The Road to Hell is Paved with Dialectics: On Christopher J. Arthur’s The Spectre of Capital

So fears the fictional spectator within the third act of Ludwig Tieck’s Die verkehrte Welt (Tieck 1978: 87). By the time it nears its conclusion, the 1797 play has become a quadruple play-within-a-play-within-a-play-within-a-play, with the character audience unable to tell what is fiction and what is reality, with Tieck undermining conventional narration as a parable of poetic fantasy and Romantic irony, part of that comic heritage extending from Aristophanes and Cervantes, up to Ludvig Holberg and Laurence Sterne. A verkehrte Welt was a recurrent cultural motif, with a similarly titled play appearing in 1683 by Christian Weise, as well as another by Johann Ulrich von König in 1725, each of which also partook from the Italian tradition of commedia dell’ arte . Heinrich Heine would later, in 1844, give the title Die verkehrte Welt to his satirical poem from the verse cycle Zeitgedichte . Yet the formulation of an ‘inverted world’ after Tieck would go on to acquire a meaning and seriousness through the German tradition altogether independent of his literary whimsy.