STEPHEN D. DOWDEN is Professor of Germanic Languages and Chair of the European Cultural Studies Program at Brandeis University.

A well-rounded collection [that] features nuanced ruminations on the manifold meanings of tragedy and the tragic in German culture from the Enlightenment through the Holocaust and its aftereffects. The topics . . . are eclectic but not eccentric, with most falling into one or more long-standing intellectual traditions of German intellectual history. . . . The broad framework allows the essays to speak across and to each other in interesting and fruitful ways, with different contributors addressing similar figures and ideas . . . . Overall, the work suggests not the elusiveness of the concepts of tragedy and the tragic in German literature and philosophy but the usefulness of their elasticity for modern thinkers and artists to better comprehend the tragedy (and comedy) of their lived experience.

• Introduction: The Pursuit of UnhappinessThe Confinement of Tragedy: Between Urfaust and WoyzeckGoethe's Faust as the Tragedy of ModernityBefore or Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften and the Tragedy of EntsagungHölderlin und das TragischeNietzsche, Büchner, and the BluesFreud und die TragödieThe Death of Tragedy: Walter Benjamin's Interruption of Nietzsche's Theory of TragedyRosenzweig's Tragedy and the Spectacles of Strauss: The Question of German-Jewish HistoryRequiem for the Reich: Tragic Programming after the Fall of StalingradThe Strange Absence of Tragedy in Heidegger's ThoughtThe Tragic Dimension in Postwar German PaintingVestiges of the TragicAtrocity and Agency: W. G. Sebald's Traumatic Memory in the Light of Hannah Arendt's Politics of Tragedy"Stark and Sometimes Sublime": Hannah Arendt's Reflections on TragedyThe German Tragic: Pied Pipers, Heroes, and SaintsAfterword: Searching for a Standpoint of RedemptionNotes on the ContributorsIndex

STEPHEN D. DOWDEN is Professor of Germanic Languages and Chair of the European Cultural Studies Program at Brandeis University.

A well-rounded collection [that] features nuanced ruminations on the manifold meanings of tragedy and the tragic in German culture from the Enlightenment through the Holocaust and its aftereffects. The topics . . . are eclectic but not eccentric, with most falling into one or more long-standing intellectual traditions of German intellectual history. . . . The broad framework allows the essays to speak across and to each other in interesting and fruitful ways, with different contributors addressing similar figures and ideas . . . . Overall, the work suggests not the elusiveness of the concepts of tragedy and the tragic in German literature and philosophy but the usefulness of their elasticity for modern thinkers and artists to better comprehend the tragedy (and comedy) of their lived experience.

• Introduction: The Pursuit of UnhappinessThe Confinement of Tragedy: Between Urfaust and WoyzeckGoethe's Faust as the Tragedy of ModernityBefore or Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften and the Tragedy of EntsagungHölderlin und das TragischeNietzsche, Büchner, and the BluesFreud und die TragödieThe Death of Tragedy: Walter Benjamin's Interruption of Nietzsche's Theory of TragedyRosenzweig's Tragedy and the Spectacles of Strauss: The Question of German-Jewish HistoryRequiem for the Reich: Tragic Programming after the Fall of StalingradThe Strange Absence of Tragedy in Heidegger's ThoughtThe Tragic Dimension in Postwar German PaintingVestiges of the TragicAtrocity and Agency: W. G. Sebald's Traumatic Memory in the Light of Hannah Arendt's Politics of Tragedy"Stark and Sometimes Sublime": Hannah Arendt's Reflections on TragedyThe German Tragic: Pied Pipers, Heroes, and SaintsAfterword: Searching for a Standpoint of RedemptionNotes on the ContributorsIndex