Warsaw: tracking the city Introduction

摘要

In Walter Benjamin's celebrated commentary on Paul Klee's Angelus Novus, the startled angel who looks out at the observer of the painting is imagined as the 'angel of history'. Caught in the storm that issues from Paradise, its wings are flattened and useless, pressed back and pinioned by the wild wind that blows against them, while wreckage piles up before the angel's horrified but powerless gaze. This allusion to a figure and its witness of catastrophic history-indeed perhaps of catastrophe beyond history, in so far as all narration inevitablyrnproves inadequate to it-might be compared to a photograph of a young girl taken in Warsaw in the aftermath of World War II and printed here.