Walter Benjamin
The Origin of German Tragic Drama.
London: NLB, 1977. First edition. Translation by John Osborne of "Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels" (Suhrkamp, 1963). Introduction by George Steiner. 0902308130 256 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 5.75" x 8.75", is bound in purple cloth, with stamped silver lettering to spine and front cover. Book shows light shelfwear. Binding is firm. Previous owner's name and address appear neatly written on front pastedown. Ten pages display red/blue ink markings. Pages 92-93, 228-229 exhibit a small foxing spot at fore edge. Pages are otherwise clean and without markings. Dust jacket shows moderate shelfwear. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.
"Walter Benjamin is widely acknowledged as perhaps the greatest German literary critic of this century. "The Origin of German Tragic Drama" is his most sustained and original work. It starts with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of aesthetic interpretation, in terms of the "digressive" and "mosaic" insights which Benjamin believed were essential to the true art of criticism. It then moves to a consideration of the nature of the baroque art of the 16tjh and 17th centuries, concentrating essentially on the peculiar stage-form of royal martyr dramas called "Trauerspiel." Benjamin also comments on the engravings of Dürer, and the theatre of Calderón and Shakespeare. Baroque tragedy, he argues, was distinguished from classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history -- a "political" world without the transcendant meanings that had inhabited Greek drama.
The characteristic atmosphere of the "Trauerspiel" was consequently "melancholy." The emblems of baroque allegory point to the extinct values of a classical world that they cannot themselves ever attain or repeat. Their suggestive power, however, remains to haunt subsequent cultures, down to the century.
Georg Lukács, an eminent opponent of Benjamin's aesthetics, singled "The Origin of German Tragic Drama" out as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the 20th century. For the English edition Professor George Steiner, of the Universities of Cambridge and Geneva, writes an interpretative essay introducing the book that will be indispensable to all students of Benjamin's work."