It could not have been more perfect. The light was right, the temperature warm, but not hot, there was a feeling of adventure in the air. After way too many days listlessly stuck at home with the oppressive heat, I was exploring the sandstone cliffs of Cape Kiwanda, located some 2 hours southwest of Portland at the shores of the Pacific.

The colors and configurations were breathtaking, I could have photographed all day long. Much of it reminded me of Paul Klee (and so some of today’s images are overlays of his art and nature, just to give you the idea.)

The association had probably been triggered by the fact that I had yearned to visit an exhibition that recently closed in Berlin, and was stuck with thinking around the issues it raised, without being able to travel to see it.

This photograph of a sandstone angel overlooking the bombed-out city of Dresden in 1945 was part of the show at the Bode Museum, which brought together images of angels from the Berlin museums that were damaged or burned during the Second World War.

Richard Peter Sr. View from the town hall tower to the south, 1945 © Deutsche Fotothek / Richard Peter sen.

The Angel of History: Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee and the Berlin Angels 80 Years after World War II centered around Paul Klee’s most famous artwork Angelus Novus and Benjamin’s texts laying out his thoughts on the “angel of history,” as he called him. The exhibition also showed excerpts of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire(1987), a film in which two angels stand watch over a divided Berlin and in which explicit reference is made to Klee’s 1920 watercolor and Benjamin’s interpretation of the artwork.

Here is what Benjamin wrote in the ninth thesis of his 1940 essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History”:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. 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. 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. The 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.^[3]

The piles of debris are, of course, not restricted to the past – we see them growing skyward all around us, in the present, if we don’t close our eyes in desperation.

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The look backwards towards the past, however, is under (re)construction – what we are allowed to see now depends on the whims of those who think they own the interpretation of the past.

President Trump’s executive order, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” aims to review and align the Smithsonian Institution’s exhibitions and materials with his interpretation of American history, focusing on removing what he calls “improper ideology.” This initiative is part of a broader effort to ensure that national museums reflect a narrative of American exceptionalism and unity ahead of the 250th anniversary of the United States. The White House

Whether it is controlling the Smithsonian, other museums or our universities, the National Park Service or the National Endowments for the Arts, Public Broadcasting or the Voice of America or shifting public to private education – it boils down to preventing people to gain knowledge and engage in independent thought – both reviled by authoritarians. (I had previously written about fascism and education in more detail here.)

While we still can, let’s look back at history not so long ago.

(My sources for today are the general education you get when visiting the site of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, Michael Burleigh’s The Third Reich: A New History, a moral history reasserting the existence of a totalitarian dictatorship in Germany, Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler: A Memoir, and, most importantly, Richard. J. Evans’ The Coming of the Third Reich. It is an intellectually rich guide, written in totally accessible language and structured in ways that really cover all aspects of the German people falling for the lure of Nazism.)

 

From its very beginnings, the National Socialist regime of Germany tried to shape cultural displays and production, trying to force German culture into the frame of the preferred ideology. Art that did not conform to the Nazi norms was declared degenerate, confiscated and/or destroyed, Paul Klee’s works among them (and he was fired from his position as a professor at a prestigious art school). Work was sold on the international market to enrich the regime and pay for war preparations. This was, of course, just one facet of societal control.

If we look at the larger picture, the goal was to amass absolute power right off the bat – handily provided by the Enabling Act which got passed in 1933. It allowed Hitler to pass laws without the consent of the Reichstag, basically eliminating all power for our parliament. If you look at power consolidation here, now, you will not have to venture far from the text of Project 2025, or, for that matter, the Supreme Court decisions of late.

One of the Nazi regime’s early undertakings was to identify minorities who could be dehumanized, labeled as them to create an us, both through rhetoric and through punitive actions of cleaning the streets of subhumans (Untermenschen) and later people with disabilities – we know what ultimately followed. (Rounding up the homeless in Washington, D.C. anyone? Putting immigrants or political opponents on trial or in deportation camps?)

Parallel to that, there were purges of the civil service, firing all who were deemed illegal or simply disloyal from professional institutions. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service from 1933 allowed the immediate removal of Jews and political opponents. (Just peruse the jobless numbers in Washington D.C. right now. Or look at the state of the Veterans’ Administration.)

At the same time, Hitler confronted military leaders and started to shape the military as his own power tool. Here is a link to the historical time line of submission of the military, documented in the encyclopedia of the U.S. Holocaust Museum. (As of this writing, military personnel from numerous states have been deployed in Washington, D.C. Armed, no less.)

In addition to the military, the Nazi regime established the Geheime Staatspolizei, the Gestapo. They wanted a centralized political police force that would be directly reporting to Nazi leadership, undermining state and local police. It took but three years, to 1936, to form such a force; that summer it was combined with the criminal police (what would here be the feds) under SS leader Himmler and his deputy Heydrich. The Gestapo’s mission was to “investigate and combat all attempts to threaten the state.” It could arrest, try and send those who criticized the regime to camps, under the 1934 law that made it illegal to criticize the Nazi Party. It could monitor individual behavior, and even send people directly to camps, under a mechanism called protective custody. They were allowed arbitrary warrantless searches and surveillance on mail and telephone calls. (Here is a smart piece on why it is risky to form analogies between ICE and the Gestapo, yet commonly seen these days.)

Note that the vast majority of Aryan Germans did not encounter or even expect to encounter the Gestapo during the 1930s. But the Gestapo was a constant threat for political opponents, religious dissenters, homosexuals, people of color and Jews. In fact, both Klee and Benjamin had to flee their country. Paul Klee left for Switzerland in 1935 and got very ill very fast. He died in June 1940, after 5 painful and increasingly debilitating years, from an autoimmune disorder triggered by stress as one factor, a disease that destroyed his body; his friend, admirer and collector Walter Benjamin took his own life but three months later, stranded in Spain while trying to escape the Nazis.

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Exhibitions like the one in Berlin allow us to look back at the horrors brought upon human kind and the environment by a fascistic regime. They bear witness to the death, the loss, the damage wrought by war, and make us think about the reach this suffering had for subsequent generations. It is this kind of honest assessment about the ravages of historical events that many fear will be suppressed by the administration’s executive orders and institutions bending the knees.

What I don’t understand, though, is that we seem to be oblivious to this history even while we are still able to look at it, read about it, being taught about it. How can we so blindly follow the play book that brought us darkness once and is likely to bring it again in one form or another? A play book, step by step mirrored by the one now catapulted into use under the guidance of the Federalist society? Amassing absolute power, destroying democratic norms, ignoring the rule of law, marginalizing and demonizing scape goats to speak to the baser instincts of people who feel powerless, has plunged the world into catastrophe. What prevents us from learning from this? Honest question, not a rhetorical one.

Richard J. Evans, citing journalist Sebastian Haffner who interviewed contemporary witnesses, provides some hint at how the process of voluntary subjugation psychologically unfolds:

“Lawyer Raimund Pretzel asked himself what had happened to the 56 per cent of Germans who had voted against the Nazis in the elections of 5 March 1933. How was it, he wondered, that this majority had caved in so rapidly? Why had virtually every social, political and economic institution in Germany fallen into the hands of the Nazis with such apparent ease? ‘The simplest, and, if you looked deeper, nearly always the most basic reason’, he concluded, ‘was fear. Join the thugs to avoid being beaten up. Less clear was a kind of exhilaration, the intoxication of unity, the magnetism of the masses.’ Many, he also thought, had felt betrayed by the weakness of their political leaders, from Braun and Severing to Hugenberg and Hindenburg, and they joined the Nazis in a perverse act of revenge. Some were impressed by the fact that everything the Nazis had predicted seemed to be coming true. ‘There was also (particularly among intellectuals) the belief that they could change the face of the Nazi Party by becoming a member, even now shift its direction. Then of course many jumped on the bandwagon, wanted to be part of a perceived success.’ In the circumstances of the Depression, when times were hard and jobs were scarce, people clung to the mechanical routine ofdaily life as the only form of security: not to have gone along with the Nazis would have meant risking one’s livelihood and prospects, to have resisted could mean risking one’s life. “( Haffner, S. Defying Hitler pg. 111-114.)

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So the angel of history looks at piles of debris. Sandstone is also a pile of debris, generally speaking. It is made out of fragments of other minerals or rocks, grains from quartz and feldspar flying through the air and accumulation for eons, then cemented by silica, calcite, and iron oxide, which contribute to the color the we see. Silica and calcite are general very light in color or even colorless, iron oxide, however, is rust-red and often stains the sandstone that way.

The cliffs at Cape Kiwanda are made of some 18-million-year-old particles, and the fact that these formations still stand has to do with their position relative to a haystack rock in front of them – it breaks up the wave action, sheltering the walls from the ever eroding surf, although erosion is not stopped completely.

Bits and pieces are constantly worn away, and sometimes massive sections drop off into the ocean. Two years ago, two large sinkhole appeared with months of each other on top of the cliffs, forcing a costly re-fencing to protect the public wandering around there.

Climate change makes it all worse. More frequent storms whipping the waves, longer periods of rain, heavier rainfall in general during climate patterns like the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) which is brought about by rising temperatures, create more and more damage. Of course, whether we will learn about climate change or support science to combat it, is another question that warrants looking at historical precedents. Doesn’t look too good. The Angel of History is at this point probably better off flying around with the pelicans to distract him/herself rather than be glued in horror to the views of wreckage accumulating around them…..

Then again, Robert Reich reminds us: “Remember: If we allow ourselves to fall into fatalism, or wallow in disappointment, or become resigned to what is rather than what should be, we will lose the long game. The greatest enemy of positive social change is cynicism about what can be changed.”

What he says.

Music today are George Crumb compositions reacting to some of Klee’s paintings. Here, an here.