Georg Buchner - Complete Plays and Prose (4 books)

GEORG BÜCHNER (1813-1837) was a German dramatist and writer of poetry and prose. His life was short, intense, and tragic -- and extremely significant for the development of modern drama. His literary achievements, though few in number, are held in great esteem in Germany and it is widely believed that, had it not been for his early death, he might have joined such central German literary figures as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller at the summit of their profession. His three plays served as an impetus for contemporary schools of drama as different as Ionesco and Brecht.

His first play, the historical drama DANTON'S DEATH (1835), follows the story of Georges Danton, a leader of the French Revolution, during the lull between the first and second terrors, and has been called "the most remarkable first play in European culture" (Guardian).

LENZ (1835), Büchner's only work of prose fiction, is a novella based on the life of the Sturm und Drang poet Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. Arnold Zweig described it as "the beginning of modern European prose".

Büchner's second play, the absurdist LEONCE AND LENA (1836), is considered a comedy but is actually a satire about the nobility veiled in humor. Erich Kästner considered the play to be one of the six most important classic comedies of the German language.

His most famous play, WOYZECK (1837), exists only in fragments and was published posthumously It is one of the most performed and influential plays in the German theatre repertory, and became the basis for many adaptations, including Alban Berg's landmark atonal opera "Wozzeck" (1925) and Werner Herzog's film "Woyzeck" (1979).


The following books are in PDF format unless otherwise noted. The PDFs are improved versions of older scans, in which the page images have been completely reprocessed with contents in bookmarks and accurate pagination.

* COMPLETE COLLECTED WORKS (Avon, 1977). Translated and Commentary by Henry J. Schmidt.

* COMPLETE PLAYS AND PROSE (Hill & Wang, 1963). Translated with an Introduction by Carl Richard Mueller.

* DANTON'S DEATH (TSL, 1982). Translated by Hedwig Rappolt.

* LENZ (Archipelago, 2004). Translated by Richard Sieburth -- ePUB