biography
| name: |
Lenz, Jakob Michael Reinhold
|
pronunciation:
[lents]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1751–92)
|
| biography:
| Writer, born in Seßwegen, Livonia, Russia. One of the chief representatives of the ‘Sturm und Drang’ drama, his sociocritical attitudes, particularly towards the nobility and the officer caste, earned him official disgrace, not least at the court of Weimar, from where he was expelled in 1776. Influenced by Rousseau during his studies in Königsberg, he also had contacts with Goethe and Herder in Strasbourg (1772–6), and later during his travels in Germany and Switzerland with Lavater. In 1777 he started to show signs of mental illness (probably schizophrenia), and after a failed return to his pastor father he went to Russia, where he died impoverished and insane in the street. Lenz's own heroes confront society's rules more or less successfully. His plays, such as Der Hofmeister oder Vorteile der Privaterziehung (1774, Lenz had himself been a tutor) and Die Soldaten (1776) found favour in the 20th-c, championed among others by Brecht. Lenz also wrote tales and dramatic theory. His life inspired a novella by Büchner, Lenz (1839). |
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