Views of Woyzeck from the medical to the existential

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
Bchner'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 psychomedical 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 Bchner's part has given way to a more strictly medical reading
of the play. Indeed, Bchner 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 Bchner'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 Bchner had written Woyzeck, an Italian army doctor by the name of Cesare
Lombroso (born the year Bchner 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
Bchner'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 Bchner'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 Bchner'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 Bchner 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 inexhaustiblespeculum 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.