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For interpreters of Walter Benjamin, the tlieory of allegory presented in Tlie Origin ofGcrnuiii Tragic Dranni (1925) presages ideas appearing in his later writings on such modern subjects as the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, the Paris arcades and Brechtian theater.' For instance, a prominent cultural historian like Susan Buck-Morss draws a direct analogy between the role the ruin plays in German Baroque Traiierspiel and the decay it comes to represent in the visual culture of the late nineteenth century:And just as the Baroque dramatists saw in the ruin not only the "highly meaningful fragment." but also the objective determinate for their own poetic construction, the elements of which were never unified into a seamless whole, so Benjamin employed the most modern method of montage in order to construct out of the decaying fragments of nineteenth century culture images that made visible the "jagged line of demarcation between physical nature and meaning.'"-Here. Benjamin's description of modernity aligns itself with the poetic compositional structures of German Baroque playwrights -the result being that his "method of montage" makes apparent the ambiguous relationship between the experienced world and its semantic representation. Buck-Morss's insistence on seeing one historical period through the lens of another resurfaces later, when she equates the tragic impact of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and the psychological trauma of World War 1 in order to posit Benjamin's nascent engagement with the capacity of a literary mode like allegory to address the nostalgia presumably inherent in modernity.'Given the notable interest expressed by Benjamin's critics in the problem of modernity, few scholars have situated his study of the Traiierspiel in the context of its own historical period -that is. the Baroque. This essay will investigate how the theses developed in Benjamin's book-on allegory, melancholia, and the theatre itself-are historically appropriate means of understanding the design, mechanics, and broader cultural relevance of German Baroque scenography. 1 begin by underscoring how the semantic performance of allegory, as Benjamin theorizes it, is in fact conjured up by the stage mechanics of the Baroque Traiierspiel. I then turn to the work of a German scenographer, Joseph Furttenbach (1591-1667), and his treatise on stage design to illustrate the effectiveness of Benjamin's theory in explaining the visual aspect of Baroque theater. 1 conclude with some remarks on the allegorical figure of melancholia, in whose spirit Baroque mourning plays were composed, and who represented, for Benjamin, the ideal viewer of an intense and crude theater tradition.Any arguments for the historical validity of Benjamin's theories must be based first on his own title, which insists on seeing Traiierspiel through its origin (or Urspriing) as opposed to its genesis (or Eulsleluing). In contrast to the necessarily forward movement of creation implied by genesis, origin, as he sees it. is a momentary and recognizable suspension be...