The Story of Walter Benjamin’s Final Days and His Cherished Paul Klee Drawing

Art historian Lisa Saltzman discusses Walter Benjamin’s final days in Paris before his suicide in 1940 and the network of intellectuals who saved his most prized possessions from World War II, including the Paul Klee drawing that inspired one of his most famous and trenchant texts, the Theses on the Philosophy of History. 

The exhibition Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds is on view at the Jewish Museum in New York through July 26, 2026. It traces the Swiss-German artist’s departure from the Bauhaus and his experience throughout the political upheaval of the 1930s prior to his death in 1940, providing a new basis for understanding his sociopolitical perspective and commitment to artistic freedom. 

Lisa Saltzman is the inaugural Emily Rauh Pulitzer '55 Chair of Modern and Contemporary Art at Bryn Mawr College. Her current book project, To Make Whole What Has Been Smashed, explores how one prescient passage from Walter Benjamin’s posthumously published writings came to transform his most cherished possession—an idiosyncratic little Paul Klee drawing of an angel—into the "angel of history," a postwar icon of impotent witness to historical catastrophe.