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

elegated to the setting in which the agonies of a natural disorder that punctually attend
Opitz‟s “concrete history” could play themselves out, as if they were merely political and
uninflected by the sport that fate presented to ideas concerning nature and history:
And just as the transformation of history into natural history in the
baroque drama was overlooked, so too, in the analysis of tragedy,
was the discrimination between legend and history. In this way the
concept of historical tragedy emerged. Here too the equation of
Trauerspiel and tragedy was the consequence, and it acquired the
theoretical function of concealing the problematic character of the
historical drama as devised by German classicism. (120)
In fact, Benjamin is revealing the continuum that exists in his thought between
tragedy and trauerspiel, inasmuch as what distinguishes the sovereign in each of these
genres is his possession of a morality that is held at bay from those who surround him.
The origin of this morality is nothing less than that which had constituted the
mythological underpinnings of tragedy – antique Greek and Christian story. The
trauerspiel sovereign, by virtue of his possession of the tradition of classical mythology to
guide him in his decision-making process – e.g.: Julius Caesar‘s rewriting of Oedipus – is
that figure whose eventual violence singularly occludes the possibility for actual,
concrete, natural history to transpire among the dramatis personae who exist in adjacency
to him. It is the common cleavage between what lies in the setting of either a tragedy or a
trauerspiel that guarantees their shared identity. Benjamin, against his express wish to
separate the two genres in our philological imagination, showed that both tragedy and
trauerspiel do exist within a philosophical and aesthetic continuum. The point that should
be clear is that natural history, allegory‘s substance as Benjamin first conceived it, was
available in those essential details of non-human figuration and force that led to the moral
consternation of kings.
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