On the Concept of History

Introduction

Benjamin wrote these eighteen short theses in Paris in early 1940, a few months before his flight and death. They were not intended for publication; Hannah Arendt brought a copy to Adorno in New York, and the Institute for Social Research first printed them in 1942 in a mimeographed memorial volume. The first thesis compares historical materialism to a chess-playing automaton secretly guided by a hunchbacked dwarf – theology. Thesis IX interprets Paul Klee’s drawing Angelus Novus, which Benjamin owned. The theses attack the Social Democratic faith in progress and historicism’s empathy with the victors: there is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

More works by Walter Benjamin

• 1935The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction