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. Georg 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.
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.
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".
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