Benjamin's Library

Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque

Jane O. Newman

• Publisher: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780801476594
• eBook ISBN: 9780801461361
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Benjamin's Library, Jane O. Newman offers, for the first time in any language, a reading of Walter Benjamin's notoriously opaque work, Origin of the German Tragic Drama that systematically attends to its place in discussions of the Baroque in Benjamin's day. Taking into account the literary and cultural contexts of Benjamin's work, Newman recovers Benjamin's relationship to the ideologically loaded readings of the literature and political theory of the seventeenth-century Baroque that abounded in Germany during the political and economic crises of the Weimar years.

To date, the significance of the Baroque for Origin of the German Tragic Drama has been glossed over by students of Benjamin, most of whom have neither read it in this context nor engaged with the often incongruous debates about the period that filled both academic and popular texts in the years leading up to and following World War I. Armed with extraordinary historical, bibliographical, philological, and orthographic research, Newman shows the extent to which Benjamin participated in these debates by reconstructing the literal and figurative history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books that Benjamin analyzes and the literary, art historical and art theoretical, and political theological discussions of the Baroque with which he was familiar. In so doing, she challenges the exceptionalist, even hagiographic, approaches that have become common in Benjamin studies. The result is a deeply learned book that will infuse much-needed life into the study of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.

1

INVENTING THE BAROQUE

A Critical History of Nineteenth- and Early
Twentieth-Century Debates

In 1935, just seven years after Benjamin’s book on the German tragic drama appeared, the Paris publishing house Gallimard released a slim volume entitled Du baroque (On the Baroque) by the Spanish philosopher and man of letters Eugenio d’Ors. Midway through the book, d’Ors indicates, in an idiosyncratic chart entitled “Genre: Barocchus” (161), that the Baroque is far more than an “oddly shaped pearl” or “the fourth mode of the second figure in the scholastic nomenclature of syllogisms” that René Wellek would famously cite, but then reject, as possible definitions some ten years later in his “The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship” (1946). Rather, d’Ors’s Baroque spills out over the borders of the categories discussed by Wellek and repeated more recently by Walter Moser (578–79), appearing as the “Barocchus macedonicus” and the “Barocchus romanus,” the “Barocchus buddhicus” and the “Barocchus tridentius, sive romanus, sive jesuiticus” in turn. According to d’Ors’s chart, there have been no fewer than twenty-two “species” of the Baroque since the “prehistoric” “Barocchus pristinus” “among the savages” (162). The historically most recent Baroque is version 20, the “Barocchus posteabellicus” of d’Ors’s—and Benjamin’s—own immediate wartime and post–World War I past.

The Baroque that d’Ors finds, or invents (from invenio, “to find”), in the early twentieth century appears to be less a specific moment in time than a “constant of culture” (99). The description is reminiscent of Friedrich Nietzsche’s identification of “Baroque style” as a “timeless phenomenon that periodically recurs,” in his Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (Human, All Too Human) of 1879 (see Barner, “Nietzsches literarischer Barockbegriff” 569). Both versions are typical of one of the ways the Baroque is said to have been defined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a strictly stylistic category; often offered as the most prominent example of this kind of deracinated metaphysics of the aesthetic is Heinrich Wölfflin’s definition of the Baroque in his famous Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Principles of Art History) (1915); there the art historian is said to have distinguished the Baroque from the Renaissance in primarily formal terms. Even though both Wellek and Ernst Robert Curtius, for example, rebelled against this account early on and in firm ways, the subsequent historiography of the period has been consistent.1 According to this narrative, formalist periodization theory developed in the early twentieth century in explicit counterpoint to—and thus as an alternative to—the heavily ideological mid- to late nineteenth-century linear and historicist versions of individual national cultural histories, the task of which had been to describe the gradual emergence of art and literature from the unified “spirit” of any given Volk. D’Ors’s chart would seem to reflect at least one part of this nonlinear and implicitly antinationalizing story when it celebrates the self-forming and self-(re)generating power of style.

Upon closer examination, however, it is difficult to see how d’Ors’s chart uncouples theorizations of period from place. In fact, the table problematizes the claim that situatedness and style are distinct from one another, and thus also the assertion that an interest in matters of form challenged cultural-historical—what we today might call ideological and identitarian—approaches to period study at the time. Its wit is lodged, for example, in its production of the Baroque not only as an insistently recurring style, but also as a combination of style with historical specificity and site. The best example is the cascade of adjectives—Jesuit, Roman, and Tridentine—that d’Ors associates with the sixteenth-century moment often singled out as the historical Baroque of record; here, local theological and political histories collaborate to anchor the period type in a place in a completely overdetermined way. D’Ors’s chart thus suggests that the task of inventing the Baroque was much more than a question of sheer form in the early twentieth century. Rather, many arguments about the period—and about its allegedly antithetical twin, the Renaissance—rooted questions of style in specific cultural sites and in nations above all. In this chapter, I argue that such period definitions emerged with particular complexity in Germany during the time d’Ors refers to as the “Barocchus posteabellicus,” the post–World War I Baroque, which was the time of Benjamin’s Baroque too.

The conventional claim—that, in the contest between theories of culture that pitted aesthetic autonomy and formal criticism against the historical functionalization and interpretation of art, it was the former that “won,” because they resisted ideological instrumentalization—obscures the ease with which the stylistic argument was itself pressed into the service of a widespread set of narratives about how the history of national modernities and of the modern German Kulturnation in particular could be told. It is in conversation with this aspect of debates about periodization that it is important to understand a further aspect of the context of Benjamin’s argument about the German Baroque—that is, as different as the methodological assumptions were in the work of the various scholars that he cites in his Tragic Drama book, all contributed to a constellation of discourses that celebrated the Baroque, finding in it not an “obscure” or degenerate period and style, not the marginal and heterodox “border region” of academic concern that many students of Benjamin—and sometimes Benjamin himself—would have had it be.2 Rather, for Benjamin, as for others, the Baroque was a privileged, and even “fashionable,”3 object of study in a field that was in the midst of its “heroic” phase (Voßkamp 684) and “golden years” (Alewyn, Vorwort 9) at the time. As often as not, this Baroque was also claimed by many to be firmly rooted in a specific place, namely the German “north,” as I show below. While Benjamin admits in a letter to Florens Christian Rang that he was not always “gripped” by his work on his thesis and occasionally had to “force” himself to work on it (Briefe 1: 326), the “dégout” that he appears sometimes to have felt for his project (327) may have resulted from a combination of the pressures on him to complete it quickly, on the one hand, and the real existential anxieties by which he was beset at the time, on the other—rather than from an aversion to the period and its peculiar texts. In the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” of the Tragic Drama book, Benjamin identifies the celebration of the Baroque with the “if not also mostly sentimental, then certainly positive obsession” with the period (G: 1.1: 234; E: 54) common at the time. This observation sheds light on how it was possible for him to have considered it a legitimate object of study in the first place.4

Scholarship by Wilhelm Voßkamp and Petra Boden (“Stamm—Geist—Gesellschaft”) on the history of literary and cultural studies in Germany in the post-1871 era has linked the spike in interest in the Baroque to the more general methodological debates that came to a head around 1890 in the new and antipositivist approach of Geistesgeschichte. Trends in the sociological study of literature, on the one hand, and the struggle to align the so-called humanistic disciplines with “scientific” (naturwissenschaftlich) approaches via reference to various systematic models, on the other, may also have played a role in crafting a science of periodization that would celebrate all epochs of the new nation’s cultural achievement in equal measure. Such debates informed literary and art historical studies alike, as they struggled to understand the relation of the Renaissance and the Baroque as two periods that were often caught in the sometimes confusing crossfire of disputes about the relationship between the formal differences that scholars and critics saw in the heterogeneous styles of the two eras and a literary-historical narrative of cultural continuity organized as a celebration of their common origins in a specific cultural and spiritual collectivity, nation, and race. It is this second aspect of the argument about period that is of particular interest in connection with Benjamin’s Tragic Drama book.

Wilfried Barner (“Das europäische 17. Jahrhundert”) has noted that beginning already in the eighteenth century the Baroque had been celebrated as much for its commitment to a kind of linguistic nationalism, in the form of massive translation projects and the production of vernacular dictionaries, for example, as for the eccentricities of style also associated with it. This “patriotic” conservation of an ancient “German (Teutonic) inheritance” (405) trespassed on yet also trumped and replaced the reputation of an Italianate Renaissance famous for the glorious rediscovery of a Romance antiquity with the equally as significant achievements of a specifically northern Baroque twin. To identify a German national Baroque as the rival to a Pan-European Renaissance, yet also as a fellow traveler in supersessionary efforts to reanimate the nation’s modernity by calling forth “ancient” forms, thus did not necessarily distinguish the periods cleanly from one another, at least in terms of their ideological thrust. As noted above, Jacob Burckhardt’s discussion of the Renaissance provided one of the most salient examples of the figurative logic subtending this kind of modernization talk. His well-known claim that the Italian Renaissance was the birth moment and “mother” of “our” “civilization” (Burckhardt 1), the Renaissance man of Italy the high-achieving “first-born [son] among the sons of Europe today” (87), still hung in the air in the 1910s and 1920s as the unanswered question about the exact relation of those beginnings to the here and now. Indeed, as Lionel Gossman and others have shown, the scary legacy for modernity of Burckhardt’s more or less ruthlessly individualistic Renaissance man, as well as of the irresponsibly extravagant and politically opportunistic secularized culture that produced him, was still very much a topic. At stake was what exactly it was that had been “reborn” in the Renaissance and was now coming to fruition in the European nations of more modern times. Was the story of the period that of a model age of glorious achievement endlessly indebted to an ancient past, or a horrific cautionary tale of a thoroughly integrated historical culture within which no one escaped the clutches of a brutally “progressive” age?5 Such questions in turn generated the dilemma of how to understand the alleged successor culture of the Renaissance, namely the Baroque. Did it continue or alter, prolong or replace, this potentially problematic Renaissance with a compensatory or alternative origin of the “modern” sensibility that was more appropriate—and potentially also more beneficial—to the here and now?6 Moreover, how was the Baroque to be understood as the afterlife of the end of the (Italian) Renaissance in the (rest of the European) modern world, and especially in the recently created German nation? Theorizations of the German Baroque during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may well have seen the period as an alternative to the Renaissance. But they understood the Baroque as doing essentially the same ideological work as the Renaissance.

This chapter examines, first, the ways in which contemporary debates about the relationship between period, modernity, and place are audible in the sections of the notoriously difficult “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” of the Tragic Drama book that deal explicitly with questions about whether or not, and, if so, how, the German Baroque should be understood as part of a “Renaissance” of the nation. Benjamin’s citation and rejection of arguments made to this effect by Paul Stachel and Herbert Cysarz, two well-known scholars of the German Baroque, are placed in conversation with arguments he derives from the medievalist Konrad Burdach, arguments about German literary-historical periodization that Benjamin then substitutes for Stachel’s and Cysarz’s claims. In the second section, I turn to exemplary articulations of contemporary discussions of the Baroque in the field most often aligned with it, namely art history; noting their centrality in Benjamin’s essay “Strenge Kunstwissenschaft” (On the Rigorous Study of Art) (1933), I discuss art historians and art theorists Heinrich Wölfflin and Alois Riegl, whose legacies are crucial to understanding the claims that were being made about the Renaissance-to-Baroque relation at the time. Observing the much underestimated importance of place in their theories helps us see how Benjamin’s citation of their work creates the basis of a new argument about the Baroque as a moment of national cultural rebirth. In the final section, I examine the work of two of the literary scholars whom Benjamin cites over and over again in the Tragic Drama book, Arthur Hübscher and Fritz Strich. Traditionally, both of these men’s work about the Baroque has been read (when it is read at all) as contributing only to stylistic debates. Returning to them to see what they say about the national collectivity and the power of place in connection with periodization theory sheds light on Benjamin’s definition of the “origin” of the Baroque German tragic drama in his book. Understanding how contemporary debates about the Baroque can be witnessed in his project to redeem the period and its texts makes clear that his project was neither idiosyncratic nor eccentric. Rather, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama was caught in a reeling network of arguments that used the Renaissance-Baroque dyad to pose questions about period and style, modernity and progress, and the cultural identity of the German nation.

The Renaissance of the German Baroque in the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue”

As opaque as the first twenty pages of the Tragic Drama book are—Benjamin himself was in all likelihood referring to them when he wrote to Gershom Scholem on 19 February 1925 that parts of the “Prologue” were “an outrageous Chutzpah” (Briefe 1: 372)—they were not the reason university officials in Frankfurt recommended that Benjamin withdraw the work from consideration as his Habilitation. In fact, like the fictional foreword that Benjamin wrote after the withdrawal, the pages that we now read as the opening salvo of his theoretical argument were not handed in with the rest of the study; rather, they appeared only later in the version of the book published in 1928.7 Without them, Benjamin’s “Baroque book” actually begins, in the section identified by the running head “The Dismissal and Misunderstanding of Baroque Tragedy” (Gesammelte Schriften 1.1: 229–31), with an overview of existing criticism, entitled “History of the Study of the German Literary Baroque” (G: 1.1: 228–37; E: 48–56); such overviews were a common way of opening a German academic exercise, both at the time and since. The strategic (mis)use of the term “tragedy” in the head to explain existing misinterpretations of what Benjamin insists is not “tragedy,” but rather the Baroque “tragic drama” (Trauerspiel), or mourning play, in fact points to one of his main complaints in this section about the prior scholarship, namely its failure to distinguish the imitative culture of the Renaissance, with its relationship of indebtedness to ancient tragedy, from the new and modern forms of the Baroque Trauerspiel.8 While Benjamin may have sought later to differentiate himself from the tribe of academics who chose not to accept him, the periodization debates in which he engages in these more traditional, or “profane,” parts of the “Prologue” suggest that this most complex of texts may profitably be read in dialogue with work about the Baroque being published at the time.9

Benjamin’s more or less workmanly overview of recent scholarship begins by noting the considerable barriers erected in the grand narratives of nineteenth...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Textual Note
• Introduction: Benjamin’s Baroque: A Lost Object?
• 1. Inventing the Baroque: A Critical History of Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Debates
• 2. The Plays Are the Thing: Textual Politics and the German Drama
• 3. Melancholy Germans: War Theology, Allegory, and the Lutheran Baroque
• Conclusion: Baroque Legacies: National Socialism’s Benjamin
• Bibliography