Woyzeck the Shape-Changer

Woyzeck is a play so charged with novelty that it has provoked innumerable interpretations, and it still shows no sign of settling down into any fixed meaning. Because its central character is the first proletarian protagonist treated tragically in western drama, Woyzeck has been hailed by theater historians as the first truly modern play. It is certainly among the first works in the Western tradition to break with Aristotle’s rough (and ancient) formulation of the types of subjects that differentiate comedy from tragedy.

According to Aristotle (in the Poetics, 330 BC ), depicting characters of high station was the work of the tragic poets, while ordinary citizens and the lower classes–servants, laborers, slaves–were more appropriately treated in comedies. The nobler forms of serious and tragic art were expected to elevate the portrayal of great men to a high idealism that was heroic and exemplary. Realists like Euripides (of whom Aristotle was not fond) made all their characters into ordinary people, while comedy was granted license to take up lesser subjects and turn them into exaggeratedly “bad” examples.

Woyzeck clearly took up a character the tradition would have depicted comically–an inarticulate menial servant–but built a circumstantial case of enormous potential sympathy for his oppressed condition in society. This powerful circumstantial case has struck many of Woyzeck‘s admirers as the revolutionary purpose of the play. When the manuscript was first discovered late in the nineteenth century, a socially conscious Realism was changing the form and content of the drama. The great German playwright Gerhardt Hauptmann (author of The Weavers) used his art as a conscious tool for social reform, and he sensed in Woyzeck a powerful precursor to his own activist instincts. Later still, the great Marxist critic Georg Lucas was to admire Woyzeck as a masterpiece of Socialist Realism, noting that, well before Karl Marx led the way, the play perfectly anticipated dialectical materialism and clearly illustrated the untenable position of the proletariat in industrialized capitalist states.

After World War I, German Expressionists like Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller, Walter Hasenclever, and the young Bertolt Brecht would revere Woyzeck as the prototype of their anti-naturalistic style. We see the Expressionists repeating over and over again the dramaturgical model of a bewildered working-class protagonist surrounded by caricatures of social roles–all meant to represent the social forces conditioning the experience of the individual in late industrialized society. Eugene O’Neill was to attempt this style in his play The Hairy Ape (1922). Alban Berg’s famous 1925 opera gave Büchner’s play wide European recognition at this time, and permanently associated Woyzeck with German Expressionism, but this is an inadequate label for the play.

Yet another view of Woyzeck that has sprung up since Berg’s opera is the psycho-medical reading of the play. Modern doctors and psychiatrists have found the portrayal of the character of Woyzeck so objectively clinical that the case for an impassioned revolutionary intent on Büchner’s part has given way to a more strictly medical reading of the play. Indeed, Büchner is now thought to have given in the scenes of Woyzeck (as well as in his novella Lenz ) one of the earliest clinically accurate descriptions of acute paranoid schizophrenia to be found in European literature.

But compelling as they are, recent medical readings of Woyzeck are not new, for they return us to Büchner’s principal sources for the play: the clinical analyses of the medical examiner Doctor Clarus, who, in the 1820s, pronounced that “a stronger exercise of free-will might have rid [the real-life Woyzeck] of his unwillingness to work, his gambling, his drunkenness, and his illegitimate satisfaction of sexual desire . . . ” all of which bad habits contributed to his predilection for bad company . . . and eventually his deliberate criminal decision to commit murder.”

Doctor Clarus was among the first of the many nineteenth-century physicians who developed an intense interest in a quasi science they called criminology : a blend of forensic medicine, psychiatry, free-wheeling speculation, and a dash of what we would later call sociology. Criminology is now a journalistic blood sport, and its invariable objective is to uncover “motives” for horrifying violent acts. Nineteenth-century criminology made it its business to solve the problem of crime scientifically, by analyzing criminal behavior and codifying the types of people who committed various types of crimes.

Long after Büchner had written Woyzeck, an Italian army doctor by the name of Cesare Lombroso (born the year Büchner died), became a professor of criminal anthropology at Turin. The good Doctor Lombroso published in 1875 a book called L’uomo delinquente, or Delinquent Man. Without realizing how closely he was paralleling the actions of Büchner’s doctor in Woyzeck, Lombroso proposed the idea that crimes were committed by a distinct criminal type with specific physiological and psychological char- acteristics. This eventually led to the search for the “extra chromosome,” which would account scientifically for criminal behavior. In the 1930s and 1940s, medical fascination with Woyzeck was no longer fixated on a sociological solution to criminal behavior; the emphasis had shifted to personal psychology and the practice of psychiatry.

Bertolt Brecht, during the same entre deux guerres years that psychiatric science was re-examining Woyzeck, made seemingly opposite use of the same example. In his theoretical writings as well as in his plays, Brecht made explicit use of Büchner’s formal innovations, in particular his episodic plot. Utterly uninterested in psychological explanations for social behaviors, Brecht was intent on developing an “epic” style of dramaturgy that would do away with causal explanations and linear psychological developments in the plots of his plays. Woyzeck, the perennial shape-changer, was to become a principal model for Brecht’s aesthetic innovations. What became known as “Brechtian montage” was already clearly present in the plot of Woyzeck, which has no discernible shape to its stark plot, no pre-planned organic sequence that culminates in epiphany and understanding. Instead we have “One Thing At A Time,” a refrain spoken by Woyzeck himself as a sort of mantra throughout Büchner’s play. This new form–so Brecht theorized–better represented the buffetings of modern man between one punishing reality and the next.

By the mid twentieth century, Woyzeck was appreciated for its stark portrayal of an existentialist despair soon to be echoed and paralleled by Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Scenes such as that depicting Woyzeck and his hapless companion Andres out cutting sticks in an open meadow suddenly seemed to anticipate the bleak atheistic suspension of post-holocaust European man in an incomprehensible (because meaningless) deterministic chaos. Woyzeck had, long before the advent of the “theatre of the absurd,” claimed new aesthetic scope for purely theatrical depictions of nameless states of consciousness, anxiety, and dread on the stage.

After the existentialists came Michel Foucault, whose classic study, Madness and Civilization  (1961), questioned our societal definitions of “deviant” behavior by showing how dominant power groups discipline and punish the people they define as criminally insane. Also in recent times, B.F. Skinner’s Behaviorism re-opened an age-old debate about free will and determinism–the very basis of the Woyzeck case and the “diminished responsibility” of the murderer observed and depicted by Georg Büchner in 1836.

No one in 1997 America will need to be reminded how topical a play about sexual betrayal, domestic violence, and manic outbursts of homicidal rage is to these closing years of the millennium. Woyzeck has never been out of fashion, aesthetically speaking, and each new generation has found it an inexhaustible speculum mundi, or mirror of the world we live in. There is a curious irony in calling Woyzeck a perennially avant-garde play, for the term is an obvious oxymoron, but this single short play has fed generation after generation of avant-garde, cutting edge, and next wave movements in the theater, and it shows no sign of failing to elicit the enfant terrible in every artist who undertakes to stage the play.

Robert Scanlan is Literary Director of the American Repertory Theater.