The Origin of German Tragic Drama by Walter Benjamin

The Origin of German Tragic Drama Reviews

• 
  Luís

  The technique betrayed humanity and turned the nuptial layer into a bloodbath.
• 
  Eero

  ok, so i didn’t really “read” this; i just read the intro and epistemo-critical prologue, but i’m moving it from my “want-to-read shelf” to my “read shelf” for the dopamine
• 
  Anya Ciccone

  It's fine but honestly life is too short
• 
  Michael

  There are some books in which the richness of the text creates for the reader a fireworks display. Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama is one such book for me. Entry into Benjamin’s study felt like a post-structuralist examination of the Baroque in which the Trauerspiel was both the occasion for and development of the constellation of literary, historical, religious and economic structures that informed the construction of both the Trauerspiel and Benjamin’s philosophical odyssey.
  
  The study starts with the epistomo-critical prologue in which Benjamin lays out his theoretical framework for an approach to literary criticism in general and the German Trauerspiel in particular. The examination of the philosophical, philological and classicist literature that informs Benjamin’s examination provides a primer on the recurring conceptual images that he will develop within his philosophical and literary essays throughout the rest of his career.
  
  The study then breaks down into two main parts: 1) the literary history of the Trauerspiel in relation to tragedy and 2) the Trauerspiel and allegory.
  
  The first part in particular felt like a text Foucault could have written. Benjamin presents an archeology of the Trauerspiel as a product of its time that speaks across its time to the literary and artistic constructs of its past (the Christian heritage of a de-mythologized world) and the present (the post-Christian world of early twentieth century capital). In it, Benjamin paints a picture of the melancholic hero, a product of a fallen history, engaged in intrigue and martyred either as an active participant in his death or as a passive recipient of her fate (and yes, Benjamin identifies and distinguishes between the tragic ways of dying for men and women). In a fallen world, Benjamin argues, the Trauerspiel presents the essence of human life as a form of suffering in which even stoic acceptance is without meaning.
  
  The melancholic hero’s stoic suffering in a world without meaning, lays the groundwork for the investigation into allegory as the driving force of German Trauerspiel. The melancholic experiences the world as disjointed (out of joint) and the source of mourning as the incapacity of joining the sign with meaning, which itself is the essence of allegory. In allegory, history emerges as a series of actions that always standing for something else, as if the result of the Hegelian dialectic of being and nothing didn’t result in becoming, but in allegory. Allegory, Benjamin argues, must therefore be distinguished from the symbolic character of the Greek tragic hero who calls forth the God in a symbolic suffering that reveals totality through the establishment of divine justice. Contrary to the symbolic form of Greek Tragedy, in the German Trauerspiel the hero’s suffering is an allegory in which it always signifies that which is not present, a meaning that is never fully grasped, a justice that cannot be claimed, a disjunction between the sign and the signified.
  
  This description does not really do justice to Benjamin’s work. The flashes of insight, the constellation of conceptual ideas, the scholarly distinctions between Greek and Christian tragedy made this book a joy to read.
  
• 
  Ashley

  r o u g h
• 
  Michal Lipták

  Let me just make some preliminary remarks here. Unsorted, fragmentary, confused remarks. You shouldn’t read them actually – they are my notes, primarily.
  
  This is real tour de force, sweeping stuff. Benjamin sets his eyes on the lesser genre of German Baroque Trauerspiel, a play that is sort of like tragedy but – Benjamin makes his point eminently – also nothing like that. Where the former draws its strength from mythology and prehistoric heroic times, in Trauerspiel content is derived from known history. Tyrants and martyrs are presented in Trauerspiel – sometimes overlapping and indistinguishable – dying in a way that doesn’t elicit catharsis, but mourning. Emotions are more naturalistic and straightforward, but also in a way over the top and unbelievable. Protagonists are melancholic and passive (similar melancholy Benjamin earlier read in Goethe’s Elective Affinities , where melancholy and passivity was cause the guilt of the characters). Language of these plays – ridiculously bent on nationalistic revival of German – is clunky and clumsy, never achieving the compact excellence of Shakespeare and Calderon. Allegory – main mode of operation in Trauerspiel – everywhere produces doubles, artificial distance between the character and meaning. Clowns and schemers never work as contrastive foil to elevate tragic presentation of fate – which Benjamin claims is the way Shakespeare operates – they are puzzling allegory of Satan. And yet, at this era of Reformation, counter-Reformation and disenchantment, the allegory no longer bears its didactic value it had in Middle Ages. Allegory of Trauerspiel is “ruin”:
  
  

  Allegory thereby positions itself beyond beauty. Allegories are in the realm of thought what ruins are in the realm of things. Hence the Baroque cult of the ruin.

  
  
  The question, though, after finishing this, is why. There are actually two whys. First why is why should we care about Baroque Trauerspiel, this duly forgotten genre, this parade of works which I am sure I’ll never, ever read (I’m liberal with my to-read list, but not that much). The second why is why Benjamin must write in such – I’m not going to flinch before that brutish word – confusing way? So fragmentary?
  
  I’ll comment (comment, because I’m incapable of answering) on the second question first. It won’t probably help you, though. Anyway, in the Epistemico-critical introduction, there’s this passage in which I read (though it may not be intended as) a jab at Husserl:
  
  

  Truth never enters into a relation, let alone an intentional one. The object of knowledge, an object determined in conceptual intention, is not truth. Truth is an intentionless being formed from ideas. The comportment appropriate to truth is therefore an entering and disappearing into it, not an intending in knowing. Truth is the death of intention.

  
  
  That’s cruel dismissal of the very possibility of “eidetic variation”, but it’s not like phenomenologists are unaware of the problem (Merleau-Ponty’s metaphysical turn in Visible et invisible is precisely motivated by the failure of transcendental reflection). But what else can these poor beings do? Their hard work at interrogation of phenomena comes at price: the blockage of access to anything like the Revelation understood theologically (Marion’s reformulation of donné is unconvincing), and they’re left with constant and recursive returns to origins. “Let’s start again from the beginning...” will be what a phenomenologist will always say.
  
  In the notion of origin though we may find common ground (Benjamin doesn’t go as far as Derrida to strip us even of notion of “origin”, which will provoke Derrida’s ire during reading of his "Critique of Violence"). So “origin” is not historical origin, but rather a constant source:
  
  

  In the most singular and eccentric of phenomena, in the feeblest and clumsiest attempts no less than in the overripe manifestations of a late period, discovery is capable of bringing the genuine to light. The idea takes in the series of signature historical formations— but not for the sake of constructing unity out of them, still less of extracting a common denominator from them. Between the relation of the particular to the idea and its relation to the concept there is no analogy: here it falls under the concept and remains what it was— particularity; there it stands in the idea and becomes what it was not— totality. That is its Platonic “salvation.”

  
  
  Is there not some affinity between such Ursprung with Heidegger’s “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes”? Heidegger:
  
  

  The origin of the artwork - of, that is, creators and preservers, which is to say, the historical existence of a people - is art. This is so because, in its essence, art is an origin: a distinctive way in which truth comes into being, becomes, that is, historical. (…) Are we, in our existence, historically at the origin? Or do we, rather, in our relationship with art, appeal, merely, to a cultured knowledge of the past? (…) What we mean, here, by the word "origin" is thought out of the essence of truth.

  
  
  In any case, Benjamin doesn’t deploy a thought-out conceptual schema akin to Heidegger. Rather, he forwards the notion of “idea as configuration” – intentionless, only something to dive into. And towards the end of his fragmentary narrative he explains he couldn’t do otherwise:
  
  

  Whatever in the way of far-reaching connections could be brought forward in a method that is here and there perhaps still a bit vague, still tied to cultural history, nonetheless comes together under the aspect of the allegorical, and gathers itself in the idea of the Trauerspiel.

  
  
  Benjamin’s fragmentary configuration of history, theology, art criticism or linguistics is indeed a method of diving in.
  
  But what is to be gained by it? In preceding essay, Goethe's Elective Affinities, Benjamin distinguishes between “truth content” and “material content” of the work of art. The more temporally distant the work of art, the more incomprehensible the “material content” – woven out of period social fabric – becomes. Such works of art thus become equipped with commentaries. But a space opens more prominently for art criticism, too, which can explain why we are commenting at all – why works still tell us something. I always proposed the art criticism should seek response to this inquiry in lasting aesthetic value of the work, but Benjamin’s opposing answer – shamelessly metaphysical, it appears to me – seems to be that what remains is truth: the way work of art negotiates language, nature, God(s) – and the people and the things.
  
  But why focus on Baroque Trauerspiel in particular? In a subversive turn it seems to me that the point is that aesthetic value – if we can trust the claim of canonical works – will not distract us here. Baroque Trauerspiel can interrogate the truth precisely because it is ruinous, transitory, imperfect. These people found themselves in disenchanted nature, history stripped of eschatology, God at extreme points (Calvinism) receding from the world, tentative steps of capitalism, language disintegrating except for “music—the last universal language of humanity since the construction of the tower”. The produced no “prime examples” of the emerging art. Their art never truly emerged. In this ruinous failure it makes most sense for Benjamin to raise the “idea”.
  
  I’m not sure how much it helps me to at least somehow grasp the nature of Benjamin’s operation if I am relatively knowledgeable in Baroque opera. Benjamin says that “from the perspective of literature and particularly of the Trauerspiel, opera must appear as a product of decay”. But Benjamin couldn’t have known – much less heard – that much of Baroque opera (Händel revival was only beginning in 1920s). If you dive into in, though, you’ll be swept in something that seems much akin to Benjamin’s description of Trauerspiele. You’ll find continuously contrasting naïveté and artificiality. You’ll find recitatives disrupting the flow and moving uncannily to common speech – that is, strangling of opera at its birth – without ever becoming it (I’ve once made this note concerning Vivaldi’s Olimpiade: “Recitative reminds one of common speech extremely closely, but one should avoid such lure at all costs. The goal is, precisely, to alienate oneself as much as possible from an allure of speech - take those recitatives as far from life as possible. One couldn't be more mistaken than to handle them in form of some Sprechgesang one knows from, I don’t know, Wagner.”). You’ll not find masterworks there. That is – except for existence of Monteverdi’s Orfeo which must be provisionally considered simply a miracle (Another my note: “If one wants, one can hear Verdi in it, capable of coming with short and very memorable musical characterizations, or Wagner with his Teutonic flow, or Janáček and his sčasenka, and so on. Of course, none of these late operatic giants had to be particularly influenced by Monteverdi, but listener is free to form his own links while trying to grasp what's happening in work of art: and truth is, that Orfeo is not just great work on its own, it seems to contain, in implicated form, practically all possibilities of opera that will be explicated in next 400 years. That Monteverdi was capable of nailing opera such effectively and profoundly some 10 years into its existence is a miracle.”), there are no great operas in Baroque.
  
  As a culturally/historically situated audience you will find yourself in impossible situation – this is what I’ve noted down (for some reason) when thinking about Händel’s Arianna in Creta: “Opera seria shows clear tendency towards commodification: the works are produced in large numbers, ensembles and opera singers are professionalized, which allows for highly complex, daring and technically demanding vocal writing – on the other hand, the overall artistic structure of the opera is standardized to ridiculous level, topics for the operas are rigidly defined, and surprising structural innovations are kept to minimum. But the audience which receives these operas is not yet an audience of buyers, and operas not yet enter the artistic market in strong sense: rather, the consumers are anachronisms of their age, dying feudal class, dinosaurs whose power will be broken in forthcoming revolutionary upheavals. They don’t know it yet, though, and operas function at that point as rituals, which are meant reflect their own social standing. Connoiseurs analyze the operas at that time, reveling in artistic opportunities allowed by professionalism and generous financing, but they only plant the seeds of future way of appreciation of works of art – they are not the intended audience yet. (…) Opera seria as a genre – which brought a lot of enjoyment – belongs not only to a cultural milieu which is far remote, it belongs to cultural milieu which is now undesired.”
  
  I’ve seen people resolve this impossible situation by simply “enjoying the tunes” in the most dimwitted way possible (I of course tend to resort to this myself from time to time, and I love Vinci’s Artaserse and Graun’s Cesare e Cleopatra for no other reason). But a slightest bit of reflection induces a self-hate that once again reveals the impossibility of the situation. And yet… there must be something in these fragments, in these ruins. The deeper one goes, the more convinced one becomes, despite the fact that only thing mounting is the evidence to contrary.
  
  Now, I don’t say I understand exactly what Benjamin tries to achieve with his diving into Trauerspiel (and necessarily its idea – that is, origin – because there’s no masterwork). But I feel certain affinity to his impossible project. In short: I think we could be buddies. (Despite the fact that I’m trained phenomenology.)
  
  So, that’s it. Now I can finally read that excellent
  dissertation by Martin Ritter that’s occupying my shelf for some 10 years now.
• 
  Jesse

  The "Epistemo-Critical Foreward" is a very nice exposition of Benjamin's critical method, but I found the rest of the book quite frustrating and opaque.
• 
  Emannuel K.

  Gosto do Benjamin e estou buscando estudar mais sobre alegoria, então ler o livro no qual ele desenvolve sua teoria desse conceito parece uma ótima ideia. Mas a realidade não foi bem assim. A parte de que a teoria de alegoria exposta nesse livro é a do Benjamin é particularmente importante. Ela não dialoga com a maior parte daquilo que entendemos por alegoria, seja como concebida desde o Renascimento com Dante, por exemplo, e também não dos diz muito hoje. Na verdade, o que o autor chama de alegoria parece se aproximar mais de símbolo ou emblema. Pode, portanto, ser mais útil a pessoas que estudam história da arte do que literatura. Talvez. Algumas passagens são bem interessantes, é verdade, mas mesmo estas estão bem distantes da genialidade dos ensaios célebres que fizeram dele um intelectual de grande impacto em diversas áreas das humanidades. Um dos fatores determinantes pode ser o fato dessa ser uma obra da juventude de Benjamin. Talvez a tradução não tenha ajudado (comecei a leitura pela edição brasileira, mas não era tão bem organizada), mas não muda o fato de que ficou abaixo das expectativas, seja como leitura ou como fonte de pesquisa.
• 
  Jessica

  Having made sure to finish this before marking it read, I don’t feel qualified to give it a rating. I’m between two and three stars, but making the distinction calls for insight I don’t have into the Baroque cultural tradition. I mention the Baroque inclusively, despite Benjamin’s ostensible focus on the German Trauerspiel, because this text ventures into English and Spanish drama and triangulates a seventeenth-century zeitgeist with pit stops in politics, history, philosophy, and sociology (selectively). I’d have to know the period thoroughly well in order to respond to Benjamin’s claims, and I’m not sure, either, how critically prescient this text was in the 1920s; Benjamin’s interest in allegory and the symbol, for instance, resonates with strains of literary scholarship, but I can’t tell how path-breaking his ideas might have been (had this received wider circulation earlier, that is). That said, though, I doubt I would have admired Benjamin’s analysis even were I more familiar with his topic, because I don’t agree with this sort of interpretive mash-up and the kind of sociological master statement it derives. It’s not surprising that this – the equivalent of Benjamin’s dissertation – was passed between the literature and art history departments; I’d say it best resembles cultural studies or metaphysical philosophy, but the perfect disciplinary fit hasn’t been invented yet. Neither is it hard to believe that this text was ultimately rejected: try telling your dissertation advisors that the “value of fragments of thought is all the greater the less direct their relationship to the underlying idea,” or that the “absence of an uninterrupted purposeful structure” is the hallmark of the treatise, which has a “very real affinity” with the mosaic. Were I to take my cue from Verso and shelve this as literary criticism, it would receive a firm two stars for its arbitrary organization and poor accessibility. I did learn from Benjamin’s Origin – but I would have gathered more from a better written text, for starters.
• 
  Elias Dourado

  Para mim, estudioso da lógica matemática, este livro de Benjamin apresenta de forma bastante erudita o impressionante valor da filosofia para além da analítica.
  
  "O conceito de sistema, do século XIX, ignora a
  alternativa à forma filosófica, representada pelos conceitos da
  doutrina e do ensaio esotérico. Na medida em que a filosofia é
  determinada por esse conceito de sistema, ela corre o perigo de
  acomodar-se num sincretismo que tenta capturar a verdade
  numa rede estendida entre vários tipos de conhecimento, como
  se a verdade voasse de fora para dentro. Mas o universalismo
  assim adquirido por essa filosofia não consegue alcançar a
  autoridade didática da doutrina. Se a filosofia quiser perma-
  necer fiel à lei de sua forma, como representação da verdade e
  não como guia para o conhecimento, deve-se atribuir impor-
  tância ao exercício dessa forma, e não à sua antecipação, como
  sistema. "
• 
  Nepo

  The reason this book is difficult is because Benjamin was trying to articulate an art form and a period that was not yet seen in his time as constituting a distinct realm of its own: Mannerism. If you have troubles getting through, I therefore recommend reading this along with Wylie Sypher's "Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature, 1400-1700," and Arnold Hauser's "Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art."
• 
  Bahar Beizaei

  Impenetrable text. Demands multiple readings. Seems to be inexhaustible in its capacity to yield truly astonishing insights about modernity, secularization, and counter-reformation theology. Unfortunately the majority of studies and commentaries written on it seem to focus (one-sidedly) on certain aspects instead of a thoroughgoing analysis of its other moments (i.e., Agamben obsesses over sovereignty, Pensky over melancholia).
• 
  Tom

  Hooray for insightful, philosophical critics who are actually good writers!
• 
  Sebastian Baere

  "There is strictly speaking only a single book that deserves to be called critical..."
• 
  Lysergius

  The subject matter, Trauerspiel, German tragic drama does not really interest, but this is Benjamin in full flow, ideas, references, and quotations just bounce off the page. Once started it is hard to put down, though rest one must, to digest what one has just read. A wonderful book.
• 
  michal k-c

  The appendices make it all worth it. in the Arcades Project Benjamin notes that there hasn’t yet been an epoch which does not feel itself to be modern, and that is probably the best one line explanation of the Messianic time we have left.
• 
  Lovely Fortune

  For German class on Aby Warburg. Another supplemental piece meant to show what other (German) philosophers thought about the same topics Warburg focused on.
• 
  Katrinka

  Never thought I'd be impatient to finish anything by Benjamin.
• 
  Alexandre R.

  The Baroque becomes livelier through your words and thoughts, Mr. Benjamin. Thank you!
• 
  Oakley Merideth

  This book is so profoundly fragmentary that it does, indeed, enact modernist literary tropes outside the realm of “literature.” Like tromping through Joyce one often surmises that they are simply reading for the intrinsic sake of reading only to be summarily shocked by an insight, an image, a phrase, or an argument that is at once beautiful yet totally unexpected and seemingly out of context. In fact, this is a book that annihilates context, page after page, yet stylistically eschews all pretenses of scholarly chaos. You don’t “feel” like you are being cast adrift, but intellectually your paddle fell into the swirling depths long ago.
  
  Here is a possible “publishing” experiment for the future—release an abridgment of two distinct types. Because, you really could render this book either eminently readable or thoroughly impenetrable with some very simplistic and ham-handed editing. Just keep those numbered sections in...throw these out...and voila! Something that is utterly distinct from the present work!
  
  Now, small minded as I am I can truly say that as a “whole” this text really doesn’t “work.” There is NOT one thesis or even one common matrix of assertions that Benjamin puts forth but merely a common “drive” and “style” sticking the pages to the spine. And while there is plenty to glean from this work (please note the verb—“glean” not “gather”) after the first section the basic cohesion and even coherency of the text truly deteriorates. But, perhaps that is the point???
• 
  Greg

  Two stars for writing. Three stars for content. Benjamin is one of those left-wing icons from the Weimar Republic. He is also one of those writers who is considered profound because his writing is so bad. This book was originally meant as his Habilitationsschrift. Habilitation is the production of another book-length work after the dissertation for PhD that in Germany is required to join the faculty of a university. It was rejected. One can see why. The book itself is a mess with approximately three different threads of thought in a tangle. Is it a book of aesthetics? Somewhat. Is it a book of literary criticism? Somewhat. Is it theological commentary? Somewhat. There is no denying that Benjamin is widely read, but his thought is extremely confused and couched in impenetrable academic German that the translator obviously has trouble making sense of. (In a way similar to Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption.) Anyone studying tragedy will have to read this book, because it is considered important (and it does make an important contribution establishing German Trauerspiel as something other than tragedy--animated by melancholy, not the tragic spirit).
• 
  Nathan

  Only read the Epistemo-Critical-Prologue for a paper I'm writing...and it was awesome. Especially pgs 47-48. My brain was buzzing and I heard bells ringing and whistles blowing. Any book that does that is instant 5 stars.
• 
  Shubhakiyarti

  Tragic is the Truth...Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
• 
  Amanda

  A very difficult read, but interesting and influential. Also good for trying to re-teach yourself German.