Selected Works by J. M. R. Lenz: Plays, Stories, Essays, and Poems by J. M. R. Lenz (review)

In Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), Goethe famously describes the dramatist, essayist, and poet Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz as a "passing meteor" that briefly traversed across the horizon of German literature before disappearing altogether. Fortunately, Goethe's dismissive statement did not prove accurate; today, Lenz's literary and theoretical works are recognized as some of the most challenging, socially critical, and aesthetically radical texts of the Sturm und Drang era. However, in the English-speaking world, Lenz has had a good deal less exposure than Goethe, Schiller, or Kleist. In fact, one might speculate that many North American university students are less likely to have read Lenz's own works than they are to have read Georg Büchner's 1836 novella fragment Lenz, which gives an account of the poet's mental collapse in the period from 1777 to 1778 (an event which for many years gave Lenz the reputation of a "mentally disturbed underdog," as the translators note in the introduction). Martin Wagner and Ellwood Wiggins's new English-language edition makes Lenz's oeuvre accessible to a broader English-speaking readership, as well as providing German studies scholars with a valuable English-language overview of Lenz's life and works informed by recent scholarship. The volume offers a representative sample of key works by Lenz, including three plays, The Tutor and The Soldiers, and The New Menoza; two stories, The Hermit and The Country Pastor; and several essays, including "Notes on Theater" and "On the Marriages of Soldiers." While some of these works have previously been translated into English, this new volume represents the most comprehensive English edition of Lenz's works to date.

Lenz is probably best known as a dramatist and, accordingly, the volume's first section features accessible translations of three of his best-known plays, The Soldiers, The New Menoza, and The Tutor. All three plays are translated from the first printed editions, which were published anonymously in Leipzig between 1774 and 1776. While the plays have all been translated into English previously, their inclusion in this volume puts them into conversation with Lenz's essays, stories, and poems, most of which have never been translated. The comedies The Soldiers and The Tutor exemplify the anti-Aristotelian approach that Lenz outlines in his essays, in which he breaks with the rigid understanding of the unity of time and place espoused by French tragedians. Especially toward the end of The Soldiers, the play's many shifts in time and space approach something like cross-cutting, which is reproduced admirably in the translation. Lenz's formal radicalism in his plays is deeply intertwined with a commitment to social realism. At the conclusion of "Remarks on the Theater," Lenz offers a guiding maxim: "the main thought of a comedy is always one matter, of a tragedy, one person." In The Soldiers, the "matter" at hand is the sexual exploitation of women by predatory soldiers; in the conclusion, Lenz has one of the characters articulate a plan for reforming the salacious Soldatenstand by establishing a "nursery for soldiers' women," who are described ironically as "amazons" who will martyr their reputation "for the stat." This plan was elucidated in a more serious way in Lenz's 1776 essay on the marriages of soldiers, which was written "for kings"; the Duke of Saxe-Weimar was one potential addressee. Similarly, The Tutor applies social-realist and anti-Aristotelian principles to the problem of private education in the eighteenth century; the play follows the downward spiral of a private tutor who lusts after the daughter of his employers. (The book's cover image, taken from a 1950 performance of The Tutor directed by none other than Bertolt Brecht, is a perfect visual tableau of this toxic situation, and makes a good implicit argument for the play's continued relevance in the #MeToo era...