Lenz

This classic of German literature—often hailed as the inception of European modernist prose—follows the mental breakdown of an 18th-century schizophrenic playwright, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz

Published after Büchner’s death, Lenz provides a taut case study of three weeks in the life of schizophrenic, perhaps the first third-person text ever to be written from the “inside” of insanity. An early experiment in docufiction, Büchner’s textual montage draws on the diary of J.F. Oberlin, the A...