Woyzeck Study Guide

Woyzeck is based on a true account of a poor man who was executed for stabbing his
wife, Marie, to death. Buchner became fascinated with the case, so much so that he used it as
inspiration for the play that would culminate his short literary career. Buchner's characters do not
represent the actual historical figures upon which they were based, although their names and the
basic outline of the story remain true to life. Many scholars consider the play the first modern
drama, and mark it as the catalyst for countless theatrical movements, most notably Naturalism
and the modern Theatre of the Absurd. Buchner's biting social commentary in the play, which
stemmed from his own political disillusionment, anticipates Karl Marx's theories although it
rejects the possibility of revolution or a classless utopia. Woyzeck exists almost as a genre in
itself, which some have labeled "psychological realism."
Because Buchner died in 1837 before ever finishing Woyzeck, leaving behind four unpolished
manuscripts, it is impossible to have a definitive version of the work. Scholars hotly debate
issues such as which scenes to include, the order of the scenes, and especially the ending. Some
versions of the play end with Woyzeck standing in the pond, others with him drowning, and still
others with him returning to the town to embrace his child (as in the version analyzed here).
Buchner intended the play to have a disjointed, fragmented quality, and scholars' piecing it
together from fragments enhances this and supports the suggestion that it greatly influenced
Brecht's style. Although each scene is structurally an independent unit, the scene where
the Grandmother tells her 'black fairy tale' is often described as the play's thematic keystone. It
encapsulates Buchner's deepest message, a pessimistic and tragic view of man's existence. As
critic Maurice B. Benn puts it, the 'black fairy tale' and therefore Woyzeck, "is one of infinite
disillusionment ending in the gloom of complete solitude." Another scholar, Carl Richard
Mueller, describes Woyzeckaffectionately as, "a series of stained-glass windows in a medieval
cathedral," to say that each scene is self-contained but builds on the last to form the coherent
whole. Mueller also emphasizes the scientific, sharp quality of Buchner's social criticism, quite
different from Romantic affectations. One stylistic choice contributing to this bold,
"dispassionate" approach is Buchner's use of caricature for every character save Woyzeck and
Marie. He wastes no time in fleshing out characters that are ultimately there only to enhance or
contrast the protagonists' traits.
Those who have staged Woyzeck in the theater have had to face the problem of how to retain the
play's disjointedness while keeping the audience's understanding and interest. Those who
succeeded generally removed blackouts between scenes, staged the play in the round, or as
Ingmar Bergman famously did, even integrated the audience with the actors so that action never
ceased. Austrian composer Alban Berg finished his opera version of the play, Wozzeck, in 1922,
and it was first performed in 1925. In order to retain Buchner's disjointed, melancholic feel, Berg
makes extensive use of atonality and rejects the standard forms of aria and trio in favor of
abstract instrumental music. Wozzeck has since become a standard and widely performed work in
the world of opera. In addition, many film versions of the play have been produced, most notably
Werner Herzog's 1979 version starring Klaus Kinski and Eva Mattes, which premiered at the
Cannes Film Festival.

Woyzeck Summary

Woyzeck is the tragic tale of a military barber named Woyzeck, who stabs to death his beloved
common-law wife, Marie, for her infidelity. We first encounter Woyzeck with his friend, Andres,
in an open field outside the town. Woyzeck is having violent, apocalyptic visions and thinks that
he hears voices, while Andres sees and hears nothing unusual. Next, we meet Marie. She is
sitting with her child by the window, watching the military marching band go by and admiring
the Drum-Major. Woyzeck arrives to give Marie money and tells her about his latest
hallucinations. The next day, Woyzeck and Marie visit a fair where they are drawn into
a Showman's booth. The Drum-Major spies Marie and is attracted to her instantly. He and
the Sergeant follow Marie and Woyzeck into the booth, where the Showman conducts a
spectacle with a dancing monkey and an "astronomical horse," all the while making jokes at
mankind's expense. The Sergeant helps Marie into the front row for a better view.
Some days later, Marie sits with her child on her lap, admiring a pair of gold earrings that the
Drum-Major gave her. When Woyzeck arrives, she lies and says that she found them. After he
leaves, she scolds herself for being a "no-good tart," but then decides that she is no more
immoral than anyone else. Our focus switches to Woyzeck, who is shaving the Officer. The latter
mocks him egotistically, telling him he has no morals or virtue. Woyzeck defends himself by
saying that he would be moral and virtuous if he were not so poor. Meanwhile, Marie and the
Drum-Major meet in secret. The sexual tension between them is explosive and it is implied that
they gratify their sexual urges. At the Doctor's office, the Doctor scolds Woyzeck for urinating in
the street, since he could have used the urine for experimental tests. He is studying the effects of
a peas-only diet on Woyzeck's physical and mental health. The Doctor is delighted by Woyzeck's
descriptions of his increasingly tormented hallucinations, and gives him a monetary bonus.
Presumably some days later, we find the Officer visiting the Doctor. The two men exchange
playful jabs before Woyzeck arrives. The Officer tells Woyzeck of Marie and the Drum-Major's
affair. Woyzeck confronts Marie, who becomes defensive and dodges his accusations. In the next
scene, we find the Doctor presenting Woyzeck to his students as an experimental subject. He
refers to Woyzeck in the manner one might refer to a lab rat or guinea pig. Back in the
guardroom, Woyzeck begins to feel very hot and tries to share his increasing mental torment
with Andres, who calls him a "bloody fool." When Woyzeck joins the other soldiers at the inn,
he sees Marie and the Drum-Major dancing and becomes enraged. We next find him alone in an
open field. He hears voices mimicking the rhythm of the dance that tell him to stab Marie to
death. That night, the voices keep Woyzeck awake.

The next day in the barrack square, Andres recounts the Drum-Major's chauvinistic comments
about Marie, and Woyzeck hurries off to the inn. There, he whistles insubordinately at the Drum-
Major, who beats him up and leaves him bleeding. In the next scene, he buys a knife from a Jew,
who jokes that he is buying himself an "economical death." Our attention then turns to Marie at
home, flipping frantically through the Bible. Her guilt has caught up with her, and she wishes to
be absolved of her sin like the adultress who was brought before Christ. Woyzeck has not been
by to see her in two days. While Marie flips through the Bible, Woyzeck is at the barracks,
rifling through his belongings. He reads from an official military document that states his
birthday as the date of the Feast of the Annunciation.
In the next scene, Marie sits with Grandmother and a group of girls on the steps to her house.
When they run out of songs, the Grandmother tells a 'black fairy tale' about an orphan boy who
found life empty and was miserable and lonely for all eternity. Just as she finishes her story,
Woyzeck arrives and leads Marie outside the town. When she tries to get away, he accuses and
insults her, and then stabs her repeatedly before the sounds of townspeople approaching scare
him away. Woyzeck goes to the inn, where he jeers at a dancing woman named Kathe. She
ignores him until she notices the blood on his hands and causes a scene. Woyzeck's excuses as to
how the blood got on his hands do not add up, and he is forced to flee to the crime scene in
search of the knife. When he stumbles upon Marie's body, he coos to her, proud that he has
absolved her of her "black" deed and made her "white" and pure again. He throws the knife in a
pond and then, deciding it is not deep enough, wades in after it to throw it deeper.
After he washes the blood off his hands, Woyzeck returns to Marie's house to find his child in
the care of the Idiot, Karl. When he tries to embrace his child, the latter screams and pushes him
away. Woyzeck sends the Idiot and child away. In the play's last scene, a Policemanaddresses
various townspeople including the Doctor and a Judge. He says simply: "A good murder, a
proper murder, a lovely murder, as lovely a murder as anyone could wish, we've not had a
murder like this for years."

Poverty
Although by the time Buchner wrote Woyzeck he had given up on the idea of a political
revolution, he makes an explicit connection between poverty and suffering in the play that critic
Maurice B. Benn calls, "a profound though by no means sentimental sympathy" for the
unfortunate. According to Buchner, the poor are the purest class because they are untainted by
pretension and laziness. Even though this also makes them unrefined and animalistic, it is
preferable to the kind of stuffy inaction or moral depravity represented by the middle-class
figures of the Officer, Doctor, and Drum-Major. Woyzeck's poverty also connects him more
deeply to the character of Christ; after all, the latter was a humble carpenter who was still
capable of the greatest and holiest things. By being poor, Woyzeck is closer to God. However,
his poverty is also the source of his physical and emotional suffering, and his eventual undoing.
If Woyzeck did not need money, he would not participate in the Doctor's unethical experiment,
which slowly drives him insane. In order to survive, he must sign himself over to a society that
wishes to harm him and that gives him no relief. As he tells the Officer, "I think if [poor people]
ever got to Heaven we'd have to help with the thunder." Were Woyzeck in a normal physical and
mental state when he discovered Marie's affair, he might react in a sane manner instead of
murdering her, because he is already hallucinating as a result of his peas-only diet. Like the
orphan in the Grandmother's 'black fairy tale,' Woyzeck finds out that as a member of the lower
class, life holds no treasures for him--only trash. Buchner's expatiations on poverty
in Woyzeckare said by many critics to anticipate Karl Marx's political theories as expounded
in The Communist Manifesto, though unlike Marx, Buchner abandoned the ideas of political
upheaval and utopian society.
Suffering
Woyzeck's suffering is inextricable from his social condition. However, it is also universal and
raises him up out of anonymity to an archetypal and even Christ-like status. According to
Buchner, Woyzeck's suffering--as a symbol of human suffering in general--is undeserved. As
Benn points out, "...Little as we are told about him, we can at least recognize that he is free from
any mean or contemptible trait." Despite his inherent goodness, Woyzeck is made to suffer by
the Officer, Drum-Major, and Doctor in various ways. He presents, "a picture of material
distress, of physical and psychical sickness, of degradation and humiliation at the hands of a
society which systematically refuses to recognize him as a human being." The Officer pays
Woyzeck, but mocks him directly and daily. The Drum-Major makes Woyzeck suffer by
wrenching away his love, Marie, and later also makes him bleed when they fight. Woyzeck is
subject to the public humiliation in front of the Doctor's students, and unethical medical
experiments that amount to physical and mental torture. His body and mind suffer violent and
dizzying effects including the hallucinations that cause him to wreak suffering and death on
Marie. Although Woyzeck's suffering connects him to Christ, making him what Reddick calls
"an archetypal sufferer," he is far from Christ-like in his response to suffering. Instead of seeking
to remedy his situation, he, "visit[s] supreme suffering on Marie in a desperate and hubristic
mimicry of divine justice." It is, of course, Woyzeck's psychological suffering as well is
instinctive humanity that makes him perpetuate this cycle of suffering. As encapsulated in the
Grandmother's 'black fairy tale' or 'anti-fairy tale,' Buchner suggests that suffering is an equally
senseless and inevitable part of human experience.
The Biblical
In the same way that he uses fairy tales and folk songs, Buchner employs Biblical references to
raise the story of Woyzeck from its mundane setting to an archetypal level. Specifically, he uses
the figures of Christ, the Virgin Mary to underscore his points about human nature and suffering.
Woyzeck is born on the day of the Feast of the Annunciation, which celebrates Christ's
conception. Also, he is the same age Christ was purported to be at the time of his death. Marie's
name, although also the name of the historical character Marie, connects her to the Virgin Mary.
She is also most often pictured in the archetypal manner of the Virgin, with her innocent child,
referred to in some versions as Christian, on her lap. Like Christ and the Virgin Mary, Woyzeck
and Marie are inherently good and righteous people put in extraordinary circumstances.
However, instead of being visited by Godly power, Woyzeck and Marie are loaded with
suffering by society.
Woyzeck is forced to endure physical and psychological torment at the hands of the Doctor, and
Marie, to have such a damaged individual as her common-law husband and the father of her
child. Just as Christ and the Virgin Mary endure the circumstances with which they are saddled,
so do Woyzeck and Marie. However, being subject to society, Buchner's characters fall into
ignominy and crime. Buchner suggests that were they not poor and downtrodden, Woyzeck and
Marie might be as great as the biblical figures with whom he associates them. His allusions to
Christ and Mary only heighten the sense that Woyzeck and Marie's shameful actions are not part
of their nature but rather, products of an unjust social structure.
Madness
The very first quality Buchner establishes in the character of Woyzeck is madness. The
playwright does make clear that Woyzeck is not naturally insane but rather driven to the brink by
society's treatment of him. Still, he allows insanity to be the foremost trait we experience in
Woyzeck. Throughout the play, Woyzeck hallucinates and spouts madness to his sane
foil, Andres, who generally ignores him or tells him to seek medical help. Ironically, it is the
medical 'help' Woyzeck endures at the Doctor's hands that makes him mad in the first place. As
we learn from the Doctor's observations, Woyzeck's peas-only diet causes him to see and hear
visions, tremble, and lose his hair, all stereotypical traits of the deranged. Since Woyzeck's
madness is a result of his 'work' for the Doctor, it is also connected to his poverty, which forces
him to comply with the commands of those more fortunate and powerful.
Buchner uses setting to reflect the state of Woyzeck's mind. Unlike the mapped, solid structure
of society with its buildings and streets, Woyzeck can be found hallucinating just outside
civilization in an open field that reflects the wildness of his thoughts. It is to just such an isolated,
unstructured setting that he brings Marie in order to murder her. In the murder scene, the
darkness, cold, mist, and "cracked" chirping of insects heighten our sense that Woyzeck's mind is
just as cold, strange, and deadly. Although once Woyzeck has resolved to kill Marie his madness
becomes chilly and calculating, until that point, madness is associated with intense heat and a
dizzying circular motion. These sensations are established when Woyzeck spies Marie and the
Drum-Major dancing up a sweat at the inn. Woyzeck internalizes the heat of their passion and
the circular rhythm of the dance so that he feels physically hot and the voice in his head repeats
"Stab, stab the bitch dead" like a mad refrain. The heat and dizzying cycles end only when
Woyzeck has succumbed to his demon and fatally stabbed Marie.
Animal Nature
Because Buchner was disillusioned with society, which he viewed as faultily structured and
harmful to the human spirit, he casts animals in a noble light in Woyzeck. At the same time, he
sympathizes with the animal's plight, acknowledging that an animal is pure in its instincts but
also limited in the scope of its opportunities. At the fair, the Showman uses his show animals to
poke fun at human existence. He claims that the dancing monkey is at the same level as a soldier,
for neither requires much skill to do his job. Comparing the monkey to a soldier specifically
connects him to Woyzeck, who is just as innocent and harmless as a trained show animal, just as
simple-minded because of his lack of education, and just as subject to the commands of his
superiors. In a later scene, the Doctor commands Woyzeck to "waggle" his ears for the medical
students in remarkably the same way that the Showman makes the monkey blow a trumpet for
the crowd's entertainment. Woyzeck is no more than a lab rat or guinea pig to the Doctor, who,
for instance, scolds him for urinating in the street because he is 'wasting' a urine sample the
Doctor could have used for his research. He completely ignores that Woyzeck is a human being
who may urinate whenever he pleases. Similarly, the Officer mocks Woyzeck to his face as
though the latter does not understand his insults. As Benn affirms, "... Both the captain and the
doctor, like the class of society which they represent, are basically unwilling to recognize any
bond of common humanity in their relationship to Woyzeck. They see him as belonging to quite
a different and immeasurably lower grade in the scale of living creatures."
By the same token, Buchner portrays the "astronomical horse" with sympathy and makes it seem
noble even though it defecates freely while the show is going on. Better to be an uninhibited
animal and "put society to shame," with one's "unspoilt nature," he suggests, than a "pig-stupid
individual" like the egotistical Officer or Doctor. Buchner keeps the "animalistic" traits typically
reserved for actual beasts for the Drum-Major, who sees Marie solely as a sexual object and
refers to wanting to use her to "spawn" or "breed."
Sexuality
In Woyzeck, sexuality is illicit and connected with madness and violence. Woyzeck seems to lack
sexual desire, although on select occasions, he refers to having once desired Marie. Presumably
he has lost his sex drive as a side-effect of his peas-only diet and Marie, sexually unsatisfied, is
primed to accept the stalwart, cocky Drum-Major's seduction. Even though Buchner deals with
the theme of animals and animal nature, he reserves a traditionally "animalistic" portrayal for the
Drum-Major. With his strutting, his plumed hat, and his chauvanistic attitude towards Marie, the
Drum-Major seems like a rooster, interested in nothing more than copulating and propagating.
He uses the words "breed" and "spawn" when referring to Marie, and also calls her a "hot bitch."
Society pens up sexuality so that when it emerges, as in the case of Marie and the Drum-Major's
affair, it is explosive. Again, Buchner blames society for the way that emotions are expressed; it
is the Doctor who suppresses Woyzeck's sexuality, indirectly causing Marie's affair. In the short
scene before they consummate their attraction, their sexual tension is connected to the wild and
demonic; the Drum-Major calls Marie a "wild animal" and says he sees the devil in her eye.
When Woyzeck witnesses the "heat" between them, he internalizes it as madness and rage. Thus,
Buchner connects sex to insanity to violence. He reaffirms this just before killing Marie when he
says: "How hot your lips are! Hot, hot, breath of a whore." This connection is especially strong
in contrast to the simple innocence of the child and little girls.
Violence
From the very first scene, Buchner introduces the pervading theme of violence, which culminates
when Woyzeck fatally stabs Marie. When we first come upon Woyzeck and Andres, the former
is spouting nonsense about decapitation and death. He points to a spot in the grass and claims
that is where "the head rolls in the evenings" when prisoners are decapitated. He claims that
someone picked up a head once and was cursed, dying days later. Woyzeck is not frightened by
the violence, but rather fascinated. His hallucinations are violent and demonic, and even
apocalyptic, like the vision he sees in they sky recalling the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Woyzeck experiences violent hallucinations as a result of the violence inflicted upon him by the
Doctor under the guise of medical experimentation. By forcing Woyzeck to subsist on only peas,
the Doctor sets him up for extensive physical and mental torment; he adds another layer of
violence by failing to treat these symptoms and letting them ravage his 'patient.' Violence can
also be taken lightheartedly or seen as inconsequential. When the Jew sells Woyzeck the knife,
he jokes that Woyzeck is buying himself an "economical death" because the weapon is so
inexpensive. When the Drum-Major beats up Woyzeck, he does so more in the name of bravado
than actual anger. Woyzeck acts insubordinately towards him by whistling, so the Drum-Major
makes him bleed. Yet even before Woyzeck whistles, the Drum-Major is looking for a fight; he
craves violence (as long as he wins) in order to assert his importance and make him feel more
manly.
The main act of violence, of course, is at the play's end. Woyzeck stabs Marie to death as
revenge for her affair with the Drum-Major. Although Woyzeck cannot beat the Drum-Major in
a fight, he wields enough power (and a knife) over Marie to end her life. As we know from
Buchner's portrayal of Woyzeck as a victim, he is inherently good and driven to violence by the
violence inflicted upon him.