Georg Buchners: The Political Philosophy As Reflected In His Work

Abstract

In the half-decade immediately following Goethe's death in 1832, there glimmered the fragile but penetrating light of a German writer who, almost a century later, would be regarded as having been a major prophet, stylistically as well as philosophically, of modern European drama and thought; Georg Buchner's life, the final three years of which were marked by feverish political and dramatic activity, flickered to an end, quenched, apparently by typhus, early in 1837. Buchner was then only twenty-three years old. Already, however, he had won the doctorate in medical and philosophical studies and a position as instructor in comparative anatomy at the newly founded University in Zurich; already he had met and dearly loved the woman whom he would have married; already he had published a widely respected play, Dantons Tod, and included, among his papers, another complete play, Leonce und Leona, as well as unfinished manuscripts of at least three other literary works, namely, the novella Lenz and the plays Pietro Aretinol and Woyzeck. And these, with the exception of the lost Aretino, would posthumously be published and ultimately win him recognition as, indeed, a genius before his time, one who had unerringly registered the deformities which had not yet penetrated the contemporary consciousness. For Buchner, amidst all the promise of his ostensibly most glorious and most exuberant youth, stood, at his early death, already far beyond the innocent ecstasy and overflowing confidence of boyhood; already, Buchner was more than any sentimental young lover who dreamily believes that "tomorrow" all shall be better; already much of life had lost its childlike sense of harmless beauty and romantic naivete; already Buchner had familiarized himself with the sight of blood; and already he had tired of it. Indeed, already, when, at a comparative age, the young Goethe had only begun to explore and revel in the immense realms of the heart and the mind, Buchner, at his early death, had momentarily almost exhausted their possibilities; already, at twenty-three, Buchner had tired perhaps of life itself; an undated entry in the fragmented remains of his diary reads: "ich fuhle keinen Ekel, keinen Uberdruss; aber ich bin mude, sehr mude. Der Herr schenke mir Ruhe."