Without Lifting A Finger

Here Kluge is looking down, both literally and metaphorically, from a vantage point above the destruction. The ironic amazement with which he registers the facts allows him to maintain the essential distance of an observer. Yet even Kluge, that most enlightened of writers, suspects that we are unable to learn from the misfortunes we bring on ourselves, that we are incorrigible and will continue along the beaten tracks that bear some slight relation to the old road network. For all Kluge’s intellectual steadfastness, therefore, he looks at the destruction of his hometown with the horrified fixity of Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history,” whose “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, make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence tha...

I called Peter Gutman. How does it happen, I asked him, that our civilization brings forth monsters? Thwarted life, he said. What else. Thwarted lives. I don’t know, I said. Maybe we’re born monsters? A storm is blowing from paradise, Peter Gutman said. It pushes the angel of history backward ahead of it. But it doesn’t turn him into a monster. But he doesn’t have eyes in the back of his head, I said. No, he doesn’t, Peter Gutman said. That’s just it: he’s blind. Blind to history, I said. Blind to horrors, if you prefer, Madame. Thank you very much, I said and hung up. I thought: Being blind to horrors would be a good thing, who could live keeping all the horrors in mind. There has to be something like an expelling, extruding, exorcising of horror, I thought. I remembered how you couldn’t stop picturing your cleaning woman’s young son who had gotten stuck under a raft while swimming in the Warta and drowned, and how his mother had had to watch when they pulled the dead boy out of th...