The Origin of German Tragic Drama by Walter Benjamin
Published 1928 · 90,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Origin of German Tragic Drama to read?
The Origin of German Tragic Drama scores 79 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 75 out of 100
- Technical philosophical and theological vocabulary derived from German idealism and Baroque scholarship.
- Sentence structure: 70 out of 100
- Abstraction: 85 out of 100
- Operates simultaneously at the level of historical fact, philosophical concept, and theological allegory.
- Information density: 82 out of 100
- The Epistemo-Critical Prologue alone requires multiple readings to unpack.
- Narrative indirection: 28 out of 100
- Benjamin circles his subjects indirectly, arriving at argument through accumulation of example and image.
- Symbolic density: 25 out of 100
- Allegory and the symbol are the book's central objects and its dominant mode of operation.
- Ironic distance: 20 out of 100
- A melancholic irony suffuses the treatment of ruin and catastrophe.
- Resolution withholding: 25 out of 100
- Conclusions are suspended or deferred in characteristically Benjaminian fashion.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- The double structure — philosophical prologue plus literary-historical main body — is itself a formal argument.
How The Origin of German Tragic Drama is regarded
The Origin of German Tragic Drama holds a literary regard score of 48 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.