Lenz (13 page)

As it so happened, he lived for the most, as did his two charges, among the officers garrisoned nearby, which is probably where he came up with those odd opinions he later espoused in his comedy
The Soldiers
. Be that as it may, this early familiarity with army life consequently led him to consider himself a great expert on military matters; indeed, he had made such a detailed study of this entire subject that, several years later, he drew up a lengthy proposal addressed to the French Minister of War, which he expected to produce great results. The miseries of military life were fairly well-analyzed, but the remedies offered were ridiculous and impracticable. He was nevertheless convinced that this document would gain him great influence at the court, and he highly resented those friends who, either by force of reason or by outright opposition, insisted that he suppress, and afterward burn, this fantastical piece of work, even
though it had already been fair-copied, placed in an envelope with an enclosed letter, and officially addressed.

As for his adventures with the above-mentioned lady, he confided to me, at first in conversation and then in writing, the full story of all his aimless and erratic maneuvers. The poetry he could infuse into the commonest of incidents often astonished me, so I strongly encouraged him to take the bud of this rambling tale, pollinate it with his wit, and then turn it into a small novel; but that was not his thing, he could only make progress when he got carried away by a boundless flood of details or haphazardly spun himself along on an endless web. Perhaps in the future, based on these premises, it might be possible to provide, in some fashion or other, a vivid picture of the course of his life up to the point when he lost himself in madness; for the present, I shall keep to things closer at hand, and which in fact belong here.

Hardly had
Goetz von Berlichingen
appeared when Lenz sent me a prolix essay, written on the small sheets of drafting paper that he ordinarily used, without the slightest margin left on the top or bottom or on the sides. These sheets were entitled: “On our Marriage,” and were they still in existence, they would be more enlightening to us now than they were to me back then, for I was still very much in the dark about who and what he was.
The primary purpose of this meandering manuscript was to juxtapose my talent and his; at times he seemed to claim he was my inferior, at times my equal; but the whole thing was carried off with so many humorous and felicitous turns of phrase that I gladly accepted the views he intended to convey, and all the more so because I truly held his gifts in very high esteem, and as a result was always urging him to pull himself together out of his amorphous ramblings and to exercise greater artistic control over his inborn creative talent. I responded in the most friendly fashion to the text he had entrusted to me, and because in its pages he had desired to establish the closest intimacy between us (as the whimsical title already indicated), from that point onward I kept him apprised of all my work, both my finished projects and those I was planning; in return, he sent me a string of manuscripts,
The Tutor, The New Menoza, The Soldiers
, his imitations of Plautus, and the translation of the English play which, as mentioned, accompanied his “Remarks on Theater.”

While reading the laconic preface to the latter, I was somewhat taken aback that he seemed to intimate that the substance of this essay, which contained a vehement attack on the rules of theater, had been delivered as a lecture to a society of friends of literature a number of years earlier, that is, at a time when my
Goetz
had not yet been written. That Lenz's acquaintances in Strasbourg should have included a circle of which I was unaware seemed somewhat problematic; but I let this pass, and soon arranged publishers not only for this but for his other writings, without in the slightest suspecting that he had singled me out as the chief object of his imaginary hatred and as the target of the vagaries of his whimsical persecution.

[Part III, Book 14]

 

Notes to Büchner's
Lenz

1     
Lenz]
This text follows the reading given by Henri and Rosmarie Poschmann, eds.,
Georg Büchner, Sämtliche Werke
(Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 2002), which is based on Karl Gutzkow's original 1839 publication of the story, “Lenz. Eine Reliquie von Georg Büchner,” in eight installments in the Hamburg journal
Telegraph für Deutschland
.

3     
The 20th]
January 20, 1778. In Bergeman's influential early twentieth-century edition of Büchner's works, this incipit was emended to “Den 20. Jänner.” Paul Celan comments in “The Meridian,” his 1961 Georg Büchner Prize speech: “Vielleicht darf man sagen, dass jedem Gedicht sein ‘20. Jänner' eingeschrieben bleibt” (“Perhaps one may say that every poem retains its ‘20th of January' inscribed within itself”). It has been suggested that Celan is here alluding not only to the opening words of Büchner's
Lenz
, but also to January 20, 1942, the date on which the implementation of the Final Solution was discussed at the Wannsee Conference. See also Celan's 1963 poem on Hölderlin's madness, “Tübingen, Jänner.”

3     
Lenz walked through the mountains.]
To reach Waldersbach — situated in the remote Steinthal or Le Ban de la Roche of Alsace — Lenz journeyed by foot from Switzerland across the Vosges mountain range. Büchner himself hiked through these mountains in the early summer of 1833; in a long letter to his family from Strasbourg, dated July 8, he provides ecstatic descriptions of the vistas of the Rhine, the Black Forest, and the Swiss Alps afforded by the heights of the Vosges.

3     
He felt no fatigue, except sometimes it annoyed him that he could not walk on his head.]
In a 1925 essay on Büchner, German critic Arnold Zweig observed that “this sentence marks the beginning of modern European prose.” In “The Meridian,” Paul Celan notes: “whoever walks on his head has heaven beneath him as an abyss.”

9     
Oberlin welcomed him]
Johann Friedrich Oberlin (1740-1826), the Protestant minister in Waldersbach who looked after Lenz between January 20 and February 8, 1778. See “Afterword.”

9     
I am a friend of. . .]
The friend is Christoph Kaufmann (1753-1795), an associate of Goethe's in Strasbourg during the early 1770s and coiner of the term
Sturm und Drang
(“Storm and Stress”). Lenz stayed with him Winterthur, Switzerland from November 1777 to late January 1778 before being dispatched to Oberlin's care.

9     
Haven't I read several plays?]
Lenz's
The Tutor
(1774) and
The Soldiers
(1776).

9     
the tranquil faces looming out of the shadows]
Oberlin and his wife, Magdelene, had five young children; when Lenz arrived, she was pregnant with a sixth.

17   
he tried everything, but cold, cold]
Toward the end of January 1834, having recovered from an attack of meningitis, Büchner writes to his fiancée Wilhelmine Jaeglé whom he had left behind in Strasbourg: “Would that I could lay this cold and tortured heart onto your breast. (. . .) I curse my current good health. I was on fire, fever covered me with kisses and embraced me like a lover's
arms. Darkness surged all around me, stars pressed through the gloom, and hands and lips bent towards me. And now? I no longer even have the pleasure of experiencing pain or longing. Ever since I crossed back over the Rhine [to Giessen], I seem to be dead inside, not a single feeling rises to the surface in me. I am an automaton; my soul has been removed.”

19   
Are you a theologian?]
Lenz had studied theology in Köningsberg in 1768-71 and again briefly in Strasbourg in 1774.

21   
sprigs of rosemary]
Traditional symbol of Love, Fidelity, and Death.

21   
the music had completely melted his paralysis away]
Büchner complains of a similar bout of paralysis (
Starrkrampf
, literally “tetanus”) to Wilhelmine Jaeglé in a March, 1834 letter: “The first bright moment in eight days. Incessant headaches and fevers, barely a few hours of decent rest at night. I don't get to bed before 2 a.m., and then fitful sleep and a sea of thoughts into which my senses fade. (. . .) I've just come in from outdoors. A single, sustained note from a thousand larks' throats drives through the sultry summer air, heavy clouds wander over the earth, the deep roar of the wind sounding like their melodious footsteps. The spring air has dissolved my paralysis. I was frightened by myself. The feeling of being dead hovered above me. Every face seemed to me a death's head, the eyes glazed, the cheeks waxen . . .”

23   
In pain I love the Lord]
Büchner's adaptation of a popular church hymn, also cited in his play
Woyzeck
. According to one of his close friends, Büchner's last delirious words were: “Yes, through pain we enter into God.”

25   
she had a white and red rose pinned to her breast]
The white rose
symbolizes death, the red, love. Lenz's mother in fact died six months later, in July 1778.

25   
transported into a state of somnambulism]
Oberlin was a student of the doctrines of Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), who popularized the notion of “animal magnetism” and investigated hypnotic and somnambulistic trance-states.

27   
how all things were imbued with an indefinable harmony]
In his 1836 lecture, “On Cranial Nerves,” Büchner, in line with the theories of such German “nature-philosophers” as Oken, provides a more scientific account of the harmonious organization of the totality of natural phenomena: “So, for the philosophical method, the whole physical existence of the individual is not directed toward its own preservation but is the manifestation of a primordial law, a law of beauty, which produces the highest and purest forms according to the simplest plans and outlines. Everything, whether form or matter, is bound by this law. All functions are the effects of this law; they are determined by no external purpose, and their so-called purposeful interaction and co-operation is nothing more than the necessary harmony in the manifestation of one and the same law . . .”

27   
the twelve apostles, each represented by a color]
See Revelation 21:14-20.

27   
Stilling]
Heinrich Jung-Stilling (1740-1817), a member of the Goethe circle in Strasbourg and later a close associate of Oberlin's, published a study of the mystical significance of the Revelation of St. John in 1799.

29   
the era of idealism was just then beginning]
Something of an anachronism on Büchner's part, given that “idealist” aesthetics of
Weimar Classicism (or early Jena Romanticism) only came to the fore a decade or so later.

29   
the good Lord has without a doubt made the world as it should be]
In a letter to his family of July 28, 1835 on the subject of his historical drama,
Danton's Death
, Büchner similarly wrote: “By the way, if anyone were to tell me that a writer should not show the world as it is but as it ought to be, then I would answer that I do not want to make it any better than the good Lord, who must surely have made the world as it should be. And as concerns the so-called Idealist poets, I find that they have created marionettes with sky-blue noses and affected emotions, but not human beings of flesh and blood whose sufferings and joys arouse my empathy and whose deeds and actions fill me with revulsion or admiration. In a word, I have high regard for Goethe or Shakespeare, but very little for Schiller.”

29   
we find it in Shakespeare]
Lenz's 1774 “Remarks on Theater” accompanied his translation of
Love's Labour's Lost;
in another essay of the period on
Götz von Berlichingen
(1773), he compared Goethe's play to those of Shakespeare. Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), another influential member of the Strasbourg Sturm und Drang circle, produced his first major anthology of folk songs,
Stimmen der Völker
, in 1778.

31   
Old German school]
Presumably the Northern Renaissance painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

33   
Apollo Belvedere]
A Roman copy of a Greek statue of Apollo in the Vatican Belvedere, said by German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann to be “the highest ideal of art among all the works of antiquity.”

33   
a Raphael Madonna]
For the “idealist” aesthetics of Weimar Classicism, Raphael's various paintings of the Madonna embodied the early Renaissance's desire to “transfigure” the real.

35   
Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus]
A painting by Rembrandt pupil Carel von Savoy (ca. 1621-1665), which Büchner had seen in the Museum of Darmstadt. The painting refers to, but does not actually depict, the passage in Luke 24: 13-41.

35   
Then another one]
The work remains unidentified, but has sometimes been thought to allude to the genre paintings of Nicolaes Maes (1632-1693), another pupil of Rembrandt.

37   
letters from Lenz's father]
Kaufmann had met Lenz's father, a puritanical clergyman who never forgave his son for giving up his theology studies, in Riga in 1777.

39   
Lavater]
Johann Caspar Lavater (1741-1801), much admired by the young Sturm und Drang writers, was the celebrated author of the
Physiognomical Fragments
(1775-78), whose fourth volume includes a “physiognomic” silhouette of Lenz. Given his interest in the mystical correspondences between the natural and spiritual world, Oberlin was quite drawn to Lavater's investigations into the paranormal. Lenz had been a guest of Lavater's in Zurich in August, 1777.