SOURCE: Nickisch, Curt Wendell. “Georg Büchner's Philosophy of Science: Totality in Lenz and Woyzeck.” Selecta 18 (1997): 37-45.

In the following essay, Nickisch outlines Büchner's thematic conceptualization of totality—the integration of all elements of human existence and all aspects of the natural world—as exemplified in Lenz and Woyzeck.

Karl Georg Büchner, a seminal and anachronistic dramatist, wrote only three plays, one of which remains unfinished, and a prose piece. A brilliant scientist, Büchner completed a dissertation on ichthian neurology and joined the University of Zurich faculty as a Reader in Comparative Anatomy. He died in February 1837, at the age of 23.

Georg was born to a family of physicians. Besides his public education, he was also instructed at home in reading, writing and contemporary literature by his mother, Caroline.¹ At the age of eighteen he left for the University of Strasbourg to study medicine, and...