Indeed, Georg Lukacs—one of the most trenchant opponents of Benjamin’s aesthetics—singled out this work as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century.The Origin of German Tragic Drama begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar stage-form of the royal martyr dramas called Trauerspiel. Benjamin also comments on the engravings of Durer, and the theatre of Shakespeare and Calderon. Baroque tragedy, he argues, was distinguished from classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history.The characteristic atmosphere of the Trauerspiel was consequently ‘melancholy’. The emblems of baroque allegory point to the extinct values of a classical world that they can never attain or repeat. Their suggestive power, however, remains to haunt subsequent cultures, down to this century.

    Leonhart Maurizarius, convicted of the muder of his wife, is languishing in prison. His case has been forgotten by everyone except the imprisoned man and his father, who is convinced of his innocence. The story of how the father provokes first the son of the man who prosecuted the case and then the prosecutor himself to reopen and re-examine the mystery is a narrative at once wise in the ways of human behavior and rich in the dramatization of philosophical concerns.