Georg Buchner - Complete Plays, Lenz, and Other Writings

BCHNER: COMPLETE PLAYS, LENZ AND OTHER WRITINGS

GEORG BCHNER was only twenty-three when he died in Zurich in 1837 (the victim of a typhus epidemic), but he crammed an astonishing amount into his brief life. Politically he had attracted the keen attentions of the Hesse police through his revolutionary activism, particularly his central involvement in the clandestine pamphlet The Hessian Messenger, and he only just escaped arrest in 1835 by fleeing to Strasbourg. He threw himself with characteristic energy into the biological sciences, and already had the beginnings of a considerable scholarly reputation by the time he went to Zurich in late 1836 to teach comparative anatomy at the new university, where he also intended to give courses in philosophy. Although little known as a writer at the time of his death and throughout most of the rest of the nineteenth century, he has long since become recognized as one of the most remarkable voices of German literature, not least because in both mood and technique he so often uncannily anticipated the twentieth century.

His poetic output is small, but startling in its variety as well as its power. Dantons Death is arguably the finest drama of violent revolution in any language; the story Lenz (the first description of schizophrenia) is widely held to be the starting-point of modern German prose-writing; Leonce and Lena is only now coming into its own as a chiaroscuro comedy of great depth and subtlety; and the Woyzeck fragments, both in their focus on an extreme underclass hero and in their rapid succession of gauntly expressive scenes, constitute one of the most original masterpieces of modern theatre.

JOHN REDDICK was born in 1940 and was educated at Kings School, Worcester, and St Peters College, Oxford. After teaching-posts at the universities of Edinburgh, Cambridge and Sydney, he took up his present position as Professor of German at the University of Liverpool. Although over the years he has published widely on German prose-writers (Grass, Hoffmann, Stifter), his energies have increasingly become focused on Georg Bchner, not least as a result of his involvement in stage productions of Bchners plays, variously in German and English. This present volume is complemented by a full critical study of Bchner by John Reddick, Georg Bchner: The Shattered Whole (Oxford, 1994).

GEORG BCHNER

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
JOHN REDDICK

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First published 1993
13

Copyright John Reddick, 1993
All rights reserved

The moral right of the translator has been asserted

All inquiries regarding performing rights in these
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c/o Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ , England

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 9781101490600

FOR SARAH

who missed out last time
by not yet existing

This new edition of Georg Bchners work arose from the coincidence of two related but separate compulsions: the practical and the scholarly. As a literary critic I have been haunted by Bchner for a long time, and in recent years have increasingly tried to lay the ghost with scholarly research. On the practical side: having become variously involved in stage work on Bchners plays, I began making English versions for particular productions and became haunted all over again, this time by the challenge of capturing as much as possible of the richness of meaning and mood in Bchners original, while also retaining its spectacular verve and crispness. Both compulsions have continued undiminished, and I hope that in this edition they have yielded a happy combination of solid background supporting vivid texts and in the case of the plays, texts that actors find easy to speak.

Many friends and colleagues have been generous with their help, and warm thanks are due especially to Mike Butler, Brian Crow, Gerry McCarthy (Birmingham); Tim Blanning, John Guthrie, Jill Mann, Barry Nisbet (Cambridge); Jim Simpson (Liverpool); and Martin Swales (London).

Special thanks are also due to the Oxford University Press for allowing me to base the Introduction to this edition on the opening chapters of my monograph Georg Bchner: The Shattered Whole.

John Reddick
February 1992

Georg Bchner is perhaps the most extraordinary phenomenon of modern German literature. He impinged scarcely at all on the consciousness of his own century. When he died in 1837 at the age of twenty-three (the victim of a typhus epidemic), he was practically unheard of beyond his own circles no wonder, considering that only a single work had been published under his name (a bowdlerized version of Dantons Death). After another half-century he was scarcely better known: although most of his writing had meanwhile appeared in one form or another, it had made little impact; he rated a mention in most literary handbooks and encyclopedias, but only as an obscure, peripheral, often dubious bit of history. Then, towards the end of the century, perceptions changed. Other writers, in particular, began to respond to his voice and to recognize his astonishing modernity. One by one his plays reached the stage: Leonce and Lena in 1895; Dantons Death in 1902; Woyzeck in 1913 (and Alban Bergs opera Wozzeck in 1925). Edition began to follow edition. An initial trickle of monographs and theses soon turned into a stream, then a flood. All of a sudden Georg Bchner was a classic. But more important he was and is a living presence. No other German writer before Brecht so vividly catches the modern imagination or is more frequently performed on the stage both in Germany and abroad. No other writer is more enthusiastically hailed by his present-day successors: Heinrich Bll has spoken of his remarkable relevance, Gnter Grass of his incendiary force; for Christa Wolf, German prose begins with Bchners Lenz which constitutes her absolute ideal, her primal experience in German literature; Wolf Biermann has gone so far as to describe him simply as Germanys greatest writer (unser grter Dichter).

But whilst there is universal agreement about the power and immediacy of Bchners voice, there have been bitter disputes about what that voice is actually saying. This is scarcely surprising, for a number of factors make him a natural focus of controversy.

Most obviously, there is the smallness of scale and interruptedness of his output. If he had lived into his seventies (like his father and four of his siblings, the youngest of whom lived on into the twentieth century), his early writings would not only have been definitively finalized and published, they would also very probably have been contextualized as part of a much larger oeuvre. As it was, they survived if at all only in scrawled, incomplete, often illegible manuscripts, or else in printed versions that were variously mutilated, truncated, bowdlerized or garbled, as well as being almost entirely posthumous and unauthorized. It seems scarcely credible, but even today, more than a century and a half after his death, there is still no definitive historical-critical edition of his work.