Lenz (Büchner)

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Lenz is a story by Georg Büchner , but the title does not come from the author. It appeared posthumously in 1839 in the Telegraph für Deutschland magazine . The exact time of its creation is unknown, but there is evidence that Büchner has been working on the material since spring 1835 at the latest and finished work on it before January 1836. The claim that the text is a fragment is as controversial as its categorization as a novella .

The story describes the deteriorating mental state of the writer Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz and is based on the one hand on some letters from Lenz and on the other hand on the written observations of Pastor Johann Friedrich Oberlin , the length of which makes up about half of the text of the novella and most of which have been taken verbatim by Büchner , so that the charge of plagiarism was repeatedly raised against Büchner.

action

Lenz is on his way to the mountain village of Waldbach (actually Waldersbach in Alsace ) to see Pastor Oberlin. His hike leads him through the wintry mountains , whose inhospitable and cold he does not feel (see derealization ). Lenz loses his feeling for space and time, he hears the voices of the rocks , sees the clouds chasing and in the sun a “glistening sword ” that cuts the landscape . His own complete exhaustion no longer penetrates his consciousness , but becomes part of the universe , the starting point for the shortest moments of highest feelings of happiness and long phases of indifference (cf. bipolar disorder ). The evening brings him loneliness and fear , his steps become like a “rumble of thunder”, for him it is as if “madness is chasing after him on horses”.

Once in the village, Oberlin, pastor and connoisseur of Lenz's dramas, welcomes him. In the parsonage, the troubled hiker enjoys the quiet family togetherness that reminds him of his own childhood . However, when he moved into his cold and bare room in the school building opposite , where Oberlin had quarters prepared for him, he experienced a relapse , and the memories of the beautiful evening quickly gave way to restlessness and "unnameable fear ". Only when he inflicts pain on himself (see borderline disorder ) and finally, following an instinctive urge, plunges into the cold well, does his condition stabilize again temporarily.

The following nights are tormented for him: his perception detaches itself from reality , turns it into a dream , "the alp of madness sits at his feet". But Lenz tries to settle in, remembers the experiences of the days, draws hope. His fellow human beings and their everyday life appear to him like a theater play . As Oberlin's companion, he becomes an actor himself, but ultimately cannot really immerse himself in this life. During the day his condition is bearable, but with the onset of darkness he is repeatedly attacked by anxiety states . The premonition of an inevitable illness increases with him. Lenz tries to take Oberlin as a role model, to see nature as a gift from God and to avert the fears that arise with the help of the Bible . He realizes that this is a last resort for self-therapy for his manic-depressive frame of mind and his incipient schizophrenia . But the "sweet, infinite feeling of well-being" is only short-lived, while the despair and suffering of his loneliness increase and finally get out of hand.

A central moment of the story is the visit of his friend Christof Kaufmann. In the conversation about art , in the passionate debate against idealistic literature (see below Büchner's Fundamental Realism ), Lenz speaks again in a focused and relaxed manner. He reacts harshly to Kaufmann's objections, but only breaks off the conversation when Kaufmann finally tells him to return to his father. He feels that his stay in this small mountain village is the only way to save himself from his "madness" into which bourgeois life would drive him.

When Oberlin and Kaufmann set off on a trip to Switzerland the next day , this marked the final, critical turning point in his medical history . He stays behind alone, but first accompanies the friends for a part of the way to the other side of the mountains, to “where the valleys flow into the plain”. On his way home, criss-crossing the deserted mountains, he arrives at the stone valley in Fouday at nightfall and finally finds shelter in a poor hut, where a terminally ill girl is lying in a fever and an old, half-deaf woman is constantly singing songs from the hymn book with a rasping voice . When he learns a few days later by the death of a little girl who grabs him fixed idea , "like a penitent" with aschebeschmiertem pilgrimage face Fouday and how Jesus of Nazareth , the girl (like Lazarus resurrect) to have. But there, in view of the dead limbs and “half-open glass eyes”, he only experiences his own impotence, which drives him to wild blasphemies and temporarily turns into an atheist : “Lenz had to laugh out loud, and atheism intervened with his laughter him and took him very safely and calmly and firmly. "

When Oberlin returns from Switzerland, he realizes Lenz's desperate state of mind, his religious remorse and his shame . He refers him to Jesus, who died for the forgiveness of the apostates. Lenz asks Oberlin about the condition of "the woman's room ". But he replies that he doesn't know what Lenz mean. As he indicated Lenz, his mistress for another lover killed to have: "Cursed jealousy . I sacrificed her - she loved yet another - I loved her, it's all worthy - o good mother also loved me I'm a murderer." After this confession of murder, which is only a product of his delusions , there are only a few brief moments when Lenz is in his right mind. The calm he drew from “the quiet of the valley and the vicinity of Oberlin” no longer works. After Lenz repeatedly threw himself out of the window at night and tried to kill himself, Oberlin had him transported to Strasbourg . Lenz only reacts apathetically . The evening landscape no longer affects him. At a stopover in a hostel, “he made several attempts to lay hands on himself, but was guarded too closely.” When they arrived in Strasbourg the next day in cloudy weather, he “seemed quite sensible, spoke to the people; he did everything as the others did, but there was a terrible emptiness in him, he no longer felt any fear, no desire; his existence was a necessary burden to him. - That's how he lived. "

Büchner's fundamental realism

Literally in the center of the narrative, packaged as a dispute between Lenz and his old friend Kaufmann, is Büchner's art theory credo. Unlike Kaufmann and most of his contemporaries, Lenz - here the mouthpiece of his author - vehemently opposes the harmonization tendencies of classical and romantic poetry. Their idealism is questionable because it is unnatural and inhumane: "the most shameful contempt for human nature". At the same time, however, he also attacks the realists: “The poets, of whom it is said that they give reality, have no idea about it; but they are still more bearable than those who wanted to transfigure reality. [...] The good Lord made the world as it should be, and we probably cannot blot better; our only endeavor should be to imitate him a little. I demand in everything - life, possibility of existence, and then it's good; then we don't have to ask whether it is beautiful or whether it is ugly. The feeling that what is created has life is superior to these two and is the only criterion in art. Incidentally, we rarely come across it: we find it in Shakespeare, and in folk songs it sounds quite like it, sometimes in Goethe; everything else can be thrown into the fire. "

Jochen Schmidt calls the radicalization of the concept of mimesis expressed here in his study of the history of the concept of genius fundamental realism . However, Lenz's proclaimed turn to the reality of life remains only theoretical. “In practice, Lenz fails. Program and existence, wanting to be and being able to be, diverge sharply. This results in the counterpoint of the narrative, for the sake of which Büchner moved the art talk into the center. The concrete experiencing Lenz suffers from the collapse of the idealistic horizon. He is metaphysically uprooted - and that's why the world falls apart for him. "

Dubbing

Wolfgang Rihm : Jakob Lenz (1977/78). Chamber opera. Libretto: Michael Fröhling, Premiere March 8, 1979 Hamburg

literature

  • Georg Büchner: Lenz . Ed. & Comm. By Burghard Dedner. Suhrkamp 1998, ISBN 3-518-18804-6 .
  • Roland Kroemer: Georg Büchner: Lenz. Simply ... understand German. Interpretation aid. Schöningh, Paderborn 2016, ISBN 978-3-14-022573-1 .
  • Günter Kunert : Fever night. In: Location information. Construction, Berlin / Weimar 1970.
  • Peter Schneider : Lenz. A story . (= Red Book 104). Rotbuch, Berlin 1973 and others
  • Gert Hofmann : The return of the lost Michael Reinhold Lenz to Riga . 1981
  • Jochen Schmidt: Büchner's 'Lenz'. In: The history of the idea of ​​genius in German literature, philosophy and politics 1750-1945. Volume 2, Darmstadt 1985, p. 48 ff.
  • Clemens Hillebrand : Labyrinths, work on Georg Büchner's Lenz. Scherrer & Schmidt, Cologne 1996, ISBN 3-927753-10-6 .
  • Christian Neuhuber : Lenz pictures, imagery in Büchner's story and their reception in the visual arts. Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2009, ISBN 978-3-205-78380-0 .
  • Jean Firges : Büchner, Lenz, Celan : The walk through the mountains. Conversation in the mountains. (= Exemplary series literature and philosophy. 29). Sonnenberg, Annweiler 2010, ISBN 978-3-933264-58-9 .
  • Eduard Habsburg : Lena in Waldersbach. A story. CH Beck 2013, ISBN 978-3-406-64494-8 .
  • Sigrid Damm: birds that proclaim land, the life of Michael Rheinhold Lenz . Insel Taschen Buch, 1992, ISBN 3-458-33099-2 .
  • Barbara Neymeyr : Aesthetics as a therapeutic. On the function of the realistic programming in Büchner's 'Lenz' . In: Barbara Neymeyr (Ed.): Georg Büchner. New ways of research. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2013, pp. 210-230, ISBN 978-3-534-24527-7 .

Film adaptations

  • Lenz , directed by George Moorse , Germany 1971, 130 minutes
  • Lenz , directed by Alexandre Rockwell , USA 1981
  • Lenz , by Oliver Hockenhull, short film Germany 1985.
  • Lenz , directed by András Szirtes, Hungary 1987, 100 minutes
  • Im Steintal by Jürgen Lodemann , Germany 1988, SWR, 43 minutes
  • Lenz - But I will be dark , director: Egon Günther , Germany 1992, 90 minutes
  • Lenz échapé , directed by Dominique Marchais, France 2003.
  • Lenz , directed by Marco Franchini, Italy 2004.
  • Lenz , director: Thomas Imbach , actors: Milan Peschel, Barbara Maurer, Noah Gsell, Barbara Heynen, Switzerland 2006, 95 minutes
  • Lenz , director: Andreas Morell , actors: Barnaby Metschurat, Karoline Teska, Germany 2009, 89 minutes
  • Büchner.Lenz.Leben , director: Isabelle Krötsch, Germany 2013. Experimental documentary with Hans Kremer

source

  1. ↑ Lenz. A relic by Georg Büchner. With a foreword and an epilogue ed. by Karl Gutzkow. In: Telegraph für Deutschland (January 1839, nos. 5, 7–11, 13–14; pp. 34–40, 52–56, 59–62, 69–72, 77–78, 84–87, 100–104 , 108-11). Büchner's bride Minna Jaeglé made a copy, which she sent to Karl Gutzkow in September 1837. Since the handwritten original of the text has disappeared, Gutzkow's first edition remains the “only authentic text witness” (Gersch).
  2. ↑ Hellmuth Karasek: The honorary writer . In: Der Spiegel . No. 3 , 1990 ( online - Jan. 15, 1990 ).
  3. ↑ Hubert Gersch: Source materials and "reproductive fantasy". In: Georg Büchner Yearbook. 8, 1990/94 (1995), p. 69.
  4. ↑ a b Jochen Schmidt: Büchner's 'Lenz'. In: The history of the idea of ​​genius in German literature, philosophy and politics 1750-1945. Volume 2, Darmstadt 1985, p. 49.

Web links

Wikisource: Lenz  - sources and full texts