ABSTRACT

KARL GEORG BÜCHNER was the eldest of the six children 1 of Ernst Karl and Louise Caroline Büchner, who at the time of his birth were respectively twenty-six and twenty-two years old: he was born on October 17, 1813, at Goddelau near Darmstadt. His father, and both his grandfathers, were doctors of medicine. His father was a freethinker, a man of hard and rather grim temperament, and a great admirer of Napoleon; he had served as a military doctor in Holland and in the French army, and had become imbued with the contemporary French spirit in politics and social life: his mother, a native of Pirmasens in the Palatinate, was a woman with feelings of strong German (not local Hessian) patriotism, of a moderately religious temperament and generally conservative character, and of cheerful and friendly disposition. The marriage between these two dissimilar people was happy, and the material existence of the family, though on a modest scale, was reasonably prosperous and secure. In 1816 the father was promoted from Goddelau to a medical post at Darmstadt, a typical small South German Residenzstadt, 2 and in Darmstadt the family remained.