Georg Büchner
While Büchner continued his studies in Gießen he started a secret society which wanted revolutionary change. With the help of the Protestant theologian Friedrich Ludwig Weidig he published the leaflet Der Hessische Landbote, a revolutionary text that criticized social problems in the Grand Duchy of Hesse. The authorities charged them with treason and issued a warrant of apprehension. While Weidig was arrested, tortured and died imprisoned in Darmstadt, Büchner fled across the border to Strasbourg where he wrote most of his literary work and translated two plays by Victor Hugo, Lucrèce Borgia and Marie Tudor. Two years later, his dissertation, "Mémoire sur le Système Nerveux du Barbeaux (Cyprinus barbus L.)" was published in Paris and Strasbourg. The ideas of François-Noël Babeuf and Claude Henri de Saint-Simon had an important influence on his work. In October 1836 he got a job at the University of Zürich as a lecturer in anatomy and went back to Zürich where he spent his final months writing and teaching until he died of typhus at the age of twenty-three.