Walter Benjamin in the context of "Ernst Bloch"

A tragedy is a genre of drama based on human suffering and, mainly, the terrible or sorrowful events that befall a main character or cast of characters. Traditionally, the intention of tragedy is to invoke an accompanying catharsis, or a "pain [that] awakens pleasure," for the audience. While many cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, the term tragedy often refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilization. That tradition has been multiple and discontinuous, yet the term has often been used to invoke a powerful effect of cultural identity and historical continuity—"the Greeks and the Elizabethans, in one cultural form; Hellenes and Christians, in a common activity," as Raymond Williams puts it.

Originating in the theatre of ancient Greece 2500 years ago, where only a fraction of the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides survive, as well as many fragments from other poets, and the later Roman tragedies of Seneca; through its singular articulations in the works of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Jean Racine, and Friedrich Schiller to the more recent naturalistic tragedy of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg; Nurul Momen's Nemesis' tragic vengeance & Samuel Beckett's modernist meditations on death, loss and suffering; Heiner Müller postmodernist reworkings of the tragic canon, tragedy has remained an important site of cultural experimentation, negotiation, struggle, and change. A long line of philosophers—which includes Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Camus, Lacan, and Deleuze—have analysed, speculated upon, and criticised the genre.

Theodor W. Adorno (/əˈdɔːrnoʊ/ ə-DOR-noh; German: [ˈteːodoːɐ̯ aˈdɔʁno] ; born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund; 11 September 1903 – 6 August 1969) was a German philosopher, musicologist, and social theorist. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the works of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and G. W. F. Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, his writings—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Minima Moralia (1951), and Negative Dialectics (1966)—strongly influenced the European New Left.

In an intellectual climate shaped by existentialism and logical positivism, Adorno developed a dialectical conception of history and philosophy that challenged the foundations of both, anticipating the divide that would later emerge between the analytic and continental traditions. As a classically trained musician, Adorno studied composition with Alban Berg of the Second Viennese School, influenced by his early admiration for the music of Arnold Schoenberg. Adorno's commitment to avant-garde music formed the backdrop of his subsequent writings and led to his collaboration with Thomas Mann on the latter's novel Doctor Faustus (1947), while the two men lived in California as exiles during the Second World War. Working at the newly relocated Institute for Social Research, Adorno collaborated on influential studies of authoritarianism, antisemitism, and propaganda that would later serve as models for sociological studies the institute carried out in post-war Germany.

"Paris, Capital of the 19th Century" (German: Paris, Hauptstadt des 19. Jahrhunderts; 1938) is one of a diptych of completed essays that was composed during the preparatory outlining and drafting phase of Walter Benjamin's uncompleted composition of the Arcades Project. The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire is its sister essay. The major themes of The Arcades Project—the construction of the Parisian arcades in the early 19th century, their blossoming as a habitat for the flâneur, their demolition during Haussmannization—appear as leitmotifs in both essays.

Paris, Capital of the 19th Century is a sketch or outline of the Arcades Project much in the same manner that Grundrisse was Karl Marx's outline for his intended eight volume masterwork Das Kapital of which he was only able to complete one volume. Whereas its sibling essay focuses on the poetry of Baudelaire as a microcosm for the full scope of ideas that Benjamin intended to address in the Arcades Project, the essays of Paris, Capital of the 19th Century attempt to cover the full spectrum of themes whose development was ultimately intended.

The Frankfurt School is a school of thought in sociology and critical theory. It is associated with the Institute for Social Research founded in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt am Main (today known as Goethe University Frankfurt). Formed during the Weimar Republic during the European interwar period, the first generation of the Frankfurt School was composed of intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents dissatisfied with the socio-economic systems of the 1930s: namely, capitalism, fascism, and communism. Significant figures associated with the school include Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas.

The Frankfurt theorists proposed that existing social theory was unable to explain the turbulent political factionalism and reactionary politics, such as Nazism, of 20th-century liberal capitalist societies. Also critical of Marxism–Leninism as a philosophically inflexible system of social organization, the School's critical-theory research sought alternative paths to social development.