Preliminary note:

I have recently been reading and trying to make sense of Walter Benjamin’s “Über den Begriff der Geschichte“—as a German native speaker I am naturally consulting the German original—from which this quotation is taken from, but I have only started working with secondary literature (it is a hobby, not what I actually do research), because it is not exactly an easy text. As such, this attempt is necessarily preliminary, and far from finalized. It is also very much "meta": after all, the text, and interpreting the text, falls into the domain of philosophy, not of history. Nevertheless, I will principally try and interpret the text in its relationship to history and historiography.

1. Introduction

First, let us talk about the text the quotation is taken from. “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” is a collection of eighteen (plus two appended) theses which could, in theory, be interpreted stand-alone, but which are thematically interrelated. The arguments and ideas contained within the text are not constructed linearly, and are rarely made explicit (the most explicit may be his biting critique of social-democratic political ineptitude in thesis XI), and the general style is rich with metaphor; the prose is certainly of a literary quality, and religious metaphors permeate the text. The vivid image of the Angelus Novus, which fuses aesthetics, theology, ethics, politics, and history, is making up the entirety of thesis IX.

As these terms imply: there are many possible interpretations, both in context with the remainder of the theses, and with Benjamin’s work at large itself (not to speak of possible literary-critical interpretations). The obvious, albeit superficial reading is a critique of contemporary politics, of Nazi Germany, or possibly a reaction to the Hitler-Stalin-pact (1). Furthermore, it has been pointed out that the theologico-political imagery permeating the essay perhaps reflected a veiled debate, a reaction to Carl Schmitt’s political theology, from which Benjamin differed in his general critique of worldly power, in which he elsewhere saw an “anthesis of the ruler’s power and ability” (2). Andreas Greiert sees in Benjamin’s motif of the “history as catastrophe” a critical reception of rational man born from secularization; he argues that Benjamin’s intent is of a religious (kabbalistic-Jewish) motivation, an insistence that “humankind,” fallen from Paradise, through which they lost their capacity to truly understand the meaning of things, “owe the world its salvation” [“Der Mensch schuldet der Welt die Erlösung”] (3). Benjamin once stated that, „The highest category of world history, to avouch for the singular sense of events, is guilt” (4); accordingly, Fenves argues that guilt accumulates over time:

Since the directionality of this process [i.e., history] owes its origin to guilt, which always deepens, the ‘times’ in which the historical continuum collapses cannot fail to be redemptive. (5)

The problem with the angelic metaphor, which alludes to this theological dimension, lies in the phrase of the angel’s wish to stop. One interpretation is an implication of the angel “stopping” representing the “end of history” in a quite literal sense: of God ending the historical world which is the result of humankind’s fall from Paradise, and the messianic promise of salvation being fulfilled. History, in this sense, is merely a delaying (“Aufschub”) of the inevitable, but it also is a chance for the redemption of guilt (hence, every human generation is imbued with a latent messianic force) (6).

(see reply for cont.)

Notes to part 1:

(1) cf. Gagnebin, Jeanne-Marie 2006, p. 285.

(2) „Antithese von Herrschermacht und Herrschervermögen,“ Walter Benjamin‘s Gesammelte Schriften I/1, pg. 250, cited after Greiert 2012, p. 359-360.

(3) Greiert 2012, p. 364–366; quotation on pg. 366.

(4) “Die höchste Kategorie der Weltgeschichte, um die Einsinnigkeit des Geschehens zu verbürgen, ist die Schuld.“ In Gesammelte Schriften VI, p. 92; cited after Greiert 2012, 365.

(5) Fenves, 2011, p. 244.

(6) Following the argument proposed by Greiert 2012, p. 368-370.

First of all, thank you OP for getting me out of my years (decade?) of lurking reddit without an account. I'm not a philosopher, literary theorist or anyone who deals with Walter Benjamin's writings in a professional capacity, but I'll try my best.

The quoted passage came from Benjamin's essay, "Theses on the Philosophy of History." The first thing to note about this essay is that it was written in 1940. Benjamin committed suicide later the same year while fleeing Nazi persecution. (A German Jew by birth, he made his home in Paris during the 1930's after the rise of the Third Reich. He was forced to flee after the French surrender.)

These dark decades of European history form the backdrop against which this passage (and Benjamin's philosophy as a whole) must be understood. But Benjamin's view on history is not as grim as a reader from 2022 might expect given the foregoing exposition on his life. One of the key ideas in his view of history is that of the "weak messianic power," which comes from an earlier part of the same essay:

"There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim." (p.256 in my copy of Illuminations)

So you can sense a tension here. A "messianic power" is, of course, the power to save, to remedy, to "make whole what has been smashed." That describes the angel's instincts, too, the desire to undo the "catastrophe" of the past. (I'm not saying that the "catastrophe" observed by the angel is a metaphor for the catastrophe of the 1930's - far from it - but that the latter would have colored the former.) But this power is only a weak one. There are certain things we can do as the generation alive on Earth, but inevitably, the past accumulates wreckage upon wreckage, history moves forward, and some (many) things are just buried unredeemed. That is what the angel observes.

I hope that explains the themes of violence, catastrophe and (lack of) redemption in this passage. Note, however, Benjamin does not portray this process in an entirely negative light. He may be talking about 1930's Europe but he is not just talking about 1930's Europe - he is talking about all history. In other words, all history is like 1930's Europe in that it destroys just as it moves forward (in a chronological sense, not a moral one). Therefore its driving force is divine (from Paradise), and it is ever driven towards the future.

This passage is, therefore, full of contradictions, and therein lies half its power. It is sorrowful but contains a glimmer of hope. It does not outright deny the Enlightenment ideal of progress, but brings out the human cost (the wreckage upon wreckage) behind what posterity might call progress. (In this sense it is a critique of that 19th-century ideology as well.) Finally, Benjamin was a Marxist, and in other parts of the essay he talks about historical materialism. But this passage embodies an almost Judeo-Christian view of history. Hannah Arendt, in her introduction to Illuminations, wrote that "nothing could be more 'undialectic' than this attitude in which the 'angel of history' does not dialectically move forward into the future, but has his face 'turned towards the past.'" (p.12) This is not to preclude human agency, but it lays bare the insurmountable loss inherent in that process we call history.

Source: Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. New York: Harcourt. 1968.