ABSTRACT
On the run from the kind of justice he spent his short life trying to overthrow, Georg Büchner sent the manuscript of his play Dantons Tod (Danton’s Death) to the then famous German novelist and essayist Karl Gutzkow. Gutzkow was known for his liberal political leanings and therefore was the obvious choice to evaluate the manuscript. Gutzkow liked the play and tried to publish it. Considering the play’s content, this was not likely to prove an easy task in the repressive Germany of the 1830s. A play depicting at least some of the main characters of the French Revolution in a positive manner could not count on much offi cial sympathy in a Germany (and Austria-Hungary) fashioned by Metternich after the 1815 Vienna Congress with the express intent of counteracting the “pernicious” infl uence of the Revolution.
