On the concept of history

tags

Marxism

Notes

The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time.

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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.

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nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.

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only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments.

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every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.

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In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradi- tion away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist.

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even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victori- ous.

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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a docu- ment of barbarism.

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The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.

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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 catas- trophe 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 blow- ing 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.

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At a moment when the politicians in whom the opponents of Fascism had placed their hopes are prostrate and confirm their defeat by betraying their own cause,

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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.

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We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter.

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