The “German” Origin of the Birth of Theory

Abstract

When Walter Benjamin gave his so-called baroque book its title—Ursprung Des Deutschen trauerspiels (origin of the German Tragic Drama; 1928)—he was clearly in dialogue with Nietzsche's project in Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy; 1872). Indeed, it is the difference between the traditional concept of birth (Geburt) and the Benjaminian notion of origin (Ursprung)—and thus the failure of the mourning play's origin to be a matter of its genesis (Entstehung) in ancient tragedy—that helps us see what Benjamin claims is the difference between the two genres and the way he would have us read the “historical” periods aligned with each (Newman 74). Moreover, precisely because the origin of the Trauerspiel is not a monodirectional birth for Benjamin, his commentary on the complex amalgam of ancient and medieval, Renaissance and baroque, and Lutheran and Catholic ideological forces and aesthetic forms that battle it out in the historical seventeenth-century Silesian dramas that he takes as his subject can be read both as an account of the multiple temporalities that shaped these odd plays and as a reflection on how those same forces traveled forward in time to shape the social, political, and existential concerns of his own, early-twentieth-century German modernity—which of course had helped produce his account of the early modern in the first place (Koepnick; Newman). Benjamin's famous association of his theory of Ursprung with a “Strudel… im Fluss des Werdens” (“eddy in the stream of becoming”) thus helpfully confounds the conventional directionality of Geburt by literally muddying the waters of just where the origin of any period's meaning might lie (226; my trans.).