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Georg Büchner's Danton's Death

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2022

Lee Baxandall
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Extract

Danton's Death is the first play of a twenty-one year old German revolutionary who died before he had lived another three years. Written in secrecy during five weeks of 1835, it may well be the most remarkable first play ever composed. It breaks through prevailing patterns of dramaturgy to a new form, creates the first passive hero in the history of tragedy, and strikingly foreshadows surrealism, expressionism and naturalism. Its author, a youth who short weeks previously had barely escaped arrest for his own revolutionary writings and organizational activities, proceeded to concentrate, in this study of the decline of the French Revolution during Danton's last days, on the antinomy of his passionate desire for social change and his calm knowledge that revolution could not succeed in Germany in his time.

Type
Research Article
Information
Tulane Drama Review , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , March 1962 , pp. 136 - 149
Copyright
Copyright © The Tulane Drama Review 1962

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References

Notes

1 Mayer, Hans, Georg Büchner und seine Zeit (Berlin, 1960), p. 340Google Scholar; Wiese, Benno von, Die deutsche Tragödie von Lessing bis Hebbel (Hamburg, 1948), II, p. 325Google Scholar.

2 “Walter Hüllerer, in a brilliant and suggestive essay published in Das deutsche Drama, edited by Benno von Wiese (Düsseldorf, 1958), II, pp. 65-88, emphasizes this element. But Höllerer in general treats Danton's loneliness as an integral part of scepticism and disillusionment, as an attitude emerging periodically whenever man's radical hopes are disappointed. My emphasis is different, as will be seen. Viëtor, Karl, Georg Büchner. Politik, Dichtung, Wissenshaft. (Bern, 1949), p. 103Google Scholar, notes this element in passing but fails to develop its contextual and formal importance where it is not explicit—which is almost like not noticing it at all. Krapp, Helmut, Der Dialog bei Georg Büchner (Darmstadt, 1958)Google Scholar, offers a splendid stylistic analysis upon which the present writer has freely drawn.

3 Mayer, pp. 192-194; Lukacs, Georg, Deutsche Realisten des 19. Jahrhunderts (Bern, 1951), p. 76Google Scholar. Both make the demurrer that while Büchner sympathized morally with the eighteenth-century Epicurean materialist and individualist Danton, yet Büchner politically favored Robespierre's position.

4 Krapp, pp. 120-121.

5 Mayer, chapter on “Kunst und Natur,” p. 275 ff.

6 For examples, see Viëtor, p. 105; von Wiese, II, p. 310; Peacock, Ronald, The Poet in the Theatre (New York, 1960), p. 186Google Scholar; Krapp, p. 136.

7 Krapp, pp. 144-145.

8 In a general manner this notion has been put forward by Benjamin, Walter, in “Was ist das epische Theater?”, Akzente (2/1954)Google Scholar.