eorg Buchner, a German poet and dramatist, was born in Goddelau, Hesse, a former state of Germany, on October 17, 1813. He studied science and medicine at the Universities of Strasbourg and Giessen. Publication of a revolutionary pamphlet that he wrote forced Buchner to leave Giessen. He went on to study philosophy at Strasbourg and eventually became a lecturer on anatomy at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.
Buchner's first play, Dantons Tod (Danton's Death), was a dramatic poem about the death of a French revolutionary hero. Leonce und Lena, a satire, and Woyzeck, the story of an army barber who kills his common-law wife, were not published until after his death. Woyzeck was published in 1879, and was the basis for Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck, first performed in 1925.
Buchner left the fragments of a novel, Lenz, which is the story of a poet who has much in common with Buchner himself. Buchner was rediscovered by the German expressionists in the twentieth century, who regarded him as a forerunner of the German expressionist movement.
Buchner died of typhus on February 19, 1837.
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