The Origin of German Tragic Drama is Walter Benjamin's most sustained and original work. It begins with a general theoretical introduction 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. 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.

Georg Lukács, an opponent of Benjamin's aesthetics, singled out The Origin of German Tragic Drama as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century.

“He drew, from the obscure disdained Gernam baroque, elements of the modern sensibility: the taste for allegory, surrealist shock effects, discontinuous utterance, a sense of historical catastrophe.” — Susan Sontag

“If the killing of Lorca was Fascism's first great crime against literature, Benjamin's death was undoubtedly its second.” — Listener

“Walter Benjamin is the most important German aesthetician and literary critic of this century.” — Sunday Times

Walter Benjamin was born in Germany in 1892 and died in Spain in 1940. His other books include Illuminations, One-Way Street, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism and Understanding Brecht. His notebooks, published as Walter Benjamin's Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, are also available from Verso.



Publication
May 2009

256 pages

Series
Radical Thinkers

Paper
iSBN-13: 978 1 84467 348 3 / US$12.95 / £6.99 / CAN$14