‘Mediating Amicably’? The Birth of the Trauerspiel Out of the Letter of Westphalia

Abstract

Nietzsche famously claimed that tragedy was born out of the spirit of music. My essay suggests that it was, rather, out of the letter of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) that the genre famously referred to by Walter Benjamin as the Baroque Trauerspiel was born. Having allegedly brought a century of religious conflict to an end and, in its place, inaugurated a new era based on the ‘modern’ international system of states, the Treaty has come to inhabit a kind of mythically progressivist axial space in early modern political history. But this new age had its price, especially for the smaller polities not or only indirectly represented at the diplomatic extravaganza that produced the Treaty. I discuss, first, Article 5 of one of the two treaties of Westphalia, the Instrumentum Pacis Osnabrugensis (IPO) between the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Sweden, which addresses the question of post-Thirty Years’ War religious freedom in the smaller duchies and cities of Protestant Silesia. I then turn to one of the Trauerspiele about which Benjamin wrote, Gryphius’ Catharina von Georgien, oder Bewehrete Bestandigkeit (Catherine of Georgia, or Constancy Maintained, 1647/1655) and read it as a commentary on the costs not of the war, but of the Westphalian peace negotiations as they played themselves out on Silesian ground.