Lenz

Translated by Michael Hamburger

Author:

Georg Büchner

New Paperback | 64 pp.
ISBN: 9781847490858
Published: 2009

£7.99 £6.39
Save: 20% off

Set against the strikingly beautiful backdrop of the Vosges mountains, Lenz tells the tale of the real-life writer J.M.R. Lenz’s nineteen-day stay in Waldersbach in 1778, describing his wanderings around the mountainous surroundings and his worsening fits of madness, eventually culminating in his removal, under guard, to Strasbourg.

Valued both as a chillingly convincing exploration of the reality of paranoid schizophrenia and an influential foreunner of literary modernism, this existential drama boasts a prose style startlingly ahead of its time and is a truly original work of literature.

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'A study of schizophrenia whose style anticipates Bernhard and Beckett.' The Guardian

'A harbinger of European modernism.' The New Yorker

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Read an excerpt from Lenz

Georg Büchner was born in Goddelau in 1813 and died of typhus in 1837, at the age of just 23. In his short life he nonetheless managed to make a significant impact on German literature and it is widely believed that, had he lived longer, he could have achieved the stature of such German literary giants as Goethe and Schiller.