Luerspiel and Tragedy

To obtain a deeper understanding of the tragic, we should perhaps look not

just at art but also at history. 1 At the very least, we may surmise that the
tragic marks out a frontier of the realm of art at least as much as of the
terrain of history. At specific and crucial points in its traj ectory, historical
time passes over into tragic time; such points occur in the actions of great
individuals. There is an essential connection between the ideas of greatness
in history and those in tragedy-although the two are not identical. In art,
historical greatness can assume the form only of tragedy. Historical time is
infinite in every direction and unfulfilled at every moment. This means we
cannot conceive of a single empirical event that bears a necessary relation
to the time of its occurrence. For empirical events time is nothing but a
form, but, what is more important, as a form it is unfulfilled. The event
does not fulfill the formal nature of the time in which it takes place. For we
should not think of time as merely the measure that records the duration
of a mechanical change . Although such time is indeed a relatively empty
form, to think of its being filled makes no sense. Historical time, however,
differs from this mechanical time. It determines much more than the possi­
bility of spatial changes of a specific magnitude and regularity-that is to
say, like the hands of a clock-simultaneously with spatial changes of a
complex nature. And without specifying what goes beyond this, what else
determines historical time-in short, without defining how it differs from
mechanical time-we may assert that the determining force of historical time
cannot be fully grasped by, or wholly concentrated in, any empirical process.
Rather, a process that is perfect in historical terms is quite indeterminate
empirically; it is in fact an idea. This idea of fulfilled time is the dominant
56 Trauerspiel and Tragedy

historical idea of the Bible: it is the idea of messianic time. Moreover, the
idea of a fulfilled historical time is never identical with the idea of an
individual time. This feature naturally changes the meaning of fulfillment
completely, and it is this that distinguishes tragic time from messianic time .
Tragic time is related to the latter in the same way that an individually
fulfilled time relates to a divinely fulfilled one.
Tragedy may be distinguished from mourning play [Trauerspiel] through
the different ways they relate to historical time. In tragedy the hero dies
because no one can live in fulfilled time. He dies of immortality. Death is
an ironic immortality; that is the origin of tragic irony. The origin of tragic
guilt can be found in the same place. It has its roots in the tragic hero's very
own, individually fulfilled time. This time of the tragic hero-which can be
no more defined here than historical time-describes all his deeds and his
entire existence as if with a magic circle. When the tragic development
suddenly makes its incomprehensible appearance, when the smallest false
step leads to guilt, when the slightest error, the most improbable coincidence
leads to death, when the words that would clear up and resolve the situation
and that seem to be available to all remain unspoken-then we are witness­
ing the effect of the hero's time on the action, since in fulfilled time every­
thing that happens is a function of that time. It is almost a paradox that
this becomes manifest in all its clarity at the moment when the hero is
completely passive, when tragic time bursts open, so to speak, like a flower
whose calyx emits the astringent perfume of irony. For it is not unusual for
the fateful climax of the hero's time to reach its moment of fulfillment during
moments of utter tranquillity-during his sleep, as it were. And in the same
way the meaning of the fulfilled time of a tragic fate emerges in the great
moments of passivity: in the tragic decision, the retarding point of the action,
and in the catastrophe. The measure of Shakespearean tragedy can be found
in the mastery he shows in identifying and distinguishing the different stages
of tragedy from one another like the repetitions of a theme. In contrast,
classical tragedy is characterized by the ever more powerful eruption of
tragic forces. It deals with the tragedy of fate, Shakespeare with the tragic
hero, the tragic action. Goethe rightly calls him Romantic.
A tragic death is an ironic immortality, ironic from an excess of determi­
nacy. The tragic death is overdetermined-that is the actual expression of
the hero's guilt. Hebbel may have been on the right track when he said that
individuation was original sin. 2 But everything hinges on the nature of the
offense given by individuation. This is the point that enables us to inquire
into the connection between history and tragedy. We are not speaking here
of an individuation to be comprehended with reference to man. Death in
the mourning play is not based on the extreme determinacy that individual
time confers on the action. It is no conclusive finality; without the certitude
of a higher existence and without irony, it is the metabasis of all life eis a/lo
 Trauerspiel and Tragedy 57

genos. 3 The mourning play is mathematically comparable t o one branch o f

a h yperbola whose other branch lies i n infinity. The law governing a higher
life prevails in the restricted space of an earthly existence, and all play, until
death puts an end to the game, so as to repeat the same game, albeit on a
grander scale, in another world. It is this repetition on which the law of the
mourning play is founded. Its events are allegorical schemata, symbolic
mirror-images of a different game. We are transported into that game by
death. The time of the mourning play is not fulfilled, but nevertheless it is
finite. It is nonindividual, but without historical universality. The mourning
play is in every respect a hybrid form. The universality of its time is spectral,
not mythic. A sign that it is related in its innermost core to the mirror-nature
of games is that it has an even number of acts. As in all other respects,
Schlegel's A larcos sets the example, j ust as in general it is an outstanding
work in which to conduct an analysis of the mourning play.4 Its characters
are royal, as is necessarily the case in the tragic drama because of the
symbolic level of meaning. This play is ennobled by the distance which
everywhere separates image and mirror-image, the signifier and the signified .
Thus, the mourning play presents us not with the image of a higher existence
but only with one of two mirror-images, and its continuation is not less
schematic than itself. The dead become ghosts. The mourning play exhausts
artistically the historical idea of repetition. Consequently, it addresses a
problem that is completely different from the one dealt with in tragedy. In
the mourning play, guilt and greatness call not so much for definition-let
alone overdetermination-as for expansion, general extension, not for the
sake of guilt and greatness, but simply for the repetition of those situations.
The nature of repetition in time is such that no unified form can be based
on it. And even if the relation of tragedy to art remains problematic, even
if it may be both more and less than an art form, it nevertheless remains
formally unified. Its temporal character is exhaustively shaped in the form
of drama. The mourning play, on the other hand, is inherently nonunified
drama, and the idea of its resolution no longer dwells within the realm of
drama itself. And here, on the question of form, is the point where the
crucial distinction between tragedy and mourning play emerges decisively.
The remains of mourning plays are called music. Perhaps there is a parallel
here: j ust as tragedy marks the transition from historical to dramatic time,
the mourning play represents the transition from dramatic time to musical
time.

Written in 1 9 1 6 ; unpublished in Benj amin's lifetime. Translated by Rodney Livingstone .

58 Trauerspiel and Tragedy

Notes

1 . The term Trauerspiel, or play of mourning, designates a series of dramas com­

posed in Germany in the seventeenth century.-Trans.
2. Friedrich Hebbel ( 1 8 1 3-1 8 63 ) , Austrian dramatist and master of the " bourgeois
tragedy. " His plays include Maria Magdelena ( 1 843) and Agnes Bernauer
( 1 8 5 1 ) .-Trans.
3. " Transformation into another type or sort. " The phrase occurs in Aristotle's " D e
Caelo " [On the Heavens] , 2 8 1 b.-Trans.
3. Friedrich Schlegel's Alarcos, a verse tragedy ( Schlegel calls it a Trauerspiel) in two
acts, was first performed in 1 802 at the Weimar Court Theater under Goethe's
direction.-Trans.
The Role of Language in Trauerspiel
and Tragedy

The tragic is situated in the laws governing the spoken word between human
beings. There is no such thing as a tragic pantomime. 1 Nor do we have
tragic poems, tragic novels, or tragic events. Tragedy is not j ust confined
exclusively to the realm of dramatic human speech; it is the only form proper
to human dialogue. That is to say, no tragedy exists outside human dialogue,
and the only form in which human dialogue can appear is that of tragedy.
Wherever we see an " untragic " drama, the autonomous laws of human
speech fail to manifest themselves; instead, we see no more than a feeling
or a relationship in a linguistic context, a linguistic phase.
In its pure forms, dialogue is neither sad nor comic, but tragic. To that
extent, tragedy is the classic and pure form of drama. The sad has no main
focus, and its deepest and indeed only expression is to be found neither in
dramatic speech nor in speech in any sense. Sadness is not confined to the
mourning play [Trauerspiel] . What is more, the mourning play is not the
saddest thing in the world. A poem can be sadder, as can a story or a life.
For sadness, unlike tragedy, is not a ruling force. It is not the indissoluble
law of inescapable orders that prevails in tragedy. It is merely a feeling. What
is the metaphysical relation of this feeling to language, to the spoken word ?
That is the riddle of the mourning play. What internal relation at the heart
of sadness causes it to emerge from the realm of pure feeling and enter the
sphere of art ?
In tragedy, speech and the tragic arise together, simultaneously, on the
same spot. Every speech in the tragedy is tragically decisive. It is the pure
word itself that has an immediate tragic force. How language can fill itself
with sadness, how language can express sadness, is the basic question of the
60 Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy

mourning play, alongside that other question: How can the feeling of sadness
gain entry into the linguistic order of art ? When language has an impact by
virtue of its pure meaning, that impact is tragic. The word as the pure bearer
of its meaning is the pure word. But alongside this, we find a word of
another sort that is subject to change, as it moves from its source toward a
different point, its estuary. Language in the process of change is the linguistic
principle of the mourning p lay. Words have a pure emotional life cycle in
which they purify themselves by developing from the natural sound to the
pure sound of feeling. For such words, language is merely a transitional
phase within the entire life cycle, and in them the mourning play finds its
voice. It describes the path from natural sound via lament to music. In the
mourning play, sounds are laid out symphonically, and this constitutes the
musical principle of its language and the dramatic principle of its breaking
up and splitting into characters. The mourning play is nature that enters the
purgatory of language only for the sake of the purity of its feelings; it was
already defined in the ancient wise saying that the whole of nature would
begin to lament if it were but granted the gift of language. For the mourning
play does not describe the motion through the spheres that carries feeling
from the pure world of speech out to music and then back to the liberated
sorrow of blissful feeling. Instead, midway through its j ourney nature finds
itself betrayed by language, and that powerful blocking of feeling turns to
sorrow. Thus, with the ambiguity of the word, its signifying character,
nature falters, and whereas the created world wished only to pour forth in
all purity, it was man who bore its crown. This is the significance of the
king in the mourning play, and this is the meaning of the Haupt- und
Staatsaktion.2 These plays represent a blocking of nature, as it were an
overwhelming damming up of the feelings that suddenly discover a new
world in language, the world of signification, of an impassive historical time;
and once again the king is both man (the end of nature) and also the king
(the symbol and bearer of significance) . History becomes equal to significa­
tion in human language; this language is frozen in signification. Tragedy
threatens, and man, the crowning pinnacle of creation, is salvaged for feeling
only by becoming king: a symbol as the bearer of this crown. And nature
in the mourning play remains a torso in this sublime symbol; sorrow fills
the sensuous world in which nature and language meet.
The two metaphysical principles of repetition interpenetrate in the mourn­
ing play and establish its metaphysical order. They are the cycle and repe­
tition, the circle and the fact of duality. For it is the circle of feeling that is
completed in music, and it is the duality of the word and its meaning that
destroys the tranquillity of a profound yearning and disseminates sorrow
throughout nature. The interplay between sound and meaning remains a
terrifying phantom for the mourning play; it is obsessed by language, the
victim of an endless feeling-like Polonius, who was overcome by madness
 Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy 61

in the midst o f his reflections. This interplay must find its resolution, how­
ever, and for the mourning play that redemptive mystery is music-the
re birth of the feelings in a suprasensuous nature.
It is the necessity of redemption that constitutes the playful element of
this art form. For compared with the irrevocability of tragedy, which makes
an ultimate reality of language and the linguistic order, every product
animated by a feeling ( of sorrow) must be called a game. The mourning
pl ay is built not on the foundation of actual language but on the conscious­
ness of the unity that language achieves through feeling, a unity that unfolds
in words. In this process, errant feeling gives voice to its sorrow. But this
lament must dissolve itself; on the basis of that presupposed unity, it enters
into the language of pure feeling-in other words, music. Sorrow conj ures
up itself in the mourning play, but it also redeems itself. This tension and
release of feeling in its own realm is a form of play. In it sorrow is nothing
more than a single tone on the scale of the feelings, and so we may say that
there is no mourning play pure and simple, since the diverse feelings of the
comic, the terrible, the horrifying, and many others each take their turn on
the floor. Style, in the sense of a unity beyond feelings, is reserved for tragedy.
The world of the mourning play is a special world that can assert its
greatness and equality even in the face of tragedy. It is the site of the actual
conception of the word and of speech in art; the faculties of speech and
hearing still stand equal in the scales, and ultimately everything depends on
the ear for lament, for only the most profoundly heard lament can become
music. Whereas in tragedy the eternal inflexibility of the spoken word is
exalted, the mourning play concentrates in itself the infinite resonance of its
sound.

Written in 1 9 1 6; unpublished in Benj amin's lifetime . Translated by Rodney Livingstone.

Notes

1 . The term Trauerspiel, or play of mourning, designates a series of dramas com­

posed in Germany in the seventeenth century. Trans.
-

2 . Haupt- und Staatsaktion: Political plays that emerged in Germany around 1 700,
concerned with the sudden fall of kings, dark conspiracies, and executions.­
Trans.