A philosophical study of Baroque mourning plays and the political theology embedded in German cultural memory
What the Work Is
The Origin of German Tragic Drama (German: Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels) is a major academic treatise written in German by Walter Benjamin, submitted in 1925 as his postdoctoral habilitation to the University of Frankfurt. The work examines German drama from the Baroque period, specifically the genre known as Trauerspiel—literally “mourning play”—which flourished during and after the Thirty Years’ War. Though intended to qualify Benjamin for a university lectureship, the work was deemed impenetrable by the faculty and was withdrawn from consideration before formal rejection.
What the Book Is About
The book undertakes a philosophical investigation of the German Baroque mourning play as a distinct dramatic form, fundamentally different from classical tragedy. Benjamin argues that the Trauerspiel represents a godless universe in which divine action has been replaced by political intrigue and the mechanics of courtly power. Where Greek tragedy derived its force from mythic and religious foundations, the Baroque mourning play operates in a world emptied of transcendence, where sovereign authority and its failures become the central dramatic concern. The work is as much a meditation on the philosophy of history, language, and allegory as it is a study of a neglected dramatic genre.
Key Ideas and Themes
Central to Benjamin’s argument is the distinction between tragedy and Trauerspiel. Greek tragedy, he contends, emerged from cultic ritual and maintained a connection to the gods, even in their destruction. The Baroque mourning play, by contrast, inhabits a world where the divine has withdrawn entirely. In place of gods, political forms govern human action; in place of providential destiny, there is only the necessity of intrigue and maneuvering within power structures.
The figure of the sovereign—the “Dark Sovereign”—is a fixation of the genre. This ruler attempts to restore order by assuming dictatorial control, dissolving parliaments, and unleashing violence, yet consistently fails. The disaster has already occurred before the action of the play begins; the mourning play laments a catastrophe that is preordained and whose consequences extend beyond the drama’s conclusion. The genre’s name itself implies this condition: it is a play of mourning, not of tragic catharsis.
Benjamin locates the origin of the Trauerspiel in the sustained anarchy of the Thirty Years’ War, a continental conflict that devastated the Holy Roman Empire and left a profound mark on German collective consciousness. Unlike the Greco-Persian Wars, which ended triumphantly for Athens and gave rise to the civic festival of tragedy, the Thirty Years’ War was experienced as an ending rather than a genesis. The mourning play, in Benjamin’s reading, is the artistic expression of a people attempting to articulate collective character formation amid the brutality of an origin that is itself inarticulate and inexpressible.
Allegory is another central concept in the book. Benjamin treats allegory not as a mere literary device but as a mechanism of profane revelation—a doomed attempt to achieve stable meaning in a world where meaning is perpetually deferred. The allegorist, in Benjamin’s account, works from a deeply melancholic instinct, arranging fragments and emblems in configurations that can never fully cohere. This understanding of allegory as a mode of knowledge, rather than mere ornament, was a significant departure from conventional literary criticism.
The book also engages with questions of epistemology and metaphysics. Benjamin’s “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” argues that absolute statement is impossible in human language or any system of representation, including mathematics and science. Ideas, he suggests, are like monads: each contains within itself an abbreviated and darkened diagram of the entire world of ideas. This philosophical position anticipates later developments in twentieth-century thought, including challenges to the certainty of scientific knowledge associated with figures like Gödel and Heisenberg, though Benjamin arrives at his conclusions through aesthetics and metaphysics rather than formal logic.
Structure and Approach
The book is notable for its unconventional structure. Rather than presenting a cleanly linear argument that progresses toward a discrete synthesis, the work proceeds through manifold detours and digressions. Benjamin himself described the completed work as “the death mask of its intention”—a formulation suggesting that the finished text preserves the trace of a purpose it cannot fully realize.
The Ursprung moves through elaborate discussions of typography and its phenomenological effects, speculations on medieval theology and the structure of time perception, demonologies of the concept, and extended meditations on allegory, hieroglyphics, emblem books, and the graphic prints of Albrecht Dürer. The book is dense with footnotes that expand into complex theological and philosophical investigations. This method reflects Benjamin’s conviction that ideas must be pursued through the concrete particularities of their manifestation in history rather than through abstract generalization.
The work’s difficulty is widely acknowledged. It is considered the most challenging prose Benjamin ever produced, demanding from its readers a familiarity with multiple intellectual traditions: German idealism, Jewish mysticism, Marxist dialectics, and the history of the Baroque period. Benjamin seems to have assumed that his readers—particularly the committee reviewing his habilitation—would grasp the subtle references and allusive gestures embedded in his text. This assumption proved unfounded.
Significance and Influence
The book’s initial reception was discouraging. The Frankfurt faculty, including the eminent Max Horkheimer, found the work impenetrable and urged Benjamin to withdraw it. A colleague’s remark that “intellect cannot be habilitated” became a famous maxim about the paradoxes of academic professionalism, gaining wider currency as Benjamin’s posthumous reputation grew.
Despite this inauspicious beginning, the work found an early and devoted reader in Theodor Adorno, who began teaching it as a seminar at Frankfurt University by 1931—the same institution that had rejected it as a habilitation. Adorno’s seminars on the book are sometimes considered the inaugural gatherings of what would become the Institute for Social Research, the institutional home of the Frankfurt School. The circle that formed around Adorno during this period eventually branched into its own academy, carrying Benjamin’s ideas into the mainstream of critical theory.
The book’s influence extends far beyond its immediate academic context. It has been credited with shaping works of major importance, including Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. The “horror of origins” as a hallmark of resistance to totalitarianism in the philosophy of history finds its root in this book, flowering through the small circle of Benjamin’s early readers.
The Ursprung was rediscovered in the second half of the twentieth century and has come to be considered a paradigm-shifting work in critical theory, the philosophy of history, and European thought more broadly. Its meditation on the tendency of democracies to elect dictators in times of cultural uncertainty—a theme that runs through the book from its composition in the early 1920s to its publication in 1928—proved prescient and continues to resonate. The work’s engagement with Carl Schmitt’s theory of the state of exception, conducted through an esoteric dialogue that spanned several of Benjamin’s writings, has become a touchstone for subsequent debates about sovereignty, emergency powers, and the fragility of constitutional order.
The book’s style, which resembles the experimental forms of literary modernism and Dadaism, initially worked against its acceptance. Benjamin expected from his academic readers the same allowances granted to avant-garde artists by their audiences—an expectation that proved unrealistic. Yet this very quality, the sense that what is hidden in the text is as important as what is explicitly stated, has made the work endlessly generative for later readers. The Ursprung remains a work that rewards—and demands—careful, repeated reading, its difficulty inseparable from the depth of its insight.
The source material provides specific details about the book’s genesis that have not yet been mentioned. Benjamin compiled the source material for the work—some 600 quotations from German baroque dramas—in the Berlin State Library in 1923. In the spring of 1924, as the Beer Hall Putsch trial prosecuting Hitler and his co-conspirators proceeded in the headlines, Benjamin fled Germany in the wake of an excruciatingly bad review of his translation of Baudelaire. The eviscerating critique of this debut effort, appearing on the front-page of several newspapers, had been served up by his Viennese doppelgänger: Stefan Zweig, the globally best-selling author, playwright, librettist and acclaimed editorial journalist who was himself a recent translator of Baudelaire. After the review was syndicated and appeared on page one of his own home turf at the Frankfurter Zeitung (where he worked as a stringer), sliding by under the radar of his sympathetic boss Siegfried Kracauer at the editor’s desk of the paper’s arts page, Benjamin decided that he would have to split town to polish off the book he had been working on.
Absconding to Capri with his voluminously annotated extracts and early drafts, he began to compile and compose these fragments into a unified book on the theme of Trauerspiel. While on the island of Capri he made the acquaintance of Asja Lācis and Bertolt Brecht. These meetings—especially his introduction to Lācis—informed his sudden conversion from casual dilettante in Marxist theory to committed dilettante in the same field, right in the middle of his project on the German Baroque. This shift in Benjamin’s theoretical disposition accounts for several of the Ursprung‘s formal oddities.
Benjamin indicates in a letter to Gershom Scholem, sent in January 1933, that Adorno “continues to teach the course” on German tragedy, “though it is no longer listed in the course catalog.” Later that month, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany.
The Nietzsche Connection
The title of the book suggests either a polemical challenge or a further development of technique and insight in relation to Nietzsche’s debut Birth of Tragedy. The Ursprung, as it turns out, offers both a challenge and a development of several of that earlier work’s themes having to do with theater as a vestigial (or otherwise, further evolved) aftermath and transformed remainder of cultic rites.
In the Birth of Tragedy, the ritual performance of the drama both unites the polity in a shared civic order, and enacts the breakdown or failure of that order in intoxication, madness, murder, suicide, familial violence and the general chaos of war according to the exorcismic principle of catharsis. This riffs on Aristotle’s dramatic theory but Nietzsche’s intent is to destroy the rationalizing Aristotelian orthodoxy in a breakthrough to the origin, facilitating a return to the embrace of more primal and violently realized forms of ritualism.
Nietzsche’s book on the subject was completed after he returned from the Siege of Metz where the German army commanded by Moltke the Elder made its breakthrough in 1871 (only a few months into Franco-Prussian War), after which the French Army was rapidly dismantled and the encirclement of Paris quickly brought France to its knees. This was in the spring of the same year that Germany became a modern nation state in and by means of the process of this invasion, which unified splintered elements and remainders of the Holy Roman Empire in the territory which today is called Germany. The Birth of Tragedy was partly intended as promotional material for the Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth Festival.
Nietzsche was not a normative public relations person, although Wagner was an important patron and father figure to him at the time that he wrote the Birth of Tragedy. The work’s intended audience was not so much the standard Opera-going public of the day. Instead it speaks toward the surging eternity of return composed of future generations who would rise up in the now-dawning (re: in the 1870s) advent of nihilism to slake themselves in a pseudo-Darwinian struggle of bloody self-assertion, as Nietzsche was later interpreted (quite plausibly) to have expressed in his Nachlass in his late reflections on this early work. Several of Nietzsche’s other early works expand or supplement his theses in the first book.
Knowledge of this description of tragedy as a sublimated form of ritual sacrifice in Nietzsche is generally assumed by Benjamin, rather than explicitly cited in each case of glancing reference to the earlier hybrid of Nietzsche’s dramaturgy and theurgy in the revision proposed by the Ursprung.
Some basic familiarity with the history of Germany’s foundation and the subsequent period leading up to and including the First World War, not to mention the Thirty Years’ War, will tend to make reading the Ursprung a more rewarding and less arduous undertaking since Benjamin assumes that his readers will possess basic historical knowledge of these events.
The Cambridge Ritualists
As Benjamin embarked upon his work, the Cambridge Ritualists (a movement that also arose in response to the Birth of Tragedy) were enjoying the pinnacle of their influence in Britain. The scholarship of these Ritualists informed and substantively inspired several now-classic works of literary modernism (by T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, H.D. and James Joyce) who were either being celebrated as a new visionary art-form or otherwise anathematized as forms of sacrilege and tried in court as obscenities. We have no evidence that Benjamin was aware of the Cambridge Ritualists, but a comparison of their scholarly project to Benjamin’s experiment in the Ursprung may be the most efficient possible description of the thrust of his argument about the Trauerspiel.
Briefly: The Cambridge Ritualists devoted themselves to reverse engineering the ritual forms and rites of the ancient Greeks, returning to the primal origin of the art in the eldritch ceremonies that preceded it by working backwards from the plays as they analyzed older archaeological evidence and inventoried or authenticated Ancient Greek art as experts, dating the work as they went along. The Ritualists also considered that Greek tragedy was a precursor to the modes of thought observed in Greek philosophy, and concerned themselves with illustrating this notion. They preferred tragedy to philosophy: they always preferred the original form to its successor.
Benjamin’s Ursprung moves in a diametrically opposite direction, contra the Cambridge Ritualists. He explored the fixations of Baroque drama (e.g. the Dark Sovereign who reinstates the order of nature by assuming dictatorial control of the state, dissolving parliament and inaugurating an orgy of slaughter, etc.) in the Trauerspiel as a precursor or primordial form of German political institutions and conventions, as well as a primeval dream-state or archaic remainder of juvenilia against whose chaos and morbid incoherence German idealism was derived as a psychic, stabilizing defense.
Benjamin was looking for the way that these plays dissolve into later political instincts and legal institutions, not attempting to enter their origin. The origin destroys itself in the process of creation, he tells us. He assumed the origin of the Trauerspiel to be—effectively—the sustained anarchy of intractable and apparently permanent violence in the Thirty Years’ War. The origin is inarticulate and inexpressible as Benjamin understood it. Drama itself is the attempt at articulation (or an important aspect of that articulation), and the political history of Germany is partly composed by the expressed application of these early attempts to describe and accomplish collective character formation in the midst of the origin’s brutality.
American, British and French readers will be able to appreciate that the Thirty Years’ War has a status in German history similar to monumentalizing tendencies directed at the American Revolution, the English Civil War (and the Restoration of the British crown), or the French Revolution but with an important difference. Namely: the Thirty Years’ War was a continental war or (in medieval terms) almost a world war that took place in the Holy Roman Empire (i.e. the imperial precursor to the mapping of later nation states that included Germany, Austria, Bohemia and parts of various other now distinct European nations etc.). It was much more das Ende (‘the End’) of something than a moment of genesis. Further, those familiar with Greek history will be in a position to appreciate that the War between the Persians and the Greeks (which the histories of Herodotus mark as the beginning of history), likewise, constituted the Attic polity out of which (in the annual festival of the Theater Dionysia in Athens) Greek tragedy first arose.
The Greco-Persian wars ended well for Athens; the Thirty Years War, for the Holy Roman Empire—not so much. Thus the distinction between tragedy and trauerspiel as Benjamin describes the ritualism of these forms.
The Esoteric Dialogue with Carl Schmitt
There is an indication in a letter that Benjamin sent as early as March 1923, that the Ursprung represents a second salvo continuing Benjamin’s esoteric dialogue with the work of Carl Schmitt on the subject of the state of exception: the tragic flaw in the structure of democracy. Benjamin first addressed this issue in his Critique of Violence, which examines—among other things—the paradox of living in Social Democracy where the constitution is suspended and martial law is declared so frequently that it constitutes an increasingly normative aspect of the functioning of the state.
Carl Schmitt wrote his Political Theology, in part, as a response to the provocation of this essay and the questions it raised. Schmitt is cited in the text of the Ursprung, and producing an answer to his challenge seems to have preoccupied Benjamin in the construction of the major sections of the book.
Benjamin sent the Ursprung to Carl Schmitt as we know from his correspondence. Schmitt responded (insofar as he responded) to this second gauntlet thrown down by Benjamin several years later by legally formalizing the Gleichschaltung, an institutional drive towards the Nazification of all German institutions and social forms (including family, church and schools in addition to every other institutional form like commerce etc.).
The Epistemo-Critical Prologue
As with the subtly feinted diagonal to Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy in the title of the whole book, Benjamin’s Epistemo-Critical Prologue, likewise contains a lyrical or sonic reference to Lenin’s book on theoretical methodology under the heading Materialism and Empirio-criticism.
Lenin’s book on methodology recommends rationalist pragmatism, subordinate to Marxist revolutionary theory, in the reading of history and world events. Benjamin’s Epistemo-Critical Prologue moves in the opposite direction: contemplating the limitations of scientific representation, and its contingency in relation to metaphysically ethereal yet, nevertheless, determining forces.
The terrain of awareness Benjamin tears open here anticipates Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, the uncertainty principle and challenges proposed to our theory of knowledge presented in the Theory of relativity. Benjamin’s thoughts on these subjects anticipate Werner Heisenberg and Kurt Gödel. But he resorts to Goethe rather than calculus. Benjamin’s critique of the hard sciences is couched in the jargon of aesthetics and metaphysics. Rather than presenting itself as a mathematical or logical proof, it suggests itself here as a sensibility.
The main drive is that absolute statement is impossible in human language or any other system of human representation including the numerical. Thus by extrapolation, he suggests in the first few pages that science is devoted to an impossible object or objective if it commits itself to the discovery of a unified field theory of static principles, given that the wild transformation of words and ideas over time will ravage these notions as the years go by; furthermore, their eternal and temporally essential transformation in real time makes it impossible to establish such principles in the first place.
From there the argument scales, iterates, qualifies and quickly recapitulates the development and relations of these dynamics throughout the history of western philosophy with particular emphasis on how they express themselves in the final, blood-drenched climax of the Reformation, specially referred to as the Baroque, for the next forty pages or so.
In terms of its epistemological and metaphysical claim (and not the specific historical substance his method addresses itself to), Benjamin’s prologue later finds provisionally inferred support in Albert Einstein’s introduction to Bertrand Russell’s book on Theory of Knowledge which awkwardly and agreeably logs an objection to the main arguments of the book that this essay by Einstein introduces. It is very unlikely that Einstein read Benjamin in order to inform his judgment on this question. Russell is a positivist. Benjamin and Einstein are not positivists.
Kracauer’s Summary of the Prologue
Kracauer gives the most concise summary of the prologue, which appears in a book review of the Ursprung shortly after it came out in print:
The difference between traditional abstract thinking and Benjamin’s manner of thinking is as follows: whereas the former drains the artifacts of their concrete plenitude, the latter burrows into the material thicket in order to unfold the dynamism at their core. [This method] accepts no generalities whatsoever, pursuing instead the unfolding manifestation of ideas in specific and really or presently perceived situations throughout history [where they ceaselessly evolve and never stabilize]. But since, for Benjamin, every idea is a monad, the whole world seems to him to proffer itself in [the holographic microcosm of] every presentation of such an idea. ‘The being that enters into it—the ideal with its previous and subsequent history—brings an abbreviated and darkened diagram of the rest of the world of ideas riding upon the artifact and concealed in its own figure,’ as Benjamin explains.
Siegfried Kracauer was a dear friend and colleague (frequently also Benjamin’s editor at the Frankfurter Zeitung) and thus had the advantage of being able to directly ask the author what he was trying to do in the book, possibly returning to the question on several occasions before doing his write-up. This may go some way towards explaining the degree by which Kracauer’s grasp of the material exceeded the depth of understanding that a panel of PhDs working in the terrain of Benjamin’s chosen subject were able to muster in the process of the Ursprung‘s review, despite the fact that they belonged to what was—at the time—the most advanced and sophisticated university system in the world at its peak: this, notwithstanding the fact that at least one of the faculty members called up for the review, Max Horkheimer, is still considered to be amongst the most important thinkers of that period.
Early Promotion and Later Influence
Siegfried Kracauer’s later protégé Theodor Adorno at the Frankfurter Zeitung‘s art-desk went on to become the Ursprung‘s greatest disciple, teaching the book as a seminar course at Frankfurt University on several occasions.
For those who understand—all at once—terms like ‘Hegelian synthesis’, ‘German Idealism’ in relation to the World Spirit or zeitgeist, Molitor’s conceptions of the linguistic mysticism in the Kabbalah, and what we might call the ur-Marxist style dialectical materialism: Benjamin is attempting a reconciliation of all these hermeneutic strategies in one fell swoop in the space of a single monograph whose subject—Trauerspiel—was already, in itself, quite obscure.
Given that readers familiar with even one of these discourses are likely to be unfamiliar with the other three strains of methodology actively transforming themselves as they intersect in the Ursprung, it is readily understandable that almost no one knew what to make of the book over the half-century prior to its rediscovery. This came in the wake of Benjamin’s sudden rise to global fame in certain academic and artistic circles in the late 1960s. Especially called to Benjamin were all-stars of the counter-culture who had academic chops but worked independently in the new journalism outside of the academy. For example: Susan Sontag, John Berger, Marshall McLuhan etc. For the most part these three (who were major voices in the zeitgeist) owe the concepts and theories that made them famous to Benjamin.
To explain Benjamin’s appeal to this later generation it may be well to remark that one of his final articles for the Frankfurter Zeitung was a meditation on the mystical dimensions that opened to him on a visit to Marseilles when he performed one of his several experiments in smoking a high-dose of hashish to observe the way in which it would alter his perceptions. Benjamin was early on the train of cannabinoids, mescaline and more generally “winning youth to the revolution by chemical sacraments” as he was on a great many other trends in thought and experimentation that would find massively scaled popular traction only later on in the century.
