Heiner Müller:

THE LUCKLESS ANGEL Behind him swims the past, shaking thunder from wing and shoulder, with a noise like buried drums, while before him the future stagnates, penetrating his eyes, his pupils explode like stars, the word wound up into a vibrating mouth-gag, strangling him with his breath. For an instant one can still see his wings beating, in the roaring one hears the hail of stones fall above behind in front of him, the vain movement more loud than violent, sporadic, gradually slower. Then the moment closes in on him: standing, in that quickly filled place, the melancholic angel rests, waiting for history in the petrifaction of flight view breath. Until the renewed noise of mighty wing-beats reproduces itself in waves through the stones and announces his flight.

The Luckless Angel, 1958

I am the angel of despair. With my hands I provide rapture, confusion, oblivion, pleasure and pain of the body. My speech is silence, my song is the cry. In the shadow of my wings terror dwells. My hope is the last breath. I am the knife with which the dead man opens his coffin. I am he who will become. My wings are the revolt, my heaven is the abyss of tomorrow.

Der Auftrag

Angels always appear when it is no longer possible to imagine the realization of hopes. These figures then become necessary; with Benjamin this is true also. Angels are figures that go beyond hope and despair.’

Interview, 1991

Mayor: We indeed want to build, here on earth, the kingdom of heaven.
The mayor’s son: No paradise without hell. No heaven without hell. And capitalism is the purgatory in which
money is recycled.
Schumanngerhard: In blood.

Germania 3