Georg Büchner (1813-37) lived the life of three people during his brief lifetime. He studied to be a medical researcher and was a student revolutionary, and of course, a playwright. He wrote three plays, Danton's Death (1835), Leonce and Lena (1836), and Woyzeck (unfinished at the time of his death). Danton's Death and Leonce and Lena focus on characters and characteristics of the French Revolution while Woyzeck concerns working class citizens and poverty.
Büchner was born on October 17, 1813 in Goddelau, a small town in Germany. He came from a family of doctors and himself studied medicine in Strasbourg, where he also began to study politics and French.
Education and Political Activity
Büchner returned to Germany in 1834 to continue his studies at the University of Giessen in Hesse. Living in Germany during the aftermath of the French Revolution, he was involved in an underground society which was against the Grand Duke of Hesse, Ludwig II. One of his activities with the society was to pen "The Hessian Courier," a political tract that encouraged peasants to revolt. In 1835, while home in Germany, Büchner wrote his first play, Danton's Death, about the early leader of the French revolution, Georges Danton, whose own Revolutionary Tribunal was used against him by Robespierre.
With a warrant out for his arrest, Büchner left Germany in 1835 due to his revolutionary activities and pamphlet writing and returned to Strasbourg to finish his studies. He received a doctorate in 1836, writing a treatise on the nervous system of a fish as his dissertation. While studying in Strasbourg, Buchner translated two plays by Victor Hugo: Lucretia Borgia and Mary Tudor. After completing his studies in Strasbourg, Büchner went to Zurich in 1836, where he was offered a post as a lecturer in natural history.
In 1837, he contracted typhoid fever and after a seventeen-day struggle with the illness, died. He was 24 years old.
Woyzeck
Woyzeck is based on a true story, a murder that took place in Leipzig in 1821. Johann Christian Woyzeck stabbed his ex-mistress seven times. He was executed three years later, in 1824. In 1985, a letter to the editor of the German Quarterly included a paragraph detailing the murder of a young girl, Marie Proteau, by an enlisted soldier, out of jealousy (who apparently later drowned himself).
In the play, Woyzeck is a young man supporting himself and his mistress and child by performing menial tasks for a Captain and by participating in medical experiments. As part of the experiments, he is forced to eat only peas. The diet aids in his mental breakdown and he begins to have hallucinations. Woyzeck also begins to grow increasingly jealous and to suspect that his mistress, Marie, is cheating on him. Marie is in fact growing bored with Woyzeck and does have a dalliance with a drum major. In a fit of jealousy, Woyzeck leads Marie towards a pond, where he stabs her to death.
Büchner's play is non-linear and thus a rejection of classicism. It is also the first play in German to feature members of the working class as the main characters. The text survived in manuscript form, of which there are four versions, each with varying numbers of scenes. In his "Notes on the Text and On Production," Henry Schmidt determines that Woyzeck is epic, in that each scene is a “slice of life,” and the scenes can be shuffled around, without destroying the structure of the play. Thus, the play can be interpreted in different ways depending upon the way in which the scenes are arranged.
Adaptations of Woyzeck
After Büchner's death, his work was largely forgotten for many years. In 1925, however, the opera Wozzeck was performed by the composer Alban Berg, based on Büchner's play. In 1979, Werner Herzog created a film based on the play and in 2000, the avant-garde theater artist Robert Wilson produced a stage adaptation of Woyzeck with music by the artist Tom Waits.
Sources:
- Georg Büchner. Woyzeck. Trans. Henry Schmidt. In Modern and Contemporary Drama. Miriam Gilbert, Carl H. Klaus. and Bradford S. Field, Jr., Eds. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1994
- Schmidt, Henry. “Notes on the Text and On Production.” In Woyzeck. by Georg Büchner. New York: Avon, 1969.
- Georg Büchner in Modern and Contemporary Drama. Miriam Gilbert, Carl H. Klaus. and Bradford S. Field, Jr., Eds. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1994
Amy Freeman - I have an MFA in dramaturgy and theater criticism. Currently, I am a critic at www.offoffonline.com. I also write a weekly column on ...
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