Set against the strikingly beautiful backdrop of the Vosges mountains, Lenz tells the tale of the real-life writer J.M.R. Lenz's nineteen-day stay in Waldersbach in 1778, describing his wanderings around the mountainous surroundings and his worsening fits of madness, eventually culminating in his removal, under guard, to Strasbourg.Valued both as a chillingly convincing exploration of the reality of paranoid schizophrenia and an influential forerunner of literary modernism, this existential drama boasts a prose style startlingly ahead of its time and is a truly original work of literature.