Winter 2001
Volume 28, Number 2

"Efface the traces!" is the refrain of the first poem in the "Primer for City-Dweller." In the bourgeois room, the opposite behavior has become habitual.... The interior obliges the house-dweller to adopt a maximum number of habits-- habits that do the interior more justice than himself.... Scheerbart, with his glass, and the Bauhaus, with its steel, have now created spaces in which it is difficult to leave traces.

--WALTER BENJAMIN

See Also O.K. Werckmeister: Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, or the Transfiguration of the Revolutionary into the Historian (Winter 1996) Andreas Huyssen: The Voids of Berlin (Autumn 1997) Jeffrey T. Schnapp: The Fabric of Modern Times (Autumn1997) Geoffrey Hartman: Benjamin in Hope (Winter 1999)

There is a picture by Klee which is called Angelus Novus. It depicts an angel who looks as if he were about to take leave of something at which he is staring. His eyes are widened, his mouth is opened, and his wings are extended. This is what the Angel of History must look like. He has turned his face toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, there he sees a single catastrophe, which ceaselessly piles rubble on top of rubble, tossing it before his feet.

---

Siah Armajani, is an architect living in Minneapolis.

Editorial Office main page * Back Issues * Subscribe to CI