Lenz

Lenz, a Novelle by G. Büchner, written in 1835-6 and published by K. Gutzkow in 1839 in the Telegraph für Deutschland under the title Lenz. Eine Reliquie von Georg Büchner. This publication formed the basis of the text in Nachgelassene Schriften (1850, ed. by his brother Ludwig Büchner), under the title Lenz. Ein Novellenfragment. The story is based on, and is partly a literal adaptation of, a report by J. F. Oberlin on J. M. R. Lenz's stay from 20 January until 10 February 1778 (Büchner has 8 February) at his rectory in Waldersbach (Waldbach in Büchner's Novelle) at the foot of the Vosges between Strasburg and Colmar. It came to Büchner's notice through his friend August Stöber (see also Stöber, D. E.). Lenz was at that time 26 and already in an advanced stage of the mental disease from which he died fourteen years later. He had been sent to Oberlin by C. Kaufmann, with whom he had spent the previous year in Switzerland and who also figures in the Novelle, at the end of which Lenz is sent by Oberlin to Strasburg. Here Lenz had met Goethe in 1771 and, after Goethe's departure for Frankfurt, had fallen in love with Friederike Brion. The unhappy course of this love is alluded to in the Novelle. Oberlin himself appears as the kind and well-loved Protestant pastor, and the story portrays the rare combination of spiritual devotion and practical initiative by which he improved the lot of the villagers.

Büchner portrays Lenz's schizophrenia by elaborating his search for God and a sign of his grace on the one hand, and on the other a sense of voidness, the result of unrelieved suffering which thrusts him into atheism. A sermon preached by Lenz in the village church forms the climax of the beneficial influence of Oberlin in the first part of the Novelle; Lenz's vain attempt to raise a dead child to life at Fouday is central to the second part, which also records his attempts at suicide before he is sent in a state of mental numbness to Strasburg.

Although Ludwig Büchner (and August Stöber) called this Novelle a fragment, it does not make a fragmentary impression and can be viewed as a consistent whole.