Georg Büchner

Georg Büchner
Georg Büchner.jpg
"Don't you hear? Don't you hear the dreadful voice that screams from the whole horizon, and that man usually calls silence?"
Born Karl Georg Büchner
October 17, 1813
Goddelau, Germany
Died February 19, 1837
Zurich, Switzerland
Occupation dramatist
Nationality German
Notable work(s) Danton's Death; Leonce and Lena; Woyzeck
Relative(s) Ludwig Büchner
Influences

Karl Georg Büchner (October 17, 1813 – February 19, 1837) was a German dramatist and writer of prose. He was the brother of physician and philosopher Ludwig Büchner. Büchner's talent is generally held in great esteem in Germany. It is widely believed that, but for his early death, he might have attained the significance of such central German literary figures as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller.

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Life and career

Born in Goddelau near Darmstadt, Hesse-Darmstadt, the son of a doctor, Büchner attended a Humanist secondary school that focused on modern languages, including French, Italian, and English. Nevertheless Büchner studied medicine in Strasbourg.

In 1828 he became interested in politics and joined a circle of William Shakespeare aficionados which later on probably became the Gießen and Darmstadt section of the "Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte" (Society for Human Rights). In Strasbourg, he immersed himself in French literature and political thought.

Georg Büchner. Drawing by J.B.A. Muston

Writing career

While Büchner continued his studies in Gießen he established a secret society dedicated to the revolutionary cause. With the help of the evangelical theologian Friedrich Ludwig Weidig, he published the leaflet Der Hessische Landbote, a revolutionary pamphlet criticizing social grievances in the Grand Duchy of Hesse. The authorities charged them with treason and issued a warrant of apprehension. While Weidig was arrested, tortured and died imprisoned in Darmstadt, Büchner fled across the border to Strasbourg where he wrote most of his literary work and translated two plays by Victor Hugo, Lucrèce Borgia and Marie Tudor. Two years later, his dissertation, "Mémoire sur le Système Nerveux du Barbeaux (Cyprinus barbus L.)" was published in Paris and Strasbourg. He was influenced by the utopian communist theories of François-Noël Babeuf and Claude Henri de Saint-Simon. In October 1836, after receiving his doctorate and being appointed by the University of Zurich as a lecturer in anatomy, Büchner relocated to Zurich where he spent his final months writing and teaching until he died of typhus at the age of twenty-three.

In 1835, his first play, Dantons Tod (Danton's Death), about the French revolution, was published, followed by Lenz (first partly published in Karl Gutzkow's and Wienberg's Deutsche Revue, which was quickly banned); Lenz is a novella based on the life of the Sturm und Drang poet Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. In 1836 his second play, Leonce and Lena portrayed the nobility. His unfinished and most famous play, Woyzeck, was the first literary work in German whose main characters were members of the working class. Published posthumously, it became the basis for Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck which premiered in 1925.

By the 1870s, Büchner was nearly forgotten in Germany when Karl Emil Franzos edited his works; these later became a major influence on naturalism and expressionism. Arnold Zweig described Lenz, Büchner's only work of prose, as the "beginning of modern European prose".

External links

Editions

Translations

There are many translations of the individual plays.

Persondata
NAME Büchner, Georg
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Büchner, Karl Georg
SHORT DESCRIPTION German playwright
DATE OF BIRTH 17 October, 1813
PLACE OF BIRTH Goddelau near Darmstadt, Hessen-Darmstadt
DATE OF DEATH 19 February, 1837
PLACE OF DEATH Zürich