Beginnings: Sweet Life on Ash Wednesday

It’s a strange thing to begin a blog about life’s pleasures on the day after Fat Tuesday, a day when the carnival ends and ancient rites of mortification and humility spring to life. Strangers, their foreheads marked by dark crosses of ash, pass me in the street, like a warning, or a rebuke. But I’ve been challenged by my dear friend over on A Cynic’s Lent to bypass perfectionism (if not mortification) and go directly to the page, and I can’t say no. So I’m offering you one of the most surprising instances of sweetness rising from catastrophe I’ve ever stumbled across, Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus.

Long before I saw Klee’s angel, I was sure I knew what he looked like. I based my dream vision on the arresting description of Angelus by German philosopher, literary critic, flâneur, Jew, contrarian, experimental drug user, secular mystic and wonderfully lyrical writer, Walter Benjamin. Benjamin was living in war-ravaged Berlin when he purchased Klee’s painting in 1921, for the equivalent of about thirty dollars. It is clear that it gave him great pleasure. He took it with him on his many moves, and it often surfaced in his works. It was in 1939, in Paris, that Benjamin wrote his Theses on the Philosophy of History. He had already survived one war. Now, with the Germans on their way, and signs of the coming horror all around him, previously unimaginable history was repeating itself. Staring at the painting on his wall, he saw:

…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. 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.

Reading this passage, one of the most cited of his surviving work, I saw the storm, and the wreckage, and that unbearable wind. And I saw the angel: terribly strong—strong enough to fly against a wind from Paradise—but rendered impotent in the face of unending catastrophe. He can do nothing but bear witness. He cannot even turn away.

I imagined him heavy, carven and allegorical, like an engraving by Durer. I saw his face, noble and Roman, with a furrowed brow. And I saw his eyes, wide and clear, but heavy-lidded and ringed with pain.

Obviously, I knew nothing of Paul Klee, who was one of the least sad artists to have walked this earth, and whose aesthetic is about as far away from Durer as it is possible to get. I should have known I was wildly off the mark when I read Donald Barthelme’s wonderful short story about Klee’s service in the World War I Imperial German army, during which he painted numbers on planes and later escorted them from base to base. In the story, Klee returns to the train where his planes are stored after a good lunch, only to find that one of them is missing. He is perturbed, but entranced by the shapes the now-empty canvas and ropes used to cover the plane make, and sits down to sketch them for awhile. Later, he solves his problem by “diddling the manifest,” to change the delivery charge from three planes to two, using his artist’s skills which are “not unlike a forger’s.” Then he tramps off to find a good chocolate shop. The secret police watching him in the story are relieved they will not have to explain the missing airplane and applaud his ingenuity. After successfully handing over the remaining two planes, Barthelme’s Klee goes on his nonchalant way:

The drawing I did of the collapsed canvas and ropes is really very good. I eat a piece of chocolate. I am sorry about the lost aircraft but not overmuch. The war is temporary. But drawings and chocolate go on forever.

Yet somehow, my readerly image remained stubbornly intact. Finally, while preparing to teach Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, I looked up Angelus Novus (Kushner quotes the Benjamin passage) to show the painting to my students.

We were shocked. This? This curly-headed, wide eyed, big-eared, open–mouthed, child’s version of an angel was the Great Angel of History? Where is the storm? And couldn’t his wings—his short, stubby wings—be raised in greeting as much as blown back away from his curious body? This angel was not grave, not stern, not weighted down by tragedy. He was tender, gentle, and really…rather sweet.

Klee painted Angelus Novus in 1920, a mere two years after returning from the war to find his colleagues dead and dispersed. The same year, he left to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar. He continued to make his vibrant, inventive, utterly original images throughout the rest of a life that included his dismissal from the Bauhaus and return to Switzerland in 1933 after his work was labeled degenerate by the Nazi’s, and five years of the painful wasting disease that took his life at the age of 60. Klee died in 1940, the same year in which Benjamin committed suicide on the Spanish border, during his attempt to flee Nazi-occupied France.

I hope that in the years before Benjamin’s terrible and accurate vision, the Angelus was a solace to him, proof that at least one artist in Europe was still filled with joy and playfulness and faith in the light touch that allows one to float, transparent and gentle in the air, even in the midst of history’s endless storm.

Sources and Additional Links

Donald Barthelme’s story, "Engineer-Private Paul Klee Misplaces An Aircraft Between Milbertshofen And Cambrai, March 1916," was originally published in The New Yorker, April 3, 1971. It can be found in several editions of his collected stories.

The passage from Benjamin is drawn from the 1988 edition of Illuminations, the collection of Benjamin’s writings edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn and published by Shocken Books (an imprint of Random House) in New York.

To see a wonderfully playful recasting of the Angelus as Benjamin himself, go here.
For a lovely review by Marshall Berman of two biographies of Benjamin go here.