The Hessian Courier (1834)
Der Hessische Landbote — a clandestine pamphlet of statistics and fury whose motto is "Peace to the cottages! War on the palaces!"
Literature · Playwrights
Georg Büchner
1813–1837 · German
Vormärz radicalism; forerunner of naturalism and expressionism
Georg Büchner was a revolutionary pamphleteer and medical scientist who wrote three plays and a novella before dying of typhus at twenty-three. Almost unknown in his lifetime, he was rediscovered at the end of the nineteenth century and is now regarded as the most modern of German dramatists: his unfinished play about a tormented soldier, written in fragmentary scenes about a man with no power at all, anticipates naturalism, expressionism and the theatre of the absurd. Germany's chief literary award is named after him.
How to spot them
- ▸Dead at 23 of typhus in Zurich; a working anatomist as well as a playwright
- ▸The pamphlet slogan "Peace to the cottages! War on the palaces!"
- ▸An unfinished play in loose scenes about a soldier who kills his lover — left in no settled order
- ▸The Georg Büchner Prize, Germany's leading literary award
- ▸Alban Berg's opera; the misreading of the hero's name from the handwriting
Key works
Danton's Death (1835)
Dantons Tod — the Terror seen through a Danton who is already exhausted; written in about five weeks while he was awaiting arrest
Lenz (1839)
An unfinished novella following the Sturm und Drang poet J. M. R. Lenz into mental collapse in the Vosges; it opens with him walking through the mountains on the 20th of January
Leonce and Lena (1836)
A satirical comedy of two royal children who flee an arranged marriage and unknowingly find each other; written for a prize competition and submitted too late
Woyzeck (1837)
Left unfinished in several drafts: a soldier fed only peas for a doctor's experiment murders his lover Marie; Alban Berg turned it into the opera Wozzeck
On Cranial Nerves (1836)
Über die Schädelnerven — his probationary lecture at Zurich, where he was appointed lecturer in comparative anatomy
Key ideas
- The "dreadful fatalism of history": individuals are carried by forces they cannot direct
- Poverty as the engine of politics — the pamphlet argues in tax figures, not slogans alone
- Drama built from short, discontinuous scenes with no fixed order, the ancestor of modern episodic theatre
Quick-fire facts
- •Born on 17 October 1813 at Goddelau in the Grand Duchy of Hesse; his father was a doctor
- •He founded the Society for Human Rights in Giessen in 1834 and co-wrote The Hessian Courier with the pastor Friedrich Ludwig Weidig, who died in prison
- •He fled to Strasbourg in 1835 with a warrant out for his arrest, and a wanted notice was published describing him
- •Danton's Death was the only one of his plays published in his lifetime, in a censored version
- •His dissertation on the nervous system of the barbel won him a doctorate from Zurich and a lectureship in comparative anatomy
- •He died of typhus in Zurich on 19 February 1837, aged 23
- •Woyzeck, unperformed until 1913, was first published in 1879 after Karl Emil Franzos deciphered the manuscript; he misread the name as "Wozzeck", which Alban Berg kept for his 1925 opera
- •His brother Ludwig Büchner was the materialist philosopher who wrote Force and Matter
- •The Georg Büchner Prize, awarded by the German Academy for Language and Literature since 1951, is the most important German-language literary prize
Drill it — 9 cards
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Sources
- Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung — Georg-Büchner-Preis
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Georg Büchner: German Dramatist