About the work
Die Soldaten (The Soldiers) is a five-act bourgeois tragedy by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, written and published in 1776 during his years in Strasbourg. A characteristic work of the Sturm und Drang movement, it avoids tragic, idealised heroes in favour of a sober, often fragmentary depiction of a bourgeois woman's social ruin — a style considered at the time neither properly literary nor stageable. Only about ninety years later, on 9 December 1863, did Eduard von Bauernfeld's adaptation reach the stage at the Vienna Hofburgtheater.
Plot
The merchant's daughter Marie is engaged to the cloth merchant Stolzius but lets herself be courted by the officer Desportes, who strings her along with promises of marriage before abandoning her. Cast out by society, Marie becomes entangled with several soldiers, while the jealous Stolzius poisons Desportes and then takes his own life. By the end, even Marie's own father no longer recognises her, so far has she fallen.
Cultural significance
The play indicts the military's exploitation of bourgeois women and the complicity of bourgeois morality, and counts among the sharpest social dramas of Sturm und Drang. It influenced later writers up to Georg Büchner's Woyzeck and served as the basis for Bernd Alois Zimmermann's opera of the same name (1965).