TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

magnanimity wins out in dire and painful circumstance. The Passion of Christ was
recommended as a model of how to survive the chaos of a potential socially productive
tyrranicide, even if the eschatology of redemption was unthinkable, and murder was just
murder, foul.
In these details of kingly conflict under changing cultural morés we can now see
how the idea of natural history is borrowed from Benjamin‟s philosophical introduction
for a direct application to the realities of the king‟s conflicted and insecure position as the
victim of unleashed forces. The Origin of German Tragic Drama makes the following
point:
The constantly repeated drama of the rise and fall of princes, the
steadfastness of unshakable virtue, appeared to the writers less as a
manifestation of morality than as the natural aspect of the course of
history, essential in its permanence. Any profound fusion of
historical moral concepts was almost as unknown to the prerationalist
west as it had been to antiquity; and as far as the
baroque is concerned this is particularly borne out in an intention
focused on world-history in the manner of a chronicle. (88)
The painstaking examination of the details of political intrigue chronicled by the
trauerspiel showed that the “natural aspect of the course of history” was due in large part
to “the corrupt energy of schemers” (88). “Nature” was simply a record of the schemers‟
discontent as they sought to usurp the title-making powers of the king. So removed was
the everyday man from ideas about virtue and morality that history, as the story of
reasonable change, could only be conceived as the possession of the sovereign.
Trauerspiel would show that everything else, everything human, everything that belonged
to the dramatis personae surrounding the autonomous monarch, is impermanent.
Benjamin argues that this impermanence was the proximate effect upon “the people” of
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