7.32 Büchner — «Woyzeck» (the last manuscript) — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read Georg Büchner 's Woyzeck in its last surviving manuscript stage: a poor soldier, used by his captain and his doctor, loses his mind as his partner Marie turns to another man. Understand spoken and dialect forms on the page: nit, nix, is, komme sie, die Auge, en arm Hurenkind, eimal . Recognise the third-person address to an inferior: Woyzeck, Er hat keine Moral! Read a play that is a fragment: scenes in an uncertain order, a stage direction without a scene, and an ending that exists only in drafts. Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the German aloud; all of them come back below. German English Ja wohl, Herr Hauptmann. Yes indeed, captain. Es wird mir ganz angst um die Welt, wenn ich an die Ewigkeit denke. I become quite afraid for the world when I think of eternity. Ein guter Mensch thut das nicht, ein guter Mensch, der sein gutes Gewissen hat. A good man doesn't do that, a good man who has a good conscience. Woyzeck Er hat keine Tugend, Er ist kein tugendhafter Mensch. Woyzeck, you have no virtue, you are not a virtuous man. Wir arme Leut! Us poor people! Unseins hat nur ein Eckchen in der Welt und ein Stückchen Spiegel People like us have only a little corner in the world and a little piece of mirror Prerequisites : 7.31 — you need the old forms of address from 7.24 Reading and 7.26 Reading , the colloquial register of 5.19 Vocabulary , the regional variants of 5.32 Vocabulary , the everyday talk of 6.23 Conversation , and the drama scenes of 7.28 Reading and 7.29 Reading . About this text Georg Büchner (1813–1837) studied medicine, wrote a revolutionary pamphlet against the rulers of Hesse, Der Hessische Landbote (1834), fled to Strasbourg and then Zurich, and died of typhus at twenty-three. He left a comedy, a story, a drama about the French Revolution, and the unfinished Woyzeck , written in 1836 and 1837. It is based on a real case. In 1821 Johann Christian Woyzeck, a former soldier, stabbed his lover to death in Leipzig; a court physician examined him and declared him responsible for his actions, and he was publicly executed in 1824. Büchner turned the case into the first German drama whose hero is a poor man, crushed by the people who use him. The play survives only in manuscripts: three stages of drafts, called H1 to H3, and an incomplete fair copy, H4, which is the latest. The order of the scenes is uncertain, and every reading edition is a reconstruction. The play first appeared in 1879, edited by Karl Emil Franzos, who misread the title as Wozzeck ; Alban Berg's opera of 1925 keeps that name. The text here is the whole of H4, about 3,700 words, in the critical edition of Werner R. Lehmann as transcribed in the TextGrid Repository. Scene numbers in square brackets are the editor's. Stage directions, printed in italics in the edition, are given in parentheses here when they follow a speaker's name or stand inside a speech, and one word split by a transcription error has been joined. H4 breaks off before the end. In the earlier drafts, Woyzeck leads Marie out to a pond at night, and stabs her; then he goes to a tavern, is seen with blood on his hand, and returns to the pond to throw away the knife. This lesson does not print those scenes. The play also contains crude language, scenes of mental illness, and two hostile remarks about Jews in the mouths of characters, the neighbours' quarrel in scene 2 and a drunken journeyman's mock sermon in scene 11. They are part of the brutal world Büchner shows; they are reproduced unchanged and are not the author's comment. Grammar in the text Spoken German on the page. The common people speak a southern Hessian colloquial German. The final -n of many endings is dropped: die Auge for die Augen , Da komme sie for Da kommen sie , Gieb ihn zu fresse . Short words are worn down: nit for nicht , nix for nichts , is for ist , en for ein , eimal for einmal , S' ist for Es ist . Read each form aloud, and the standard word usually appears. The address Er . The captain and the doctor speak to Woyzeck in the third person singular, with a capital Er : Woyzeck, Er hat keine Moral! , Theil Er sich ein , Zeig Er sei Puls! In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries this was how superiors addressed servants, soldiers and common people: more distant than du , much lower than Sie . Woyzeck answers Ja wohl, Herr Hauptmann , and addresses them with Sie . The captain even makes a joke about the form: Wenn ich sag: Er, so mein ich Ihn, Ihn. Fragments and repetition. Büchner 's characters do not speak in long periods like Kleist's narrators. They repeat themselves: the captain's ein guter Mensch, ein guter Mensch , Woyzeck's immer zu, immer zu . They break off: Wer kein Geld hat. The broken sentences are the language of people who are not allowed to finish. The doctor's Latin. The doctor pays Woyzeck to eat nothing but peas and examines him as a scientific case. He speaks in the medical Latin of his time: aberratio mentalis partialis , musculus constrictor vesicae . Büchner , himself a doctor, uses the jargon as satire: Er ist ein interessanter casus. The spelling. Lehmann prints Büchner 's own spelling: seyn, todt, Athem, giebt, jezt, Thier . Speakers' names stand in capitals, as in the manuscript. Reading it a second time, scene by scene Scenes 1–2: visions. Woyzeck and his comrade Andres cut sticks in an open field outside the town. Woyzeck hears noises under the ground and sees fire in the sky. In town, Marie watches the drum major march past with the soldiers, quarrels with a neighbour, sings to her child, and is frightened by Woyzeck's strange words when he looks in at her window. Scenes 3–4: the earrings. Scene 3 is only a stage direction: a fair, with booths and lights; Büchner had not yet copied it out. In scene 4 Marie admires a pair of earrings in a piece of mirror. Woyzeck asks where she got them; she says she found them. He gives her his pay, and leaves. Alone, she calls herself a bad person. Scene 5