Georg Buchner
LENZ
Translation and Introduction by Michael Hamburger
Lenz
is the only story known to have been written by Georg
Buchner, the author of
Danton's Death
and
Wozzeck.
The story is
based on factual evidence. Buchner's sources were a diary kept by Oberlin
in 1778 and a French biography of Oberlin, both of which were pub–
lished by friends of Buchner's in 1831. _
Jacob Michael Reinhold Lenz, the subject of this story, was a poet
and dramatist of the
Sturm und Drang
period in German letters. He was
born in 1751 in the Baltic province of Livonia. His father was a Lutheran
pastor and he himself studied theology at Konigsberg. After two years'
rather lukewarm study, he gave up to become private tutor to the two
young Barons von Kleist. In 1771 he traveled with them to Strasbourg,
where he met Goethe. When Goethe left for a journey with one of the
Kleist brothers, Lenz was introduced to Friederike Brion, Goethe's
inamorata, and fell in love with her. He became notorious as "Goethe's
ape." He suffered his first attack of insanity in Switzerland, where he
stayed with C. Kaufmann from November 1777 to January 1778. Kauf–
mann sent him to Oberlin's vicarage in the Steintal and later visited
him there with Lisette Ziegler, his fiancee. This is the period of Buchner's
story. Although Lenz's mental state gradually improved after his removal
to Strasbourg, he was taken back to Lithuania in 1779, fell into obscurity
and died near Moscow in 1792.
Though
Lenz
was left unfinished when Buchner died in 1837-at
the age of twenty-three-he wrote it in Strasbourg in 1836, certainly
before
Wozzeck,
possibly before
Leonce und Lena.
Apart from a single
gap which we can fill in from Buchner's sources, it is unlikely that he
would have substantially changed or amended his story. The unusual
narrative style, with its repetitions, ellipses and colloquialisms, is wholly
in accordance with his general principles and with the peculiar subject
of this story, a subject wholly beyond the scope of contemporary writers
of fiction. Among other things, Buchner was a brilliant scientist; but
