Literary genius
Forever young and relevant after 200 years: Georg Büchner was ahead of his times.
The young physician from near Darmstadt was a pioneering spirit. He was ahead of his times and ready to oppose traditional conditions. Nowadays, Georg Büchner (1813–1837) would probably be active in the Occupy Movement. After all, this movement cited Der Hessische Landbote, Büchner’s revolutionary pamphlet of 1834. The literary genius, who died aged just 23, will always remain young and refreshingly relevant. The 200th anniversary of the writer and revolutionary will be celebrated in 2013.
Three classics in a nutshell
Danton’s Death The play was written in just five weeks, and yet it is a gripping drama with moving language and powerful content. “When history comes to open its graves, despotism may yet choke on the smell of our corpses,” says Büchner’s Danton. He uses the example of the French Revolution to show how the ideals of freedom can be transformed into their opposites. Whilst Büchner was writing Danton, he lived in fear of arrest. The play was published in1835, in a censored version. Danton’s Death was the writer’s only work to be published during his lifetime. But its premiere was not staged until 1902.
Leonce and Lena Büchner’s protagonists, Prince Leonce of the Kingdom of Popo and Princess Lena of the Kingdom of Pipi, command the stage in a seemingly harmless, humorous and playfully light-hearted comedy. But this simply masks a biting satire of the decadence at the royal courts and the pettiness of Germany’s small-state mentality in Büchner’s day. In order to banish all the previous boredom of life, Leonce promises his Lena: “We shall have all the clocks in the kingdom destroyed, all calendars banned, then we shall measure the hours and months by the flower clock alone, by the rhythms of blossom and fruit.”
Woyzeck Büchner never completed this play, but it is one of the most frequently performed works on stages in Germany – because it poses fundamental questions, and almost every sentence is a sensuous experience. In brief: an ordinary soldier stabs to death his unfaithful lover. But behind the simple plot lie the eternal, unsolved questions: How do circumstances influence human beings? What is destiny, and what is freedom of decision? And why do we do, what we do?
