I do not mean that the 1925 version of Der Turm definitively satisfies some valid set of abstract or traditional requirements for tragedy. The requirements imposed on any poetic form by a critical thought that has enough philosophical ambition to be interesting are not such that they can be satisfied. Especially in Der Turm, which raises the question of the manner in which a spectator experiences his own critical understanding, and the question of the communal experience of the theater as ritual, both the creation of the work and its critical discussion must become speculative, tentative endeavors. It is not remarkable, therefore, that Hofmannsthal himself grows uncertain about the first large version of his tragedy. What disturbs us, in watching him pull down that edifice, is not the fact itself so much as our general theoretical perception of the fragility and mutability of precisely those constructs by which we imagine we establish an enduring presence in whatever huge twilight our experience of time belongs to.

In his essay on Der Turm, Rey says of the long 1925 version (Turm 1):

Rey is correct in noting the haste he speaks of here, but this very perception makes questionable the conclusion he draws from it.