Literature & Film

Lenz, Georg Büchner´s visionary exploration of an 18th century playwright´s descent into madness, grew in part out of Alsatian pastor Johann Oberlin´s journal.

Lenz is a dispassionate account on the nervous system of a schizophrenic, perhaps the first third-person text ever written from the inside of insanity. At his death at the age of 23 in 1837, Georg Büchner also left behind Leonce and Lena, Woyzeck, and Danton´s Death—psychologically and politically acute plays well ahead of their time.