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 schizophrenia in general, and a true description of Lenz's mental illness in particular.³ Its authority...