Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque by Jane O. Newman (review)

Jane O. Newman’s book is an outstanding work of scholarship that situates Benjamin’s iconic 1928 The Origin of the German Tragic Drama in the elaborate web of thinking about the cultural origins of the modern (post-1871) German nation-state—an origin that for Benjamin and many of his contemporaries lay in a northern European Baroque. I have nothing but praise for the detail, depth, and clarity of its conception and execution. Because I am not a scholar of the Baroque and have not read or reread the art historians and critics so fruitfully examined here—Konrad Burdach, Heinrich Wölfflin, Alois Riegl, Arthur Hübscher and Fritz Strich, among others—I cannot measure Newman’s persuasive interpretations against my own or those of scholars from Croce to Wellek whom she cites. I can indicate instead the persistently intriguing problems that her study addresses through the lens of the origin of Benjamin’s Origin, and suggest some issues closer to my own fields of cultural theory and contemporary German Studies that Newman’s work helps us to more clearly understand. Indeed, from my point of view, the philological discipline of her work—as much as it demonstrates the virtues of a detailed contextual reading methodology indebted to the Annales historian Marc Bloch—opens up inquiries into topics and approaches not limited by Newman’s commitment to historical hermeneutics and archival materialism.

Newman is interested in a double specification at stake in Benjamin’s book, originally written as his Habilitationsschrift, or postdoctoral thesis for qualifying as a professor. By specification, Newman means the work of determining the differentia that separates out a distinct epoch as a coherent whole with unique principles and characteristics. There are in this regard two research objects at stake in Benjamin’s book, one explicit—the literary Baroque of German tragic drama—and one implicit— the cultural present of Weimar era Germany. Closely examining Benjamin’s “library” (his scholarly references, records, and correspondence, and the material volumes and archives to which they point), Newman reconstructs the breadth of his engagement with the influential Baroque scholars of his day, demonstrating how their common concern with periodizing (and locating) a German Baroque distinct from the Italian Renaissance (as championed by Jacob Burckhardt) was deeply connected with their wish to establish the singular cultural character of modern Germany between its founding as a nation-state in 1871 and its defeat in WWI. In other words, to determine a German national Baroque separate from and equal to the southern European Renaissance was to supply grounds for a distinct German contemporaneity that might assert its cultural legitimacy in a postwar Europe torn by contending forces of nationalism and pan-Europeanism.

The projects that “constructed the Baroque as an object of the national imagination” (77) were, however, complicated by the many rival candidates for the modern origin of the German nation—from the Lutheran Reformation and Weimar Classicism to the Catholic Counterreformation and Romanticism. These complications in the network of scholarly claims that Benjamin was negotiating led to Benjamin’s formulating what came to be one of his most characteristic concepts, that of a text’s prehistory and afterlife, with its relationships of latency and redemption. While the seventeenth-century Baroque is thus constructed as a unique gathering point, “an eddy” (71), drawing together the antithetical social forces of secularizing Europe, its status as the decisive origin of German modernity finds confirmation in nineteenth-century Romanticism’s return to the Baroque’s stylistic and thematic concerns—a national-historical “redemption” echoed again in the fascination the Baroque exercised on Benjamin and his contemporaries in the twentieth century. Thus, while the Baroque is a unique historical moment and not a cultural constant, its capacity to express something essential about German identity means that its sign flashes up again and again in critical moments of national history.

As idiosyncratic as Benjamin’s notoriously complex epistemology of Baroque...