That is precisely it! I greatly respect Büchner as a writer (even and especially when he copies-and-pastes from primary sources and it somehow blends in perfectly with his own idiosyncratic diction) and for his own (brief) life, but the damage his play has done and still can do through being read as historiography (rather than, well, assorted rantings of an increasingly cynical would-have-been revolutionary) is immense.
(Heck, even read by a layman as a piece of literature it's damaging - it's been required reading for many German high school classes for the past two years, with absolutely disastrous results, since the average German high school student has no knowledge of the history of the Revolution beyond 'er, 1789?', and nor have the teachers. Not only is it impossible to follow, much less enjoy the unfolding plot without a fair amount of background knowledge, but my class actually ended up deducting that if only that Danton fella had got up and taken the reins from that ivory-tower sissy Robespierre, everything would have turned out wonderfully. Which is not only historically absurd but absolutely not what Büchner writes or implies. The only thing that qualifies his Danton as something resembling the play's hero is that he is the one who gets to spout the most of Büchner's personal philosophy - and that in itself contradicts the aforementioned notion. His interpretation of the historical Danton and Danton's role - and, correspondingly, his characterisation of the people, the masses - is actually very similar to that by Romain Rolland. Oh, I digress ...)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-09-05 09:25 pm (UTC)(Heck, even read by a layman as a piece of literature it's damaging - it's been required reading for many German high school classes for the past two years, with absolutely disastrous results, since the average German high school student has no knowledge of the history of the Revolution beyond 'er, 1789?', and nor have the teachers. Not only is it impossible to follow, much less enjoy the unfolding plot without a fair amount of background knowledge, but my class actually ended up deducting that if only that Danton fella had got up and taken the reins from that ivory-tower sissy Robespierre, everything would have turned out wonderfully. Which is not only historically absurd but absolutely not what Büchner writes or implies. The only thing that qualifies his Danton as something resembling the play's hero is that he is the one who gets to spout the most of Büchner's personal philosophy - and that in itself contradicts the aforementioned notion. His interpretation of the historical Danton and Danton's role - and, correspondingly, his characterisation of the people, the masses - is actually very similar to that by Romain Rolland. Oh, I digress ...)