Abstract

Gryphius’s Catharina von Georgien questions the very foundation of the international legal order by demonstrating the fragility, indeed the impossibility of peace as an agreement based on voluntary consent. As an alternative, it develops a martyrological model of international order, which, however, is intrinsically paradoxical. In so doing, it institutes a martyrological poetics that conceives of tragic play as a poetic form capable of evoking a vision of eternal peace through the representation of suffering and death in the world of sovereign states.