In his study of the seventeenth-century German baroque dramas, The Origin of the German Mourning Plays, Walter Benjamin conveys the idea of history as “petrified nature,” and nature as “petrified history.” The popular baroque emblems of human skeletons and skulls signify the idea of history as constant mortification and transience. In the baroque image of the fossil is embodied the idea of the survival of the past in the present.

Theodor Adorno in this essay “The Idea of Natural History,” offers a philosophical interpretation of Benjamin’s idea of natural history. In “The Idea of Natural History,” Adorno compares Benjamin’s
concept of natural history with Lukácsian idea of “second nature.” This term designates, for Lukács, the reified world of capitalism, the alienated world, the world of convention. If Lukács demonstrates the retransformation of the historical, as that which has been, into nature, then here is other side of the phenomenon: nature itself is seen as transitory nature, as history.

For Benjamin the emblem of natural history is “a cipher to be read.”