In the death of tragedy we read that George Steiner considered Goethe’s composition of Urfaust to be the moment when German literature nearly embraced the full force of the tragic but then stepped back from its implications. This essay will follow Steiner’s insight and ask why the tragic was not, circa 1772, fully embraced. Steiner had already argued that the coming together of creative genius and a historical setting propitious for tragedy is an altogether rare occurrence. Others, like Erich Heller, have seen the problem in a complete lack of any tradition that would have allowed Goethe to look more insistently at the problem of evil. Some critics, such as Nicholas Boyle, see in Goethe’s pulling back a psychological necessity: the great poet needed to develop other aspects of his creative genius. And many scholars have suggested that the truly tragic was incompatible with Goethe’s optimistic, universal character. No doubt there is considerable truth in each of these interpretations. Yet they emphasize Goethe’s personality traits at the cost of concentration on the vast social and historical changes surrounding the years 1772 to 1775, when Urfaust was written, and focus on genre considerations to the exclusion of an analysis of the tenuous connection between intellectuals and ordinary people.

Roughly two millennia after Aristotle’s assertion that “a tragedy is an imitation of personages better than the ordinary man,” the question of who can be represented as tragic remained open. Precisely this openness allows us to see in Urfaust a rich, contradictory initial embrace of what Steiner calls the “low tragic”—one that, contrary to Aristotle, and to the Ständeklausel (estates clause) of Johann Christoph Gottsched, involved ordinary people as the subject of genuine tragedy. But the embrace was reluctant. Urfaust, it will be argued, also represented the failure to see, hear, and empathize fully with the “people” whose voice the intellectuals of Sturm und Drang hoped to recapture but in fact sentimentalized. To heighten contrast, the essay then takes up the moment when, according to Steiner, German drama drew closer to low tragedy: Büchner’s Woyzeck. What separates the possibilities of the tragic is neither genius nor genre, I contend, but a more immediate and political engagement with the people.

Individual will, rather than the seemingly hard facts of race or language or natural borders, makes a nation – this was the message Ernest Renan offered in 1882 in his famous address to the Sorbonne, “Qu'est-ce que'une nation?” A nation is a daily plebiscite, he memorably told his audience. He also reminded them that for a nation to be a nation, it must have a common past of “endeavors, sacrifice, and devotion.” Suffering more than joy unites a people; collective grief is more valuable than a string of triumphs. Yet just as this common past must be remembered, it must also be forgotten. Thanks to a greater scholarly sensitivity to the problems of memory, Renan has recently achieved renewed importance. Yet the kind of memory and forgetting to which Renan referred was very specific; it involved traumatic religious violence: the St. Bartholomew's Massacre of 1581 and the thirteenth-century massacres of the Albigensians in the Midi.

Long ignored by historians, the history of anti-Jewish violence has witnessed a remarkable surge in scholarly interest. This new work, which has illuminated both medieval and modern manifestations of anti-Jewish violence, allows one to conceptualize the tradition of violence and to ask questions about its patterns and significance. As we know from the standpoint of an interpretive study of culture, group violence, no matter how appalling, is almost never senseless, but instead expresses meaning and remains for the historian one of the most promising if disheartening avenues into the popular imagination. Similarly, speech said in the midst of violent acts (a specific category of speech act) represents an opening for a cultural history of anti-Semitism that takes seriously both its diachronic dimension and its contemporary context.

Historians are just now beginning to put this story together. Although the history of anti-Semitism is a rich field, it has tended to ignore the problem of violence, and, where it has not ignored the problem, it has tended to concentrate on explaining the causes of violence as opposed to discerning the significance and meaning, in an anthropological sense, of violent acts and words. Until recently, this was even true of major nation-tearing events, like the Dreyfus Affair. In 1998, Pierre Birnbaum could write in the introduction to The Anti-Semitic Moment:

In Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Daniel J. Goldhagen averred:

As scores of historians familiar with late nineteenth-century German politics have argued, Goldhagen mistook political positions on the margin for positions at the center and willfully described as the mainstream a racial anti-Semitism ready to expel, if not kill, the Jews of Germany. Demonstrably, this position was not the mainstream, though the matter is more complicated than a simple recounting of the dismal electoral fortunes of political anti-Semitism would suggest. As Massimo Zumbini has recently argued, the career of racial anti-Semitism in the Second Empire occurred in two stages. In the founding years of organized anti-Semitism, 1879–1881, the new anti-Semites modernized and radicalized anti-Semitism, rendering it political, racial, and increasingly tied to pseudoscientific thinking. Yet as their project proved a failure, the anti-Semites drifted toward the political periphery, where their anti-Semitism became radical, and their paranoia evident. Eliminationist anti-Semitism, to take Goldhagen's term, cannot be said to be representative of public opinion in Imperial Germany, but it can be found at the periphery – in the work of anti-Semites like Theodor Fritsch, whose Handbook of the Jewish Question became a bible of the extreme right and openly advocated deportation of East European Jews and revoking emancipation legislation.

When it comes to history, every student seems to understand that at the end of the day, the person with the Gatling gun determines who tells the subsequent story and how. There is, nevertheless, a richer way of looking at historical perspective; it derives from perspective in painting, and more precisely from the intersection between modern historical thinking and the discovery of linear projection.

In his dedication of The Prince to Lorenzo de Medici, Niccolò Machiavelli hinted at this intersection. “Just as men who are sketching the landscape put themselves down in the plain to study the nature of the mountains and the highlands, and to study the low-lying land they put themselves high on the mountains, so,” Machiavelli wrote in 1513, “to comprehend fully the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to comprehend fully the nature of princes one must be an ordinary citizen.” The perspective of an observer outside the thing being observed, Machiavelli implies, is the precondition for comprehension. For Machiavelli, perspective had a particular, painterly resonance. Roughly a century earlier, Filippo Brunelleschi had conducted his famous experiments leading to the discovery of linear perspective, which Leon Battista Alberti then systematized for the use of his fellow artists in his famous treatise, On Painting, published in 1436.

In a little-known pamphlet entitled “Explanation of the New Instruments of the Sun,” published in 1528, the mapmaker and cosmographer Sebastian Münster attempted to enlist his fellow countrymen in a collaborative effort that would reveal the “hidden beauties” of “our common German fatherland” and create a work “in which one will see all of Germany … as if in a mirror.” The mirror would reflect “Germany's territories, cities, towns, villages, distinguished castles and monasteries, its mountains, forests, rivers, lakes, and its products, as well as the characteristics and customs of the people, the noteworthy events that have happened, and the antiquities which are still found in many places.” But as one man alone could not “describe Germany properly,” it would be necessary to collaborate. For Münster, “properly” meant by observation and measurement, and to aid his collaborators, the leading humanists of the day, Münster sketched a regional map of the area around Heidelberg, where he then taught. Modest in appearance, the map was the first to use sighting lines to form triangles, from which Münster could measure angles to the towns he depicted and then estimate the distances to them. A primitive form of triangulation, Münster's method represented a small but significant step forward in geographical accuracy.

What was lost in the nineteenth century, according to Hannah Arendt, was a form of human solidarity. In Men in Dark Times, Arendt has Lessing stand neither for reason nor for tolerance, but for compassion, and not for the egalitarian compassion of fraternity, but for the selective compassion of friendship. The political relevance of this point becomes evident when we consider what, for Arendt, was the antithesis of friendship, namely cruelty. When higher and more powerful ideas held sway – whether the inexorable progress of history, the natural egoism of nations, the necessity of creating a more perfect society, or even the imperative of logical non-contradiction – more limited commitments, requiring discrete acts of courage, diminished. Cruelty then became thinkable. More precisely, it became a reality in the nexus between thought and act. Arendt illustrates the argument with Germans and Jews in the Third Reich. The antithesis to Nazi policies, she insisted, was not to say “are we not both human beings?” but to say, to each other, “Germans and Jews, friends.” The first response constituted a cosmopolitan appeal to universals; it ignored what, in fact, had transpired by the time of the Nuremberg Laws. The second response demanded a counter-assertion of ties to one's neighbor and a refusal to concede the Nazi state's severance of human solidarities.

On February 21, 1519, the citizens of Regensburg tore down the synagogue of the venerable Jewish community, whose documented existence in the city dated to circa 1000, making it at the time the oldest Jewish community in Germany. As in many German cities throughout the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, razing the synagogue signaled the onset of expulsion. As he sketched the synagogue interior, Albrecht Altdorfer knew the expulsion was imminent; he sat on the same city council that gave the Jews two days to clear the synagogue and five days to evacuate the city. Edicts of expulsion did not mandate that citizens tear down synagogues, but this was the usual way, with Christian churches symbolizing victory atop the rubble of Jewish houses of worship. Yet in Altdorfer's etching, it is the overwhelming sense of architectural durability, supported by massive arches, that strikes us. To heighten the synagogue's solidity, Altdorfer illuminated its supporting walls, vaults, and the column on the left with fiercer light than realism demanded. In the etching, the actual light comes from a window, with the light of the protective Star of David casting a faint shadow beyond the man leaving the synagogue for the last time. The man looks at us as his shadow reaches toward us, as if to implicate us in his fate. But the pull of history is with the woman before him, and she exits the door into a space where there is no light.