I saw Leonce und Lena today, a play which might be overrated or overly beautiful, I could not tell from the children*s version we went to with my kids at the Opernhaus Zürich. I had seen the play before, a couple of times actually, the adult version. I had thought it a bit clumsy. Brilliant lines. Words like rockets fired into the cold air. A certain view of the world that can be seen as anarchistic or just bored and nihilistic. There is a political tone to it, there is a utopian streak in Leonce*s refusal to function – but in the end it really is a children*s play for grown-ups. Which is not a quality judgement per se. When I got home I turned on the computer and saw what the New York Times posted as their headline: “Time Short, but G.O.P. Leaders say Shutdown Can Be Avoided”. Right, again? This is ridiculous. Will this go on for the next, what, ten years? We were there in the summer of 2012. Nothing changed, it seems. The biggest economy of the world, not counting China, might be forced to shut down its government services. So if you take Leonce serious and his contempt for the politics of his father Peter, you see something here: The politicians in this play called American Democracy are puppets staging a show for an audience that is only there because it has to be there. If you read Büchner like that, which a lot of people do, you can see him as a critic of power, of the way power numbs the mind of people, of the boredom that is spread by the stupidity of those in power. But is that the case? Yes and no. And Woyzeck actually tells another story altogether, as does Dantons Tod. Both are love stories, in a way, as is Leonce und Lena – but the love of both Woyzeck and Danton is a love of life in death. They become themselves only in extinction. There is murder in one play, revolution in the other. Death lingers over both, death touches them, death kisses them. Leonce und Lena is different in this regard, at first look. But if you read more closely you will see this sign of depression everywhere, this negativity of Leonce which might be masked as poetry but will turn against Lena in the future. There is no way that this love will last. Because Leonce is too much in love with his idea of himself as a useless bit of matter in this universe. Is that freedom? I doubt that. But it might be the very reason why the world remembers and pays hommage to this very genius of destruction who perished here, in Zürich, and is burried at a place called Germaniahügel. He was born on October 17, 1813, and had a small mouth, a pale face and a look of defiant fatigue.