SOURCE: Grimm, Reinhold. “‘Cœur’ and ‘Carreau’: Love in the Life and Works of Büchner.” In Love, Lust, and Rebellion: New Approaches to Georg Büchner, pp. 79-100. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

In the following excerpt, Grimm comments on themes of love and eroticism in Büchner's dramas, particularly Danton's Death.

What [Büchner's] texts contain is clear—and clearly the critics, virtually without exception, have chosen to avert their eyes. Let us begin by simply listing what the reader encounters.

Two women commit suicide out of love for their men: one while in the grip of madness, the other through a conscious decision (decades before Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, she dies a veritable “love-death”). And there are men no less extreme in their passions: one drowns himself after having nearly strangled his lover; another attempts to take his own life in a similar manner—in...