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Masterplots, Fourth Edition

Woyzeck

by Dennis Vannatta

First published: 1879; first produced, 1913 (English translation, 1927)

Type of work: Drama

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of plot: Early nineteenth century

Locale: Germany

The Story:

Franz Woyzeck is a conscript fusilier, a poor, simple soldier with a peasant’s slow mind and a peasant’s superstitions. The only happiness he has in his wretched existence comes from his relationship with his sweetheart Marie and their small son. Because his army pay does not suffice for the support of his household, he is forced to earn additional money by performing menial tasks about the camp and in the garrison town where his regiment is stationed.

Serving as a barber’s apprentice in his youth, he is often called in to shave his Captain. The officer, a man of speculative, ironic temperament, likes to talk about such topics as time and eternity, matters often beyond Woyzeck’s comprehension. Sometimes the Captain jokingly reproves the poor fellow for his lack of morals, since he fathered a child without benefit of a wedding ceremony. Woyzeck always declares that if he were a gentleman with a laced coat and a cocked hat he, too, could be virtuous. He considers virtue to be a privilege of the educated and great, and not intended for miserable creatures such as himself.

An eccentric Doctor also pays Woyzeck a few coins to act as the subject of fantastic medical experiments. The soldier is supposed to live on a diet of peas and to hold his water for stated periods of time. When Woyzeck tries blunderingly to explain his views on nature and life, the Doctor is delighted. He thinks Woyzeck’s halting remarks show an interesting aberration, and he predicts that the man will end in a madhouse.

One day, Woyzeck and his friend Andres go into the country to cut wood for the Captain. Woyzeck begins to talk wildly about the freemasons, claiming that they burrowed under the ground and that the earth they hollowed out is rocking under his feet. Their secret signs were revealed to him in dreams, and he is fearful of their vengeance. Andres, usually a matter-of-fact fellow, becomes rather alarmed when Woyzeck pictures the Last Judgment in the glowing colors of the sunset. Returning home, Woyzeck tries to explain to Marie the vision he saw in the sky. She is hurt because in his excitement he fails to notice his son. That afternoon, a handsome, bearded Drum Major ogled Marie while she stood at her window and talked to a friend outside. She wonders about Woyzeck and his strange thoughts. Marie is hearty and earthy. It is easier for her to understand people’s emotions than their ideas.

Woyzeck and Marie go to a fair. As they enter one of the exhibits, the Drum Major and a Sergeant come by and follow them into the booth, where the barker is showing a horse that can count and identify objects. When the showman calls for a watch, the Sergeant holds up his timepiece. To see what is going on, Marie climbs on a bench and stands next to the Drum Major. That is the beginning of their affair. A short time later, Woyzeck finds Marie with a new pair of earrings that she claims to have found. The simple-minded soldier remarks that he was never lucky enough to find anything in pairs. While Woyzeck is on duty or doing extra work, the Drum Major visits Marie in her room. Full-blooded and passionate, she yields to him.

Woyzeck has no suspicions of her infidelity. One day, as he bustles down the street, he meets the Captain and the Doctor. The Captain begins to talk slyly about beards and hints that if Woyzeck were to hurry home he will be in time to find hairs from a bearded lover on Marie’s lips. Woyzeck becomes pale and nervous, whereupon the Doctor shows great clinical interest in his reactions. The Captain assures Woyzeck that he means well by the soldier and Woyzeck goes loping home. When he peers steadily into Marie’s face, however, he can see no outward signs of guilt. His scrutiny disturbs and then angers her. She defies him, practically admitting that she has another lover, but she dares Woyzeck to lay a hand on her. Unable to understand how anyone so unkind could look so beautiful and innocent, he leaves the house. Not knowing what else to do, he goes to the Doctor’s courtyard. There the physician makes him appear ridiculous in front of a group of medical students.

The next Sunday, Woyzeck and Andres are together in the barracks, Woyzeck is restless and unhappy because there is a dance at an inn near the town and he knows that Marie and the Drum Major will be there. Andres tries to stop his friend, but Woyzeck says that he has to see them for himself. He goes to the inn and through an open window watches Marie and her lover dancing. Andres, fearing a disturbance, finally persuades him to go back to town. Karl, a fool, is among some loafers near the inn door; he says that he smells blood.

That night, Woyzeck, unable to sleep, tells Andres that he still hears music and sees the dancing. He also mumbles about his vision of a knife in a store window. The next day, when he encounters the Drum Major at the inn, the two men fight and Woyzeck is badly beaten by his swaggering rival. Mad with jealousy, he goes to a pawn shop and buys a knife like the one he saw in his dream. At the barracks, he gives away most of his possessions. Resisting Andres’s attempt to get him to the infirmary, Woyzeck goes to Marie and asks her to go walking with him. On a lonely path near the pond he takes out his new knife and stabs her to death.

Then he goes back to the inn and dances madly. When a girl named Käthe notices bloodstains on his hand, he says that he cut himself. Questioned further, he screams that he is no murderer and runs from the inn. Wanting to get rid of the incriminating knife that he had left beside Marie’s body, he throws it into the pond. His first throw falls short. Desperate, he wades out to hurl the knife into deeper water, gets in over his depth, and drowns.

A group of playing children hear adults talking about the murder. They run to Woyzeck’s son and tell him that his mother is dead.

Critical Evaluation:

Georg Büchner’s untimely death in 1837 was fortunate in one respect: His play Woyzeck remained unfinished. Had he lived to polish the play’s structure and bring it, as most scholars agree was his intent, to its logical conclusion with Woyzeck’s trial, conviction, and execution, the result may have been an interesting, perhaps even pioneering work, but it would not have been the completely unprecedented, startling piece that it is in its unfinished state. Indeed, the unordered succession of scenes and fragments seems out of place in the early nineteenth century, seeming to belong much more comfortably with the tortured expressionism of the early twentieth century.

Because the style and the structure of the Woyzeck fragments are so perfectly wedded to the work’s characterization and theme, the play has, in whatever order it is presented or read, the inevitability of a finished product. One version ends with the court clerk describing the crime with relish as a “beautiful murder,” and another ends with the children excitedly rushing off to view Marie’s body before the authorities move it. The other obvious aspect of the play’s being incomplete is the fact that it breaks off shortly after Woyzeck murders Maria, but this very lack of resolution is ideally suited to reflect not only the uncertainties of the twentieth century worldview but, more important, those of Woyzeck’s world. The play offers no consoling gesture, just as Büchner offers Woyzeck none. All of society’s institutions fail Woyzeck, who is tragic not because he is a great man brought low but because he started low and never had a chance.

Büchner was caught up in the radical protest politics of his day and his primary thematic intent in Woyzeck was no doubt political. Woyzeck’s troubles can be traced most directly to his low economic class. His pay is so meager that he is forced to hire himself out for scientific experiments that play havoc with his health. Even with supplemental pay, he cannot afford to marry Marie, whose affection, as long as he thinks he has it, is the one redeeming feature of his life. Since they cannot afford to marry, their child is illegitimate and cannot be baptized. Marie is as much a victim of poverty as is Woyzeck. She worries about her bastard child and is so pathetically eager for something to take her away from her drab surroundings and circumstances that she takes up with a vulgar drum major who can afford to buy her a few trinkets.

Poverty, though, is just one aspect of Woyzeck’s world that makes his life so hopeless. No age is free of poverty, but most ages offer consolations to the poor, the most obvious being religion, with its promises of the hereafter. Actually, Woyzeck is filled with religious imagery and direct quotations from the Bible, but these, rather than healing and consoling, tend toward the apocalyptic and anticipate violence to come. At moments, Marie is acutely aware of her “fallen” state, feels painful remorse, and calls on God for mercy. It is Woyzeck who summons up the apocalyptic imagery, and his wrath most closely resembles the biblical prophets impatient of evil. Had his moral vision been less rigid, Woyzeck might have accommodated himself to the world’s imperfections and not been driven to violence; had Marie not come equipped with moral sense, she might at least have enjoyed her dalliance and not been afflicted with remorse. These two not only do not profit from their religious beliefs but are plagued by them.

It is in Büchner’s century that there was, at least among many intellectuals, a movement away from religion as a guiding principle and source of truth. What replaced religion for many of these apostates was science. Here, too, however, Büchner was ahead of his time, for Woyzeck manifests modern cynicism about the wisdom and worth of scientists and science. Woyzeck’s being forced to hire himself out as a guinea pig for the doctor’s experiments, who wants to observe the effects of a diet of peas, underscores both the evils of poverty and the inhuman arrogance of science. Indeed, Woyzeck’s depression and psychosis were certainly exacerbated by a diet lacking in vitamins and other nutrients. Like the god of religion, the god of science fails Woyzeck.

Referring to Woyzeck as a guinea pig is in keeping with the play’s animal motif. Horses, monkeys, and lizards are all present or at least referred to, always with a direct or implied comparison to human beings. The horse can count as well as a person; the monkey sports a uniform and sword just like a soldier; and the death of a lizard, the doctor maintains, would be a greater loss to his experiment than the death of Woyzeck. This underscores the pessimism of the play and also prefigures Charles Darwin, who not long after Büchner’s death was to rock the world with the theory that human beings were not higher beings close to a god of creation but animals that, like all animals, evolved according to laws of nature.

Although Woyzeck is a brilliantly conceived character, the play is not a character study so much as the dramatization of the spirit of an age about to be born. Woyzeck is an Everyman suffering through an age when the old certainties eroded and the new ones are suspect. Driven to desperation like so many of his fellow human beings, Woyzeck can only lash out and destroy, but that, too, brings only pain.

Further Reading

1 

Crighton, James. Büchner and Madness: Schizophrenia in Georg Büchner’s “Lenz” and “Woyzeck.” Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998. This study of Büchner’s depiction of schizophrenia examines his sources of information about the disease and discusses the social and personal circumstances that resulted in the creation of both Woyzeck and Lenz. Crighton intersperses his analyses of the plays with information about Büchner’s life, relationships, and medical education, as well as nineteenth century literature about mental illness.

2 

James, Dorothy. “The ’Interesting Case’ of Büchner’s Woyzeck.” In Patterns of Change: German Drama and the European Tradition, edited by Dorothy James and Silvia Ranawake. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. Provides a fine introduction to understanding the place of Woyzeck in German drama. James also places Büchner in a context of developing European thought.

3 

Kaufmann, Friedrich Wilhelm. German Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Russell & Russell, 1972. Kaufmann notes that in plays such as Woyzeck, Büchner is dramatizing the collapse of old European values and the process of coming to grips with new realities. Woyzeck himself is an Everyman, condemned by his poverty to a life of misery.

4 

Reddick, John. Georg Büchner: The Shattered Whole. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Seeks to offer new interpretations of Woyzeck and Büchner’s other works and discusses the playwright’s values, ideas, and politics. Reddick argues that Buchner was aesthetically way ahead of his time primarily because his idealistic assumptions and aspirations were far behind the times.

5 

Richards, David G. Georg Büchner’s “Woyzeck”: A History of Its Criticism. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2001. Compilation of nineteenth and twentieth century criticism of the play, demonstrating the ongoing debate about the authority of its text and the sharply divided opinion about the drama.

6 

Ritchie, J. M. German Expressionist Drama. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Notes the influence of Woyzeck on twentieth century German expressionist drama and provides compelling evidence that the play was ahead of its time.

7 

Stodder, Joseph H. “The Influences of Othello on Büchner’s Woyzeck.” Modern Language Review 69 (January, 1974): 115-120. An interesting comparison that points to the plot similarities between William Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice (pr. 1604) and Büchner’s Woyzeck, which both concern men driven by jealousy to murder women they love and are then tortured by remorse. Leads the author to conclude that Shakespeare’s work was a direct influence on Büchner.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Vannatta, Dennis. "Woyzeck." Masterplots, Fourth Edition, edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=MP4_31979560000966.
APA 7th
Vannatta, D. (2010). Woyzeck. In L. W. Mazzeno (Ed.), Masterplots, Fourth Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Vannatta, Dennis. "Woyzeck." Edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno. Masterplots, Fourth Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2010. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.