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The end of whose history? Whose end of history?

Article Excerpt
Walter Benjamin's text on the Angel of History has attained cult status at the expense of being torn out of its intricate context in the Theses on the Philosophy of History and thus frequently misunderstood. It varies a bon mot of the German Early Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schlegel: "The historian is a prophet turned backwards". But while Schlegel retained at least a degree of optimism about the future, for all his disillusionment with the revolutionary dawn in France, Benjamin's angel, whose back is turned to the future not by choice, but by force majeure, has often been read as the ultimate expression of despair with history, as a rejection of all possibility of progress.

This interpretation does not stand up even within the text itself--the storm which blows the angel backwards into the future is "what we call progress", but the angel cannot see its goal. If he were to attempt to deduce it from the past, with its endlessly mounting pile of catastrophes, he could only predict a further, greater catastrophe; but Benjamin's image itself points the absurdity of such predictions. In the broader context of the Theses, however, its meaning is much clearer; they constitute a sustained attack on those who claim ownership of the end of history, and legitimate their tactics through this claim. The principal butt of this critique is, of course, the "revolutionary attentism" of the German Social Democrats, who were so convinced that "history was on their side" that they failed to take adequate steps to counter the "unforeseen" rise of Nazism. But Gunter Hartung has shown that the attack is also directed against the abuse of dialectic by the Stalinist party apparatus, as a constant guarantee of the correctness of the Party line. (1) Within the constraints of the consensus he and Brecht had reached in their conversations in Denmark, to avoid direct and open criticism of the Soviet Union at this critical juncture in the triumphal progress of Nazism, Benjamin could only adopt an oblique approach to the deformations of Stalinism. (2)

It is not hard to understand the depth of his depression, confronted by the apparently irresistible rise of the Fascists, the collapse of the socialist opposition, the corruption of socialism in the Soviet Union and the final kick in the guts, the Hitler-Stalin pact. But, in a sense, it only confirmed insights which had been present in his...

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