Lenz Page 10
And thus this unfortunate young man departed from us with three companions and two coachmen. During the trip he did not resort to violence, seeing he was outnumbered, even though he did resort to cunning, especially at Ensisheim, where they spent the night. But the two schoolmasters responded to his cunning politeness with their own, and everything went off exceptionally well.
Whenever we speak, we are judged; whenever we act, it is passed over in silence. In this matter, several judgments have already been offered; there are those who have said: we should not have taken him in in the first place; there are others: we should not have kept him on so long; and still others: we should not have sent him away.
Things will, I think, go the same way in Strasbourg. Everybody judges according to his particular temperament (one could not do otherwise) and according to his preconceived notions of the entire matter, which however cannot possibly be accurate and true, for at the very least it does not account for all the many links in the chain which, over and beyond us, can only be known to God; it would be impossible to describe these accurately, and yet a single inflection, a single glance that cannot be described is often more crucial and more meaningful than the recounting of events now lying in the past.
My only answer to all current or future judgments, contrary or self-contradictory though they may be, is the following: everything that we did in this matter, we did before God, and at every point we were convinced that, given the circumstances, it was the best thing to do.
I recommend this unfortunate patient to the good offices of my fellow men and recommend that he be treated with the same good intentions by everybody who reads this.
from: Poetry and Truth
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
WHOEVER wishes to get a more immediate sense of what this lively [Strasbourg] group was thinking, talking and arguing about should read Herder’s essay on Shakespeare in the collection On German Character and Art; and in addition Lenz’s “Remarks on Theater,” appended to his translation of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Herder delves into the depths of Shakespeare’s essence and provides a magnificent account of them; Lenz takes a more iconoclastic stand against theatrical conventions, insisting that each and every thing be treated in Shakespearean fashion. Since I have been obliged to mention this individual, as talented as he was strange, this is the fitting place to say a few words about him by way of experiment. I first made his acquaintance toward the end of my Strasbourg stay. We saw little of each other; he moved in circles other than mine, but we sought out opportunities to meet and enjoyed each other’s conversation, given the mutual convictions we shared as young men the same age. Small, nicely proportioned, a charming little head whose delicate shape was perfectly complemented by his dainty and somewhat understated features; blue eyes, blond hair, in short, a little personage of the sort I have from time to time met among Northern youths; soft yet cautious in step, agreeable yet not entirely fluent in speech, whose demeanor, fluctuating between reserve and shyness, well became a young man. He was excellent at reciting short poems, especially his own, and wrote in a flowing hand. As for his disposition, all that comes to my mind is the English word whimsical which, as the dictionary indicates, gathers any number of oddities into a single concept. Precisely for this reason no one was perhaps more suited to feel and imitate the extravagances and excesses of Shakespeare’s genius. The abovementioned translation bears witness to this. He treats his author with considerable license, playing loose and easy, but he is so adept at donning his predecessor’s armor, or rather his clown costume, and manages to mime his gestures so hilariously that he was certain to reap the applause of anyone who finds delight in these things.
[Part III, Book 11]
I have already supplied a sketch of the outward features of this odd individual and affectionately recalled his talent as a humorist; now I would like to speak of his character more in terms of its side effects than from a descriptive angle, for it would be impossible to accompany him along the erratic course of his life while providing a portrayal of all his peculiarities.
One is aware of that species of self-torture which, in the absence of any external or social constraints, was then the order of the day, afflicting precisely those possessed of the most exceptional minds. Things which torment ordinary people only in passing and which, because unengaged in self-contemplation, they seek to banish from their thoughts, were instead acutely registered and observed by the better sort, and set down in books, letters, and diaries. But now the strictest moral demands placed upon oneself and others were commingled with an extreme negligence in one’s own actions, and the vague notions arising out of this semi-self-knowledge encouraged the strangest proclivities and most outlandish behavior. This unremitting work of self-contemplation was further abetted by the rise of empirical psychology, which, if unwilling to describe everything that causes us inner unrest as wicked or reprehensible, could nonetheless not entirely condone it; and thus was set into motion a permanent, irresoluble state of conflict. Of all the full- or half-time idlers intent on digging into their inmost depths, Lenz excelled in cultivating and perpetuating this state of conflict, and thus he suffered in general from that tendency of the age to which the depiction of Werther was meant to put a stop; but he was cut from a different cloth, which set him apart from all the others, whom one had to admit were thoroughly open, decent creatures. He, by contrast, had a decided propensity for intrigue, indeed, for intrigue pure and simple, without any particular goal in view, be it reasonable, personal, or attainable; on the contrary, he was always concocting some twisted scheme, whose very contortions were enough to keep him wholly entertained. In this way, throughout his life his fancies played him for a rascal, his loves were as imaginary as his hates, he juggled his ideas and feelings at whim, so that he would always have something to do. By these topsy-turvy means, he would attempt to impart reality to his sympathies and antipathies, and then would himself destroy this creation again; and so he was never of use to anybody he loved, nor did he ever do harm to anybody he hated, and in general he seemed only to sin in order to punish himself, only to intrigue in order to graft some new fiction onto an old one.
His talent, in which delicacy, agility, and extreme subtlety all vied with each other, proceeded from a genuine depth, from an inexhaustible creative power, but, for all its beauty, there was something thoroughly unhealthy about it, and it is precisely talents such as these that are the most difficult to evaluate. One cannot fail to appreciate the outstanding features of his works; they are suffused by something quite sweet and tender, but this is intermixed with instances of buffoonery so baroque and so asinine that, even in a sense of humor this all-pervasive and unassuming, even in a comic gift this genuine, they can hardly be pardoned. His days were occupied by airy nothings to which, ever assiduous, he managed to give meaning, and if he was able to idle away his hours in this fashion, it was because, given his outstanding memory, the time he actually devoted to reading always proved to be most fruitful, enriching his original way of thinking with a great variety of materials.
He had been sent to Strasbourg to accompany two Livonian cavalry officers, and a more unfortunate choice of a tutor could not have been made. The older of the two barons returned to his native land for a time and left behind him a young lady to whom he was tenderly attached. In order to keep at bay the younger brother, who was also courting this young lady, as well as any other suitors, and to preserve her heart for his absent friend, Lenz now took it upon himself to pretend he was smitten by this beauty or, if you will, head over heels in love. He put this hypothesis to work with the most obstinate adherence to the ideal he had formed of her, without any awareness whatsoever that he, like the others, was merely serving as a figure of fun and entertainment for her. So much the better for him! For he too took the whole thing to be a sheer game, one that would last all the longer given that she was playfully replying in kind, now attracting him, now repelling him, now encouraging him, now rejecting him. One may rest assured th
at had he fully realized what was actually transpiring on various occasions, he would have certainly congratulated himself upon the happy discovery.
As it so happened, he lived for the most, as did his two charges, among the officers garrisoned nearby, which is probably where he came up with those odd opinions he later espoused in his comedy The Soldiers. Be that as it may, this early familiarity with army life consequently led him to consider himself a great expert on military matters; indeed, he had made such a detailed study of this entire subject that, several years later, he drew up a lengthy proposal addressed to the French Minister of War, which he expected to produce great results. The miseries of military life were fairly well-analyzed, but the remedies offered were ridiculous and impracticable. He was nevertheless convinced that this document would gain him great influence at the court, and he highly resented those friends who, either by force of reason or by outright opposition, insisted that he suppress, and afterward burn, this fantastical piece of work, even though it had already been fair-copied, placed in an envelope with an enclosed letter, and officially addressed.
As for his adventures with the above-mentioned lady, he confided to me, at first in conversation and then in writing, the full story of all his aimless and erratic maneuvers. The poetry he could infuse into the commonest of incidents often astonished me, so I strongly encouraged him to take the bud of this rambling tale, pollinate it with his wit, and then turn it into a small novel; but that was not his thing, he could only make progress when he got carried away by a boundless flood of details or haphazardly spun himself along on an endless web. Perhaps in the future, based on these premises, it might be possible to provide, in some fashion or other, a vivid picture of the course of his life up to the point when he lost himself in madness; for the present, I shall keep to things closer at hand, and which in fact belong here.
Hardly had Goetz von Berlichingen appeared when Lenz sent me a prolix essay, written on the small sheets of drafting paper that he ordinarily used, without the slightest margin left on the top or bottom or on the sides. These sheets were entitled: “On our Marriage,” and were they still in existence, they would be more enlightening to us now than they were to me back then, for I was still very much in the dark about who and what he was. The primary purpose of this meandering manuscript was to juxtapose my talent and his; at times he seemed to claim he was my inferior, at times my equal; but the whole thing was carried off with so many humorous and felicitous turns of phrase that I gladly accepted the views he intended to convey, and all the more so because I truly held his gifts in very high esteem, and as a result was always urging him to pull himself together out of his amorphous ramblings and to exercise greater artistic control over his inborn creative talent. I responded in the most friendly fashion to the text he had entrusted to me, and because in its pages he had desired to establish the closest intimacy between us (as the whimsical title already indicated), from that point onward I kept him apprised of all my work, both my finished projects and those I was planning; in return, he sent me a string of manuscripts, The Tutor, The New Menoza, The Soldiers, his imitations of Plautus, and the translation of the English play which, as mentioned, accompanied his “Remarks on Theater.”
While reading the laconic preface to the latter, I was somewhat taken aback that he seemed to intimate that the substance of this essay, which contained a vehement attack on the rules of theater, had been delivered as a lecture to a society of friends of literature a number of years earlier, that is, at a time when my Goetz had not yet been written. That Lenz’s acquaintances in Strasbourg should have included a circle of which I was unaware seemed somewhat problematic; but I let this pass, and soon arranged publishers not only for this but for his other writings, without in the slightest suspecting that he had singled me out as the chief object of his imaginary hatred and as the target of the vagaries of his whimsical persecution.
[Part III, Book 14]
Notes
Notes to Büchner’s Lenz
1 Lenz] This text follows the reading given by Henri and Rosmarie Poschmann, eds., Georg Büchner, Sämtliche Werke (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 2002), which is based on Karl Gutzkow’s original 1839 publication of the story, “Lenz. Eine Reliquie von Georg Büchner,” in eight installments in the Hamburg journal Telegraph für Deutschland.
3 The 20th] January 20, 1778. In Bergeman’s influential early twentieth-century edition of Büchner’s works, this incipit was emended to “Den 20. Jänner.” Paul Celan comments in “The Meridian,” his 1961 Georg Büchner Prize speech: “Vielleicht darf man sagen, dass jedem Gedicht sein ‘20. Jänner’ eingeschrieben bleibt” (“Perhaps one may say that every poem retains its ‘20th of January’ inscribed within itself”). It has been suggested that Celan is here alluding not only to the opening words of Büchner’s Lenz, but also to January 20, 1942, the date on which the implementation of the Final Solution was discussed at the Wannsee Conference. See also Celan’s 1963 poem on Hölderlin’s madness, “Tübingen, Jänner.”
3 Lenz walked through the mountains.] To reach Waldersbach — situated in the remote Steinthal or Le Ban de la Roche of Alsace — Lenz journeyed by foot from Switzerland across the Vosges mountain range. Büchner himself hiked through these mountains in the early summer of 1833; in a long letter to his family from Strasbourg, dated July 8, he provides ecstatic descriptions of the vistas of the Rhine, the Black Forest, and the Swiss Alps afforded by the heights of the Vosges.
3 He felt no fatigue, except sometimes it annoyed him that he could not walk on his head.] In a 1925 essay on Büchner, German critic Arnold Zweig observed that “this sentence marks the beginning of modern European prose.” In “The Meridian,” Paul Celan notes: “whoever walks on his head has heaven beneath him as an abyss.”
9 Oberlin welcomed him] Johann Friedrich Oberlin (1740-1826), the Protestant minister in Waldersbach who looked after Lenz between January 20 and February 8, 1778. See “Afterword.”
9 I am a friend of. . .] The friend is Christoph Kaufmann (1753-1795), an associate of Goethe’s in Strasbourg during the early 1770s and coiner of the term Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”). Lenz stayed with him Winterthur, Switzerland from November 1777 to late January 1778 before being dispatched to Oberlin’s care.
9 Haven’t I read several plays?] Lenz’s The Tutor (1774) and The Soldiers (1776).
9 the tranquil faces looming out of the shadows] Oberlin and his wife, Magdelene, had five young children; when Lenz arrived, she was pregnant with a sixth.
17 he tried everything, but cold, cold] Toward the end of January 1834, having recovered from an attack of meningitis, Büchner writes to his fiancée Wilhelmine Jaeglé whom he had left behind in Strasbourg: “Would that I could lay this cold and tortured heart onto your breast. (. . .) I curse my current good health. I was on fire, fever covered me with kisses and embraced me like a lover’s arms. Darkness surged all around me, stars pressed through the gloom, and hands and lips bent towards me. And now? I no longer even have the pleasure of experiencing pain or longing. Ever since I crossed back over the Rhine [to Giessen], I seem to be dead inside, not a single feeling rises to the surface in me. I am an automaton; my soul has been removed.”
19 Are you a theologian?] Lenz had studied theology in Köningsberg in 1768-71 and again briefly in Strasbourg in 1774.
21 sprigs of rosemary] Traditional symbol of Love, Fidelity, and Death.
21 the music had completely melted his paralysis away] Büchner complains of a similar bout of paralysis (Starrkrampf, literally “tetanus”) to Wilhelmine Jaeglé in a March, 1834 letter: “The first bright moment in eight days. Incessant headaches and fevers, barely a few hours of decent rest at night. I don’t get to bed before 2 a.m., and then fitful sleep and a sea of thoughts into which my senses fade. (. . .) I’ve just come in from outdoors. A single, sustained note from a thousand larks’ throats drives through the sultry summer air, heavy clouds wander over the earth, the deep roar of the wind sounding like their melodious footsteps
. The spring air has dissolved my paralysis. I was frightened by myself. The feeling of being dead hovered above me. Every face seemed to me a death’s head, the eyes glazed, the cheeks waxen . . .”
23 In pain I love the Lord] Büchner’s adaptation of a popular church hymn, also cited in his play Woyzeck. According to one of his close friends, Büchner’s last delirious words were: “Yes, through pain we enter into God.”
25 she had a white and red rose pinned to her breast] The white rose symbolizes death, the red, love. Lenz’s mother in fact died six months later, in July 1778.
25 transported into a state of somnambulism] Oberlin was a student of the doctrines of Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), who popularized the notion of “animal magnetism” and investigated hypnotic and somnambulistic trance-states.
27 how all things were imbued with an indefinable harmony] In his 1836 lecture, “On Cranial Nerves,” Büchner, in line with the theories of such German “nature-philosophers” as Oken, provides a more scientific account of the harmonious organization of the totality of natural phenomena: “So, for the philosophical method, the whole physical existence of the individual is not directed toward its own preservation but is the manifestation of a primordial law, a law of beauty, which produces the highest and purest forms according to the simplest plans and outlines. Everything, whether form or matter, is bound by this law. All functions are the effects of this law; they are determined by no external purpose, and their so-called purposeful interaction and co-operation is nothing more than the necessary harmony in the manifestation of one and the same law . . .”