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This chapter examines the pattern of quotations in the Tragic Drama and looks at their links to an ideology of nation. The literal production of the tradition of Baroque plays that Benjamin cites can be witnessed particularly clearly in a late nineteenth-century nationalist edition of the plays of one of the seventeenth-century Silesian playwrights he discusses, namely Andreas Gryphius. Benjamin appears to have owned this volume, which was edited by Hermann Palm. The chapter discusses the Palm Gryphius text in more depth, placing Palm's version of the Baroque in dialogue with several Baroque and “Enlightenment” editions of plays and with the longer tradition of German theater. Finally, the chapter discusses how a non-German playwright like Shakespeare could belong to a “modern” German Baroque.

This chapter first considers the ways in which Benjamin read the Silesian plays precisely not as the “tragic dramas” of John Osborne's English-language translation, but rather as “mourning-play” texts that differed significantly from ancient tragedy in Benjamin's mind. It then examines the art historical debates pertaining to the Renaissance and the German Baroque and how they articulated a new periodicity of style that involved the collectivity of the nation in important ways. The chapter next turns to contemporary definitions of a specifically literary German Baroque by critics Fritz Strich and Arthur Hübscher. Their discussions mirrored the art historical conversations by striving to locate the essence of a German literary tradition in an autonomous national sensibility and canon of forms. Benjamin's Baroque dipped into and was part of these several discussions of the Baroque as a “heroic” national age.

This introductory chapter looks into the lack of critical attention of German discussions on the history of the Baroque, noting how Walter Benjamin's The Origin of the German Tragic Drama has in particular fallen into obscurity even in the already obscure field of Baroque studies. More pointedly, Benjamin was just one of the many scholars engaged in the debates about the Baroque that were conducted with particular intensity beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century and continuing on into the early part of the twentieth century. Hence this chapter initiates this book's efforts to rescue these discussions and Benjamin's role in them from the obscurity into which they have “faded” by providing a brief refresher of the history of the Baroque as well as the particular contexts that inform Benjamin's ideas of the Baroque and the text of his Tragic Drama book.

This chapter provides an eighteenth-century context for Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantatas with obbligato organ by showing how their various components engage in a larger discourse about the German Baroque organ: namely, its intimation of Heaven. There are almost 200 surviving church cantatas by Bach, eighteen of which contain movements where the organist transitions from a continuo player to a concertist. Modern scholarship has considered such compositions primarily from two perspectives: a historiographical perspective, which places them in the larger context of the history of the keyboard concerto; and a compositional perspective, which considers them as examples of the arrangement and reworking of previous musical material. This chapters examines how a particular yet widespread way of thinking about the organ gave rise to a fruitful context for the obbligato organ cantata in the early eighteenth century by analyzing Bach’s works from the perspective of an original listener—that is, as a member of the congregation. It argues that Bach’s libretto guided his instrumentation and that he often took advantage of the longstanding identification of the organ with Heaven.