ABSTRACT
In 1835, Georg Buchner, a young biology student and failed political vanguardist from the German state of Hesse, inserted sizeable verbatim excerpts from historical sources into his first play, Danton's Death, a drama about the fatal divisions among the French Revolution's political vanguard during the Reign of Terror. In Danton's Death one can see an early example of stereoptic collage revealing the limitations of different artistic and historiographic realisms. Danton's Death dramatizes the literal death of an avant-garde. Buchner characterizes the division within the French revolutionary vanguard as being partly about which usable past has the most to offer their revolution. One of the play's most common stereoptic effects occurs when Buchner, in juxtaposing documentary speeches with fictional ones, suggests a disjuncture between idealist rhetoric and corporeal reality. One of the central problems in Buchner's play is what McLuhan calls the narcosis of media consumers.
