Walter Benjamin, 1940:
“A Klee drawing named „Angelus Novus“ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixed contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth 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 only single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurts it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise, it has got caught in his wings such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly is pushing 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.”
(IX Thesis of the Philosophy of History)