HELMUT OEHRING
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A N G E L O F H I S T O R Y
There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It depicts an angel who looks as if he is about to move away from something he is staring at. His eyes are wide open, his mouth is open, and his wings are spread out. This must be what the angel of history looks like. He has his face turned toward the past. Where we see a chain of events, he sees a single catastrophe that piles rubble upon rubble and hurls it at his feet. He would like to linger, awaken the dead, and piece together what has been shattered. But a storm blows from paradise, caught in his wings, and is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him inexorably into the future, to which he turns his back, while the pile of rubble before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.
Walter Benjamin On the Concept of History 1940
Angelus Novus I is an ensemble study for eleven instrumental soloists based on the painting of the same name by Paul Klee from 1920, which inspired Walter Benjamin to write his historical theses on the “angel of history.” Klee's watercolor drawing marks the end of a long series of studies by the painter on the angel motif, yet it points to things to come through its serial principle and, at the same time, through its philosophical content and prophetic potential in view of the historical and biographical events of the 1930s and 1940s — the Nazi dictatorship, World War II, the Shoah, as well as the death of the “degenerate artist” Klee in exile in Switzerland and Benjamin's suicide while fleeing the Nazis. For Helmut Oehring, who often composes in cycles, this ensemble study is the beginning of his five-part Angelus Novus cycle of various genres based on Klee's painting and Benjamin's texts.
But those who knew the man and his work will never forget either of them.
Hans Mayer, 18 October 1940 in the obituary for Walter Benjamin's death on 26 September 1940
...the most eerie version of myself standing outside.
Dear child, oh, I beg you,
Pray for the hunchbacked little man.
I imagine that the “whole life” that people say passes before the eyes of the dying is composed of images like those that the little man has of us all. They flit by quickly, like the pages of those tightly bound little books that were once the precursors of our cinematographs... The little man has these images of me too.
Walter Benjamin