Introduction

DIE ARBEIT DES HERRN DR. BENJAMIN … ist überaus schwer zu lesen. Es werden eine Menge Wörter verwendet, deren Sinn zu erläutern der Verfasser nicht für erforderlich hält.” (The work of Dr. Benjamin … is excessively difficult to read. A lot of words are used whose sense the author does not feel obliged to explain.) These are the first words of a review written by the scholar Hans Cornelius in 1925, at a time when Benjamin was trying to obtain the academic title of professor at the University of Frankfurt.

And Cornelius's judgment is right. The text of Benjamin's Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of the German Mourning Play, 1928), conceived in 1916 and written down in the years 1924 and 1925, is in some ways unreadable. Max Horkheimer, who assisted Cornelius in his judgment and participated remotely in the academic process of Benjamin's unsuccessful candidacy, “failed” to recognize the importance of the text, as did Walter Brecht, Fritz Saxl, and Richard Alewyn. They refused to write a review of it after its publication by Rowohlt. The fortunate discovery of the book by Benjamin scholars in the last decades has transformed the controversial Trauerspiel book into a kind of summa philosophiae of Benjamin's work, nowadays universally praised as Benjamin's most sustained and original masterpiece. It is the objective of the following article to show the appropriateness of this judgment on the basis of key ideas of the book and thereby to unfold new perspectives with crossreferences to contemporary thought — represented here by W. G. Sebald and Gilles Deleuze.

However, before going into Benjamin's text, we need to ask why Benjamin opted for a diction that was viewed as excessively difficult by Cornelius. The question is legitimate because Benjamin at that time faced economic problems, and one may ask why a scholar should complicate his academic vocation when other texts of his prove that he did possess profound expertise in a discerning and skillfully pedagogical writing style. A possible answer could be that Benjamin situated his work in coordinates that, at first glance, look incompatible: Nietzsche's theory of Greek tragedy, Carl Schmitt's treatise of the sovereign, the writings of the Warburg school, and the reflections of Florens Christian Rang concerning the relation of mourning play and tragedy. But another answer might be more convincing: Benjamin had not solely the intention of writing an interpretation of the Baroque according to the academic standards of his time.