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The Great War and the persistence of tradition
In his ninth ‘Thesis on the philosophy of history’, Walter Benjamin addresses an issue crucial to this study: the dialectical relationship between old and new, between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ in twentieth-century cultural history. Benjamin recalls:
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 towards 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. This 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.
No image does more to capture the subtle and contradictory elements embedded in European cultural history in the period of the Great War. Benjamin's ‘angel of history’ did indeed float into the future with his gaze fixed firmly on the past. His back was turned on us, those who have come after; the onward march towards ‘modernism’ did not concern him.
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