The Origin of German Tragic Drama

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

Overview

The Origin of German Tragic Drama is Walter Benjamin's most sustained and original work. It begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar stage-form of royal martyr dramas called Trauerspiel. Benjamin also comments on the engravings of Durer and the theatre of Calderon and Shakespeare. Baroque tragedy, he argues, was distinguished from classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history. Georg Lukacs, an opponent of Benjamin's aesthetics, singled out The Origin of German Tragic Drama as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781804290460
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	08/22/2023
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.07(w) x 7.79(h) x 0.64(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

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

“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

From the Publisher

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