 Benjamin’s doctoral dissertation, ‘The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism’, was awarded, summa cum laude, by the University of Bern, Switzerland, in 1919. His celebrated essay on Goethe’s novella, The Elective Affinities, was begun shortly after and put into practice the theory of art criticism developed in his dissertation. Benjamin’s Habilitationsschrift on the Origin of the German Mourning-Play (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels)—the thesis which would have enabled him to become a professional academic—had, he feared, with the death of his intellectual ally, the Protestant theologian Florens Christian Rang, lost its “proper reader” (GB 3:16). In 1925, he was forced to withdraw his submission from the University of Frankfurt am Main and with it the possibility of a future academic position. However, despite this academic failure, an excerpt from the work appeared in a literary journal two years later and the book was published the following year (1928), quickly receiving favourable attention in a number of well regarded newspapers and periodicals in Germany and further afield (Brodersen 1996, 154). In an ironic twist, Benjamin’s failed Habilitation study became the subject of a seminar course taught at Frankfurt University in 1932–3 by Theodor Wiesengrund (later Theodor W. Adorno).