The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) on the day of the inaugural session of Germany’s lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, in Berlin, March 25, 2025.Photo illustration: The Globe and Mail. Source photo: Lisi Niesner/REUTERS
Jonathan Garfinkel’s latest book is In a Land Without Dogs the Cats Learn to Bark.
I was standing in line for a recent exhibition at the Bode Museum, The Angel of History: Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee and the Berlin Angels 80 Years After WWII. It was a perfect museum Saturday in Berlin: rains pelted the city from the east. My girlfriend and I dressed up in our weekend best, our phones put away, a ritual of quiet. These days I look for ways to forsake the hourly witnessing of the unravelling of our civilization. Art is a perfect balm and antidote. In this case, it was an aesthetic escape into the sculptures and paintings of the 18th century. As the line for the exhibit snaked through the museum’s permanent collection, a ding rang from the inside of my suit jacket pocket. My girlfriend raised an eyebrow. I’d forgotten to turn off the ringer.
“Are you sure?” she said.
Without thinking I found myself pulling out the phone. There was a link to an article that a friend insisted I read, “RIGHT NOW.”
“It’s just one message,” I said. “I can read it before we go inside.”
My girlfriend went off to look at Byzantine art. I understood my reasoning was not unlike the proverbial nicotine addict taking one “final” cigarette. But it was too late. I clicked the link. The headline: “In eastern Germany, youths embrace nationalism, extremism.” Not new information. After all, one in five Germans had voted for the Alternative For Germany (AfD) in this year’s election, a record for the populist group the German secret service has designated a right-wing extremist organization that undermines democracy. It’s also common knowledge that young men are their biggest contingent of supporters, particularly in the former German Democratic Republic.
AfD’s win in Germany has some fearing for the future, while others worry of a return to the past
What shocked me were the quotes from teenagers who said things like, “Hitler is glorified big time” and that the far right is “cool.” At techno dance parties, the article reported, they are said to shout, “Foreigners out!” above the wailing music. In the Saxon city of Dessau-Rosslau, teens have been seen spraying swastika graffiti on bridges alongside the lyrics of Kanye West’s banned song Heil Hitler. That Nazism has become “part of teenage pop culture,” according to Projekt GegenPart, a group that tries to educate and intervene with populist youth in rural Germany, is more than worrisome. It’s totally messed up. The question is: how did we get here? And where will this go?
I toggled my phone into airplane mode, wishing to undo what I’d just seen.
As I eyed the line of people snaking through the museum, I thought back to the ’90s, when I first came to Berlin. My Polish-Jewish grandmother reprimanded me. “Why the hell would you go there of all places?! Why not New York or India?” I assured her Germany was different than it was in her time.
I told my grandmother stories of a man I’d befriended named Holly, whose father had been enlisted by the Hitler Jugend, and whom Holly rebelled against by avoiding military conscription and moving to Berlin in the late ’80s, where he was part of the German punk and electro-techno scene a.k.a. the Love Parade. Music – and partying – was personal. To live in Berlin meant to be anti-nationalist and anti-war.
It’s part of the reason I love Berlin. The city’s anti-nationalism not only assured me that Germany had moved on from its past. It spoke to my own present beliefs: that any nationalism fuels lines of hatred, through the creation of arbitrary borders and fictional mythologies. It’s the story of the 20th century and the ongoing headlines of bloodshed we cannot turn away from today.
A visitor looks at the 1945 photograph of a ruined Dresden called View From the City Hall Tower Towards the South by Richard Petersen at The Angel of History exhibit.Adam Berry/Getty Images
It was a different time. The Wall had just fallen. And some of us – Jews and Germans alike – were united in our transnational hatred of Nazis and anything resembling fascism. The only swastikas I saw in Berlin were the ones sprayed onto the doors of our local punk bar, Baiz, that said, “Gegen Nazis,” a line struck through it. No Nazis allowed.
We were traversing the edges toward a more open history, or so we believed. Parties in old Nazi bunkers were ubiquitous. But more than that, it was the conversations I remember, the descendants of Nazis and Holocaust survivors colliding over cheap wine and cigarettes. I admired the German monuments to its past. I believed the country wore its guilt on its sleeve.
After the fall of the Wall, Berlin was home for many because of cheap apartments that artists flocked to. But it also became home for a traumatic reckoning. When I attended the war crimes trial of death camp guard John Demjanjuk in Munich in 2009, it felt like a page had been turned in Germany: they had indeed learned from their past.
But Germany hasn’t, obviously. And given the way the rest of the Western democratic world is going, a worrisome foray into right-wing populism that skillfully manipulates history and facts, it’s fair to say that from Israel to the United States, from Hungary to China, from Russia to Sudan, few have learned from the 20th century. Why should Germans be different?
The truth is I have always held up Germany to a higher bar on the subject of political memory. In part it’s because of my Jewish grandmother: I wanted her to believe that people – and a nation – can change. Of course, it’s also due to the horrors Germany is responsible for. As a long-time visitor to and now resident of Berlin, it’s a given that the past is invoked in political speeches marking history. Even that is starting to change.
Recently the newly elected AfD mayor of Dessau-Rosslau, Laurens Nothdurft, on the 80th anniversary of the end of the war, didn’t mention Nazi war crimes or the mass murder of Jews in a speech because he was trying to “look forward” to “a positive future.” What positive future is he envisioning? Now that Germany has decided to rearm itself, closed its European borders and contemplates conscription for the first time since the fall of the Wall, what is going to happen to this country? Which is to ask: How did we forget so much?
The doorman tugged at my sleeve. Time to go in. I escaped the present into art: The Angel of History.
A publicity still from Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire), a 1987 film by Wim Wenders.ARGOS
One night many years ago, after a late one at the famous cocktail bar the Wurgeengel (the name is based on Luis Bunuel’s 1962 film, The Exterminating Angel), Holly and I rode our bicycles through Kreuzberg. We ended up outside a Catholic church, St. Michael’s, named after the archangel Michael. The roof had fallen in thanks to a bomb dropped by the Allies in February, 1945. The city had never repaired it, letting it exist as both homage to war and prayer for peace.
There was an eeriness to the ruin. For some reason this decadence, the caved in roof that sprouted vegetation, wayward leaves and ghost-like history, felt to me like an appropriate residence of angels. I felt the presence of something. And while I wouldn’t say I felt the archangel Michael’s protection against evil, I will say it made me a believer, not in God, but in angels and Berlin.
Since then I have come to associate Berlin with angels. It is not an original thought. In Tiergarten, an angel peers down from the Siegessäule, spreading its wings like a prayer, beckoning the city. Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire) famously imagines a Berlin rife with angels who listen in on the inner thoughts of its citizens – a gesture both poetic and Stasi-like. Following two angels – one played by Bruno Ganz, the other by Otto Sander – we watch as the angels whisper into the ears of its citizens, protecting them, encouraging them through their day-to-day affairs. An homage to the destruction and rebuilding of a city constantly changing, the angels act more as loving witnesses than saviours (one Berlin citizen considers jumping off a bridge toward his death; Otto Sander tries to talk him down; for a moment he reconsiders; in the end, suicide wins). These angels move back and forth over the Wall like a wind of despair. The liminal reality of Berlin as a divided city, East and West, helped reinforce Mr. Wenders’ notion of in-between worlds, the divine and the earthly, good and evil. Maybe this is why I believe St. Michael’s is the place of angels. It speaks to our divided selves.
Sure enough, a short excerpt from the film was featured in The Angel of History. Central to the exhibition, however, was Angelus Novus (New Angel in Latin), an oil monoprint from Paul Klee on loan from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. While Klee never lived in Berlin (he taught at the Bauhaus and was a key figure in German art before he fled the country in 1933), his “Angel” became associated with the city thanks to the Berlin resident philosopher Walter Benjamin whose essay, Theses on the Philosophy of History, interpreted it.
A visitor to The Angel of History exhibit in Berlin views Paul Klee’s Angelus NovusAdam Berry/Getty Images
Benjamin was obsessed with the work; he’d bought it from Klee in 1920 and carried it with him to Paris when he fled the Nazis. When Benjamin tried to leave France for Spain, he entrusted the painting with Theodor Adorno, who was supposed to give it to Benjamin when he made it to America. But Benjamin never did escape Europe. He swallowed a cyanide pill when his exit papers from France were denied – he knew returning to France was a death sentence. In his will, the painting was left to the mystic Gershom Scholem, who donated it to the Israel museum.
But Klee’s painting doesn’t really do it for me. It’s a troubled, haunted work, and it’s not what I look for in an angel. Klee’s abstract figure is rather unangelic – part winged bird with a face resembling a startled horse, looking not toward the past, but just … the side. As if casting a glance at a scurrying squirrel through Tiergarten park.
Paul Klee’s work Angelus Novus once belonged to German Jewish philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin who wrote how its face “… is turned towards the past … seeing one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.”Israel Museum in Jerusalem/Public Domain
In the winter, I like to spend time in many of Berlin’s graveyards (as do many Berliners: cemetery cafes are in vogue at the moment). There’s one graveyard in particular I like. I’m drawn to the angels at the gate. When I walk past them, I feel I’m passing from one world to the next, and the angels are shepherding me through. They bring me comfort. It’s not metaphysical, but practical. I step out of the mayhem of the city and find peace amongst the quiet and the dead. I know my angels are far from the angels of the Bible, frightening and angry creatures who act as messengers of divine will and agents of redemption. Still, I like them nonetheless.
I turned back to Klee’s painting. It didn’t just confuse me; his un-angelic angel unsettled me. It neither brought me closer to the divine nor resembled anything peaceful. He seemed to awkwardly beckon me for its attention, holding his hands up, asking people to stop. Attend to what? Stop what?
Benjamin wrote, “Where we perceive a chain of events, [the angel of history] 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.”
Maybe my whole notion of angels is backward and upside down.
An exterior view of the Bauhaus in Dessau, where artist Paul Klee taught in the 1920s. Plans to celebrate the centenary of the world famous design school’s move to the city from Weimar is being challenged by far-right Alternative for Germany, who argue that the international and modernist vision of the Bauhaus ran counter to the traditional and nationalist German values they promote.GETTY IMAGES
The past five years have been a trying accumulation of catastrophes. From the pandemic to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, from the ruination of Gaza to an American fascism dressed in populism, coupled with economic uncertainty and rapid environmental collapse that will only worsen, the feeling of overwhelming despair is too much. We look for answers like we look for angels, the kind we hope to find. Maybe that’s why to the youths of Dessau, Nazis are cool again, and Hitler the exterminating angel will save us.
Benjamin’s angel is different.
His angel of history lives amidst the capitalist catastrophe of our times, one disaster to the next. How do we break this cycle? Can we?
In Mr. Wenders’ film, when the angel cannot stop the man from choosing suicide, he lets out a desperate cry. What upsets me about Klee’s angel is his similar sense of horror and paralysis. Instead of saving us, he’s a powerless witness. Much like Benjamin felt in 1930s Europe. Mr. Wenders, Benjamin and Klee’s angels are miserable realists, not saviours nor icons of peace. Amidst their silence, the incomprehensible unfolds. They mirror our mouths agape in horror. No words, no prayer, no comfort, nothing to stop the continuing violence but ourselves, whom Benjamin, rightfully so, had little faith in.
The marble sculpture Angel by Giambattista Bregno, made in 1511, taken from the Santa Maria dei Servi church in Venice, then later damaged in 1945, at The Angel of History.Adam Berry/Getty Images