On the Concept of History Quotes

“There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.”
― Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

“The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.”
― Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.”
― Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

“Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history... There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.”
― Walter Benjamin, On the Concept 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 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 in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a 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.”
― Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency.”
― Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

“Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”
― Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

“The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.”
― Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

“Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history... There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one.”
― Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

“A cronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history, To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past - which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has past become citable in all its moments.”
― Walter Benjamin, Tesi di filosofia della storia

“Nothing has corrupted the German working class so much as the notion that it was moving with the current. It regarded technological developments as the fall of the stream with which it thought it was moving. From there it was but a step to the illusion that the factory work which was supposed to tend toward technological progress constituted a political achievement. The old Protestant ethics of work was resurrected among German workers in secularized form. The Gotha Program already bears traces of this confusion, defining labor as ‘the source of all wealth and all culture.’ Smelling a rat, Marx countered that ‘the man who possesses no other property than his labor power’ must of necessity become ‘the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners”
― Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

“There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism.”
― Walter Benjamin, On the Concept 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.”
― Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

“Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden. This conviction, which had a brief resurgence in the Spartacist group, has always been objectionable to Social Democrats. Within three decades they managed virtually to erase the name of Blanqui, though it had been the rallying sound that had reverberated through the preceding century. Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”
― Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

“Er hat das Antlitz der Vergangenheit zugewendet. Wo eine Kette von Begebenheiten vor uns erscheint, da sieht er eine einzige Katastrophe, die unablässig Trümmer auf Trümmer häuft und sie ihm vor die Füße schleudert. Er möchte wohl verweilen, die Toten wecken und das Zerschlagene zusammenfügen. Aber ein Sturm weht vom Paradiese her, der sich in seinen Flügeln verfangen hat und so stark ist, dass der Engel sie nicht mehr schließen kann. Dieser Sturm treibt ihn unaufhaltsam in die Zukunft, der er den Rücken kehrt, während der Trümmerhaufen vor ihm zum Himmel wächst. Das, was wir den Fortschritt nennen, ist dieser Sturm.”
― Walter Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte: Neu bearbeitete Ausgabe (Klassiker der ofd edition)

“Articolare storicamente il passato non significa conoscerlo <>. Significa impadronirsi di un ricordo come esso balena nell'istante di un pericolo.”
― Walter Benjamin, Tesi di filosofia della storia