The Soldiers (play)

The Soldiers (German: Die Soldaten) is a 1776 tragedy by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz written from his own experiences during his service under Friedrich Graf Kleist von Nollendorf.[1][lower-alpha 1] It was influential on Georg Büchner in his attempt to write the drama Woyzeck (left incomplete 1837), although that is set at a lower social stratum. The play is the source of two operas: Soldaten by Manfred Gurlitt (1930) and Die Soldaten by Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1965).

References

Notes

1. "In Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz's The Soldiers (Die Soldaten, 1776) we have the most explicit critique of soldiers' sexual behavior and the baleful effect on bourgeois daughters. In this play, based in part on his personal affiliation in the service of Friedrich Graf von Kleist, Lenz levels harsh social critique against the unsupervised interchange between the military and young women. "[2]

1. John Osborne J.M.R. Lenz: The Renunciation of Heroism 1975- Page 130 "straightforward plot is punctuated by a number of scenes which show other aspects of the disorderly moral life of the soldiers; and a number of programmatic scenes in which the problems created by their behaviour ..."
2. Simpson 2006, p. 18

Sources

• Simpson, Patricia Anne (2006). The Erotics of War in German Romanticism. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. ISBN 083875662X.