The Origin of German Tragic Drama () was the postdoctoral major academic work (habilitation) submitted by Walter Benjamin to the University of Frankfurt in 1925.Introducing Walter Benjamin, Howard Cargill, Alex Coles, Andrey Klimowski, 1998, p. 112 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.Jane O. Newman, Benjamin's Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque, Cornell University Press, 2011, p. 28: "... university officials in Frankfurt recommended that Benjamin withdraw the work from consideration as his Habilitation." “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”…which suspects any human thinker or politician claiming special possession of a primum mobile, or first principle over which they hold the monopoly of interpretation.
RE: Calasso’s Forty Nine Steps esp. the chapter on Adorno w/ ref. to chapters on Benjamin, Krauss, Judge Schreber & Jung (the chapter on Heidegger as an optional elective) 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.
History Benjamin compiled the source material for the work that would become The Origin of German Tragic Drama, some 600 quotations from German baroque dramas, in the Berlin State Library in 1923.
In the spring of 1924, as the Beer Hall Putsch trial prosecuting Hitler and his co-conspirators proceeded in the headlines, Benjamin fled Germany in the wake of an excruciatingly bad review of his translation of Baudelaire.“The Task of the Translator” collected in the Benjamin anthology Illuminations, appeared as the introduction to this work and was nearly as long as the text of the poems themselves by word count.
The eviscerating critique of this debut effort by an early-career Benjamin, appearing on the front-page of several newspapers, had been served up by his Viennese doppelgänger whose major continental celebrity presented an inverse image of Benjamin's own career trajectory: Stefan Zweig (the globally best-selling author, playwright, librettist and acclaimed editorial journalist who was himself a recent translator of Baudelaire).Richard Harper. Displacement: Zweig, Roth and Benjamin. Three Eminent Writers Hunted to Death by Fascism. Arrowhead Press, 2025.
After the review was syndicated and appeared on page one of his own home turf at the Frankfurter Zeitung (where he worked as a stringer), sliding by under the radar of his sympathetic boss Siegfried Kracauer at the editor's desk of the paper's arts page, Benjamin decided that he would have to split town to polish off the book he had been working on.
Absconding to Capri with his voluminously annotated extracts and early drafts, he began to compile and compose these fragments into a unified book on the theme of Trauerspiel for what he hoped would be his habilitation—the qualification that would allow him to become a university lecturer in Germany.
While on the island of Capri he made the acquaintance of Asja Lācis and Bertolt Brecht.Erdmut Wislawa. Walter Benjamin and Bertolucci Brecht: The Story of a Friendship. Yale University Press, 2009.
RE: also the introduction to Benjamin's Moscow Diaries, Briefweschel with Scholem, the introduction to the English translation of The Origin of German Tragic Drama by George Steiner et al.
Benjamin's acquaintance with comrade Brecht does not develop into their historically memorable friendship but Benjamin falls head-over-heels in love with Asja Lācis immediately during this stay in Capri. He will follow her all the way to Moscow in a failed attempt to woo her before the Ursprung is published. These meetings—especially his introduction to Lācis—informed his sudden conversion from casual dilettante in Marxist theory to committed dilettante in the same field, right in the middle of his project on the German Baroque. This shift in Benjamin's theoretical disposition accounts for several of the Ursprung formal oddities.
He finished and submitted the work for approval to the Philosophical Faculty at the University of Frankfurt in 1925. The faculty, which included established academics like Max Horkheimer,Horkheimer later became Benjamin's patron and—roughly speaking—his grant supervisor as an emissary of funding at the Institute for Social Research sometimes known as the Frankfurt School. found the work impenetrable and urged Benjamin to withdraw it from consideration.
By 1931, it was being taught as a recurring seminar by a young all-star Privatdozent named Adorno, who quickly received promotion and tenure in the process of teaching the book at the same university where it was rejected as Benjamin's habilitation. The seminar may in this sense be considered the inaugural seminar of the Institute for Social Research, since the circle that gathered around Adorno during this time eventually branched off into its own academy.
Benjamin indicates in a letter to Gershom Scholem, sent in January 1933, that Adorno “continues to teach the course” on German tragedy, “though it is no longer listed in the course catalog.” Later that month, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany.
Style & scope
Historical references
The title of the book suggests either a polemical challenge or a further development of technique and insight in relation to Nietzsche's debut Birth of Tragedy. The Ursprung, as it turns out, offers both a challenge and a development of several of that earlier work's themes having to do with theater as a vestigial (or otherwise, further evolved) aftermath and transformed remainder of cultic rites.
In the Birth of Tragedy, the ritual performance of the drama both unites the polity in a shared civic order, and enacts the breakdown or failure of that order in intoxication, madness, murder, suicide, familial violence and the general chaos of war according to the exorcismic principle of catharsis etc. This riffs on Aristotle's dramatic theory but Nietzsche's intent is to destroy the rationalizing Aristotelian orthodoxy in a breakthrough to the origin, facilitating a return to the embrace of more primal and violently realized forms of ritualism.RE: Sue Prideaux. I am Dynamite: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche. Or just read the text of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and scan the introduction, these aspects will be mentioned in all editions after 1945.
Nietzsche's book on the subject was completed after he returned from the Siege of Metz where the German army commanded by Moltke the Elder made its breakthrough in 1871 (only a few months into Franco-Prussian War), after which the French Army was rapidly dismantled and the encirclement of Paris quickly brought France to its knees. This was in the spring of the same year that Germany became a modern nation state in and by means of the process of this invasion, which unified splintered elements and remainders of the Holy Roman Empire in the territory which today is called Germany. The Birth of Tragedy was partly intended as promotional material for the Richard Wagner's Bayreuth Festival.
Nietzsche was not a normative public relations person, although Wagner was an important patron and father figure to him at the time that he wrote the Birth of Tragedy.“Fatal Attractions” by Roberto Calasso in Forty Seven Steps. Pimlico, 2000. The work's intended audience was not so much the standard Opera-going public of the day (although he may have assumed they would be interested). Instead it speaks toward the surging eternity of return composed of future generations who would rise up in the now-dawning (re: in the 1870s) advent of nihilism to slake themselves in a pseudo-Darwinian struggle of bloody self-assertion, as Nietzsche was later interpreted (quite plausibly) to have expressed in his Nachlass in his late reflections on this early workMartin Heidegger. Nietzsche Seminar. Vols I-IV. Several of Nietzsche's other early works expand or supplement his theses in the first book.See for example Nietzsche's studies of War in Homer, and his monograph on pre-socratics under the heading Early Greek Philosophy.
Knowledge of this description of tragedy as a sublimated form of ritual sacrifice in Nietzsche is generally assumed by Benjamin, rather than explicitly cited in each case of glancing reference to the earlier hybrid of Nietzsche's dramaturgy and theurgy in the revision proposed by the Ursprung.
Some basic familiarity with the history of Germany's foundation and the subsequent period leading up to and including the First World War, not to mention the Thirty Years' War, will tend to make reading the Ursprung a more rewarding and less arduous undertaking since Benjamin assumes that his readers will possess basic historical knowledge of these events.
The Cambridge Ritualists
As Benjamin embarked upon his work, the Cambridge Ritualists (a movement that also arose in response to the Birth of Tragedy) were enjoying the pinnacle of their influence in Britain. The scholarship of these Ritualists informed and substantively inspired several now-classic works of literary modernism (by T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, H.D. and James Joyce) who were either being celebrated as a new visionary art-form or otherwise anathematized as forms of sacrilege and tried in court as obscenities.Anderson, Margaret C. "'Ulysses' in Court." The Little Review Jan-Mar. 1921: 22-25. Web We have no evidence that Benjamin was aware of the Cambridge Ritualists, but a comparison of their scholarly project to Benjamin's experiment in the Ursprung may be the most efficient possible description of the thrust of his argument about the Trauerspiel (the German form of tragedy that arose during the Baroque period in the midst of the Thirty Years' War and its aftermath).
Briefly: The Cambridge Ritualists devoted themselves to reverse engineering the ritual forms and rites of the ancient Greeks, returning to the primal origin of the art in the eldritch ceremonies that preceded it by working backwards from the plays as they analyzed older archaeological evidence and inventoried or authenticated Ancient Greek art as experts, dating the work as they went along. The Ritualists also considered that Greek tragedy was a precursor to the modes of thought observed in Greek philosophy, and concerned themselves with illustrating this notion. They preferred tragedy to philosophy: they always preferred the original form to its successor.
Benjamin's Ursprung moves in a diametrically opposite direction, contra the Cambridge Ritualists.