Georg Büchner

by John Reddick

Dedicated revolutionary? Closet Christian? Extreme nihilist? Georg Buchner has always been prone to wildly differing interpretations, such is the multiplicity of his voice. Although he died when only twenty-three - an age at which Goethe had not yet even written Werther - Buchner's small handful of works count amongst the greatest achievements of modern German writing, and seem to speak to us with ever greater power and immediacy. This is the first major study of Buchner in English for nearly twenty years, and it includes radically new readings of Dantons Tod, Leonce und Lena, and Woyzeck. Showing these works in a fresh perspective, John Reddick provocatively argues that Buchner was aesthetically so far ahead of his time mainly because he was seriously behind the times in his essentially idealist premisses and aspirations. Beyond any particular interpretation, however, Reddick seeks above all to make the reader more fully alive to the sheer vitality and richness of Buchner's extraordin