Georg Büchner’s drama fragment «Woyzeck» was created in 1836 and broke with the drama fragment the world view and the traditions of classical theater. Woyzeck is regarded as the original of the «social drama».
Georg Buchner: Woyzeck
Figure 1: The station drama based on the development of the protagonist WoyzeckSource:
The simple soldier Franz Woyzeck has a hard life. In order to be able to care for his lover Marie Zickwolf and their child Christian, Woyzeck works as the captain’s subordinate and makes himself available for the doctor’s inhuman experiments.
Due to his very low financial means, he cannot marry his beloved and the doctor’s experiment, in which Woyzeck is only allowed to eat peas, triggers considerable physical and psychological failures in him over time.
Woyzeck loves Marie and this love seems to keep him alive, but she dreams of a glamorous life. Marie is dissatisfied with her living conditions and wants social advancement. That’s why she gets involved in an affair with the attractive, but also very arrogant and superficial drum major.
Word of the infidelity gets around among the townspeople and Woyzeck overhears the betrayal at a dance one evening when Marie and the drum major dance past him without noticing him. This completely throws him off track. Woyzeck’s physical and especially his mental state worsens – he begins to hear voices that seem to command him to kill Marie.
After an unsuccessful fight with the drum major – who is physically superior to Woyzeck – he decides to kill Marie out of revenge. Meanwhile, he continues to be exploited and bullied by the Captain and the Doctor.
Woyzeck gets a knife and lures his lover to a small lake, where he bloodthirsty stabs her and then throws the murder weapon into the lake. Marie’s body is found and the citizens suspect Woyzeck when he appears in the inn with bleeding hands. He flees in panic and wants to take his child Christian with him. However, his son turns his back on him, leaving Woyzeck alone as a tragic figure. His further fate remains open at the end.
The language in the drama fragment does not follow any particular logic. There is no stylized theatrical language, because the actors use their status or. professional language and sometimes speak colloquial language.
The most important justification for the importance of the drama Woyzeck probably lies in the socio-critical dimension of the story. The social conditions of that time are described in real terms and are still relevant today, since certain social laws can still be found in a certain form today.
But there are also philosophical questions about the meaning of human life. So Woyzeck is an important piece of modern theatre.
Historical background and epoch of the drama fragment «Woyzeck»
The work is based on a true incident, which occurred around 1821. The 41-year-old unemployed and homeless wig maker and hairdresser Johann Christian Woyzeck from Leipzig stabbed his lover Johanna Christiane Woost, five years his senior, out of jealousy. He was arrested immediately after the crime and a long legal battle ensued, in which the criminal responsibility of the mentally unstable Woyzeck was examined. That same year he was sentenced to death for the crime; three years later, on August 27, 1824, he was publicly executed on the Leipzig market square.
The execution was initially suspended because the sanity of the accused was called into question by new testimonies. The privy councilor Dr. Johann Christian August Clarus drew up two reports, according to which the perpetrator was declared sane.
The Woyzeck’s case sparked a debate over the offender’s criminal capacity, as many experts defined the historical Woyzeck’s circumstances as the cause of his moral fallibility. These results were published in various medical journals, analyzed by Georg Büchner and finally processed in his drama fragment.
The protagonist of the drama shows many parallels to the real Woyzeck: the mental confusion and the actually good-natured nature of the perpetrator, which was reversed by his girlfriend’s infidelity and led to murder out of jealousy. The real Woyzeck also had a child together, the murder took place in the evening and was carried out with a stabbing weapon.
The appraiser Clarus painted the picture of a mentally unstable person who possessed schizophrenic traits and even believed in the conspiracy by the Freemasons. Büchner also adopted formulations in his work:
«Stab the Mrs. Wootin Dead»
became to
«Stab the Ziwolfin dead»
The author Georg Buchner
The young Georg Büchner came into contact with the historical Woyzeck story through the magazine of his father, a doctor. He himself also studied medicine in Strasbourg and then switched to the state university in Giessen. He was politically active and also experienced personal crises, as he suffered from severe depression for some time.
The pamphlet «The Hessian Courier» was published by him in 1834 and addressed social grievances: His most famous exclamation was: “Peace to the huts! War on the palaces!”. As a result of this action, Georg Büchner had to leave Germany and fled into exile in Switzerland.
There he wrote, among other things, the drama «Woyzeck», which was only published posthumously. Büchner died of typhus in 1837 at the age of only 23. There was no completed final version of the drama; only a text fragment was found in the estate. The fragment consisted of 27 barely decipherable, unordered scenes.
40 years after his death, the journalist Karl Emil Franzos used a chemical mixture to make the faded writing legible. Here, however, Franzos made a mistake, because he picked out the name «Wozzeck» and published the version under this name.
Over the years, many different readings arose due to the difficulty in deciphering Büchner’s manuscript. The most widespread version was not published until 1967 by the writer and literary critic Werner Lehmann. However, new interpretations of the text and the individual scenes are still being created today.
The work still has a high status in literature today: Woyzeck offers a significant insight into contemporary social conditions. The theme of human coexistence, the question of human existence and the various approaches to interpretation are still relevant today. Büchner’s work therefore stands for the justification of the social theater and is representative of modern theater.
Woyzeck (Büchner) – The most important thing
- Georg Büchner’s drama fragment «Woyzeck» was written in 1836 and is unfinished due to his early death.
- The story tells the fate of soldier Woyzeck, who murders his lover due to his jealousy and mental confusion.
- The work is based on a true event.
- In doing so, Büchner broke with the world view and the traditions of classical theatre.
- Woyzeck is regarded as the original of the «social drama».
- The drama offers a meaningful insight into contemporary social conditions.