Lenz (15 page)

________

To add a further lateral dimension to Büchner's novella, the following chronology offers a narrative of what is known of the life of the historical Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792). Like
Danton's Death
, which compresses the action of the play into a mere seven days,
Lenz
drastically contracts an entire destiny into three fraught weeks, consigning the remainder of its protagonist's existence, both before and after this crisis, to the margins of the text — where it functions as a missing yet implicit biographical frame whose invisible pressure can nonetheless be felt throughout the narrative. “Novels,” wrote Novalis, “arise out of the shortcomings of history.” What Büchner includes of Lenz's history therefore emerges from everything he chose to omit — specific dates, back story, causal connectives, in short,
everything that might enable the reader to establish some sort of
context
for the matter at hand. The last, laconic sentence of the novella merely informs us: “So lebte er hin” (“And so he lived on”). Not happily ever after, as in a fairy-tale, but numbed out, resigned to fate, condemned (like Beckett's characters) simply to endure that “living on” (or
Fortleben
) which, according to Walter Benjamin, characterizes the afterlife of originals in translation.

1751:
Lenz born in Sesswegen, a small town in the recently annexed Russian province of Livonia, populated by Estonians and Latvians but dominated by a culturally influential minority of Germans. His father is an authoritarian Protestant minister from Pomerania, his mother the daughter of a clergyman. Secondary schooling in Dorpat. First poems.

1768:
Is sent to study theology in the Prussian port city of Königsberg, but instead attends the lectures of Immanuel Kant (to whom he addresses an ode), begins reading Rousseau on the latter's recommendation, translates Pope's “Essay on Criticism,” Shakespeare, and the comedies of Plautus. Publishes a long historical poem on the misfortunes visited upon the Baltic lands by the late Russo-Swedish war.

1771:
Against the express wishes of his father, interrupts his studies in order to accept employ as a “tutor” to two brothers, the barons von Kleist, whom he accompanies to their military posting near Strasbourg in May. Will remain in Alsace for the following five years, first moving from garrison to garrison with the two young barons and then, after 1774, eking out a meager livelihood by giving private lessons in German, history, geography, and military science. To placate his father, enrolls in the faculty of theology at Strasbourg's Protestant university. Over the course of 1771, becomes friends with the twenty-two-year-old Frankfurt native Johann Wolfgang Goethe, two years his junior, who is studying law in Strasbourg. The latter puts him in touch with Johann Gottfried Herder, who has also recently fled the cultural backwaters of Livonia and is now the chief intellectual mentor of Goethe and his group of student friends (Jung-Stilling, Wagner, Klinger, Müller, Merck). This circle of young writers, who gather at the home of the Strasbourg actuary Daniel Salzmann and devote themselves to the establishment of a new national German literature freed from the hegemony of French neoclassicism, constitutes the core of the literary avant-garde later known as the Sturm und Drang movement.

1772:
Writes his first major play,
The Tutor or The Advantages
of Private Education
, a “comedy” in which the hero, horrified at his seduction of a young female student, castrates himself in the fifth act. Inspired by Shakespeare and traditional traveling German puppet shows, the play's open form and genre-bending ironies will be much admired by Büchner and, later, Brecht. During the summer, pays court in Sesenheim to Friederike Brion, a love of Goethe's whom he had left in the lurch the previous year upon returning to Frankfurt. In letters to Salzmann, Lenz describes himself as a Pygmalion in search of a fantasy Galatea. Later learning of Lenz's attempt to gain Friederike's intimacy in his wake, Goethe is not amused.

1773:
Another romantic triangle: ostensibly appointed to play the part of chaperone, Lenz is smitten by the coquettish fiancée of one of his employers, the elder von Kleist brother. Will subsequently recount this comedy of errors in a Wertherian diary novel which he presents to Goethe in manuscript. Literary activities include the preparation of essays on Goethe's play,
Götz von Berlichingen
, Herder's philosophy, the poetry of Ovid and Virgil, and translation of fragments of Shakespeare's
Coriolanus
.

1774:
Goethe's European best-seller,
The Sorrows of Young Werther
, is published by Weygand in Leipzig. During the same year, at Goethe's suggestion, the same publisher brings out four books by Lenz:
Remarks on Theater
, to which is appended
his translation of Shakespeare's
Love's Labour's Lost (Amor vincit omnia);
his German versions of Plautus; and two comedies,
The Tutor
and
The New Menoza
.

1775:
At the zenith of his reputation, founds the “German Society” of Strasbourg, where he lectures “On the Advantages of the German Tongue,” “On the Cultivation of the German Tongue in Alsace, Breisgau and Neighboring Regions,” and on Goethe's
Götz
and
Werther
. In the early spring, visits Goethe's sister Cornelia and her husband Johann Georg Schlosser at their home in Emmendingen in Baden; in a manuscript entitled “The Moral Conversion of a Poet, as Described by Himself,” which he presents to Goethe, he expresses his deep Platonic love for the latter's sister. Goethe passes through Strasbourg in late May and again in early June and exchanges poems with Lenz in celebration of their warm friendship, but their relationship may have been strained by latter's publication the previous year of Goethe's vicious satire of Christoph Martin Wieland — the reigning writer at the Court of Weimar, where Goethe, at the personal invitation of the duke, will take up permanent residence in November.

1776:
Establishes a journal,
Der Bürgerfreund
, to publish the proceedings of the “German Society” of Strasbourg as well as portions of his new comedy,
The Soldiers
, which deals with the
seduction and abandonment of young women of the lower classes by aristocratic officers. Is invited by Goethe to join him at the Court of Weimar in April, along with Sturm und Drang playwright Friedrich Maximilian Klinger and the philosopher Herder — who arranges for the book publication of
The Soldiers
later that year in Leipzig. Upon arrival in Weimar, hopes that “brother Goethe,” who has now been officially appointed to the Privy Council, will enable him to present his essay “On Military Marriages” to Duke Karl August and to set forth his various projects for social reforms. But instead of achieving any official station at the court, he is treated as a figure of fun on account of his eccentricities. Goethe observes in a letter: “Lenz is among us like a sick child, and we rock and dandle him and give him whatever toy he wants to play with.” Realizing that his role at Weimar, as he puts it in his play
Tantalus
, is “to serve as a farce for the gods,” he retires to the rural hamlet of Berka for the summer, where he writes the epistolary novel,
The Forest Brother
(subtitled “A Pendant to
The Sorrows of Werther
”), which refracts his frustrations with aristocratic court life. During the early fall, Charlotte von Stein, Goethe's new love interest, invites Lenz to join her for a month as an English tutor in her country castle — perhaps out of pity, perhaps to incur the jealousy of her evasive paramour. Wieland observes in an early November letter:
“Since he has been here, hardly a day has gone by when Lenz has not played one prank or another which would have blown up in anyone else's face.” One of these pranks (a scurrilous poem or pasquinade involving highly placed personages at the court?) provokes Goethe to refer in a November 26 diary entry to “Lenzens Esely” (“Lenz's asinine behavior”); exasperated, he asks the duke to expel Lenz from Weimar on November 29. The latter writes Herder on the same day that he has been “cast out of Heaven as a vagrant, rebel, and satirist,” bitterly adding: “How long are all of you going to keep on bowing and scraping to social etiquette and illustrious names?” Immediately seeks asylum in Emmendingen, at the home of Goethe's sister Cornelia: pregnant, feeling abandoned by both her husband, Schlosser, and her brother, she welcomes him with sympathy.

1777:
Like “The Shipwrecked European” of the title of one of his 1776 poems, Lenz spends the year adrift. In January, visits the blind Alsatian poet Gottlieb Conrad Pfeffel in Colmar, then makes his way to Switzerland: stops in Basel, then in Zurich, where he stays at the home of the celebrated Swiss theologian and mystic, Johann Kaspar Lavater. Cornelia gives birth to a daughter in May, naming Lenz the godfather. Visits the Rheinfall and the Saint Gotthard pass. Returns to Emmendingen in June, devastated by the death of Cornelia just a month after
she had given birth. Writes his last major story “The Country Preacher,” a didactic portrait of a rural parson's economic and moral reforms of peasant life according to physiocratic principles. Further political projects: observing the unrest of the Republicans in Zurich, dreams of becoming “the epic poet” of the Swiss struggle for freedom; drafts plans for the foundation of a model school for women in Basel. Increasingly unstable, seeks out ex-Stürmer und Dränger Christoph Kaufmann in Winterthur, who reports in late November that Lenz has had a serious “accident” (a suicide attempt?) and decides to place him in the care of the Alsatian pastor Johann Friederich Oberlin.

1778:
Stays with Oberlin in Waldersbach from January 20 to February 8, then is taken in by an old friend in Strasbourg for a few weeks before being sent on to Goethe's brother-in-law Schlosser in Emmendingen. At the latter's insistence, tries to patch things up with his father, to whom he writes in March: “Father, I have sinned in the eyes of heaven and in your eyes and am henceforth no longer worthy of being called your child.” In April, Schlosser reports to a mutual friend that Lenz's condition has worsened: “He again attempted to throw himself out the window, he continued hitting his head against the wall, which forced me to have him tied up and get two guards to watch him day and night for the last ten days. Even under these conditions,
he continues yowling and bellowing like a cow, gnashing his pillow and scratching at himself.” The crisis passed, Schlosser decides that only manual labor can cure what he describes as Lenz's “hypochondria”: he is sent to live for three months as an apprentice to a shoemaker in Emmendingen, then spends another six months with a forester in Wiswyl.

1779:
January-June: With funds raised by Schlosser among friends in Weimar, Colmar, and Switzerland, is placed in the care of a doctor in Hertigen (who describes his affliction as “melancholia”). In June, Lenz's brother Karl arrives to take him back to Livonia, where their father has become General Superintendent of the Protestant churches of the province. Plans are made to get him a position as headmaster of the cathedral school of Riga, but Herder refuses to write him a recommendation letter, which costs him the job. Sets off to St. Petersburg to seek employment at the court: writes an ode to the czarina, publishes an essay on the education of young nobles, to no avail.

1780-1792:
The
Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek
prints an obituary of Lenz in 1780. In this posthumous condition, he spends the remaining twelve years of his life in Moscow, an embarrassment to his father and abandoned by all his German friends. Acts as private secretary to Gerhard Friedrich Müller, explorer of Siberia, influential historian and director of the archive of the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who finds him private students among the nobility. Frequents Masonic circles and writes up several proposals for social and educational reforms. Other projects include the founding of a new university in Livonia, the creation of public libraries, the establishment of a new banking system in Russia, the publication of a French newspaper in Moscow, a literary society for the Russian nobility. Aspiring to the role of cultural intermediary, translates a number of texts from Russian into German. During his final years, befriends the cosmopolitan Russian writer Nikolai Karamzin, who notes in his
Letters of a Russian Traveler
that “even in his madness, his poetic ideas continued to astonish us.” Is found dead on a Moscow street during the night of March 24, 1792, apparently homeless, age forty-one — perhaps, given his close ties to prominent Freemasons, the victim of a political assassination by agents of the czarina who fears the exportation of the French Revolution to Russia.

___________

In his 1985 autobiography,
The Play of the Eyes
, Elias Canetti describes a memorable visit to Strasbourg in 1933. Invited to the Alsatian capital to attend a festival of modern experimental music, he discovers upon arrival that he has been lodged in the very room in which the philosopher Herder used to receive
daily visits from his young disciple Goethe. What's more, upon usher ing him into these hallowed quarters, Canetti's host presents him with a gift copy of an ancient
Almanac of the Muses
containing a poem of Lenz's, unaware of the full symbolic significance that this sacred relic holds for his guest — as Canetti explains, his discovery of Büchner's
Lenz
(and
Woyzeck
) the previous year had been one of the great conversion experiences of his entire literary career. Now in Strasbourg, housed directly across from its celebrated cathedral (whose spire still featured the tablet where Goethe and Lenz had inscribed their names in friendship), he feels himself part of the great apostolic succession of German literature: