The last, laconic sentence of the novella merely informs ...

The last, laconic sentence of the novella merely informs us: 'So lebte er hin' ('And so he lived on'). Not happily ever after, as in a fairy-tale, but numbed out, resigned to fate, condemned (like Beckett's characters) simple to endure that 'living on' (or Fortleben) which, according to Walter Benjamin, characterizes the afterlife of originals in translation.

Goethe observes in a letter: 'Lenz is among us like a sick child, and we rock and dandle him and give him whatever toy he wants to play with'. Realizing that his role at Weimar, as he puts it in his play Tantalus, is 'to serve as a farce for the gods', he retires to the rural hamlet of Berka for the summer ...

Buechner's reading of Lenz's innovative Sturm and Drang prose dramas is evident in many of the formal features of his play [...] in the utterly un-Aristotelian distribution of the dramatic action into a series of fragmentary episodes or tableaux whose rapid-fire scene and mood changes acquire an almost stroboscopic or hallucinatory intensity.

No wonder Gutzkow wrote him upon hearing that he had written his masterpiece, Danton's Death, 'in five weeks at most'; 'You seem to be in a great hurry. Where do you want to get to? Is the ground really burning under your feet?' Or as Camille Desmoulins remarks in Danton's Death: 'We have no time to waste'. To which the world-weary Danton retorts, quoting Shakespeare's Richard II: 'But it is time that wastes us'. This state of urgency (or emergency) is the hallmark of Buechner's finest writing. Danton's Death is the fastest moving historical drama in the entire modern repertory and the precipitous paratactic pace of Lenz is unmatched by anything in nineteenth century prose until Rimbaud's Illuminations.

Richard's Sieburth's afterword to his translation of Buechner's Lenz