Coiled Razor Wire and Shards of Glass

The American Repertory Theater will be presenting, as its first offering in the new year, Marcus Stern’s staging of a new version of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, translated by Gideon Lester. We can and do classify Woyzeck as a modernist classic despite the fact that it was written in 1835-36 by a very gifted twenty-two-year-old who never lived to see the play’s enormous impact on European and American drama. When he started on this astonishing play, Büchner had only a few weeks more to live. Woyzeck was first produced in 1913 after lying dormant for almost eight decades, and eight more decades have passed between that first production and the upcoming A.R.T. production. The play has, in all this time, proven itself to be timelessly “ahead of its time,” and it offers immediate and open-ended inspiration for a postmodern impulse director like Marcus Stern.

Woyzeck was left unfinished when its young author died, quite precipitously in his twenty-third year, during a wintertime typhus epidemic in Zurich. But what this young prodigy left behind (along with three other completed plays) was a manuscript of potent force and uncanny premonition: few plays from any era (and certainly no other from the 1830s) have proven to be as influential in twentieth-century drama as has Woyzeck. But it is also highly uncertain to what degree the play’s revolutionary style and form were completely conscious innovations on the part of their author. For the very young Büchner left us a drawerful of unordered and unfinished scenes out of which every production has had to recreate its own version of a whole. Even the title “Woyzeck” is conjectural, and though now conventionalized, it is not in Büchner’s manuscript.

For over forty years after Büchner’s premature death, there was little consciousness that the manuscript even existed. It was published for the first time in 1879, in a belated edition of all of Büchner’s writings, but it did not find a stage production for yet another thirty years. In the years before World War I, the play started igniting imaginations in Germany, and after the war, Woyzeck became a major vehicle for exporting an aesthetic movement loosely called “German Expressionism” elsewhere in Europe. The young Bertolt Brecht was galvanized by Woyzeck in performance, and its influence can be seen in every play he wrote, from Drums in the Night to The Caucasian Chalk Circle. The Viennese composer Alban Berg made the play into the opera Wozzeck in 1925 (the alternate spelling is due to difficulties differentiating Büchner’s handwritten ys from zs). Both the opera version and the original play have secured for Büchner–an author who died when Andrew Jackson was president–an enduring place in twentieth-century letters and aesthetics.

Woyzeck was inspired by a violent homicide that took place on June 3, 1821, in Leipzig–a good distance away from the Büchner home in Darmstadt. Georg Büchner was only seven years old at the time of the crime, but he would eventually read several accounts of the murder and of the mental condition of the murderer–an aimless man named Johann Christian Woyzeck–in medical journals in his father’s office. The trial of Johann Christian Woyzeck–who confessed to stabbing his mistress seven times after she canceled an assignation with him, only to entertain a handsome soldier instead–dragged on for years and became sensational news. Most of the delays in legal procedure were caused by misgivings about Woyzeck’s mental competence before and after the crime, and learned doctors were asked to examine the murderer and report to the courts. In particular, Woyzeck was examined by a Dr. Clarus, who issued a first report some three months after Woyzeck had been arrested in which he declared that the accused was fit to stand trial and to be held accountable for his actions. Woyzeck was sentenced to death. But a year and a half later, the sentence had still not been carried out, and Dr. Clarus was again asked to examine the prisoner. Dealing now with a condemned man awaiting execution, the inflexible Dr. Clarus issued a second report in February of 1823 confirming that Johann Christian Woyzeck had indeed been sane enough in 1821 to be held accountable for his crime, and he further asserted that Woyzeck, though now worse off, was sane enough to be executed.

The controversy over Woyzeck’s obviously distraught nature was agitated enough that another eighteen months passed before the prisoner was put to death. In the presence of a large crowd in a main square in Leipzig on August 27, 1824, Johann Christian Woyzeck was led up the steps of a high platform, where he was seated on a simple chair and strapped down. He was then decapitated by a horizontal sword stroke from his executioner, and the crowd watched his head roll off his knees and bounce down onto the scaffolding. As a young medical student steeped in the science, the politics, and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, Büchner would later have things to say about this act of official barbarity and its relation to the revolutionary idea of the Rights of Man. Woyzeck’s had been the O.J. Simpson case of the 1820s, a sensational jealousy-murder case that opened, like the recent John Salvi case, a serious debate about public and institutional treatment of the insane.

After the huge public spectacle of Woyzeck’s execution, a Dr. Marc published an impassioned medical protest questioning the propriety of executing a mentally unbalanced man, and Dr. Clarus defended his medical judgments and his advice to the courts in heated exchanges in journals to which Büchner’s father, a physician himself, subscribed.

We do not know when the young Büchner read his source materials, but we do know that by the time he took up the Woyzeck case to rework it into a play, Büchner had experienced protracted anxieties about his own imminent arrest while watching at a distance legal terrorism at work as his best friend was gradually starved and tormented to death in a Hessian prison. This grim war of nerves was played out during Büchner’s last three years of life, and while he lived constantly under the threat of arrest, interrogation, and imprisonment himself, Büchner confessed in his letters that he feared he was losing his sanity. His early death from a survivable fever (he was otherwise in reasonably good health) attests to the state of his exasperated nerves and his agonized conscience. All this stress, clearly reflected in the fragments of Woyzeck, was caused by his passionate student involvement in the radical “Liberal” politics of the post-Napoleonic era.

Büchner had been raised in a comfortable bourgeois household, his father holding, after years of military service as a combat physician with Napoleon, a secure post in the service of the Grand Duke Ludwig of Hesse-Darmstadt. After early schooling in Darmstadt, Georg Büchner was sent to Strasbourg, France, for his first two years of medical school. He spent two happy and productive years (between the ages of eighteen and twenty) in the very liberal atmosphere of Strasbourg. Here the young Goethe, a generation earlier, had picked up a similar romantic lust for freedom and liberation from oppressive government. Büchner, whose father was authoritarian and military in his bearing, reveled in the revolutionary student enthusiasms of Strasbourg, and–also like Goethe–he fell in love while living on his own in this cathedral city on the French side of the Rhine. Meanwhile, in his home state of Hesse, open rebellion racked the city of Frankfurt, and a brutal and deadly crackdown–while successfully restoring order in the streets–inflamed subterranean revolutionary passions.

A peculiar Hessian law required Büchner, as a Hessian national, to complete his schooling in Giessen, in his home state. The twenty-year-old with a girlfriend in Strasbourg deeply resented his forced move to a town he found ugly and provincial. He turned his hatred of authority into a dedicated participation in an underground revolutionary movement that he helped found: the Society for the Rights of Man. Büchner used his still untested literary gifts to compose a dangerous political pamphlet (in the vein of Thomas Paine) urging the peasantry of Hesse to armed revolt, in the spirit of the French revolution. This was serious sedition, and looked on as high treason by the Grand Duke’s secret police. An informant in his group tipped off the police, who promptly arrested Büchner’s best friend, a student named Minnegerode. It was dozens of copies of Büchner’s pamphlet that cost Minnegerode his liberty, and Büchner expected at every moment to be arrested as well. He survived a search of his rooms, a police interrogation, and close surveillance, then was called back to his father’s house in Darmstadt, where he was kept in virtual house arrest by a very angry father to whom he denied any participation in rebellious politics. Though Minnegerode was brutally abused in prison, he never revealed Büchner’s authorship of the seditious pamphlet, a document expressing outrage over the punishing taxation levied on the Hessian peasantry and one that openly advocated armed attacks upon the ruling rich. Büchner’s pamphlet, entitled The Hessian Courier, has been described as “the first communist manifesto.”

It was while marking time in his father’s house, dreading daily that his role would be discovered and an arrest would destroy his life and disgrace his father, that (amazing reaction!) Georg Büchner decided to try writing his first play. Steeping himself in two histories of the French revolution that he found in his father’s library (one by Thiers, one by Mignet) Büchner dashed off his theatrical masterpiece, the play Danton’s Death. It is doubtful whether anyone ever wrote a better first play. The author was just turning twenty-one as he mused, with political disaster looming over him, on the last days of the revolutionary hero Georges Danton–days that led him inexorably to the guillotine. Circumstances such as those in the play, and their parallels in Büchner’s own life, tend indeed to focus the mind, and it soon became clear that Büchner’s anxieties were based on very real threats to his own life and liberty. Minnegerode’s denouncer finally tipped off the police to Büchner’s involvement, and a warrant was served for his arrest. Georg’s younger brother Wilhelm boldly turned himself in with his brother’s warrant and, when discovered, made up a story about his brother’s being sick in bed, thus winning a reprieve of two days’ time, during which Georg escaped from his father’s house and crossed on foot into France, where he took refuge once again in Strasbourg.

Once in Strasbourg–he arrived in March of 1835–Büchner embarked on an amazing eighteen months of almost miraculous productivity. His friend Minnegerode wasted away in a Hessian prison throughout this same period, and he was never far from Büchner’s tormented thoughts. But Büchner, happily reunited with his former fiancee, resumed his medical studies and wrote a demanding doctoral dissertation on the nervous system of the barbel (a species of river fish), a work requiring long laboratory hours and one that won him his doctorate. Solicited by the German publisher who had accepted Danton’s Death, Büchner simultaneously filled two commissions to translate full-length plays by Victor Hugo–Lucrèce Borgia and Marie Tudor–producing German translations of real literary merit, which are still prized in Germany. This work he followed up by writing two more original full-length plays, Leonce and Lena and Pietro Aretino, the latter of which was destroyed by his fiancee after his death. He also wrote several philosophical essays and an unfinished but brilliant novella, Lenz, which many literary critics consider his most important work. And sometime during the last months of his life, while he prepared an equally brilliant inaugural lecture (on the nerves of the skull) for the new position he had just earned as Lecturer on Anatomy at the medical school at Zurich, he dashed off the fragmentary scenes of Woyzeck.

Büchner was a house afire during these last months of his life, and the handwriting in the Woyzeck manuscript shows a precise, meticulous hand working at breakneck speed. The famous z-y confusion reflected in Alban Berg’s variant “Wozzeck” is easy to understand once one sees the virtually identical y and z in the speeding hand. Only after independent research unearthed the historical sources could the Woyzeck spelling be ascertained. A mere matter of months after assuming his new duties in Zurich, Büchner caught the fever that killed him, and it cut off his plans to rejoin his beloved in Strasbourg at the Easter term break. Few if any of his relatives, who mournfully collected his literary remains, had any notion what the loose pages with “Woyzeck” scribbled on them represented for the European theatre. They would have been startled if told that their Georg would be considered one of the great dramatists of the European tradition, for he had never had a play produced. They thought of him as a successful medical student and scientist, a young man on the verge of a solid scientific career. His literary scribblings were not, for them, the precious evidence of the vocation of a genius, and one completed play among his papers was actually discarded.

A new production of Woyzeck is an opportunity to examine the brilliant shards of this fragmented sketch of a play. As director, designers, translator, and dramaturg prepare for the rehearsal process, we have the distinct impression of handling something like broken glass, for the scenes of this play are short, intense bursts of theatricality as startling as gunshots and as cutting and dangerous as coiled razor wire. We see, through the accumulating mosaic of these scenes, a world frighteningly like our own, where human dignity is fighting a desperate battle with innumerable forms of abuse, most of them official and authoritarian in some way, some of them openly malicious, many of them–and these are the most unsettling — awesomely impersonal and deeply imbedded in primordial layers of human nature.

Robert Scanlan is Literary Director of the American Repertory Theater.