Origin Of German Tragic Drama

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.

"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

The Origin of German Tragic Drama is generally acknowledged as Benjamin's most sustained and original work and as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century. It begins with a general theoretical introductions 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. Later, Benjamin discusses the engravings of Durer, and the theatre of Shakespeare and Calderon. Baroque tragedy, he argues was distinguished from classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history.

Benjamin"s most sustained and original work, considered to be one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century.

'Walter Benjamin is the most important German aesthetician and literary critic of this century.' --George Steiner

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.Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College at Cambridge University and the author of dozens of books (The Death of Tragedy, After Babel, Martin Heidegger, In Bluebeard’s Castle), George Steiner is one of the world’s foremost intellectuals.