Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art

LM (24995/24997)

What is the relation of allegory to symbol, as defined by

Benjamin in the Trauerspiel book?

Student ID: 1511496

Word Count: 3927

What is the relation of allegory to symbol, as defined by Benjamin in the Trauerspiel book?

In a Curriculum Vitae found in Walter Benjamin’s historical records, he set a mission statement

for his book The Origins of German Tragic Drama, in which he wrote, ‘to provide a new view

of German drama of the seventeenth century. It sets itself the task of contrasting its form -

Trauerspiel - to tragedy and attempts to indicate the affinity that exists between the literary form

of Trauerspiel and the art form of allegory.’1 The book exemplifies the fullest account of

Benjamin’s theory of allegory in an attempt to redeem both the genre of the German Trauerspiel

or ‘mourning-play’ of the baroque period, and the allegorical mode of expression itself. The

baroque mourning play is simple in action, but this is counterbalanced by an exaggerated and

violent language and centres on the crude themes of violence, cruelty and death. Through neo-

Aristotelian criticism, it appeared so far removed from the classical standards of serenity, beauty

and unity, that it was dismissed as a ‘bastardized version of classical tragedy’.2 However,

Benjamin rejected the use of ‘so-called timeless standards of classical aesthetics’ to critique

baroque creations, and promoted a historico-philosophical approach which demonstrates the

necessity to understand a work of art in terms of its historical specificity.3 Hence one of the key

aims of the book is to reconsider the Trauerspiel as expressly distinct from tragedy. The first

part of the book realises this aim as an almost entirely descriptive account of various plays by

German dramatists including Johann Christian Hallmann, Martin Opitz and Daniel Caspar von

Lohenstein. Whereas tragedy is categorised as a sacrificial drama, in which ‘the hero is offered

up to the Gods for atonement’ and conveys a mood of suffering, the mood inherent to the

structure of the Trauerspiel is mourning (Trauer). In the second part of the book, Benjamin

examines the allegorical structure of the plays and demonstrates how the allegorical mode as an

artistic technique is key to understanding the Trauerspiel in order to reveal its truth content. This

1
Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, (Berkeley and London, 1994) p63
2
Wolin, p65
3
Wolin, p69

1
essay will focus on the content of this second part to establish the relation that Benjamin

establishes between allegory and symbol. Through a confrontation between allegory and symbol

which parallels that of Trauerspiel and Tragedy in part one, Benjamin achieves his second aim;

to recognise allegory as ‘the polar opposite to symbol’, but therefore as having ‘equal power’.4

To make way for an argument that allegory is a significant mode of expression,

Benjamin starts by noting precisely what it is not: a symbol. Used interchangeably before the

late eighteenth century, symbol and allegory were made expressly distinct in the writings of

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who separated the terms into two modes of representation in his

famous Werke, stating that ‘symbolism transforms… the idea into an image in such a way that

the idea remains always infinitely effective,’ while allegory ‘transforms appearance into a

concept, the concept into an image… the particular in the general.’5 In this light, the symbol

represents a contained image, where, in a romantic ‘non-committal’ perspective, ‘conflict

between infinite and the finite resolve’ and expresses ‘a miraculous unity of beauty and form in

the highest fullness of being.’6 The symbol was idealised in romantic discourse as a harmony of

the ‘material’ and the ‘transcendental’. The material is the earthly, or as Benjamin states the

‘creaturely’, and the transcendental relates to the realm of God. In contrast, allegory expresses

an arbitrary relation between the language of creatures and the language of God, and is unable to

partake in such a unity as the symbol, appearing as ‘a conventional relationship between an

illustrative image and its abstract meaning.’7 This widespread notion of allegory as a mere

illustration of a concept, contributed to its denigration for centuries following romantic thought.

Both symbol and allegory are concerned with presenting that which is ‘beyond the scope of

sensuous appearance’, but Benjamin wants to disprove the romantic belief that only the symbol

4
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborn, (London 1977), p187
5
Rainer Nägele, Theater, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and Scenes of Modernity, (Baltimore and London,
1991) p88
6
Benjamin, p164
7
Benjamin, p162

2
can do so by presenting an image that is contained, timeless and transcendent. He insists that it

is fundamentally false, as the relation between the transcendental and the material is not one of

Aristotelian ‘containment’, and cannot be presented, but it can be sensuously represented in the

allegorical. To ultimately build an authentic concept of the allegorical, he must first deconstruct

the romantic concept of the symbol, and reconstruct it as a theological concept.8

Benjamin quotes Georg Friedrich Creuzer to reaffirm the classical distinction between

the allegorical as signifying a concept other than itself (the idea), and the symbol being an

embodiment of that idea, but he goes against Creuzer’s conclusion that it is allegory that

‘embraces myth.’9 As he writes in part one, ‘historical life’ is the true content of the Trauerspiel

and ‘in this it is different from tragedy. For the object of the latter is not history, but myth.’10 In

symbolic expression, the mythic character has the ability to lift the artwork from the

development of history to preserve an image of divine beauty. Yet, allegory actually partakes in

the expression of the baroque vision of history through an image of historical decay, which, in

contrast to the symbolic image of sacrificial eternity, acquires the power capable of ‘blasting

apart myth’.11 This tension between myth and history is recurrent in the various distinctions and

dialectics Benjamin demonstrates throughout his book.

The Trauerspiel is understood by the antinomical structure in which history loses its

confidence in eschatological redemption and becomes, in the process of its decay, nature, or

setting. In the second part of the book, Benjamin notes in his discussion of the ‘antinomies of

the allegorical’ that ‘any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything

else.’12 Allegory, therefore is essential to exposing that the plays are eschatological but only

implicitly so. Benjamin draws on Creuzer’s undeveloped ideas on temporality to shape his

8
Bainard Cowan, 'Walter Benjamin's Theory of Allegory', New German Critique, 22 (1981) p111
9
Benjamin, p165
10
Benjamin, p165, p62
11
Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst, 1993) p113
12
Benjamin p175

3
argument on the temporal structure of eschatology in allegory. ‘Whereas in the symbol

destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of

redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a

petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been

untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face – or rather in a death’s head.’13

Allegory is thereby a means to defeat the apparent unity and stability of the symbol by

representing the finitude of human life. The destructive power of allegory is antithetical to the

illusory assertion of symbolism and this is most apparent in temporal terms, as Creuzer states,

‘the distinction between the two modes (symbol and allegory) is to be sought in the

momentariness which allegory lacks… there (in the symbol) we have momentary totality; here

we have progression in a series of moments.’14 The experience of a symbolic object, in its initial

perception as beautiful and whole, is momentary and fleeting. This immediacy and instantaneity

of the symbolic, is precisely what allegory does not achieve. In its conventionalism, arbitrariness

and repetitiveness, it is bound by the very flow of time and in this sense, allegory was long

conceived as nothing more than a failed symbol, expressing the ‘displacement of meaning

inherent in ancient myth.’15 Joseph Görres similarly describes the symbol as being ‘self-

contained…it remains itself,’ while ‘the other (allegory) is progressing, dramatically mobile…

like the natural world and living progression of humanity.’16 Benjamin notes that the key

distinction between symbol and allegory lies ‘within the category of time.’17 However, he sees

the symbol as deceptive in how it seeks to exclude time in order to presentation of the

transcendent, and it is therefore allegory, which embraces temporality, that allows for the natural

process of decay, or, history.

13
Benjamin, p166
14
Benjamin, p165
15
Pensky, p113
16
Benjamin, p165
17
Benjamin, p166

4
 The allegorical dialectic can be thought of in stages; the first being devaluation of

objects in the profane world. They lose their inherent meaning, which Max Pensky calls a

‘destructive moment but such devaluation leads to a creative response.’18 Fragmentation follows

when the baroque world extinguishes the ‘false appearance of totality’ as rendered by the

symbol, leaving the image as ‘a fragment, a rune,’ which can then transform into an emblem and

forge a new meaning in the third and final stage of allegorical construction.19 Allegory

transforms the fragments into signs, and it is the role of the allegorist to assign meaning to the

fragments, ‘which raises them onto a higher plane, and which can, indeed, sanctify them.

Considered in allegorical terms, then, the profane world is both elevated and devalued.’20 The

symbol offers participation in, and knowledge of, the absolute, but Benjamin argues that this

symbolic quest for knowledge is in its apparent ‘fullness’ is invalid. Contrarywise, allegory

expresses, in its dialectic structure, a lack of this fullness. The truth that is promised in symbolic

representation is revealed by allegory as unavailable. Here Benjamin refers to the Platonic

notion of truth as transcendent reality in which objects may only partake, and how allegory

makes clear that truth resides elsewhere and is, in fact, impossible to present. The existence of

truth is confirmed, but allegory recognises its absence in the creaturely world and successfully

represents this as a fragmentary relationship between man and the absolute. Truth is therefore

present not as an end product, as true of the symbol, but in the process of representation itself.

The dialectic is thus revealed in part as paradoxical, as ‘the devalued fragment is devalued

precisely insofar as it is elevated as part of a higher, ordinary image of unity.’21

At the end point of the Trauerspiel drama, allegory reaches its limit, and the dialectic

leads ‘ever downward’ in a complex destruction of history until there is an abrupt moment of

theological reversal. As Benjamin quotes from a Trauerspiel by Lohenstein, ‘so will I, a death’s-

18
Pensky, 117
19
Benjamin, p176, p177
20
Benjamin, p175
21
Pensky, p126

5
head, become an angel’s countenance.’22 And the corpse, the central allegory for death in the

baroque, becomes, as ‘seen from the point of view of death’, re-allegorised into the image of

Christ’s dead body which comes with the promise of eternal life in an allegory of resurrection.23

Fragments of the ‘profane’ world are transformed into emblems which allow the ‘shining forth’

of salvation.24 In the end, in what Benjamin calls ‘the essence of melancholy immersion’,

Melancholia turns to absolute faith, and ‘evil is nothing other than allegory.’25 As he

forewarned, ‘Paradox must have the last word.’26

Another baroque motif Benjamin discusses in detail is the architectural ruin. The ruin

was important for allegorical reference during the baroque period, pictorially in painting and as

a typical background image for the Trauerspiel. If the death’s head serves as a reminder for the

inevitable fate of living things, the ruin represents the very transience from which the baroque

view of life takes its significance. It embodies the destructive effects of time passing, and history

therefore ‘stands written on to the countenance of nature in the characters of transience… in the

ruin history has physically merged into the setting.’27 ‘In allegory, all meanings are subject to

time’ and time is mourned in the Trauerspiel in the form of the ruin, which presents the

‘allegorical physiognomy of the nature-history,’ an overarching theme in Benjamin’s discussion

which is in part another dialectic relating to that of the symbol and allegory. While the symbol

may adequately present an or the ‘archetype of nature’, it is allegory which expresses the

essentiality of history in the baroque vision, which is also preoccupied with the ‘finitude’ of

earthly life.28 By its physical decay into fragments, the material ruin in the Trauerspiel becomes

significant as they contribute to the baroque rejection of the classical idealised ‘whole’ image:

22
Benjamin, p215 So werd ich Todten-Kopff ein Englisch Antlitz seyn. Daniel Casper von Lohenstein: Redender
Todten-Kopff Herrn Matthaus Machners
23
Benjamin, p218
24
Wolin, p70
25
Benjamin, p233
26
Benjamin, p216
27
Benjamin, p177
28
Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London and New York) p58; Benjamin, p177

6
‘History assumes the form of irresistible decay… not eternal life. Allegory thereby declares

itself to beyond beauty.’29 The lack of instantaneity in the allegorical interpretation of the ruin,

which has been witness to history, thus opposes the false transcendence of the romantic symbol.

Furthermore, as the architectural ruin bears the long cycle of growth and decay, its form

becomes ambiguous as half historical monument (human history) and half nature and therefore a

component in Benjamin’s case for the allegorical history-becoming-nature in the Trauerspiel.

The underlying vision of allegory is the return of history to nature, or natural setting as a result

of ‘the failure of fulfilment of human endeavour in history.’30 If history is a repetitive cycle of

failings in the human world, a sense of incompleteness arises which allegory can provide with

meaning by ‘filling the gap with enigmatic knowledge’.31 This relates back to the importance of

the process of allegorical interpretation and as truth existing not as an end point but in the ruin

which is part of a greater development of history. The allegorical image within this process is

itself a ruin, a fragment which has lost all meaning to then be recovered and restored by the

allegorist.

Richard Wolin contends that the work of art, which has been created in a specific

moment in history, has the ability to ‘transcend to reveal something suprahistorical’ which is an

image of the truth.32 Just as the allegorist will struggle to restore meaning to disparate emblems

and signs through a ‘forgotten and misunderstood art from’ that is allegory, the critic has the

difficult role of deciphering meaning from the Trauerspiel, which is itself a ruin by virtue of its

allegorical substructure and also because it has ‘died away’ as an art form.33 Benjamin states,

‘nothing is less approachable than the Trauerspiel… what has survived is allegorical

references.’34 It has therefore been left to criticism and although misunderstood by romantic

29
Benjamin, p178
30
Eli Friedlander, Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait, (Massachusetts, 2012) p129
31
Friedlander, p130
32
Wolin, p30
33
Wolin, p63
34
Benjamin, p182

7
symbolism, his ultimate argument is that it has to be criticised and contemplated under allegory.

Benjamin’s discussion on criticism in the Trauerspiel book relates back to the material found in

his 1922 essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities in which he parts with Goethe’s prose in favour of

experiencing art through a process of dialectical mediation. He writes, ‘material and truth

content (of a work of art) … became separated from one another over the course of time,’ and it

is the material content which lasts, this is what the critic must use to recover the truth content or

some fragment of it in the application of meaning.35

‘Criticism means the mortification of the works,’ so it is the critic who must destroy the

illusory beauty in the work of art, bring it out of this material stage, into the stage whereby

mediation can redeem its the truth content.36 Here Benjamin makes another distinction between

the allegorical mode and the symbolic mode of interpretation, as allegories die out, become

dated and become ruins which invite later criticism, the symbol, ‘as romantic mythologists have

shown, remains persistently the same.’37 For the romantics, the point of criticism was to reaffirm

the ‘the intensified, perfected creation of form and idea’ in the classical symbol and was

therefore not open to criticism like the allegorical. Benjamin writes of the classical as ‘not

permitted to behold the imperfection’ which left it perfect in its momentariness, but the

allegorical, ‘beneath its extravagant pomp’ was misunderstood as ambiguity,’ yet this was the

very characteristic which caused the allegorical object to be left as dead for the allegorist to then

assign a meaning from a multiplicity of meanings. He makes it clear that philosophical criticism

works to show that art has the function of making historical content into philosophical truth, but

for this to occur, the work must appear dead, essentially, a ruin. Criticism must therefore appear

destructive, and he makes the distinction between allegorical and romantic criticism, as the latter

assures the eternity of the art work in all that is beautiful in its form, while the former looks to

35
Wolin, p30
36
Benjamin, p182
37
Benjamin, p183

8
what ‘appears peculiar’ and dislocated.38 The allegorist must erode and then preserve the work

as a ruin, and succeeds depending on the death of the object. The critic has to destruct all other

possible meanings, as meanings are not self-evident and can mean anything else. The critical

text on the art work can therefore complete it, representing its immortality and its ‘relation to

redemption.’39

He notes in his Elective Affinities essay that criticism must begin with ‘commentary’,

that is, pure analysis of the material content of an art work which will then be followed by

‘criticism proper’ where the truth content is reached.40 The significance of this methodological

standpoint comes through in the Trauerspiel book itself, set explicitly in the Epistemo-Critical

Prologue, which precedes a descriptive analysis of various plays in part one, and an allegorical

investigation of their truth content in part to and therefore exemplifies Benjamin’s practice of

immanent critique. The book consists of what Pensky calls a ‘mosaic fitting together of

phenomenal fragments’, fragments of philosophical thought which, out of their context seem

unrelated but are indirectly so and fuse for the sake of the object, which is here, the

Trauerspiel.41 Bernd Witte has, for this reason, marked the book as an allegorical artwork in

itself.42 Benjamin uses the philosophical style of discourse which in itself is an allegory of the

truth as it represents it not in content but in form. Bainard Cowan notes that Benjamin defends a

style that is esoteric and difficult because it is necessary in representing the ‘experience of truth’

as obscure and expresses the unavailability of truth as also realised in the philosophical

treatise.43 The difficulty of the philosophical treatise bears witness to the fact that ‘there is no

continuous passage from the realm of phenomena to the transcendent realm of ideas’ and they

38
Friedlander, p50
39
Wolin, p68
40
Wolin, p64
41
Pensky, p108
42
Ibid.
43
Cowan, p115

9
are, in fact, separated by an ‘unbridgeable gap.’44 As mentioned above, allegory intents to fill

the gap between history and nature, and more generally, it moves, as a dialectic in the gap

between two distinct realms of being and meaning. This provides another point of departure

from the completeness of symbolic expression.

Cowan states that Benjamin reads philosophy as literature and literature as allegory, so

he champions the form of writing, above the content, in its ability to become an allegory of the

truth.45 Benjamin defines allegory as ‘the movement between extremes’ and writing exists in

this gap.46 It is clear that allegory is crucial in an interpretation of the Trauerspiel in terms of

subject matter, in the baroque motifs discussed above, in the general imagery of death and decay

which transforms into redemption, and in the exaggerated language and underdeveloped form

which leaves the play as a ruin for allegorical criticism. However, allegory is most important to

the Trauerspiel not in what it represents, but how it is represented. Benjamin reverses the

perception that seventeenth-century allegory is convention of expression, but rather ‘expression

of convention…and the very same antinomies take plastic form in the conflict between the cold,

facile technique and the eruptive expression of allegorical interpretation. Here too the solution is

a dialectical one. It lies in the essence of writing itself.’47 His discussion unfolds in another

dialectic in the language of the Trauerspiel between the ‘intoxicating’ spoken word and the

‘signifying’ written word by associating the former with the artistic, plastic symbol and the latter

with the ‘amorphous fragment’ of the allegorical script.48 Written in a decade preoccupied with

emblems and Egyptian hieroglyph, the word of the allegorical script points to the visual, but

simultaneously, ‘at one stroke, the profound vision of allegory transforms things and works into

stirring writing.’49 The allegorical image is equally dependent on the written word as an

44
Cowan, p111
45
Cowan, p114
46
Benjamin, p160
47
Benjamin, p176-177
48
Benjamin, p201, Benjamin, p190
49
Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, or Toward a Revolutionary Criticism, (London, 1981) p4

10
explanatory device, usually in the form of a caption, which forms part of what is depicted,

different entirely from the symbolic image that is self-sufficient in the visual. Benjamin also

notes the significance of the introductions and epilogues of literary works ‘for it was only rarely

that the eye was able to find satisfaction in the object itself.’50 There was a co-dependency, and a

‘rift’ between words and their objects, objects and their meanings. As discussed above, the

allegorical mode of representation makes explicit this rift, and is central to the dialectic between

being and meaning which is replicated in the gap between the ‘materiality of the written mark’

and the ‘divine signified’.51 The symbol is instantaneous, ‘the lyrical, the single moment in

time’, again temporality is imbedded into the symbol-allegory discussion, raising the point that

allegory is not limited to the constraints of time as is the symbol.52 Its meaning is multiple, ebbs

and flows between the signifier and the signified, and most importantly, is not frozen so can be

approached historically, and by modern criticism.

Coming back finally to the importance of the form of the Trauerspiel script, which,

Benjamin states, is the ‘baroque ideal of knowledge… (it is) not merely a sign of what is to be

known but in itself an object worthy of knowledge.’53 This was not to mean that the stage

performance was not just as complex, has the plot and language were ‘woven into the restricted

space’ of the stage, but it does not need to be voiced in order to achieve transcendence. Allegory

is essentially recognised for its ‘awkward heavy handedness,’ it is fragmentary, ‘untidy and

disordered’ and Benjamin attributes Novalis to understanding this technique of allegory by

relating it to a ‘magician’s den’ which signifies the arbitrary way in which the allegorist must

work.54 Benjamin draws on Franz von Baader to further the point that the allegorist’s task is

subjective; ‘it is entirely up to us whether we use any particular object of nature as a

50
Benjamin, p188
51
Eagleton, p13; Pensky, p120
52
Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, (Princeton, 1971)
p72
53
Benjamin, p187, p188
54
Benjamin, p187, quoting Novalis, pseudonym and pen name of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg.

11
conventional sign for an idea… to convey characteristics we have ourselves lent it.’55 The

abundance of images and the multiplicity of their possible meanings has to be waded through by

the allegorist in an attempt to reinstate continuity to form a whole, not the whole, and the

meaning eventually assigned resides not in the object, but in the subjective contemplation of the

allegorist. However, to return once again to the ending of the Trauerspiel, where evil is revealed

to be non-existent, this is because evil only enters subjective pensiveness with knowledge of

good and evil, which is deemed as ‘subjective and nonsense.’56 Pensky describes this end stage

of the Trauerspiel where the play reaches ‘absolute subjectivity and knowledge of evil’, which

does not exist so, ‘once subjectivity grasps objects as mournful constructs and its own

knowledge of them as moments of its own subjectivity then subjectivity itself is overcome.’57

The allegorical mode through subjectivity shows the very illusory nature of things in the

meaninglessness which is inherent in subjective meaning which can itself present the

meaningless of evil and allegory shows the non-existence of what it represents which is death.

In conclusion, the relation of allegory to symbol in Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book is one

of extreme complexity. It is fleshed out in a number of dialectics including classicism and

baroque, history and nature or written script and spoken word, through which both allegory and

symbol aim to reveal the relation between the creaturely world of being and the transcendent

world of meaning. As has been discussed, however, it is not what symbol and allegory distinctly

represent, but how they go about representing. Throughout his discussion, temporality plays a

key role in distinguishing between the allegory and the symbol, and the dialectical image that

the allegorical gives, is superior for Benjamin. The allegorical mode of representation is also

seen as more successful in its representation of truth content, as it points to the fact that truth is

actually unpresentable, it resides elsewhere and not in the image. Finally, it is significant that he

55
Benjamin, p184
56
Wolin, p72
57
Pensky, p134

12
expresses the characteristics of allegory and Trauerspiel not merely in the content of the book,

but in its form, as allegory.

13
Bibliography

Primary Source

Benjamin, Walter., The Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborn, (London
1977), first published as Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 1927

Secondary Literature

Benjamin, Andrew., and Osborne, Peter., (eds.), Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and
Experience (London and New York, 1994)

Caygill, Howard., Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London and New York, 1998)

Cowan, Bainard., 'Walter Benjamin's Theory of Allegory', New German Critique, 22 (1981),
109–22

Eagleton, Terry., Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London, 1981)

Friedlander, Eli., Walter Benjamin: A philosophical portrait (Massachusetts, 2012)

Jameson, Fredric., Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature

(Princeton, 1971)

Pensky, Max., Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst,
1993)

Symons, Stéphane., Walter Benjamin: Presence of Mind, Failure to Comprehend (Leiden and
Boston, 2012)
Wolin, Richard., Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley and London, 1994)

Nägele, Rainer., Theater, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and Scenes of Modernity,
(Baltimore and London, 1991)

14