Lenz (16 page)

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.

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.