Before he tried to flee further when the Nazis invaded France, Benjamin entrusted Klee's drawing, together with other important papers, to librarian Georges Bataille, who hid it at his place of work, the French National Library.

After World War II, Bataille gave the print to Theodor Adorno in Frankfurt, who per Benjamin's last will sent it on to Gershom Scholem, a distinguished scholar of Jewish mysticism, who had emigrated to Palestine in 1923.

[1] According to Scholem, Benjamin felt a mystical identification with the Angelus Novus and incorporated it in his theory of the “angel of history,” a melancholy view of historical process as an unceasing cycle of despair.

[3]In 2015, in conjunction with her solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, American artist R. H. Quaytman discovered that the monoprint had become adhered to an 1838 copperplate engraving by Friedrich Müller after a portrait of Martin Luther by Lucas Cranach.

[4][5] The name and concept of Klee's "New Angel" has inspired works by other artists, filmmakers, writers and musicians, including John Akomfrah, Ariella Azoulay, Amichai Chasson, Carolyn Forché, Laurie Anderson, Rabih Alameddine, Daniel Boyd and Ruth Ozeki.