In accordance with our meta agreement to have topic challenges and a later meta agreement to have topic challenges lasting for two months and overlapping by one month, it is time to announce the May–June 2022 topic challenge.
Based on the number of votes (+6), the next topic challenge of the year 2022 will be
Georg Büchner
What's a topic challenge?
See the meta posts linked above, and also this main meta post. In short, during May and June 2022 you are invited to try to read at least one Georg Büchner story and ask questions about it.
Participation is not obligatory in any sense, and questions on other works are more than welcome during May and June too; they just won't count as part of this topic challenge.
How can I take part?
By getting hold of some works of Georg Büchner and asking (or answering!) good questions about them. Questions about these works should be tagged with georg-buechner and german-literature, and a tag for the work's title. We'll keep a list of all such questions in an answer to this meta post.
Below is Tsundoku's presentation:
Georg Büchner (1813 – 1837) never reached the age of 24 but counts as one of the most important figures of 19th-century German literature. While still a student, he published the pamphlet Der Hessische Landbote / The Hessian Courier, which criticised the social injustice that existed in Hessen at the time.
Due to his death at a young age, his works fit into a single volume:
- the play Dantons Tod (Danton's Death, 1835) is set during the French revolution and makes use of many historical sources;
- the novella fragment Lenz is based on a document about the author J. M. R. Lenz, more specifically an episode in the author's life during which he suffered an attack of paranoid schizophrenia;
- the play Leonce and Lena is a satire on the nobility;
- the play Woyzeck is his best-known work and was frequently adapted into various media, most famously Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck.
One of the most important literary prizes for German literature is the Georg Büchner Prize, which has been awarded since 1951.
Büchner's works, including translations, can be found online, e.g. at Project Gutenberg and at Internet Archive.
What's next?
- Vote for the next topic challenge (June–July), or propose your own topic!
