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  detail from "Landscape, Istria," Mitja Koman  
  "This is how one pictures the angel of history," writes Walter Benjamin in 1940. "His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that 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."

Time and again, as I was leafing through books, trying to make sense of what is happening in the world and not succeeding, I have thought of Benjamin's angel (he appears in "Theses on the Philosophy of History"). Though World War II had begun and he was a German Jew, Walter Benjamin could not have known of the Holocaust when he wrote this text. Yet as readers, our knowledge of it and of Benjamin's untimely death informs the text retroactively.

  
    ...as I consider the war pictures...  
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