Lenz Page 13

  Between late January and late February 1835, he wrote Danton’s Death at a white heat and immediately sent it off to the journalist Karl Gutzkow, the leader (with Heine) of the group of left-wing intellectuals known as “Young Germany.” At Gutzkow’s enthusiastic recommendation, a heavily censored edition of these “Dramatic Tableaux of the French Reign of Terror” (as the play was subtitled) was published in Frankfurt later that July under Büchner’s name — even though, given his hazardous political situation, he had explicitly requested anonymity. Büchner’s reading of Lenz’s innovative Sturm und Drang prose dramas (and of Shakespeare) is evident in many of the formal features of his play — most notably in the slangy recourse to a vernacular German whose earthy bawdiness serves to undercut the lofty flights of revolutionary rhetoric, and in the utterly un-Aristotelian distribution of the dramatic action into a series of a fragmentary episodes or tableaux whose rapid-fire scene and mood changes acquire an almost stroboscopic or hallucinatory intensity. Büchner’s adoption of what critics have called the “open form” of Lenzian drama in turn allows him to explore the fundamental political and philosophical debates of the play — embodied by the opposition between the epicurean skepticism of Danton and the theory-driven asceticism of Robespierre — from a variety of shifting perspectives which in the end provide no dialectical resolution to the contradictions of the French Revolution. Pointing ahead to Lenz, the play enigmatically closes with a scene in which the character Lucile Desmoulins, welcoming her imminent execution, sits on the steps of the guillotine like a mad Ophelia, singing of death.

  _____________

  Having learned that a warrant for his arrest was still outstanding in Darmstadt, Büchner escaped by foot to Strasbourg in early March, slipping into the city under the pseudonym of Jacques Lutzius, wine cellarer. In June, the official governmental newspapers of Darmstadt and Frankfurt published a descriptive mug shot of him, announcing that though he had fled the Fatherland, he was still wanted for high treason. The portrait, one of the few that survive of Büchner, is worth quoting, given its distant resemblance to those of his fellow exile Lenz:

  Age: 21 years,

  Hair: blond,

  Forehead: very prominent,

  Eyes: grey,

  Nose: strong,

  Mouth: small,

  Beard: blond,

  Chin: round,

  Face: oval,

  Complexion: fresh,

  Stature: strong, thin,

  Specific characteristics: near-sightedness.

  Although he eventually managed to regularize his situation with the French authorities by re-enrolling in medical school, Büchner’s return to Strasbourg was marked by a constant fear of deportation and, as his letters to his family show, deep concern about the ongoing arrests and imprisonments of the student comrades he had left behind. As for the possibility of radical political change in Germany, he wrote his brother, “For the last six months I’ve been utterly convinced that nothing is to be done and that anyone who sacrifices himself right now is foolishly risking his neck . . . I know that purposeful, unified action is impossible and that all attempts to undertake it will prove in vain.”

  Disillusioned with the prospects for revolution (which, he observed — well before Marx — could only come about through the collective mobilization of the masses, not through the individual agency of bourgeois intellectuals) and fully aware of the precariousness of his position in France as a political refugee, Büchner threw himself into what he half-jokingly referred to in a letter to Gutzkow as “subtle suicide through work.” Indeed, between the writing of Danton’s Death in January 1835 and his death at age 24 in 1837, Büchner produced his entire literary and scientific oeuvre within the space of a mere thirty months. Only a few of these works were published during his lifetime: Danton’s Death, two translations of dramas by Victor Hugo, and his French doctoral dissertation, Mémoire sur le système nerveux du barbeau. The rest would have to await posthumous publication: Leonce and Lena, Woyzeck, Lenz, On Cranial Nerves, as well as various essays on Descartes and Spinoza (a comedy entitled Aretino was unfortunately lost). No wonder Gutzkow wrote him upon hearing that he had written his masterpiece, Danton’s Death, “in five weeks at most”: “You seem to be in a great hurry. Where do you want to get to? Is the ground really burning under your feet?” Or as Camille Desmoulins remarks in Danton’s Death: “We have no time to waste.” To which the world-weary Danton retorts, quoting Shakespeare’s Richard II: “But it is time that wastes us.” This state of urgency (or emergency) is the hallmark of Büchner’s finest writing. Danton’s Death is the fastest moving historical drama in the entire modern repertory and the precipitous paratactic pace of Lenz is unmatched by anything in nineteenth-century prose until Rimbaud’s Illuminations. By the time Büchner gets to Woyzeck (as Werner Herzog’s 1978 film adaptation admirably demonstrates), the breakneck speed has become positively manic.

  Upon his return to Strasbourg in the spring of 1835, Büchner immediately undertook the translation of Victor Hugo’s historical dramas Maria Tudor and Lucretia Borgia — a bit of literary scut work arranged for him by his friend Gutzkow and otherwise not worth mentioning were it not for the light it casts on Büchner’s transit between languages, already evident in his transposition of French historical documents into German in Danton’s Death. Daily life in bilingual Strasbourg placed him into a kind of linguistic in between: his fiancée Wilhemine Jaeglé was, it would seem, a French speaker (her letters to Büchner, at any rate, were penned in French) and his courses at the university were also conducted in French, the academic language in which he wrote his doctoral thesis in comparative anatomy on the nervous system of the barbel fish. Just as Goethe and his fellow writers of the Sturm und Drang period had paradoxically profited from their linguistic deracination in bilingual Alsace in order to elaborate their vision of new national German literature grounded in native folk traditions, so Büchner’s exile in Strasbourg exercised a profound impact on his relation to his mother tongue. As Antoine Berman has shown in his L’Epreuve de l’étranger, this “trial” or “proof” of the foreign is a crucial trope in the theory and practice of translation of the German Romantics, for whom the German language must first travel outside of itself (or, in Hegelian terms, alienate itself) in order, in a movement of dialectical reversal, to recover itself at a higher (and presumably, more national) level. But in the case of Büchner’s Lenz — the parallels with the late hymns and fragments that Hölderlin wrote after his return from Bordeaux are striking — this triumphant homecoming after the odyssey into the Other never takes place. If the prose of this novella remains so astonishing even to this day, it is because Büchner, writing at the borderlines and as it were in translation, manages to estrange — or disorient — his native German into an idiom utterly foreign, utterly new. Traduttore-traditore runs the hoary adage: accused of high treason by his Fatherland, Büchner in his Lenz in turn traduces standard literary German, inciting it to a revolutionary outbreak it has never known before or since. It is to this radical infidelity that I hope my own translation has remained faithful.

  Based as it is on the transcription of original documents (most massively, Oberlin’s diary), Lenz also works like a translation in a far more literal, intertextual sense. To judge from his correspondence, Büchner apparently began gathering the materials for his novella just as he was finishing up his Hugo versions in the early summer of 1835. Through the good offices of his close friend August Stöber, he had at his disposal: Ludwig Tieck’s recent three-volume edition of Lenz’s works (with biographical material); Ehrenfried Stöber’s aforementioned 600-page Vie de J.F. Oberlin; various manuscripts by Lenz (including his letters to Salzmann about Friederike Brion and the proceedings of the “German Society” of Strasbourg); a copy of Oberlin’s diary; and local lore about Lenz gathered from pastor Jaeglé and other acquaintances in Alsace. At the outset, it would seem that it was Lenz’s troubled relation to Goethe (as lensed through the latter’s Poetry and Truth) that mos
t attracted Büchner’s interest. For example, informing his family of his new project, he wrote: “I have here obtained a great deal of interesting information about a friend of Goethe’s, an unfortunate poet called Lenz, who was here [in Strasbourg] at the same time as Goethe and went half mad.” Gutzkow, who was encouraging him to quickly come up with a “second book” to cash in on the succès d’estime of Danton’s Death, also alludes in his letters to Büchner to the “novella” mentioned by the latter which, under the tentative title, Memories of Lenz, was to have dealt with the tortuous friendship between the “stranded poet” and Goethe. As late as 1836, still not having received Büchner’s manuscript, Gutzkow insistently returned to the Goethe theme, which he obviously thought might have provided the subject for a piquant roman à clef: “A novella Lenz was at one point under consideration. Didn’t you write me that Lenz replaced Goethe at Friederike’s side? What Goethe recounts about him in Strasbourg, the way in which he sought to protect a lady love who had been entrusted to his care, is also very suitable material.”

  For Gutzkow, then, what he refers to as Büchner’s “Lenziana subjective and objective” would have turned on the tragi-comic tale of Lenz’s Strasbourg amours and, more particularly, on his unrequited courtship of Friederike Brion — not a word of which is mentioned in Goethe’s Poetry and Truth. Goethe instead focuses on the story of Lenz’s hapless imbroglio with Cleophe Fibich, the fiancée of one of his employers — clearly a screen memory serving to hide Lenz’s far more disquieting attentions to Friederike. In the account of his Strasbourg years contained in Poetry and Truth, Goethe had carefully crafted the story of his love for Friederike into a sentimental idyll straight out of Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield or Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse and, together with the celebrated “Sesenheim lyrics” addressed to her, this kitschy chapter of his youth had acquired canonical status among German readers avid for details about the romantic life of their national poet. August Stöber, who had discovered Lenz’s letters to Salzmann in the Strasbourg library, was obsessed with the Goethe-Friederike-Lenz triangle, later devoting an entire 1841 monograph to the question — which revealed, among other things, that some of the recently discovered “Sesenheim lyrics,” originally attributed to Goethe, had in fact been written by Lenz. But in his extremely condescending portrait of Lenz in Poetry and Truth, Goethe had considerably downplayed the depth of their early friendship, choosing primarily to dwell on the latter’s eccentricities while presenting him as the living symptom of everything that was sickly and self-indulgent about the generation of Werther. Although he praised Lenz’s inborn creative talents, Goethe magisterially wrote him out of literary history: compared to his fellow Sturm und Drang playwright Klinger, he observed, Lenz was merely “a transient meteor who passed but for a moment over the horizon of German literature and suddenly vanished without leaving any trace behind.” After the expulsion from Weimar, this single phrase from Poetry and Truth served, more than anything else, to seal the fate of Lenz’s reputation for generations to come. Even Ludwig Tieck, knowing of Goethe’s deep-seated animosity towards his erstwhile friend, hesitated at length before issuing his edition of Lenz’s collected works in 1828. Goethe’s death in 1832 thus opened a space for Büchner to rescue the traces of the “stranded poet” from erasure.

  As Gutzkow had well realized, the story of Goethe’s and Lenz’s ill-fated friendship, focused on their shared object of infatuation, Friederike Brion, would have made for a fascinating study in literary Doppelgängerei. At their first meeting at Salzmann’s in Strasbourg, Goethe was reputed to have said to Lenz, “Bist mir willkommen, Bübchen. Es ist mir als ob ich mich in dir bespiegelte” (“I welcome you, young fellow, it’s as if I saw myself mirrored in you”) and indeed, throughout their acquaintanceship (or what Lenz only half-jestingly referred to as their “marriage”), the latter would assume the role of Goethe’s specular double — “Goethe’s ape,” as certain contemporaries derisively referred to him. In a very Pirandellian sense, Lenz acted the part of a character in search of an author, and this author proved to be Goethe — at once his idol and phantasmatic rival. Both in his literary works (most evident in his novel The Forest Brother, subtitled “A Pendant to The Sorrows of Werther) as well as in his choice of love objects, Lenz unerringly chose to live out a script written by his idealized Other: first, in his courtship of Friederike Brion (whose primary purpose seems to have been to gain access to Goethe’s private love letters to her), then in his deep Platonic attachment to Goethe’s beloved sister Cornelia (for whom he seems to have incestuously functioned as a substitute brother), and finally in Weimar, when he managed to gain the intimacy of Goethe’s current paramour, Charlotte von Stein. In each of these homosocial triangulations, Lenz acts as a parasite on the host organism of Goethe or as a distorted and increasingly disturbed quotation of the Goethean original. By expelling this troublesome guest from Weimar, Goethe essentially kills a double who has gotten out of hand—a secret sharer who reminds him all too much of those Wertherian follies of his youth which he must now, as a respected and powerful public figure, consign to oblivion if he is to successfully erect himself into a national literary monument.

  None of this of course figures in Büchner’s novella, but by placing Lenz’s madness at the center of his story, he not only articulates what Goethe had chosen to repress or pass over in silence in Poetry and Truth, but also structurally reproduces the relationship of parasite to host by allowing his own account as it were to feed off (and disrupt) a tutelary text in the fashion of Lenz himself. Of the slightly less than ten thousand words of Büchner’s Lenz, about one-eighth are directly lifted, without attribution, from the Oberlin manuscript his friend Stöber had lent him. Far from merely constituting a covert act of plagiarism, Büchner’s strategy of quotation is in fact a brilliant (post-)modernist experiment in intertextuality, for it allows him to incorporate bits and pieces of documentary “fact” as design elements in the larger collage structure of his fiction. A recent German edition of Lenz has typographically dramatized this complex overlapping of Büchner’s novella and Oberlin’s diary by directly overprinting the former onto the latter. In this graphic configuration, with both texts now occupying an identical space on the page as superposed strata, Oberlin’s eyewitness account of Lenz’s madness (inked in pale green) ghosts its way through — and visually perturbs — our reading (in black and white) of Büchner’s tale. The net effect produced is a series of uncanny interferences between first- and third-person narrative, between fact and fiction, between original and translation — all of which serves to create what in French are called parasites and in English, static. Significantly enough, as Lenz sinks deeper and deeper into schizophrenia over the course of the novella, ever more fixated on the paternal imago of Oberlin, ever more wracked by Oedipal desires and guilt, so Büchner’s text grafts itself ever more closely onto the pastor’s diary until, at the end, his own authorship seems to vanish altogether into the parasitic static. Whether Lenz is a finished work or, as Gutzkow and many subsequent critics have claimed, merely a “fragment” thus in a sense becomes irrelevant. Like its protagonist, its destiny has been simply to “live on,” now found, now lost in the white noise of translation.

  Background Readings:

  Berman, Antoine, L’Epreuve de l’étranger (Paris: Gallimard, 1984).

  Boyle, Nicholas, Goethe: The Poet and the Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), vol. 1.

  Büchner, Georg, Sämtliche Werke, eds. Henri and Rosemarie Poschmann (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992), 2 vols.

  Büchner, Georg, Lenz, ed. Hubert Gersch (Stuttgart: Reklam, 1984).

  Büchner, Georg/Oberlin, J.F., Lenz, ed. Klaus Detjen (Frankfurt: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 2003).

  Büchner, Georg, Complete Works and Letters, eds. Walter Hinderer and Henry J. Schmidt (New York: Continuum, 1986). Büchner, Georg, The Complete Plays, ed. Michael Patterson (London: Methuen, 1987).

  Büchner, Georg, Complete Plays, Lenz and Other Wr
itings, trans.

  John Reddick (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1993). Canetti, Elias, The Memoirs of Elias Canetti (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).

  Crighton, James, Büchner and Madness (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998).

  Guthrie, Lenz and Büchner: Studies in Dramatic Form (New York: Peter Lang, 1984).

  Hauschild, Jan-Christoph, Georg Büchner, Biographie (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993).

  Lindenberger, Herbert, Georg Büchner (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964).

  Knapp, Gerhard, Georg Büchner (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1984). Müller-Sievers, Helmut, Desorientierung: Anatomie und Dichtung bei Georg Büchner (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2003). Reddick, John, Georg Büchner: The Shattered Whole (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

  Serres, Michel, Le Parasite (Paris: Grasset, 1980).

  Winter, Hans-Gerd, J.M.R. Lenz (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987).