[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 schizophrenia in general, and a true description of Lenz's mental illness in particular.³ Its authority resides in the perceived authenticity of Büchner's portrayal of mental illness, in a narration which is delivered from the perspective of a sympathetic observer whose voice is intermingled with that of the doomed sufferer. The persuasive power of Büchner's language is unmistakable. From an innocuous opening sentence—“Den 20. [Januar] ging Lenz durch's Gebirg”⁴—the narrative moves rapidly and spectacularly toward its intention: the linguistic representation of a deteriorating mind. Büchner has succeeded in transforming the structure of his protagonist's psychological state into language: short sentences are compressed, linked by commas and not separated by periods, without an attempt at using subordinate clauses. The resulting paratactic structure, the piling up of short sentences without relief from subordinating elements, gives the effect of breathlessness and confusion; it illustrates an inability to place hierarchy or order upon events and put them in their proper perspective. The effect is dazzling, as the following sample from the long opening paragraph demonstrates:

Gegen Abend kam er auf die Höhe des Gebirgs, auf das Schneefeld, von wo man wieder hinabstieg in die Ebene nach Westen, er setzte sich oben nieder. Es war gegen Abend ruhiger geworden; das Gewölk lag fest und unbeweglich am Himmel, so weit der Blick reichte, nichts als Gipfel, von denen sich breite Flächen hinabzogen, und alles so still, grau, dämmernd; es wurde ihm entsetzlich einsam, er war allein, ganz allein, er wollte mit sich sprechen, aber er konnte nicht, er wagte kaum zu athmen, das Biegen seines Fußes tönte wie Donner unter ihm, er mußte sich niedersetzen; es faßte ihn eine namenlose Angst in diesem Nichts, er war im Leeren, er riß sich auf und flog den Abhang hinunter. Es war finster geworden, Himmel und Erde verschmolzen in Eins. Es war als ginge ihm was nach, und als müsse ihn was Entsetzliches erreichen, etwas das Menschen nicht ertragen können, als jage der Wahnsinn auf Rossen hinter ihm. Endlich hörte er Stimmen, er sah Lichter, es wurde ihm leichter, man sagte ihm, er hätte noch eine halbe Stunde nach Waldbach. Er ging durch das Dorf, die Lichter schienen durch die Fenster, er sah hinein im Vorbeigehen, Kinder am Tische, alte Weiber, Mädchen, Alles ruhige, stille Gesichter, es war ihm als müsse das Licht von ihnen ausstrahlen, es ward ihm leicht, er war bald in Waldbach im Pfarrhause. Man saß am Tische, er hinein; die blonden Locken hingen ihm um das bleiche Gesicht, es zuckte ihm in den Augen und um den Mund, seine Kleider waren zerissen. Oberlin hieß ihn willkommen, er hielt ihn für einen Handwerker.

I have quoted this rather extensive passage from the opening paragraph of the novella to demonstrate the force of Büchner's prose: it does not, for example, inform the reader that on the 22nd of January, two days after the disoriented walk through the mountains Büchner describes, the historical Lenz wrote a letter to Johann Kaspar Lavater in which there is no indication of mental confusion.⁵ The novella overwhelms the reader through the power of Büchner's language, and the conclusion that insanity must be like this or, more specifically, the insanity of Lenz was like this is the result of Büchner's artistry, not necessarily of his knowledge or observation of mental illness. The illusion that the realist Büchner has created is so complete that readers find it difficult to distance themselves from the text and respond to it as a work of art, rather than as the authentic representation of the mental illness of Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz.

I do not intend to argue that Lenz was not mentally ill, nor do I want to claim that the novella Lenz does not contain a convincing representation of insanity. Instead, I want to review the evidence on which the conclusion that Lenz was a schizophrenic is based, and make two related points: first, Büchner's novella Lenz is above all a work of fiction, and a reading of it for biographical purposes must be approached with extreme caution;⁶ second, the sources on which assessments of Lenz's mental illness have been based are limited and need to be reexamined and reevaluated within a context of 18th-century discourse on insanity. The psychoanalytic Lenz biography called for by Rüdiger Scholz would be a useful beginning for such a project.⁷

BüCHNER'S NOVELLA

Since Lenz's image, and particularly our understanding of his madness, has been profoundly determined by representations of his madness, it is pertinent that recent studies on late 18th- and early 19th-century literary representations and social perceptions of insanity enter into Lenz scholarship. The most distinguished work in this area is Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization. Foucault theorizes that our perception of madness underwent significant changes during the 17th and 18th centuries. A brief summary of the history of insanity follows: During the Middle Ages, some madmen in Germany were confined in the so-called Narrentürme, but the majority were expelled, and many found a peripatetic home in the Narrenschiffe which roamed villages and seas. The Narrenschiff is, of course, a motif which figures prominently in literature, and the character of the fool as the speaker of truth has been known from antiquity to Shakespeare and beyond. The image of the madman, or fool, was used for didactic purposes, or even for amusement, but madness did not seem to be a particular embarrassment to the community, only an inconvenience inasmuch as the insane, like the indigent, required care. But as early as the 16th century, and increasingly in the 17th and, particularly, 18th centuries, madmen acquired a different role. Foucault argues that the insane ultimately assumed the place lepers had previously held in society, that is, the moral values attached to lepers, which made them function as outcasts and scapegoats, were transferred to the insane. The natural outcome of this development was the extensive confinement of the insane during the 18th century. For the age of reason, madness and other social deviances, in their utterly uninhibited display of the existence of unreason, were particularly uncomfortable and embarrassing, and hiding the evidence was a convenient solution.⁸ Foucault stresses the fact that during the age of reason madness became linked to morality. A new work ethic, which arose out of changing economic conditions, severely condemned idleness, regarding it as the root of all evil, and created the so-called workhouses, in which “young men who disturbed their families' peace or squandered their goods, people without profession, and the insane”⁹ were locked up together. In the classical age, “for the first time, madness was perceived through a condemnation of idleness.”¹⁰ Since an idle life was regarded as the ultimate rebellion against God, and madmen were included in the proscription of idleness, madness was no longer considered both a medical and moral problem, as had been the case in the Middle Ages and in antiquity, but only an ethical problem.

We must give serious consideration to the connection between madness and idleness if we are to understand Oberlin's evaluation of Lenz's behavior. There is, of course, no criticism of Lenz's life-style in Büchner's novella; quite to the contrary, it is an extremely sympathetic portrayal of him. But Oberlin's journal was the basis for Büchner's understanding of Lenz's insanity, and Büchner depended on its description and judgment of Lenz's conduct. In an essay with the thought-provoking title “Lenz Viewed Sane,” published in 1974, Janet K. King argues that Büchner wanted to portray society, not Lenz, as insane. King notes that while “Oberlin's diary depicts a man deeply disturbed and emotionally unstable, the pastor's report does not use terms such as wahnsinnig or toll.”¹¹ In the concluding sentence of his report, Oberlin refers to Lenz as “bedauernswürdiger Patient,”¹² but it is noteworthy that he uses the word “vergnügt” many times throughout the report, when describing either Lenz's condition or the manner in which time was spent. These many lighter moments seem to occur even more frequently than the serious episodes so well known from the novella, during which Lenz behaves irrationally and frightens everyone around him. They seem to indicate that Oberlin hesitated to associate Lenz with the insane who were confined to institutions and often chained and treated like animals. King points out that mystical experiences, not unlike those undergone by Lenz and related by Oberlin, were not unusual occurrences in the Steintal, where Oberlin was pastor. Oberlin himself wrote a treatise entitled ‘Berichte eines Visionärs über den Zustand der Seelen nach dem Tod,’ and his comment about Lenz's efforts to raise a young girl from the dead was simply: “[es war] ihm aber fehlgeschlagen.”¹³ This, King argues, is an indication that he was not particularly dismayed by Lenz's behavior. Oberlin was, however, critical of Lenz's way of life and admonished him to honor his mother and father if he wanted to find peace of mind.¹⁴ King notes that the tendency to disapprove of Lenz's way of life reappeared in his “obituary in the Allgemeine Literaturzeitung of May 1792 [which] simply judges him a misfit in a manner reminiscent of Kaufmann's reproaches which Büchner introduced into the novella.”¹⁵ The newspaper expresses the following opinion: “Er [Lenz] starb, von wenigen betrauert, und von keinem vermißt. Dieser unglückliche Gelehrte … verlebte den besten Teil seines Lebens in nutzloser Geschäftigkeit, ohne eigentliche Bestimmung.”¹⁶

This link among the admonitions by Kaufmann, Oberlin, and the newspaper must be noted, for they are critiques of Lenz which resemble those by his own father. The 18th century's fear of idleness, the mortal sin of bourgeois society described by Foucault, is reflected in these attitudes. In an age which perceived madness “on the social horizon of poverty, of incapacity for work, of inability to integrate with the group,”¹⁷ it must have been difficult to separate one condition from the other in a man as complex as Lenz. His existence in the economic margin was certainly one of the factors leading to the aberrant behavior first noted by Kaufmann in November 1777,¹⁸ and then by Oberlin in January 1778. Possibly because of his inability to find permanent employment—a condition which certainly was not his alone, as the crowded workhouses attest—Lenz had “alienate[d] himself outside the sacred limits of its [the bourgeoisie's] ethics.”¹⁹ His friends and associates could very well have considered him to be mad.

When Georg Büchner chose the theme of madness as one of his central concerns, the perception of madness and, particularly, its treatment in literature had changed considerably. Madness had been celebrated by Cervantes and Shakespeare, but after the middle of the 17th century, it was expelled from most literary forms and confined to satire; Gottsched's banishment of Hanswurst from the German stage is symptomatic of this development.²⁰ During Romanticism, a preoccupation with the pathological returned with greater force, and madness in literature acquired a new function: it was no longer perceived as entirely negative, but came to be associated with artistry and even was, to a certain degree, idealized and glorified (Reuchlein 228, 230). By the time Büchner wrote Lenz, the Romantics' glorification of madness had been transformed by the sober positivistic appraisal of insanity as illness, a perception of madness which was reflected in literature by a demand for clinical descriptions. Responding to both romantic and realistic perceptions of insanity, Büchner combined the tradition of the Künstler- und Wahnsinnsroman while treating madness as an illness. His protagonist, like Tasso or the artist figures in romantic narratives, exists outside the bourgeois world, but his madness is not idealized, nor is it associated with his antibourgeois life-style. As Reuchlein perceptively observes, Büchner's major innovation, a move which differentiates his text from those of Romanticism and the 18th century, is his focus on madness itself, rather than on its effects or causes:

Weitaus stärker als bis dahin üblich, steht im Lenz der Krankheitsprozeß als solcher und gleichsam für sich … im Zentrum des Erzählens. Demgegenüber verlieren über das Pathologische hinausweisende Momente transzendenter, genieästhetischer, erkenntnistheoretischer, zeitkritischer oder moralischer Natur etc., die die literarische Beschäftigung mit dem Wahnsinn im späten 18. wie im frühen 19. Jahrhundert eigentlich erst motiviert hatten, an Bedeutung und rücken in den Hintergrund. Insgesamt erreicht damit die, seit dem Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts in der Psychopathologie wie in der Dichtung beobachtbare, Tendenz zur Konzentration auf die Symptomatik der Seelenkrankheit und auf deren Dynamik bei Büchner literarisch einen Kulminationspunkt.

(Reuchlein 389)

Reuchlein identifies Büchner's innovation in the literary representation of madness as responsible for psychologists' and literary scholars' interest in this work as a case study. These interpretations, which have become a commonplace in Büchner scholarship (Reuchlein 389-96),²¹ have had their echo in Lenz scholarship. One Lenz scholar writes: “… the temptation often arises to dismiss all his thoughts as the product of an unbalanced mind—which of course they were.”²² Yet it is understandable that critics would react to Lenz in this way, for Büchner's complicated narrative perspective, which blends the narrator's and the protagonist's voices and invites the reader's complete identification with the experience of the protagonist, gives the strong impression that his novella is just that—a case study. Lenz is, however, not an authentic medical report of mental illness in general, as many scholars have assumed, nor is it a true depiction of the mental illness of Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz.

Notes

1. A shorter version of this paper was read at the meeting of the American Association for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Seattle, Washington, March 1992.

2. Letter from Lavater to Sarasin, August 1777. Lenz in Briefen, ed. Franz Waldmann (Zurich: Stern, 1894) 73.

3. See Walter Hinderer, “Georg Büchner: ‘Lenz’ (1839),” Romane und Erzählungen zwischen Romantik und Realismus, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1983) 274.

4. Georg Büchner, Werke und Briefe, ed. Werner R. Lehmann, 5th ed. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984) 68.

5. Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, Werke und Schriften in drei Bänden, ed. Sigrid Damm (Munich: Hanser, 1987) 3: 566-67.

6. Indeed, Timm Menke has recently argued that the novella belongs in Büchner scholarship and not in Lenz scholarship. See “‘Durchs Fernglas der Vernunft die Nationen beschauen.’ Lenz-Rezeption in den letzten Jahren der DDR: Christoph Heins Bearbeitung des Neuen Menoza.” Paper delivered at the International J. M. R. Lenz Symposium of 17-20 October 1992, held at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma.

7. See Rüdiger Scholz, “Eine längst fällige historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe: Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 34 (1990): 212.

8. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage, 1988) 3-37, 199-220.

9. Ibid. 45.

10. Ibid. 58.

11. Janet K. King, “Lenz Viewed Sane,” The Germanic Review 49 (1974): 148.

12. Büchner, commentary 366.

13. Ibid. 363.

14. The author of a medical dissertation on Lenz's schizophrenia also notes: “Für Oberlin besteht ein deutlicher Zusammenhang zwischen den Sünden, die Lenz begangen hat, und seinem Wahnsinn, der ihm als Strafe auferlegt worden ist.” See Herwig Böcker, “Zerstörung der Persönlichkeit des Dichters J. M. R. Lenz durch die beginnende Schizophrenie” (Diss. U of Bonn, 1969) 217. Another medical study, which unfortunately has not been available to me, is by R. Weichbrodt, “Der Dichter Lenz, eine Pathographie,” Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheit 62 (1920): 153-87. Böcker summarizes Weichbrodt's study as follows: “Die ersten Anzeichen des Wahnsinns treten in Weimar auf, vorher besteht kein Hinweis auf Krankheitssymptome. Weichbrodts Diagnose: Katatonie, Remission mit Restzustand, 1786 neuer Schub, rasche Verblödung. In seinen letzten Jahren habe Lenz nur noch vegetiert und 1792 sei er an seiner Katatonie gestorben.” See 12. In a brief chapter on Lenz, K. R. Eissler says little to further an understanding of Lenz. See Goethe, eine psychoanalytische Studie, trans. Peter Fischer (Basel and Frankfurt: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1983) 57-73.

15. King 147-48.

16. Quoted by King 148.

17. Foucault 64.

18. M. N. Rosanow, Jakob M. R. Lenz, der Dichter der Sturm- und Drangperiode: Sein Leben und seine Werke, trans. C. von Gütschow (Leipzig: Schulze, 1909) 389.

19. Foucault 58.

20. Georg Reuchlein, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft, Psychiatrie und Literatur: Zur Entwicklung der Wahnsinnsthematik in der deutschen Literatur des späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Fink, 1986) 50. Subsequent references appear in parentheses in the text. Other studies on this topic are by Jutta Osinski, Über Vernunft und Wahnsinn: Studien zur literarischen Aufklärung in der Gegenwart und im 18. Jhdt. (Bonn: Bouvier, 1983) and by Anke Bennholdt-Thomsen and Alfredo Guzzoni, Der “Asoziale” in der Literatur um 1800 (Königstein: Athenäum, 1979).

21. Hinderer 270-78.

22. See Bruce Duncan, “A ‘Cool Medium’ as Social Corrective: Lenz's Concept of Comedy,” Colloquia Germanica 8 (1975): 232.