SOURCE: Reddick, John. “The Desperate Mosaic.” In Georg Büchner: The Shattered Whole, pp. 3-28. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

In the following excerpt, Reddick studies the fundamental tension between Büchner's scientific and literary perceptions of the world.

[Büchner] died at 23 (an age at which Goethe had not even produced Werther); he left the barest handful of texts; and he impinged little on the consciousness of the century in which he so briefly lived. Not for him the succession of definitive editions, the Eckermanns eager to immortalize each crumb of wisdom from his mouth. His œuvre, already slender enough, was further decimated by the disappearance, perhaps even the physical destruction, of the great majority of his letters,¹ his putative diaries, and possibly an entire play—the mysterious “Pietro Aretino.”² Not one of his writings was published in his lifetime in authentic and definitive form; even his doctoral...