The intermedia reception of Georg Büchner´s narration Lenz

Especially in the last decades, Büchners Lenz became one of the most influantial and received narrations of German literature. But up to now, the polyphonic tissue of mutually affecting ways of understanding and actualizing prevented a comprehensive analysis of this fascinating reception history. This project tries to close this precarious gap in the Büchner-research and thus make a contribution to a deeper comprehension of this key text in modern literature. Beside well-known documents of reception a lot of scientifically yet little or not analysed texts are included in the investigation as well as transformations, adaptations and conversions of Büchner`s Lenz in music, painting, theatre, broadcast and film. The goal of the project is to give a chronological, integrative description of the complex reception process in its historical and social context.

Especially in the last decades, Büchners Lenz became one of the most influential narrations of German literature. It served and serves as a basis for literary texts as well as for music settings, film adaptations, dramatizations, for works of the fine arts up to installations and other varieties of intermedial referencing. The very reception of the last two decades made evident, how intensive this key text in modern literature is received in almost every field of art, art event and every-day culture. But while the intertextual actualizations of this fascinating reception history are researched quite sufficiently, the documents in other medias were almost neglected up to now. The project tried to close this precarious gap in the Büchner-research. As theoretical foundation the approach of the `literaturzentrierte Intermedialitätsforschung` was adapted for the demands and increased by the aspect of an diachronic structure of intermedial contacts. Already on the contacted work this fields are pointed out, which are predestined for intermedial references. So the aspects of `iconicity`, `music` and `dramatic organization` were analysed in their meaning in the text and for the reception. Under the title Lenz-Bilder a study on the pictureext-intermediality in Lenz and its reception in the fine arts will be published 2007 as first result of this investigations. Focus of the first part of this book will be the iconicity in the narration, while the second part is dedicated to the Lenz-inspired pictures. Works of the expressionist Gramatté, the surrealist Toyen, the neoromantic Migneco, the Hesse-illustrator Böhmer and others are as well analysed and shown in their communication with Büchner`s text as contemporary works of Hrdlicka, Theumer, Kohl, Leonhard, Goltzsche and others of the more than three dozen artists, most of them unknown in research. The rich results of research in the other fields, however, shall be presented in articles. Partially widely advanced are the studies on the music adaptations (which extend from symphonic projects and operas to rocksongs), on the most different forms of theatre, on the works of concept art and media art (e.g. Rodney Graham`s important loop- version) and on the Lenz-films (from Moorse to Imbach). An overall view of the intermedial reception of Lenz has already been finished.