ABSTRACT
Conformism is the dominant mode of society in the age of Metternich: similarly, the dramas of the age portray tragic heroes who are the victims of impersonal forces. The tragic guilt of individual characters is caused not by a single moral flaw or an act of personal hubris, but by a radical disharmony between their existence and the forces that govern the world in which they find themselves. The personal decisions and acts that determine their fate intimate a universe that makes game of their aspirations. Grillparzer in his early plays still follows the Shakespearian (and Aristotelian) pattern: what isolates the hero from the social collective is an individual act, his tragic guilt equals ethical guilt, its expiation in his death is followed by a renewal of the political order. In Grillparzer’s later work the pattern changes: what now isolates the hero and leads to his tragic downfall is not a single act of hubris but a whole disposition of mind which amounts to his finest personal virtue – his wisdom and scrupulousness — which in the world of politics lead to chaos and strife. In the individual’s downfall no order is affirmed, no divinity validated, the world just goes on. For Hebbel all assertion of individuality is tragic: its destruction by the State is the very law of universal history, the necessary condition of historical change and of the renewed political order that ensues. With Buchner we enter the world of the absurd. Where some of Hebbel’s tragic heroes had shown a strange and chilling pride in their election for sacrifice, Buchner’s antiheroes live in a universe dominated by a meaningless determinism: the social collective to which they belong is implacably hostile; the only value they cling to is their sentient, suffering selfhood, their mere existence.
