Lenz (14 page)

43   
had wrestled with it like Jacob]
See Genesis 32: 25-31.

51   
he heard a child had died]
According to Oberlin, the child's name was Friederike — the same as Lenz's (and Goethe's) love-object, Friederike Brion.

53   
Lenz shuddered when he touched the cold limbs]
In an 1832 letter, the medical student Büchner expresses his revulsion at having to dissect cold cadavers. At several points in his correspondence
with Wilhelmine Jaeglé, he compares himself to a corpse awaiting reawakening.

53   
Arise and walk!]
See Matthew 9:5, Mark 2:9-12, and Luke 5:23-25.

55   
Sin and the Holy Ghost]
Perhaps a typographical error for “die Sünde wider den heiligen Geist,” i.e., “sin against the Holy Ghost.”

55   
Pfeffel]
Gottlieb Konrad Pfeffel (1736-1809), blind Alsatian author of patriotic poetry; Lenz had stayed with him in Colmar in January, 1777 after his expulsion from Weimar.

57   
I've deserted my faith]
See Psalms 53: 3.

57   
the eternal Jew]
Ahasuerus, condemned to wander the earth in eternity as a punishment for spurning Christ on the road to Calvary.

57   
she was still in love with someone else]
When Lenz first encountered Friederike Brion in the summer of 1772 in Sesenheim (near Strasbourg), she was still in love with Goethe, who had broken off with her the previous year and moved to Frankfurt. In a letter of March 20, 1834 to Wilhelmine Jaeglé, Büchner had cited a poem of Lenz's in the persona of Friederike which evoked her jilted love.

61   
a shepherd's pipe]
Most likely a mistranscription of Oberlin's text, which reads “Habergeise,” i.e., a “snipe,” or a toy “top,” whose humming or droning sounds were associated with demonic hobgoblins or night phantoms.

61   
Tedium the root of it all]
Cf. Büchner's comedy
Leonce and Lena
, I, i: “The things people do out of boredom! They study out of boredom, they pray out of boredom, they fall in love,
marry and multiply out of boredom, and finally die out of boredom . . .”

65   
Sebastian by his side]
Sebastain Scheidecker, the aforementioned schoolmaster.

67   
requesting that he add a few lines]
In the original 1839 printing of the text, this is followed by the sentence, “See the letters” — most likely a manuscript note by Büchner to himself.

Notes to Oberlin's “Mr L. . .”

81   
Mr. L. . .]
While retaining the Kafkaesque title of a manuscript transcription given in Hubert Gersch's
Studienausgabe
of Büchner's
Lenz
(Stuttgart: Reklam, 1984), this version is based on the text given in the Poschmanns' edition of Büchner's
Sämtliche Werke
(Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992). Büchner read Oberlin's account in a manuscript copy; it was later published by August Stöber in three installments in the journal
Erwinia
in 1838/39 under the title “Der Dichter Lenz, im Steinthale,” accompanied by the following note: “This moving, unsophisticated and heartfelt text, drawn from the papers of the reverend Oberlin, constitutes a curious contribution to the biography of a misfortunate and talented writer. See also
Life of J.F. Oberlin
, by D.E. Stöber, p. 215, as well as “The Writer Lenz, Further Information” by August Stöber,
Morgenblatt
, 1831, nos. 250 and ff., where the letters from Lenz to Salzmann may also be found. My dear friend Georg Büchner, who died in Zurich on February 19, 1837, wrote a novella on the basis of this text, which unfortunately remained a fragment. It is to appear in the edition of his works which D. Gutzkow is preparing. — The editor.”

85   
Allez donc au lit]
Go back to bed again — what is this — hey! — in the water when it's this cold out! — Go back to bed!

87   
at the outset my sermons were quite eloquent]
Oberlin normally
gave his sermons in French (and not in the local patois); once a month, he conducted services in German in Belmont.

89   
Lavater, Pfeffel]
See notes to Büchner's
Lenz
.

91   
Mr. Schlosser]
Goethe's brother-in-law, Johan Georg Schlosser (1739-1799). Lenz had briefly stayed with him and his wife, Goethe's sister Cornelia, after having been expelled from Weimar in late November, 1776. Schlosser would subsequently take care of Lenz in Emmendingen after the latter's departure from Oberlin's.

99   
Lenz's letter to Salzmann]
An editorial note by August Stöber. Lenz wrote a number of letters to Goethe's Strasbourg mentor Johann Daniel Salzmann (1722-1812) evoking his visits to Friederike Brion in Sesenheim in the summer of 1772.

107  
a noble woman in W.]
Perhaps Goethe's Weimar friend, Charlotte von Stein.

107  
Abaddon]
The “angel of the bottomless pit” in Revelation 9:11.

107  
Friederike]
Friederike Brion.

109  
“Vite, chez l'homme juré”]
Quick, to the bailiff's, have him send me two men.”

119  
“Ecoutez, nous ne voulons point faire du bruit]
“Listen, we don't want to make any noise, if you have a knife, just hand it over to me quietly and with nothing to fear.”

Notes to Goethe's
Poetry and Truth

129  
From
Poetry and Truth] The text follows the (slightly modernized) version given by Gersch in his
Studienausgabe
of Büchner's
Lenz
, based on the first printing of Goethe's
Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit
(Tübingen: Cotta, 1811-14), 3 vols., which is the edition Büchner would have read.

131  
The collection
Of German Character and Art] Edited by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), this 1773 collection,
Von deutscher Art und Kunst
, included essays by Herder on Ossian and folk song, on Shakespeare, as well as Goethe's “On German Architecture,” in which he praised the Gothic style of the Strasbourg Cathedral.

131  
His translation of Love's Labour's Lost]
Brought out in 1774 (by Goethe's publisher Weygand in Leipzig) under the title
Amor vincit omnia
, and accompanied by his “Anmerkungen übers Theater.”

131  
I first made his acquaintance]
Goethe and Lenz first met in Salzmann's circle in 1771; toward the end of that year, Goethe returned to Frankfurt and did not revisit Strasbourg until 1775.

133  
The English word
whimsical
]
Defined by Dr. Johnson's Dictionary as “freakish; capricious; oddly fanciful.”

137  
The depiction of Werther]
Goethe's
Die Leiden des jungen Werthers
was first published by Weygand in 1774, to European acclaim.

139  
Two Livonian cavalry officers]
The two brothers Friedrich Georg and Ernst Nikolaus von Kleist. In 1773, the former fell in love with Cleophe Fibich, the daughter of a Strasbourg jeweler and a friend of Friederike Brion's. Cleophe Fibich was in turn, according to Lenz, the model for the character Marie (abandoned by an officer) in his play
The Soldiers
.

141  
those odd opinions he later espoused in his comedy
The Soldiers
]
Among other reforms that Lenz suggests in this 1776 play: the establishment of official military brothels in order to spare the virtue of civilian girls from the sexual predations of officers. The proposal Lenz submitted to the French Ministry of War was published as
Über die Soldatenehen
(“On Military Marriages”) in 1776.

143  
at first in conversation and then in writing]
In the fall of 1774, Lenz wrote a
Diary
in which he recounted in slightly fictionalized fashion the imbroglio created by the simultaneous courtship of Cleophe Fibich by the two von Kleist brothers and Lenz himself, each secretly betraying the other. Initially written in English to keep it from prying eyes and then translated into German, the manuscript of this
Diary
was presented by Lenz to Goethe in the summer of 1775. It remained in Goethe's papers until 1797 when, responding to Schiller's request for some undiscovered “Lenziana,” he sent it on for eventual publication in the latter's magazine,
Die Horen
. Though noting its “biographical and pathological value,” Schiller decided against its publication and Lenz's
Diary
was not brought out until 1877.

143  
Hardly had
Goetz von Berlichingen
appeared
] Originally written in November-December 1771, Goethe's boisterous historical drama was first published in June, 1773.

147  
the object of his imaginary hatred]
Goethe's paranoid comments are illuminated by his account of his “Visit to Sesenheim 1779” to see his old flame Friederike Brion. Written in 1809 (just as he was beginning to embark on his autobiography,
Poetry and Truth
), this text was first posthumously published by Eckermann and Riemer under the title “Lenz” in 1837 in their two-volume Cotta edition of Goethe's works (two years before the posthumous publication of Büchner's
Lenz
by Gutzkow):

The greater portion of our conversation concerned Lenz. After my departure, he had introduced himself into the house and had tried to find out whatever was possible about me, and, given all the efforts he was making to see my letters to her in order to fish around in them, she in the end grew suspicious. He had in the meantime, as was his wont, pretended to fall in love with her, for he thought this was the only was of gaining access to all the girl's secrets; and now that she was wary of him, she declined his visits and withdrew ever more from him, which drove him to the most ridiculous threats of suicide, claiming he would be declared half-crazy and taken to the city. She also explained to me that it had been his intention to harm me and to destroy my public reputation and whatever else, and for this reason he had allowed my farce directed against Wieland to be printed.

Goethe had more or less given Lenz permission to print his satire
Gods, Heroes, and Wieland
in 1774, but the following year, already contemplating his subsequent move to the Court of Weimar (where Wieland lived), Goethe apparently felt this polemical attack might compromise him in the eyes of this influential Enlightenment German man of letters.

 

Like De Quincey's “The Last Days of Immanuel Kant” or Chateaubriand's
Life of Rancé
, Büchner's
Lenz
is an experiment in speculative biography, part fact, part fabrication — an early nineteenth-century example of the modern genre of docufiction. When pressed to define his aesthetic project, Büchner tended to think of himself above all as a poet-historian: “The dramatic poet is, to my eyes, nothing but a writer of history,” he explained in an 1835 letter, “but he is superior to the latter in that he recreates history for a second time for us and transports us immediately into the life of an era instead of giving a dry account of it; instead of giving us characteristics, he gives us characters and instead of descriptions, he gives us figures. His greatest task is to come as close as possible to history as it actually happened . . . he makes the past come to life again.” In the case of his play
Danton's Death
, Büchner pored over (and liberally cited) a variety of documentary sources — Thiers's and Mignet's histories of the French Revolution, Strahlheim's compilation of primary materials relating to the Terror — in order to cast the drama of his doomed anti-hero into a present tense as immediate as an
eyewitness's bewildered gaze. Büchner's other most famous play,
Woyzeck
, similarly combines the archival research of the historian with the resurrectional powers of the poet. Based on the transcripts of the murder trials of three men who had killed their mistresses (and which involved some of the earliest instances of the insanity defense in German legal history),
Woyzeck
manages to transform anonymous public records into a work whose fierce representation of the private sufferings and humiliations of its protagonist fully bears out what his friend Karl Gutzkow (describing
Lenz
) called Büchner's “reproduktive Phantasie,” that is, his ability to
reproduce
historical characters in his imagination and, through this act of mimetic translation, render them absolutely singular, absolutely alive.

Following the lead of Gersch's “Studienausgabe” of
Lenz
, this bilingual edition supplies English-speaking readers for the first time with two of the major historical sources that Büchner consulted for his 1839 novella — the manuscript diary of the kindly Alsatian pastor, Johann Friedrich Oberlin, who took the distraught Lenz into his care in the Vosges mountains for three weeks in early 1778, and Goethe's (somewhat less kindly) recollections of his early friendship with the playwright during his Sturm und Drang years in Strasbourg, first published in the third volume of his autobiography
Poetry and Truth
in 1814. What
emerges from the juxtaposition of these three temporally and generically distinct visions of the figure of Lenz is something like a cubist portrait painted from several perspectives at once — a multiple exposure of an original model too evasive to be seized by any single image. Or in more paleographic terms: to read Oberlin's or Goethe's accounts in conjunction with Büchner's novella is to realize the extent to which the latter works like a palimpsest, now erasing, now leaving visible the traces of the texts onto which it is inscribed.