Georg Buchner
born Oct. 17, 1813, Goddelau,
Hesse-Darmstadt [Germany]
died Feb. 19, 1837, Zürich, Switz.
German dramatist, a major forerunner of
the Expressionist school of playwriting
of the early 20th century.
The son of an army doctor, Büchner
studied medicine at the Universities of
Strasbourg and Giessen. Caught up in the
movement inspired by the Paris uprising
of 1830, Büchner published a pamphlet,
Der hessische Landbote (1834; The
Hessian Messenger), in Giessen calling
for economic and political revolution,
and he also founded a radical society,
the Society for Human Rights. He escaped
arrest by fleeing to Strasbourg, where
he completed a dissertation. This earned
him an appointment as a lecturer in
natural science at the University of
Zürich in 1836. He died in Zürich of
typhoid fever the following year.
Büchner’s three plays were clearly
influenced in style by William
Shakespeare and by the German Romantic
Sturm und Drang movement. In content and
form they were far ahead of their time.
Their short, abrupt scenes combined
extreme naturalism with visionary power.
His first play, Dantons Tod (1835;
Danton’s Death), a drama of the French
Revolution, is suffused with deep
pessimism. Its protagonist, the
revolutionary Danton, is shown as a man
deeply distraught at the bloodshed he
had helped unleash. Leonce und Lena
(written 1836), a satire on the nebulous
nature of Romantic ideas, shows the
influence of Alfred de Musset and
Clemens Brentano. His last work,
Woyzeck, a fragment, anticipated the
social drama of the 1890s with its
compassion for the poor and oppressed.
Except for Dantons Tod, not produced
until 1902, Büchner’s writings appeared
posthumously, the fragmentary Lenz in
1839 and Woyzeck not until 1879. Woyzeck
served as the libretto for Alban Berg’s
opera Wozzeck (1925).
Büchner, the elder brother of the
physician and philosopher Ludwig
Büchner, exercised a marked influence on
the naturalistic drama that came into
vogue in the 1890s and, later, on the
Expressionism that voiced the
disillusionment of many artists and
intellectuals after World War I. He is
now recognized as one of the outstanding
figures in German dramatic literature.
