PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The article starts with a simple, but yet overlooked observation concerning German baroque play: If any sovereign (as the all-responsible representative of the divine order) is urged to judge at his court, he always will opt for death sentences, fatally determined by his emotions. Yonder traditional investigations of religious, deconstructive, or social historian frames of reference, it is shown how, as an anthropological impact and a kind of early modern ‘counter-discourse’, Gryphius and Lohenstein demonstrate that man is definitely not capable to rule reasonably; literature so refutes contemporary con- cepts of ‘absolutism’ as misconceiving human nature in a fundamental way. Contrarily, late baroque authors around 1700 / 1720 like Hallmann and Günther transform the high-ranking genre tragedy and its ‘deathly’ subject matter into its own travesty by formal means – a promising path German literature unfortunately did not follow.