Exile, Fracture and the Dance of Death: Paul Klee and Walter Benjamin

Abstract

Among the myriad themes and techniques that Paul Klee (1879–1940) manipulates in his vast yet intimate oeuvre, the fragmented body motif makes an extensive appearance. Of particular import for this theme are the last years of the artist’s life overlapping unhappily with the beginning of the Second World War. Already during the 1914–18 war, Klee, who had settled in Munich after his marriage in 1906, had been mobilised at age 36. (Although born in Switzerland, he held German citizenship because of his German father.) He received his draft notification on the same day — 11 March 1916 — as a telegram announcing the death at Verdun of his friend Franz Marc, then acclaimed by many as the leading German expressionist artist. Another friend, the painter August Macke, with whom Klee had travelled to Tunisia in April 1914, had been killed in action by September 1914. Klee’s entries into his Tagebücher (Diaries) make clear that he did not share the war fervour and willingness to sacrifice that characterised Marc’s position and in general the conceptual horizon of the first war years.¹ To the contrary, Klee attempted to distance himself psychologically from the war, a distanciation he expressed in terms of an otherness of inner space, an aesthetic of ‘crystallisation’ or abstraction, and after 1916, in a resolutely ironic undercutting of his own military service.

Angels (they say) often do not know whether they move among the living or the dead.

Engel (sagt man) wüßten oft nicht, ob sie unter Lebenden gehn oder Toten.

Rilke, Duineser Elegien, First Elegy