About the work
Der neue Menoza, or The Story of Prince Tandi of Cumba, is a comedy by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, written in 1773 and published anonymously by Weygand in Leipzig in 1774. Its stage premiere did not come until 4 February 1963, at the Neue Bühne of the University of Frankfurt am Main — nearly two hundred years after it was written.
Plot
Prince Tandi of Cumba travels to Saxony, posing as a savage eager to learn about European Enlightenment, and falls in love with Wilhelmine, daughter of Captain von Biederling, while contending with the vain Count Camäleon for her hand. A tangle of swapped children and hidden parentage briefly threatens to reveal Tandi and Wilhelmine as siblings, before his true origins come to light and the marriage can proceed.
Cultural significance
With its mix of comic and tragic elements and its critique of European double standards, the play ranks alongside Der Hofmeister and Die Soldaten as one of Lenz's three central dramas, and has since been read as a forerunner of the Theatre of the Absurd. Contemporaries such as Christoph Martin Wieland found its plotting implausible, while the Romantics later prized the play's formal freedom.