Georg Büchner
DICHTUNGEN, SCHRIFTEN, BRIEFE UND DOKUMENTE
Edited by Rosemarie and Henri Poschmann
Two volumes, 2,311pp. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker. Paperback, 25euros.
3 618 68013 9
I must declare an interest. We owe the precarious survival of Georg Büchner’s works to the inspired perspicacity of my great-great-uncle, the Galician-Jewish novelist and publicist Karl Emil Franzos. It was he who began publishing Büchner’s writings in 1878, in the periodical Mehr Licht! – a characteristic homage to Goethe’s mythical last words. Franzos’s editorial labours began in 1875. Virtually no minutiae of textual, biographical, historical information, no particles in the history of Büchner’s reception to this day (there will be one glaring omission) seem to elude Henri and Rosemarie Poschmann, editors of these two volumes. Their edition of Büchner’s Dichtungen, Schriften, Briefe und Dokumente runs to some 2,300 pages on thin paper. Yet, so far as I can make out, they do not tell us how or why Büchner’s fragmentary, often scarcely legible “foul papers” came into Franzos’s caring hands. Nor do they elucidate the awesome clairvoyance which it must have taken at that date to recognize something of Büchner’s stature. My mother, a Viennese grande dame if ever there was, affirmed that it was an apothecary in Lemberg who drew Franzos’s attention to the material, when it ran the risk of becoming waste paper. This may be a family legend. But it would not be out of tune. Büchner’s resurrection is as miraculous as are his creations.
Dantons Tod was the only play published during Büchner’s lifetime (he died aged twenty-three). Published by a political exile, against the background of the 1830 uprisings and Büchner’s own clandestine, radical activities, the text was mutilated by censorship. The Poschmann version embodies a complete revision and recension of the manuscript material now preserved in Weimar. It draws on the genesis of the play as it can be reconstructed from Büchner’s correspondence with the radical writer and confidant Karl Ferdinand Gutzkow. A conspectus of historical sources, as reflected in Büchner’s insurgent pamphleteering in the Hessischer Landbote, extends to Thiers and Mignet. The distant promise and aura of the American Revolution flicker in the background. As do passages from Shakespeare, a ubiquitous presence, and from the early Goethe and Schiller. The Poschmanns document the degree to which Büchner, barely out of adolescence, was steeped in philosophic precedents. Dantons Tod (Danton’s Death) echoes Spinoza and Rousseau, Kant, Fichte and Feuerbach. Like Leopardi, another rebellious pessimist and, though in a different vein, Hölderlin, Georg Büchner at no point separates the poetic from the theoretical, the literary from the metaphysical.
Almost all who came across this subversive, seemingly ephemeral drama condemned it out of hand. Detraction was vicious. It dwelt on Büchner’s “obscenity”, on his “diabolical” mockeries of the established order. Not until Max Reinhardt’s production in Berlin in December 1916, a significant date, was there a breakthrough.
The textual criticism and the line-by-line annotations in this presentation are monumental. Consider the source material offered for Danton’s famous uses of Nichts (“nothingness”). Büchner is echoing Melissus in the excerpts he made of Greek philosophy, but also Spinoza’s Ethics. Or consult the references to a German Volksbuch of 1602 and to a lyric by Friedrich Daniel Schubart in regard to Camille Desmoulins’s invocation of the Wandering Jew: “The world is the everlasting Jew”. One of the very few oversights is the lack of any commentary on Danton’s Kosmopolitischsten, a challenging term with, perhaps, a brief and complex history. No editorial industry, however, can substantiate the fantastic originality of the drama. The colloquial yet cadenced prose, the abrupt modulations from crass naturalism into a kind of hectic lyricism, or self-ironizing rhetoric on the verge of the hysterical may reflect Büchner’s interest in Jakob Lenz’s Der Hofmeister (1774) and Die Soldaten (1776). Goethe’s Götz and the prose in the early Faust fragments were available. But the idiom, the cinematographic pulse of successive scenes, the psychological acumen and sheer political insight are Büchner’s own. They have lost nothing of their impact. Dantons Tod endures as the first classic of ennui, of a noia more insidious than violence or death. Revolutionary immensity, the drug of power and public acclaim can stale to routine, to a macabre void. “Ich kokettiere mit dem Tod”, says Danton. As in Baudelaire there is the constant analogy between political and sexual boredom, between the nervous exasperation brought on by cyclical violence and the automatism of sex (how could a sensibility scarcely out of its teens see so deeply?). Initiating a motif which will be crucial throughout his writings, Büchner celebrates the promises of sleep. Where “nothingness has murdered itself” (“Das Nichts hat sich ermordet”), only sleep possesses consoling reality. The lullaby spell “Schlafe schlafe” as it haunts Büchner will be picked up by Alban Berg.
Dantons Tod remains, almost scandalously, the most adult, disenchanted of all political dramas, the one in which the mesmerizing, homicidal yet also trivial tenor of politics is most acutely enacted. Robespierre’s soliloquy as “night snores above the earth” induces the recognition that “sin resides in thought”. Only chance will determine whether this thought becomes a political deed. Büchner’s illuminations would be indispensable to the political dramaturgy of Brecht and Sartre. But they would also energize the lucid despair of actual revolutionaries. The fascinating, at times talismanic, role of this play in Russian Revolutionary circles, notably during the nightmare of the purges, has yet to be assembled. Georg Büchner knew precisely how and why revolution devours its own.
As if to instance Plato’s finding that the writer of tragedy and of comedy are identical, Büchner produces Leonce und Lena. The piece was most probably composed in the summer of 1836 and completed shortly before Büchner’s death. It is a montage of quotations, of parodistic elements and Aesopian political allusions. The fundamental theme is that of an attempted flight from the despotic absurdities and constraints of court life. The philosophic background is of particular density, reflecting Büchner’s simultaneous study of Descartes and Spinoza. The risible pomp of a princely marriage amid the surrounding proletarian misère touches on Büchner’s own as yet undisclosed betrothal. Fairy-tale conceits draw on Tieck, on E. T. A. Hoffmann, on Brentano, Tristram Shandy and Goethe. As always, the underpinning is that of Shakespearean ironies and arcadias. But the principal model is that of Musset’s chamber theatre. If the dominant chord in Dantons Tod is that of exhaustion, of an aching insomnia, Leonce und Lena dramatizes tedium, the apathy of soul known as acedia. The insightful sorrows of Shakespeare’s Feste seem to haunt the work, but in the arresting phrase “Mein Leben gähnt mich an”, what we hear is Musset’s Fantasio. The text was not staged till a private production in Munich in 1895. It has been read as a herald of the theatre of the absurd. Perhaps it should be regarded as a libretto. Of various operatic settings, that of Paul Dessau in 1979 has the most vitality. It may be that Busoni should have tried. He shared Büchner’s estimate of Gozzi, whose bitter play on the words fama/fame, “glory” and “hunger”, provides Büchner’s epigraph. As it stands, the comedy remains problematic. At moments, it is Peter Maxwell Davies’s use of it in his masque Blind Man’s Buff of 1972 which best renders its sprightly sadness.
The Poschmanns provide what is by far the most authoritative recension yet attempted of Woyzeck. It derives from what can be gathered of Büchner’s intended construction and from the successive stages of composition as these survive in the Weimar archive. We are given two versions, a kombinierte Werkfassung and a Hauptfassung together with ancillary fragments. The editorial industry, a fair amount of the manuscript material being almost illegible, is prodigious. At least three manuscripts, two partial, one combinatorial, are deciphered. Yet as the editors point out, vital moments, notably the finale, remain uncertain. Büchner’s intentions can be construed in different ways. In addition to these alternative scenarios this Deutscher Klassiker edition includes voluminous source material and something of the criminology, juridical proceedings and psychiatric reports which underlie the play. What can be known of Johann Christian Woyzeck’s macabre deed and destiny in Leipzig in 1821 is set out for us with admirable clarity.
In Western drama, there is a time prior to Woyzeck and one after – as there is before and after Waiting for Godot. The fact that Büchner’s play had its premiere only in November 1913 in Munich strengthens the intimations of interaction, of forward echo between these two texts. Büchner was aware of the overwhelming novelty of his project. As he confided to Gutzkow in early June 1836, his play would seek out the inception “of a new spiritual life among common folk and consign to the devil moribund modern society”. But what Woyzeck enacts is so much more. It is as if the Fool had taken over King Lear. Even this, however, is a halting analogy. With Woyzeck it is not only inarticulacy which detonates within tragedy; it is the millennial suffering and abjection of common man. The script evolved in tandem with Büchner’s research on the nervous system and cerebral lesions, together with his annotations of Spinoza, which he pursued to the day of his death. This dual background underwrites an expressive extremity, a paradoxically materialist, indeed physiological vision unprecedented in literature. There are shards out of the Lutheran Bible, folk proverbs and slang. Numbingly, children’s rhymes and ditties punctuate the dark like those spectral lights which Woyzeck glimpses on the black waters. At every point, the pressures of the unspeakable, of ungoverned sexuality and sadism, but also of starved love try to break through the limits of language. In Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, “words ache at us”. In Woyzeck, it is the pain, the stifled need of the mute – made more unbearable by the officious rhetoric of the empowered.
It is not only Beckett’s work which is unimaginable without Woyzeck. It is Expressionism, and the eroticism and scabrous violence of modernity. It is the theatre of Wedekind, Toller, Brecht and Heiner Müller. It is Dr Caligari. As if to emphasize the themes of frustration in the play and Georg Büchner’s own destiny, the genius of Alban Berg’s music came to overshadow its book. After 1925, Berg’s Wozzeck achieved global renown. It still interposes, as it were, between ourselves and Woyzeck, whose raw truth it manifests but also transfigures, a form of betrayal. The flotsam of mysticism, of populist angst, the autistic agony of fallen man, a solitude beyond Rousseau’s imaginings, elude the music. What emerges in Berg, on the other hand, are such components as the ironic counterpoint between Büchner’s Marie and the Margarete of Goethe’s Faust. Ideally, one ought to stage the play in the afternoon and the opera on the same evening.
There is no manuscript authority for Lenz. Even the title was appended to the novella by Büchner’s posthumous editors. The project seems to date back to the autumn of 1835. Lenz’s writings were available in Ludwig Tieck’s edition of 1828. The wretched life of Lenz himself was surrounded by a vivid, partially legendary aura in the radical and clinical circles which Büchner frequented in Strasburg. After 1780, traces of Lenz had all but vanished. His beggarly death in a Moscow street in May 1792 was virtually unnoticed. Goethe’s anathema prevailed. Indirect testimony reached Büchner via Daniel Stöber’s memoir of Oberlin, Lenz’s compassionate host. Like the deranged Lenz, Büchner too wandered the Vosges and sensed in Lenz’s plays and psychotic visitations a mesmeric foreshadowing of his own and Woyzeck’s fate. To this day, there is disagreement over the status of the fiction. Is it a fragment? How dominant are its psychiatric concerns? The themes of social persecution, of lost sanity and of autistic wandering are crucial to Büchner’s writings. Hölderlin’s Umnachtung, Nietzsche alone in his mountains, confirm the persistence of these motifs in German sensibility. What is undoubted is the seminal impact of Lenz on German prose and narrative. Another masterpiece composed under pressures we can only guess at.
Of the projected drama on Aretino, we know next to nothing. How much of it was there for Büchner’s prudish fiancée Wilhelmine Jaeglé to burn? Dantons Tod, Leonce und Lena, Woyzeck, Lenz, political pamphleteering of fierce intelligence, a clutch of compelling letters. The notion of “precocity” is fatuous. There is perhaps only one figure in Western literature comparable to Büchner, namely Rimbaud. No explanation of Büchner’s originality, of the uncompromising ripeness of his powers is forthcoming. What remains is a sense of incommensurable loss. What would he have produced had he lived?
It is in Paul Celan that Büchner’s genius has its most formative echo. The “Meridian”, Celan’s famous statement of poetics at the (appropriate) occasion of his Büchner Prize, turns on Dantons Tod. Celan’s “Conversation in the Mountains” is an inspired reprise of and variant on Lenz. Celan’s obsessive sense of persecution, his bouts of mental infirmity, his reinvention of the German language, are often an epilogue, decisive in its own right, to Büchner’s works and days. Of all this the Poschmanns tell us nothing, illustrating thes ardonic French dictum that one may indeed know everything, but nothing else.
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George Steiner is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. His recent books include Grammars of Creation, 2001, and Lessons of the Masters, 2003. He is the editor of Homer in English, 1996.
