Volume 24, Number 18 · November 10, 1977
The Origins of Walter Benjamin
By Charles Rosen
The Origin of German Tragic Drama
by Walter Benjamin, translated by John Osborne
New Left Books (London), 250 pp., £7.25
The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Trauerspiel) is an esoteric book. That is surely the immediate reason why first the Department of Germanic Studies and then the Department of Philosophy of Art of the University of Frankfurt rejected this study of seventeenth-century dramatists when it was presented to them as a thesis. The publishers of the English translation have enhanced Benjamin's esotericism by omitting all page numbers from the table of contents, as well as by printing the six separate sections of the book's two parts with no indication of where one stops and the next one starts. The esotericism is deeply rooted in Benjamin's style: even where the book is easy to read—by no means necessarily where it is best—the argument is not made explicit, and the connection between ideas is only suggested, never emphasized.
Review, 7660 words
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