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.
Walter Benjamin, the great German Jewish cultural critic, loved Paul Klee’s painting “Angelus Novus.” Whenever he moved to a new apartment, he hung it on the wall, to watch over him as he wrote. But it haunted him too. Or maybe it was the future that was haunting him. The world kept forcing him onward, and he couldn’t see where it was all going. He figured it would all look like what had come before.
TRANSCRIPT
There’s a painting by Paul Klee that’s been haunting me lately. It’s a figure in tans and yellows with a big head and goofy, oversized eyes. Its wings look like hands held up, delighted to see you. Between the eyes and the upturned bottom lip, I’ve always thought the angel was smiling. But that’s not how Walter Benjamin saw it. Benjamin, the great German Jewish cultural critic, who died fleeing the German invasion of France in 1940—he bought the painting in 1921. Usually a stiff, inhibited intellectual, getting hold of this painting made him twinkle. Klee had named it Angelus Novus, the New Angel, and whenever Benjamin moved into a new apartment, he hung it on the wall, to watch over him as he wrote.
But Benjamin didn’t see laughter in this angel’s expression. He saw terror. In an essay he wrote just months before his death, he describes what the angel is seeing. It’s the horror of history. The angel is being blown backwards by a storm raging out of Paradise. The chain of events we think of as history? For the angel it’s a catastrophe, and the rubble is just piling up. Writing as a German Jew in the midst of the Holocaust, it makes sense that all that progress of the past few centuries—railroads, Zyklon-B—looked to Benjamin like devastation. And where was that storm driving the unwilling, terrified Angel? The future. The endless, terrible, future. A future that’s arriving sooner than we expected, on the backs of deadly virus molecules wrapped in oil.
Covid-19 is making the horizon harder to see, but we’re still headed in the same direction. If you, like me, are afflicted with any kind of climate anxiety, you can probably imagine why Benjamin’s angel is sticking with me. In so many ways, the age of fossil fuels has been great. They turn on our lights, they run our computers and cars—and who doesn’t love a good road trip?
And it’s not just things that light up and go. Recently, historians have started to show us how fossil fuels paved the way for democracy itself. Not Athenian democracy, with senators in togas discussing their friend Plato’s Republic. But modern, popular democracy, with the labor movement and the 40-hour work week. (Ha. Remember that?)
Because, as you know, the industrial age was built on coal. Over the nineteenth century, coal miners and workers in shipping and railways realized they had a kind of magic power. Society needed those workers to dig up coal and transport it along the rails and across the seas. And the workers realized it was really easy to stop the coal from coming. With the pull of a lever, a disgruntled engineer could stop a train. With a few conversations, dock workers could agree to stop unloading a ship. That meant no more energy to power your factories, your city. It meant the workers could starve you of carbon. And since coal workers were connected to so many other industries, workers of all stripes could make demands. The working class gained a collective power they’d never had before. They could demand democracy.
The magical thing about fossil fuel is that millions of years of the sun’s energy has been condensed into a lump of coal, or a barrel of oil. If a pile of wood is sunlight made solid, coal and oil are super concentrated sunlight. And once you realize you have condensed sunlight you can buy and sell, who wouldn’t build an economy around it? Steam engines. Internal combustion. Coal-fired power plants to fuel our podcasts.
And now the atmosphere is choking on carbon dioxide: 412 parts per million. Twenty years ago it was 370. It hovered between 200-280 for at least 800,000 years before that. Half the fossil fuels we’ve burned on this planet have been in the past thirty years. Since the Berlin Wall fell. Since the Super Nintendo. The last time carbon dioxide levels were this high was more than three million years ago. Sea levels were 80 feet higher than they are now. Giant camels roamed through forests in the Arctic.
Fossil fuels have led us into the future. We have smartphones and video calls and same-day delivery. We have 3-D printers. Diet Coke. Endless Star Wars films. Lizzo, for god’s sake. There are things to be thankful for. And then, in California, a firestorm engulfs Paradise, and in Wuhan, a virus is born that will, months later, engulf the globe.
Is this what the future looks like, Lizzo belting while Australia burns and Bangladesh drowns? What do you imagine when you picture the future? Are things getting better, or worse? Are you planning for it? Paying off debt? Saving for retirement? Trying to stay in shape? Are you optimistic? Losing sleep? Do you live in the present? Do you have a therapist? How much control do you have over the future? Is the future political? Do you think things will get better? Are you excited? Are you prepared for any of it? Who is the future for? The rich? The rest of us? Just white people? Will there be anything left for you?
Sorry, sorry. I got thinking about my kids. Anyway, I’ve been trying to figure out how we’re going to survive the future, but maybe the real question, the question Benjamin was trying to answer, is how to survive the past.
By early 1940, when Benjamin started writing about the angel of history, he was already lonely. He’d always been a loner. In his mannerisms, the way he held his head, his speech, he was old-fashioned. He didn’t fit in the twentieth century. After his death, his friend Hannah Arendt wrote that “No one was more isolated than Benjamin, so utterly alone.”
He’d moved to Paris, to escape the Third Reich. Now, there was a rumor that refugees from Hitler’s Germany were going to be sent back there, as if it was 2019 and they were at the southern border of Texas. Through connections in New York, Benjamin got an emergency visa to the U.S. He had another visa through Spain, to set sail heading west from Lisbon. But he was missing an exit visa from France. Normally, this wouldn’t have been a problem. There was a relatively short hike through the mountains along a road the French border police ignored. But Benjamin was not a hiker. He’d been diagnosed with an enlarged heart. He felt too much. And when he and his traveling companions reached the Spanish border, the officials gave them bad news. The border had been closed earlier that day. They would have to go back to France tomorrow.
He must have felt so lonely. A deepening of the isolation he had felt as a Jew in Europe his whole life. But, for all his love of modern Paris, its arcades and cast iron, maybe it was progress Benjamin most feared. Once, he asked himself whether the Austrian writer Karl Kraus lived at the threshold of a new age. “Alas,” he wrote, “by no means. He stands at the threshold of the Last Judgment.” That how the world felt to him in 1940.
That’s how I imagine the Covid crisis feels on the front lines. That’s how the climate crisis feels to me. It’s not really the future—it’s the past we have to survive. The weeks when the virus was hiding in our systems. The carbon built up from decades of burning. The islands of trash in the Pacific, microplastics in our food, asbestos in our schools, tetrachloroethylene in our drinking water. The legacies of plantation slavery—white supremacy, mass incarceration. Our relationships with our parents.
The past catches up with us, like it caught up with Benjamin. That’s what he was carrying over that mountain. All the rubble the angel of history couldn’t ignore. It built up, a weight on his back, so that by the time he got to that hotel room with its creaky bed, he could go no further.
In the small hotel that night on the Spanish border, Benjamin lay in his bed, shirtless, fidgety. He’d placed his gold grandfather watch on a shelf to stare at it, watching the future tick closer. Later that night, he wrote a note to his traveling companion, Henny Gurland. “It is in a small village in the Pyrenees, where no one knows me, that my life will come to a close.” He took a massive dose of morphine, and died the next day.
From the top of the Pyrenees, Benjamin thought he could see what the future held. It feels that way today, too. To some of us, sometimes, it all looks like disaster. It can be tempting to give up. But we can’t really know what’s on the horizon. Maybe if Benjamin had been able to talk to Henny Gurland at the hotel, she could have listened for a bit, and given him a chance to hold on.
Often, when we lean in to each other, things can look less bleak. When we figure out ways to be with and for, instead of within and against. When we can train ourselves to see not just the brutal truth in front of us, but to see what could be, behind it. The possibilities that are right here with us. Like Henny Gurland, who, perhaps, Benjamin could have spoken with through the night. Who could have reminded him that things turn out differently than you expect. Or if Rebecca Solnit, the great American Jewish cultural critic, could have gone back and told him that “The future is dark, yes, but the darkness is as much of the womb as the grave.”
Maybe it was because they were shaken by his death, but hours afterward, the Spanish officials opened the border to Benjamin’s companions. A few weeks after, you didn’t even need a visa.
The essay where he describes the angel is called “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Right before the paragraph about the Angelus Novus, Benjamin quotes a poem by Gerhard Scholem. “My wing is ready for flight, I would like to turn back. If I stayed timeless time, I would have little luck.” Benjamin wrote his description of the angel in the months before he fled France. He wanted to turn back, I imagine, as he made his way, step by step, over the mountains to Spain. But behind him was Fascism, the Gestapo, the wreckage of history. In the hotel, the morphine helped him take flight in what seemed the only way left to him. Sometimes the world forces you onward.
A friend asked me recently, “who will carry the burden of hope”? I think Benjamin would have been skeptical about hope. This is the man who wrote "There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” But after his death, his friend Hannah Arendt handed off the manuscript of the history essay to another friend, Theodore Adorno. Adorno, Arendt, and others who loved Benjamin and his thought saved his work and published it. If Benjamin’s work is a document of barbarism, underneath that work is a network of friendship, of sharing the burden.
If we find other ways of looking around, we can see that all the pasts we carry are not just weighing us down. The world is always being made. If it feels heavy, that’s because the only way to carry it is together.
In this age of migrations, of borders suddenly closed, of walls and long walks, what pasts are you carrying? How will you – how do you – get together with others, to share the burden, which is really the burden of having been born? How to help each other bear it? That’s the question, isn’t it?
This is Age of Humans. I’m Alex Chambers.
This episode was written and produced by me, Alex Chambers, with original music by Ramón Monras-Sender. Ramón also edited the script. The Hot Stuff editorial board includes Ross Gay, Essence London, Dave Torneo, Molly Weiler, and Kayte Young.
As usual, I’m going to end with a Hot Stuff tip for surviving the future. As we all shelter in place, it’s easy to feel alone. But you haven’t been taken up by the rapture yet. Let people know. This is how they did it in northern California, late March, in the year of the coronavirus. Thanks to Nick Ferrari and his son Jack for doing the field recording. And for the Q & A.
That’s it. Thanks for listening.
NOTES
Two of the major histories on the relationship between fossil fuels, capitalism, and modern democracy, are Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011), and Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016).
“For no one was more isolated than Benjamin, so utterly alone,” Hannah Arendt, “Introduction: Walter Benjamin, 1892-1940,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn. (London: Pimlico 1999 [German copyright 1955, English translation copyright 1968]), 15.
“He stands at the threshold of the last judgment” in Hannah Arendt, “Introduction,” Illuminations, 42.
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn. (London: Pimlico 1999 [German copyright 1955, English translation copyright 1968]), 245-55.
Much of the research about Benjamin’s life is from Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings’s Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).
“The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave,” Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, 3rd Ed. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2004/2016), 5.
“Giant camels roamed the Arctic,” Stephanie Paige Ogburn, “Ice-Free Arctic in Pliocene, Last Time CO2 Levels above 400 PPM,” Scientific American May 10, 2013.