On Walter Benjamin's Death and the History Thereof.

Any attempt to speak to the larger public of Walter Benjamin, German-Jewish intellectual, inevitably runs up against the problem of explaining who he was, against the problems of definitions when confronting this wide-ranging talent. What words do I seek out to introduce him? There are so many and one cannot in good conscience choose one or even three: literary and art critic, translator, essayist, historian, marxist, philosopher. One solution, that he may in fact have appreciated, is simply to present you with this image of his library card for the Bibliothèque  Nationale de France. The year is 1940 and he is already on the run from the Nazis that have taken over his native Germany. This will be his final year to live. 

Accepted theory is that running farther and farther away from the fascist menace, he crossed the Pyrenees into the town of Portbou. There he was denied crossing for supposed new legislation forbidding it and so he allegedly completed suicide by overdose of morphine. The following documentary searches out the evidence for this received wisdom and comes up only with more questions between two silences, and how many voices who can but say, over and over again, "No sé, no sé." The documentary is on one hand an interrogation into the circumstances of the thinker's death. More largely it is an enquiry into the practice of history and its ellipses.

In his essay "On the Concept of History" Benjamin speaks of the Angel of History.

"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."[1]

"Theses on the Philosophy of History", Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1969: 249.

The Angel of History…. Seraphim, cherubim and the rest are dread creatures. There is a reason their favorite conversation opener is “Be not afraid.” There is though much to fear, pace Gabriel. Walter Benjamin lived through a dark time, the European Destruction, Totalitarianism’s stranglehold over Europe. We seem to be on the brink of rhyming that period with our own horrors of inhumanity, at once specific to this twenty-first century and timeless. The Angel of History once more shows his aweful face as here in 2020 we face a refugee crisis the likes of which have not been seen since Benjamin's time, people fleeing unliveable conditions in so many countries and arrive at a border, some fiction created on a two dimensional piece of paper, only to find that time and human feeling have run out.