Walter Benjamin’s famously difficult study of the German Trauerspiel, the baroque “mourning play”.

Benjamin moves through seventeenth-century German drama, allegory, sovereignty, catastrophe, martyrdom, ruins, theatricality, and the difference between classical tragedy and baroque tragic drama. It is not a friendly book, exactly. It is an emerald with footnotes.

Benjamin loves making criticism feel like metaphysics, archaeology, theology, and weather damage all at once. He is less interested in drama as a tidy literary category than in the way forms carry historical pressure — how grief, power, decay, violence, and divine absence become structures of meaning. The book begins with the dense “Epistemo-Critical Prologue,” then moves into the machinery of Trauerspiel itself: tragedy, allegory, melancholy, the sovereign, the corpse, the emblem, the ruin. Good for readers of Benjamin, Frankfurt School, literary theory, German studies, baroque aesthetics, modernism and the like.

First English-language edition published by NLB in 1977, translated by John Osborne, with introduction by George Steiner. Originally published in German as Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1963. Hardback with dust jacket. Good second-hand condition overall, with visible rubbing, scuffing and shelfwear to the jacket, especially across the black front panel.