| Georg Büchner |
| I find in human nature a terrible uniformity, in human relationships an irrepressible force, shared by everyone and no one. The individual just foam on the wave, greatness mere chance, the rule of genius a puppet-play, a laughable struggle with an iron law. In these Kafkaesque words, Büchner effectively described his own creative life. "Acknowledged by as divergent figures as Artaud and Brecht to be the father of modern theatre, Georg Büchner left behind only three works for the stage. Nevertheless he emerges as one of the most extraordinary talents in the history of European theatre, whose influence extended well beyond his own century" (Büchner ix). This man's creative work was, however, totally obscure during his own life. Büchner was born on 17 October 1813 in Goddelau. He came from a family of medical men and studied natural science (zoology and comparative anatomy) in Strasbourg (1831-33). He continued his studies at the University of Giessen, where he assumed a leading role in underground political activity. He was obsessed with overthrowing the autocratic governments of German states, including that of his own Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt. In 1834 Büchner published Der Hessische Landbote (The Hessian Courier), a pamphlet that urged peasants to revolt against their oppressors. The pamphlet was an appeal based on the peasants' economic plight and was intended to be incendiary: "In this year of 1834 it seems as though the Bible is telling lies. It seems as though God had made peasants and artisans on the fifth day and the princes and nobles on the sixth; and as though the Lord had said to the latter: Have dominion over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, as though the peasents and common people were to be counted as creeping things...The peasant goes behind the plow, but the nobleman goes behind the peasant and drives him on as he does the oxen, he takes his corn and leaves him with the stubble...[the peasants'] sweat is the salt on the nobleman's table" (Büchner 231-2). Written 33 years before Marx's Das Kapital, The Hessian Courier was perhaps too far ahead of its time. Most of the peasants who received the pamphlet were illiterate. Even worse, they immediately handed it over to police and several of the individuals who created and published the pamphlet were arrested. Büchner had his room searched, but responded to this action with such indignation that he was somewhat removed from suspicion. Some of those arrested, including Pastor Weidig, the radical clergyman who inserted his own ideas into Büchner's original text for the pamphlet, died in prison. In a space of five weeks in early 1835, Büchner wrote the play Danton's Tod (Danton's Death). It is a pseudo-historical drama centering around Georges Jacques Danton, a radical but pragmatic leader of the French Revolution. In March of the same year, Büchner fled to Strasbourg after learning of his imminent arrest. There he wrote the comedy Leonce und Lena and the prose-narrative Lenz. In 1836 Büchner received a doctorate from the University of Zurich, on the strength of his dissertation The Nervous System of the Barbel. He also began work on Woyzeck; Büchner continued to write the play through January 1837. Büchner contracted typhus and died on 19 February 1837; he was 23. read next...............Woyzeck/Wozzeck |