Büchner, Georg

(1813-1837)

   Playwright. Büchner's three plays remained unperformed during his lifetime and were not premiered until decades after his untimely death of typhoid in Zurich. His first was Dantons Tod(Danton'sDeath, 1835), which he wrote in the aftermath of the failed 1830 revolution and his own disillusionment with attempts to establish greater freedoms in his native Hessia. He wrote the comedy Leonce und Lena sometime in 1836, and it became the first of his plays to be premiered (in 1895). His best-known play, Woyzeck, is not a play at all but a fragment of scenes on which he had been working shortly before his death. It premiered in Munich during the 1913-1914 season and became emblematic of "primordial modernism" because it was so inchoate, but also because several critics perceived in the random suffering of its nearly inarticulate hero a personification of powerless victimhood in the merciless grip of authoritarian forces. Alban Berg (1885-1935) composed an opera he titled Wozzeck based on the play; it premiered in 1925. Werner Herzog (Werner Stipetic, 1942- ) directed a popular film version in 1979 starring Klaus Kinski as Woyzeck.