The Origin of German Tragic Drama

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.

If the killing of Lorca was Fascism’s first great crime against literature, Benjamin’s death was undoubtedly the second.

Walter Benjamin is the most important German aesthetician and literary critic of this century.