Georg Büchner's Woyzeck

Karoline Gritzner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317332985
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Arte dramático

'Everyone's an abyss. You get dizzy if you look down.' -- Woyzeck

Georg Büchner's Woyzeck was left unfinished at the time of its author's death in 1837, but the play is now widely recognised as the first 'modern' drama in the history of European theatre. Its fragmentary form and critical socio-political content have had a lasting influence on artists, readers and audiences to this day.

The abuse, exploitation, and disenfranchisement that Woyzeck 's titular protagonist endures find their mirror in his own murderous outburst. But beyond that, they also echo in the flux and confusion of the various drafts and versions in which the play has been presented since its emergence.

In this fresh engagement with a modern classic, Gritzner examines the revolutionary dimensions of Büchner's political and creative practice, as well as modern approaches to the play in performance.

1

Woyzeck the open wound

The inscription on Georg Büchner’s gravestone reads: An unfinished song sinking into the grave / He takes with him the most beautiful verses (Ein unvollendet Lied sinkt er ins Grab / Der Verse schönsten nimmt er mit hinab). This melancholy epitaph invokes the work of death as interruption and loss of potential. The ‘unfinished song’ refers not only to Büchner’s brief life (he died at the age of 23), it also alludes to the various unfinished political, scientific and literary projects which the gifted young man engaged with more or less simultaneously, in haste and under pressure from political persecution. Above all, the unfinished song is Woyzeck, Büchner’s uncompleted dramatic fragment and the play he is best known for. It was one of two other plays that he intended to publish ‘within the next eight days’, he wrote to his fiancée shortly before his sudden death from typhus on 19 February 1837. Woyzeck was published posthumously in 1879.

As a student Büchner was engaged in a proto-socialist political project which involved radical, subversive actions. Inspired by the ideals of the French revolution, he founded a secret ‘society for human rights’ in southern Germany and co-edited a radical political pamphlet, The Hessian Courier, in 1834. The pamphlet called for an end of heavy taxation and urged the peasant population of Hesse to revolt against their aristocratic exploiters. Its motto was ‘Peace to the hovels! Death to the palaces!’. The dissemination of the pamphlet proved to be a disappointing and humiliating failure because the intimidated peasants handed the illegally distributed copies over to the police. Büchner’s accomplices were detained in prison and in 1835 he himself fled to Strasbourg to avoid arrest and to prepare for his exile to Switzerland as a political refugee. Whilst researching the history of the French Revolution he developed a pressing awareness of the ‘terrible fatalism of history’ (letter to his fiancée, 1834) and later abandoned the belief in the ‘possibility of a political revolution now’ (letter to his brother, 1835).¹ However, the unfinished business of his politics gave way to a deeper study of science and philosophy, as well as to an intensified literary output which included the historical drama about the French Revolution, Danton’s Death (1835), the comedy Leonce and Lena (1836), the novella Lenz (1835), two translations of plays by Victor Hugo (Marie Tudor and Lucrèce Borgia), a play about the Renaissance poet Pietro Aretino which has been lost, and the unfinished tragedy of Woyzeck which Büchner began to work on in 1836. Apart from Danton’s Death, all of his literary works were published posthumously and often interfered with by subsequent editors, as was partly the case with Lenz and most substantively with Woyzeck. Büchner also wrote philosophical papers on Descartes and Spinoza and had hoped to teach a lecture course on German philosophy at Zürich university after his emigration. This plan did not come to fruition either, and instead he embarked on a career in the natural sciences at Zürich university in 1836. His scientific research about the nervous system of the barbel fish species earned him a doctorate and he was subsequently appointed as a professor of comparative anatomy. Büchner’s diverse intellectual, creative, scientific and political activities are impressive, considering the brevity of his life, and they had one thing in common: they were revolutionary.

This book examines Woyzeck as an example of Büchner’s revolutionary literary practice and as a text in which his historical-political consciousness and artistic style find their most concentrated expression in the formal statement of fragmentation. Scholar Andrew Gibson has argued that modernity (beginning with the French Revolution) is characterised by a logic of historical discontinuity, interruption and fracture. He calls it modernity’s ‘logic of intermittency’ – a sensibility which always anticipates new beginnings in the form of new events. Gibson extends this logic to the present day and considers the experience of intermittency to have intensified in the contemporary world of free market economics.² My reading of Woyzeck will approach Büchner as a thinker and practitioner of intermittency for whom drama was, as he stated in a letter to his family, a way of ‘creat[ing] history anew’.³ His study of the socio-economic conditions of his day made him conclude that ‘nothing can be done … at the present time’⁴, which implies a belief in the deferral of the possibility of revolutionary transformation rather than a nihilistic rejection of such hope. In Büchner’s work the thought of intermittency arises as a response to the overwhelming negativity of social and individual experience. His drama can be considered as a caesura, or interruption, which keeps alive the possibility that something different will emerge from the gaps, silences and interruptions of the flux of life as he imagined it for the stage. Woyzeck is Büchner’s final work in progress and widely considered to be the first modern drama in the history of European theatre. Its modernity is reflected in the play’s experimental form and in its socio-critical subject matter.

Büchner left us three fragmented draft manuscripts (H1, H2, H3) and an incomplete final version (H4) which contains some elements of the previous drafts but excludes others. The play has had an extraordinary reception history, involving damage to the original text, mis-readings of the author’s handwriting (for decades the play was called Wozzeck), and long periods of obscurity until its publication in the late 19th century and its rediscovery (through performance) as a modernist masterpiece in the early 20th century. The fragmented status of the work has rarely been embraced at face value and often editors have attempted to ‘complete’ the work by re-writing, re-ordering, cutting certain scenes and even adding new ones in order to give the plot a more linear development and a satisfactory conclusion. However, none of the suggested editions can be fully endorsed and the debate about the play’s unstable textual identity is ongoing. Taken as a whole, the draft manuscripts form an incomplete and incoherent unity; some individual scenes are hastily sketched, others are more developed, but no logical order is apparent. The play’s episodic structure is replete with gaps and silences which are juxtaposed by explosive moments of transgressive action.

A brief look at the four draft manuscripts (H1–H4) which make up this fragmentary drama offers an insight into the development of Büchner’s compositional process which reveals a gradual expansion of a sense of social circumstance and critique. The first manuscript (H1) contains 21 ‘scenes’ (Büchner did not number them and some are very roughly sketched). It begins with the carnival scene and presents a basic outline of the murder story, with the main characters named as ‘Louis’ (=Woyzeck) and ‘Magreth’ (=Marie). In H2 (comprised of nine scenes) the two main characters are now named as Woyzeck and Louise (=Marie) and the beginning of the action (‘An Open Field. The Town in the Distance. Woyzeck and Andres cut wood’) introduces the themes of superstition and hallucination. The following scenes paint Woyzeck’s fraught relation to figures of authority in his encounters with the Captain, the Doctor (Professor), and the Drum-Major. We are also provided with more details about Woyzeck’s poverty and alienated social situation. This expanded sense of a social class structure and Woyzeck’s suffering continues in the first scene of the third draft (H3): ‘The Professor’s courtyard’ where Woyzeck is objectified and ridiculed. The fourth draft manuscript contains a total of 17 scenes in varying stages of completion and with a number of empty spaces which could suggest that the gaps were intended to be filled by scenes from earlier drafts. This has indeed been suggested by editors who tried to reconstruct the manuscript for a reading and acting text, notably Werner R. Lehmann whose 1967 Hamburg edition of Woyzeck is an exemplary historical-critical work. Fritz Bergemann’s 1922 reconstruction had omitted certain scenes, notably those that suggest a continuation of the narrative after the murder scene. He also manipulated the presentation of Woyzeck’s character by downplaying his violent behaviour in favour of a more sympathetic and humanist portrait. Lehmann, on the other hand, resisted such structural and thematic alterations to the manuscripts and included a wider selection of scenes, which encourages readers to make up their own minds about the text. Lehmann’s edition consists of 24 scenes and four fragments, and it is the basis of the English translation by Gregory Motton (1991) which is used as a reference in this present study. The editorial history of this text demonstrates that none of the published editions of the play can claim literary accuracy because Woyzeck exists in the form of four draft manuscripts in varying stages of completion. Since 1879, when the first edition of the play was published by Karl Emil Franzos (albeit in contaminated form and under the title of Wozzeck), Büchner scholarship has been preoccupied with reconstructing not only the text itself but also its historical, political and cultural contexts.

The first half of the 19th century was a turbulent time for people in the various principalities of Germany, a country that did not exist as a unified state until 1871. When the Napoleonic wars in Europe finally came to an end in 1815, German society demanded social and political changes. But the rulers of the most powerful German states, Prussia and Austria, feared the impact of the French Revolution and its associated demands for social reform. In Büchner’s home state, the Grand Duchy of Hesse, the monarchical exploitation of the peasant population became unbearable for many and Büchner, the son of a medical doctor, developed an interest in radical politics at a young age. In 1828 he founded a branch of the Society for Human Rights in Hesse and when he moved to Strasbourg to begin his studies of medicine in 1831, he became exposed to the liberal ideals of the French Revolution, especially the utopian socialist theories of François-Noël Babeuf and Claude Henri de Saint-Simon. In 1833 he returned to Hesse to continue his studies of practical medicine at the University of Giessen, where he met the evangelical theologian and political activist Friedrich Ludwig Weidig. In a letter to a friend that year, Büchner wrote: ‘The political conditions could drive me mad. The poor people patiently pull the cart on which the princes and the liberals play out their absurd farce’.⁵ Büchner’s outrage at the high levels of social and economic injustice in the Grand Duchy of Hesse was channelled into rebellious action, and even though his political interventions collapsed, he continued to engage with social reality and historical questions in his literary work.

The character of Woyzeck is modelled on a real person: Johann Christian Woyzeck, a German barber and one-time soldier who was obsessively jealous over his lover (a widow named Christiane Woost) and stabbed her to death in 1821. During Woyzeck’s trial, his defence lawyers argued that he was not responsible for his actions because he suffered from hallucinations and showed other signs of mental imbalance. Over a three-year period, the court ordered a series of medical investigations into Woyzeck’s mental health, and the case attracted a lot of public attention. The final psychiatric examination was conducted by a Dr Clarus who concluded that Woyzeck was of a sane mind at the time of the murder and therefore entirely responsible for his actions. Woyzeck was sentenced to capital punishment and decapitated in the main square of Leipzig in 1824. Dr Clarus published his account of Woyzeck’s case in a medical journal which the young medical student Georg most likely found in his father’s library. In his literary manuscripts Büchner imagines the hardship of Woyzeck’s daily life from different perspectives, drawing on a detailed study of Dr Clarus’s medical report and his controversial judgement. Büchner incorporates key details from the documentary material provided in the case study, such as references to Woyzeck’s poverty, his fear of the freemasons, his recurring hallucinations, his fits of jealousy and rage, and the voice that called to him: ‘Stab the Woost dead!’. But in important ways the dramatic text diverges from Clarus’s high-minded and authoritarian representation of Woyzeck as someone who was morally corrupt but mentally sane and therefore responsible for his sinful life and criminal actions. In contrast, Büchner depicts an individual who is determined by outer (economic and social) circumstances as well as internal (psychological and emotional) motivations and instincts. He transforms the wrongly understood historical Woyzeck, whose life was instrumentalised as the material for a scientific case study, into a complex dramatic character. Büchner’s theatrical re-imagination of Woyzeck’s existence based on documentary evidence affords Woyzeck another life (and another chance) in performance. In the play he appears as a socially isolated, impoverished and aimless individual; as an anti-hero who wrestles with forces that are beyond his control and whose crime of passion (or desperation) brings about his downfall. Büchner’s dramatic transformation of documentary materials had already been de...