jugend, and whom Holly rebelled against by avoiding military conscription and moving to Berlin in the late eighties, where he was part of the German punk and electro-techno scene a.k.a. the Love Parade. Music – and partying – was personal. To live in Berlin meant to be antinationalist and antiwar.

It’s part of the reason I love Berlin. The city’s anti-nationalism not only assured me that Germany had moved on from its past. It spoke to my own present beliefs: that any nationalism fuels lines of hatred, through the creation of arbitrary borders and fictional mythologies. It’s the story of the 20th century and the continuing headlines of bloodshed we cannot turn away from today.

It was a different time. The Wall had just fallen. And some of us – Jews and Germans alike – were united in our transnational hatred of Nazis and anything resembling fascism. The only swastikas I saw in Berlin were the ones sprayed onto the doors of our local punk bar, Baiz, that said, “Gegen Nazis,” a line struck through it. No Nazis allowed.

We were traversing the edges toward a more open history, or so we believed. Parties in old Nazi bunkers were ubiquitous. But more than that, it was the conversations I remember, the descendants of Nazis and Holocaust survivors colliding over cheap wine and cigarettes. I admired the German monuments to its past. I believed the country wore its guilt on its sleeve.

After the fall of the Wall, Berlin was home for many because of cheap apartments that artists flocked to. But it also became home for a traumatic reckoning. When I attended the war crimes trial of death camp guard John Demjanjuk in Munich in 2009, it felt like a page had been turned in Germany: they had indeed learned from their past.

But Germany hasn’t, obviously. And given the way the rest of the Western democratic world is going, a worrisome foray into rightwing populism that skillfully manipulates history and facts, it’s fair to say that from Israel to the United States, from Hungary to China, from Russia to Sudan, few have learned from the 20th century. Why should Germans be different?

The truth is I have always held up Germany to a higher bar on the subject of political memory. In part it’s because of my Jewish grandmother: I wanted her to believe that people – and a nation – can change. Of course, it’s also due to the horrors Germany is responsible for. As a long-time visitor to and now resident of Berlin, it’s a given that the past is invoked in political speeches marking history. Even that is starting to change.

Recently the newly elected AfD mayor of Dessau-Rosslau, Laurens Nothdurft, on the 80th anniversary of the end of the war, didn’t mention Nazi war crimes or the mass murder of Jews in a speech because he was trying to “look forward” to “a positive future.” What positive future is he envisioning? Now that Germany has decided to rearm itself, closed its European borders and contemplates conscription for the first time since the fall of the Wall, what is going to happen to this country? Which is to ask: How did we forget so much?

The doorman tugged at my sleeve. Time to go in. I escaped the present into art: “The Angel of History.”

One night many years ago, after a late one at the famous cocktail bar the Wurgeengel (the name is based on Luis Bunuel’s 1962 film, The Exterminating Angel), Holly and I rode our bicycles through Kreuzberg. We ended up outside a Catholic church, St. Michael’s, named after the archangel Michael. The roof had fallen in thanks to a bomb dropped by the Allies in February, 1945. The city had never repaired it, letting it exist as both homage to war and prayer for peace.

There was an eeriness to the ruin. For some reason this decadence, the caved-in roof that sprouted vegetation, wayward leaves and ghost-like history, felt to me like an appropriate residence of angels. I felt the presence of something. And while I wouldn’t say I felt the archangel Michael’s protection against evil, I will say it made me a believer, not in God, but in angels and Berlin.

Since then I have come to associate Berlin with angels. It is not an original thought. In Tiergarten, an angel peers down from the Siegessäule, spreading its wings like a prayer, beckoning the city. Wim Wenders’s 1987 film Der Himmel über Berlin ( Wings of Desire) famously imagines a Berlin rife with angels who listen in on the inner thoughts of its citizens – a gesture both poetic and Stasi-like. Following two angels – one played by Bruno Ganz, the other by Otto Sander – we watch as the angels whisper into the ears of its citizens, protecting them, encouraging them through their day-today affairs. An homage to the destruction and rebuilding of a city constantly changing, the angels act more as loving witnesses than saviours (one Berlin citizen considers jumping off a bridge toward his death; Otto Sander tries to talk him down; for a moment he reconsiders; in the end, suicide wins). These angels move back and forth over the Wall like a wind of despair. The liminal reality of Berlin as a divided city, East and West, helped reinforce Mr. Wenders’s notion of in-between worlds, the divine and the earthly, good and evil. Maybe this is why I believe St. Michael’s is the place of angels. It speaks to our divided selves.

Sure enough, a short excerpt from the film was featured in “The Angel of History.” Central to the exhibition, however, was Angelus Novus ( New Angel in Latin), an oil monoprint from Paul Klee on loan from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. While Klee never lived in Berlin (he taught at the art academy in Düsseldorf until 1933 when he fled Germany), his painting became associated with the city thanks to the Berlin resident philosopher Walter Benjamin whose essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” interpreted Klee’s painting.

Benjamin was obsessed with the painting; he’d bought it from Klee in 1920 and carried it with him to Paris when he fled the Nazis. When Benjamin tried to leave France for Spain, he entrusted the painting with Theodor Adorno, who was supposed to give it to Benjamin when he made it to America. But Benjamin never did escape Europe. He swallowed a cyanide pill when his exit papers from France were denied – he knew returning to France was a death sentence. In his will, the painting was left to the mystic Gershom Scholem, who donated it to the Israel museum.

But Klee’s painting doesn’t really do it for me. It’s a troubled, haunted work, and it’s not what I look for in an angel. Klee’s abstract figure is rather unangelic – part winged bird with a face resembling a startled horse, looking not toward the past, but just … the side. As if casting a glance at a scurrying squirrel through Tiergarten park.

In the winter, I like to spend time in many of Berlin’s graveyards (as do many Berliners: cemetery cafés are in vogue at the moment). There’s one graveyard in particular I like. I’m drawn to the angels at the gate. When I walk past them, I feel I’m passing from one world to the next, and the angels are shepherding me through. They bring me comfort. It’s not metaphysical, but practical. I step out of the mayhem of the city and find peace amongst the quiet and the dead. I know my angels are far from the angels of the Bible, frightening and angry creatures who act as messengers of divine will and agents of redemption. Still, I like them nonetheless.

I turned back to Klee’s painting. It didn’t just confuse me; his unangelic angel unsettled me. It neither brought me closer to the divine nor resembled anything peaceful. He seemed to awkwardly beckon me for its attention, holding his hands up, asking people to stop. Attend to what? Stop what?

Benjamin wrote, “Where we perceive a chain of events, [the angel of history] 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.”

Maybe my whole notion of angels is backward and upside down.

The past five years have been a trying accumulation of catastrophes. From the pandemic to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, from the ruination of Gaza to an American fascism dressed in populism, coupled with economic uncertainty and rapid environmental collapse that will only worsen, the feeling of overwhelming despair is too much. We look for answers like we look for angels, the kind we hope to find. Maybe that’s why to the youths of Dessau, Nazis are cool again, and Hitler the exterminating angel will save us. Benjamin’s angel is different. His angel of history lives amidst the capitalist catastrophe of our times, one disaster to the next. How do we break this cycle? Can we?

In Mr. Wenders’s film, when the angel cannot stop the man from choosing suicide, he lets out a desperate cry. What upsets me about Klee’s angel is his similar sense of horror and paralysis. Instead of saving us, he’s a powerless witness. Much like Benjamin felt in 1930s Europe. Mr. Wenders, Benjamin and Klee’s angels are miserable realists, not saviours nor icons of peace. Amidst their silence, the incomprehensible unfolds. They mirror our mouths agape in horror. No words, no prayer, no comfort, nothing to stop the continuing violence but ourselves, whom Benjamin, rightfully so, had little faith in.

Recently the newly elected AfD mayor of Dessau-Rosslau, Laurens Nothdurft, on the 80th anniversary of the end of the war, didn’t mention Nazi war crimes or the mass murder of Jews in a speech because he was trying to ‘look forward’ to ‘a positive future.’ What positive future is he envisioning?