Lenz Page 11

  27 the twelve apostles, each represented by a color] See Revelation 21:14-20.

  27 Stilling] Heinrich Jung-Stilling (1740-1817), a member of the Goethe circle in Strasbourg and later a close associate of Oberlin’s, published a study of the mystical significance of the Revelation of St. John in 1799.

  29 the era of idealism was just then beginning] Something of an anachronism on Büchner’s part, given that “idealist” aesthetics of Weimar Classicism (or early Jena Romanticism) only came to the fore a decade or so later.

  29 the good Lord has without a doubt made the world as it should be] In a letter to his family of July 28, 1835 on the subject of his historical drama, Danton’s Death, Büchner similarly wrote: “By the way, if anyone were to tell me that a writer should not show the world as it is but as it ought to be, then I would answer that I do not want to make it any better than the good Lord, who must surely have made the world as it should be. And as concerns the so-called Idealist poets, I find that they have created marionettes with sky-blue noses and affected emotions, but not human beings of flesh and blood whose sufferings and joys arouse my empathy and whose deeds and actions fill me with revulsion or admiration. In a word, I have high regard for Goethe or Shakespeare, but very little for Schiller.”

  29 we find it in Shakespeare] Lenz’s 1774 “Remarks on Theater” accompanied his translation of Love’s Labour’s Lost; in another essay of the period on Götz von Berlichingen (1773), he compared Goethe’s play to those of Shakespeare. Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), another influential member of the Strasbourg Sturm und Drang circle, produced his first major anthology of folk songs, Stimmen der Völker, in 1778.

  31 Old German school] Presumably the Northern Renaissance painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

  33 Apollo Belvedere] A Roman copy of a Greek statue of Apollo in the Vatican Belvedere, said by German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann to be “the highest ideal of art among all the works of antiquity.”

  33 a Raphael Madonna] For the “idealist” aesthetics of Weimar Classicism, Raphael’s various paintings of the Madonna embodied the early Renaissance’s desire to “transfigure” the real.

  35 Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus] A painting by Rembrandt pupil Carel von Savoy (ca. 1621-1665), which Büchner had seen in the Museum of Darmstadt. The painting refers to, but does not actually depict, the passage in Luke 24: 13-41.

  35 Then another one] The work remains unidentified, but has sometimes been thought to allude to the genre paintings of Nicolaes Maes (1632-1693), another pupil of Rembrandt.

  37 letters from Lenz’s father] Kaufmann had met Lenz’s father, a puritanical clergyman who never forgave his son for giving up his theology studies, in Riga in 1777.

  39 Lavater] Johann Caspar Lavater (1741-1801), much admired by the young Sturm und Drang writers, was the celebrated author of the Physiognomical Fragments (1775-78), whose fourth volume includes a “physiognomic” silhouette of Lenz. Given his interest in the mystical correspondences between the natural and spiritual world, Oberlin was quite drawn to Lavater’s investigations into the paranormal. Lenz had been a guest of Lavater’s in Zurich in August, 1777.

  43 had wrestled with it like Jacob] See Genesis 32: 25-31.

  51 he heard a child had died] According to Oberlin, the child’s name was Friederike — the same as Lenz’s (and Goethe’s) love-object, Friederike Brion.

  53 Lenz shuddered when he touched the cold limbs] In an 1832 letter, the medical student Büchner expresses his revulsion at having to dissect cold cadavers. At several points in his correspondence with Wilhelmine Jaeglé, he compares himself to a corpse awaiting reawakening.

  53 Arise and walk!] See Matthew 9:5, Mark 2:9-12, and Luke 5:23-25.

  55 Sin and the Holy Ghost] Perhaps a typographical error for “die Sünde wider den heiligen Geist,” i.e., “sin against the Holy Ghost.”

  55 Pfeffel] Gottlieb Konrad Pfeffel (1736-1809), blind Alsatian author of patriotic poetry; Lenz had stayed with him in Colmar in January, 1777 after his expulsion from Weimar.

  57 I’ve deserted my faith] See Psalms 53: 3.

  57 the eternal Jew] Ahasuerus, condemned to wander the earth in eternity as a punishment for spurning Christ on the road to Calvary.

  57 she was still in love with someone else] When Lenz first encountered Friederike Brion in the summer of 1772 in Sesenheim (near Strasbourg), she was still in love with Goethe, who had broken off with her the previous year and moved to Frankfurt. In a letter of March 20, 1834 to Wilhelmine Jaeglé, Büchner had cited a poem of Lenz’s in the persona of Friederike which evoked her jilted love.

  61 a shepherd’s pipe] Most likely a mistranscription of Oberlin’s text, which reads “Habergeise,” i.e., a “snipe,” or a toy “top,” whose humming or droning sounds were associated with demonic hobgoblins or night phantoms.

  61 Tedium the root of it all] Cf. Büchner’s comedy Leonce and Lena, I, i: “The things people do out of boredom! They study out of boredom, they pray out of boredom, they fall in love, marry and multiply out of boredom, and finally die out of boredom . . .”

  65 Sebastian by his side] Sebastain Scheidecker, the aforementioned schoolmaster.

  67 requesting that he add a few lines] In the original 1839 printing of the text, this is followed by the sentence, “See the letters” — most likely a manuscript note by Büchner to himself.

  Notes to Oberlin’s “Mr L. . .”

  81 Mr. L. . .] While retaining the Kafkaesque title of a manuscript transcription given in Hubert Gersch’s Studienausgabe of Büchner’s Lenz (Stuttgart: Reklam, 1984), this version is based on the text given in the Poschmanns’ edition of Büchner’s Sämtliche Werke (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992). Büchner read Oberlin’s account in a manuscript copy; it was later published by August Stöber in three installments in the journal Erwinia in 1838/39 under the title “Der Dichter Lenz, im Steinthale,” accompanied by the following note: “This moving, unsophisticated and heartfelt text, drawn from the papers of the reverend Oberlin, constitutes a curious contribution to the biography of a misfortunate and talented writer. See also Life of J.F. Oberlin, by D.E. Stöber, p. 215, as well as “The Writer Lenz, Further Information” by August Stöber, Morgenblatt, 1831, nos. 250 and ff., where the letters from Lenz to Salzmann may also be found. My dear friend Georg Büchner, who died in Zurich on February 19, 1837, wrote a novella on the basis of this text, which unfortunately remained a fragment. It is to appear in the edition of his works which D. Gutzkow is preparing. — The editor.”

  85 Allez donc au lit] Go back to bed again — what is this — hey! — in the water when it’s this cold out! — Go back to bed!

  87 at the outset my sermons were quite eloquent] Oberlin normally gave his sermons in French (and not in the local patois); once a month, he conducted services in German in Belmont.

  89 Lavater, Pfeffel] See notes to Büchner’s Lenz.

  91 Mr. Schlosser] Goethe’s brother-in-law, Johan Georg Schlosser (1739-1799). Lenz had briefly stayed with him and his wife, Goethe’s sister Cornelia, after having been expelled from Weimar in late November, 1776. Schlosser would subsequently take care of Lenz in Emmendingen after the latter’s departure from Oberlin’s.

  99 Lenz’s letter to Salzmann] An editorial note by August Stöber. Lenz wrote a number of letters to Goethe’s Strasbourg mentor Johann Daniel Salzmann (1722-1812) evoking his visits to Friederike Brion in Sesenheim in the summer of 1772.

  107 a noble woman in W.] Perhaps Goethe’s Weimar friend, Charlotte von Stein.

  107 Abaddon] The “angel of the bottomless pit” in Revelation 9:11.

  107 Friederike] Friederike Brion.

  109 “Vite, chez l’homme juré”] Quick, to the bailiff’s, have him send me two men.”

  119 “Ecoutez, nous ne voulons point faire du bruit] “Listen, we don’t want to make any noise, if you have a knife, just hand it over to me quietly and with nothing to fear.”

  Notes to Goethe’s P
oetry and Truth

  129 From Poetry and Truth] The text follows the (slightly modernized) version given by Gersch in his Studienausgabe of Büchner’s Lenz, based on the first printing of Goethe’s Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit (Tübingen: Cotta, 1811-14), 3 vols., which is the edition Büchner would have read.

  131 The collection Of German Character and Art] Edited by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), this 1773 collection, Von deutscher Art und Kunst, included essays by Herder on Ossian and folk song, on Shakespeare, as well as Goethe’s “On German Architecture,” in which he praised the Gothic style of the Strasbourg Cathedral.

  131 His translation of Love’s Labour’s Lost] Brought out in 1774 (by Goethe’s publisher Weygand in Leipzig) under the title Amor vincit omnia, and accompanied by his “Anmerkungen übers Theater.”

  131 I first made his acquaintance] Goethe and Lenz first met in Salzmann’s circle in 1771; toward the end of that year, Goethe returned to Frankfurt and did not revisit Strasbourg until 1775.

  133 The English word whimsical] Defined by Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary as “freakish; capricious; oddly fanciful.”

  137 The depiction of Werther] Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers was first published by Weygand in 1774, to European acclaim.

  139 Two Livonian cavalry officers] The two brothers Friedrich Georg and Ernst Nikolaus von Kleist. In 1773, the former fell in love with Cleophe Fibich, the daughter of a Strasbourg jeweler and a friend of Friederike Brion’s. Cleophe Fibich was in turn, according to Lenz, the model for the character Marie (abandoned by an officer) in his play The Soldiers.

  141 those odd opinions he later espoused in his comedy The Soldiers] Among other reforms that Lenz suggests in this 1776 play: the establishment of official military brothels in order to spare the virtue of civilian girls from the sexual predations of officers. The proposal Lenz submitted to the French Ministry of War was published as Über die Soldatenehen (“On Military Marriages”) in 1776.

  143 at first in conversation and then in writing] In the fall of 1774, Lenz wrote a Diary in which he recounted in slightly fictionalized fashion the imbroglio created by the simultaneous courtship of Cleophe Fibich by the two von Kleist brothers and Lenz himself, each secretly betraying the other. Initially written in English to keep it from prying eyes and then translated into German, the manuscript of this Diary was presented by Lenz to Goethe in the summer of 1775. It remained in Goethe’s papers until 1797 when, responding to Schiller’s request for some undiscovered “Lenziana,” he sent it on for eventual publication in the latter’s magazine, Die Horen. Though noting its “biographical and pathological value,” Schiller decided against its publication and Lenz’s Diary was not brought out until 1877.

  143 Hardly had Goetz von Berlichingen appeared] Originally written in November-December 1771, Goethe’s boisterous historical drama was first published in June, 1773.

  147 the object of his imaginary hatred] Goethe’s paranoid comments are illuminated by his account of his “Visit to Sesenheim 1779” to see his old flame Friederike Brion. Written in 1809 (just as he was beginning to embark on his autobiography, Poetry and Truth), this text was first posthumously published by Eckermann and Riemer under the title “Lenz” in 1837 in their two-volume Cotta edition of Goethe’s works (two years before the posthumous publication of Büchner’s Lenz by Gutzkow):

  The greater portion of our conversation concerned Lenz. After my departure, he had introduced himself into the house and had tried to find out whatever was possible about me, and, given all the efforts he was making to see my letters to her in order to fish around in them, she in the end grew suspicious. He had in the meantime, as was his wont, pretended to fall in love with her, for he thought this was the only was of gaining access to all the girl’s secrets; and now that she was wary of him, she declined his visits and withdrew ever more from him, which drove him to the most ridiculous threats of suicide, claiming he would be declared half-crazy and taken to the city. She also explained to me that it had been his intention to harm me and to destroy my public reputation and whatever else, and for this reason he had allowed my farce directed against Wieland to be printed.

  Goethe had more or less given Lenz permission to print his satire Gods, Heroes, and Wieland in 1774, but the following year, already contemplating his subsequent move to the Court of Weimar (where Wieland lived), Goethe apparently felt this polemical attack might compromise him in the eyes of this influential Enlightenment German man of letters.

  Translator’s Afterword

  Like De Quincey’s “The Last Days of Immanuel Kant” or Chateaubriand’s Life of Rancé, Büchner’s Lenz is an experiment in speculative biography, part fact, part fabrication — an early nineteenth-century example of the modern genre of docufiction. When pressed to define his aesthetic project, Büchner tended to think of himself above all as a poet-historian: “The dramatic poet is, to my eyes, nothing but a writer of history,” he explained in an 1835 letter, “but he is superior to the latter in that he recreates history for a second time for us and transports us immediately into the life of an era instead of giving a dry account of it; instead of giving us characteristics, he gives us characters and instead of descriptions, he gives us figures. His greatest task is to come as close as possible to history as it actually happened . . . he makes the past come to life again.” In the case of his play Danton’s Death, Büchner pored over (and liberally cited) a variety of documentary sources — Thiers’s and Mignet’s histories of the French Revolution, Strahlheim’s compilation of primary materials relating to the Terror — in order to cast the drama of his doomed anti-hero into a present tense as immediate as an eyewitness’s bewildered gaze. Büchner’s other most famous play, Woyzeck, similarly combines the archival research of the historian with the resurrectional powers of the poet. Based on the transcripts of the murder trials of three men who had killed their mistresses (and which involved some of the earliest instances of the insanity defense in German legal history), Woyzeck manages to transform anonymous public records into a work whose fierce representation of the private sufferings and humiliations of its protagonist fully bears out what his friend Karl Gutzkow (describing Lenz) called Büchner’s “reproduktive Phantasie,” that is, his ability to reproduce historical characters in his imagination and, through this act of mimetic translation, render them absolutely singular, absolutely alive.

  Following the lead of Gersch’s “Studienausgabe” of Lenz, this bilingual edition supplies English-speaking readers for the first time with two of the major historical sources that Büchner consulted for his 1839 novella — the manuscript diary of the kindly Alsatian pastor, Johann Friedrich Oberlin, who took the distraught Lenz into his care in the Vosges mountains for three weeks in early 1778, and Goethe’s (somewhat less kindly) recollections of his early friendship with the playwright during his Sturm und Drang years in Strasbourg, first published in the third volume of his autobiography Poetry and Truth in 1814. What emerges from the juxtaposition of these three temporally and generically distinct visions of the figure of Lenz is something like a cubist portrait painted from several perspectives at once — a multiple exposure of an original model too evasive to be seized by any single image. Or in more paleographic terms: to read Oberlin’s or Goethe’s accounts in conjunction with Büchner’s novella is to realize the extent to which the latter works like a palimpsest, now erasing, now leaving visible the traces of the texts onto which it is inscribed.

  ________

  To add a further lateral dimension to Büchner’s novella, the following chronology offers a narrative of what is known of the life of the historical Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792). Like Danton’s Death, which compresses the action of the play into a mere seven days, Lenz drastically contracts an entire destiny into three fraught weeks, consigning the remainder of its protagonist’s existence, both before and after this crisis, to the margins of the text — where it functions as a missing yet implicit biographical frame whose invisible pressure can noneth
eless be felt throughout the narrative. “Novels,” wrote Novalis, “arise out of the shortcomings of history.” What Büchner includes of Lenz’s history therefore emerges from everything he chose to omit — specific dates, back story, causal connectives, in short, everything that might enable the reader to establish some sort of context for the matter at hand. The last, laconic sentence of the novella merely informs us: “So lebte er hin” (“And so he lived on”). Not happily ever after, as in a fairy-tale, but numbed out, resigned to fate, condemned (like Beckett’s characters) simply to endure that “living on” (or Fortleben) which, according to Walter Benjamin, characterizes the afterlife of originals in translation.

  1751: Lenz born in Sesswegen, a small town in the recently annexed Russian province of Livonia, populated by Estonians and Latvians but dominated by a culturally influential minority of Germans. His father is an authoritarian Protestant minister from Pomerania, his mother the daughter of a clergyman. Secondary schooling in Dorpat. First poems.

  1768: Is sent to study theology in the Prussian port city of Königsberg, but instead attends the lectures of Immanuel Kant (to whom he addresses an ode), begins reading Rousseau on the latter’s recommendation, translates Pope’s “Essay on Criticism,” Shakespeare, and the comedies of Plautus. Publishes a long historical poem on the misfortunes visited upon the Baltic lands by the late Russo-Swedish war.

  1771: Against the express wishes of his father, interrupts his studies in order to accept employ as a “tutor” to two brothers, the barons von Kleist, whom he accompanies to their military posting near Strasbourg in May. Will remain in Alsace for the following five years, first moving from garrison to garrison with the two young barons and then, after 1774, eking out a meager livelihood by giving private lessons in German, history, geography, and military science. To placate his father, enrolls in the faculty of theology at Strasbourg’s Protestant university. Over the course of 1771, becomes friends with the twenty-two-year-old Frankfurt native Johann Wolfgang Goethe, two years his junior, who is studying law in Strasbourg. The latter puts him in touch with Johann Gottfried Herder, who has also recently fled the cultural backwaters of Livonia and is now the chief intellectual mentor of Goethe and his group of student friends (Jung-Stilling, Wagner, Klinger, Müller, Merck). This circle of young writers, who gather at the home of the Strasbourg actuary Daniel Salzmann and devote themselves to the establishment of a new national German literature freed from the hegemony of French neoclassicism, constitutes the core of the literary avant-garde later known as the Sturm und Drang movement.