Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz - Lenz As A Literary Figure

Lenz As A Literary Figure

Lenz, a novella fragment by Georg Büchner, deals with Lenz's visit to the minister Friedrich Oberlin, in the Vosges. Lenz had visited Oberlin, on the suggestion of Kaufmann, because of his reputation as a pastor and psychologist. Oberlin's account of the events of Lenz's visit furnished Büchner with the source of his story, which in its turn was the source of Wolfgang Rihm's chamber opera Jakob Lenz.

In Paul Celan's acceptance speech for the Georg Büchner Prize for Literature in 1960, both the historical man and the "Lenz" of Büchner's fragment figure heavily. In the first line of Büchner's novella, Lenz sets off for the mountains on the 20th of January. Celan relates this to the life of the poem, asking, "Perhaps one can say that every poem has its 20th of January?" He adds that the poem remains mindful of such dates. Celan also says of his work "Conversation in the Mountains," composed after a missed encounter with Adorno, that it was written from such a date: that he started writing from his own "20th of January."

More recently the writers Peter Schneider, in his story Lenz (1973), and Gert Hoffmann, in his novella Die Rückkehr des verlorenen J.M.R. Lenz nach Riga ("The Return of the Lost J.M.R. Lenz to Riga", 1984), have given literary form to the events of his life.

Also worth mentioning is Marc Buhl's novel of 2002, Der rote Domino ("The Red Domino"), which uses the friendship between Goethe and Lenz, and its abrupt end, as the inspiration for a detective story.