The Origin of German Tragic Drama

by Walter Benjamin, John Osborne (Translator), George Steiner (Introduction)

Overview

Cited by Lukács as a principal source of literary modernism, Walter Benjamin’s study of the baroque stage-form called Trauerspiel (literally, “mourning play”) is the most complete document of his prismatic literary and philosophical practice. Engaging with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German playwrights as well as the plays of Shakespeare and Calderón and the engravings of Dürer, Benjamin attempts to show how the historically charged forms of the Trauerspiel broke free of tragedy’s mythological timelessness. From its philosophical prologue, which offers a rare account of Benjamin’s early aesthetics, to its mind-wrenching meditation on allegory, The Origin of German Tragic Drama sparkles with early insights and the seeds of Benjamin’s later thought.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781844673483
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	06/09/2009
Series:	Radical Thinkers
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is the author of Illuminations, The Arcades Project, and The Origin of German Tragic Drama.

George Steiner, author of dozens of books (The Death of Tragedy, After Babel, Heidegger, In Bluebeard’s Castle, My Unwritten Books, George Steiner at the New Yorker), is Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College at Cambridge University.

Table of Contents

	Introduction
	Epistemo-Critical Prologue
	The Concept of the treatise
	Knowledge and truth
	Philosophical beauty
	Division and dispersal in the concept
	Idea as configuration
	The word as idea
	Ideas non-classificatory
	Burdach's nominalism
	Verism, syncretism, induction
	Croce and the artistic genres
	Origin
	Monadology
	Neglect and misinterpretation of baroque tragedy
	'Appreciation'
	Baroque and expressionism
	Pro domo
	Trauerspiel and Tragedy
	Baroque theory of the Trauerspiel
	The insignificance of the influence of Aristotle
	History as the content of the Trauerspiel
	Theory of sovereignty
	Byzantine sources
	Herodian dramas
	Indecisiveness
	Tyrant as martyr, martyr as tyrant
	Underestimation of the martyr-drama
	Christian chronicle and Trauerspiel
	Immanence of baroque drama
	Play and reflection
	Sovereign as creature
	Honour
	Destruction of the historical ethos
	Setting
	The courtier as saint and as intriguer
	The didactic intention of the Trauerspiel
	Volkelt's 'Aesthetics of the Tragic'
	Nietzsche's 'Birth of Tragedy'
	The tragic theory of German idealism
	Tragedy and legend
	Kingship and tragedy
	'Tragedy' old and new
	Tragic death as a framework
	Tragic, forensic and Platonic dialogue
	Mourning and tragedy
	Sturm und Drang, Classicism
	Haupt- und Staatsaktion, puppet play
	The intriguer as comic character
	The concept of fate in the fate-drama
	Natural and tragic guilt
	The stage property
	The witching hour and the spirit world
	Doctrine of justification, [characters not reproducible], melancholy
	The melancholy of the prince
	Melancholy of the body and of the soul
	The doctrine of Saturn
	Emblems: dog, sphere, stone
	Acedia and unfaithfulness
	Hamlet
	Allegory and Trauerspiel
	Symbol and allegory in classicism
	Symbol and allegory in romanticism
	Origin of modern allegory
	Examples and illustrations
	Antinomies of allegorical interpretation
	The ruin
	Allegorical soullessness
	Allegorical fragmentation
	The allegorical character
	The allegorical interlude
	Titles and maxims
	Imagery
	Aspects of a baroque theory of language
	The Alexandrine
	Fragmentation of language
	Opera
	Ritter on script
	The corpse as emblem
	The bodies of the gods and Christianity
	Mourning and the origin of allegory
	The terrors and the promises of Satan
	The limit of pensiveness
	'Ponderacion Misteriosa'

Editorial Reviews

He drew, from the obscure disdained German baroque, elements of the modern sensibility: the taste for allegory, surrealist shock effects, discontinuous utterance, a sense of historical catastrophe.

Susan Sontag

Walter Benjamin is the most important German aesthetician and literary critic of [the twentieth] century.

Sunday Times

Praise for The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin

“Benjamin was the interlocutor of all the demons and angels of storytelling. And this is why he knew its endless secrets. Listen to him.”
– John Berger

“This volume collects an extraordinary array of short pieces by Walter Benjamin that lets us see the centrality of stories, dreams, and tales to his own experimental writings. This volume is a marvelous gift that will reorient our reading of Benjamin in startling ways”
– Judith Butler

“Much praise is due to the editors for bringing together a newly translated collection of his short fictions, The Storyteller, in which he shows our iniquitous material world suffused and sabotaged by the uncanny like no one else.”
– Jacqueline Rose

“A circular book to visit again and again, a book one can start reading right in the middle or read backwards, playing with its chapters and sentences wildly and freely, just as the philosopher would have probably wished.”
– Elif Shafak, Financial Times

“An event.”
– Jonathon Sturgeon, Guardian

From the Publisher