The Origin of German Tragic Drama
English cover | |
| Author | Walter Benjamin |
|---|---|
| Language | German |
| Subject | Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Metaphysics, Post-metaphysics, Theology, After-theology, Metalogic, History, Kabbalah, Nihilism, Contra-Nihilism, Epistemology, Criticism, Polemic, literary criticism, Critical theory, History and Philosophy of Science, Dramaturgy, Performance theory, Proleptic Exemplar, German Idealism, Contra-German Idealism, Demonology, Art history, Art, Ars Memoriae, Antifascism |
The Origin of German Tragic Drama (German: Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels) was the postdoctoral major academic work (habilitation) submitted by Walter Benjamin to the University of Frankfurt in 1925. The book is a study of German drama during the baroque period and was meant to earn Benjamin the qualification required to become a university instructor. Warned of the certainty of the work's rejection, Benjamin withdrew it from consideration. “He did not know as yet that ‘intellect cannot be habilitated,‘ to quote [a colleague's] wickedly insolent statement about him.”
This bon mot—‘Intellect cannot be habilitated’—went on to become a maxim about the paradoxes of professionalism in the academic humanities later on in the century, in the wake of Benjamin’s posthumous fame.
The book was rediscovered in the second half of the 20th century and has come to be considered a paradigm shifting work in the history of critical theory, the philosophy of history, and in European thought writ large. It had a deep influence on many works that became widely important before the Ursprung itself was recalled for general consideration by scholars in many fields including (but not limited to): The Origins of Totalitarianism, Dialectic of the Enlightenment and Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.
The “Horror of origins” as a hallmark of resistance to totalitarianism in the philosophy of history, finds its root running through this book before it flowers from the small and hermetic circle of his early readers: Adorno, Horkheimer, Arendt, and Scholem.