Making a Whore of Freedom: Büchner's Marion Episode
No moment in Georg Büchner's drama has been assigned more significance as a marker of his radical modernity than the "Marion episode." Apparently unprecedented in form and content, this brief, enigmatic exchange between a prostitute and the protagonist of Dantons Tod [Danton's Death] is taken as the archetype of Büchner's jagged, proto-montage aesthetic, as the first example of his proto-psychological focus on the close rendering of sensation, and as the foundational statement of what is taken to be his proto-nihilist repudiation of history. This essay suggests that such impressions are mistaken. It reveals the Marion episode to be a tightly constructed allegory of French Revolutionary history, and one that takes as its precedent and pretence the most widely known work of pre-Revolutionary pornography in Europe, the once-forbidden Thérèse philosophe [Thérèse the Philosopher]. Linking the pornographic to the political, mirroring each in the other, the Marion episode, it suggests, does not use eroticism to break with history so much as to illuminate it, figuring the Revolution as a process shaped and driven by a libertine structure of desire that its violence exhausts and destroys. Rather than marking out Büchner as a proleptic modernist, the "Marion episode," it concludes, places him firmly, with Baudelaire, in second-generation modernity, registering the emergence of the modern from the destructive violence of the past.
Complete plays, Lenz and other writings
Danton's death Leonce and Lena Woyzeck Lenz the Hessian messenger on cranial nerves selected letters.
Problems of a centralised department in a decentralised mental hospital.
Abstract This paper deals with some of the issues and problems which arose in a state mental hospital, when in the course of becoming a more community-oriented facility, the hospital decentralized its clinical structure into geographically-based treatment units while retaining a centralized nursing department administration. The effects of unitization and a subsequent attempt to reoganize the nursing department on both the character of professional roles and the integration of parts of the hospital are discussed within the context of an open-systems conceptual model of hospital organization.