SOURCE: Peischl, Margaret T. “Büchner's Lenz: A Study of Madness.” Germanic Notes and Reviews 27, no. 1 (spring 1996): 13-19.

In the following essay, Peischl summarizes the subject, action, style, and central conflicts of Lenz.

The reader who doesn't know in advance that Georg Büchner's novella Lenz deals with the mental decline of the Sturm und Drang writer, J. M. R. Lenz, is at least introduced immediately on the first page to a very tense and uncanny scene precluding healthy normality. The protagonist is portrayed from the start as an individual plagued by rapidly changing moods and with a strange manner of thinking: »Nur war es ihm manchmal unangenehm, daß er nicht auf dem Kopf gehen konnte.«¹ In the first five paragraphs of the novella Lenz demonstrates four different moods: he is successively indifferent, plagued, passionate, and greatly alarmed. Soon the reader notices that the landscape also appears sinister...