The tragic transfigured: 20th century German thought on the tragic

(Rosenzweig, Benjamin and Szondi)

Alfredo Walls
Word count:

In one of his earliest reflections on the tragic, Walter Benjamin claims that “to
obtain a deeper understanding of the tragic, we should perhaps look not just at art
1
but also at history.” Benjamin’s initial insight would evolve into a denial of an
essentialist view of the tragic, replacing it with what Peter Szondi called a
“philosophy of the history of tragedy”.2 My doctoral research aims to explore the
transfigurations of the tragic in 20 th century German thought, focusing in
Benjamin’s work as a locus of intersection for Philosophy, Theology and Literary
Criticism. Benjamin’s unique study of the tragic blends theological insights with
historical materialism, as expressed in his famous opening metaphor of On the
Concept of History, representing the closure of German idealism’s articulations of
the tragic.

Although Szondi finds in Benjamin a remainder of two centuries of philosophical

explorations of the tragic that conceive it as a certain dialectical structure
connected with ‘the meaning of being’,3 Daniel Weidner considers that such
conceptualization “remains unstable and constantly vanishes”, 4 and ultimately
constitutes a failed experiment. My research will trace how the tragic is overcome
as a philosophical notion in Benjamin and Szondi’s later attempt, perhaps the last
one, to formulate a general concept of the tragic.

This proposal builds upon my previous study of individual tragedies and their
connections with philosophical articulations of the tragic. My Bachelor’s dissertation

1
Walter Benjamin, ‘Trauerspiel and Tragedy’, in Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings. Volume 1
(1913-1926), eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1996), pp. 55–58., p. 55.
2
Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic, trans. Paul Fleming (Stanford, California: Stanford
University Press, 2002)., p. 49.
3
Szondi., p. 55
4
Daniel Weidner, ‘Reading the Wound. Peter Szondi’s Essay on the Tragic and Walter Benjamin’,
in Textual Understanding and Historical Experience. On Peter Szondi., ed. Susanne Zepp
(Paderborn: Wilhem Fink, 2015), pp. 55–70., p. 68.
focused on the birth of the tragic as a poetological paradigm in Aristotle’s Poetics,
and my MA dissertation traced the philosophical implications of the ‘tragic turn’ in
18th century German philosophy and literature through a comparative study of
Hölderlin’s Death of Empedocles and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. My doctoral
research will continue such comparative and intersectional approach to the tragic.
From a philosophical level, I intend to explore how Franz Rosenzweig’s messianic
view of history influences Benjamin’s thought, as well as his further incorporation of
historical materialism and theology in an understanding of art and literature that
directly affects literary criticism. An important aspect of my research will be the
study of the theological turn in 20th century German literature and thought. My
project will contribute to the field tracing modern configurations of the tragic in
literary works, such as Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, potentially expanding into
other artistic disciplines, following Benjamin’s intermedial approach.

Departing from the common intersection between philosophy and literature in 20 th

century German thought, and Benjamin in particular, my research will adopt
Szondi’s Essay on the tragic as a methodological paradigm, building on his notion
of the tragic as a dialectical emplotment and aiming at close literary criticism of
particular works of art from a philosophical framework.

My research will commence tracing the theological imprint of the tragic at its birth
as a philosophical notion. Joshua Billing’s recent work has already traced a
theological concern at Schelling’s speculation about the possibility of a Christian
tragedy. In Calderón’s La Devoción de la Cruz, Schelling found a transfiguration of
the dialectics of freedom and necessity of classical tragedy into the Christian
interplay of original sin and divine forgiveness. 5 In Schelling’s view, the Catholic
ethos of Calderón’s plays allows an interplay between the fatal determination of
original sin and final reconciliation through divine forgiveness, a structure that
replicates the dialectics of fate and sacrifice of the tragic in antiquity.

5
See Joshua Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic. Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy (New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014)., p. 130.
Only until Franz Rosenzweig would fully incorporate the tragic into a Jewish
messianic theology of history in The Star of Redemption. Rosenzweig postulates a
“metaethical self” (73)6, an individuated self separated from the totality of being,
which in the tragic is associated with a mute and blind hero who nonetheless
remains visible for the spectator and thus exists in the world. In this sense, the
tragic hero of classical antiquity is for Rosenzweig a primitive stage in the
development of History where man is silent before the Absolute, an enclosedness
that is only overcome when transfigured into the openness of the saint. Modern
tragedy thus becomes “the tragedy of absolute man in his relationship to the
absolute object” (210), development which will only find its absolute openness in
the figure of the saint, where the Self finally becomes Soul and lives in the
Absolute.

A yet-to-be-explored intersection between Benjamin’s and Rosenzweig’s thoughts

is the role of language, or absence thereof, in the tragic. While Rosenzweig’s
notion of silence, which repeatedly appears in the Star, is explicitly associated with
the impossibility of communication of the tragic hero, in Benjamin the tragic is “the
only form proper to human dialogue [… ] situated in the laws governing the spoken
word between human beings.”7

Walter Benjamin’s Der Ursrpung des Deutsches Trauerspiel (The Origin of

German Trauerspiel) unfolds a philosophy of history where tragedy and
Trauerspiel are contrasted as vehicles of ‘fulfilled and unfulfilled historical time’, 8 a
notion of strong biblical and messianic imprint that continuously appears in his
writings. In the Ursprung, princes and kings function as proxies of divine will, and
their fall and misfortune is thus an expression of theological significance.

Departing from Schelling’s conception of Calderón as a tragedian, Benjamin sees

in the Spanish playwright the perfect expression of the form of the baroque
6
Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William H. Hallo (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1985)., p. 73.
7
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy’, in Walter Benjamin.
Selected Writings. Volume 1 (1913-1926), eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996)., p. 59.
8
Benjamin, ‘Trauerspiel and Tragedy’., p. 56.
Trauerspiel. Benjamin traces its real origins to the medieval mystery and martyr-
plays where the Christian history of redemption is played out in the stage. It is
precisely this staging of the theology of salvation which makes the nature of the
Trauerspiel so starkly different to the tragic, grounded in myth and in a narrative of
heroic sacrifice.

Current research projects at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages

coincide with my doctoral project, both in its general comparative approach and its
specific thematic concern with German 20th century literature and Walter Benjamin.
Oxford’s collaborative research groups, particularly the Benjamin Research Group
and the Rhetorics of Religion in German Modernism Group, will be essential
platforms for my research, benefiting especially from the recent work of Caroline
Duttlinger, Charlie Louth and Daniel Weidner, directly relevant for my project. Other
research groups, such as the European Humanities and Kafka Research Centres,
will also contribute to my research in a variety of intersections. Finally, the funding
opportunities for study in Germany, such as the Michael Forster, Theodor Heuss
and Hanseatic scholarships represent unique opportunities to further develop the
linguistic skills for close literary analysis of texts.

That is why Rosenzweig asserts that “The tragedy of the saint is the secret longing
of the tragedian” (211).

This manifests in Calderón’s masterpiece La vida es sueño, when Astolfo

unsheathes his sword to fight Segismundo and disclaims any offense towards the
prince, and thus towards God: “Yo defiendo / mi vida; así la majestad no ofendo.”
(719-720) 9

9
Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La Vida es Sueño, ed. Evangelina Rodríguez Cuadros, 18th ed.
(Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1997). 787-791.
Nevertheless, Benjamin studies the Trauerspiel through its expressions in minor
German playwrights, since “the form itself becomes evident precisely in the lean
body of the inferior work, as its skeleton so to speak.” 10

After Kant’s criticism, German idealism would endeavor to reconcile the gap
between subject and object, a project explicitly sketched in The Oldest Program
toward a System in German Idealism, coincidentally unearthed by Franz
Rosenzweig, which promises “a complete system of all ideas, or, what comes to
the same, of all practical postulates,” 11 striving towards “eternal unity”.12 Whether
the document was authored by Schelling, Hölderlin or Hegel, the aim for a
universalizing system of philosophy that achieves unity in all realms of reality is
clear. German idealism would find in ancient tragedy the vehicle to explore the
dialectics of reconciliation, emerging as the ideal dramatic form to stage the .

The consolidation of the tragic as a dialectic emplotment o

porque el hado más esquivo,

la inclinación más violenta,
el planeta más impío,
sólo el albedrío inclinan,
no fuerzan el albedrío
(787-791)

In my MA dissertation, Benjamin’s argument for the marginal as a clearer

expression of the ideal form found expression in the election of Sophocles’ last
play, the Oedipus at Colonus, often overshadowed by the two other Oedipus plays,
thoroughly incorporated into the canon.

10
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso,
1998)., p. 58.
11
Translation by David Farrell Krell. See David Farrell Krell, The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism
and the Languishing of God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005)., p. 22.
12
Farrell Krell., p. 26.
To obtain a deeper understanding of the tragic, we should perhaps look not just at
art but also at history At the very least, we may surmise that the tragic marks out a
frontier of the realm of art at least as much as of the terrain of history. At specific
and crucial points in its trajectory, historical
time passes over into tragic time; such points occur in the actions of great
individuals. There is an essential connection between the ideas of greatness in
history and those in tragedy—although the two are not identical. In art, historical
greatness can assume the form only of tragedy. Historical time is infinite in every
direction and unfulfilled at every moment. 13

The tragic is situated in the laws governing the spoken word between human
beings. There is no such thing as a tragic pantomime. Nor do we have tragic
poems, tragic novels, or tragic events. Tragedy is not just confined exclusively to
the realm of dramatic human speech; it is the only form proper to human dialogue.
That is to say, no tragedy exists outside human dialogue, and the only form in
which human dialogue can appear is that of tragedy. Wherever we see an
“untragic” drama, the autonomous laws of human speech fail to manifest
themselves; instead, we see no more than a feeling or a relationship in a linguistic
context, a linguistic phase. In its pure forms, dialogue is neither sad nor comic, but
tragic. To that extent, tragedy is the classic and pure form of drama 14

When language has an impact by virtue of its pure meaning, that impact is tragic.
The word as the pure bearer of its meaning is the pure word. But alongside this, we
find a word of another sort that is subject to change, as it moves from its source
toward a different point, its estuary. Language in the process of change is the
linguistic principle of the mourning play15

Whereas in tragedy the eternal inflexibility of the spoken word is exalted, the
mourning play concentrates in itself the infinite resonance of its sound. 16

At the point where a philosophy, as a philosophy of the tragic, becomes more than
the knowledge of the dialectic around which its fundamental concepts assemble, at
the point where such a philosophy no longer determines its own tragic outcome, it
is no longer philosophy. It therefore appears that philosophy cannot grasp the
tragic-or that there is no such thing as the tragic17

Benjamin does not replace the philosophy of the tragic with poetics, but rather with
the philosophy of the history of tragedy. Benjamin's method is philosophy because
he strives to recognize the idea, and not the formal laws of tragic poetry. But he
refuses to see the idea of tragedy within a tragic process in itself, as it were, which

13
Benjamin, ‘Trauerspiel and Tragedy’., p. 55.
14
Benjamin, ‘The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy’., p. 59.
15
Benjamin, ‘The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy’., p. 60.
16
Benjamin, ‘The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy’., p. 61.
17
Szondi., p. 49.
would be bound neither to a historical situation nor necessarily to the form of
tragedy, to art in general.18

In Benjamin's interpretation, all the following situations must be called tragic: The
emancipation from "ancient right" can occur only by revering it once again; the
removal of "fatal obligations" demands, in turn, death as its price; the "new aspects
of the life of the nation" require for their realization the individual as hero, but must
also destroy him, for they are "inadequate for the single will." Benjamin did not
want to conclude from the dialectical structure of sacrifice in Greek tragedy that the
tragic in general possesses a dialectical essence. Yet neither did he overlook this
dialectical structure.19

Even Benjamin-who not only surrendered the general concept of the tragic, but
also believed it was necessary to dismiss German Idealism's entire theory of
tragedy as being erroneously based on the concepts of guilt and atonement-comes
across the dialectical moment in his interpretation based on the philosophy of
history.20

The dialectical structure of the tragic is thus not reserved for the philosophical
perspective; it is familiar to the dramaturgical viewpoint, as well as to that based on
the philosophy of history, although almost always in conceptual particularization, so
that the dialectic as such is almost never considered to be tragic. The dialectic,
however, is valid as a criterion for the definition of the tragic 21

One can draw no other consequence from this than the one drawn from the crisis
to which the dialectical conception of the tragic in the post-Idealist era led: There is
no such thing as the tragic, at least not as an essence. Rather, the tragic is a
mode, a particular manner of destruction that is threatening or already completed:
the dialectical manner. There is only one tragic downfall: the one that results from
the unity of opposites, from the sudden change into one's opposite, from self-
division. But it is also the case that only the demise of something that should not
meet its demise, whose removal does not allow the wound to heal, is tragic. The
tragic contradiction may not be sublated in a superordinate sphere, whether
immanent or transcendent. If this is the case, then either the object of destruction
was something trivial, which as such eludes the tragic and offers itself to the comic,
or the tragic is already vanquished in humor, covered up in irony, or surmounted in
faith22

According to Benjamin, interpreting a text (as well as translating it) means to put its
readability on trial in a specific historical situation; if we accept that, the question of
Benjamin’s actual contribution to current theoretical debates coincides with the
question of how it is possible today to read Benjamin’s texts: How do we relate to
18
Szondi., p. 49.
19
Szondi., p. 51.
20
Szondi., p. 52.
21
Szondi., p. 54.
22
Szondi., p. 55.
the distinctions they make, and what sense could we make of the categories they
imply?23

As the depiction of a universal conflict in humanity’s constitution, tragedy has a

constant character in antiquity and modernity. Yet Christian religion transforms the
ancient concepts of freedom and necessity, with important implications for tragedy.
At the heart of Schelling’s description of Greek works was a notion of fate as a
natural force powerful enough to undermine individual freedom radically.
Schelling’s reading of the OT assumes that necessity is strong enough to make
Oedipus guilty of a crime against his own will. Guilt in antiquity could be
conditioned purely by circumstance, and so carried no moral implications.
Christianity, by contrast, sees the universe as “a moral world,” and freedom as its
essential quality (Philosophy 61; SW 1.5, 430). For such a worldview, guilt is
always immoral, since it must emanate from a free action. An unavoidable crime—
which Schelling sees as the ideal plot of tragedy—is impossible under Christianity.
Christian religion appears unable to recognize the essential tragic conflict of
freedom and necessity, and so to be incapable of tragedy. 24

In order to prove the possibility of an identity of ancient and modern art, he must
show that Christian tragedy is possible. Though Schelling has based his account of
modern drama entirely on Shakespeare, he is forced to look elsewhere for the true
tragic in modernity: “we must be able to hope for a Sophocles of the differentiated
world, for a reconciliation within what we call sinful art” (Philosophy 273; SW 1.5,
725–26). The answer to this hope, Schelling finds, “is suggested from a previously
little-known side,” the Spanish dramatist Calderón de la Barca, whose Devotion of
the Cross (La Devoción de la Cruz) had recently been translated into German by
A. W. Schlegel (Philosophy 273; SW 1.5, 726). Though Schelling has only read this
one play, he finds realized in it the reconciliatory possibilities of modern tragedy
that had been so lacking in Shakespeare. As a Catholic, Calderón appears to have
a different relationship to guilt and sin. Schelling distinguishes between the purely
spiritual religion of (Protestant) Christianity and Catholicism, which is “according to
its nature a mixture of the sacred and profane, which assumes sin in order to prove
the power of grace in their reconciliation” (Philosophy 269; SW 1.5, 720). Where
Protestantism sees sin as a choice of the individual, Catholicism considers it (as
original sin) unavoidable, but reconcilable. It thus allows for a true conflict of
freedom and necessity, which will be resolved not by human action, but by divine
forgiveness.25

“The first principle and, so to speak, the basis of the entire edifice of his art is
admittedly what the Catholic religion has given him, to whose view of the universe
and of the divine order of things it essentially belongs that there be sin and sinners
so that through the mediation of the church God may prove his grace on them.
Thus is introduced a general necessity of sin, and in Calderón’s piece
23
Daniel Weidner, ‘Thinking beyond Secularization: Walter Benjamin, the “Religious Turn”, and the
Poetics of Theory’, New German Critique, 37.111 (2010), 131–48.
24
Billings., p. 128.
25
Billings., p. 130.
under discussion the entire fate [Schicksal] develops out of a kind of divine
predestination [Schickung]. (Philosophy 273; SW 1.5, 726)” 26
 the first part of Benjamin's thesis is concerned with repudiating the dogmatic
attempt by later critics to impose onto these plays the external criteria of
Aristotelian aesthetics, which are rooted in classical tragedy. Benjamin's
understanding of tragedy here (and his approach to the mourning-play in
general) is partially influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy.
Benjamin claims that The Birth of Tragedy substantiates the critical insight that
the empathy of unguided modern feeling is unhelpful for properly grasping
ancient tragedy (OGT, 101). Instead, Nietzsche undertook a metaphysical
inquiry into the essence of tragedy as a dialectical interplay of the contrasting
aesthetic impulses of Apollonian semblance and Dionysian truth. This dialectic
is central to Benjamin's own philosophical investigations, particularly his claim—
derived from his discussion of Goethe's Elective Affinities—that an
expressionless moment is constitutive of art, in which the limits of semblance
are broached precisely in order to illuminate an artistic truth. 27

Influenced by ideas from Franz Rosenzweig and Florens Christian Rang

(Asman 1992), Benjamin presents tragedy as expressing a perceived break
between the prehistorical age of mythical gods and heroes and the emergence
of a new ethical and political community. The historical limitations of Nietzsche's
theory of tragedy become acute when it comes to the question of the possibility
of a recuperation of the tragic form in modern theatre. Whilst Nietzsche tends to
simply denounce the weakness of modern drama against the strength of the
Greeks (excepting, in his early work, the operas of Wagner), Benjamin is
concerned with establishing whether the historical conditions of the tragic form
are themselves a limit to its contemporary efficacy. 28

In tragedy, initially, we still see the Absolute at play with itself: in the Christ-event it
will be seen to be a play in all earnest; but the framework in which the Christian
reality is conceived (self-portrayal of the Absolute, in which the characters are only
“masks” of the Spirit) is basically the same. Both tragedy and the Passion have the
same basic nature: they are act. Reality is action, not theory. 29

In tragedy, initially, we still see the Absolute at play with itself: in the Christ-event it
will be seen to be a play in all earnest; but the framework in which the Christian
reality is conceived (self-portrayal of the Absolute, in which the characters are only
“masks” of the Spirit) is basically the same. Both tragedy and the Passion have the
same basic nature: they are act. Reality is action, not theory. 30

26
Quoted in Billings., p. 131.
27
Peter Osborne and Matthew Charles, ‘Walter Benjamin’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy.
28
Osborne and Charles.
29
Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Theo-Drama I: Prolegomena, ed. by Graham Harrison (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press).
30
Von Balthasar.
The second possibility is that of the closed tragic conflict. This is
what Goethe understands by the tragic: “Everything that can be called tragic
depends on some irreconcilable opposition. Tragedy disappears if there is
accommodation or the possibility of it.”  Here there is no way out of the tragic
2

situation at its own level, but the latter “is not the whole of the world”; “from the
overarching totality”, “on a higher plane than that on which this conflict had a fatal
issue”, meaning can shine through. This is how it is in baroque drama and in
idealism,  and even in Hebbel’s pantragicism, where the tragic “extends deep into
3

the being of God” and “is inherent in life itself”, but the hero’s tragic situation,
placed as he is between “equally valid opposites”, by no means appears
meaningless, for even in the midst of collapse it is the path to reconciliation. 31

First of all we can deduce from this, again with Lesky, that genuinely
tragic situations are possible for Christians. This is something that many
deny, George Steiner, for instance32
Rosenzweig hopes to redeem time from Spenglerian contingency, from the
uncontrollable flux which he discovered when he studied history and philosophy. A
significant component of the attack on Hellenism is the total rejection of the tragic
idea. In his discussion of modern tragedy, Rosenzweig adopts Spengler’s
distinction between tragedy of action and of character (210): while in ancient drama
action differed but heroes were always the same, in modern drama each hero has
unique perspective. Also, the chorus (207), which used to represent the world
addressing the hero, has become superfluous and disappeared because the
modern hero, endowed with volition and mortality, is directly visible and audible,
and needs no mediation. Dialogue, rather than monologue, predominates. 33

Selves like him cannot converge and create a community because they are all
mute, blind
and deaf – rigid marble statues which demand immortality by remaining ever
themselves. This is the speechless, sightless, motionless ethos of the pagan hero.
As for his tragic predicament, ‘the consciousness of antiquity did not account him
culpable for rising up in defiant surges and staking out a character as such, but
rather for holding fast to a particular character which was unevenly blended and
which lacked harmony, so that some one element in it predominated and disturbed
the good proportions. Only this congenital defect was the hamartema which
necessitated the tragic fall of the hero’ (Rosenzweig 1971: 212). This is
Rosenzweig’s portrait of the ‘classical man’, painted with passionate revulsion. 34

‘What transpires on the stage does not advance him to fear and sympathy but
rather to contradiction and involvement’ (209). This is because his tragedy ‘aims for
a goal which is quite alien to classical tragedy: for a tragedy of the absolute man in
31
Von Balthasar.
32
Von Balthasar.
33
Vassilis Lambropoulos, The Tragic Idea (London: Bloomsbury, 2006)., p. 121.
34
Lambropoulos., p. 122.
his relationship to the absolute object’ (210). Rosenzweig draws on Spengler and
Kierkegaard to identify this man as Faust complemented by Don Juan, and to
propose (contradicting his earlier claim about the irreducible variety of modern
heroes) that all the unique modern heroes converge to ‘this absolute human being
who not only confronts the Absolute knowingly, but who has experienced the
Absolute and who now, out of this experience, lives within the Absolute, this
character whom the Faust-dramas can only strive for without attaining him because
they remain, still and yet, stuck in the
limited life – this is none other than the saint. The tragedy of the saint is the secret
longing of the tragedian’ (211). There is no need for Faustian character to mature
towards catastrophe, like Spengler’s Lear. All drama aspires to the mystery play. 35

To him, and likewise to Rosenzweig, ‘Athens’ means constraining speculative

thought,
invented truth and sinful metaphysics, while ‘Jerusalem’ signifies free biblical
thought, eternal truth and biblical epistemology (Shestov 1966). Before the end of
the second decade of the twentieth century, knowledge and history, on the one
hand, and faith and revelation, on the other, emerge as rival worldviews. 36

Benjamin dismisses the entire theory of tragedy created by German Idealism and
seeks to replace it with ‘the philosophy of the history of tragedy’ 37

Benjamin elaborates a theory of tragic presentation of legend on the basis of a

three-stage development: fate, sacrifice, atonement (Wolin 1980: 77). He sees in
tragedy a unique struggle of humanity against fate, against the mythical justice of
the Olympians. The ancient rights of the Olympian gods destroy the hero because
these rights do not measure up to the demands of his or her tragic will but at the
same time the fate of this hero prefigures the future of his or her community. His
death transcends the confines of old myth and redeems the collectivity, an
achievement which belongs to that future community. All this is part of agon, the
contest in which all ancient plays participate and which in turn provides their basic
structure.
The performance of the tragic hero, the sacrificial victim, in the agon is defined by
his silence. Here Benjamin adopts Rosenzweig’s definition of the ‘meta-ethical
man’ (Benjamin 1977: 107-8), the actual ‘self’ of the pagan man who wills his
individuality without relying on any outside norms, and remains speechless
because he no longer communicates with the world of gods or fellow men.
Rosenzweig contrasts to the classical tragedy of paganism revelation in which man
emerges from the mute isolation of elemental self-assertion and enters a
relationship with God and Man. 38

The tragic hero, by sacrificing himself to the Olympian fate, opens the way for a
future ethical community but his own ethic is neither conscious nor articulate. He is
35
Lambropoulos., p. 123.
36
Lambropoulos., p. 124.
37
Lambropoulos., p. 125.
38
Lambropoulos., p. 126.
a one-dimensional, soulless creature who is always the same self, always
sentenced, always dumb, always dead – rooted and buried in his self. Although
defiant, he resigns himself to speechlessness since he cannot overcome myth.
This is the tyranny of mythical fate which annihilates those who challenge it.
Unable to make law or history, he is destined to be another innocent victim in the
ritual cycle of the sacrificial agon. Benjamin understands this agon in terms of his
three-stage narrative of hubris/fate, punishment/sacrifice, and
redemption/atonement39

Like Rosenzweig before him, Benjamin rejects the idea that a rejuvenation of
tragedy is possible. The Greek past represents the only possibility of tragedy.
‘Whereas Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy seemed to establish a theory of modernity
as a scenario of tragedy, Benjamin’s book on the Trauerspiel proposes a theory of
modernity as a theory of the Trauerspiel in radical opposition to tragedy. The
incompatibility of tragedy and Trauerspiel is the architectural foundation’ (Nägele
1991: 113) of the latter treatise. 40

Caught between nostalgia and anticipation, Benjamin and other people of his
generation aimed to give the godforsaken world of modernity an alternative,
messianic vision, with the ‘angel of history’ providing hope, utopia and redemption.
It all hinges on the conviction that the historical predicament is melancholic, not
tragic, as mortals look forward to Judgment Day. As Benjamin argued in 1916, the
universality of the Trauerspiel is no longer mythic and not yet historical but a hybrid
of the two – it is spectral. Since its time is finite and yet not fulfilled, non-individual
and yet without the certitude of higher existence, it has no conclusive finality. If
tragic time is only individually fulfilled, true historical time (the time of the empirical
event) is infinite and unfulfilled. Fulfilled historical time is not individually fulfilled; it
is messianic time, the historical idea provided by the Bible (Benjamin 1996: 55-6).
41

If the tragic has "fallen" in both conceptual and political terms, how can we
continue to speak about it? The collapse would suggest a very basic outcome -
that the tragic as a category does not exist. According to Szondi, this is exactly the
position Benjamin holds, a position which however is refuted in the "Transition"
section of the Essay on the Tragic. According to Szondi, Benjamin does not
conceive the tragic formally, by means of poetics, but by the philosophy of history
and as a phenomenon of Greek antiquity which only functions as a counter image
to the Baroque mourning play. Despite this reservation, however, Szondi refers to
Benjamin's ideas on tragedy at great length. He concedes that Benjamin conceived
dialectical structures of the tragic on different levels, and points out that his ideas
are "not evident in Benjamin's text primarily because the mourning play is his
object of inquiry"42

39
Lambropoulos., p. 127.
40
Lambropoulos., p. 128.
41
Lambropoulos., p. 129.
42
Weidner, ‘Reading the Wound. Peter Szondi’s Essay on the Tragic and Walter Benjamin’., p. 62.
Szondi ends his argument with Benjamin by affirming the dialectical as the
fundamental principle of the tragic. "There is no such thing as the tragic, at least
not as an essence. Rather, the tragic is a mode, a particular manner of destruction
that is threatening or already completed: the dialectical manner. There is only one
tragic downfall: the one that results from the unity of opposites, from the sudden
Change into one's own opposite, from self-division." This repeats the formal idea of
the tragic dialectic into which the philosophical discourse has collapsed. However,
now there is a second condition. "But it is also the case that only the demise of
something that should not meet its demise, whose removal does not allow the
wound to heal, is tragic. The tragic contradiction may not be sublated in a
superordinate sphere, whether immanent or transcendent. If this is the case, then
either the object of destruction was something trivial [... ] or the tragic is already
vanquished in humor, covered up in irony, or surmounted in faith."
This second condition is somewhat surprising. We have not heard of it thus far. It is
not only highly conventional and present in Aristotle, but also relates to the course
of the argument. If philosophy was never able to conceptualize the tragic without
emptying it, it was also unable to transcend it dialectically. Thus, the tragic is a
limit-concept of philosophy and organizes the transition of trajectory from
philosophy to philology-to the readings that will follow. 43

The readings of the dramatic texts end on a note similar to the one the theoretical
section of the Essay ends on: in a fall, a collapse. It is the end not only of the tragic
as a concept, but also of tragedy as the structure of a plot. Thus, the essay has
dissolved its object twice, has untied its complexities and revealed the basic
dialectical structure of the tragic. As structure, however, it does not remain stable
but constantly vanishes. If we understand the Essay literally as a "Versuch," as an
experiment, the experiment seems to have failed. But it is this failure that not only
leads Szondi to develop other, more directly essayistic forms of writing, but gives
the Essay on the Tragic its peculiar form and content. The text makes a double
movement. It organizes the appearance and disappearance of its object. In this
movement, both personal and historical experiences are inscribed 44

Franz Rosenzweig's Der Stern der Erlösung had appeared in 1921. It seemed to
articulate, as no other book had, the unstable glories of the German-Jewish
connection and of the bearing of that
connection on the Jewish past and on the enigma of the messianic future. It also
contained one of the three models of a theory of tragedy which Benjamin drew on -
the two others being Nietzsche's and that of the phenomenologist and Husserl-
follower Max Scheler.45

Benjamin is at pains to show that the Aristotelian and neo-classical elements in the
baroque theatre of Lutheran and Counter-Reformation Germany are deceptive,
indeed immaterial. The true Ursprung is to be found in the intricate energies,
43
Weidner, ‘Reading the Wound. Peter Szondi’s Essay on the Tragic and Walter Benjamin’., p. 63.
44
Weidner, ‘Reading the Wound. Peter Szondi’s Essay on the Tragic and Walter Benjamin’., p. 68.
45
George Steiner, ‘Introduction’, in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, ed. by John Osborne
(London: Verso), pp. 7–24., p. 13.
visionary habits and political-doctrinal emblem-code of the baroque. German
literary theory and scholarship, with its strong classicizing bias, has misread or
simply neglected this compaction. From this oversight and misinterpretation
derives the attempt to make of the baroque Trauerspiel a bastard or ancillary
version of eighteenth-century tragedy. Nothing, according to Benjamin, could be
more erroneous.
Tragodie and Trauerspiel are radically distinct, in metaphysical foundation and
executive genre. Tragedy is grounded in myth. It acts out a rite of heroic sacrifice.
In its fulfilment of this sacrificial-transcendent design, tragedy endows the hero with
the realization that he is ethically in advance
of the gods, that his sufferance of good and evil, of fortune and desolation, has
projected him into a category beyond the comprehension of the essentially
'innocent' though materially omnipotent. deities (Artemis' flight from the dying
Hippolytus, Dionysus' myopia exceeding the blindness of Pentheus). This
realization compels the tragic hero to silence, and here Benjamin is strongly
influenced by Rosenzweig's concept of the 'meta-ethical' condition of tragic man.
The Trauerspiel, on the contrary, is not rooted in myth but in history. Historicity,
with every implication of political-social texture and reference, generates both
content and style. Feeling himself dragged
towards the abyss of damnation, a damnation registered in a profoundly carnal
sense, the baroque dramatist, allegorist, historiographer, and the personages he
animates, ding fervently to the world. The Trauerspiel is counter-transcendental; it
celebrates the immanence of existence even where this existence is passed in
torment. It is emphatically 'mundane', earth-bound, corporeal. It is not the tragic
hero who occupies the centre of the stage, but the Janus-faced composite of tyrant
and martyr, of the Sovereign who incarnates the mystery of absolute will and of its
victim (so often himself). 46

Behind this fusion stands the exemplum of Christ's kingship and crucifixion.
Baroque drama is inherently emblematic-allegoric, as Greek tragedy never is,
precisely because it postulates the dual presence, the twofold organizing pivot of
Christ's nature - part god, part man, and
overwhelmingly of this world. If the German baroque theatre has antecedents,
these must be located not in the classics, but in the medieval misreading of
classical-Senecan fragments and in the obsessive 'physicality' of the mystery
cycles. It is in the Senecan obsession with loud agony and in the medic, al-
Christological insistence on the mortification of the flesh, especially where the flesh
is merely the momentary husk of divine or sanctified spirit, that baroque stagecraft
has its roots47

These antinomies of transcendence and immanence of myth and history, of

heroism and tyranny or martyrdom, of silence and loquacity, lead Benjamin to his
fundamental distinction between tragedy and Trauer. Tragic feelings, in the sense
assigned to them by Aristotle's Poetics and Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, are

46
Steiner., p. 16.
47
Steiner., p. 17.
experienced by the spectator. They refine, enrich and bring into tensed equilibrium
the inchoate muddle or incipience of the spectator's emotions. But fundamentally,
tragedy does not require an audience. Its space is inwardness and the viewer
aimed at is 'the hidden god'. Trauer, on the other hand, signifies sorrow, lament,
the ceremonies and memorabilia of grief. Lament and ceremonial demand
audience. Literally and in spirit, the Trauerspiel is a 'play of sorrow', a 'playing at
and displaying of human wretchedness'. 48

And so the production of lesser writers, whose works frequently contain the most
eccentric features, will be valued no less than those of the great writer. It is one
thing to incarnate a form; it is quite a different thing to give its characteristic
expression. Whereas the former is the business of the poetic elect, the latter is
often done incomparably more distinctly in the laborious efforts of minor writers.
The life of the form is not identical with that of the works which are determined by
it, indeed the clarity with which it is expressed can sometimes be in inverse
proportion to the perfection of a literary work; and the form itself becomes evident
precisely in the lean body of the inferior work, as its skeleton so to speak. 49

the thesis of the renaissance form of German drama in the seventeenth century is
supported by
reference to the Aristotelianism of the theoreticians. We have already noted now
inhibiting the Aristotelian definitions were to any appreciation of the value of the
dramas. We should now emphasize that the term 'renaissance-tragedy' implies an
overestimation of the influence of the Aristotelian doctrine on the drama of the
baroque. 50

in the middle of the seventeenth century Aristotelian poetics had not yet become
that simple and imposing structure of dogma with which Lessing came to grips.
Trissino, the first commentator on the Poetics, introduces unity of action as a
complement to unity of time: unity of time is regarded as aesthetic only if it is
accompanied by unity of action. Gryphius and Lohenstein adhered to these unities
- although in the case of Papinian the unity of action is questionable. This solitary
fact completes the list of those features derived from Aristotle. The theory of the
period does not give a precise definition of unity of time. 51

Unity of place, which was only introduced into the discussion by Castelvetro, is
irrelevant to the baroque Trauerspiel, it does not occur even in Jesuit theatre. Even
more conclusive is the indifference towards the Aristotelian theory of tragic effect
which is evident in the manuals. Although this particular part of the Poetics, in
which the influence of the cultic character of the Greek theatre is more
conspicuous than elsewhere, cannot have been very accessible to the
seventeenth-century mind. However, the greater the difficulty of fathoming this
doctrine, in which the theory of purification by the mysteries was at work, the more
48
Steiner., p. 17.
49
Benjamin, Orig. Ger. Tragic Drama., p. 58.
50
Benjamin, Orig. Ger. Tragic Drama., p. 60.
51
Benjamin, Orig. Ger. Tragic Drama., p. 60.
room there was for interpretation. And this is every bit as slight in its thought-
content as it is striking in its distortion of the original antique intention. Fear and pity
are not seen as participation in the integral whole of the action, but as participation
in the fate of the most outstanding characters. Fear is aroused by the death of the
villain, pity by that of the pious hero. For Birken even this definition is too classical,
and he replaces fear and pity with the glorification of God. and the edification of
one's fellow-men as the purpose of the Trauerspiel52

The Trauerspiel should fortify the virtue of its audience. And if there was a
particular virtue which was indispensable in its heroes, and edifying for its public,
then this was the old virtue of apatheia. The association of the stoic ethic with the
theory of modern tragedy was effected in Holland; and Itysius had remarked that
the Aristotelian eleos should be understood exclusively as an active impulse to
alleviate the physical and mental suffering of others, and not as a pathological
collapse at the sight of a terrifying fate, not as pusillanimitas but as misericordia.
Without any doubt such glosses are quite alien to Aristotle's description of the
contemplation of tragedy. Thus, again and again, it is the single fact of the royal
hero which prompted the critics to relate the new Trauerspiel to the ancient tragedy
of the Greeks. 53

Historical life, as it was conceived at that time, is its content, its true object [of the
Trauerspiel]. In this it is different from tragedy. For the object of the latter is not
history, but myth, and the tragic stature of the dramatis personae does not derive
from rank - the absolute monarchy - but from the pre-historic epoch of their
existence - the past age of heroes. For Opitz it is not the conflict with God and
Fate, the representation of a primordial past, which is the key to a living sense of
national community, but the confirmation of princely virtues, the depiction of
princely vices, the insight into diplomacy and the manipulation of all the political
schemes, which makes the monarch the main character in the Trauerspiel. The
sovereign, the principal exponent of history, almost serves as its incarnation. 54
Like the term 'tragic' in present day usage - and with greater justification - the word
Trauerspiel as applied in the seventeenth century to dramas and to historical
events alike. Even the style gives an indication of how close to each other the two
things were in the contemporary mind55

The sovereign is the representative of history. He holds the course of history in his
hand like a sceptre. This view is by no means peculiar to the dramatists. It is based
on certain constitutional notions. A new concept of sovereignty emerged in the
seventeenth century from a final discussion of the juridical doctrines of the middle
ages […] Whereas the modern concept of sovereignty amounts to a supreme
executive power on the part of the prince, the baroque concept emerges from a
discussion of the state of emergency, and make, it the most important function of
the
52
Benjamin, Orig. Ger. Tragic Drama., p. 61.
53
Benjamin, Orig. Ger. Tragic Drama., p. 61.
54
Benjamin, Orig. Ger. Tragic Drama., p. 62.
55
Benjamin, Orig. Ger. Tragic Drama., p. 63.
prince to avert this. The ruler is designated from the outset as the holder of
dictatorial power if war, revolt, or other catastrophes should lead to a state
emergency. This is typical of the Counter-Reformation. 56

The religious man of the baroque era clings so tightly to the world because of the
feeling that he is being driven along to a cataract with it. The baroque knows no
eschatology; and for that very reason it possesses no mechanism by which all
earthly things are gathered in together and exalted before being consigned to their
end. The hereafter is emptied of everything which contains the slightest breath of
this world, and from it the baroque extracts a profusion of things which customarily
escaped the grasp of artistic formulation and, at its high point, brings them violent
Iv into the light of day, in order to clear an ultimate heaven, enabling it, as a
vacuum, one day to destroy the world with catastrophic violence. 57

For the 'very bad' there was the drama of the tyrant and there was fear; for the
'very good' there was the martyr-drama and pity. This juxtaposition of forms
appears strange only as long as one neglects to consider the legal aspect of
baroque princedom. Seen in ideological terms they are strictly complementary. In
the baroque the tyrant and the martyr are but the two faces of the monarch. They
are the necessary extreme incarnations of the princely essence. As far as the
tyrant is concerned, this is clear enough. The theory of sovereignty which takes as
its example the special case in which dictatorial powers are unfolded, positively
demands the completion of the image of the sovereign, as tyrant. The drama
makes a special point of endowing the ruler with the gesture of executive power as
his characteristic gesture, and having him take part in the action with the words
and behaviour of a tyrant even where the situation does not require it; in the same
way it was probably unusual for full robes, crown and sceptre to be wanting when
the ruler appeared on the stage. 58

Above all it is the figure of Herod, as he was presented throughout the European
theatre at this time, which is characteristic of the idea of the tyrant. It was his story
which lent the depiction of the hubris of kings its most powerful features. Even
before this period a terrifying mystery had been woven around this king. Before
being seen as a mad autocrat and a symbol of disordered creation, he had
appeared in an even crueller guise to early Christianity, as the Antichrist. 59

The enduring fascination of the downfall of the tyrant is rooted in the conflict
between the impotence and depravity of his person, on the one hand, and, on the
other, the extent to which the age was convinced of the sacrosanct power of his
role60

56
Benjamin, Orig. Ger. Tragic Drama., p. 65.
57
Benjamin, Orig. Ger. Tragic Drama., p. 66.
58
Benjamin, Orig. Ger. Tragic Drama., p. 69.
59
Benjamin, Orig. Ger. Tragic Drama., p. 70.
60
Benjamin, Orig. Ger. Tragic Drama., p. 72.
Deeper examination is not therefore necessary in order to ascertain that an
element of martyr-drama lies hidden in every drama of tyranny. It is much less
easy to trace the element of the drama of tyranny in the martyr-drama. A
precondition of this is familiarity with that strange image of the martyr which was
traditional in the baroque - at least in the literary baroque. It has nothing to do with
religious conceptions; the perfect martyr is no more released from the sphere of
immanence than is the ideal image of the monarch. In the drama of the baroque he
is a radical stoic, for whom the occasion to prove himself is a struggle for the crown
or a religious dispute ending in torture and death. 61

the value of these dramas has, supposedly, been definitively settled in the
conclusion that they are deficient in inner conflict and tragic guilt. To this can be
added the evaluation of the plot. It differs from the so-called antithetical plot of
classical tragedy in virtue of the isolation of motives, scenes, and types. Just as in
the Passion-play tyrants, devils, or Jews appear on stage in the profoundest
viciousness and wickedness, without being permitted to explain themselves or to
develop, or indeed to display, anything other than their base schemes, so too does
the drama of the baroque like to show the antagonists in crudely illuminated
separate scenes, where motivation usually plays an insignificant part. It could be
said that baroque intrigue takes place like a change of scenery on the open stage,
so minimal is the illusionistic intention, so obtrusive the economy of the counter-
plot. 62

In this context we need to bear in mind the affinity between the baroque drama and
the religious drama of the Middle Ages, which is evident in the extent to which both
share the character of the Passion-play. But given the kind of insights that arc
current in a critical literature dominated by empathy, this reference needs to be
cleared of the suspicion that it is an example of that futile analogy-mongering which
hinders rather than advances the task of stylistic analysis. Here it might be
observed that the representation of the mediaeval elements in the drama of the
baroque and its theory is to be seen as a preliminary to further confrontations of
the spiritual worlds of the baroque and the middle ages, which will be encountered
elsewhere. The resurrection of mediaeval theories in the age of the wars of
religion, the continued dominance of the middle ages in 'politics and economics, art
and science', the fact that the middle ages were not overcome, indeed, were not
given their name, until during the seventeenth century, all this has long since been
stated. 63

Accordingly, Franz Joseph Mone has convincingly demonstrated the connection

between the mediaeval drama and the mediaeval chronicle. It appears 'that world
history [was] seen by the chroniclers as a great Trauerspiel, and the chronicles of
world history were related to the old
German plays. In so far as the chronicles conclude with the Day of Judgment, that
is to say the end of the drama of the world, Christian historiography is, of course,
61
Benjamin, Orig. Ger. Tragic Drama., p. 73.
62
Benjamin, Orig. Ger. Tragic Drama., p. 75.
63
Benjamin, Orig. Ger. Tragic Drama., p. 76-77.
related to the Christian drama; and here it is important to note the statements of
those chronicler, who clearly indicate this relationship. 64

The tension derives from a question concerning the redemption of mankind, which
was allowed to expand to immeasurable proportions by the secularization of the
mystery-play, which did not only occur among the Protestants of the Silesian and
Nuremberg schools, but equally so among the Jesuits and with Calderon. For all
that the increasing worldliness of the Counter-Reformation prevailed in both
confessions, religious aspirations did not lose their importance: it was just that this
century denied them a religious fulfilment, demanding of them, or imposing upon
them, a secular solution instead. 65

attempt to find, in a reversion to a bare state of creation, consolation for the

renunciation of a
state of grace. Here, as in other spheres of baroque life, what is vital is the
transposition of the originally temporal data into a figurative spatial simultaneity.
This leads deep into the structure of the dramatic form. Whereas the middle ages
present the futility of world events and the transience of the creature as stations on
the road to salvation, the German Trauerspiel taken up entirely with the
hopelessness of the earthly condition. Such redemption as it knows resides in the
depths of this destiny itself rather than in the fulfilment of a divine plan of salvation.
The rejection of the eschatology of the religious dramas is characteristic of the new
drama throughout Europe; nevertheless the rash flight into a nature deprived of
grace, is specifically German. For in the supreme form of this European theatre,
the drama of Spain, a land of Catholic culture in which
the baroque features unfold much more brilliantly, clearly, and successfully, the
conflicts of a state of creation without grace are resolved, by a kind of playful
reduction, within the sphere of the court, whose king proves to be a secularized
redemptive power.66

But if the secular drama must stop short on the borders of transcendence, it seeks,
nevertheless, to assure itself of this indirectly, in play. Nowhere is this clearer than
in La vida es sueño, where we have a totality worthy of the mystery-play, in which
the dream stands over waking life like the vault of heaven. Morality is valid within it:
“But, waking or sleeping, one thing only / Matters: to act rightly; If awake, because
acts are real, / If dreaming, to win friends for the time of awaking.” Nowhere but in
Calderón could the perfect form of the baroque Trauerspiel be studied. The very
precision with which the 'mourning' [Trauer] and the 'play' [Spiel] can harmonize
with one another gives it its exemplary validity - the validity of the word and of the
thing alike67

The apparently pagan worldliness of this form is in fact the profane complement to
the religious mystery-play. But what attracted even the theoreticians among the
64
Benjamin, Orig. Ger. Tragic Drama., p. 77.
65
Benjamin, Orig. Ger. Tragic Drama., p. 79.
66
Benjamin, Orig. Ger. Tragic Drama., p. 81.
67
Benjamin, Orig. Ger. Tragic Drama., p. 83.
romantics so irresistibly to C:alder6n - so that he, rather than Shakespeare, might
perhaps be called their dramatist, kata exochen is the unparalleled virtuosity of the
reflection, thanks to which his heroes are always able to turn the order of fate-
around like a ball in their hands, and contemplate it now from one side, now from
the other. To what else did the romantics ultimately aspire than genius, decked out
in the golden chains of authority, reflecting without responsibility? Yet the
unparalleled Spanish perfection, which, however high it stands in terms of artistic
quality, seems always to be one step higher in calculatedness, does not perhaps
reveal the stature of the baroque drama, which extends beyond the limits of the
purely literary, quite so clearly as the German drama, whose ambiguous nature is
not so much concealed in the primacy of the artistic, as revealed in that of the
moral. As its vocational ethic so emphatically proclaims, Lutheran moralism was
always intent on bringing together the transcendence of the life of faith and the
immanence of everyday life; it therefore never permitted the decisive confrontation
between human-earthly perplexity and princely-hierarchical power on which the
conclusion of so many of Calderon's dramas depends. The end of the German
Trauerspiel is therefore both less formal and less dogmatic, it is - morally, not, of
course, artistically - more responsible than that of the Spanish drama 68

The constantly repeated drama of the rise and fall of princes, the steadfastness of
unshakeable virtue, appeared to the writers less as a manifestation of morality than
as the natural aspect of the course of history, essential in its permanence. 69

Discontent is the classic motive. The sovereign alone reflects any kind of moral
dignity, and even here it is the totally unhistorical moral dignity of the stoic. For this,
rather than the Christian hero's trust in salvation, is the attitude which is universally
encountered in the principal characters of the baroque drama. 70

in the terms of the martyr-drama it is not moral transgression but the very estate of
man as creature which provides the reason for the catastrophe. This typical
catastrophe, which is so different from the extraordinary catastrophe of the tragic
hero, is what the dramatists had in mind when - with a word which is employed
more consciously in dramaturgy than in criticism - they described a work as a
Trauerspiel71

bestows Rosenzweig's erudite speculation with a sharp existential edge:

threatened directly with the vision of tragic doom, the self fights for a glimpse of
hope. This "mood' will be immediately transposed into the leading motif of The
Star: the passage from the tragic world view, in which every individual becomes
sacrificed to the holistic order of being, to the messianic life view which offers the
singular existence a hopeful exit from the system-with the "star of redemption" as

68
Benjamin, Orig. Ger. Tragic Drama., p. 84.
69
Benjamin, Orig. Ger. Tragic Drama., p. 88.
70
Benjamin, Orig. Ger. Tragic Drama., p. 88.
71
Benjamin, Orig. Ger. Tragic Drama., p. 89.
the sole guide through the wretched "night of the world" immersed in the war of
elements.72

Athens stands not for philosophical freedom. but rather for a tragic religion that
sees life as constrained by fate, destiny and natural necessity from which there is
no escape. Jerusalem, on the
other hand, stands not for fanatical obedience, but rather for a religious revolution
that allows an Exodus from the Egypt of self-enclosed nature and liberates life from
the power of death. It is not the traditional pairing of reason versus unreason,
which delivers the right criterion of difference, but the opposition of two
fundamental decisions – life against death and love against indifference73

This failure is the overall theme of Rosenzweig's analysis of the tragic hero, where
he-polemically following Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy-presents Greek tragedy as a
para-religious form, almost approaching the threshold of revelation, but also
withdrawing in the last moment, precisely because of the non-askability of certain
vital questions, "the Job-like questions" the tragic hero is unable to pose: "The
poets may pose Job-like questions of guilt and fate , but to the heroes themselves ,
unlike Job, it never even occurs to pose them " (SR. 78). It is only in the religious
world "after revelation," in which such human figures as Job the Rebel become
possible at all: the paradigmatic embodiment of the self "who wants to remain,
wants to live" (SR . 3) and who, for the sake of this individual will, throws an
accusation against the unjust arrangement of being, including the creator of the
worldly order, God himself.
The critique of the tragic world-view constitutes the most important part of the first
book of The Star, called "Creation." For Rosenzweig (as for Nietzsche), tragedy is
not a distant genre of ancient Greece; it is the ever actual, "ever-recurring" pattern
of old thinking which lies at the bottom of every philosophy "from Ionia to Jena."
Yet his main purpose is not exactly Nietzschean: while Nietzsche wished for the
return of the tragic religion of the Dionysiac, all-embracing One, Rosenzweig wants
to create a new way out of the tragic universe-a new Exodus which will lead us
once again from the "house of bondage," the Egypt of totality. He sees tragedy as
a critical tram1tion between the mythical pagan pre-world and the world of
revelation and focuses on the tragic hero as the first rebel who dares to defy the
holmic order of being. But became the tragic hero yet lack- the language in whjcl1
he could meaningfully articulate his rebellion his separation manifests itself only in
a defiant silence. through which he receives the final verdict of Fate. Even if he
must "go under" and be punished for his rebellious hubris, he does not accept
death as a just judgment.
Rosenzweig paints a portrait of the tragic hero as a self-enclosed, impenetrable
and inwardly dead Selbstheit (Self) that is "mute as a marble " (SR, 207): a human
monument that proudly commemorates his defiant hubris and simultaneously a

72
Agatha Bielik-Robson, ‘Franz Rosenzweig’, in Religion and European Philosophy. Key Thinkers
from Kant to Žižek, ed. by Philip Goodchild and Hollis Phelps (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 184–
95., p. 184.
73
Bielik-Robson., p. 186.
helpless stone in the hands of Fate, the Heraclitean Great Child who plays with the
mortals as if with the marbles. 74

The soul, die Seele, thus differs from the tragic Self, der Selbst, just like life differs
from death, or, like the world after revelation differs from the non-illuminated
preworld. While the Self emerges in the process of tragedy as a dark dead-end of
mute self-withdrawal, the Soul appears as a radiating centre of life intensified
whose mission is to spread the mode of singularisation onto the remaining
multitude of creatures: 75

74
Bielik-Robson., p. 188.
75
Bielik-Robson., p. 191.