1 - Walter Benjamin and the European avant-garde

Summary

The year 1924 produced a series of crucial turns in Walter Benjamin's career. The years leading up to 1924, to which he later referred as his “apprenticeship in German literature,” saw Benjamin intent on a reevaluation of German Romanticism, and the development of a theory of criticism with deep roots in that very Romanticism. His major published works of the period included studies of Goethe's novel Elective Affinities, a dissertation on Friedrich Schlegel's theory of criticism, and, in 1924, a major study of German baroque mourning plays, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama; in each of these texts, Benjamin develops his own literary theory from concepts and procedures evident in the works themselves, only to turn the new theory back on the text from which it in some sense sprang. The rhythms of Benjamin's practice and theory of criticism in these years contain two intertwined movements. On the one hand, his criticism entails the demolition or demystification of the unified work of art – what we today call its disenchantment. Benjaminian criticism reduces the apparently coherent, integrally meaningful work to the status, to name but a few of Benjamin’s figures, of ruin, of torso, of mask. In the study of The Origin of the German Tragic Drama he writes that “criticism is the mortification of works” (Origin, 182; trans. modified).