A plan for life gone wrong. Reflections on J.M.R. Lenz

The conventional view of Lenz as a person who failed in an exemplary way do es only make sense if you measure his life and works not-as older literary criticism did-by the yardstick of Goethe's classical succeeding, but by Len z's own demands. The analysis of his letters shows that he failed because o f the for him insoluble conflict of detaching himself from his father. Exte rnally, he tore himself away from his father's authority by breaking off hi s divinity study at Konigsberg in the spring of 1771 to become a freelance writer instead of a parson. On the other hand, however, internally he remai ned bound to the father who had been elevated to a god-imago. Thus, his sec ret plan for life was not the irrevocable break with his father, but the at tempt to reconcile him quasi in retrospect through a successful career as a n acknowledged and famous poet, thus vindicating the legitimacy of his own way of life. This double-bind is what caused Lenz's failure, as the literar y renown he craved did not materialise; it could not materialise anyway, ho wever, because he turned his works into the medium for articulating the con flicts arising from his detachment, his works serving this purpose less thr ough their action, more through their aporetic structure.