From Situation-Dependent and Chronic Boredom to Profound Boredom: A Study of Boredom in Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, Lenz and Leonce und Lena

The present article aims to analyze the traces of chronified situation-dependent boredom and deep boredom present in a selection of Georg Büchner’s works: Lenz, Leonce und Lena and Woyzeck, examining the implications of this imprint on the nineteenth-century thinking in general, and on Georg Büchner’s thought in particular. Following Josefa Ros Velasco’s research on boredom, not only the transition from a chronified situation-dependent boredom to a deep boredom will reflect the impetus of an epoch imbued with a generalized tendency to the dominion of rationalism and over substance and nature, but also the gradual mutation that this deep boredom underwent -until it reached its most maladaptive variant- will turn out to be a symptom of this profound shift in thinking. The dawn of industrialization brought the well-known fragmentation of which Schiller had already warned; the loss of nature and art in favour of science finds its expression in Büchner through the constant allusion to boredom, as well as to the lack of communication that it sparked. Thus, boredom acts in Büchners oeuvre as a warning against a generalized tendency to dehumanization of man by man. Among all the typologies of boredom analyzed, the particular category of boredom experienced by Woyzeck reveals to be especially interesting, inasmuch as it goes beyond a mere warning to this new hypothetical mindset, insofar as it wields the hope that the dehumanized modern subject still may be able to entrust to himself the maxim of sapere aude.