Hermann Kurzke

All too often, Georg Büchner has been enlisted for the wrong cause. Hermann Kurzke’s major biography has now been published. In it, this scholar of German literature not only tells the story of a genius, but also revolutionises our former view of the writer. (…)
Kurzke has written this book for impassioned readers, but it will certainly be the subject of lively discussion in specialist circles, too, as it contains a substantial, almost subversive revision of some aspects of our previous understanding of Büchner. (…)
Büchner was not infrequently enlisted for the wrong cause. After the Nazis had presented him as the “intellectual leader” of a genuinely German socialism, Kurzke believes that he was taken into the grip of left-wing revolutionary sentimentality following Georg Lukács’ proclamation of him as a materialist and early communist. This made him shrink “to a very small stature” in East Germany’s real socialism, little different from “West German verbal radicalism”. Büchner’s revolutionary vigour did indeed collapse surprisingly quickly under the pressure of persecution in 1834, turning “first into anger and defiance, then despair and depression”.

Friedmar Apel: “Ein göttlicher Funke hat in ihm gewirkt”
© Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 16 February 2013