In Every Case The Storyteller Is A

This Is How One Pictures The Angel Of History. His Face Is Turned Toward The Past. Where We Perceived 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 From Paradise; It Has Got Caught In His Wings With Such Violence That The Angel Can No Longer Close Them. This Storm Irresistably Propels Him Into The Future To Which His Back Is Turned, While The Pile Of Debris Before Him Grows Skyward. The Storm Is What We Call Progress.

The Crowd Is The Veil Through Which The Familiar City Beckons To The Flâneur As Phantasmagoria-now A Landscape, Now A Room.

In The Convulsions Of The Commodity Economy, We Begin To Recognize The Monuments Of The Bourgeoisie As Ruins Even Before They Have Crumbled.

Experience Has Taught Me That The Shallowest Of Communist Platitudes Contains More Of A Hierarchy Of Meaning Than Contemporary Bourgeois Profundity.

Opinions Are To The Vast Apparatus Of Social Existence What Oil Is To Machines: One Does Not Go Up To A Turbine And Pour Machine Oil Over It; One Applies A Little To Hidden Spindles And Joints That One Has To Know.