8 - Writing on the Run: Georg Büchner's Revolutions

Summary

Agitator

THE YEAR IS 1834: he sits at his manuscript, fearing arrest at any moment. The Darmstadt police were his Muses, he would later say, a sardonic angle on the urgency of this genesis. He needs money. He is still at home, but there's a ladder against the back garden wall for a quick getaway. Some of his fellow-conspirators are already safely over the border, in nearby Strasbourg or in Switzerland. The less lucky ones are or soon will be in jail, betrayed by informers and agents provocateurs, facing years of confinement, interrogation, sometimes torture. His closest collaborator, the pastor Friedrich Ludwig Weidig, defiant in adversity but finally despairing after three years of solitary confinement, will slash his veins; the authorities soon find him, but they leave him to bleed to death, a judicial murder.

Büchner has been involved in plans to free some of the prisoners, which is one reason why he has stayed on in Darmstadt, but the plan has collapsed: the bribed guard has been withdrawn from service. The imprisoned colleagues will haunt Büchner's conscience and his imagination— he knows that such pressures would have slowly broken him. Once safe in exile he will write to the family of his relief that the constant threat of arrest has been lifted, though Darmstadt has requested extradition in a “wanted” notice now in circulation. Phantasies of imprisonment will visit the typhus delirium of the young man's last days, which will be very soon.

The present manuscript apart, he is hardly yet a writer. He has coauthored with Weidig an inflammatory pamphlet, which is mainly what has got him into this trouble. Otherwise he is just a medical student in his early twenties, with two years at the University of Strasbourg behind him and a third more locally, at Giessen, Justus Liebig's university. Now he is working at home for his examinations and doing some private teaching for would-be medical students; there are anatomical diagrams all over his desk. These also served, his brother Ludwig would recall, to hide the manuscript from his father, a respected senior medic whose social standing helped keep the police at bay.