Volume 1, Number 2 · June 1, 1963
Buechner
By Robert Brustein
Complete Plays and Prose
by Georg Buechner, translated with an introduction by Carl Richard Mueller
Hill and Wang, $1.75
Georg Buechner, the German dramatist, died in 1837, at the age of twenty-three, leaving behind him an inflammatory revolutionary manifesto, an unfinished prose narrative, two complete plays and a scramble of disconnected episodes in dialogue (undeciphered and unpublished until 1879) called Woyzeck. These facts are remarkable when we consider that Buechner is generally conceded to be one of the great seminal figures of dramatic literature: even in a century notable for untimely deaths and small leavings, his life seems terribly brief and his literary output extremely fragmentary. Still, the really astonishing thing about Buechner is neither the shortness of his career nor the meagerness of his production: it is the exceptionally modern quality of his temperament. Buechner admired Goethe; he adored Shakespeare; and he made a strong personal identification with that obsessed 18th-century dramatist, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, who became the feverish hero of Buechner's uncompleted novel. But although the impact of all three writers can be felt on his work, Buechner seems to develop independently of literary conditioning. Like William Blake, he is one of those extraordinary prodigies who occasionally bursts into the sky of history—unexpected, unforeseen—and proceeds to cast his illumination over future generations.
Review, 1685 words
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