Büchner, Georg - Helga Stipa Madland (essay date winter 1993)
Helga Stipa Madland (essay date winter 1993)
SOURCE: Madland, Helga Stipa. “Madness and Lenz: Two Hundred Years Later.” German Quarterly 66, no. 1 (winter 1993): 34-42.
[In the following excerpt, Madland approaches Büchner's novella Lenz as a generalized literary depiction of madness, rather than as a quasi-medical account of the insanity of the historical Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz.]
Lenz(1) lenzelt noch bei mir.(2)
The authoritative document on which literary history has based its perception of Lenz's madness is neither a report by a contemporary observer of the sick Lenz, nor Lenz's own description of his experience with mental illness, nor an assessment of it by medical authorities, but a 19th-century fictional text—Georg Büchner's novella Lenz. This famous piece of fiction, justifiably one of the most admired and respected works of German literature, is considered to be a model representation of...
[The entire page is 3128 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Navigate
