Georg Büchner by A. K. Dzhivelegov 1935
Written: 1935
First Published: 1935 in Selected Works of Georg Büchner, pg. 9-37 (Introduction), Academia Publishing House, Moscow–Leningrad (in Russian)
Source: imwerden.de
Translated by: Anton P
Büchner lived less than twenty-four years and wrote: four plays, more or less unfinished (The Death of Danton, Leonce and Lena, Woyzech, Aretino), the unfinished short story Lenz, three philosophical works. (History of Greek Philosophy, The System of Spinoza, The System of Descartes), the proclamation Appeal to the Peasants of Hesse, many poems and letters. He also taught some courses in comparative anatomy at the University of Zurich.
It was no coincidence that the German radical public mourned the untimely death of this amazing young man, just as the Russian radical public mourned the death of Dobrolyubov, who died at the same age and was just as promising.
What killed both of them was an unbearable struggle. And, perhaps, it was even more difficult for Büchner in Metternich’s Germany than it was for Dobrolyubov thirty years later in Tsarist Russia.
It is true that at the time Büchner spoke, a certain turning point had already begun. The July Revolution of 1830 in France overthrew the foundations of the political order forged at the Congress of Vienna and which, after 1814-1821, led to constitutions in small states. The police bans in Germany of 1834 lacked the intimidating force of the Carlsbad Decrees of the Holy Alliance of 1819. The economy was slowly reviving after a long hibernation. Of the social classes only the upper bourgeoisie had its own organization. It is this wealthy bourgeoisie that brings about a Customs Union between Prussia and several small states: the beginning of the unification of Germany. Only this class could use for its own interests the paragraphs of the constitutional statutes, not insignificantly resistant to freedoms. Economists, journalists, poets worked only for this class: Friedrich List, Rottek and Welker, Duttlinger, but also the literary movement Young Germany. The other classes had no organization to protect their economic interests, and naturally had no guaranteed protection in the constitutions. And literature did not reflect their needs and interests, neither scientifically nor artistically. The artisans nowhere, or almost nowhere, showed class consciousness. The peasants were oppressed and in desperate poverty. There was hardly any proletariat. There was silence among the workers.
And this dark mist is suddenly broken by a bolt of lightning. On August 1, 1834, at the gates of the city of Giessen, in the Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, the police arrested the student Karl Minnegerode. They found on him two copies of the proclamations Hessische Landbote (Appeal to the Hessian Peasants). The notices were confiscated, the student was imprisoned. The hunt had started. Pastor Friedrich Ludwig Weidig and journalist August Becker, “red Becker” as he was called in Marx’s circle in the 1840s and later, were soon arrested. After some time, the young writer Georg Büchner disappeared from the duchy.
Weidig was the head and Büchner the soul of the defeated secret society of conspirators. Shortly before this, Büchner had returned from France, where he had studied at the University of Strasbourg. In Giessen, where he continued his university studies, he made friends with the circle of Weidig, who headed the Giessen branch of the organization that had recently, in 1833, organized the attempted insurrection (Wachensturm) in Frankfurt. In this circle, Büchner immediately assumed the position of the leading scientific and literary mind, lectured on philosophy and tried to discuss with the members of the circle about revolutionary art, as he understood it. Weidig, a monarchist who did not understand how a revolution could take place without a connection with bourgeois liberals, looked askance at the young man: he was frightened by Büchner’s revolutionary temperament and confused by his political views. The conflict between them seemed inevitable, and the gap was prevented only by the defeat of the circle.
Among those arrested was a traitor who told everything he knew. But he did not know everything, and therefore the trial lasted a long time. Minnegerode became mentally ill in prison, and on February 23, 1837, Weidig, tortured, cut his throat with a piece of glass in a fit of insanity. Büchner, who had moved there from France and become an assistant professor in the department of comparative anatomy, died four days earlier in Zurich. Then “red Becker” told the court the story of the proclamation.
Büchner wrote the proclamation. Weidig, who was as revolutionary as a Protestant priest of Metternich’s Germany can be, poured a good portion of lamp oil into the molten metal of Büchner’s revolutionary passion. In this form the notice was printed. In this form it spread and in this form it reached us. Becker, in his trial testimony, helped us identify Weidig’s additions, but we will never know what this God-fearing rebel erased from Büchner’s text.
We know that when Büchner saw his pamphlet in print, he was deeply indignant at Weidig’s “corrections” and said that he had deleted exactly what he himself attached most importance to and without which the rest would be meaningless. We know what the two biggest changes Weidig made were. Where Büchner wrote “the rich”, die Reichen, Weidig put die Vornehmen, a word meaning noble and not in the social, but in the everyday sense. This, as we shall see, obscured Büchner’s clear social thinking. This was further overshadowed by the fact that Weidig deleted all the stinging attacks on liberals that Büchner had liberally sprinkled throughout the appeal. But this is not enough. Weidig dismantled the inner logical connection of Büchner’s appeal, enriching it with passages from the Bible and divine principles, as if it were a Sunday sermon and not a revolutionary proclamation. August Becker, after Büchner had already died, revealed to the end the course of his thoughts in all their revolutionary significance. By his testimony he legally drowned his friend, which was no longer dangerous to him, but in the eyes of posterity he surrounded his name with a glittering halo.
So what is Büchner’s theory?
What Büchner saw in German life boils down to one thing: the struggle of the liberal bourgeoisie against reactionary governments for political power. The bourgeoisie demanded a greater share of power than the meager maps of the German states gave it. After the July Revolution of 1830 in France, the pressure of the bourgeoisie increased somewhat, but continued to be ineffective as before. Metternich kept a watchful eye to make sure that Germany’s rulers were not swayed by liberal ideas and made no real concessions. Büchner knew that in some places revolts were being planned: in Frankfurt, very recently, such a revolutionary attempt even led to the people taking to the streets. But he was sure – and the facts showed that his belief was not empty pessimism – that all these efforts were doomed in advance to failure. And he made the point precisely: the bourgeois revolutionaries have nothing and no one to oppose the government troops, except a handful of intellectuals and individual artisans. The masses do not participate in the movement. A revolution can only be achieved by the hands of the broad masses. It is the masses that must be won over by the revolution, they are the ones that must make its cause their property. But how? Purely political slogans–constitution, human rights, freedom of the press–will tell them nothing. Because when one says “the masses”, one must have in mind mainly the peasants. And the villagers do not understand this. It is only on the peasants’ indifference to political slogans that their loyalty to their overlords is based. But this faith is only apparent. There is no doubt that the peasants are blamed for discontent and the reason for their discontent is very clear. It is their economic condition: dependence on the landlord, meager incomes, extremely heavy taxes, in a word: hunger. For the revolution to succeed, it must, through intelligent agitation, win over the peasants, who are exhausted by hunger and poverty.
Why did Büchner see the peasants as the main revolutionary force?
As a student in Strasbourg, he studied the history of the French Revolution a lot. In the history of 1789-1799. the revolutionary role of the peasantry was evident and had already been clarified in literature. The echoes of the French Revolution in Germany in the last decade of the 18th century were, if we exclude individual movements in the cities of the Rhine, which arose from the bourgeois intelligentsia, only the peasant movements along the Rhine, in Hesse-Kassel, in Saxony, in Silesia. The Jacquerie of Hesse-Kassel was not yet forgotten where Büchner lived. And most importantly: just now, in 1830, immediately after the news of the July days reached Germany, a stormy, though quickly suppressed, peasant movement swept through Hesse-Darmstadt. It started unexpectedly and spontaneously. Someone came to the villages of Hesse and talked about what happened in Paris a few weeks ago. He simply spoke to them, as a messenger, nothing more. And the villages rose up to do the same.
But not only was there no agitation: there was no sensible leadership of any kind and not even a rudimentary organization. Life was hard and they believed that if a large crowd gathered, everything would be like in France. But it did not happen like in France. The dragoons’ swords in Hesse-Darmstadt had so far proved sharper.
And yet the movement captivated minds. It gave Büchner the main ideological impulses. He had no other material for social constructions. Bourgeois democracy in Germany was not capable of revolutionary action. This was shown by the attempted uprising in Frankfurt in 1833. The role of the proletariat was even less noticeable. More than ten years would have to pass and Karl Marx would have to appear, capable of surveying all European arenas of industrial labor, in order to create the ideology of the proletarian revolution.
What was Büchner’s method of trying to make sense of this material and draw political lessons from it? Büchner drew his main guiding views from materialist philosophy. From it he got his idea of the dominance of the material element in social life. Büchner completely denied the meaning of the idea as a force independently driving social development. By this he renounced all connection with the idealistic philosophy which at that time dominated the minds of the majority of progressive people, including the leaders, of Young Germany. Büchner’s attitude towards the latter was evidently determined by a consciousness of the need to maintain some sort of regular connection with this more radical wing of the liberal bourgeoisie.
Büchner also owed something to Saint-Simon: from him he got the idea of dividing people into workers and vermin. But Büchner could not accept the whole doctrine of Saint-Simon. He stood on a firmly atheistic platform and was disgusted by the religious teachings of Saint-Simon. With his sensitive soul and lively mind, he realized that it was impossible to emphasize the primary importance of the material factor in public life and at the same time to give religion a permanent place in it, that is, something that Pastor Weidig, the most consistent revolutionary, wanted among German bourgeois radicals. When Büchner had to meet the descendants of Saint-Simon in life, they provoked an ironic attitude on his part. One of them–who, evidently, was one of Enfantin’s pupils–Büchner cruelly mocks in his letters.
What was Büchner’s socio-political position after all? There is disagreement about this in the urban literature. There the question often arises, was Büchner a socialist or not? Some seem to blame him for not being like that, others just regret it, others rejoice. These discussions are just ridiculous.
Büchner was not a socialist. And since he wanted to remain in his plans on German soil and move on from existing German relations, he could not be a socialist. Büchner is interesting because he remains in history the ideologist of a pure agrarian revolution. This is a milestone. Büchner’s older contemporary, Ludwig Gall (1790-1863), who tried to spread Fourierism to Germany in the same 1830s, was unsuccessful. No one just heard him. He is remembered more as the inventor of the method of scientific adulteration of wine (gallicization) than as a socialist.
At the time Büchner spoke, the demand for a pure agrarian revolution could be fully justified. Two or three decades will pass and the peasant revolution will become possible only in conjunction with the proletarian revolution.
To determine more precisely Büchner’s social position, one needs to familiarize oneself in detail with his main political work, the Appeal to the Hessian Peasants.
“Peace to the huts! War on the palaces! Friede den Hütten, Krieg den Palästen!”
Thus begins Büchner’s declaration. “He first popularized this slogan, which has since been reproduced on thousands of posters.”
The formula does not belong to Büchner. Did he get it, apparently, from Chamfort (from his letters), and Chamfort probably borrowed it from a forgotten work? Robert, chef des brigands (Robert, the leader of the brigands. 1791) by the unknown playwright Lemartelier, who turned Schiller’s romantic masterpiece into an urban melodrama.
But Büchner, and he alone, gave this slogan that revolutionary meaning, which neither the famous 15th-century eulogizer, nor even the dramatist of the time of the Great Revolution, could put into it.
“The peasant follows his plough, and the nobleman (Weidig’s emendation? Büchner used to say the rich man - A. D.) follows the peasant and chases him and the oxen harnessed to the plough... The life of a peasant is constant work, strangers eat the fruits of his fields before his eyes, he is covered with roses, his sweat is salt on the table of the nobles” (again instead of the rich - A. D.)
After this eloquent, energetic introduction, does the reckoning begin? How much taxes the peasants pay, how much the rich pay, and what each social group receives for it from the state. Then there are wonderful, slightly grotesque sketches, full of rich revolutionary passions. “Come closer to him and look at him, throwing off his princely cloak. He eats when he is hungry. he sleeps when he is tired. Look: he was born into the world naked and helpless like you, and he will go to the grave as stiff and frozen, and yet his foot is on your neck. The princely mantle is a carpet on which high-ranking lords and ladies of the court are debauched. they cover their scabs with orders and ribbons, they dress their leprous bodies in precious clothes. The daughters of the people are their maids and concubines, the sons of the people are their lackeys and soldiers. Go to Darmstadt and see how happily those gentlemen live there with your money, tell your hungry wife and children how the gentlemen have fat bellies from their food... All this you endure because a handful of scoundrels tell you: the government is from God.”
Then, about the constitutions, in which Büchner is equally negative towards the ducal power, because they give nothing to the masses and only deceive them with the fact of their existence. “What are these gifted constitutions in Germany? Nothing more than empty chaff, from which princes thresh grain for themselves. Who are our Landtags (parliaments)? They are clumsy carts, who may once or twice bar the way to the predatory incursions of princes and ministers, but can never build a bulwark of German liberty. What are our election laws? Violation of human and political rights for the majority of Germans.” And to show that among the rulers of Germany there is a kind of mutual insurance against the attack of the masses, Büchner goes to Hesse-Darmstadt, criticizes its constitution, its parliament, and asks what would happen if it were not as it really is, but real constitutions and real parliaments. And he answers: “The predatory vultures from Vienna and Berlin would very soon show their claws and strangle the freedom of our little country. The entire German people must win their freedom, and that time, dear countrymen, is not far off.”
To illustrate his point, Büchner, in few but surprisingly powerful words, tells of the French Revolution: how the revolted people forced the king to recognize his will as law, how the king swore allegiance to the constitution created by the representatives of the people, and then broke his oath, how the people executed the king – “thus they must deal with traitors” – how reactionary Europe rallied against the revolution and how the revolution crushed it: “her voice shook the thrones and raised the joy of the peoples.”
Further, by the end, obviously, Weidig is making a censer and smoking incense. And only a few lines, imprinted with a genuine Büchner temperament, broke up the passages from the prophets and the apostolic letters. Here are the lines: “Open your eyes and count the bunch of your oppressors, for they are only strong thanks to the blood they drain from you, and thanks to the fact that you put your laboring hands at their disposal. There are not more than ten thousand of them in the whole duchy, and you are seven hundred thousand. This is the ratio between the number of people and their oppressors throughout Germany.” With Büchner, after that, apparently, there followed – should have followed – an impassioned plea. “Rise and crush your enemies!” But instead, Pastor Weidig’s parchment planned: “And until the Lord calls you by his messengers and his signs, watch, strengthen your spirit, pray and teach your children to pray thus: Lord, let it break the scepter of our oppressors, and let your kingdom come – the kingdom of righteousness. Amen.”
The confusion of biblical passages with revolutionary appeals was very common in the Middle Ages, in the era of the Reformation, in the era of the Puritan revolution. Later, revolutionary appeals began to be combined with other things. After the French Revolution, such a connection completely fell out of fashion. In the 19th century, the Hessische Landbote was probably the only proclamation with such a wealth of biblical texts. No wonder Büchner was furious.
But the silencing he suffered from Pastor Weidig was not the only reason for his grief. The proclamation was received extremely coldly – to say the least – by people Büchner considered like-minded. One such conversation was announced in court. One of the leaders of the radical democracy, Karl Zeiner, testified: “I told Weidig that the manifesto was written very harshly and was really disgusting. Weidig replied that he had already talked about it, that the original text was even more terrible, but that he had toned it down somewhat.” A whole line of bourgeois revolutionaries, in their own way very consistent and courageous, who had been repeatedly sued before and after, who had been in prisons and fortresses, reacted negatively to the proclamation. Among them was Professor Wilhelm Jordan, a future member of the left at the Frankfurt National Assembly in 1848.
The explanation for this fact is not difficult to find. It was even given to the court. Despite the fact that Weidig carefully tried to hide the main idea of the proclamation, again painting the rich into noble, this idea was so bright that it was obvious to everyone. One of the defendants said that Büchner struck everyone with the novelty of his ideas. And the innovation was that Büchner’s revolution was not like the revolution of his friends. They spoke of a purely political revolution and were afraid of a social one, because it “carries with it a tyranny”. And for Büchner, a political revolution without a social one was something incomplete and meaningless. Büchner clearly imagined the revolution to be a revolt of the poor against the rich. He deliberately sowed class hatred and saw it as a revolutionary lever. He had already arrived at the theory of the class struggle, although it remained for him half-hearted and incomplete. He lacked material in the social structure of Germany at that time to think it through. If the workers were within his political field of observation, his formula of class opposites–rich and poor–could easily be broken down into more distinct concepts. And the idea of a social revolution, violence as a method, was obvious. It was this idea that frightened the bourgeois revolutionaries. They did not want a social revolution at all. At that time, fourteen years before 1848, they feared even universal suffrage and stood–Weidig first of all–in favor of privileges. But Büchner scoffed at preferential elections.
And yet, disagreements with people he considered political collaborators saddened him. With his program he was literally alone.
But even more disturbing to him was the attitude towards the Hessische Landbote by the peasants themselves. He threw it at them very generously, slipped it under the doors, put it in the shutters. But the result was unexpected. Most took the samples they found to the police. Becker heartbrokenly told the trial that the proclamation was the final blow to Büchner. He wanted to know if the revolution could be based on the peasants. It was a kind of “going to the people,” and with the same results that our Narodniks faced when they first went to the peasants in the early 1870s. These results seriously disappointed Büchner. Furthermore, he experienced burning suffering, because they undermined all his faith in the revolution. He considered revolution the only means to win freedom and a democratic system, for he had no faith in the constitutional development in which his friends hoped. And suddenly it turned out that the class on which his hopes were based, not only was not, at best, ripe for revolutionary struggle, but perhaps not capable of it at all.
But why? Why were peasants able to play such a huge revolutionary role in France during the Great Revolution? Why were they able to raise a movement in Hesse itself in 1830? And why, despite Büchner’s call, did they remain passive in 1834?
In one of his letters to Karl Gutzkow (July 1835), Büchner writes that the entire revolution “...must be taken over by the masses of the uneducated and the poor. the relationship between rich and poor is the only revolutionary element in the world. Only famine can give birth to the goddess of freedom, and only Moses, after sending us seven Egyptian plagues, could be our messiah. Feed a peasant and the revolution will die of apoplexy (man muest den Bauer und die Revolution bekommt eine Apoplexie). Any country chicken in a pot will break a Gallic rooster’s neck.” This was written after the failure of the Hessian peasant organization. But the idea itself had matured in Büchner much earlier. Already in 1833, i.e. before returning from Strasbourg, he wrote to his parents, explaining why he avoided participating in the Hambach festival: “...lately I have become convinced that only the necessary needs of the broad masses can lead to changes, that all the actions and the cries of individuals are utterly futile and a mad waste of energy.” Let us dwell for now on Büchner’s main idea. Why is hunger the only revolutionary force, and why should a well-fed peasant abandon the revolution?
Büchner does not explain this, but he is so convinced of it that when, during his time as a professor in Zurich, rumors reached him that the German governments intended to introduce reforms that would improve the condition of the peasantry, he became seriously worried: he feared that the German rulers had thought the same thought and were consciously trying to cut the ground under the revolution. What was the course of his reasoning? This, it seems, can be guessed.
What does it mean to “feed the peasant”? Obviously, you give him enough land so that he can harvest enough land from it to feed himself and his family, and you also make sure that neither the landowner nor the state interferes with his work, and that he has enough of the fruits of his labor so that he and his family could live a life worthy of a man. Büchner hoped that until the peasant achieved this, he would support the revolution. But is it really necessary for him to leave her when he has all this? Did the French peasants abandon the revolution when, in 1793, they received estates and political freedom from the Jacobin Convention and, moreover, increased their holdings at the expense of the national property? No, but in France the revolution was threatened by reactionary feudal Europe and the peasants defended the revolution, because the victory of the counter-revolution meant the confiscation of their lands. But then they gave the scepter of France to Bonaparte, who promised to protect their acquisitions – and this was a real blow to the revolution.
If Büchner had lived until the spring of 1848 and learned about the role of the peasants in the revolutions of southwestern Germany (Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria), he might have seen in this the confirmation of his anxieties. The peasants there at first very vigorously supported the bourgeois revolutionaries, but, having received personal freedom and the prospect of acquiring land, they became completely indifferent to the further course of the revolution. This was even worse than the news that the Hessian villagers were dragging his Hessische Landbote to the police.
Such was the drama of Büchner. But this was his personal drama, that of Georg Büchner, and not the drama of the revolution. Because it was determined entirely by temporary conditions. It was inherent in the 1830s and was associated with the special conditions for the development of the German peasantry. But more importantly, all the drama disappeared in the 1840s. As soon as people were found wise enough to foresee the entry of the proletariat into the arena of social struggle, a way out of Büchner’s cursed circle began to be sought. The cause of the revolution was not at all as hopeless as it seemed to Büchner.
But Büchner died, suffocated in his hopeless conclusions. The stamp of tragedy remained on him even after his eyes closed forever. And a pessimistic touch is found in all his works, where he raises and resolves issues related to the revolution in one way or another.
In the drama The Death of Danton and in the play Woyzech we find many echoes of his moods. The first examines the issues of the revolution in social terms, the second in individual terms.
The Death of Danton was written during perhaps the most troubling days of Büchner’s life: when the manuscript of the Hessische Landbote was delivered to Weidig, printed, distributed. when the proclamation fell into the hands of the police and became the subject of a judicial investigation; when the authorities seized and imprisoned Büchner’s friends and associates one by one, when he himself was in danger of arrest at any moment and barely managed to escape in time, and when her failure of the whole affair was accompanied by such heavy disappointments. Danton imprinted on himself this whole period of painful experiences.
The project bears clear traces of haste and underdevelopment. Danton had to be finished as soon as possible and sent to Gutzkow, so that Büchner would receive the much-needed pay. The head of Young Germany praised it very much at the time, and it really deserves praise. There are great parts in it.
Gutzkow, in praising Danton, did not notice that he was praising something that was in every way opposed to the idealism and romanticism of Young Germany. Büchner is neither an idealist nor a romantic, but a materialist and a realist. He wants to follow the creative paths not of Schiller, but of Goethe and Shakespeare: “As for,” he says, “the so-called ideal poets, I find that they have produced almost nothing but puppets with blue eyes, but they give me no people with flesh and blood, whose sufferings and joys I could experience, whose actions I would either loathe or admire. In a word, I place Goethe or Shakespeare very high, but Schiller very low.” Earlier, another poet, but incomparably older, Pushkin, thus characterized his dramaturgy: “I imitated Shakespeare in a free and broad portrayal of characters, in an unusual composition of types and simplicity ... image of the time and historical figures, without chasing stage effects, romantic passions, etc.”
In The Death of Danton, the gritty horror epic is stunningly presented. The revolutionary popular crowd is pulsing with life. Figures like Danton, Desmoulins, Herault de Sechelles, Robespierre are sculpturally plastic and lustrous, truly “free and broad,” but the female types–Julie and Lucille–are not without a touch of sentimentality, showing that Büchner as a playwright is also associated with the previous period in the development of German drama. But for Büchner, this was not the main thing. It was much more important for him to reveal his political program in the drama than to give it a complete artistic completion and a real finish.
First of all, he had to show that the main driver of the French Revolution, like any revolution, was the material condition of the masses, the “Hunger King.” Read the street scene in the first act and listen to the crowd’s discussions about the irresistible behavior of Simon’s daughter: this introduces the general tone of the play.
“Your belly is full of hunger, and they are suffering from an over-full stomach, you have holes in your blouses, and they have warm dresses, you have calluses on your palms, and they have velvety hands. So, you work and they do nothing. Well, you had it, but it was stolen from you. Therefore, if you want to get back a few pennies of your stolen property, you have to sell your body and beg. therefore, they are rotten and must be killed!” And in response there is a multi-voiced roar: “Death to anyone who has no holes in his dress! ... Death! Death! ... He has a handkerchief! He is an aristocrat! (Hang him) at the traffic light! At the traffic light!”
In sketching this scene, Büchner was, of course, solving by himself for the tenth and hundredth time a political theorem, the correct solution of which was necessary at the time he wrote, and was necessary for the proper orientation of the German revolution. And, of course, these scenes, oozing realism, were real combat journalism after all.
In exactly the same way, the main tragic conflict of the play, which Büchner arranges and characterizes quite realistically in the forms of the characters, is revealed as the political problem of the modern class struggle in the German revolution of 1830.
In a revolution, as in all social relations in general, the material element dominates, because this determines the course and outcome of the class struggle. A further conclusion is drawn from this position: the impossibility of any kind of stable coalition among the workers and even the vanguard of the bourgeoisie, the radical bourgeois intelligentsia. Büchner speaks of this in terms characteristic of his time, but his message is clear. In 1836 he wrote about Gutzkow, one of those who placed all their revolutionary hopes in the intellect, the future author of Knights of the Spirit: “He is by no means the wisest. It is impossible to reform society with the help of an idea, with the forces of an educated class! Our age is completely materialistic. The more directly you engage in politics, the sooner you will reach the point where reform itself will stop. You will never cross the gulf between educated and uneducated society ... I am convinced that an educated and prosperous minority, whatever concessions it gets for itself from the authorities, will never be able to eliminate its strained relations with the broad masses.”
The “educated and prosperous minority” is the bourgeois intelligentsia, the “broad mass” is the people, that is, according to Büchner, first of all the peasant masses, the revolutionary force, which alone stood in the field of his horizons. The rich and the poor cannot come to an agreement, for some have a “belly full of hunger,” while others have a “stomach full” of gluttony. Under such conditions, everything the intellect could say would be “completely futile and a mad waste of energy.” But Büchner could not enlarge the circle of the “hungry”: nothing told him that there was a real revolutionary element in Germany except the peasantry. After all, several more years, full of thunder and storms, had to pass before Weitling’s artisanal communism appeared.
In The Death of Danton, Büchner seeks and finds artistic images for this regular program of his. Danton, Philippe, Herault, Desmoulins are true representatives of the intelligentsia. They are lost because they cannot decide to relate to people. But they cannot do that because such is the nature of the intelligentsia: among the Dantonists, in Young Germany, everywhere and always. Even the most radical group of the revolution, the Jacobins: Robespierre, Saint-Just and their supporters, must break themselves in every possible way, make all kinds of sacrifices to maintain the popular line. They must flatter the people, deceive everybody, deceive the Assembly: this is the picture in Büchner. The Jacobins triumphed in the project. But everyone knows that Thermidor’s guillotine is already waiting for them and will kill them very soon. For the gulf between them and the people is as impassable as between the people and the Dantonists.
And in the theoretical, incoherent sighs of Danton before his capture “on the steppe” – there is such a scene in the play – you can hear, as it were, an echo of Büchner’s own frustration, his consciousness of his own hopeless isolation from the world: after all, he was awaiting arrest when he wrote Danton. And perhaps his sympathy for Danton is explained by the fact that he felt upon him the same fate which destroyed his hero.
If Büchner had worked on Danton in a calm state, the realism of the work would perhaps have been brighter and its whole would have been artistically complete. But even in the form in which it appeared in print, it is an absolutely extraordinary work, for it combines artistic and political value, a stunning picture of the Great French Revolution, and the revelation of the inevitable coming revolution in Germany.
Danton is the struggle of Büchner’s revolutionary faith against the facts that undermine it: an appeal to history from today’s grim lessons. Not without reason did Büchner say that the playwright is superior to the historian, because creatively, although in complete agreement with the facts, he resurrects the past. And this he does better than the historian: instead of “dry history, he creates history for us a second time, instead of features, he gives characters, instead of descriptions, images.”
As long as Büchner operated on the data of the French Revolution, everything went well for him: the inevitability of the revolution was confirmed sociologically. But when he turned to the German reality, the conclusions were sad: not only was there no need to talk about the inevitability of revolution, but its very possibility became questionable. In Danton, faith defeated unbelief.
In this sense, Danton is a real “optimistic tragedy”, because it was written after the revolution in Germany began to appear to the author as completely impossible.
This optimism, which seemed to be so well established by both the artistic and political conceptions of Danton, did not last long for Büchner. Not a trace of it remained in his later works of art.
During Büchner’s lifetime, Leonce and Lena, a comedy, and Lenz, a short story, were published. Two more works remained unpublished: Woyzeck or Wozzeck, found in his archive a few years after his death – this work we will now analyze – and Pietro Aretino, which ended up in the possession of Büchner’s fiancee and which was destroyed by her, as an atheistic work. This act of brutality and hypocrisy, depicting in a very unattractive manner the mind and views of a pious girl, and even the nature of her relationship with a loved one who had just died, deprived us of the opportunity to look into another corner of Büchner and the creative work of this author who has been so badly maligned by history. The fact itself is not surprising. The fiancee was a pastor’s daughter. Poor Büchner had no luck with the pastors: one mutilated his Hessian proclamation, another’s daughter burned Aretino.
If Danton is unfinished, then the other three plays are even more unfinished. In the comedy Leonce and Lena the parodic setting now and then slips into a realistic one, and this stylistic break undoubtedly indicates that the author has crumpled his subject. The novel Lenz is simply not finished. As for the Woyzeck tragedy, it has come down to us in such a form that it is impossible to say with certainty what the order of the scenes in it should be.
And yet, all three works contain wonderful touches that complement the picture of Büchner as a writer, thinker, and fighter that emerges from the Landbote, from Danton, and from the letters.
All three works are closely related to each other and to all of Büchner’s earlier writings. More and more he lost faith in revolutions, more and more he bowed under the weight of pessimistic visions. But he continued to hurry, though not so vigorously as in Danton, and wrote Leonce and Lena. He wanted to exhaust the entire palette his job gave him to check his thinking once more. From history he turns to today, from tragedy to parody. In another design he returns to the same thoughts.
He paints the life of a German countryside residence and ridicules it in the spirit of those grotesque sketches we met with in the Proclamation. The bearer of ridicule, the Danton of parody is the wise rascal Valerio, who hits the monarchy, the bureaucracy and the liberals with the harshest and wittiest barbs: perhaps these are the very ones that Weidig threw out of the Proclamation. Büchner seems to be asking the reader: can such a monstrously irrational creature as the German monarchy really last long? But he amplifies the mockery with another tool. When an image of popular life is thrust under his pen, the irony disappears, the skeptical smile turns into a grimace of bitterness. Büchner paints a completely realistic picture with a broad brush. The depiction of human suffering in Leonce and Lena, as in The Death of Danton, is the most powerful passage. But this was already not enough for Büchner.
Ridicule, in alliance with passion, proved to be the last stake of Büchner’s faith in the revolution. In Leonce, everything became less intense and less convincing than in Danton. No wonder the play itself turned out to be even more crumpled than Danton. A pessimistic conclusion is confirmed. There was no more room for optimism.
And Büchner wrote Lenz. Lenz gives vent to the author’s purely subjective feelings. At the time he wrote this short story, we know that he no longer saw a way out for the revolution. Here, with particular sharpness, the ever-strong fatalistic notes in him began to speak. For a long time it seemed to him that every situation was given once and for all and therefore could not be changed. “Circumstances are beyond our will”: this is how he puts this idea in a letter to his parents from France in early 1834. In Lenz, written after the failure of the proclamation and the flight to France, Büchner returns once more to this idea and tries to develop it in a fictional form. But he throws the work away before finishing it, clearly frightened by the grim conclusions he has reached. The short story gives such an impression that Büchner suddenly felt the onset of a nervous breakdown, a real nervous breakdown, carrying with it madness in the bud. There was something to fear.
Woyzeck is no stranger to these feelings. This work is also fatalistic, but the role of fate is played by nature in it. It suppresses the soul of the hero, Woyzeck, a wretched downtrodden pauper who becomes – and cannot help but become – a victim of wealth, power and nature. He kills his girlfriend and the play is meant to show that he had no choice but to kill her given the circumstances in which he lives. Danton portrays the mass, which is driven to rebellion by the force of social conditions, shows how these social conditions lead to a natural event, hunger, which the masses are unable to resist. The incentive to kill is in their mind. The work becomes – although it is all fragmentary – masterful and overwhelming. There are few places where the process is depicted with such amazing conviction, these passages depict two creatures with very good inclinations: a lovely girl who is forced to become a prostitute, and a very good and intelligent boy who is turned into a murderer by circumstances. The inevitability of both outcomes is revealed with extraordinary persuasiveness.
Büchner died without finding a way out of that tragic conflict in which he saw the destruction of both the revolution and the revolutionary. And what hastened his death, perhaps, was the consciousness of this despair.
But despair, let us say again, was not objective. It did not necessarily arise from the events that Büchner observed and explained. The conclusion to despair is explained by the imperfection of his method. He rightly established the dominance of the material factor in history, rightly declared that history is a class struggle, a struggle between rich and poor on the basis of material interests. But he accepted the conditions prevailing in Germany in the 1830s as if they were given once and for all. His method was not fertilized by the idea of dialectical development.
This explains his mistakes, this explains the sense of hopelessness of the revolution, this explains his personal tragedy, which brought him to the brink of madness and destroyed him so young, the one who promised so much.