The book on mourning-plays concluded Benjamin’s German “cycle of production” (C, 322). At the beginning of the 1920s Benjamin became immersed in what was planned as a large-scale study of political thought, of which only a few fragments and the ‘Critique of Violence’ remain (Steiner 2001, 61). As Uwe Steiner notes, while Benjamin’s political thought may be situated in the milieu of Expressionist Nietzsche-reception, the centrality that the realization of happiness occupies in his definition of politics as “the satisfaction of unenhanced humanness” is constructed in direct opposition to Zarathustra’s tragic heroism (Steiner 2001, 49–50, 61–62). This marks both a continuity with and a break from what Irving Wohlfarth has called his earlier “politics of Youth” (Wohlfarth 1992, 164), which drew heavily on a philosophy of history and culture influenced by Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations. Benjamin remarked that his break from the Youth Movement did not constitute the abandonment of this earlier thought, however, but its submergence into a ‘harder, purer, more invisible radicalism’ (C, 74). This in part accounts for what T. J. Clark describes as the “cryptic” character of - what Adorno termed (SW 4, 101-2) - the anthropological materialism of The Arcades Project, where, Clark comments, it is “as if such a politics were being actively aired and developed elsewhere” (Clark 2003, 45–46).