Büchner, Georg

The German playwright and novelist Karl Georg Büchner was born in the town of Goddelau in the Grand Duchy of Hesse and grew up in Darmstadt where he was educated privately and attended college. Three of his siblings became well-known personalities: his sister Luise as a feminist author, his brothers Alexander and Ludwig as professor of literature and materialistic philosopher respectively. Büchner's father was a doctor, a close friend of Napoleon's and an atheist; he was strict and he discouraged Georg from pursuing a literary career. Instead, persuaded him to study medicine at the university of Strasbourg, a German-speaking, French-influenced city where Büchner enjoyed a more open-minded atmosphere than at home. He lodged with a priest to whose daughter, Minna Jaegle, he got secretly engaged, and he mixed in radical circles that embraced a form of utopian socialism.