Georg Buechner

 

Georg Buechner, one of the most renowned writers in German, was born in 1813 in the small Hessian town of Goddelau. His father was the physician Karl Ernst Buechner, and his mother was Louise Carolina Buechner, born Reuss. He was the eldest of eight chidren, two of whom died in infancy. Of Georg's five surviving siblings, three became prominent authors.

In 1816 the Buechner family moved to Darmstadt, where his father was employed as a physician by the city and a hospital in addition to maintaining a private practice. It is not known what sort of education Georg received up to the age of eight; at that age he began attending private schools in Darmstadt. Among the subjects he studied continuously from ages 8 to 18 were French, Latin and Greek. At 16 he attended a short intensive course in Italian.

In 1831, at age 18, Buechner moved to Strasbourg and enrolled in the medical school there, and studied comparative anatomy until 1833, when he transferred to the university of Giessen back in his native Hesse, which allowed a maximum of 2 years of foreign study.

Buechner had become politicized during his time in Strasbourg at the latest. In 1834 he wrote and published the first of his works which would eventually become world famous, a pamphlet he called the Hessische Landbote, known in English as the Hessian Courier, a bold condemnation of the Hessian regime and its mistreatment of the people in Hesse. The Hessian authorities sought to arrest him, but he was able evade them. Friedrich Ludwig Weidig, a protestant pastor, one of the people who helped Buechner distribute his pamphlet, was arrested, tortured, and died in 1837 in prison under circumstances which still have not been satisfactorily explained.

As a fugitive, Buechner wrote one masterpiece after another: Danton's Tod, a portrayal of the last days of the French revolutionary Georges Danton, one of the former colleagues guilloutined by Robespierre; Lenz, a novella based on the life of the Sturm und Drang poet; Leonce und Lena, a play satirizing the ancien regime; and, greatest of all, Woyzeck, a heart-rending tragedy portraying a soldier who goes insane after being mistreated by a gruesome doctor who uses him for medical experiments and limits his diet to peas, his unfaithful wife and his cruel superior officers. Woyzeck was incomplete when Buechner died, and the manuscript was in such a bad state that it was several decades before it was published. Nevertheless, the play has been performed all around the world, and served as the basis for several films including the version directed by Werner Herzog with Klaus Kinski in the title role, and an opera by Alban Berg.

In the meantime he continued his medical studies, specializing in the nervous system, which were impressive enough to win him a position in the faculty of the University of Zuerich.

And in 1837 he died of typhoid fever, just 23 years old.