who wrote the angel of history (in theses on the philosophy of history )
Theses on the Philosophy of History One key to Benjamin’s critique of historicism is his rejection of the past as a continuum of progress. This is most apparent in thesis XI. His alternate vision of the past and “progress” is best represented by thesis IX, which employs Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus (1920) as the "angel of history," with his back turned to the future: "Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet [...] That which we call progress, is this storm." Benjamin thus inverts Marxist historical materialism, which was concerned with predicting a revolutionary future, to assert that historical materialism's true task ought to be, in Beiner's words, "to save the past."[3]