Benjamin himself was one of the many intellectuals who participated in the conflicts of the time, engaging - as his contemporary and forgotten sources, with few exceptions, indicate - in dialogue with almost all dominant narratives of cultural, political, and literary history, which used the dichotomy of Renaissance-Baroque to raise questions of modernity, progress, style, and cultural identity of Germany in one of the most critical moments of its history, which would lead to the triumphant proclamation of World War I and the desperate reality of the Interwar period, a period that, according to Benjamin, coincides approximately with the period between the conception (1916) of "The Origin" and the writing (1925) of it.

To use one of its metaphors, "The Origin" acts as a seismographic needle that records all the intellectual vibrations of Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, transforming Benjamin's text into a complex network of positions, through which only the "uniqueness" of the author is revealed.