Deviance And Inheritance

Georg Büchner was an important German writer in the early 19 th century.Due to his untimely death,he only left four literary works to the readers,namely "Danton's Tod","Leonce und Lena","Woyzeck" and "Lenz",to which full attention was not paid until the early 20 th century.As it turned out,his works,all classics,are not only unique in form,but also contain groundbreaking ideas that obviously deviate from the German aesthetic tradition.The Büchner Prize for Literature,named after him,also demonstrates the importance of this writer to German literature.The complexity and contradiction of Büchner's identity have brought difficulties to researchers,and it is difficult to find the unity among them.He is a natural science scholar who studied medicine,a revolutionist who devoted himself to the peasant movement,an early communist who aimed the spear of revolution at the aristocracy,and a writer who showed fatalism and nihilism in his literary works.His social revolutionary practice and literary creation are opposite to each other,and coincidentally they exist simultaneously,which makes it difficult to explain why they can be unified in the same person.If Büchner's revolutionary activities and literary works are interpreted from the perspective of ideological history,the inner connection between them can be exposed:revolutionary spirit and humanitarian love.On the one hand,it appears as a social revolution in reality,which must overthrow the current system by means of violence,and strive for the basic living conditions for the majority of the people at the bottom.On the other hand,it appears in literary works as questioning and even despair of "humanity".However,this is not pure nihilism,instead it aims at launching a metaphysical revolution in the ideological world.The purpose is to break the literary tradition of "the Epoch of Art",the peak period of German culture,and lead literature to the realistic concern of "human" `.Büchner's aesthetic revolution was carried out by opposing idealism and aesthetic autonomy.Setting Schiller as a target,he criticized the ills of the era in which idealistic aesthetics was estranged from reality and politics.On a deeper level,this criticism actually points to the German traditional idealistic theory of "humanity",which breaks the German spiritual tradition of "inwardness".Büchner,based on a materialistic way of thinking,suggests that the illusory speculative humanity tradition and the one-sided pursuit of spiritual freedom should be abandoned;by stepping out of the narrowness of civic nature and paying attention to the lives of the people at the bottom,the social system can be reformed so as to truly realize the freedom,equality and fraternity pursued since the Age of Enlightenment.In a word,Büchner is a humanitarian writer with a revolutionary spirit.