Autopsie von Revolution und Restauration. Georg Büchner und die politische Imagination by Patrick Fortmann, and: Dichter der Immanenz. Vier Studien zu Georg Büchner by Ariane Martin und Bodo Morawe (review)

Can there have been since antiquity so enormous an inverted pyramid of commentary and interpretation balanced on so small an œuvre and so brief a writing career as that of Georg Büchner? I no longer attempt to stay abreast of it, so that I can only open a window on two of the newest contributions to the profusion. Patrick Fortmann’s 350-page monograph is an expansion of one chapter (!) of his Harvard dissertation; moreover, it deals only with Der hessische Landbote, Leonce und Lena, and Dantons Tod. It begins in traditional dissertation manner by securing a theoretical foundation, the dichotomy of the French theorist Jacques Rancière, derived in turn from Foucault, between the “police,” a metonomy for the oppressive status quo maintained by traditional European governments, and “politics,” the resistance to this order and the erasure of its boundaries. This is too abstruse for me to comment on; although Fortmann returns to it at the end, I think the study could have stood as well without it. For Fortmann, perhaps unusually today, engages in a microscopic explication of practically every word and phrase, every implication, every allusion to historical and current events, and to the thought and writings of many others. In regard to the latter, one might wonder whether the harried and speed-writing Büchner could have read and retained such a volume of material, but Fortmann is concerned with him in his larger context. As for the virtually Talmudic assignment of meaning to minutiae of the text, suggesting that Büchner himself has become a sacred text, one might think that it would put a good deal of pressure on intentionality if Fortmann cared anything about it, but the person Büchner is hardly present here except as the homo faber of intricate texts.

Fortmann leaves aside some of the conventional issues that have worried interpreters, such as whether Büchner tends more to Danton or more to Robespierre, or the editing of the Landbote by Pastor Weidig. He describes this problem in detail but by highlighting the radicality of the text he makes Weidig’s revisions less important. He interprets the pamphlet as a unity, including its religious dimension. For all we know, Büchner may have been responsible for some of the biting accusations of the oppressors’ violations of the Gospel, what Fortmann calls the “Depastoralisierung der Obrigkeit” (82), in order to reach the horizon of his targeted readership. The revolution, never mentioned, proceeds from “einer eschatalogischen Geschichtskonstruktion” (109). Fortmann considers Büchner in all his intellectual range and takes special note of his scientific and medical studies. The metaphor of the autopsy, which Gutzkow introduced in his response to Dantons Tod, calls to mind the anatomical theater, which reveals hidden and unpleasant things to the eye, as Büchner does in his decidedly non-Romantic and non-Classical exhibits of salaciousness, meanness, suffering, and pauperization. Fortmann stresses that Dantons Tod is full of opened and torn bodies, chopped-up and heaped-up corpses. He treats Büchner less as an activist than as a revealer of unpleasant truths of a world that is in no way harmonious or unitarily interpretable. Thus he is much concerned with difference, of aesthetics and politics, commonality and separation, and juxtaposed oppositions such as that of Danton and Robespierre.

The meticulous detail of Fortmann’s explications can only be summarized here. In the Landbote he concentrates on, among other things, the disunity of the community, the demystification of the sovereign, the suffering of the common people, and the eschatology and work of the revolution. He sees the Landbote as accompanied by skepticism as to its efficacy; the people are potentially revolutionary but apathetic...