J. M. R. Lenz: Die Soldaten [The Soldiers]

Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz's play Die Soldaten [The Soldiers, 1776] is probably the best known of the author's works and one of the most influential products of the German Sturm und Drang [Storm and Stress] movement. Lenz was a pioneer of a radically open form of drama in German, which broke with the classical poetics of Aristotle and challenged the primacy of French neo-Classicism on the German stage. In his dramatic practice, Lenz dispensed with established conventions to produce a vital, dynamic theatrical form, which abandons linear exposition in favour of a rapid unfolding of events, blurs customary distinctions between comedy and tragedy and eschews the studied bienséance [propriety] of French neo-Cla