"The world is chaos. Nothingness is the yet-to-be-born god of the world"
About this Quote
The line works because it’s both metaphysical and political. Buchner wrote under censorship, amid the crushed hopes and brutal reprisals that followed early 19th-century revolutionary ferment in the German states. His plays (and his activism) circle systems that grind human beings down: poverty, medical exploitation, state violence, a social order that talks like morality while behaving like machinery. In that world, “chaos” isn’t merely the street riot; it’s the moral randomness of who eats, who suffers, who gets called virtuous.
The “yet-to-be-born” detail adds a grim historical forecast. Nothingness isn’t fully enthroned, but the conditions are ripening: faith erodes, institutions hollow out, language loses its guarantees. Buchner anticipates modernity’s signature dread - not that there’s an angry god watching, but that there may be no watcher at all, and that this vacancy will become the new sacred. It’s cynicism with a pulse: a dramatist staging the coming age where meaning itself feels like a failed revolution.
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Buchner, Georg. (2026, January 15). The world is chaos. Nothingness is the yet-to-be-born god of the world. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-world-is-chaos-nothingness-is-the-140916/
Chicago Style
Buchner, Georg. "The world is chaos. Nothingness is the yet-to-be-born god of the world." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-world-is-chaos-nothingness-is-the-140916/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The world is chaos. Nothingness is the yet-to-be-born god of the world." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-world-is-chaos-nothingness-is-the-140916/. Accessed 5 Feb. 2026.










