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The project seeks to
fill the largest gap currently existing in our knowledge of Jakob Michael
Reinhold Lenz (1751-92). One of the
leading members of the Sturm und Drang movement and much admired by his friend
Goethe, Lenz has probably had a greater influence on creative writing in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries than any other author of his time,
principally because he developed, both in theory and practice, a kind of drama
that was dedicated to the discussion of social, political and psychological
problems of everyday life. In 1771
Lenz broke off his studies at Königsberg and travelled to Alsace where, as
servant and companion to two Prussian noblemen who had joined the French army,
he was able to observe the practices of the army at close quarters.
One result of his experiences was his play Die Soldaten (completed
1775), which analyses the relationship between the military and the civilian
population. Lenz’s interest was
not merely literary, however, and over the next two years he invested
considerable time and energy in analysing the organisation of the army and
developing possible solutions to the problem of its integration into society.
Lenz’s investigations drew him into arguments concerning such matters as the
manning of garrisons, the organisation of military assaults, and the proper
social conduct of soldiers and their wives.
His proposals are not without their eccentricities, but they reveal a
detailed knowledge of the subject matter and a grasp of the nation as an organic
whole. From this followed his
concern with conflicts between the army and civil society and with the lack of
cohesion in the army, two symptoms of the fragmentation of society which Lenz
believed had to be prevented by institutional reform. Lenz’s work in this area is especially significant as it is
the only known example of sustained political analysis in the Sturm und Drang.
Furthermore, it represents one of the first examples in Germany of what
was to become the Napoleonic conception of the army as defender of the
fatherland, and it is thus an important document of the development of ideas of
nationhood in Germany.
These writings, composed shortly before, during and immediately after Lenz’s
stay as Goethe’s guest in Weimar in 1776, survive in the form of about 600
sides of manuscript mostly lodged in the Biblioteka Jagiellonska in Kraków,
Poland. One section was published
in 1913 by Karl Freye under the title ‘Über die Soldatenehen’, and this
remains the only section that appears in any of the editions of Lenz’s works.
The current project, which is supported by a grant from the Arts and Humanities
Research Board, aims to make the whole complex available to scholars for the
first time. The manuscripts consist
of a mass of drafts and jottings, which are difficult to decipher and to
interpret. Most are written in
(faulty) French. Several of them
belong to drafts addressed to the French Minister of War, which degenerate in
the course of their composition into apparently disconnected notes or
mathematical calculations scribbled in odd corners of sheets of paper, sometimes
even on top of each other. Lenz’s
drafts show that he was also considering other formats, such as attempts at a
letter-novel or a proposal for a set of laws governing marriage and divorce, but
there are also loose sheets, and it is yet not clear how many distinct versions
of the project are reflected in these papers.
A small sample of Lenz's work, a fragment from a
fictional letter addressed to the French Minister of War Saint-Germain can be
viewed on this website.
[Home] [Project description] [Research team] [Sample text] [External links]
These pages are maintained by Elystan Griffiths.
