Leonce and Lena/Lenz/Woyzeck (German Literary Classics in Translation)

Georg Biichner is the only German dramatist of his period whose plays have not only survived both as theater and as literature, but have grown more important, more relevant with the passage of time, observes Michael Hamburger. Biichner, who died in 1837 at the age of twenty-three, shared less with the Romantic and Neoclassic elements of his own day than with the Sturm und Drang of the 1770s - and through it with the example of Shakespeare. Biichner was a forerunner of the Naturalist school and of the Theatre of the Absurd. His position as a political revolutionary, more radical in his thinking about society than his liberal friends or colleagues, had a great deal to do with his originality as an imaginative writer. The two plays and one short story translated here by Mr. Hamburger exhibit Biichner's preoccupation with the dilemma of freedom and determinism; each of the works illustrates the problem in a different way. Con- structed within a comic, fairy-tale framework, Leonce and Lena investigates the limits on human freedom imposed by social and moral conventions. In this work Biichner displays a satiric wit and a talent for comic dialogue reminiscent of Shakespeare. Woyzeck, the in- spiration for Berg's opera, also deals with convention buf, in a bleak atmosphere of human frailty and tragedy. The short story, "Lenz, " delves deep into the mind of the brilliant, troubled Sturm und Drang writer, J. M. B. Lenz, and reveals his persistent battles with madness. MICHAEL HAMBLBGER is a noted poet, translator, critic, and lecturer, and has published widely.