link - Trent University

JONATHAN BORDO
Trent University
THE HOMER OF POTSDAMERPLATZ—WALTER BENJAMIN IN
WIM WENDERS’S SKY OVER BERLIN/WINGS OF DESIRE,
A CRITICAL TOPOGRAPHY
Abstract
The essay explores the deep and pervasive influence of Walter Benjamin
in Wim Wenders’s Der Himmel über Berlin (The Sky over Berlin
under the English title Wings of Desire). The essay draws its title
from the Benjaminean storyteller named “Homer” in the film, whose
search for the lost Potsdamerplatz is the theme of his principal
recitation. The text offers a chorography of Potsdamerplatz to show
why Wim Wenders needs Walter Benjamin as his companion in
order to recover the heart and soul of the then divided city of Berlin,
still submerged in the nightmare of its recent Nazi past. Wenders’s
dependency on Walter Benjamin sheds light on and gives content
to the filmmaker’s ambition to make film as an art of memory.
Without making any obvious declarations about the Holocaust,
Himmel über Berlin points a way toward a civic remembrance that
goes beyond the piety of the monument and the politics of identity
to fuse urgency with inwardness in a treasure house of memorable
images.
I began seriously to entertain writing about Der
Himmel über Berlin (literally, “The Sky over Berlin”
known under the English title, Wings of Desire) when
I wanted to show, at least to my own satisfaction,
and with procedures that were in my grasp, the
deep and pervasive influences of Walter Benjamin
and Rainer Maria Rilke in this film. To watch
the film was as if I was reading Benjamin and
Rilke. There were some signs dotted throughout
the work, akin to the angel Damiel’s footprints
after he falls to earth to become human. Their
traces seem to me everywhere throughout the film.
When I watched the film, my own private “thoughtvoices” (Gedankenstimmen) murmured Benjamin, Rilke,
Walter Rilke, Rainer Maria Benjamin. Why was
that? This essay draws its title from the storyteller
in the film. Played by Curt Bois, the storyteller is
named “Homer.” This Homer hangs around in
the City Library and patrols the wasteland called
Potsdamerplatz as his beat (fig. 1).
His search for Potsdamerplatz is the theme of
his principal recitation. Because of his cathexis to that
place, I call him “The Homer of Potsdamerplatz”
and his recitation, after Brecht, “The Song of
Potsdamerplatz.” Because the recitation about that
place occurs at that place, I call his recitation a
Fig. 1. Still from Wim Wenders, Himmel ueber Berlin, 1987. Courtesy of Wenders Images.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009
Also available online – brill.nl/ima
IMAGES 2
DOI: 10.1163/187180008X408618
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“chorography.” This recitation is inaugurated by
the question, “Where is Potsdamerplatz?” My essay
takes up Homer’s chorography of Potsdamerplatz
to show why Wim Wenders needs Walter Benjamin
as his companion in order to recover the heart
and soul of Berlin, a divided city in 1987, still
submerged in the nightmare of its recent Nazi
past.1
I
In a writing that Wenders considered a prologue
to the film, he had this to say about the film, why
it takes place in Berlin, why the film takes the
visual form it does, why there are angels, why they
behave in such odd and erratic ways and other
such matters:
When God, endlessly disappointed, finally prepared
to turn his back on the world forever, it happened
that some of his angels disagreed with him and took
the side of humans, saying they deserved to be given
a second chance. Angry at being crossed, God banished them to what was then the most terrible place
on earth: BERLIN. And then turned away. All this
happened at the time that we today call the end of
the Second World War. Since that time these fallen
angels from the second angelic rebellion, have been
imprisoned in the city, with no prospect of release,
let alone of being readmitted to heaven.2
87
Berlin in ruins at the end of World War II is inextricably tied to the ruination unleashed as total
war from Berlin as the power center of the Third
Reich. Berlin might then be compared to ancient
cities under a curse, and Berlin indeed had a special curse, because its utter ruination was sealed
by the decision of Adolf Hitler to make Berlin his
tomb. Hitler made Berlin his fate. So in Wenders’s
ontotheological pronouncement, the fate of humanity unfolds in the ruins of Berlin and the search
for reasons for human survival, to counter God’s
disgust, is in conditions of utter deprivation and
inhumanity.
How could Berlin live with and live down its
own infamous history? Wenders is not the only contemporary German artist to situate his work in
ruins. Anselm Kiefer had already constituted ruins
as the visual surface upon which to exhibit critically and allegorically the nightmare of German
history from his early Burning Landscape, which
refigures Caspar David Friedrich to his later monumental ruin surfaces (fig. 2). Finally, W.G. Sebald
has made ruins and the quest for redemption in
ruins, the topic of his literary life work. His last
work is a genealogy of the ruins of German cities.
Toward the end of that work, Sebald cautions his
(German) readers with the following reminder:
Because of their solidarity with humans, the Herr
Gott has condemned some of his angels to be
among them, condemned to be confined in the
City of Berlin. The proem corroborates that the end
of World War II is the zero point of Berlin. Berlin
is where the angels are consigned to be because
Berlin “was the most terrible place on earth.”
There is a perhaps perverse temptation to ask what
made Berlin such a particularly terrible place then?
It surely cannot be because of the sheer and awful
carnage of a city reduced to rubble. In such terms
how could Berlin be the worst? But if “most terrible place on earth” is understood in terms of the
Herr Gott’s disgust for humankind, then Berlin
might qualify because Berlin had been the capital of the Nazi state that had unleashed utter
devastation against humanity itself from there.
The majority of Germans today know, or so at least
it is to be hoped, that we actually provoked the annihilation of the cities in which we once lived. Scarcely
anyone can now doubt that Air Marshall Göring
would have wiped out London if his technical
resources had allowed him to do so. Speer describes
Hitler at a dinner in the Reich Chancellery in 1940
imagining the total destruction of the capital of the
British Empire: “Have you ever seen a map of
London? It is so densely built that one fire alone
would be enough to destroy the whole city, just as
it did two hundred years ago. Göring will start fires
all over London, fires everywhere, with countless
incendiary bombs of an entirely new type. Thousands
of fires . . . we can destroy London completely. What
will their firemen be able to do once it’s really burning?” This intoxicating vision of destruction coincides
with the fact that the real pioneering achievement
in bomb warfare—Guernica, Warsaw, Belgrade,
Rotterdam—were the work of Germans.3
1
All the image citations for Der Himmel über Berlin (placed
in brackets in the notes) are based upon the notations in
Wim Wenders und Peter Handke, Der Himmel über Berlin: Ein
Filmbuch (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1998).
2
Wim Wenders, The Logic of Images: Essays and Conversations,
trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 78.
3
W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (Toronto:
Vintage, 2003), 103.
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Fig. 2. Anselm Kiefer, Die Ordnung der Engel, 1985–1987. Mixed media on canvas.
Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Gift of Penny and Mike Winton, 1987.
Utter ruins as a desideratum of total war were
themselves part of the fiendish dialectical inheritance of the Nazis in their appropriation of the
symbolic form of the ruin. The Nazis themselves
came to aestheticize the ruin as the monument to
commemorate the beautiful idea of National
Socialism after its destruction. One need only to
recall Albert Speer’s often quoted proposition on
the ruin value of monumental architecture. He
begins by describing the initial stage of clearance
of the Zeppelin field for the Nuremberg parade
ground:
The building of the Zeppelin field was begun at
once, in order to have at least the platform ready
for the coming party rally. To clear ground for it,
the Nuremberg streetcar depot had to be removed.
The clearance left rubble that became the fertile
ground for Speer’s aestheticizing ruins into a theory, no less, of ruin-value:
One could easily visualize their further decay. This
dreary sight led me to some thoughts which I later
propounded to Hitler under the pretentious heading
of “A Theory of Ruin Value.” The idea was that
buildings of modern construction were poorly suited
to form the “bridge of tradition” to future generations which Hitler was calling for. It was hard to
imagine that rusting heaps of rubble could communicate these heroic inspirations which Hitler admired
4
in monuments of the past. My “theory” was intended
to deal with this dilemma.
It is one thing for ruins to be left as a remainder, another for ruins to be fabricated in order to
remain. This fabrication of ruin imitates the ruins
of classical antiquity:
By using special materials and by applying certain
principles of statics, we should be able to build structures which even in a state of decay, after hundreds
or (such were our reckonings) thousands of years
would more or less resemble Roman models. To
illustrate my ideas I had a romantic drawing prepared. It showed what the viewing stand on the
Zeppelin field would look like after generations of
neglect, overgrown with ivy, its columns fallen, the
walls crumbling here and there, but the outlines still
clearly recognizable.4
So ruins and the “pretentious” theory of ruin-value
ferment in the reservoir of Nazi symbology and
Wenders, like his contemporaries, Kiefer and
Sebald, refusing to discard the tainted trope of
ruin, takes it up and seeks to refigure it. The ruins
of Berlin are the aesthetic surface upon which
Wenders makes survival and redemption the linked
themes of Himmel über Berlin (fig. 3). The angels
are consigned to be with human beings there
at the end of World War II. In another of his
free-form poetic articulations, Wenders declares
Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Avon, 1971), 56.
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89
Fig. 3. Still from Wenders, Himmel über Berlin. Courtesy of Wenders Images.
survival to be the reason why his film is in and
of Berlin:
And so I have ‘Berlin’ representing the world.
I know of no place with a stronger claim.
Berlin is ‘an historical truth’.
No other city is such a meaningful image,
Such a PLACE OF SURVIVAL,
So exemplary of our century . . .
I say: there is more reality in Berlin than any other
city . . .
Berlin is more a SITE than a CITY . . .
My story isn’t about Berlin
Because it’s set there,
But because it couldn’t be set anywhere else. . . .5
language game of survival carries an unhappy
legacy of the decline of the West, of racialist theories of biological succession that go back to
Gobineau and Chamberlain to become the
pyrotechnic fuel at the heart of the Nazi world
view. It was the German people who were threatened with extinction. One need only recall some
of Hitler’s last words taken down by Albert Speer
in the bunker in the garden of the Reich Kanzelrei,
300 meters from Potsdamerplatz that merely repeat
the theory of racialist Niedergang and apply it
finally to the German people itself:
if the war is lost, the people will also be lost [and] it
is not necessary to worry about their needs for elemental survival. On the contrary, it is best for us to
destroy even these things. For the nation has proved
to be weak, and the future belongs entirely to the
strong people of the east. Whatever remains after
the battle is in any case only the inadequate [mindenwertigen], because the worthy ones will be dead.6
To assert, as Wenders does, that Berlin is the “most
terrible place on earth” that renders Berlin “a place
of survival” draws attention to the very word survival.
To be sure, survival is a word with great weight
these days in an era of impending ecological catastrophe, failed states, and pandemic disease. Contemporary consciousness is full of the foreboding
of the world falling away, of the daily disappearance of species, of languages, of cultures, of the
erosion of the basic wherewithal for the sustenance
of life on the planet, and so a viewer is especially
open and sensitive to Wenders’s existential ecology, and might welcome a good soak in the edgy
almost noir medium of anxiety. Here again the
For Wenders to take up survival as his theme
threatens to overwhelm him with difficulties similar to his decision to work with the tainted trope
of ruins. Wenders seems willing to assume them.
In a Derridean language, he takes ruins and survival up under an “X”7 with National Socialist
symbolic forms as an underlay.
5
Wim Wenders, On Film (London: Faber and Faber, 2001),
233.
6
Alexandra Richie, Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin (New
York: Carroll and Graf, 1998), 575.
7
See also the discourse of survival in Giorgio Agamben,
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford
University, 1998) and the way that the positing of survival
as a minimum inevitably invites its transgression.
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The survival of Berlin is tied to the willingness
of the present to acknowledge and absorb its past,
which might thus be a collective ethical vocation.
Wenders declares it his vocation as a filmmaker
to make and preserve true images so they are not
lost. In an essay written for Cahiers de Cinéma,
Wenders motivates this aesthetic ecology with these
poignant words:
This second example of Wendersean onto-theology declares the vocation of the filmmaker. True
images, their making and preserving, define the
filmmaker’s vocation, a contribution to the great
work of memory. In a world where God has
removed itself, humans are faced with the oblivion of forgetfulness. Whether God exists or not,
it is better not to assume God as the infinite archive
of everything. Rather humans themselves are compelled to take up this work of memory, at least
to create and preserve “all surviving images.” Such
is the artist’s vocation, a vocation that goes back
to the storyteller:
to help that place survive—a heritage, an add-on
to the place. There is film itself in its vocation to
create and curate true images. Thus the survival
of Berlin is the first register of the film maker’s
vocation while the very practice of cinema as a
poetics of memory is the second vocation.10 To
make a contribution to this gigantic work of memory is thus both the vocation of Wenders’s cinema
and the theme of Himmel über Berlin because the
fate of Berlin requires the survival of memory. The
burden of memory has a special site in the film.
It is the library where the storyteller makes his
appearance. The angels are sequestered in the
library, their primary earthly domicile.
This memory work is what Wenders might mean
when he says, “Berlin isn’t a city it is a site.” Site
betokens the significances that are brought somewhere in order to make that somewhere a place.
A synonym here for site is “investment.” Site thus
betokens the agenda, the virtual, the ideational—
in short, the invisibles of a place. Wenders seeks to
mobilize the forces of art to bring the history of
Berlin, through the nightmare of the Third Reich,
into the present. Only if Wenders enters into and
penetrates the Nazi past to make it contemporary will Berlin have a chance to flourish. Wenders
pursues a redeeming moment both through the
film as a document and through the fiction of the
romance between an angel and a trapeze artist as
the final encounter at the Club. With strains of
Schubert interrupting Nick Cave, they declare their
love:
For centuries only poets and painters have taken up
this gigantic work of memory. Then photographers
made a valuable contribution, then cinema people,
with ever greater sums of money and ever less understanding.9
Not only the whole city, but the whole world shares
in our decision. We are greater than just the two of
us. We embody many. We occupy the square of the
people and the whole square is full with persons who
wish what we wish . . .11
The artist’s role is to take up “this gigantic work
of memory.” Wenders’s ecological poetics has two
registers. There is the film’s contribution to a place
This film of Berlin aspires to stage a redemptive
moment as its contribution to the “great work of
memory.” Berlin is the site to redeem the city.
Wenders, The Logic of Images, 87.
Ibid.
10
Film, because of its technology, comprises the second
register of his aesthetic ecology. He anticipates a new threat—
the threat that comes from the digital image:
so unworthy of being recalled that you have to ask yourself
whether it wouldn’t be better to return to the old traditions
of poets and painters. It’s better to have a few images that
are full of life than masses of meaningless ones.” Wenders,
On Film, 150–1.
11
Wenders and Handke, Der Himmel über Berlin: Ein
Filmbuch, 162.
As a boy I often used to ask myself if there really
was a god who saw everything. And how he managed not to forget any of it: the motion of the clouds
in the sky, every individual’s gestures and footsteps,
the dreams . . . I said to myself that while it was
impossible to imagine such a memory existing, it was
even sadder and more desolating to think that it didn’t and that everything was forgotten. (This childish
panic still upsets me.) The story of all phenomenon
would be infinitely great, the story of all surviving
images infinitesimally small.8
8
9
“Nowadays it’s mostly television that conserves images. But
the inflation of electronic images offered us by television seems
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II
For Wim Wenders, Potsdamerplatz is the epicenter of the zero point of Berlin 1945. Before
addressing the Song of Potsdamerplatz at the site
for its recitation, here is what Potsdamerplatz looks
like as of August 2008 (fig. 4).
This site became one of the world’s biggest real
estate bonanzas with the fall of the Berlin Wall in
1989. After 1995, it is no longer the Potsdamerplatz
circa 1987, the location for the sequence in the
film that I call “The Song of Potsdamerplatz.”
Indeed Wenders’s Himmel über Berlin is an important deposit to reclaim Potsdamerplatz as a locale
of memory. In 1987 there were no street signs;
there wasn’t even a convergence of streets because
there were no streets. If “Platz” means place, public space, commons, even square where people
gather as in Victoria Park or Place de la République
or the New England Commons, Potsdamerplatz
wasn’t such a place. It wasn’t a place, at all.
Potsdamerplatz circa 1987 was a wasteland, a
“zone of exception” extricated from the everyday
circulation of life and the “no-man’s land” between
east and west Berlin in the partition of the city by
the Four Powers after World War II. Potsdamerplatz
was no-man’s land, to recall the space between
the entrenched armies on the Western Front in
World War I, an interdicted space devoid of human
presence. The Berlin Wall itself runs through
Potsdamerplatz bisecting the space where the Platz
was itself divided into Western and Eastern sectors (figs. 5 and 6). The no-man’s land after the
war was Potsdamerplatz in the neighborhood of
the absolute power center of National Socialism,
a scant 300 meters from Hitler’s Chancellery and
his bunker.
Wenders mobilizes the forces that Potsdamerplatz
holds as a site of over determined, ferocious history by injecting a dynamic narrative element in
the figure of the storyteller named “Homer.” This
storyteller is not an invention out of the blue.
Wenders’s Homer is the agent of the film’s function as a document of Berlin. This Homer arose
from Wenders’s creative engagement with Peter
Handke:
In a very early version I told Peter Handke there
was the character of an old archangel who lives in
a library. Peter had no use for him, but on the wall
in front of his desk was a reproduction of Rembrandt’s
Homer, an old man seated which had Homer speaking to a disciple but the picture had been cut in two
and the storyteller had separated from his listener
so he’s now merely soliloquizing.12 Peter was very
fond of the painting and changed my idea of an
archangel into an immortal poet. Now I for my part
Fig. 4. Potsdamerplatz. © 2008 Google Imagery © 2008 Digital Globe, GeoEye
GeoContent, AeroWest, Map Data © 2008 Tele Atlas. Accessed 4 August, 2008.
12
The reproduction that Wenders refers to in Handke’s
studio is most likely of Rembrandt’s Homer (1663) at the
91
Mauritshuis, The Hague.
92
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Fig. 5. Blake Fitzpatrick & Vid Ingelevics, Berlin Wall Fragment,
from Reunification Proceeds: Slabs and Slivers, 2004, courtesy of the
artists.
Fig. 6. Alan Cohen. Potsdamerplatz, Berlin, 1996. Courtesy of the artist.
   — 
had no idea how to integrate Homer into my script.
Finally we had Homer living in a library, and Peter’s
dialogue became a voice inside his head. Curt was
neither man nor angel, but both at once. Because
he’s as old as cinema itself.13
The very name “Homer” invokes the epic tradition of the storyteller as the model for the practice
of the great work of memory. Wenders himself
insisted on a vernacular and seemingly GermanJewish Homer out of Berlin of the twenties, perhaps
even overriding the inclination of Peter Handke
who wanted a more bustlike and canonic Homer,
Rembrandt’s Homer. This Homer is the cinematic
incarnation of the character of the storyteller whom
readers would have met in Walter Benjamin’s
famous essay “Der Erzähler.”14 Readers of that
essay will recall its basic propositions—of the decline
of the oral tradition of storytelling under conditions of modernity, of the loss of a communal
space and privatization with the rise of fiction. By
this transfiguration of a critico-literary subject into
a character, Wenders takes up these propositions
and brings them into the narrative present of his
film in Berlin circa 1987. Homer brings most
tellingly into the film the German Jewish cultural
legacy of pre-Hitler Berlin.
93
Wenders’s Homer searches in vain for the lost
Potsdamerplatz of the era before the rise of National
Socialism. His song is of a vanished Potsdamerplatz,
Potsdamerplatz perdu.
Since on Potsdamerplatz Café Josti was certainly
there. In the afternoons I would go there to chat
over coffee and then have a smoke at Löhse and
Wolf, a renowned tobacco shop, just over there.
Thus Potsdamerplatz cannot be here, definitely not
and there is no one even to ask.15
He recalls a street scene and café life (fig. 7). He
names favorite locales. Café Josti was certainly
there where he had his afternoon coffee and then
smokes from the “renowned” tobacconist Löhse
and Wolf. He recalls an era where cars and horsedrawn vehicles still could be found. He owned a
car, as did Hammen, the owner of the Chocolate
Shop:
Potsdamerplatz was a lively spot. There were streetcars, horse-drawn omnibuses and even two cars; one was
mine and the other belonged to Hammanthe Chocalatier. Wertheim’s Department Store was also here.16
This lively place of his speech unfolds as Homer
shuffles through the empty wasteland. The recitation
Fig. 7. Potsdamerplatz. Postcard, 1930. Collection of the author.
Wenders, Ibid., 271–2.
Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Selected Writings,
eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge,
13
14
Mass.: Belknap, 1996–2003), 3:143–166.
15
Wenders and Handke, Der Himmel über Berlin: Ein Filmbuch, 57.
16
Ibid., 59 [2084].
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suddenly shifts as he remembers a dramatic change
that has occurred. This is how he marks the
National Socialist advent in 1933: “And then suddenly flags were hanging there; the whole plaza
was completely hung with flags.”17 The rise of
National Socialism is heralded by flags filling the
square and a marked change in the atmosphere
of Potsdamerplatz as a public space: “and the people were not at all friendly anymore, and also the
police.”
In the diegesis of this recitation, the feeblesighted Homer looks out over these grounds. The
viewer in black and white sees wasteland where
Homer sees, with his reminiscing inner eye, flags
filling the square. In the director’s edition of the
film, a few seconds of color documentary footage
of the bombed-out ruins of apartment buildings
are spliced into the black and white of the storyteller’s ambulation. This inserted color image
visualizes the era of the Nazi Regime by showing its
end, not its rise as Homer recollects it, not flags
filling the square but the ruins of apartment
buildings at the demise of the Nazi state and the
destruction of Berlin. Thus in a flash within a very
short sequence, the history of Berlin in the twentieth
century is shown as three epochs—the pre-Hitler
era going back to 1900, the era of the twelve-year
Reich, and the narrative present of the film, all of
which are exhibited on the waste of Potsdamerplatz
in the zone of no-man’s land. Homer recalls the
whole epoch of Potsdamerplatz from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, but
the place name “Potsdamerplatz” does not answer
any longer to his speech. Potsdamerplatz is not
discernable to the storyteller, yet there it is as photographic evidence, a place that thwarts its address.
Wenders’s filming of Potsdamerplatz is thus a document of it, circa 1987.
Homer interrupts his reminiscence by saying
“but this can’t be Potsdamerplatz. There isn’t even
anyone here to ask.” Potsdamerplatz is no-man’s
land and he has been banished to it, a “mocked
poet banished on the threshold of no man’s land.”18
There is no one else here. The feeble-sighted
Homer is shown shambling through this wasteland, lost in his thoughts, grampussing to himself
17
18
19
Ibid., 58
Ibid., 60.
Ibid., 58 [2079].
about where he is. “I cannot find Potsdamerplatz. No,
I think right here. . . . Yet it can’t be here.19 Over and
over he speaks and acts in response to the question,
“where is Potsdamerplatz?” In his recitation, he
seeks Potsdamerplatz without finding it. If this is
where Potsdamerplatz is, then this cannot be
Potsdamerplatz. This enfeebled Homer, guided by
a companion, the angel Cassiel whom viewers treat
as invisible, carries the name of Potsdamerplatz,
as if it were a lost place in the heart of Berlin, a
physical location without an address.
In the waste of Potsdamerplatz, Homer recalls
blind Oedipus accompanied by his daughter
Antigone, another errant sojourner seeking after
another place. Homer’s question in pursuit of
Potsdamerplatz is the same question that Oedipus
asks Antigone in the last of Sophocles’ Theban
plays: “What is this place on which I have set
foot?20 Oedipus flees Thebes to find a final resting place in the exile of Athens. The whole first
scene of Oedipus at Colonus unfolds in answer to
that question. Oedipus is at Colonus. He senses
that he has reached his destination but he needs
to confirm it. The play unfolds to show that
Oedipus has reached his destination. Oedipus asks
the name of the place where he has set foot. The
name Colonus marks the spot. Wenders’s storyteller
never reaches that destination. Being at Potsdamerplatz, he fails to find that destination and
throughout the film, until the very end, he pursues a destination called “Potsdamerplatz” without
ever reaching it. Colonus is a sacred precinct,
Potsdamerplatz a wasteland. His quest is thwarted
by Potsdamerplatz itself, its history. His search
seems somewhat naïve. Doesn’t he know that this
is, after all, Potsdamerplatz, the epicenter of the
most terrible place on earth, the heart of darkness
itself?
The recitation returns to the era when Walter
Benjamin wrote “The Storyteller.” The storyteller
is one of the many strands that Wenders weaves
with Walter Benjamin in Himmel über Berlin. A second strand is Homer’s angel sidekick, Cassiel, who
aspires to become Benjamin’s Angel of History,
while a third strand is Berlin itself, Berlin as the
subject of the film. Benjamin wrote two essays just
20
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, trans. Robert Fitzgerald, in
Greek Tragedies, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1960),
112.
   — 
prior to his exile from his Heimatstadt, Berlin.
One was called Berlin Childhood circa 1900. It
begins with these words:
In 1932 when I was abroad, it began to be clear to
me that I would soon have to bid a long, perhaps
lasting farewell to the city of my birth. Several times
in my inner life, I had already experienced the process
of inoculation as something salutary. In this situation, I resolved to follow suit, and I deliberately
called to mind those images which, in exile, are most
apt to waken homesickness: images of childhood. My
assumption was that the feeling of longing would no
more gain mastery over my spirit than a vaccine
does over a healthy body. I sought to limit its effect
through insight into irretrievability—not the biographical but the necessary social irretrievability—of the
past.21
Wenders’s Benjaminean storyteller seeks the Berlin
that Benjamin himself was forced to flee. The storyteller, an old man, returns to Berlin in 1987 as
if he were carrying the images that Benjamin had
packed in his suitcase in order to limit the damage of longing through insight into the “necessary
social irretrievability of the past.” Oedipus takes
exile from Thebes to find his destination in Athens
at Colonus by finding out its name. Walter
Benjamin did not survive the war; yet Walter
Benjamin’s storyteller survived both as the cinematic subject of the storyteller and as Curt Bois,
a Berlin actor from Benjamin’s Berlin. Curt Bois,
this actor, went into exile in Hollywood and
returned to East Germany after the Second World
War. Between the material and physical survival
of Berlin as one register and survival as cultural
memory as the second register, Wenders introduces a mediating term—the storyteller as the
survivor played by an actor from Berlin in the
twenties who survived Hitler.
III
The question of Oedipus is the storyteller’s question,
“What place is this?” This question invites further
discussion in the language-games of place. “What
place is this” asks the question, “what is a place?”
Topos is often taken to mean place and the
inscriptions and writing on place give us the geographer’s kind of word, topography (topos + graphos):
21
95
the writing of “topos.” Topography might be taken
as a writing of place. Yet the geographer will typically translate the Greek word topos as a kind of
space, a kind of space with properties and characteristics that are to be added onto an objective
and empty concept of space. One need only recall
Cartesian space as extended matter. Place fills an
empty space with qualifications. Place fills the
empty space. Thus for the geographer place is a
kind of space. Yet from the Greek root top we
have both the words topos and topic. The same root
word sits between geography and rhetoric: geographically as a bounded space of human inscription
and dwelling; rhetorically as a space which holds
a pattern of thought. Both topic and topos, place
denotes an occupancy inscribed with persons and
language. Without writing in either case, there is
no place. Thus one might think of place as the
space that falls between brackets. Topography sets
out a space, from the clearance of abstraction by
establishing boundaries as the perimeter.
Topography—because it informs place—fixes a
place in objective physical space or as the space
of language. It designates the brackets within which
there is a human habitus or the dwelling of thought.
But topography does not answer the question of
Oedipus when he asks, “What place is this here
where I have placed my foot?” Or when the Homer
of Potsdamerplatz asks, “Can this be Potsdamerplatz
designating the place here where I walk?” when
he utters the name “Potsdamerplatz.” The play
Oedipus at Colonus unfolds to secure Colonus as the
final resting place for Oedipus. Wenders’s Homer
fails to find the place that he seeks even though
he is objectively there at that place. Potsdamerplatz
is a location without an address. There is a conceptual lesson here. The word topos is unable to
answer questions about place that require an address
in the existential sense of Oedipus and Homer.
The dictionary may extend the meanings of this
word under topos or add another word. Consider
another word.
Oedipus at Colonus provides a word other than
topos to meet this existential requirement, a requirement that makes speech and presence inseparable.
To Oedipus’s initial question, “what place is
this?” Antigone responds by “This place I do not
know; the city is Athens,” to which Oedipus retorts
Walter Benjamin, “Berlin Childhood,” Selected Writings, 3:344.
96
 
“. . . yes. Everyone we have met has already told
us that.”
Antigone uses the word “topos” for place.
Oedipus says that of course he knows that they
are in the vicinity, area, region, outskirts of Athens.
He knows the topos but he wants to know exactly
where they are, where he is standing, what place
this is.
The word that Oedipus uses is not topos as a
place word but the word choros. What is the
difference? Colonus is singular. It is just that place,
exactly there, nowhere else. Its ascription is marked
by the momentary, here and now existential of a
subject asking what place is this. A place name is
given by way of response: “Colonus.” It is the
address. This place here is choros, which is the singular specificity of a place here for me at this
moment. It is one thing to show Potsdamerplatz
on a map, and to get there following MapQuest.
It is quite another to match what the name signifies
to the one asking the question with what it brings
or yields objectively in the world. It is the difference
here between the name attached to a map and
the name that we carry about places, the names
brought to a place by Homer and Oedipus. The
Homer of Potsdamerplatz finds no coincidence or
agreement between the name he utters and his
location. The location is not a destination. Oedipus,
through an unfolding search, finds a concordance.
That something is “brought” to somewhere to
make it a place might be called the site aspect of
a place because it refers to all the investments that
are brought from somewhere to a locality to make
it a place. Those investments in relation to place
are off-site to make it a place. In this convergence
somewhere becomes a place. An address becomes
a destination.
I am not the first to pursue a distinction between
topography and chorography in the problematization of space. Victor Walters, for one, has sought
such a distinction between topography and chorography in Placeways.22 Perhaps Walters is too sweeping
in his claim and doesn’t pay close enough attention to how the semio-linguistic operation of speech
acts of naming establish somewhere as a place.
“Potsdamerplatz” and “Colonus” in the texts that
I have considered are invocations, that is, acts of
bringing places into existence through naming. It
is one thing to find place names on maps, quite
another thing for places to come into existence by
the very act of naming. Speech acts of naming
help to clarify the distinction between topography
and chorography. The question, “what place is
this?” requests by way of answer a name. The
name summons the place through the event of the
name this place here, right now, for Oedipus. Acts
of speech bring the concept under the name.23
Before returning to Potsdamerplatz, we can see
a difference in the invocative relation of a name
designating a place in the two previously mentioned essays of Benjamin. In Berlin Chronicle,24
Benjamin arranges his notes on the Berlin of his
youth as if it were a military map. They are dominated by a topographical anxiety to make his
places objectively significant. Berlin Childhood sets
in motion the disposition of place names so that
they will invoke those places and summon their
existence as acts of Proustean retrieval. The aim
of this writing is not to inoculate himself against
nostalgia. Quite the opposite, it is to recover the
past as an intoxication for his life as an exile.
Benjamin does not hide this Proustean ambition
in Berlin Childhood. I would refer both to the
kind of narrative that unfolds in Act One Scene
One of Oedipus at Colonus, in Benjamin’s Berlin
Childhood 1900 and in “The Song of Potsdamerplatz” as chorographies. Thus topography and
topographic description are not only more general
and descriptive than chorography. They also do
not require the act of naming for meaning to be
generated. A toponym is person neutral. It is a
description that is devoid of an existential situation initiated as an act of naming.25
Wim Wenders offers a topography of Berlin,
organized and distributed in terms of a limited
number of sites of historical significance, mostly
in the centre of Berlin which he turns into film
locations. Such locations stake out the precinct of
Berlin in a topographical sense. The major sites
that Wenders uses as locations in his film may be
22
Victor Walter, Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1988). I would
like to thank David Kettler for bringing this work to my
attention. See more recently, Peter C. van Wyck, “Emphatic
Geography: Notes on the Ethical Itinerary of Landscape,”
Canadian Journal of Communications 33, 2 (2008).
23
See Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1966).
24
Berlin Chronicle 2:595.
25
See Jesper Svenbro on “Hierheit” in Phrasikleia: An
Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Ithaca:
Cornell University, 1993) 42–3.
   — 
divided into two groups: those that establish the
mise-en-scène for the face of the film, called famously
in English Wings of Desire, the romance between
a fallen angel and a trapeze artist in Berlin. The
Circus Alekine and the Club are the primary film
locations. Both are marked by their transitoriness.
The Circus has a short season. The Club is flyby-night. Neither are big contributors to the other
face of the film Himmel über Berlin that has Berlin
as its aesthetic subject, a filmic deposition of Berlin
that subtends the romantic narrative. “Wings of
Desire” contributes to and perhaps drains the
filmmaker’s ambition to make “a film in and about
Berlin. A film that might convey something of the
history of the city since 1945. . . .”26 The literal
translation of the German title, “Sky over Berlin,”
establishes the sky over Berlin as the initial ideal
standpoint, a viewpoint outside the world looking
at the world. This birds-eye view of the world,
of the eye in the sky, from outside looking in but
shut out is the angelic stance. It is also the position of the camera. It is the view from heaven,
where sky in German means heaven and not the
view from the earth and what it is for humans
to be earthly dwellers.27 The angel point of view
is the camera eye. Himmel über Berlin has seven
sites, each of which carries historical significance.
Six of them are the Gedachnis Kirche,
Potsdamerplatz, the AnhalterBahnhof, the Victory
Column, the Wall and the air raid bunker. The
seventh is the Staatsbibliothekzu Berlin (Berlin
State Library) about which I shall have more to
say by-the-by. Topography allows one to figure
out and plot the mise-en-scène. Yet only one of
these sites is given a distinct chorographic treatment by Wenders, a persistent cinematic unfolding
that asks and answers the question, “What place
is Potsdamerplatz?” Homer asks questions and
generates a chorography of Potsdamerplatz that
has, as I will show, a special significance for
Wenders in his ambition to create true images
that reclaim memory. For Wenders topography is
memory; yet topography only becomes memory
at a site, a site whose archive must be opened.
Potsdamerplatz turns topography into chorogra-
Wenders, On Film, 232.
Margaret Olin reminded me of the potentialities resting
between Himmel as sky and Himmel as heaven. Wenders
works from Himmel as Sky to reach Himmel as heaven.
26
27
97
phy. Nowhere is his work of memory more
poignant and fraught than in the chorography of
Potsdamerplatz. What makes Potsdamerplatz the
archive? In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression Jacques
Derrida enunciates the place of the archive with
these words:
“With such a status, the documents, which are not
always discursive writings, are only kept and classified
under the title of the archive by virtue of a privileged topology. They inhabit this uncommon place,
this place of election where law and singularity intersect in privilege. At the intersection of the topological
and the nomological, of the place and the law, of
the substrate and the authority, a scene of domiciliation becomes at once visible and invisible.”28
Derrida writes about Freud’s house that has become
his museum. Here “the uncommon place” of a
“taking place” is at the intersection of convergent
forces of repressed collective memory (National
Socialism), of personal tragedy (Benjamin’s chorography of Berlin as preparation for flight), the
literary-filmic narrative of Berlin carried by a survivor. The shelter for this memory need not be a
building and a depository. In this case the archive
is the film. At the intersection between the invisible and the visible of thwarted contemporary
history and the invisible of the repressed and horrific
debris of a still smoldering Nazi past, Homer opens
the archive of the film at Potsdamerplatz. X marks
the spot.
Potsdamerplatz, unlike any other site in the film,
requires a subject for whom the invocation of the
name “Potsdamerplatz” summons a place. Potsdamerplatz is the only site where the location and
place require a genealogy of its address.
IV
For Dante the passage into the Inferno is through
a dark forest.29 For Wenders the passage into the
Inferno of the Third Reich, and from there to the
era preceding the Third Reich, as the barrier and
the passage, is the wasteland of Potsdamerplatz.
Wenders and Handke are rather thoughtful about
28
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans.
Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3.
29
Dante, The Inferno, trans. Robert Pinsky (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1994).
98
 
human spaces of dwelling that have fallen into
desuetude, ruins, voids, wastelands.
I only wish that other cities had as many backwaters or blind spots as Berlin. It is really extraordinary
that a city like Berlin has all this empty space everywhere. There are so many of those sites, places like
on the Friedrichstrasse or the Potsdamerplatz which
is in the film too. In other cities like New York or
Tokyo or Paris or London—no, London has a bit
of that sort of thing too, but not in the center, more
in the outskirts—you never suddenly find yourself
with a clear sight of the horizon across an empty
wasteland full of scrub and weeds. I think it’s one
of the most extraordinary things about Berlin, the
fact that those wildernesses still exist.30
Wastelands, ruins, no-man’s lands fill Wenders’s
Berlin. Such wildernesses support ramshackle
dwellings, fly-by-night human edifices, the circus,
for example, the club another. The AnhalterBahnhof is a ruin on a wasteland. Potsdamerplatz
is no-man’s land, a jurisdiction of ruin. Wasteland
from the Third Reich, no-man’s land because it
marks a void of political separation between the
east and the west in the divided city. In the passage that was just cited, Wenders notes, although
it seems grudgingly, London is at least comparable to Berlin, yetnot quite as enriched as Berlin
by its voids and abysses. Although Wenders speaks
in aesthetic terms about wastelands, his observations are informed by history. Berlin was bombed
and then became the last battleground of the
European Theatre in World War II by Hitler’s
choice. Wenders omits and then includes London.
Why? Because both cities were systematically
bombed almost into annihilation. They are to be
contrasted to Paris, the city Hitler spared. Perhaps
this explains the admiring disdain, touched perhaps by Schadenfreude, which Wenders seems to
have for unscathed cities such as Paris or Zurich.
Paris wasn’t bombed. Berlin was. These wastelands, blind spots, backwaters, voids are there
because they are among the last urban traces of
the Berlin of the Third Reich. Because of the ubiquitous and comprehensive devastation through
bombing and battleground, the incarnation of Berlin
that existed before the Third Reich was wiped
out. These wastelands, stripped even of ruins, are
Wenders, On Film, 391.
Wenders and Handke, Der Himmel über Berlin: Ein Filmbuch,
121 [5033].
30
31
the still raw skin of earth and ground that goes
back to 1945. These empty spaces are the hallowed backwaters and blindspots in 1987 which
history has left as the commons, yet to be converted into real estate. It is apt that Wenders calls
Potsdamerplatz a wilderness:
The Potsdamerplatz was amazing the way it was,
now they’ve planted lawns everywhere, prettified it
up, and it’s nothing, it doesn’t exist anymore. It used
to be a kind of wilderness.31
The sequence that I wish to call “The Song of
Potsdamerplatz” takes place in one of the most
highly charged power zones in the history of the
twentieth century. Potsdamerplatz is the wounded
surface, a threshold below which is the void of
the Hitler era. Only through that era does the
long history of Berlin yield itself to memory. In a
celebrated footnote, Freud writes: “Every dream
has at least one place where it is unfathomable,
the navel, as it were, by which it is connected to
the unknown.”32 Potsdamerplatz is the navel that
is the passage that holds the memory and secrets
of the Third Reich, the only passage through which
there is access to Berlin before 1933. Not that it
can’t be known and studied, not that it can’t be
represented, yet for it all, Wenders constrains visualization. Potsdamerplatz is the entrance into the
frozen, vertical structure of terror. It sits in the
heart of the terror regime, as Alexandra Ritchie
reminds us in Faust’s Metropolis:
. . . The centre of Berlin today is filled with reminders
of those terrible weeks but none is so startling as the
wall murals painted deep inside the Potsdamer bunker
which were found shortly after the wall was taken
down. In June 1991 an area that once lay in East
Germany’s no man’s land was being cleared in preparation for a Pink Floyd concert when part of the
bunker complex was discovered virtually intact from
the last days of the war . . . it measured about 300
square meters . . . when it was opened there were
still boxes of ammunition, piles of weapons, including a rocket launcher, and crates of empty Bordeaux
wine bottles lying around; the smell was unpleasant;
filthy water and debris floated at knee height and
the walls were covered in propaganda paintings which
depicted victorious SS men protecting German farmers, women and children, rounding up surrendering
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. trans. Joyce
Crick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 88.
32
   — 
British soldiers at Dover and standing in shiny boots
and helmets. . . . Most of the murals were ringed
with oak leaves and crowned with eagles. . . . The
glorification of the Nazi ideal grimacing from the
moldering walls afforded an insight into the fanaticism of those men who, with only days to live, insisted
on painting images of victory . . .33
I cite this passage at length in order to make the
point, perhaps a reminder, that the whole area
that the storyteller referred to as “a lively spot,”
was at the center of the district that housed the
Nazi State apparatus and hence had below it the
underground city of a vast and intricate bunker
complex. A map of this “Viertel’ shows the
Reichskanzlerei and Hitler’s bunker to the north and
the Gestapo Headquarters to the south (fig. 8).
Indeed that site makes sense of another monument of ruins in the film, The Anhalter Station
Fig. 8. Map Regierungsviertel. From Alexandra Richie, Faust’s Metropolis
(New York: Carroll and Graff Publishers, inc, 1998), 468.
33
Richie, Faust’s Metropolis, 594.
99
100
 
and the wasteland in front of it, traversed by
Peter Falk who quips “. . . not the station where
the train stopped but the station where the station stopped . . .”34 (fig. 9). The Anhalter Station
was perhaps the main train station from which
Berlin’s Jewish citizens were transported to their
deaths. Indeed, the bunker that is near the Anhalter
station is the set for Wenders’s holocaust film-ina film. There, Berlin police and Berlin’s Jewish
Citizens commingle waiting for the scene of their
deportation to unfold. This scene marks the
roundup of Berlin’s Jewish citizens between 1941
and 1943. Here is a description of one of the later
transports:
These deadly transports began on 19 October, with
Jews being herded to the three railway stations of
Grunewald, Pultiztstrasse and the main AnhalterBahnhof. A hundred and seventeen ‘old age’ transports
took 14,979 Jews to Theresienstadt. . . . By 11 March
1943 in a total of sixty-three transports, 35,738 of
the 66,000 Jews still living in Berlin had been deported
to Auschwitz and most had been mudered. Three
months later the Gestapo finally closed the office of
the Jüdische Gemeinde in Berlin and transported to
Auschwitz all those still waiting for permission to
emigrate. On 19 May 1943 Goebbels proudly declared
Berlin ‘Judenfrei,’ a feat which he termed his ‘greatest
political accomplishment.’35
state apparatus, makes Wenders’s topography vertical and stratigraphic. Indeed that which occupies
the wasteland of Potsdamerplatz is an archeological trench. The trench stakes out three layers
of history—the contemporary history of Berlin
from 1987 to 1945, the Nazi era from 1945 to
1933, the pre-Hitler era from 1933 to circa 800 CE.
The middle period is gestured to, designated, yet
it barely yields visualization. We are engaged by
the ruins, not the flags. Potsdamerplatz confirms
the film’s zero point of 1945, between two histories that converge on either side of the blank
between 1933 and 1945. On one side—the Berlin
before Hitler, on the other side the Berlin that
seeks a future as it emerges, a survivor like the
storyteller, from the ruins. If it were imagined this
way, Potsdamerplatz is a blank, a gap. Wenders
gestures to this blank but it is only seldom shown,
like the paucity of fragments of the dream content in relation to the dream thought. After all,
Hitler’s bunker was just 300 meters away from
Potsdamerplatz, and we know from Speer that
Hitler viewed the bunker as his tomb:
This withdrawal into his future tomb, had for
me, a symbolic significance as well. The isolation of
this bunker world, encased on all sides by concrete
and earth, put the final seal on Hitler’s separation
from the tragedy which was going on outside under
the open sky. He no longer had any relationship
to it.’36
Yet Potsdamerplatz, which holds the bunker complex as the gigantic labyrinthine brain of the Nazi
Fig. 9. Still from Wenders, Himmel ueber Berlin. Courtesy of Wenders Images.
Wenders and Handke, Der Himmel über Berlin: Ein Filmbuch,
121 [5033].
34
35
36
Ibid., 517.
Ibid., 568.
   — 
Because Potsdamerplatz is the critical nexus of the
height and abyss of Nazi Power, I want to designate Potsdamerplatz as the zone of Hitler’s absent
Tomb.37 So much then for the site of Homer’s
chorography. No wonder that it has to be taken
into account; no wonder as well that this Homer
of Walter Benjamin and Weimar should be lost
at this very spot. He is there, yet unable to find
it. For if Berlin year zero is the definition of bare
or mere survival, the film posits Potsdamerplatz
as the ground that prepares, as documentary history, the narrative pursuit of a redemptive moment
that would lift Berlin out of this condition.
V
Now is the moment to gather the strands that tie
Walter Benjamin to Wim Wenders into the question, “why does Wenders give Walter Benjamin
such an important place in the formation of his
film?” Why does he need Walter Benjamin?
Wenders’s creative transformation of his Homer
into the storyteller is one indication. Another indication, as I have already mentioned, is Benjamin’s
topographical practice of Berlin. Wenders acknowledges Benjamin’s importance for Himmel über Berlin
in his writing:
The genesis of the idea of having angels in my Berlin
story is very hard to account for in retrospect. It
was suggested by many sources at once, first and
foremost, Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Paul Klee paintings
too. Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History . . . there
have always been childhood images as invisible,
omnipresent observers, there was, so to speak, the
old hunger for transcendence, and also a longing for
the exact opposite—the longing for comedy.38
In his acknowledgment of the influence of Rilke,
Wenders grasped intuitively the alliance between
the power of film, its ubiquity and the trope of
angels:
I am grateful to Ihor Junyk for reminding me of another
tomb in Joseph Roth’s “The Tomb of the Emperor,”which
was the basis of the Johannes Schaff film Trotta, a film introduced to me by Karsten Harries in Munich in 1971.
38
Wenders, On Film, 236. Wenders accounts for his captivation with angels: ‘I really don’t know what gave me the
idea of angels. One day I wrote ‘angel’ in my notebook and
the next day ‘the unemployed.’ Maybe it was because I was
37
101
. . . I filled a whole notebook but it still didn’t add
up to a film . . . but with angels you could do anything, there were connections all over the place, you
could go anywhere. You could cross the wall, pass
through a window into people’s houses and anyone,
a passer-by, passengers in the underground, was suddenly the hero of a potential film. It was scary; there
was too much freedom for the imagination.39
Yet despite such acknowledgements to Rilke, Walter
Benjamin occupies an inextricable place above and
below the surface of the film, as influence and
filmic presence. The citation of Benjamin in the
film itself at the outset of the scene in the library
is one proof of such co-presence. Indeed Benjamin
is the first name to be mentioned as the initial
thought-voice (Gendanken-Stimmen) in the great
symphonic beehive of knowledge, the library. A
female voice is overheard reading the following
passage from an edition of Walter Benjamin:
Walter Benjamin bought Paul Klee’s watercolor,
Angelus Novus, in 1921. Until his flight from Paris
in June 1940, it hung in his various workrooms. In
his last writing, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”
(1940), he interpreted the picture as an allegory of
a look back over history.40
The dates 1921–1940 mark the epoch between his
acquisition of the picture and his forced abandonment of it in his flight from Paris in 1940 (fig. 10).
Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus is an iconic continua in
the life and thought of Walter Benjamin. Its initial purchase in 1921 coincides with his efforts to
establish the journal called Angelus Novus, the title
of a cultural journal under his directorship which
Benjamin parses in these words:
This point touches on the ephemeral aspect of this
journal—a point that has been kept in mind throughout. For it is the fair price exacted by the journal’s
call for true contemporary relevance. After all, according to a legend in the Talmud, the angels—who are
born anew every instant in countless numbers—are
reading Rilke at the time—nothing to do with films—and
realizing as I read how much of his writing is inhabited by
angels. Reading Rilke every night, perhaps I got used to the
idea of angels being around. . . .” 268–9.
39
Ibid.
40
Wenders and Handke, Der Himmel über Berlin: Ein Filmbuch,
22 [1072].
102
 
Fig. 10. Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920. India ink, color chalks and brown wash
on paper. Gift of Fania and Gershom Scholem. John and Paul Herring, Jo Carole
and Ronald Lauder Collection. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photograph (c)
Collection The Israel Museum/by David Harris.
created in order to perish and to vanish into the
void, once they have sung their hymn in the presence of god. It is to be hoped that the name of the
journal will guarantee its contemporary relevance,
which is the only true sort.41
Angelus Novus refers to the new, the ephemeral
and to the now: Jetztzeit, modernity. The journal
seeks to establish the contemporary as its horizon
of interest, with a stance toward history that viewed
the past as contained in the present. In the language of the Arcades, the stance of Angelus Novus
begins in “awakening consciousness.” This reflection
41
and the aspiration of cultural criticism to be in
the present, contemporary, makes the Angelus
Novus, janus-faced, a hybrid agenda. One face is
turned toward the past while the other sits in the
now of the present. These are the two stances of
modernity itself—the new and the now, the past
and history as anxious and continually to be sifted
debris. Benjamin’s Journal, Angelus Novus, aspired
to be the herald of contemporary history.
The ninth of the “Theses on the Philosophy of
History” recalls Klee’s Angelus Novus as the symbolic form for Benjamin’s project of contemporary
Benjamin, “Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus,” Selected Writings, 1:296.
   — 
history, which he expresses in terms of a historical theology. This last writing, unpublished in his
lifetime, is the source of the first thought-voice in
the library. Klee’s angel is the icon for the angel
of history:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel
looking as though he is about to move away from
something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are
staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.
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 catastrophe
which keeps piling up wreckage upon 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.42
As the angel of history, the Angelus Novus views
“one single catastrophe which keeps piling up
wreckage upon wreckage.” Ruins are a dominant
motif in Walter Benjamin’s cultural histories. In
this thesis, Benjamin elevates the ruin to the status of theological construct. Human beings bear
ruins into the future as if, with these surviving
fragments, the whole of life can be reassembled
at the end of time. The Angelus Novus “who sees
one single catastrophe” is thus a witness to the
ruins. Thus with this Benjamin thought-voice,
Wenders brings the Angel of History into his film.
103
This passage prepares the way for Cassiel as the
Angel of History coupled to the storyteller.
Walter Benjamin’s second entrance into the film
takes place soon afterward, still at the library, in
the figure of the storyteller called Homer (fig. 11).
The storyteller, the most obvious Benjaminean
apparition, makes his appearance climbing the
stairs in the new library of Berlin. He mutters to
himself an almost epic and Hesiodic invocation to
the muses that begins:
tell me muse of the storyteller, who has been thrust
into the world . . . both a child and an ancient and
through him is revealed everyman.
with time those who listened to me became my readers and out of the depths with a slightly open mouth
repeats it as clearly and powerfully
as a liturgy for which no one needs to be initiated
As to how the words and sentences fit together.43
This song with its invocation to the muses establishes its epic vocation. That it is an elegy that
time and history have disabled becomes clear when
one compares Homer’s recitation to the opening
of “The Storyteller” that begins with his major
proposition of the decline of storytelling under the
conditions of modernity:
. . . the art of storytelling is coming to an end . . .
experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth
is the source from which storytellers have drawn,
Fig. 11. Still from Wenders, Himmel ueber Berlin. Courtesy of Wenders Images.
42
Benjamin “On the Concept of History,” in vol. 3 of
Selected Writings, 392.
43
31.
Wenders and Handke, Der Himmel über Berlin: Ein Filmbuch,
104
 
and among the writers who have set down the tales,
the great ones are those whose written versions differs
least from the speech of the many nameless storytellers. . . .44
According to this proposition, the storyteller’s art
of memory has come to an end because of the
shock of technological change and because of the
change of communication medium after Gutenberg.
With the printing press the communicativity of the
story shifts from the collective to the personal and
private.45 Wenders’s Homer belongs to the Benjamin
school of epic singers who became writers.
What Wenders’s Homer enunciates is precisely Walter
Benjamin’s claim of the decline of the muse-derived
element of remembrance under the technological
condition of modernity. The library is the site of
another thread, sewing Walter Benjamin into the
fabric of the film. Besides the storyteller as the
agent of oral memory, the ur-vessel of the great
work of memory, Wenders makes Cassiel the
angel of history through his attachment to the storyteller. But how can such a mentorship be possible,
given that the storyteller draws his song from deep
within his failing body (“I am an old man with a
broken voice, but the story arises always still from
my depths”)46 while the angel, disembodied, is not
of the ontological stuff to narrate. How can a
being outside time bodilessly grasp the causality
of time, the moment and the chain of moments
that makes one thing follow from another? Why
the library as the site that cathects Benjamin to
the angels and to his storyteller? Why do Wenders’s
angels and the storyteller hang out at the library?
There is irony that the singer of tales takes refuge
in the repository of the written word! An initial
response is the very library itself. Indeed Benjamin
wrote an essay about the library, his own private
library, mind you but the library all the same.
The essay “Unpacking My Library” sets out the
personal intimate relations that Benjamin has to
his books as carrying the very sources of memory
itself:
Once you have approached the mountains of crates
in order to mine the books from them and bring
them to the light of day—or, rather, of night—what
44
45
46
Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 3:144.
Ibid.
Wenders and Handke, Der Himmel über Berlin: Ein Filmbuch, 31.
memories crowd in upon you! . . . But one thing
should be noted: the phenomenon of collecting loses
its meaning when it loses its subject. Even though
public collections may be less objectionable than private collections, the objects get their due only in the
latter.”47
It is as if the storyteller arose from out of the
involuntary memory of Benjamin’s childhood to
find himself taking shelter in the library. The library
is the sanctuary for the angels to soak up all that
the library holds, everything that makes up the
universe as it is known to humans. It is their ethereal fuel. The unheard music of the spheres is
their nourishment, the nourishment of thought, of
the immaterial, of the eternal. And the State Library
of Berlin, a new piece of architecture, is such a
busy, knowledge-saturated place, full of the silence
of study. Would it be too hasty and bold to say
that the library is a rather special site in the history of the Jewish contribution to German culture?
This ancient people of the book with the long cultivation of literacy over thousands of years, marked
by the recitation in thought, in the scene, of the
first words of the Hebrew Bible, read in the original tongue? For the library is the repository of
the book and the book is the vehicle of the sacred
and knowledge itself. That tradition and the cultivation of literacy as an acquisition of modernity
are recalled in Klaus Sluter’s Well of Moses. Wenders
at this site fuses the forces of knowledge and learning as the essential elements of what he calls “the
great work of memory.” That alliance was dealt
a near fatal blow not that far from the new library
at Berlin with the book burnings of May 10, 1933.
Hitler burnt the books as if to replace the library
with the parade ground (fig. 12). The library now
holds a commemorative plaque of the books that
were burnt that night. I imagine there to be a
catalogue to the missing books. Perhaps the library
or at least a reading room ought to be named
after Walter Benjamin since no one of his generation was more a custodian and phantom of the
library than he. So there is a certain poetic justice that places Benjamin’s storyteller in the
institution that Benjamin revered more than any
other human institution.
47
Benjamin “Unpacking My Library,” Selected Writings,
2:491–2.
   — 
105
Fig. 12. Micha Ullman. Bibliotheke: Memorial to the Book burning by the National
Socialists, 10 May, 1933. August-Bebel-Platz, Berlin, 1995. Photograph: Margaret Olin.
Wenders’s storyteller need be distinguished from
the storyteller in the epic tradition of oral narrative by one significant structural fact. The epic
singer was not present to the events that are sung.
The Wenders’s storyteller endured the era that is
the subject of his narration. The events at Troy
were carried through an anonymous oral tradition.
The singers invoke the muses because they weren’t
there at Troy while being part of an anonymous
tradition of communal memory, first recognized
by Giambattista Vico.48 Wenders’s Homer, the
Homer of Potsdamerplatz, was alive and present
in the time before Hitler, going back to the turn
of the century and somehow endured the Nazi era
to find himself as a survivor all alone in the contemporary city of Berlin circa 1987. There is a
special and acute existential sense to his assertion
that he has lost the community of his listeners
“And they no longer sit in a circle, but rather by
themselves, and no one knows one from another.”49
His fall into solitude is not merely the result of a
change in medium. His fall into solitude is because
he is a survivor. He has lost his community because
they have perished. Mostly Walter Benjamin’s “The
Storyteller” is an essay about the reproduction of
culture due to a traumatic change in medium. The
essay, however it communicates the horrors of
modern warfare, does not pose the question of
survival itself and this is what defines the storyteller. Homer is a survivor who finds himself a
clochard, a homeless person in the library, banished to the no man’s land of Potsdamerplatz.
Solitude through loss defines this Homer searching the wasteland at the heart of historical Berlin
for Potsdamerplatz perdu.
Homer’s condemnation to solitude leads to the
last strand of implication that binds Benjamin to
Wenders. To strengthen and spiritualize the vocation of the storyteller as a survivor, Wenders finds
an actor who indeed came from Benjamin’s world,
who survived when Benjamin didn’t. Wenders
found Curt Bois to play this Homer. When the
viewer encounters this Homer talking to himself,
cut off from his circle of listeners, to be picked up
by the silent and invisible angel partner, Cassiel,
he finds an actor who came from Benjamin’s era,
an actor who might well have encountered Walter
Benjamin. Curt Bois was from Berlin of the Weimar
era, who took refuge in America from Hitler, who
played in the film Casablanca, and left his exile in
48
Here I have in mind the tradition of scholarship
that is associated with Milman Parry and finds its succession in the communication theory of Harold Innis
and the Toronto School and most recently in the work of
Jesper Svenbro and the Paris School of Comparative Ancient
Studies.
49
Wenders and Handke, Der Himmel über Berlin: Ein Filmbuch,
30 [1087].
106
 
California to return, like Brecht, to East Germany.
Benjamin did not survive, but his storyteller survived as a character played by a survivor. Wenders
exploits this difference to encrypt his film as a document of the time because Curt Bois who plays
the storyteller is a survivor. In his existential presence, Curt Bois documents this era while the
character he plays narrates it.
VI
. . . Therefore show him
something simple, formed from generation to
generation
until it’s truly our own, dwelling near our hands and
in our eyes.
Tell him of things. He’ll stand more amazed; as you
stood beside the ropemaker in Rome or by the potter
along the Nile. (Rilke, The Ninth Elegy)50
Why does Wenders need Benjamin? What role does
he play for Wenders? Wim Wenders’s relationship
to Walter Benjamin can be said simply: Walter
Benjamin is Wim Wenders’s companion.
The very notion of the “companion” is not my
construal but that of Wenders himself. The “companion” is a thread that runs through the film. It
explicitly surfaces as a designation of Peter Falk
when he seeks to entice the angels Damiel and
Cassiel to fall into human existence. He extends
his hand first to shake the hands of the absent
and invisible angels with the following address:
“I know you are out there; I can feel you; you’ve
been hanging around for ages . . . I am your friend,
compañero. . . .”51
Falk, the actor playing himself, goes on to demonstrate how good it is to be a human being. He
rubs his hands together to get the blood circulating, lights up a cigarette, sips a far too hot cup
of coffee. Compañero is the Spanish word for
“companion.” (fig. 13).
The film is marked by the double of couples—
Damiel and Cassiel as angel buddies, Damiel and
Marion, the high-wire artist; Cassiel and Homer,
the storyteller. The couplings define vocations for
the angels as that which gives them the desire to
become human. Damiel desires the immediacy of
himself as a human presence in relation to another
human presence. Cassiel desires time and duration. Damiel’s vocation incarnates through the
woman, while the incarnation of Cassiel was to
be through the storyteller. Yet, there is one other
couple that is both in and outside the film. It is
Walter Benjamin and Wim Wenders. I have already
shown that Benjamin is both an on-site and offsite presence. He is the companion for Wenders
Fig. 13. Still from Wenders, Himmel über Berlin. Courtesy of Wim Wenders Images.
50
Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. Edward Snow
(New York: North Point Press, 2000), 55.
51
Wenders and Handke, Der Himmel über Berlin: Ein Filmbuch,
123 [5043].
   — 
107
This passage explains the oddness of their behavior. They still are shown to behave as if they were
guardians,yet they are unable to protect. Consider
the suicide Cassiel can’t prevent. Yet they still
place themselves in-between, as if they were
mediators but they are unable to communicate.
“They are condemned to be witnesses.” Curiously,
Wenders assigns them the role of the witness as
if witnessing were a condition or state of affairs
that remained to them after all the typical angelic
powers and roles, capacities and dispositions were
stripped away, leaving the witness as a pathetic
residue. Still, how can they be witnesses, especially
if the inherited grammar of the witness at least in
the Western tradition presupposes that a witness
be present in the here and now? The metaphysics
of presence presupposes that a witness be present
to an event.53 Angels are mediating entities precisely because they can be present both to the
divine and the invisible and to the visible and the
human. Yet at least when we speak about
“menschliche Dasein,” we mean a being who meets
two necessary existential ontological conditions to
be a witness—that being has to be present to witness and that being has to be able to share its
testimony as speech. From this philosophical point
of view, angels might be defined as beings lacking in Dasein, that is, beings that are not here or
there, beings unable to express, indicate and to
say “da” meaning here, there. These angels do not
qualify as witnesses in the primary sense of the
witness as “testis.” Quite simply they are not present because they lack presence.54 However they do
qualify in what might be considered a second sense
of witness that Benveniste also addresses, namely
the witness that is beyond or outside of the testamentum, not here or there, not present but a
testimony that is beyond the here and now.
Benveniste exposes this sense around the word
superestis from which is derived the word “superstition”: the ghost, the elder, the storyteller, the
angel. The Homer of Potsdamerplatz follows the
epic tradition of the Homer of the Iliad and the
Odyssey by invoking the muses. Invocation in
the epic tradition affirms the singer’s position to
be a carrier of the memory of the community on
the assumption that the singer was not there.55
This helps explain the attraction that Cassiel has
for the singer of tales in general and Wenders’s
storyteller in particular. Wenders’s Homer was both
there, a survivor, and an elder, namely a carrier of
a collective in his body. This is what makes him
the Homer of Potsdamerplatz. The Homer of
Potsdamerplatz is thus both testis and superestis—
both an eye-witness and an elder, a Vichean subject,
a delegate of communal memory.
If the eyewitness and the elder are the two prototypes for the witness, there remains a third sense
of the witness that is both and neither the eyewitness nor the elder. It is the arbiter and this
role is off-site but it is active and interventionist.
The witness-as-arbiter might be the eavesdropper
(and the angels are eavesdroppers), the referee
function that is off the field in a game, the judge,
the chorus. It is a spectator but a spectator who
can interfere to disturb the action. But it is also
the spectator and the photographer as intrusive
spectator—the specular witness in short. It is in
Wenders, The Logic of Images, 78.
Jacques Derrida, La Voix et Le Phénomène, (Paris: Presses
universitaires de France, 1967) especially chap. 6.
54
See Émile Benvéniste, Le Vocabulaire des institutions indoeuropéenes, 2 vols. (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969) and Jonathan
Bordo, “Picture and Witness at the Site of the Wilderness”
in Landscape and Power, 2nd ed. WJT Mitchell (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002), especially 298–302.
55
See Jesper Svenbro, La parole et le marbre: aux origines de la
poétique grecque, Ph.D. dissertation, Lund University, 1976.
in much the same way that Virgil was Dante’s
companion in his descent into the Inferno. Without
Virgil, Dante would not be able to recognize the
ancients in the underworld, would not be able to
find his way. Without Virgil, he would be without the power to narrate.
For Wenders, the companion-as-double authorizes the truth of filmic testimony. It will be recalled
that the dissident angels are condemned to Berlin
at the end of the Second World War because it
was the most terrible place on earth. The angels
in their expulsion from Heaven have been stripped
by the Herr Gott of all their traditional kerygmatic powers. They aren’t guardians, messengers
or agents of any kind of divinity. These fallen
angels of Berlin are available only as invisible and
spectral company for humans:
“They are condemned to be witnesses, forever nothing but onlookers, unable to affect men in the slightest,
or to intervene in the course of history. They are
unable so much as to move a grain of sand.”52
52
53
108
 
the “arbiter” role that the filmmaker Wim Wenders
needs Walter Benjamin to validate his practice as
a specular witness. Wenders calls on Walter
Benjamin in order to authenticate his filmic work
as testimony. Benjamin provides him with the validation to address the horrible Nazi legacy. Only
with this validation can Wenders’s film contribute
to the great work of memory.
In his declaration and visual demonstration that
his angels are defined in terms of their sublime
and ineffable weakness, Wenders makes a significant
contribution to the understanding of the witness
in contemporary civic society. By defining the minimum conditions for what it is to be a witness as
someone “condemned” to be “nothing but an
onlooker,” Wenders defines a witness as someone
who derives his capacity for testimony from the
recognition of powerlessness; and in this he advances
along a line of thought first put forward by Camus.56
Wenders’s posit of the angel-as-witness problematizes weakness and incapacity as necessary conditions
for testimony. This is rather important in the evangelical age that we presently endure. It is also of note
in the context of a religious culture where testimony
requires acts of faith. By stripping his angels of
the powers of intervention, of protection and communication, Wenders prompts the viewer to
experience angels who contradict these expectations. Wenders proves over and over that the angels
of Berlin are unable so much as to move a grain
of sand. From this thought experiment, it does not
take a large step to make a figural transposition.
Faced with the horrific legacy of the Third Reich,
it is not hard for someone in the present, not a
survivor but a latecomer, like Wenders or this
author for that matter, not to have been there,
not to have been either a victim or a perpetrator, not to have been a bystander either. Wenders
was not there. He came afterward. I came afterward. We were latecomers. Being a latecomer does
not free him from that horrible legacy yet the
inheritance still whispers “. . . and where would
you have been, what would you have done . . .”
or “. . . you weren’t there, you were lucky . . .”
Had Wenders been there, he like Gunther Grass,
would likely have been a perpetrator, and this
author a victim, as his preceptors instilled in him
since his childhood. Yet Wenders was not there
to perpetrate, nor this author to be a victim. When
does empathy turn into the pathetic fallacy or
paralyzing guilt? Acknowledgment begins with
the admission of weakness, of powerlessness as an
ontological condition. I acknowledge that these
abominations took place. Yet this acknowledgment
is retrospective testimony. The alliance that Wenders
forges with Benjamin is like Dante’s alliance with
Virgil, because through the subject of Walter
Benjamin, Wenders has found his way into a hellish reality and found a way to return to the present.
His film becomes a link in a chain of “the great
work of memory.”
Der Himmel über Berlin is not about the Holocaust,
even though aspects of the film explicitly address
the Holocaust. The Holocaust is in the very grain
of the film. The burden of acknowledgment saturates the very signifying apparatus itself, like the
surface of a Kiefer painting, over saturated in what
it shows, minimum and even evasive in what it
says. Der Himmel über Berlin does not make any
obvious political statements about the Holocaust
and yet the film is all about it. It carries the
Holocaust as involuntary memory.
Throughout the world, major commemorative
sites to the murder of the European Jews have
been built for which there are different names and
capitals: Washington, Jerusalem and Berlin. These
monuments seem to demand memory as a tribute of declaration, of recognition, acts of testimony.
Yet in order to remember, in order even to
acknowledge, it is also necessary to forget, to paraphrase the words of Riva the heroine in the first
European film of traumatic recollection, Hiroshima
Mon Amour.57 Der Himmel über Berlin remembers without having either to say or show very much. By
making that horror part of the very texture of the
film, it shows a way toward civic remembrance
that transcends the politics of identity to fuse
urgency with inwardness in a treasure house of
memorable images.
Albert Camus, La Peste, in vol. 2 of Oeuvres completes, (Paris:
Gallimard, 2006).
57
Margerite Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour, (Paris: Gallimard,
1960), 32: “J’ai lutté, pour mon compte, de toutes mes forces,
chaque jour, contre l’horreur de ne plus comprendre du tout
le pourquoi de se souvenir. Comme toi, j’ai oublié.” I have
struggled in my way with all my strength, each day, against
the horror, not to understand the “why” of this memory.
Like you, I forgot.
56
   — 
Notes
Acknowledgments: The initial thought for this paper
was given at Exiles for which I would like to thank
David Kettler. A first draft of the paper was given
as a paper at the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago in spring 2005. I wish to thank Peg
Olin for that invitation. This was followed by a
Phi Beta Kappa lecture at the University of
Rochester in spring 2006 for which I would like
to thank Paul Duro. A reading of Oedipus at Colonus
109
with Jesper Svenbro at Thorigny in the Fall of
2007 helped better conceptualize the language of
place. I also wish to thank Ursula Staudinger who
sent me the Filmbuch, William Beard who introduced me to Wenders a long time ago, Ian
McLachlan, Victoria DeZwaan and the Cultural
Studies faculty, and the myriad hundreds of students in an introductory Cultural Studies course
at Trent University where the film was screened
annually from 1998 and 2005.