`I have gathered here all sorts of interesting notes about a friend of Goethe, an unfortunate poet named Lenz, who lived here at the same time as him and ended up half-mad`. With this brief comment, Georg Büchner, one of the most important German writers of the 19th century, refers in 1835 to the poet Lenz, who, along with Goethe, was one of the central creators of the literary movement Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) at the beginning of the 1770s. Büchner's primary source is mainly the short report titled Mr. L., written by Pastor Oberlin, who offered asylum to Lenz in the mountainous Alsace when the unfortunate poet had already begun to show serious mental disturbances. However, Büchner defends his 'own' Lenz, narrating the same story in a completely different way and from a completely different perspective. Büchner approaches his subject from three perspectives: As a political exile, he sympathizes with the persecuted Lenz, as a writer, he is oriented towards the creator Lenz, and finally, as a young doctor, he is interested in the 'psychiatric case of Lenz'. The latter is simultaneously the most delicate approach, given that the creator is called to penetrate the most problematic side of Lenz, namely the manifestation of his mental illness, in the year 1778. Although the 19th century is full of stories and novellas, no other corresponding text in German literature has such a rich bibliography as this text. Büchner's Lenz is the matrix of many later literary texts and psychiatric studies centered on the descent into madness. [Excerpt from publisher or edition presentation text]