Monatshefte

A comprehensive treatment of an author who died at the age of 23 and who produced only a political tract, three dramas, and a brief narrative would seldom merit more than a slim volume. Yet a string of weighty studies offering comprehensive overviews of Georg Büchner has emerged in the past century and includes significant monographs by Hans Mayer, Karl Viëtor, Henri Poschmann, John Reddick, and Gerhard Knapp, to name only a few. In 2009, two new volumes on Büchner appeared, adding to this tradition. Although each draws on past traditions, each also offers new insights into Büchner and advances scholarship on him.

Christian Neuhuber's monograph, part of the Schmidt "Klassiker Lektüren" series, is intended for those unfamiliar with Büchner, most likely advanced gymnasial and beginning university students. It focuses on Büchner's literary work and so excludes a detailed biography and engagements with his philosophical and scientific writings, but nonetheless expands the scholarship on Büchner, a significant feat for a volume of this kind. The book is organized by its pedagogical aim: it is divided into five chapters, each based on one of Büchner's literary works ("Der Hessische Landbote," Dantons Tod, "Lenz," Leonce und Lena, and Woyzeck), and each of these chapters is subdivided into six identical subheadings ("Entstehungskontext und historischer Hintergrund," "Überlieferung," "Quellen und Einflüsse," "Aspekte der Forschung," "Analyse," and "Wirkungsgeschichte und künstlerische Rezeption"). Within each section the reader finds the bolded keywords typical of "Studienausgaben" that help students identify the most important names, events, and concepts. The style, although far from simple, is clear and comprehensible, and the arguments precise and easy to follow. The book concentrates more on surveying established scholarship and debates than on introducing new questions or findings on Büchner. Nonetheless, Neuhuber's work not only treats existing scholarship, but also adds to current research on the reception of Büchner, [End Page 125] specifically in the musical and visual arts. Neuhuber provides the first survey on this scale of Büchner's extensive "intermedial" influence, most particularly on the graphic arts.

As the subheading "Entstehungskontext und historischer Hintergrund" intimates, Neuhuber's approach to Büchner is grounded in biographical and historical detail and foregrounds Büchner's activities as a political revolutionary as crucial to understanding his oeuvre (i.e., Leonce und Lena is read as a response to the public spectacle of Prince Ludwig II of Hessen-Darmstadt's marriage). Readers more inclined to philosophical readings of Büchner will find, however, that the subsequent "Aspekte der Forschung" and "Analyse" sections manifest a keen sensitivity to and a broad familiarity with the differing interpretive traditions associated with Büchner, for Neuhuber gives fair treatment to a range of interpretations, including both philosophical and political. While not afraid to reveal his own political stance, Neuhuber takes great care to delineate the claims and to sustain the tensions that drive the debates within Büchner scholarship. Readers come away wanting to delve even deeper into Büchner's texts and into the scholarship surrounding them.

Neuhuber's knowledge of Büchner scholarship and reception is impressive. His sections on "Überlieferung" and "Quellen und Einflüsse" are grounded in the most current textual and editorial research on Büchner, as found in the recent Marburg edition of Büchner's works, and highlight Büchner's engagement with his literary predecessors and contemporaries as well as the editorial controversies and challenges associated with texts that are notorious for their lack of authoritative published versions. His summary of Büchner's literary reception benefits similarly from Dietmar Goltschnigg's seminal three-volume series, Georg Büchner und die Moderne (2000ff.). Particularly noteworthy is Neuhuber's attention to "intermediale Rezeption": for each chapter, Neuhuber includes a lengthy listing, and in many cases descriptions...