"As Good A Murder As You'd Ever Want To See":

Human Reduction in Georg Buchner's Woyzeck

Joseph L. Lockett
December 20, 1989
English 367a
Modern Drama: Ibsen to 1940
Dr. John Meixner

Throughout dramatic history, tragedies have depicted a hero's humanity being stripped from him. Usually, as in Shakespeare's classic paradigms, we see the hero, whether King Lear or Othello, reduced from his original noble stature to nothingness and death. Yet Georg Buchner's fragmentary play Woyzeck shows us a protagonist already stripped of humanity, transformed into and treated as an animal. Indeed, Woyzeck, far from being a simple tale of a village murder, shows us the systematic debasement, even intellectual and spiritual "murder," of the protagonist and all his class.

Like August Strindberg's Ghost Sonata, Woyzeck identifies most of its characters only by professions or descriptions, not by names. Franz Woyzeck and Marie are surrounded by a whirl of anonymous figures: the Captain, Doctor, Drum Major, Barker, Grandmother. Perhaps this shows the world as it appears from Woyzeck's point of view. For Woyzeck sees the world as filled with anonymous forces. In scene I, Woyzeck talks of "the Freemasons!" as responsible for the rolling heads and underground passages he hallucinates into being. In scene VIII, Woyzeck speaks of "the toadstools, Doctor. There -- that's where it is. Have you seen how they grow in patterns? If only someone could read that." Woyzeck's world is filled with and controlled by great forces only occasionally glimpsed, and perhaps he attributes to the Doctor and Captain some of the same mysteriousness and respect he gives his hallucinations.

Animal imagery appears throughout Woyzeck -- appropriate, since the rough society Woyzeck exists in has been lowered to the animalistic level. Marie is a sensuous, animal woman, so she describes her new lover the Drum Major with phrases like "He stands on his feet like a lion" (scene II) and "a chest like a bull and a beard like a lion." (scene VI). Others, in turn, speak of her as an animal, especially the Drum Major. At first sight of her, he says she is "good enough for the propagation of cavalry regiments and the breeding of drum majors!" (scene III), as if she were nothing but an animal to be bred. Later, he repeats "Hell, let's breed a race of drum majors, hey?" and calls her "You wildcat!" (scene VI). Woyzeck, crushed by visible evidence of Marie's infidelity, cries "Why doesn't God blow out the sun so that everything can roll around in lust, man and woman, man and beast. They'll do it in broad daylight, they'll do it on our hands, like flies." (scene XI).

Animal imagery especially surrounds Woyzeck himself, in his interactions with the characters who oppress and dehumanize him. The Captain sighs that "I feel sorry for horses when I think that the poor beasts have to go everywhere on foot." (scene IX). Yet he cares even less for Woyzeck, for he ridicules the poor soldier mercilessly about Marie's unfaithfulness. As Woyzeck hurries away, the Captain says "that tall rascal takes off like the shadow before a spider" (scene IX) -- Woyzeck is comparable to an insect, in the captain's view. But the Doctor is the most persistent and obvious character is his disparagement of Woyzeck as an animal. He complains that Woyzeck "pissed on the wall like a dog" and exclaims that "if it were a Proteus that were dying -- !" (scene VIII). Woyzeck has less value to the doctor than even a bacterium does. The Doctor throws a cat from his window, and when Woyzeck catches it observes "The fellow holds onto the beast so tenderly, like it was his own grandmother!" (scene XVIII). Woyzeck, treated like any other of the Doctor's laboratory animals, has found an affinity for his companions in suffering. The Doctor drives the point home by moving directly from the cat and its "new species of rabbit louse, a beautiful species" to Woyzeck, and then complaining about Woyzeck's failure to wiggle his ears with "You dog, do I have to wiggle them for you? Are you going to act like the cat? This, gentlemen, represents a transition to the donkey...." (scene XVIII).

Scene III, at the carnival, holds the key to much of the animal imagery in Woyzeck. There the Barker exhibits a costumed monkey, saying "as God made it -- he's nothing, nothing at all. Now see the effect of art: he walks upright, wears coat and pants, carries a sword!.... It's all education; he has merely a beastly reason, or rather a very reasonable beastliness -- he's not a dumb individual like a lot of people, present company excepted.... The monkey is already a soldier. That's not much -- it's the lowest level of the human race." (scene III). Here most blatantly we see Buchner's image of people as animals, elevated only by a thin veneer of civilization. Woyzeck, a soldier, is no better than an educated monkey -- and will become much worse, for monkeys do not murder.

Woyzeck and Marie enter the carnival booth, to hear the announcer present his "astronomical horse" and urge it to "Show your talent! Show your beastly wisdom. Put human society to shame. Gentlemen, this animal that you see here... is a member of all learned societies, is a professor at our university... Yes, that is no dumb animal, that's a person! A human being, a beastly human being, but still an animal...." (Scene III). Richard Schechner, in his "Notes Toward an Imaginary Production" of Woyzeck, writes of "a confusion between the animal and the human worlds. Not the naked ape, but the dressed ape and the naked man.... It would be appropriate to have all the animals played by men." In Woyzeck, animals become human and humans are reduced to animals. The horse urinates on the floor, presaging the Doctor's grievance with Woyzeck five scenes later for the same offence. And the horse, with its so-called "double raison" is "still nature, unideal nature" (scene III) or, as Woyzeck puts it, "us common people... we act like nature tells us." (scene V). The horse "can add, but he can't count on his fingers.... He simply can't express himself, explain himself!" (scene III). The unfocused drivel the Captain and Woyzeck both pour out in scene IV, the shaving scene, is a result of the same malady.

Interestingly, horses show up at other points in Woyzeck in strangely appropriate imagery. At almost the beginning of the play, in scene II, Marie sings to her child "Johnny, hitch up your six horses fleet, / Go bring them something to eat. / From oats they will turn, / From water they'll turn, / Only cool wine will be fine...." (scene II). From the very start we see a confusion between the animal and the human, as horses begin to drink wine. The Captain, as mentioned before, expresses pity for horses just before heaping ridicule on Woyzeck in scene X. The dancing in town, at which Woyzeck sees the Drum Major and Marie together, takes place "at the Horse and at the Star" (scene X) -- common enough names for taverns, but appropriate in light of the example of "natural," uninhibited behavior, like Marie's, that the "astronomical horse" has set earlier. And in the agonizing scene XXVII (which Schmidt's text places last), horses appear in the final line of the play. Woyzeck's child refuses to look at him, and to get Karl, the idiot, to take the boy to get a cookie, Woyzeck coaxes him with "Hop-hop! Horsey!" Karl responds cheerily with "Hop-hop! Horsey! Horsey!," presumably bearing Woyzeck's child off on his shoulders. The horse, the brute animal used to pull freight and bear burdens, reappears again, even as Woyzeck, human horse or clothed monkey, is left alone on stage, stripped of Marie and even the love of his child.

But animal imagery is not the only method Buchner uses to show Woyzeck's dehumanization and debasement. Woyzeck tries to think, to be a philosopher, yet everyone chides him about it: such intellectualism is not for such as he. The Captain reproves Woyzeck with "Oh, are you stupid, terribly stupid!," and when the innocent barber tries to quote Scripture in support of an argument, complains "What's that you're saying? What kind of a crazy answer is that?", finally to end their talk with "You're a good man, a good man. But you think too much, that's unhealthy." (scene V). And the Doctor sternly reprimands "Woyzeck, you're philosophizing again." (scene VIII).

What the Captain and Doctor view as elevated thought is as useless and unfocussed as Woyzeck's efforts. The Captain obfuscates with "Eternal -- that's eternal -- that is -- eternal -- you realize that, of course. But then again it's not eternal, it's only a moment, yes, a moment.... Morality -- that's when you are moral, you understand. It's a good word." (scene V). The Doctor's research on the effects of a diet of peas for a quarter-year, or the time he was "just holding my nose out the window, letting the sun's rays hit it, so as to examine the process of sneezing" (scene VIII), or his lectures on the falling cat and Woyzeck's ears (scene XVIII) are equally ridiculous. Even Woyzeck's mother's icon, with its inscription of "May pain be my reward, / Through pain I love my Lord. / Lord like Thy body, red and sore, / So be my heart forevermore." (scene XVII) advocates only enduring, even accepting pain, rather than planning and striving against it.

With such opposition, it is hardly surprising that Woyzeck eventually does give in and stop trying to think. Gradually he gives in to hallucinations and emotion, as when he hears the ground whispering "stab -- stab the bitch to death? Stab -- stab the bitch to death.... Do I hear it over there, is the wind saying it too? It goes on and on -- stab her to death... to death." (scene XII). The Drum Major "proves" the strength of mindlessness and physicality by beating Woyzeck at wrestling, and Woyzeck gives in to emotional violence, with the messy murder of scene XXI. But his downfall comes from lack of thinking -- he leaves his knife at the scene of the crime, fails to clean his hands after the murder, and invents the unbelievable story of wiping blood from his right hand on his right elbow. Indeed, Woyzeck's mind seems to go completely as he rediscovers Marie's body and asks "why is that red thread around your neck? Who helped you earn that for your sins?" (scene XXIII). In his demented state, Woyzeck sees the slash across Marie's neck as a necklace given her by an admirer, much like the earrings the Drum Major gave her earlier.

This malaise of unease and unworthiness infects many of the other characters of Woyzeck's class. Marie is insecure and fatalistic: she becomes irate when her neighbor Margret comments on how her eyes shine after seeing the Drum Major, and she tells her son "you're only the son of a whore, and you make your mother happy with your bastard face." (scene II). Marie complains "I'm just a poor woman" and "What a bitch I am.... Everything goes to hell anyhow, man and woman alike." (scene IV). And though she resists the Drum Major's amorous advances, she soon gives up with "For all I care. What does it matter?" (scene VI). Soon, though, she begins reading the Bible, pleading "My God! my God! Don't look at me." (scene XVI) as she reads of the adultress presented to Christ.

The First Apprentice, in the midst of his drunken revelry in scene XI, complains that "Brother, I could cry a rain barrel full of tears. I wish our noses were two bottles and we could pour them down each other's throats.... do not ye despair, yes, yes, life is lovely and fine, yet all that is earthly is passing, even money must eventually decay." (scene XI). The Drum Major, too, gets drunk, and confesses "a man gotta drink. I wish the world was booze, booze.... Oh, brandy, that's my life, / Oh, brandy gives me courage!" (scene XIV). Only Andres and Karl the idiot are free of depression, probably because their lives are so simple. Andres' conversation consists of nothing but snatches of folk song, affirmative monosyllables, and simple, factual, questions and answers -- he has no philosophy. Karl's life is a simple one of children and fairy tales: in scene XVI he tells himself fairy tales on his fingers and in the climactic blood-discovery scene he can say only "And then the giant said: I smell, I smell, I smell human flesh." (scene XXII).

Perhaps the most graphic depiction of the world that seems to be against Woyzeck and all his class is the "anti-fairy tale" told by the Grandmother in scene XIX. Her story portrays a child whose hopes and dreams are dashed one by one. Everything he knows or finds is dead: parents, neighbors, the rotten wood the moon is made of, the wilted flower of the sun, and the dead flies that are the stars. Fittingly, just as the Grandmother finishes her tale Woyzeck arrives to take Marie away -- so that he can kill her. Woyzeck is just like the little child. His mother is dead, and left him only the morbid couplets inscribed on her icon. The Captain and Doctor are worse than dead: far from being friends, they torment him. Marie, the star on which he staked his hopes, is dead to him, for she has passed her love on to the Drum Major. And in the end, even Christian, Woyzeck's son, refuses his father's love.

Woyzeck is dead whether or not the Court Clerk who so admires "a good murder, a real murder, a beautiful murder" (scene XXVI) leads him to trial or not. The Captain's and the Doctor's relentless scorn and disparagement have killed his intellectual, rational part. Marie has murdered Woyzeck's emotional side almost from the moment he saw her with the Drum Major's earrings -- the red necklace of blood which signals Marie's death is only justice, in Woyzeck's eyes. Viewed as "the lowest level of the human race", no better than a dressed monkey, Woyzeck is systematically stripped of his humanity and oppressed. To the Captain, to the Doctor, he is no better than a spider or a Proteus bacterium. Perhaps he would empathize with Gloucester, in Shakespeare's King Lear, another tale of humanity supremely stripped away:

"As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods:
They kill us for their sport."
(King Lear, IV.i.36-7)

Text used:
Woyzeck, by George Buchner.
Translated and edited by Henry J. Schmidt
Introductory notes by Richard Schechner.
Avon Books (New York) 1969