Contents

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Acknowledgments ix
4. Introduction: The Pursuit of Unhappiness 1
5. 1: The Confinement of Tragedy: Between Urfaust and Woyzeck 21
6. 2: Goethe’s Faust as the Tragedy of Modernity 40
7. 3: Before or Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften and the Tragedy of Entsagung 65
8. 4: Hölderlin und das Tragische 93
9. 5: Nietzsche, Büchner, and the Blues 124
10. 6: Freud und die Tragödie 148
11. 7: The Death of Tragedy: Walter Benjamin’s Interruption of Nietzsche’s Theory of Tragedy 171
12. 8: Rosenzweig’s Tragedy and the Spectacles of Strauss: The Question of German-Jewish History 195
13. 9: Requiem for the Reich: Tragic Programming after the Fall of Stalingrad 216
14. 10: The Strange Absence of Tragedy in Heidegger’s Thought 229
15. 11: The Tragic Dimension in Postwar German Painting 255
16. 12: Vestiges of the Tragic 287
17. 13: Atrocity and Agency: W. G. Sebald’s Traumatic Memory in the Light of Hannah Arendt’s Politics of Tragedy 296
18. 14: “Stark and Sometimes Sublime”: Hannah Arendt’s Reflections on Tragedy 311
19. 15: The German Tragic: Pied Pipers, Heroes, and Saints 325
20. Afterword: Searching for a Standpoint of Redemption 337
21. Contributors 357
22. Index 361