IN HIS STUDY of German baroque theater, Origin of the German Mourning Play, Walter Benjamin emphasizes the ostensibly unbridgeable distance that separates the German Trauerspiel from Greek “tragedy.” The latter, he argues, relying primarily upon the work of Franz Rosenzweig and of his friend Florens Christian Rang, articulates the revolt of the “self” against a mythical-polytheistic order whose language it could and would no longer speak. Benjamin thus implicitly defines Greek tragedy as a configuration of silence, consisting not only in the refusal to accept and speak a pagan language but also in a mute prophecy of the coming of a new and different kind of god. The German baroque Trauerspiel, by contrast, emerges at the other end of the historical spectrum announced by (this notion of ) Greek tragedy, at a paradoxical historical configuration, characterized, on the one hand, by the hegemony of Christianity in Europe and, on the other, by the threatened implosion of this hegemonic force through the challenge of the Reformation and the devastating wars of religion that followed. The Treuga Dei1 that marked the end of these wars and at the same time accompanied the rise of the modern European political system of nation-states also saw the emergence of a theatrical medium called upon to respond to anxieties that the traditional Christian eschatological narrative had sought to assuage. The following chapter seeks to stage the story of this emergence and of its implications for the cultural significance of a certain theatricality.
In the summer of 1924, as he was completing work on his study of German baroque theater, Benjamin met and fell in love with Asja Lacis, a Latvian woman actively involved in the Russian Revolution and a committed Marxist. In her memoirs, written decades later, she recalls the following incident:
He was deeply immersed in his book on The Origin of the German Mourning Play. When he explained to me that it concerned an analysis of seventeenth-century German baroque tragedy, that the literature was known only to a few specialists, that the tragedies were never performed—I replied with a grimace, “Why concern oneself with dead literature?” He was silent for a while, then said: “First of all, I am introducing a new terminology into aesthetics and literary studies. Regarding more recent drama, the concepts “tragedy” and Trauerspiel [mourning play] are used indiscriminately, as mere words. I demonstrate the fundamental difference between tragedy and Trauerspiel. The baroque dramas express desperation and contempt for the world—they are literally “sad,” mournful plays [traurige Spiele]. By contrast, the attitude of the authentic Greek tragedians is unbending in its opposition to the world and to destiny. This difference in attitude and bearing is important. It must be kept in mind and leads ultimately to a distinction between the genres of tragedy and Trauerspiel. Baroque drama is in fact the origin of the melancholy plays that are widespread in German literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”
Secondly, he added, his investigation was not merely academic but directly related to current problems of contemporary literature. He emphasized explicitly that in his work he designated the baroque drama’s search for a formal language as an analogous manifestation to expressionism. This, he said, is why [he] treated the artistic problematic of allegory, emblems, and ritual so extensively. Previously, aestheticians tended to downgrade allegory as a second-rate artistic technique. He wanted to prove that allegory was an artistically valuable device, even more, that it was a particular form of artistic perception.
At the time, I was not satisfied with his responses …. Back then, in Capri, I did not really grasp the connection between allegory and modern poetics. Retrospectively I now understand how incisively Walter Benjamin had penetrated modern problems of form.2
But Benjamin had done more than Lacis was willing to acknowledge, even retrospectively, and perhaps even more than he himself was aware of. At the heart of his study, as Benjamin indicates in his response to Lacis, is an effort to rethink and indeed to “rehabilitate” allegory as a mode not just of articulation but also of “artistic perception.” The perception involved, however, is not merely artistic, at least in the traditional sense. This is why the key to an understanding of this text lies not only in an examination of the question of allegory, nor even in the distinction between the “genres” of tragedy and Trauerspiel to which Benjamin alludes in his response to Lacis, but rather in the relation between the two: between the significance of the Trauerspiel, on the one hand, and that of allegory, on the other. Such reflection reveals that the Trauerspiel is as little a traditional aesthetic genre as allegory a device of rhetorical or aesthetical style.3 Allegory, as Benjamin approaches it, consists above all in a distinctive mode of signification. In this, it continues Benjamin’s initial Habilitation project, which he had been forced to abandon when he discovered that a young German philosopher named Martin Heidegger had beaten him to the punch by publishing a book on the same medieval scholastic treatise that Benjamin had intended to interpret, De modis significandi, which at the time was ascribed to Duns Scotus but which has since been reattributed to Thomas of Erfurt. Although he reacted very negatively to Heidegger’s study, he finally decided that it would be more prudent to choose another dissertation topic, which turned out to be German baroque theater.4 The notion of allegory that emerged as this theater’s distinctive mode of articulation shows, however, that Benjamin’s shift in theme and period by no means meant that he had abandoned his earlier interest in language, only that he had shifted the terrain of investigation from that of a philosophy grappling with religiously motivated problems of signification to that of a theater reacting to a religious crisis of epochal proportion.5
To be sure, Benjamin’s concern with history has often been noted; indeed, he himself, in the highly speculative “epistemo-critical prologue” to his book, designates the method he follows as “historical-philosophical.” But however much his notion of Geschichtsphilosophie diverges from what one might expect, and however sharply he himself demarcated it from what might generally be considered to be empirical history, the last is by no means unimportant to the way in which Benjamin approaches the relationship between allegory and theater, to which his interpretation of modernity will remain indebted.6
Benjamin’s historical references—although they are intended to be something other than just chronological or empirical—play a decisive role in the link he goes on to establish between theater and allegory. His historical concerns are foreshadowed in a remark that he makes in a letter to his close friend Florens Christian Rang, whom he regarded as the ideal reader of his study and whose writings on Greek tragedy were an important source for his demarcation of tragedy from Trauerspiel. Writing to Rang in 1923, he asks his friend for help:
At this point in my work I am confronted by two problems, concerning which anything you might have to say would be extremely important. … The first concerns the Protestantism of the seventeenth century. My question is, what is responsible for the fact that it was precisely the Protestant writers (the Schlesian dramatists were Protestants and emphatically so) who developed ideas that were extremely medieval in character: drastic notion of death, atmosphere [of] the dance of death, conception of history as a great tragedy. … My suspicion is that the answer must be sought in the then-prevailing condition of Protestantism, but I have no access to this. The second [problem] concerns the theory of tragedy. (GS, 1.3:890)
The importance of these two questions for Benjamin’s study can hardly be overestimated. His interest in the theory of Attic tragedy was, above all, to demonstrate how radically distinct it was from the seventeenth-century Trauerspiel, which he considered to be a response to a historically specific crisis in Christian eschatology. He therefore sought to establish a radical discontinuity separating the Greek epoch from the Christian one, including their respective theaters. Nevertheless, his two questions about Protestantism and tragedy turn out to be inseparable, for they hinge on a problem that informs Benjamin’s entire approach to the German baroque—and through it, to modernity in general: that of the individual and its relation to theater. The two “historical” references around which that axis will be elaborated are both made explicit in the letter to Rang: on the one hand, Greek myth; on the other, the Protestant Reformation.
Another of Benjamin’s letters indicates that Rang replied to both questions, although his remarks on the subject of Protestantism have unfortunately been lost. To the second question Rang responded, first with a short discussion “Agon and Theater,” and then, in another letter, with a longer gloss elaborating his initial remarks. Rang interprets Greek tragedy as an elaboration of the notion of agon (“competition”), which prefigures later Christian elements. At the center of his agonistic conception of tragedy is the significance of mortality: the agon, he writes, derives from the ritual sacrifice to the dead (Totenopfer).7 In the agonistic dimension of tragedy, Rang discerns a shift in the Greek attitude toward death. His thinking here is inscribed in a long and suspect tradition that sought to trace the roots of modern Germany back to ancient Greek culture, out of which the “Aryan” tradition of “Germanic” culture was said to evolve.8 Rang articulates the continuity in this relationship by means of an ambiguity in the German word Opfer, which has two distinct if related meanings: “victim” and “sacrifice.” According to Rang, the shift articulated in Greek tragedy involves a change in which the significance of the dead for the living is no longer construed in terms of passive victimization but rather in those of “loving” sacrifice. Rang saw the “agonistic” struggle of tragedy, epitomized in the dramas of Aeschylus, as manifest in the “protagonist’s” refusal to submit passively to the fatality of death and with it to a polytheistic order for which mortality was the determining difference between humans and gods. Although we lack the letter in which Rang responded to Benjamin’s question about the relation of Protestantism to medieval motifs, his agonistic interpretation of Greek tragedy can already be seen as preparing the way for the experience of Protestantism that Benjamin will foreground in his study. For the means by which the tragic hero “breaks through” and “out” of the vicious circle of the established mythical order is a certain faith: “Agon comes from mortal sacrifice [Totenopfer]. The one to be sacrificed can escape if he is quick enough. Ever since, pale anxiety before the dead, who demand the survivor as sacrificial victim, was overcome by the faith that lovingly blesses the dead. Or rather: not just the dead, but rather an even more sublime dead [ein höherer Toter noch]. ”9In this “faith” that death, pure and simple, will not have the last word but will acquire a “higher” significance, the tragic hero already prefigures the Protestant challenge that Benjamin will place at the center of his interpretation of the Trauerspiel and that will find doctrinal expression in Luther’s notion of sola fides, of “faith alone” as the path to salvation.
The triumph of faith over works is thus anticipated in Rang’s account of the tragic hero’s struggle to replace the pagan gods with “a higher Savior-God.” Such a struggle, he asserts, assumes a number of different if interrelated aspects. First, it takes place in and as the flight of the hero, literally his racing—his Lauf —across the stage, a movement that, Rang writes, “cuts the amphitheater in two and sets the spatial border of the scene [skene].” In short, the flight of the hero from pursuing, avenging gods and furies is simultaneously a search for a savior, but one that leads, not to a new, liturgical ritual, but to a theatrical practice that constitutes its space precisely by dividing it. Theatrical space—the stage—in this sense is dividual par excellence.10Its division, however, no longer separates gods from humans, Rang continues, but rather the gods among themselves or, better, the existing pagan gods from the god to come. This coming “Savior-God” will entail a very different relation of humans to the divine. The dividing line separating humans from gods will be redrawn in a manner not unlike that which splits the stage. It will no longer separate two fully heterogeneous spheres, the sacred from the profane, but rather will establish a certain continuity between the two. God will become mortal, so that through his self-sacrifice man can become immortal.
This is not made entirely explicit by Rang, but his argument goes clearly in that direction, as is indicated by the second set of figures he employs to characterize the flight of the tragic protagonist. It takes up the link, long recognized, between tragedy and tribunal, drama and trial, moving das Gericht (“the court”) toward das jüngste Gericht, the Last Judgment. Tragedy as trial, he writes, looks toward a day when finally “the community”—das Gemeinde —will emerge as the highest court of appeal, with the power to “recognize and authorize the sacrifice [das Opfer], death, but at the same time to decree victory both to man and to God.”11
The affirmation by Rang of a “victory” of “the community,” however, elicits further questions from Benjamin: “From your final sentence I take it that the conclusion of tragedy is still far removed from any certain sense of the victory of the Man-Savior-Principle and that there, too, a sort of non liquet remains as the undertone” (GS, 1.3:892). Benjamin, in short, is less certain than is Rang about the victory of the community over death, even less about the definitiveness of the Last Judgment with respect to the pagan gods. In his response Rang seems to agree with Benjamin, but with a characteristic displacement:
This is absolutely my opinion. The particular tragic solution [Lösung] found is salvation, to be sure, but it remains a problematic one, postulated in prayer but not realized … Or—to speak in the figure of the agonistic race—: the Savior-God that is attained ends one act but is not the final station of the fleeing soul; it provides a destiny of grace in a particular case, but no assurance, no total rest, no Gospel. (GS, 1.3:892–93)
In short, Rang argues that Greek tragedy is an agonistic anticipation of the Protestant community of believers, united by faith rather than by works. Moreover, for Rang the fact that tragedy is a pre figuration of such a community rather than the community itself makes it theatrical. Only through such a space can resistance to the established mythical-astral order deploy itself as prophecy:
Tragedy is the break with astrology and thus the escape from a destiny based on the orbits of the stars. … You know that … the form of the sacred edifices in the cultural sphere of astrological religion (which covered all of Europe) is that of Uranus: in some sense an image of the cosmos. Of a destiny that is closed. Now, in addition to the Circus, which is nothing but the architectural fixation of the movement around the master’s grave … and which already acknowledges a redemption [Erlösung] within the orbit of astrology and of destiny—[in addition to the circus] it is the hemispherical theatrical construction that offers a way out of this circle. (GS, 1.3:893)
Precisely this capacity of theater to offer a possible way out of the dilemmas resulting from a failing religious and cosmic order will guide Benjamin in his approach to the German Trauerspiel and to modernity in general. Theater, it should be remembered, is here defined as a space that is riven, spatially and temporally, and that therefore can offer a possible escape from the circular orbit of a closed but discredited cosmos.
Thus for Benjamin as for Rang, theater constitutes the response of an uncertain spatiality to questions of life and of death, involving the relation of the human to the divine, but also that of knowledge and faith. Benjamin and Rang diverge in their respective evaluations of the “problematic” character of theatrical salvation or “redemption [Erlösung].” The non-liquet that Rang saw as the most powerful argument for the power of faith, will, for Benjamin, tend to contaminate “faith” itself, thus foregrounding, in the most problematic way imaginable, its relation to “knowledge.” This problematic relationship of faith to knowledge will play itself out in, and even more as the German baroque Trauerspiel, which, as Benjamin interprets it, is as irreducibly theatrical as it is allegorical.
• • •
Rang is not the only inspiration for Benjamin’s theory of tragedy. The other major source, as Benjamin himself indicates, is Franz Rosenzweig, above all his major work, The Star of Redemption. As the title indicates, Rosenzweig, like Rang, reads tragedy from the perspective of redemption, in German, Erlösung. What Rosenzweig adds to the theories put forward by Rang in his letters to Benjamin underscores the defiance of the individual hero. Whereas for Rang the tragic protagonist is defined above all by his anxious if ecstatic attempt to escape the closed circle of an unredeemed nature, for Rosenzweig the tragic hero does not merely flee: he or she resists by rejecting the language of an order s/he no longer accepts. Benjamin adopts this conception of the tragic hero without feeling obliged to support it with any sustained discussion of individual tragedies. What interests him, it appears, is the speculative theory of tragedy built on the categorical refusal of the tragic hero to speak. This refusal is interpreted dialectically following Rosenzweig, who was, of course, an eminent reader of Hegel. According to this dialectic, the refusal of the tragic hero to speak implicitly announces the coming of a new language and a new community. By refusing to speak, the tragic hero demonstrates the dialectics of the self:
For the characteristic sign of the Self, the seal of its grandeur as of its weakness, is its silence. The tragic hero has only one language that corresponds to it: silence. Thus it is from the very beginning. Precisely for this reason it was necessary for the tragic to create the art form of the drama: in order to depict that silence. [ … ] By refusing to speak, the hero burns the bridges that tie him to God and the world, lifting himself above the sphere of a personality that demarcates and individualizes itself against others by speaking, and [conversely] entering the frigid solitude of the self. The Self knows nothing outside of itself, it is absolutely solitary. (GS, 1.1:287)
Benjamin combines Rosenzweig’s conception with Rang’s to interpret the silent self-sacrifice of the tragic hero as the portent of a new world to come. Tragedy thus becomes a “preliminary step of prophecy,” linguistic through and through. In refusing to speak the established language of pagan polytheism, the tragic hero silently but performatively prophesies the coming of a radically different community and world order.
Benjamin’s syncretic blending of Rang and Rosenzweig thus casts Greek tragedy in the role of the pagan refusal of paganism, which becomes a dialectical prefiguration and prophecy of the monotheistic era that was to follow. To call this era Judeo-Christian, however— something Benjamin never does and probably never would have dreamed of doing—would be to beg the point. Precisely the conflicts and discontinuities within the ensuing monotheistic era make up the not so hidden agenda of the German baroque Trauerspiel as Benjamin interprets it, and more generally of Western modernity as such. Benjamin construes both the baroque Trauerspiel and the modern period that followed as responses to the problematic situation of an isolated self and its difficult relation to the community its silence is said to announce. Because of the difficulties of this relationship, promise and prophecy can easily assume the proportions of a nightmare. It is this nightmare that Benjamin associates with the emergence of the Reformation in Europe and with the responses it elicits. The German Trauerspiel, and implicitly western modernity itself, must be understood in terms of these responses.
To understand the response, however, it is first necessary to recall the situation in which it arises. This situation, as Benjamin portrays it, has two salient features. The first he describes as the attainment of a position of unquestioned hegemony by European Christendom: “Of all the profoundly divided and ambivalent periods in European history, the Baroque was the only one that fell in a period of undisturbed rule of Christendom” (GS, 1.1:258).
This meant, by contrast to the middle ages, for instance—whose relationship to the baroque had been the initial object of Benjamin’s question addressed to Rang—that no purely external enemy could be held responsible for unresolved problems and unfulfilled prophecies. These problems and crises, which came to a head within the history of European Christianity in the sixteenth century, are linked to the emergence of the Reformation. This is how Benjamin describes that link:
The great German baroque dramatists were Lutherans. Whereas in the decades of Counter-Reformation restoration Catholicism permeated worldly life with the accumulated power of its discipline, Lutherism had always assumed an antinomian position with respect to everyday life.12 The rigorously moralistic conduct of civil life that it preached stood in direct opposition to its rejection of “good works.” By denying these any spiritual or miraculous effect, by rendering the soul dependent upon the grace of faith alone, and by making political and worldly affairs the testing grounds of a life destined to display civic virtues but with only an indirect relation to religious matters, it inculcated in the people a strict sense of duty and obedience, but in its leaders a disposition to melancholy. Already in Luther, whose last years were filled with a mounting sense of oppression, a sharp reaction developed against the storming of the work. To be sure, “faith” still helped him survive this challenge, but it could not prevent life from becoming shallow. … An element of Germanic paganism and a sinister belief in the submission to fate expressed itself in this overcharged reaction, which in the end dismissed not just the redemptive qualities of good works, but these works as such. Human actions were deprived of all value. Something new arose: an empty world. (GS, 1.1:317, my italics)
The decisive elements in this description are the “storming of the work,” on the one hand, and the “sharp reaction,” tinged with melancholy, that sets in almost immediately, with Luther himself. To understand the nature of the reaction, one must first realize that, as Benjamin argues, this “storm against the works” is directed not merely against “good works” and their redemptive capacity, but against all “works as such.” Their significance is subordinated to an act of “faith” that is no longer felt to be mediated or assured by superindividual institutions such as the Church, with its rites, sacraments, and dispensations, but rather to result from the relatively isolated encounter of the individual with God via the mediation of Scripture. This redemptive if problematic power is in turn transferred to “the book” in general. Though the relationship of the Gutenberg era to the Protestant Reformation is well known, the perspective through which Benjamin approaches it reveals a dimension that has been less widely recognized and discussed. In the somber light of a world emptied of meaning by the devalorization of works and actions, the book becomes “an Arcanum against attacks of melancholy.” Its significance resides in its ostensible capacity to “house and cover [das Behauste und Gedeckte]” (GS, 1.1:320) the inhabitants of an “empty world” devoid of meaningful works. In other words, the value of the book to the baroque consists in its protective volume as much if not more than in its meaning. But—and this is decisive for Benjamin’s argument—the book is no panacea either, since the evacuation of meaning from human actions as well as their products, affects books no less than the world in which they exist. “Immersion” in either “led all too easily into the abyss” (GS, 1.1:320). Benjamin summarizes the result as follows: “If the secularizing [Verweltlichung] of the Counter-Reformation gained force in both religious confessions [Catholic as well as Protestant], religious inclinations still did not lose their weight: it was only that the century refused them a religious resolution, in order to impose or demand a worldly one in its place” (GS, 1.1:258).
One decisive aspect of the Counter-Reformation’s “worldly response” to the radical antinomianism of the Protestant Reformation is the spread of melancholy, which is associated with the distinctively allegorical theater of the German baroque Trauerspiel. It is an ambivalent response, insofar as it recognizes from the start that what it has to offer cannot meet the need and desire for a Last Judgment. Yet in Benjamin’s reading it emerges as a paradigm for the modern response to a crisis to which it is inextricably—originally —bound.
The radical antinomianism that comes to the fore in the Protestant Reformation places human being and society in a situation that is as intolerable as it is insoluble: it exalts the situation of the individual while subjecting that individual to an uncertain destiny, alone before God, unable to influence the future by action, dependent upon a faith whose status remains fundamentally opaque. To this challenge, what Benjamin calls the “Counter-Reformation”—a term that is only apparently familiar, since he causes it to veer away from its usual meaning—seeks to respond, not simply in the name of Catholicism but in that of all organized religion and perhaps all organization as such. This is the situation of the German baroque and it will mark Europe in the centuries to follow.
The Reformation, with its attack on good works, brings forth a paradoxical situation: On the one hand, it stresses the immanence of faith within each individual. On the other hand, it renders problematic the relation of such individualized immanence to anything outside of itself—above all, to divine transcendence. Before the Reformation, the legitimacy of the Catholic Church, an institution that defines itself in part through its claim to universal validity, offered a guarantee of an orderly, transparent relationship of immanence to transcendence through the sacraments and rites that it organizes and defines as “good works.” However, when this connection between the world of mortal human beings and the immortal world of the gods is severed, a situation emerges that is quite literally unworkable (my term, not Benjamin’s). Such unworkability plays itself out in the conception of politics, history, and art. In each of these realms, effective action, as defined by the production of meaningful works, becomes increasingly problematic. In the political realm, the rise of the authority of the secular state with respect to the power of the Curia endows princes with a power that tends toward the absolute. But such absolute power reveals its limitations, since it is no longer able to claim a transcendent justification, and hence the power to endow collective life with a meaning that could comprehend and surpass individual mortality. The sovereign is thus primus inter pares, but still subject to the guilt and corruption held to pervade an essentially unredeemed and guilty creation, consisting of mortal, perishable, and largely unsalvageable individuals. This view of an essentially flawed, guilty, and corrupted creation carries over, naturally, to the works and institutions intended to organize and authorize life in the created world.
All of this marks with particular radicality, but also particular brutality, the historical situation of the German baroque, which, by contrast to that of Spain and England, is unable to sustain the kind of politically centralized nation-state that might counterbalance the antinomian thrust unleashed by the Reformation:
Whereas the Middle Ages portrayed the vulnerability of world events and the transience of all creatures as stations on the way to salvation, the German mourning play buries itself entirely in the disconsolate character of worldly existence. … The move away from eschatology characterizes spiritual plays in all of Europe; nevertheless, the frantic flight into an unredeemed nature is specifically German. (GS, 1.1:260)
This “frantic flight into an unredeemed nature” is itself, however, anything but purely natural. And here the distinctive dimension of Benjamin’s staging of the German baroque emerges. If the Reformation, as he analyzes it, poses a profound crisis to all institutions, above all political and religious ones, at the same time it opens the way for a very traditional institution to assume a radically new role. That institution was the theater. And the role it was to assume is that of restaging history and politics, not as transparent representations of unquestionable realities, but as allegories. Why theater, and why allegory?
The answer to both questions is the same. Theater emerges as the paradigmatic worldly institution in a world where meaning —which, in the Christian framework at least, is structured as a completed and self-contained narrative, with beginning, middle, and end—is subverted by the deprecation of works. A work can be understood as an activity or product that is localized, determined spatially and temporally, and invested with a certain narrative meaning as the result of an intention of which it is the effect. First there is the intention, then there is the execution, finally there is the work as result and fulfillment of the two previous phases. A rite, in this sense, can also be a work. A mass takes place at a certain prescribed place and time, authorized by the institution of the Church and invested with a meaning that places the mortal body of the individual in symbolic communion with the immortal body of Christ through consumption of the wafer. The Church provides the intermediary framework that enables the mortal body of the individual to commune with the immortal spirit of Christ. It implements this communion by providing it with a repeatable, predictable, localizable time and place, a consecrated site, as well as with a significance that transcends such localization.
The Reformation challenged the validity of such institutionalized communion. One major response to this antinomian challenge was the development of another approach to the question of localization, one that foregrounded the constitutive role of the individual as opposed to that of the conventional and consecrated sacrament. Since, however, the situation of an individual is determined primarily by its “here and now,” such situatedness must be invested with significance if it is to be preserved from inevitable change and neutralization. In such a movement of signification alone can the mortal individual find possible consolation for the unredeemed limitations of pure immanence or secularization. “Secularization” for Benjamin involves, therefore, “the conversion of originarily temporal data into a spatial inauthenticity and simultaneity” (GS, 1.1:260). The “originarily temporal data,” defined by their position within an eschatological narrative articulating a movement toward grace and salvation, are thus “spatialized” and “secularized,” but in an inauthentic spatiality defined by a “simultaneity” that marks disunion and divergence more than simple self-identity. Such inauthentic simultaneity is thus the sole chance available to an individual otherwise condemned to perish by virtue of its unredeemable authenticity.
Since “history,” under the antinomian impact of the Reformation, comes to be understood as the rush of an unredeemed “nature” or “immanence” toward an end emptied of significance, or at least rendered totally opaque, the only hope available to the baroque is to attempt to stem this forward tide by creating a space that, by virtue of its very inauthenticity, might slow if not abolish the irresistible pull toward a catastrophic terminus. This inauthentic locale is construed as a theatrical stage, a showplace, a Schauplatz: “It is not the antithesis of history and nature that has the last word for the baroque, but rather the limitless secularization of the historical in and as the Creation. The hopeless course of world events is not contrasted with eternity, but with the restoration of a paradisiacal timelessness. History wanders onto the stage” (GS, 1.1:271).
This stage is, however, literally a “showplace,” a Schauplatz. By contrast to Greek tragedy, for instance, it is a place delimited and constituted essentially by those who witness it as audience and as spectators, as onlookers. Here the contrast with tragedy, which, as we have seen, Benjamin considers a historically distinct phenomenon by virtue of its association with the singular situation of ancient Greece, takes on a significance that remains implicit in his book. Whereas tragedy is said to challenge “myth” with the silent prophecy of a future in which human being is elevated above the limitations of mortality— Rang’s prefiguration of the Gospels, Rosenzweig’s silent prophecy— the German baroque Trauerspiel can be read as a kind of epochal “return of the repressed” in which the tidings are no longer good, no longer guaranteed by the institutional authority of a universal Church. Such a “return” does not, of course, involve a simple regression to the status quo ante, to a pre-Christian state of pagan polytheism. Rather, what “returns” does so within the parameters of the Christianity it splits: that is, contests but also defends. The form this ambivalent split assumes cannot, therefore, be directly religious. Instead, it is itself double: theatrical and allegorical. In this “return,” the ambiguity of pagan polytheism is repeated but also transformed by allegorical theater. Again, why allegorical? Because allegory is the traditional means of investing a manifestation with a signification that it cannot possibly have in terms of a purely immanent, self-contained structure. It thereby brings the signifying potential traditionally associated with a generalized transcendence to bear upon the claims of a localizable and individualizable secular immanence.
If allegory marks the more or less forced convergence of phenomenon and meaning, it does not achieve their fusion or unification. Such convergence remains, therefore, disjunctive. This disjunction defines the specifically theatrical medium of the German baroque Trauerspiel as irreducibly allegorical. The localized space of the theatrical stage may be that of a world theater, but the world of this theater remains inauthentically historical, insofar as “history” is understood either as Heilsgeschichte, eschatology, or as its secularized counterpart. Both are conceived in terms of fulfillment: whether of a divine plan of salvation or a human one of development. What Benjamin, by contrast, designates throughout this text as “natural history” refers to a movement of perdition rather than progress, a “fallen” creation that is doomed to finitude and mortality without any perspective of a meaning that would transcend such limitation. It is, therefore, a story not of grace but of guilt, not of freedom but of destiny. The German baroque mourning play seeks to respond to such “natural history” by bringing it on stage and exposing it to the view of those caught up in it. In so doing, the hope seems to be that, qua allegory, such staging will either contain the temporal push toward oblivion or at least slow it down by displaying it.
By virtue of such staging, allegorical theater—theater as allegory, and allegory as theater—never definitively takes place. Not just because whatever it displays could, qua allegory, mean something other than what it appears to be, but because the space of the stage, which it inhabits, is no more definite or stable. There are no steadfast walls of a National Theater to define its status or space, but only an audience, which is as mutable and inconstant as the “natural history” deployed on stage. Indeed, the stage itself is always on the move. History may “wander” onto the stage, but the stage itself wanders: it is quite literally, in German at least, a Wanderbühne, a “wandering theater,” just as the political institution upon which it depends and which it mirrors, the “court,” is movable, with the seasons. To be sure, this does not differentiate the German “courts” from those in France, Spain, and England. The German courts and their theaters, however, unlike their Spanish, English, or French counterparts, have neither a unified nation-state nor a national religion to fall back on. This is why the antinomianism Benjamin attributes to Luther and the early Reformation assumes such decisive importance for the German baroque mourning play, as distinct from the theater of the more unified European nations. Such unity, Benjamin seems to imply, is a condition for the production of artistically great “works,” such as the dramas of Calderon and Shakespeare, to which he constantly refers, although primarily, as with Greek tragedy, invoking them as a contrasting background against which to highlight the fragmentary nature of the German Trauerspiel, which, he insists, is constitutionally unable to produce great aesthetic works. But such aesthetic inferiority is also the means by which German baroque theater, taken not as individual works but as an ensemble of fragments, is able to reveal aspects of the dilemma of the age far better than any theatrical masterwork ever could. One of the things it reveals—and it is not the least significant—is that the theatrical medium, as opposed to the artistic genre, does not instantiate itself in individual, self-contained, and meaningful works, but rather in plays that never come together to form a self-contained whole, remaining true to their name: plays, fragments, pieces (in German, Stücke ; in French, pièces).
This irreducibly fragmentary character predestines the theatrical medium—which is to say, theater as medium —to emerge increasingly as a paradigm for the modern situation. What, then, is the nature of this theatrical medium? Perhaps its most salient character is its replacement of character or, rather, of the hero, by “natural history,” which is to say, a notion of history derived from the Christian promise of individual redemption, but also cut off from its fulfillment. Severed from its symbolic connection with transcendence by the subordination of good works to individual faith, the Christian history of salvation—Heilsgeschichte —turns into its opposite, Unheilsgeschichte, a story of unremitting decline and fall. Against this notion of history as catastrophe, as Unheil, the staging of history as Trauerspiel seeks to seal off all openings to a transcendence feared as a threat of perdition rather than desired as a path to salvation. Returning to the question he had posed to Rang concerning the relation of medieval to baroque theater, Benjamin places the problem in the following historical context:
Christianity or Europe [reference to Novalis’ famous essay of that name] is divided into a series of European Christendoms, whose historical actions no longer claim to be situated within the trajectory of a process of salvation. The affinity of the Trauerspiel to the Mystery Plays is called into question through the inescapable despair that seems to have the last word in secularized Christian drama. … It is the tension of an eschatological question … without a religious solution, which was denied by the century. … All these attempts remained confined to a strict immanence and without any prospect of opening onto the beyond of the Mystery Plays. (GS, 1.1:258–59)
In short, what you see in the Trauerspiel is all you are going to get: all and nothing. What is performed on the stage is all there is: it has no further intrinsic, symbolic significance, except perhaps that of confirming the lack of symbolic significance, the lack of a transition leading from the secularized stage of the Counter-Reformation to a world beyond. But at the same time what you see is not what you get, since the significance of what you see depends upon things not seen and not shown. This lack of symbolic immanence opens the theatrical site to a potentially endless, if by no means simply arbitrary, series of possible allegorical interpretations, which in turn call into question the stage itself. The direction in which this questioning of the stage moves is suggested by the following comparison between the Trauerspiel and Greek tragedy: “Whereas the spectator of tragedy was solicited and legitimated by the drama, the Trauerspiel must be understood from the standpoint of the viewer. The latter experiences how, as on the stage, an interior space of feeling devoid of any connection to the cosmos, situations are placed before him” (GS, 1.1:299).
To be “placed before” means not to be made transparent, but rather to be made enigmatically proximate to what remains irreducibly elusive. The external stage is as cut off from the rest of the world as the spectator’s inner world of feelings is from the cosmos. Nothing could be further from the relation of the spectator to a tragedy. This relation, according to Benjamin, was essentially unambiguous because tragedy could still be considered a work, an entity that is self-identical and meaningful, and as such one that is capable of determining unequivocally its relation to its audience. However, in a world in which works no longer have such unambiguous value, the Trauerspiel must depend more upon the response and situation of its audience. It presents them with an image of their own lack of connectedness or, rather, of the radical incommensurability between their inner feelings, the realm of “faith,” and the external, phenomenal world in which they live. The divided theater is the spatial expression of this discrepancy or, as Benjamin puts it, this “relationless inner space.” And yet, given that the space outside the theater, that of “natural history,” is also experienced as one of guilt and perdition, it is only by upping the ante and asserting its precarious artificiality and inauthenticity that theater can possibly survive. This explains the baroque tendency to extremes, to exaggerations, and, above all, to “ostentation”: “Its images are arranged in order to be seen,” from the perspective of the spectator. The sight of these images is intended to compensate for the emptying of the world. But they remain allegorical “masks,” and hence the world they “reanimate” is a world of the living dead, of ghosts and ghouls, rather than of the resurrected.
What is displayed on stage remains deeply enigmatic, ambiguous, allegorical. Allegory results precisely from the aporetic insistence upon an immanence that refuses to relate to anything outside of itself. Threatened by pure tautology, such refusal paradoxically winds up signifying anything and nothing, in danger of both exploding and imploding. Benjamin describes this as the “antinomies of allegory,” in which
Every person, every thing, every relationship can signify an arbitrary other. This possibility announces to the profane world an annihilating yet just verdict. For that world is designated as one in which details are not so important. And yet, for anyone familiar with the allegorical explication of texts, it is also unmistakable that such properties of meaning, precisely through their ability to point elsewhere, acquire a power that makes them appear incommensurable with profane things and raises them to a higher level, indeed, can even sanctify them. (GS, 1.1:350–51)
Allegory can thus be understood as the return of a mythological ambiguity within the monotheistic tradition that was supposed to supplant it definitively. Paradoxically, this return is ushered in by the radical individualism emphasized by the Reformation. It entails the return of a certain theatricality, which is now no longer subordinate to the eschatological narrative of redemption otherwise known as “history.” When history is said to “wander in and onto the stage” as allegory, it brings with it a drastic change in the status of the tragic “action,” of the “plot,” which ever since Aristotle had increasingly framed and dominated performance, defined as “drama” rather than as “theater.” With the restaging of natural history as allegorical theater, however, the movement on-stage is no longer framed by a linear and goal-directed concatenation of events, by a meaningful and unified plot constituting the play as a self-contained “work.” Rather, narrative recounting, storytelling, is revealed to be what it always has been: part and parcel of a staging that is not necessarily informed or comprehended by a closed storyline.
In Benjamin’s account of the German baroque Trauerspiel, the consequences of this shift become manifest in the figure and function of the “intriguer” or “plotter.” That figure emerges out of the crisis of secular authority marked by the rise and fall of the political sovereign, emblem of a history that has fallen back into an unredeemed nature. The sovereign’s inability to rule, followed sooner or later by his demise, exposes the unbridgeable “antitheses between the power of the ruler and his capacity to exercise it effectively” (between Herrschermacht und Herrschvermögen (GS, 1.1:250). Out of this crisis the figure of the intriguer emerges, the plotter and courtier who aids and gradually supplants the ruler who cannot rule. Through this replacement, the position of the hero or the protagonist loses its dominance. But the plot also changes its position and function. With the “plotter,” the “plot” reveals itself to be part of the scenario rather than its informing frame. The “plotter,” like the allegorical scholar, whose knowledge is just as cut off from its object as the plot is from a totalizing goal, manipulates links and connections simply for the pleasure of doing so, not in the hope of accomplishing anything, least of all leaving behind a great work. In this irremediably fallen creation, “power” changes its meaning: it is no longer transitive, the power to do or accomplish anything, but rather a mode of being that arranges and combines, manifesting itself in virtuosity rather than control.13 Although Benjamin doesn’t cite him, it is hard not to think of Loge in Wagner’s Tetralogy, that somber tale of the decline and fall of the Germanic gods. Loge is a facilitator, exacerbator, seducer, but never one who acts to acquire power for himself, in his own interest. Indeed, apart from exploiting the contradictions of the gods themselves, Loge appears to have no proper interest. This is probably why he has no role to play in the second half of the Ring, which, as a Gesamtkunstwerk, still has a conclusion to present, a Twilight of the Gods. For the intriguer, by contrast, the exercise of power as the manipulation of others must be its own reward. In the absence of the Work, virtuosity is all that is left. Anyone who thinks otherwise might well ponder the fate of Wotan, his family, and the nation that followed in their footsteps.
Benjamin, for his part, compares the plotter-courtier-scholar to a more theatrical figure, that of the choreographer or ballet master, who trains and tortures his (feminine) pupils to make them learn and master their bodies, not as organic unities, but as articulations of joints and of membra disjecta, ready to be placed in space rather than deployed as a whole. One is reminded here, although once again Benjamin himself makes no mention of it, of the near-dictatorial role exercised by many of the most innovative theatrical directors of the past one hundred years: from Artaud to Kantor, from Peter Stein to Pina Bausch. Indeed, the theatrical “director” seems a mirror image of the political dictator: this, too, is characteristic of the despotism that rules, precariously, the baroque world and, in more veiled forms, its modern successors, politically as well as theatrically.
Once again, such despotism, less “Oriental” than “Western,” is itself a desperate reaction to a no-win game. The theatrical medium does not so much seek salvation as ward off impending catastrophe through its spatio-temporal, that is, localized suspension on stage. Such a desperate project is therefore predicated upon inevitable and considerable violence. The inauthentic spatialization of the theatrical medium must be violent—or, as Artaud calls it, “cruel”—insofar as it is rooted in an irreducible violation: the violation of whatever convention has consecrated as natural, organic, and self-contained. In addition to his references to the despotic practices of the ballet master, choreographer, political tyrant, and intriguer-courtier, the violence of this violation described by Benjamin announces the coming collaboration and convergence of the “new” media with their more traditional predecessors, purged of their traditional aestheticism: the convergence of photography and painting, of cinema and theater, of digitization and analogical representation, of text and “hypertext.” From the moment when, in the spirit of the Reformation, all works are declared to be intrinsically empty, which is to say, powerless to assuage the anxiety of mortality without being informed by something interior and invisible called “faith, “the world of appearances, which is the medium not only of works but of acts and hence of “subjects,” the world to which Western modernity aspires, can no longer be taken for granted. The light that illuminates it no longer comes from within, no longer illuminates the space it renders visible, is no longer a lumens naturale. It comes from elsewhere, an elsewhere that bears no intrinsic relation or affinity to that which it illuminates. Like a spotlight —a recurrent figure in Benjamin’s descriptions of the baroque—it casts a harsh glare, violating everything it thereby renders visible. This kind of light alters, perhaps forever, the status of the image:
The image in the field of allegorical intuition is fragment, rune. Its symbolic beauty dissolves once the light of divine erudition falls upon it. The false semblance of totality goes out. For the Eidos is extinguished, the similitude dissolves, the cosmos within dries up. In the parched rebus that remains, there resides an insight that is still accessible to the delving if confused scholar. Unfreedom, incompleteness, brokenness of the sensuously beautiful phusis was denied to classical art and aesthetics for essential reasons. Just this, however, is what baroque allegory, hidden behind its insane ornateness, brings to the fore. A fundamental premonition [Ahnung] of the problematic of art … emerges as the recoil of [art’s] self-celebration in the Renaissance. (GS, 1.1:352)
To have retraced the genealogy of this “fundamental premonition of a problematic of art” remains, perhaps, the most important result of Benjamin’s study. His notion of an allegorical theater, and of an allegorical theatricality exceeding the dimensions of theater in the narrow sense, can help to reinscribe the problematic status of the work of art, and of works in general, in a concept of history that does greater justice to the aporias of singularity that even—and especially—today continue to mark the ongoing struggle of reformative and counter-reformative tendencies that also goes under the name of modernity.