Metaphysical Laughter: Walter Benjamin’s Engagement with Viennese Satire

This article introduces a previously unexplored dimension of Walter Benjamin’s scholarship – his productive engagement with Viennese satirists, which constellates such different writers as Joseph Anton Stranitzky, Johann Nestroy, Karl Kraus and Alfred Polgar. The analysis unfolds across two pivotal sections: the first examines the interplay between mourning and comedy in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [Origin of the German Trauerspiel], which Benjamin describes as a textile dialectic based on his reading of Stranitzky but also leaves as a desideratum in his addenda to the Trauerspiel book, citing Friedrich Hebbel and Nestroy as hostile neighbours that embody this dialectic. The second section delves into Benjamin’s reading of Kraus and his ‘planetary defeatism’ as a key concept to understand Benjamin’s fascination with Polgar. The textile dialectics of inside and outside now assume an emblematic dimension: Polgar’s writings highlight the characteristic recasting of historical events as natural phenomena in Viennese satire by linking it to Benjamin’s theory of allegory. Through this exploration, the article reveals not only the underappreciated depth of Benjamin’s theoretical engagement with Viennese satire, which represents some of his most explicit thoughts on the aesthetics of the comic but also a specific notion of the metaphysical character of the comic that follows from this engagement.