Georg Büchner

German dramatist and writer of poetry and prose.

Büchner studied medicine at the Universities of Strasbourg and Giessen. Caught up in the movement inspired by the Paris uprising of 1830, Büchner published a pamphlet, Der hessische Landbote (1834;The Hessian Messenger), in Giessen calling for economic and political revolution, and he also founded a radical society, the Society for Human Rights. He escaped arrest by fleeing to Strasbourg, where he completed a dissertation. This earned him an appointment as a lecturer in natural science at the University of Zürich in 1836.

His unfinished and most famous play, Woyzeck, was notable as a literary work because the main characters were members of the working class. Published posthumously, it became the basis for Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck which premiered in 1925.

He died 19 February 1837, Zürich, of typhoid fever, age 23.