Walter Benjamin’s Final Days and His Cherished Paul Klee Drawing | S10, EP7 DIALOGUES PODCAST

Why It Matters

The story shows how a single artwork anchored Benjamin’s concept of history and how exile networks safeguarded pivotal ideas, reminding today’s scholars of the fragile transmission of cultural memory during crises.

Key Takeaways

• Benjamin bought Klee’s 1920 Angelus Novus drawing in Munich
• The drawing inspired Benjamin’s “Angel of History” metaphor
• Benjamin fled Nazi Germany, carried the drawing through Paris exile
• He entrusted the artwork to non‑Jewish librarian Georges Bataille for safekeeping
• Post‑war, the drawing resurfaced, influencing critical theory and memory studies

Summary

The Dialogues podcast episode examines Walter Benjamin’s relationship with Paul Klee’s 1920 drawing Angelus Novus and traces how both the artwork and Benjamin’s seminal “Thesis on the Philosophy of History” survived the Nazi onslaught.

Benjamin purchased the drawing in Munich a year after its exhibition, financing it through a loan from fellow Jewish philosopher Ernst. After fleeing Berlin in 1933, he carried the work to Paris, where he endured internment, statelessness, and relentless attempts to secure visas while drafting his historic essay.

In the essay’s famous ninth stanza Benjamin describes the Angel of History as an angel thrust forward by a storm he calls progress, eyes fixed on a pile of wreckage. The episode highlights the dense correspondence network—Adorno, Arendt, Georges Bataille—and Bataille’s crucial role in hiding the drawing and Benjamin’s manuscripts.

The survival of Angelus Novus and the thesis underscores how personal objects can shape intellectual theory and how exile networks preserved critical thought, offering contemporary scholars a vivid case study of memory, trauma, and the politics of cultural preservation.

Original Description

An interview about Walter Benjamin’s final days in Paris before his suicide in 1940 and the network of intellectuals who saved his most prized possessions from World War II, including the Paul Klee drawing that inspired one of his most famous and trenchant texts, the Theses on the Philosophy of History.

The exhibition Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds is on view at the Jewish Museum in New York through July 26, 2026. It traces the Swiss-German artist’s departure from the Bauhaus and his experience throughout the political upheaval of the 1930s prior to his death in 1940, providing a new basis for understanding his sociopolitical perspective and commitment to artistic freedom.

Lisa Saltzman is an art historian and Chair of Modern and Contemporary Art at Bryn Mawr College. Her current book project, To Make Whole What Has Been Smashed, explores how one prescient passage from Walter Benjamin’s posthumously published writings came to transform his most cherished possession—an idiosyncratic little Paul Klee drawing of an angel—into the "angel of history," a postwar icon of impotent witness to historical catastrophe.

Learn more about Paul Klee https://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/paul-klee

Learn more about the Jewish Museum Exhibition: https://thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/paul-klee-other-possible-worlds/

Browse publications about Paul Klee https://www.davidzwirner.com/collect/paul-klee

David Zwirner is an art gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong. We present physical and online exhibitions, podcasts, books, and more.

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