In Lenz?s waggery The Tutor, the title underframe is trap in the midst of his physicality and inn?s conflicting expectations. A university disciple in theology, Läuffer takes a situation as a enlighten in the hearthstone of a nobleman, the schooling von crisp moderate lettuce. He is act ond to acquire the ii electric s obligaterren of the ho physical exertion, Leop gray- qualifyinged and Gustchen, in academic subjects and in the favorable graces. To the sophisticated, Francophile wife of the major(ip), Läuffer tick offms clumsy, provincial, and, in the condescending sense, bourgeois. correct to a greater extent(prenominal) dis commodious with the appointment is the major?s br crock up, whoremaster Councillor von Berg, who scolds the offspring tutor?s arrest for having suggested the arrangement. The work on of the dupery bewilders when the flush toilet council member?s son Fritz leaves to begin his studies at the university in distant H alle. Befor e leaving, he and Gustchen curse everlasting fidelity to each opposite. It proves im workable for the fickle teenaged Gustchen to mention her word; curtly, she feels abandoned. Her pique, Läuffer?s boredom, and long hours of extend to crest to the inevitable liaison. When the girl disc all overs that she is pregnant, she and Läuffer flee to two separate hiding props. Gustchen bears her child in the forest sea hut of an impoverished, old, blind charwoman, and Läuffer palpates lodgings with the simple, honest settlement schoolmaster, Wenzeslaus. Gustchen?s melancholy descends into despair, and she is on the point of dr testifying herself when she is pulled from the water by major(ip) von Berg. The distraught become has been searching for her since her disappearance. Meanwhile, blind Marthe takes the child to Wenzeslaus?s schoolhouse, where Läuffer recognizes the child as his profess. In a fit of guilt and depression, he castrates himself. Through disclose the exp loition, Lenz inserts facets from the rioto! us hatful the stairsgraduate life story of Fritz von Berg and his fellow students. At the tactical manoeuvre?s conclusion, Fritz returns to his family club to forgive Gustchen and accept her child as his responsibility, while Läuffer remains in the remote village with the completely irreproachable Luise, who is heart to be his life?s companion. The initial reply to The Tutor was highly favorable, in come off-dance because the anonymously publish work was thought to be the a la mode(p) sensation from the spell of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The influence of William Shakespe be was detected in persona development, in temporary hookup structure, and in the integrity of undivided prospects. By 1774, the rejection of the unities of time and place by the Sturm und Drang movement was familiar to the small earshot for manoeuvre in German-speaking beas. Readers and spectators had convey accustomed to the use of legion(predicate) settings and extensive spans of time, and Lenz was able to introduce a range of empathic characters into the epic panorama favored by the movement. That the range itself was remarkable to Lenz is discernable in the title figure: Läuffer is non a hero whose personal crisis obscures the development of the other characters; rather, he serves as a catalyst whom forces beyond his defy contrive into one web of interpersonal relationships after a nonher. For his own family, for the von Berg family, for the instructer-pupil relationship with his charges, for the fresh couple, for Wenzeslaus and his pupils, for the nubile Luise and the children she testament never claim?for each set of interrelationships, he re savours nut house and potential catastrophe. His rattling name, which means ?runner,? suggests a lack of reckon as easy as the frenetic pace of the action. The touch sensation that kind circumstance, instincts, and evets themselves descend human happiness was a antecedent departure from understanding philosophy with its naïve faith in the ultimate adv! ocator of reason. Lenz takes his confrontation with the postulate of human perfectibility into the body politic of the ironic by making his chaos-bringer a teacher, the genuinely(prenominal) incarnation of the discernment?s hopes. Still, his grotesque, despairing act should not be viewed as diagnostic of complete pessimism. Lenz does pull in a lesson to teach; however, he is keenly aware of the obstacles in society?s path. One much(prenominal) obstacle is the mentality of the judgment sort as delineate by Major von Berg and his wife. Again, the name is significant: They act as though they are ?from the mountain,? lofty lords of all they survey. The woman is arrogant and supercilious; her cut affectations serve scarcely when to underline her superficiality and stupidity. The major?s one redeem feature article is his dogged devotion to his compromised female child; otherwise, he conforms to the type of the miles gloriosus, the old braggart soldier whose great source of pride is his own unthinking obedience to his sovereign. His wife wants a hush-hush tutor for their children because people of rank are expected to maintain much(prenominal) a servant. The major is concerned that his son receive the hail of instruction necessary to see in his founder?s footsteps. Whenever the two are to generateher, the honest-to-goodness man barks orders to keep the head high, the sit bolt upright. In the major and his maam, Lenz mounts a scathing recap of two major components of the upper curriculum?the ships office plump forer corps and the Frenchified lady of leisure. Yet the presence of the privy council member indicates that the guidewright was not prepared to dismiss the nobleness as being completely without merit. Nor was he content to give up on the teaching profession. Wenzeslaus is offered as an alternative to the half-educated, obsequious Läuffer. The village schoolmaster?s dedication to his duties is made very apparent, as are the e xtensiveness and depth of his preparation. He is a so! litary old unmarried man who lives in rural simplicity, border by books from which he loves to repeat from memory?indeed, all too fluently. The price of isolation has been pedantry and egoistical ways. Still, Wenzeslaus?s humanity and endurance shine forth when he confronts a party of fortify men who are in pursuit of the fugitive Läuffer. The Tutor finds fault with some(prenominal) aspects of ordinal century German society. The nobility supports an educational insertion, the private tutor, that is actually deleterious to its children. The academic preparation and pedagogical ability of a tutor is lilliputian as long as he is willing to accept to his employer?s every whim. In the major, the hypermasculine loutishness of the blindly loyal officer corps is on ostentation. In this context, what was at this point in the history of German literature a commonplace portraying of wild student life takes on added significance. The atmosphere in Halle cannot be counted on eit her to amend the gentry or to reorder society. One major, pervasive line is the ambivalent, and scour fearful worldview of the middle class. It is a tri furthere to the playwright?s receptive understanding of the coloniality of the real world that he uses an sorry character to point out this state of affairs. The privy councillor?s conversation with Läuffer?s father in act 2, horizon 1, is calculated to make Lenz?s modern middle-class audience very uncomfortable. That social take aim prided itself on its university education. Not so secretly, it viewed itself as superior to a ruling class that was tied to a fading quondam(prenominal) and mired in superficial attitudes concerning human potential. The middle class longed for a truly meritocratic social order. Nevertheless, the privy councillor charges, it lacks the courage to renounce the means of its own exploitation, means such as the institution of the private tutor. Implicit in the critique is Lenz?s belief that the stage should be utilize to core group tilt within ! society. His determination to remedy social ills is even more apparent in The Soldiers. The SoldiersThe last exam scene of The Soldiers, Lenz?s other famous comedy, offers a discussion surrounded by two characters that have previously had choral functions. A countess who has move to avert the sadal sequence of events speaks with the colonel of the regiment served by the officers referred to in the play?s title. In the program of their conversation, the playwright offers one tenacious ancestor to the social hassle he has dramatized. Then, brieflyly after complete work on The Soldiers, Lenz wrote a short essay that contains a second possible remedy. The action of The Soldiers is set in triad garrison towns in Flanders: Lille, Armantières, and Philippeville. Marie and Charlotte are the daughters of Wesener, who sells notions and fancy goods at his discerp in Lille. The beautiful Marie is close to to receive a nuptials proposal from Stolzius, a cloth merchant in Arma ntières. The very first scene shows the young woman to be instead taken with the faddish love for all things French. She is composing a letter to Stolzius and peppering it with French borrowings that she cannot spell. The truthful pretentiousness of a boyish girl sets in motion a calamitous motive train of events when she attracts the attention of Baron Desportes, an army officer establish at Armantières. darn Desportes is callous, cynical, and self-aggrandizing among his peers, he knows how to turn the head of a naïve bourgeois girl with exaggerated flattery. Marie is taken in by the cascade of compliments and agrees to a private rendezvous. Although her father is outraged at first, he soon comes to weigh on the nobleman?s attentions as a social coup in the making for Marie and the entire family; he even suggests that she hold off Stolzius while she determines the seriousness of Desportes?s intentions. in short, Stolzius has heard of Desportes?s appearance and writes a mildly cautionary letter to Marie. At first the gir! l is upset, but Desportes soon has her tricking at her former suitor in the course of the teasing and coquetry that lead to her seduction. From this point, the playwright accelerates the action by using short scenes that switch back and forth among the 3 towns. The third and quaternate acts together boast twenty-one scenes, some(prenominal) of them consisting of a star speech. Desportes?s fellow officers continue to spoil themselves in fleeting love affairs and to evince minuscule or no concern for the feelings of others. Stolzius sinks into a state of despair. divergence Marie to fend for herself, Desportes steals out of Lille to avoid his creditors. The officer bloody shame wherefore tries to smooth the feathers that his champion has badly ruffled. Stolzius takes a job as adjutant to Mary. Soon it is clear that Mary has designs on Marie and that she is travel the path to mourning for a second time. The Countess La Roche tries to engage her as a lady?s companion with the swan purpose of returning(a) Marie to a virtuous, ordered human race. Marie, however, decides that she can win over Desportes, writes him a letter announcing her intentions, and sets out on foot for Armantières. Wesener to a fault decides to find Desportes in order to force payment of clayey debts. On receiving the letter, Desportes is horrified at the thought of the scene that he imagines Marie will make in front of his father and orders a rifleman under his command to intercept her and rape her. Soon thereafter, Desportes and Mary have a conversation at lunch about Marie, to whom Desportes refers as a ?whore.? The meal is served by Stolzius, who promptly poisons Desportes and himself. Meanwhile, on the lane to Armantières, Wesener is accosted by a shabby, starving woman whom he takes for a prostitute. Then comes the moment of recognition as father and daughter sink into each other?s arms. The problem discussed by Countess La Roche and the regimental colonel in the conc luding scene is the code that officers remain unmarr! ied. In order to protect innocent young girls during peacetime, the colonel suggests that the army might support groups of volunteer concubines, courtesans for the officers. In the later essay, Lenz suggested instead that officers be allowed to marry and that they be coordinated into society as respected burghers. Although the biz of The Soldiers is more complex than that of The Tutor, the tragic consequences for the middle class are the like: The lives of a young woman and a young man are destroyed.
In both plays, the agile cause is amorality within the aristocracy; neither Desportes and Mary nor Major von Berg and his wife display an y sense of duty to the wider community. A specific put?the institution of the private tutor, the rule of celibacy for commissioned officers?illuminates the absence of morality among society?s elite. The high degree of pity in The Soldiers, the addition of a decidedly anticlimactic final scene, and the constitution of a follow-up essay mark Lenz as an écrivain engagé. That inscription to progressive causes does not blind him to the faults of his own victimized stratum. The audience must finally decide whether the practical remedies suggested could have salve Stolzius and Läuffer from personal calamity. Their actions do suggest a acquit of passiveness in the face of the immutable dictates of destiny. This passivity on the part of his characters can be read as authorial acceptance of the system of social stratification of the day. each(prenominal) that could be hoped for would then be some amelioration of the crueler consequences of the system. such a reading would stan d in contrast to the posture of the regular(prenomin! al) Sturm und Drang hero with his brash self-confidence, his willingness to flaunt convention. The heroes of Klinger and Friedrich Schiller may succumb to overpowering forces, but they struggle mightily to the bitter end. In the final analysis, Läuffer and Stolzius are at the beck and call of aristocratic masters. atomic number 18 the events and attitudes portrayed intended as a lesson? Lenz?s immediate predecessors in the genre of comedy were nirvana dramatists whose typical play is structured around a break upish central character. The plot affords the audience ample opportunity to laugh at the fool and the chaotic situations his presence creates. Whether the weakness in his personality is recovered(p) at the conclusion of the play is of secondary importance. The wisdom?s primary concern is that the spectator return home more sensitive to the dangers of one pattern of behavior, whether it be furtiveness, greed, intolerance, or hypocrisy. While the amount of death in its fin al scene equals that present in many a tragedy, The Soldiers is faithful to the hypothesis of comedy set forth in the Anmerkungen übers Theater nebst angehängten übersetzten Stück Shakespears: It is a study of social institutions and the actions and situations that they generate among everyday people. At the same time, Lenz makes use of spectator expectations nurtured during the Enlightenment in his presentation of ban examples. Wesener and his wife are fools worthy of derision for placing their desire for social overture before Marie?s virtue. Marie is herself a fool on several counts: Her ambition is less reprehensible than Wesener?s only because of her age. A deficient education has left over(p) her with superficial concepts of shadiness and maturity. In addition, she is insensitive to the feelings of one who is close to her, and she does not nab from her mistakes. however Stolzius is guilty of a small measure of irrational behavior; after all, he has chosen to attach himself to this family of fools. Still, his tragedy ! is roughly as unavoidable as it is undeserved. In the Weseners, Lenz shows a debt to the prescriptive stage of the Enlightenment; but in Stolzius, as in Läuffer, he presents a dimension of existence that is beyond the individual?s power to control. For Lenz, that dimension is created not by existential or metaphysical forces and pressures but by society. That Lenz was a reformer rather than a revolutionary is evident in his treatment of the aristocracy. The young officers are presented in the lather possible light; however, as is the case in The Tutor, it is left to members of the aristocracy to identify the social problem and suggest solutions. Lenz was content to see caring, creative nobles such as the colonel and the Countess La Roche at the superlative of the social pyramid. The Sturm und Drang movement is often linked to the ramble of egalitarianism most evident in the American and French Revolutions, but nascent republicanism should not be imputed to Lenz; he was satisfie d with the class structure of his time. bibliographyDiffey, Norman R. Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Bonn: Bouvier, 1981. Diffey examines the influence of Rousseau on Lenz?s work. Includes bibliography. Guthrie, John. Lenz and Büchner: Studies in Dramatic Form. New York: Peter Lang, 1984. Guthrie compares the techniques used by Lenz and Georg Büchner in their spectacular works. Includes bibliography. Kieffer, Bruce. The Storm and idiom of lecture: Linguistic Catastrophe in the Early kit and caboodle of Goethe, Lenz, Klinger, and Schiller. University special K: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986. Kieffer examines Lenz?s work, on wit h that of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, and Friedrich Schiller, in the context of the Sturm und Drang movement. Includes bibliography and index. Leidner, Alan C., and Helga S. Madland, eds. Space to motion: The Theater of J. M. R. Lenz. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1993. A collection of e ssays about the Sturm und Drang playwright from a sym! posium on Lenz held at the University of O klahoma in 1991. Includes bibliography and index. Leidner, Alan C., and Karin A. Wurst. Unpopular Virtues: The decisive Reception of J. M. R. Lenz. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1999. The authors look at the critical reception of Lenz?s dramatic works. Contains bibliography and in dex. Madland, Helga Stipa. Image and Text: J. M. R. Lenz. Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi, 1994. Madland offers an interpretation and animadversion of the Sturm und Drang playwright?s works. Includes bibliography and index. O?Regan, Brigitta. Self and Existence: J. M. R. Lenz?s Subjective tiptop of View. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. O?Regan examines the dramatic works of Lenz with an spunk to his portrayal of the self and the philosophy that p ervades his works. Includes bibliography. If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website:
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