Origin of the German Trauerspiel

by Walter Benjamin

Book Overview

Origin of the German Trauerspiel was Walter Benjamin's first full, historically oriented analysis of modernity. Readers of English know it as "The Origin of German Tragic Drama," but in fact the subject is something else--the play of mourning. Howard Eiland's completely new English translation, the first since 1977, is closer to the German text and more consistent with Benjamin's philosophical idiom.

Focusing on the extravagant seventeenth-century theatrical genre of the trauerspiel, precursor of the opera, Benjamin identifies allegory as the constitutive trope of the Baroque and of modernity itself. Allegorical perception bespeaks a world of mutability and equivocation, a melancholy sense of eternal transience without access to the transcendentals of the medieval mystery plays--though no less haunted and bedeviled. History as trauerspiel is the condition as well as subject of modern allegory in its inscription of the abyssal.

Benjamin's investigation of the trauerspiel includes German texts and late Renaissance European drama such as Hamlet and Calder n's Life Is a Dream. The prologue is one of his most important and difficult pieces of writing. It lays out his method of indirection and his idea of the "constellation" as a key means of grasping the world, making dynamic unities out of the myriad bits of daily life. Thoroughly annotated with a philological and historical introduction and other explanatory and supplementary material, this rigorous and elegant new translation brings fresh understanding to a cardinal work by one of the twentieth century's greatest literary critics.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674744241
• ISBN13: 9780674744240
• Release Date: February 2019
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Essential reading for students of critical theory

While it concerns baroque Trauerspiel (literally, "mourning play" or "lamentation play," not "tragic drama") this book is necessary reading for students of critical theory who don't have literature as a primary field of interest. In it, Benjamin develops his critique of allegory (which he later amended in his work on Baudelaire and would play a major role in The Arcades Project) as well as his method of philosphical history, which would decisively influence Theodor Adorno (see, for example, Adorno's book on Kierkegaard and his lecture "The Idea of Natural History"). Don't let the notoriously opaque prologue dissuade you from reading beyond the opening pages--the rest of the book has more stylistic and conceptual clarity (which doesn't mean it's easy!). In fact, you may want to skip the prologue and return to it after reading the body of the text. In any case, this book will give you a solid grounding for understanding the foundations of Benjamin's work--it should not be slighted. I deduct a star not because of Benjamin but because of the translation (less than sterling) and Steiner's introduction which, despite correcting the title's translation, restricts itself to literary concerns.