Lenz + The Hessian Courier

eorg Buchner, a German poet and dramatist, was born in Goddelau, Hesse, a former state of Germany, on October 17, 1813. He studied science and medicine at the Universities of Strasbourg and Giessen. Publication of a revolutionary pamphlet that he wrote forced Buchner to leave Giessen. He went on to study philosophy at Strasbourg and eventually show more became a lecturer on anatomy at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. Buchner's first play, Dantons Tod (Danton's Death), was a dramatic poem about the death of a French revolutionary hero. Leonce und Lena, a satire, and Woyzeck, the story of an army barber who kills his common-law wife, were not published until after his death. Woyzeck was published in 1879, and was the basis for Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck, first performed in 1925. Buchner left the fragments of a novel, Lenz, which is the story of a poet who has much in common with Buchner himself. Buchner was rediscovered by the German expressionists in the twentieth century, who regarded him as a forerunner of the German expressionist movement. Buchner died of typhus on February 19, 1837. (Bowker Author Biography) The life of Georg Buchner was short, intense, and tragic-and significant for the development of modern drama. Buchner started a literary revolution that is continuing still. His three modern plays, Danton's Death (1835), Leonce and Lena (1850), and Woyzeck (1850), were greatly ahead of their time in their penetrating dramatic and psychological treatment. They served as an impetus for contemporary schools of drama as different as Ionesco's Theater of the Absurd and Brecht's Epic Theater. Buchner was particularly modern in his portrayal of isolated individuals, who often talk past one another. He was the first major dramatist to present events in an episodic manner and dispense with logically constructed plots. Alban Berg based the libretto of his opera Wozzeck on Woyzeck. Danton's Death, a powerful drama of the French Revolution. The opera like Woyzeck, is still popular. (Bowker Author Biography) show less