In Hohenems in Vorarlberg, Austria, a sculpture by the local artist Günther Blenke stands at the corner where the Judengasse and Christengasse (now Schweizer Straße and Marktstraße) once met. It is made of a piece of lightning-struck wood from a burnt tree. The piece of wood was found by Franz Sauer in Switzerland. Günther Blenke added a pair of rusty wings to the wood. The sculpture is surrounded by a circular fountain with a diameter of two metres. The title of the sculpture is Angel of History. The reference to angels has two points of reference: the location is at the site of the former Engelburg, a guesthouse that belonged to Stefan Zweig’s maternal family, the Brettauers. The Brettauer-Zweig family is one of the many Jewish families that were scattered from Hohenems across Europe and the world. These also include the Brunners, whose story was told in the exhibition “The Last Europeans” at the Jewish Museum in Hohenems in 2020. The title of the exhibition refers to the following passage from a letter written by Walter Benjamin to his friend Stephan Lackner:

“One wonders if by chance history was not in the process of forging a brilliant synthesis between two Nietzschean concepts, namely the good European and the last man. On might obtain the last European as a result. We are struggling not to become that last European.”(cit. Mario Tronti. Politics at Sunset. Theses on Benjamin, in e-flux Journal. Nr. 139, 10 (2023), transl. Robert Hurley ) With the Engelburg and the admonishing words about “the last Europeans”, the sculpture links the (Jewish) history of the town of Hohenems with Walter Benjamin’s famous IXth Thesis on the Concept of History, in which Benjamin refers to Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus.

Thesis IX reads:

“My wing is poised to beat 
but I would gladly turn home 
were I to stay to the end of days I still be this forlon.”

Gerhard Scholem, Greetings from the Angelus, Poems, Brooklyn: Archipelago Books. 2018, p. 39–40, transl. Richard Sieburth.

“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, 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.” (Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, I, New York: Schocken Books 1969, p. 249.)

Günther Blenke’s sculpture offers another version of the visual representation and interpretation of the theme of the “Angel of History”, as in the works of HAP Grieshaber, Heidrun Feistner and Anselm Kiefer, for example. In the context of Benjamin’s thesis, every work of art also relates to Klee’s painting. And since Walter Benjamin also draws the image of his Angel of History in his thesis with words and connects it with concepts, a special connection arises. It is transferred, as it were, to every version that is given artistically by the Angel of History, whether as a sculpture or drawing or print, whether as an installation, performance or dance or as a poetic text.

Walter Benjamin calls this particular context a “constellation” or “configuration”. It is a matter of layers and connections, even montages and constructions made of materials and forms, layers of images and ideas, meanings and questions. They can appear as works of art and texts, but also as ambiguous dream images or ambiguous picture puzzles, as allegories or “dialectical images”. Benjamin was particularly interested in the form of the “dialectical image”. And he probably understood his IXth Thesis on the Angel of History as such. For Benjamin, a dialectical image is an image “wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.“ (Benjamin, The  Arcades, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1999, p. 462).

Works of art can be such constellations – and thus literally enable a moment of recognisability in the present, in which those who look at a work of art “bring to mind” what is depicted in it: they can, as it were, find themselves in the perspective of the work of art and trace what is currently “relevant” to them. They find themselves, in Benjamin’s words, “meant” by the historical and layered aspects worked through in the work of art.

Günther Blenkes Version des Engels der Geschichte spricht die Betrachtenden auf besondere Weise an. In seiner Skulptur steckt buchstäblich das „Blitzhafte“ einer Konstellation aus Materialien eines Naturprozesses und industriellen Fertigungsmaterialien, angebranntes Holz und verrostetes Eisen. Erstaunlich bleibt, dass die Materialien jedem Wind und Wetter ungeschützt ausgesetzt standhalten. Der verkohlte Holzteil erinnert an Yakisugi, eine traditionelle japanische Technik zur Holzkonservierung durch Verkohlung. Gleichzeitig suggeriert die rostige Patina auf dem Stahl, der ins Brunnenwasser reicht, die Preisgabe an den Korrosionsprozess, und verheimlicht die darunterliegende witterungsbeständige Sperrschicht. So werden Konstellationen aus Fortschritt und Verfall überraschend neu konfiguriert: Naturgeschichte wird mit menschlicher Geschichte im Bilde einer Botenfigur verbunden, dem Engel der Geschichte, der unterschiedliche Aspekte von Geschichte, Fortschritt in der Geschichte und Ende der Geschichte, Trümmerhaftigkeit und Katastrophe „verkörpert“. Und diese Verkörperung wird in Teilen selbst zu einem Vexierbild: Zum Beispiel mit der Frage: Welches Gesicht zeigt diese Botenfigur den Betrachtenden, die ihnen als Engel der Geschichte sowohl vom Aufstieg und Fall der Natur und vom Fortschritt und Verfall der Menschengeschichte in der Natur kündet?

Günther Blenke’s version of the angel of history speaks to the viewer in a special way. His sculpture literally contains the “lightning-like” quality of a constellation of materials from a natural process and industrial production materials, charred wood and rusty iron. It is astonishing that the materials withstand the elements unprotected. The charred wood is reminiscent of yakisugi, a traditional Japanese technique for preserving wood by charring. At the same time, the rusty patina on the steel, which reaches into the well water, suggests that it is being exposed to the corrosion process, concealing the weather-resistant barrier layer underneath. In this way, constellations of progress and decay are surprisingly reconfigured: Natural history is linked with human history in the image of a messenger figure, the Angel of History, who “embodies” different aspects of history, progress in history and the end of history, ruin and catastrophe. And this embodiment itself becomes a picture puzzle in parts: for example, with the question: what face does this messenger figure show the viewer, who, as the Angel of History, tells them about the rise and fall of nature and the progress and decline of human history in nature?

A simple but also provocative answer that Günther Blenke’s sculpture might give to this question is: an Angel of History who has lost his face. As if he had been struck by lightning, which at the moment of impact transformed him into a ruinous chimera of natural processes and cultural history, a kind of hybrid in which the allegorical and the symbolic are fused in a flash. It could also be a dream image of the sudden end and lightning-like break-off of history, because in the reality of the viewer, neither has (yet) occurred… even if the Holocaust and the dropping of the atomic bomb are historical events of past catastrophic history.

The nightmarish and enigmatic quality of Günther Blenke’s sculpture could be revealed in the context of such an answer precisely in the absence of the angel’s face in the sculpture. A face that no longer shows itself or that only shows nothingness? Or is it an aspect of hope, inasmuch as – as one interpreter says – the “knothole in the sculpture looks back into history like a wide-open eye” (in order to learn from it?) or even an “opening”, a view of somewhere else, beyond history as a tale of suffering (as a theological promise)? Benjamin himself was sceptical in his theses on the concept of history with regard to the fostering of hopes. But: “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” (Thesis VI, Benjamin, Illuminations. With an introduction by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968, p. 255)

Such a historian “grasps the constellation in which his own epoch has entered into a very specific earlier one. In this way, he establishes a concept of the present as the now, in which splinters of the messianic are interspersed.” (Thesis A of the appendix) Does Günther Blenke’s sculpture offer a view of history that speaks of this hope? Could it possibly be a kind of messianic fragment for some viewers in a present time in which the history of catastrophes is rendered ineffective for a moment? A faceless angel of history, suddenly “shot down” by progress and/or out of the blue – would this be an allegory of the end of the history of catastrophes?

The faceless being at the centre of Hohenems also takes us to Venice. There, the Belgian artist Berlinde de Bruyckere is currently showing her work at the Basilica San Giorgio Maggiore for this year’s art biennale. The exhibition focuses on the three larger-than-life archangel sculptures City of Refuge III. The three archangels are enveloped in heavy, tattered fur coats. Despite their material heaviness, the creatures convey a fragile lightness and threaten to tip over at any moment.

While the face of Günther Blenkes’ angel in Hohenems is lost, the faces of the archangels in Venice remain veiled. In both cases, the countenance is missing. Furthermore, the angel’s wings are torn apart, while the dreadful figures by De Bruyckere can barely lift their wings. In their own way, both angel sculptures thus point to the loss of freedom and embody the state of being at the mercy of the storm or gravity, respectively, through the weighty drapery. In Venice, City of Refuge III reveals a more pronounced aesthetic of the nightmare, of the horrific and of the surreal than in Hohenems. Perhaps what Berlinde De Bruyckere emphasises with her visual dramaturgy allows us to listen to some barely perceived resonances in the Hohenems Angel of History: Despite all the nightmarish overtones, the angel fits idyllically into the centre of Hohenems, but on the other hand it has a disturbing dystopian element of awakening – through the opening, which not only allows a view through, but also opens up the possibility of being confronted with something that one neither expects nor wants in everyday life. Benjamin writes in Thesis IX: “His mouth is open.” An open mouth does not speak, it is silent, but in a different way to a shut mouth. The open mouth becomes a speechless gesture and addresses precisely the absence of words, through piercing silence. A certainty sinks into its silence as a resounding truth: those who have fallen silent do not stop speaking. They speak in dreams, at the thresholds and edges of the boundaries of reality. In the border town of Hohenems, the question arises as to whether the angel can be taken as a metaphor for the town or the town as a metaphor for the angel. In any case, Hohenems is testament to the fact that traversing (μεταφορά-μετάληψις) a border can decide between life and death.

The angel of history storms into this drama and invites us to the Otherworld, where instead of familiar faces, the uncanny opens up – or the face of death, the facies hippocatica, hides behind a veil or appears on a sudarium. After all, the loss of one’s face also stands for a situation or a situation in which someone is exposed, shamed, abused and despised. It is the loss of honour, esteem and respect. Why does this angel have no face in this place on the border between Austria and Switzerland, where so many people lost their lives fleeing from the Nazi tyranny? In this respect, it would be worth asking to what extent the loss of an angel’s face does not herald the end of the suffering that accumulates in the ruins, and thus also the end of the history of catastrophes in which it is imposed on people. Then Günther Blenke’s angel of history could also stand for what Walter Benjamin enigmatically calls with Karl Kraus: “Origin is the destination”. In fact, Benjamin also called Karl Kraus a “new angel”: “Perhaps one of those who, according to the Talmud, are created anew every moment in countless swarms, in order to cease and vanish into nothingness after they have raised their voices before God.” (transl. from Benjamin, Gesammelte Werke II/1, Suhrkamp 1991, p. 367)

It is no coincidence that Walter Benjamin chose the face to reflect the history of decay, suffering and catastrophe:

“While in the symbol the transfigured face of nature is revealed fleetingly in the light of salvation, in the allegory the facies hippocratica of history lies before the observer’s eyes as a frozen primeval landscape. History, in all that it has from the beginning been untimely, sorrowful, and mistaken, is imprinted in a face – no, in a skull.” (transl. from Benjamin, Gesammelte Werke I/1, Suhrkamp 1991, p. 343) The “English/angelic face” into which the face of a skull could transform – it is missing from Günther Blenke’s sculpture. In the place of the face – does an abysmal hole yawn there, or does the possibility of redemption open up there? And if the face is missing – where does the angel of history “look at”?

These are the questions that arise. In order to follow the traces further, in artistic forms, it may be interesting to think about the Angel of History in connection with images of dream visions and faces of the angel. Here, one trace leads to the question of whom or what the Angel of History turns his face to, whom it adresses by gaze – and why perhaps no longer at the End of History.

In the language of the Hebrew Bible, the past is referred to with the word lefanim, lifne. It is a combination of the preposition l, which can have the meaning “before”, with the noun panim (pl.) with the basic meaning “front, face”. The phrase lefanim, lifne therefore means “before the face”. What this means for Klee’s painting, Benjamin’s image and Blenke’s sculpture, for the reading of the thesis on the angel of history as a dream and a picture puzzle, will offer interesting traces for both the interpretation and the further artistic work with the ideas and configurations of history contained in it.

Robert Krokowski
Thomas Sojer