Schwitters and Benjamin: the modernity of the baroque and romanticism

摘要

This paper is an attempt to read Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau through Walter Benjamin's theory of the baroque in his book The Origin of German Tragic Drama (or Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, hereafter simply Ursprung). It then considers whether Benjamin's idea of a relationship between the baroque and Early German Romantic art theory has any bearing on the charge of Schwitters' contemporaries that he was merely a 'German Romantic' in Dada costume. In the first place, this is an exercise in matching formal attributes to concepts, and must be assessed on whether the comparisons are apposite: whether Benjamin's distinctions allow us to see more in Schwitters; whether the works of Schwitters provide the kind of illustration to the Trauerspiel that Paul Klee's angel does to Thesis IX of 'On the Concept of History'. In the second place, the paper concerns what it is to call a twentieth-century work 'baroque'.