Lenz Read online

  1772: Writes his first major play, The Tutor or The Advantages of Private Education, a “comedy” in which the hero, horrified at his seduction of a young female student, castrates himself in the fifth act. Inspired by Shakespeare and traditional traveling German puppet shows, the play’s open form and genre-bending ironies will be much admired by Büchner and, later, Brecht. During the summer, pays court in Sesenheim to Friederike Brion, a love of Goethe’s whom he had left in the lurch the previous year upon returning to Frankfurt. In letters to Salzmann, Lenz describes himself as a Pygmalion in search of a fantasy Galatea. Later learning of Lenz’s attempt to gain Friederike’s intimacy in his wake, Goethe is not amused.

  1773: Another romantic triangle: ostensibly appointed to play the part of chaperone, Lenz is smitten by the coquettish fiancée of one of his employers, the elder von Kleist brother. Will subsequently recount this comedy of errors in a Wertherian diary novel which he presents to Goethe in manuscript. Literary activities include the preparation of essays on Goethe’s play, Götz von Berlichingen, Herder’s philosophy, the poetry of Ovid and Virgil, and translation of fragments of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.

  1774: Goethe’s European best-seller, The Sorrows of Young Werther, is published by Weygand in Leipzig. During the same year, at Goethe’s suggestion, the same publisher brings out four books by Lenz: Remarks on Theater, to which is appended his translation of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (Amor vincit omnia); his German versions of Plautus; and two comedies, The Tutor and The New Menoza.

  1775: At the zenith of his reputation, founds the “German Society” of Strasbourg, where he lectures “On the Advantages of the German Tongue,” “On the Cultivation of the German Tongue in Alsace, Breisgau and Neighboring Regions,” and on Goethe’s Götz and Werther. In the early spring, visits Goethe’s sister Cornelia and her husband Johann Georg Schlosser at their home in Emmendingen in Baden; in a manuscript entitled “The Moral Conversion of a Poet, as Described by Himself,” which he presents to Goethe, he expresses his deep Platonic love for the latter’s sister. Goethe passes through Strasbourg in late May and again in early June and exchanges poems with Lenz in celebration of their warm friendship, but their relationship may have been strained by latter’s publication the previous year of Goethe’s vicious satire of Christoph Martin Wieland — the reigning writer at the Court of Weimar, where Goethe, at the personal invitation of the duke, will take up permanent residence in November.

  1776: Establishes a journal, Der Bürgerfreund, to publish the proceedings of the “German Society” of Strasbourg as well as portions of his new comedy, The Soldiers, which deals with the seduction and abandonment of young women of the lower classes by aristocratic officers. Is invited by Goethe to join him at the Court of Weimar in April, along with Sturm und Drang playwright Friedrich Maximilian Klinger and the philosopher Herder — who arranges for the book publication of The Soldiers later that year in Leipzig. Upon arrival in Weimar, hopes that “brother Goethe,” who has now been officially appointed to the Privy Council, will enable him to present his essay “On Military Marriages” to Duke Karl August and to set forth his various projects for social reforms. But instead of achieving any official station at the court, he is treated as a figure of fun on account of his eccentricities. Goethe observes in a letter: “Lenz is among us like a sick child, and we rock and dandle him and give him whatever toy he wants to play with.” Realizing that his role at Weimar, as he puts it in his play Tantalus, is “to serve as a farce for the gods,” he retires to the rural hamlet of Berka for the summer, where he writes the epistolary novel, The Forest Brother (subtitled “A Pendant to The Sorrows of Werther”), which refracts his frustrations with aristocratic court life. During the early fall, Charlotte von Stein, Goethe’s new love interest, invites Lenz to join her for a month as an English tutor in her country castle — perhaps out of pity, perhaps to incur the jealousy of her evasive paramour. Wieland observes in an early November letter: “Since he has been here, hardly a day has gone by when Lenz has not played one prank or another which would have blown up in anyone else’s face.” One of these pranks (a scurrilous poem or pasquinade involving highly placed personages at the court?) provokes Goethe to refer in a November 26 diary entry to “Lenzens Esely” (“Lenz’s asinine behavior”); exasperated, he asks the duke to expel Lenz from Weimar on November 29. The latter writes Herder on the same day that he has been “cast out of Heaven as a vagrant, rebel, and satirist,” bitterly adding: “How long are all of you going to keep on bowing and scraping to social etiquette and illustrious names?” Immediately seeks asylum in Emmendingen, at the home of Goethe’s sister Cornelia: pregnant, feeling abandoned by both her husband, Schlosser, and her brother, she welcomes him with sympathy.

  1777: Like “The Shipwrecked European” of the title of one of his 1776 poems, Lenz spends the year adrift. In January, visits the blind Alsatian poet Gottlieb Conrad Pfeffel in Colmar, then makes his way to Switzerland: stops in Basel, then in Zurich, where he stays at the home of the celebrated Swiss theologian and mystic, Johann Kaspar Lavater. Cornelia gives birth to a daughter in May, naming Lenz the godfather. Visits the Rheinfall and the Saint Gotthard pass. Returns to Emmendingen in June, devastated by the death of Cornelia just a month after she had given birth. Writes his last major story “The Country Preacher,” a didactic portrait of a rural parson’s economic and moral reforms of peasant life according to physiocratic principles. Further political projects: observing the unrest of the Republicans in Zurich, dreams of becoming “the epic poet” of the Swiss struggle for freedom; drafts plans for the foundation of a model school for women in Basel. Increasingly unstable, seeks out ex-Stürmer und Dränger Christoph Kaufmann in Winterthur, who reports in late November that Lenz has had a serious “accident” (a suicide attempt?) and decides to place him in the care of the Alsatian pastor Johann Friederich Oberlin.

  1778: Stays with Oberlin in Waldersbach from January 20 to February 8, then is taken in by an old friend in Strasbourg for a few weeks before being sent on to Goethe’s brother-in-law Schlosser in Emmendingen. At the latter’s insistence, tries to patch things up with his father, to whom he writes in March: “Father, I have sinned in the eyes of heaven and in your eyes and am henceforth no longer worthy of being called your child.” In April, Schlosser reports to a mutual friend that Lenz’s condition has worsened: “He again attempted to throw himself out the window, he continued hitting his head against the wall, which forced me to have him tied up and get two guards to watch him day and night for the last ten days. Even under these conditions, he continues yowling and bellowing like a cow, gnashing his pillow and scratching at himself.” The crisis passed, Schlosser decides that only manual labor can cure what he describes as Lenz’s “hypochondria”: he is sent to live for three months as an apprentice to a shoemaker in Emmendingen, then spends another six months with a forester in Wiswyl.

  1779: January-June: With funds raised by Schlosser among friends in Weimar, Colmar, and Switzerland, is placed in the care of a doctor in Hertigen (who describes his affliction as “melancholia”). In June, Lenz’s brother Karl arrives to take him back to Livonia, where their father has become General Superintendent of the Protestant churches of the province. Plans are made to get him a position as headmaster of the cathedral school of Riga, but Herder refuses to write him a recommendation letter, which costs him the job. Sets off to St. Petersburg to seek employment at the court: writes an ode to the czarina, publishes an essay on the education of young nobles, to no avail.

  1780-1792: The Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek prints an obituary of Lenz in 1780. In this posthumous condition, he spends the remaining twelve years of his life in Moscow, an embarrassment to his father and abandoned by all his German friends. Acts as private secretary to Gerhard Friedrich Müller, explorer of Siberia, influential historian and director of the archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who finds him private students among the nobility. Frequents Masonic circles and writes up several proposals for so
cial and educational reforms. Other projects include the founding of a new university in Livonia, the creation of public libraries, the establishment of a new banking system in Russia, the publication of a French newspaper in Moscow, a literary society for the Russian nobility. Aspiring to the role of cultural intermediary, translates a number of texts from Russian into German. During his final years, befriends the cosmopolitan Russian writer Nikolai Karamzin, who notes in his Letters of a Russian Traveler that “even in his madness, his poetic ideas continued to astonish us.” Is found dead on a Moscow street during the night of March 24, 1792, apparently homeless, age forty-one — perhaps, given his close ties to prominent Freemasons, the victim of a political assassination by agents of the czarina who fears the exportation of the French Revolution to Russia.

  ___________

  In his 1985 autobiography, The Play of the Eyes, Elias Canetti describes a memorable visit to Strasbourg in 1933. Invited to the Alsatian capital to attend a festival of modern experimental music, he discovers upon arrival that he has been lodged in the very room in which the philosopher Herder used to receive daily visits from his young disciple Goethe. What’s more, upon usher ing him into these hallowed quarters, Canetti’s host presents him with a gift copy of an ancient Almanac of the Muses containing a poem of Lenz’s, unaware of the full symbolic significance that this sacred relic holds for his guest — as Canetti explains, his discovery of Büchner’s Lenz (and Woyzeck) the previous year had been one of the great conversion experiences of his entire literary career. Now in Strasbourg, housed directly across from its celebrated cathedral (whose spire still featured the tablet where Goethe and Lenz had inscribed their names in friendship), he feels himself part of the great apostolic succession of German literature:

  How had [my host] known this? I had taken that young poet [Lenz] to my heart like a brother, I loved him, not as I loved those great men Goethe and Herder, but as one who had suffered an injustice, who had been cheated out of his rights. Lenz, to this day an avant-garde poet, whom I had got to know through Büchner’s novella, that incredible piece of German prose, Lenz, who was horrified at the thought of death, to whom it was not given to make his peace with death. Strasbourg, where an avantgarde, though a musical one, was now meeting, was the right place for Lenz. Here he had met Goethe, his idol, who was also his ruin; and sixty years later, Büchner, his disciple, who thanks to him had brought German drama to perfection in a fragment, had also been here. That much I knew, and it all converged in this town.

  This entire tradition of the avant-garde, Canetti morosely concludes, now lay in mortal danger: only a few weeks before his arrival in Strasbourg, Hitler had ordered the infamous burning of the books. After this auto-da-fé, German literature would have little choice but to retreat into exile.

  When the eighteen-year-old Georg Büchner set off from his native Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt to pursue his medical studies at the University of Strasbourg in late 1831, he could not have foreseen that his own brief literary career would similarly take shape under the sign of exile, but it is clear from his correspondence that, compared to his stifling existence in the small provincial town of Darmstadt, he immediately found the cosmopolitan French city electrifying: to the “nasskalte Holländer-atmosphäre” (“the sopping-cold Dutch atmosphere”) of Germany, he by far preferred the “Gewitterluft” (“the stormy air”) of France. Unsettled weather indeed: during Büchner’s initial two years in Strasbourg, the political tempest fomented by the July Revolution of 1830 had not yet subsided. Although Belgium had gained its independence, the uprising in Poland had been brutally and swiftly suppressed, and in late 1831, the silk weavers (or canuts) of Lyon erupted into open rebellion, with the worker unrest then shifting the following June to Paris, where sixty republicans were killed in the course of anti-government demonstrations and martial law was imposed for three weeks. Strasbourg, at the confines of France and Germany, provided a haven for political dissidents of both countries during the initial years of repression that followed the bourgeoisie’s triumphant consolidation of its power in 1830, and Büchner was therefore exposed to a broad array of left-wing ideologies, rubbing shoulders with Fourierists and Saint-Simonians, and (very likely) participating in the local meetings of Blanqui’s “Société des amis du peuple” and the even more militantly populist “Société des droits de l’homme,” latter-day disciples of the revolutionary firebrand Babeuf.

  Among Büchner’s closest friends during his first 1831-33 stay in Strasbourg were the brothers August and Adolph Stöber, both active in the student club “Eugenia,” whose meetings he frequently attended, lecturing his fellow members on the outlook for radical political action in Germany. The Stöber brothers’ father, Ehrenfried Stöber, classified as an “homme dangereux” by the French police, was the German translator of the apocalyptic Paroles d’un croyant by the socialist theologian Lamennais, the most Blakean of the French romantics, as well as the author (in French) of a lengthy Vie de J.F. Oberlin (1831) which touched on Lenz’s stay with the Alsatian pastor — this edifying portrait of Oberlin’s good works among the peasantry in the remote mountains of Alsace would supply Büchner with the setting for his novella Lenz (while also providing the model for Balzac’s 1833 Utopian novel, The Country Doctor, as well as the inspiration for the missionary school in Ohio founded in his name that same year). Following in his father’s footsteps, the young August Stöber, something of a local history buff, was pursuing his own independent research into the particulars of Lenz’s residence in Alsace during the early 1770s, and in 1831 published a brief biographical study of the writer featuring letters recently unearthed in Strasbourg’s municipal library which concerned his ill-starred courtship of Friederike Brion — the entire essay intended to illuminate both what was “beautiful and blissful” and at the same time “contorted and cramped” about Lenz’s Sturm und Drang years.

  During his stay in Strasbourg, Büchner lived at the home of the Protestant minister Johann Jakob Jaeglé — to whose daughter, Wilhelmine, he secretly became engaged in 1832. Jaeglé, like the elder Stöber, had been a close associate of Oberlin’s — indeed, he had delivered the official oration at the latter’s funeral in 1826 — and it was in Jaeglé’s library that Büchner came across the very same issue of Schiller’s Almanac of the Muses with the poem by Lenz that Canetti would so treasure during his visit to Strasbourg exactly a century later. Lenz’s ballad, written in the persona of Friederike Brion, evokes the despair of a young woman jilted by her lover (i.e., Goethe). Oddly enough, Büchner quoted this text to his fiancée Wilhelmine in a 1834 letter from Giessen in which he finally gave her permission to announce their secret engagement to her father. Even more oddly, the opening line of this poem was also used by Büchner that same year to code secret messages to his political co-conspirators in the plot to overthrow the government of the Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt — Lenz’s troubled simulations of desire translated into the covert Oedipal language of revolution.

  __________

  Required by Hessian law to return to the territories of the Grand Duchy after his two years of study abroad, Büchner enrolled in late October 1833 at the University of Giessen, where he would spend the next nine months. After the exhilaration of Strasbourg, life in this small university town plunged him into a severe depression — further deepened by the brief bout of meningitis from which he suffered soon after his arrival. By the following March, his mental condition, to judge from his letters to his fiancée Mina Jaeglé, had deteriorated into almost catatonic despair. The descriptions of his despondency uncannily prefigure the language of Lenz: “Since I crossed the Rhine, I seem to be dead inside, not a single feeling comes to the surface. I’m an automaton; my soul has been removed. . . . There are no mountains here with an open view. Hill after hill and broad valleys, everywhere a hollow mediocrity; I can’t get used to this landscape, and the city is abominable. . . . Incessant headaches and fever, barely a few hours of inadequate rest. I don’t get to bed before two a.m. and then
constant sudden awakenings, a sea of thoughts that consume my senses. . . . My mental faculties are completely worn out. Work is impossible. . . . I’m afraid of my own voice — and of my mirror. . . . I’m alone, as in a grave; when will your hand awaken me?”

  In his letters Büchner often conflates his own private misery with the sufferings of the impoverished peasantry in the backward Duchy. “The political situation here could drive me insane,” he wrote to his friend August Stöber, “The poor people patiently draw the cart upon which the princes and the liberals play out their comedy of apes. Every night I pray to the hang-man’s rope.” Although he had promised his parents before leaving Strasbourg that he would not get involved in “clandestine politics and revolutionary children’s pranks” when he returned home, he soon fell in with revolutionary student circles and founded secret chapters of the French “Society for the Rights of Man” in Giessen and Darmstadt in the spring of 1834 — this engagement in militant politics perhaps providing him with the only viable escape from his suicidal depression. Above and beyond his shadowy activities as an organizer of radical student and workers’ cells, Büchner’s sole venture into concrete revolutionary praxis seems to have been the co-authorship with Friedrich Ludwig Weidig of the incendiary pamphlet The Hessian Messenger — a call to arms to the peasantry to rise up in insurrection against their feudal overlords. Given the draconian enforcement of censorship laws in the police state of Hesse, the government authorities, tipped off by an informant, were swift to react: in August, Büchner’s close friend Karl Minnigerode was arrested and subsequently incarcerated for three years for attempting to distribute the pamphlet, soon followed by Weidig who, after considerable torture, languished in prison until 1837 before finally deciding to slash his wrists. Although a warrant was issued for his arrest as a suspected co-conspirator and his student quarters in Giessen thoroughly searched, Büchner (for the moment at least) narrowly managed to escape the fate of his associates. He took refuge in his family’s home in Darmstadt, where he spent the fall researching the history of the French Revolution in the municipal library and working in his father’s medical laboratory.