Two events mark the beginning of a new period in Büchner scholarship: the founding of the Georg Büchner Gesellschaft in May 1979 and Gerhard Schmid's publication of a facsimile edition of Woyzeck in 1981. Also in 1981, in a second special volume of Text und Kritik devoted to Georg Büchner, Thomas Michael Mayer, a founder of the Georg Büchner Society, announced in a review entitled “Some New Tendencies of Büchner-Scholarship” that the society's annual publication, the Georg Büchner Jahrbuch, would “serve as an organ for taking stock of the current state of scholarship and for new contributions, for reflection and debate, for the documentation of sources, the rapid mediation of controversy and communication of new findings,” and would be comprehensive in its inclusion of debate and the results of research (265).

In a study published in 1980, Albert Meier summarizes and continues the trend of the politically oriented seventies to emphasize the socially critical content of Woyzeck. Meier sees the play not as a fragment but as an analytical model of a historically determined situation as it relates to an individual. In his view, it is a politically and dramaturgically radical attempt to “represent the historical totality” of Büchner's time (16).

In a brief discussion of the manuscripts Meier concludes that Büchner changed his conception of the play after writing the first sequence of scenes, nearly all of which relate to jealousy and murder. Only the carnival scene and some lines spoken by a barber go beyond this basic plot. With the exception of the figures appearing in the last scene (H1,21), all the figures in this version are from the same social class. The second group of scenes introduces representatives from other social levels, and the various relationships of the figures to each other make possible the “very exact placement of each one into a social system of coordinates.” In this context Woyzeck's abnormal behavior no longer appears to be the result of his “sickly exaggerated jealousy” but rather of his social situation, the forces of which do not allow him any autonomy and compel him to work constantly to support his family (24-27).

Whether H2 represents a change in conception or a filling of the gaps does not seem particularly relevant for Meier's interpretation, since he considers H4 to be a synthesis of H1 and H2. In this final version Büchner presents Marie's infidelity, intensifies Woyzeck's jealousy, and at the same time develops their social conditions. Appearing for the first time in this version, Meier claims, is a psychologically accurate connection between unhealthy jealousy and the social situation. Meier finds support for this interpretation in scene H4,4, in which Marie admires her new earrings for the effect they have on her appearance and for their intrinsic value. Woyzeck loses her for two reasons: he cannot acquire social recognition for her, and his work prevents him from being able to spend time with her. He can meet neither her material nor her physical demands. According to Meier, Woyzeck's thought of killing Marie derives not merely from jealousy but also from the social causes of his jealousy and from his ever-increasing isolation. Marie's infidelity undermines his social position and subjects him even more to the ridicule and abuse of his social superiors (30-31).

Also contained in scene H4,4 is Marie's use of “psycho-terror” on her son, by which Meier means her reference to the sandman, which is meant to force the child to self-discipline by creating fear of supernatural punishment. To escape this danger, the child must continually control himself, thus internalizing the supernatural force and becoming accustomed to being controlled by it. This supposedly hinders his ability to resist real danger. Marie thus contributes to the continuation of oppression of her own class; to get her own pleasure she must deprive others of theirs (36).

.....

Ingrid Oesterle claims in a 1984 article that Woyzeck is related to, but not a pure example of, “Schauerliteratur” (thriller or Gothic literature) and the tragedy of fate. Büchner found inspiration and sources in the works of Ludwig Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and other romantic writers. Characteristic of this genre is the shift from dominance of vision and the eye to involvement of all the senses: hearing, smelling, touching, and the awareness of temperature and physical pain. Since the source of suffering and anxiety is obscure, mysterious, and incomprehensible, dialogue and communication decrease in importance and language is simplified and loses its literary quality (1984, 169-74, 186-87). From her analysis of the play's first scene, Oesterle demonstrates that Woyzeck shares the following structural elements and motifs with Gothic literature: disagreeable and fateful places, bewitched nature (ghostly light phenomena and optical illusions with deadly consequences), the terror of seemingly unnatural appearances and forces such as the Freemasons, terrible stillness, and the sudden change from deathly silence to deafening noise and from darkness to visionary brightness (189-96).

In another article published in 1984, Heinz-Dieter Kittsteiner and Helmut Lethen object to interpretations that seek a “hidden center” and that fill the “empty spaces” beneath the “semblance of a plot,” as do Wolfgang Wittkowski (by supplying a Christian content) and Albert Meier (by applying Ingarden's aesthetics). Kittsteiner and Lethen intend, on the other hand, to heed Mercier's advice from Dantons Tod and “to follow the phrases to the point they become embodied,” that is, to look at what actually is, rather than at what supposedly lies hidden. In their view, Büchner's accomplishment was to “destroy linguistically the meaning-centers around which the thinking of his time circled,” an accomplishment that is itself a product of his time, in which thought patterns that were common in the eighteenth century were losing their validity. Büchner rejects the thinking and theories of the Enlightenment and idealism in favor of an “anthropological materialism” (240-42).

In comparison with the historical Woyzeck, who belonged to and wanted to be a part of bourgeois society but was incapable of internalizing bourgeois morality, Büchner has deprived his figure of many of Woyzeck's bourgeois attributes, write Kittsteiner and Lethen. Thus, in disagreement with those interpreters who identify a conflict of conscience in Woyzeck, Kittsteiner and Lethen argue that Woyzeck does not reflect upon his situation and on what is right or wrong; rather, he responds to inner voices and their projection onto the outside world. Büchner agrees with the Romantics in their devaluation of the moral influence of conscience on action and in their recognition of angst as internalized conscience. In depriving Woyzeck of his bourgeois attributes, Büchner does not portray Woyzeck's supposed madness as medical pathology but as a mode of perceiving and understanding the world. The revolutionary implications disappear from this “magical-apocalyptic world view”: Woyzeck does not experience a call to rebellion but simply the command to kill (249-52).

According to Kittsteiner and Lethen, the bourgeois ego, which Woyzeck does not possess, views its actions from a moral-philosophical perspective, according to which the world must be thought of as a system of goals in the pursuit of which there is no insurmountable gap between nature and freedom. The world as history is a place for the future realization of morality. History is linear, goal-oriented, and progressive. Büchner appears to adapt an earlier view of history as cyclical. Or perhaps more accurately, his thinking about history is paradoxical, in that, as Maurice Benn and Reinhold Grimm have claimed, he considers it to be both linear and cyclical. The Doctor and the Captain in Woyzeck represent these opposing views (255-57).

The Captain suffers from the cyclical nature of time, the eternal and hopeless repetition of the same or similar actions as represented for him by the turning of the mill wheel. He has a “feudal” relationship to time but, seen existentially, he is also modern in his melancholic reaction to the passing of time and in his awareness of the absurdity of life. As indicated by his attempts to slow down Woyzeck and the Doctor, he wants to reduce or escape from the consequences of passing time (258-64). The Doctor, in contrast, is always in a hurry. He wants to move with time and to contribute to the progress of time and history. In the Doctor's view, the Captain and Woyzeck are anachronisms (265-66). According to Kittsteiner and Lethen, the representation of the restive motion of Woyzeck's body shows the conflict in him of the cyclical and linear orientations to time and his lack of an inner regulator that could reconcile the opposing tendencies (266-67).

In a study of accountability in works by E. T. A. Hoffmann and Büchner published in 1985, Georg Reuchlein views Woyzeck as a reaction against the fundamental assumptions of restoration psychology and justice upon which Dr. Clarus's evaluations are based, especially the belief that, except in certain extreme cases, people are able through reason and free will to determine their fate and control their actions. Whereas the judicial system in the eighteenth century had tried to separate morality and religion from the administration of justice, lawyers and psychiatrists in the 1920s criticized the separation of moral and juridical judgments. Woyzeck's case provided grist for the mills on both sides of the question. A year after their publication in 1824, Clarus's conclusions were attacked by the Bamberg court physician Dr. Carl Moritz Marc and defended against Marc's attack by Dr. Johann Christian August Heinroth, who, like Clarus, considers the loss of reason to be the consequence of sin and therefore punishable. By caricaturing and criticizing morality, religion, and indeterminism, Büchner discredits and disqualifies the philosophical, ideological foundation of Clarus's and Heinroth's juridical and medical assumptions (55-57).

It can be determined from Büchner's play that Woyzeck is not sane and accountable for his violent action, Reuchlein writes, but the actual state of his mind cannot be determined. In the first stage of composition, the signs of Woyzeck's madness follow his discovery of Marie's infidelity and could be considered products of his passion. In H2 and H4, which Reuchlein sees as belonging together in the second stage of composition, these signs precede the discovery and are therefore pathological, a fact that is of such importance that it becomes the focus of the beginning scene of the second version (H2) and, in revised form, of the final one as well. Like the Doctor, Marie and Andres, too, note Woyzeck's disturbed mental state. If Woyzeck is not actually mad, he is at least, as Kanzog writes, psychically stigmatized. In either case, he is not as Clarus sees him. On the other hand, Büchner's depiction of him also departs from the historical facts. Unlike the historical Woyzeck, Büchner's obtains a knife only after he hears voices commanding him to kill Marie, and Büchner's Woyzeck hears the command repeatedly, whereas the historical Woyzeck heard voices only once. Büchner thus emphasizes the compulsive element of the murder (61-63). Because he makes his Woyzeck more moral than the historical murderer, Büchner's text could not have changed the official judgment of Woyzeck, Reuchlein concludes, but it could have had an impact on the public, which was unfamiliar with the factual details. Furthermore, Büchner raises questions about causes, which he finds not only in the individual but also in social relationships. While definite causal relationships cannot be determined—we don't know, for example, what the effect of Woyzeck's diet of peas is—it is clear that blame lies, or also lies, with the social order (69-71, 74-75).

The primary goal of John Guthrie's 1984 study of the dramatic form of plays by Lenz and Büchner is to demonstrate that these playwrights do not have as much in common as has generally been assumed and that Büchner's plays do not fulfill the theoretical demands of the open form of drama as defined by Krapp, Klotz, and others. Guthrie considers it ironic that the theories of the open form of drama, which have influenced subsequent editors and interpreters of the text, were based on Bergemann's edition, whose editorial principles, according to his critics, were based on the closed form of drama. While it is true that Bergemann's edition has been criticized for the contaminations undertaken to strengthen causal connections, this in itself does not result in a text representative of the closed form of drama. Nor should it be assumed, as Guthrie does, that all editors and critics who “assign the play as a whole to the category of the open form” place theory ahead of analysis (121).

At issue here is not the assignment of the play “as a whole” to a particular category, but the identification and analysis of the characteristics peculiar to different and in some ways opposing traditions and forms of drama, namely, the classical and the Shakespearean, the closed and open form, the linear and episodic, or whatever designations one might choose to give them. Klotz does not presume to prescribe what characteristics the forms must have: rather, on the basis of his analysis of a number of plays of each type, he identifies characteristics he considers peculiar to each form. Klotz's procedure certainly has greater methodological validity than the one proposed by Guthrie, which is based on his “conviction that theories such as that of the open form do not substantially contribute to an understanding of the play's real, that is to say, dramatic structure” (121).

In opposition to presumed implications of the theory of the open form of drama, Guthrie argues that Woyzeck does not consist of a sequence of static images or independent and autonomous scenes that can be rearranged at will without affecting the meaning of the whole (121). But Klotz does not claim that scenes can be rearranged at will. As noted above, those who advocate the arbitrary rearrangement of scenes tend to represent the standpoint of theatrical production and directorial creativity. Likewise, the argument for the play's open ending does not mean, as Guthrie implies, “that a number of endings are possible and can be supported by internal evidence” (121). It means, rather, that no ending is given and none unequivocally foreshadowed by internal evidence. The play ends as it begins: in medias res. There are a number of possibilities for what could follow the break in the action, but none of these is specified by the author.

In a scene-by-scene analysis, Guthrie attempts to demonstrate that the plot follows a clear line of development, with each scene having its proper and foreordained place, and that the play therefore belongs to the closed form of drama. “It is argued,” he writes, “that because the open form of drama knows no exposition,” because scenes are supposedly interchangeable, and because each scene anticipates the conclusion in the same way, it is possible to begin the play “with any, or at least a large number of scenes,” an argument that supposedly has been used to justify beginning the play with H4,5, in which Woyzeck shaves the Captain. But Guthrie's assumptions about the implications of the open form are not accurate and the explanation he offers apodictically for the placement of H4,1 is based on subjective criteria: “if one looks carefully at the justification for using H4,1, apart from its authorization in the manuscripts, one finds that it is justified not at all from the point of view of a theory but because it is the best scene to commence with in every conceivable way.” And: “In view of the scenes Büchner has left us, however incomplete, this one cannot be bettered as exposition” (122).

In his discussion of the fair scene, Guthrie identifies the middle section between the Barker's speech outside the booth and the Showman's performance inside, that is, the moment in which contact is made between Marie and the Drum Major, as the “most important part of the scene” and “its real body,” because it is significant for the development of the plot. “The actual content of the ‘Marktschreier's’ ranting does not matter as much as this does.” Compared to the “serious foreground action,” Guthrie claims, the meaning of the Barker's words comparing Woyzeck to a monkey (words actually spoken by the “Ausrufer” rather than the “Marktschreier”) “cannot conceivably be evident to an audience at this stage, for the simple reason that we have not seen enough of the main character.” The impact of the speeches in this “quasi-episodic element in the plot” differs in nature from that of the rest of the scene, Guthrie claims. “One may suggest that it is a less intense impact, analogous to comic relief in Shakespeare, preparing us for the main point of the scene” (128-29).

Here and elsewhere, Guthrie appears to contradict his own argument by acknowledging the existence of episodic elements in the play, that is, elements peculiar to the open form as defined by Klotz. He identifies H4,9 (Captain. Doctor), for example, as a “pendant-like scene” that “does not forward the plot in the most direct way possible” (134). Likewise, some of scene H1,14 (Margret [= Marie] with Girls in Front of the House) is “not, strictly speaking, part of the development of the plot” (146). Furthermore, some of Guthrie's assumptions regarding the forms of drama are not accurate: he argues, for example, that the scenes are not independent and autonomous because there are manifold connections between them (126), but such interconnection is described by Klotz and others as not only typical of, but essential for the open form of drama, since such connections—Klotz's “metaphorische Verklammerung,” and the recurrence of various types of motifs—help create dramatic unity where some of the unifying devices of the closed form of drama are lacking.

More convincing is Guthrie's opposition to the claim that the play's end is implied in every scene or that the structure of the play is circular. As he, and more recently Burghard Dedner have demonstrated, the plot is characterized by a tight linear and chronological development.

Burghard Dedner joins Guthrie in arguing against the commonly accepted view that Woyzeck is an example of the open form of drama and in deploring what he considers to be attempts by editors to make their editions comply with this form. Dedner acknowledges that Büchner follows Shakespeare rather than the classical drama, but with the retention of linear plot development and the strict and condensed sequence of scenes that is characteristic of the latter. Taking exception to the comparison of the structure of Woyzeck to the form of a ballad, which he attributes especially to Viëtor, but which, in fact, was quite common in criticism before Viëtor, Dedner claims that the play is not non-linear and does not progress through stations or separate episodes, and that the scenes were not written “helter skelter” (bunt durcheinander), as Viëtor maintains, but in sequence. “If the open drama has no continual, uninterrupted plot development,” he argues, then the form of Woyzeck is closed (1988/89, 163-165). However, by admitting to the inclusion of remnants of folk life such as folk songs and some of the events involving children, and of a number of “interior scenes” such as H4,2, in which Marie observes the Drum Major, H4,3, in which she observes the Barker, and H4,17, in which Woyzeck surveys his life and possessions, Dedner, like Guthrie, undermines his own argument (169). And to his examples could be added others such as the Grandmother's tale and the banter of the journeymen.

Dedner bases his argument on conclusions drawn from what he considers to be a complete manuscript: in his view, the plot as contained in H4 and H1,14-21—with the possible inclusion of H3,2—is complete as it stands and does not require further supplementation from earlier drafts (147). In H1 he sees a causally connected sequence of scenes with some passages left open, whether intentionally or not. This manuscript consists of a closed sequence of scenes focusing on the murder and its aftermath and connected by two principles he identifies as “haste” (Hetze) and a “tendency to simultaneity” (Tendenz zur Simultaneität). The scenes are connected by Woyzeck's scurrying from one activity to the next and by an increase in the tempo toward the end. Simultaneity or near simultaneity can be found in several instances where scenes overlap or appear to be taking place at the same time: for example, after Marie has been stabbed in H1,15, her dying sounds are heard by the people coming in H1,16; and scene H1,18 with the children may be taking place at the same time as the inn scene, H1,17. In Dedner's view, both of these “connecting principles” are more developed in H2 and H4, though he admits that some are actually eliminated in the revision of earlier scenes for inclusion in H4 (147-51).

According to Dedner's calculations, the action of the play takes place in as little as forty-eight hours and in no more than three days, which is in keeping with the unity of time of the classical drama. He argues against the transposition of H1,18, which was introduced by Franzos, retained by Lehmann and Poschmann, and defended by Kanzog. In his response to Lehmann's argument that the children would not be up at such a late hour, Dedner echoes an observation made by Patterson in a 1978 study of the play's duration, which Patterson estimates to be four days, namely, that it “depends on a rather middle-class view of bringing up children” (Patterson 1978, 120). Not all children are so disciplined as to be in bed two hours after dark, Dedner argues, and that would be especially true on an evening in which the news of a murder would spread quickly through crowded quarters, creating a special situation in which the children would likely share the excitement and desire to witness the murder scene. As indicated above, H1,18 could be taking place at the same time as H1,17, and it establishes a connection between H1,16 (the arrival of people at the pond and discovery of the murder) and H1,19, in which people responding to the news of the murder arrive at the pond and scare off Woyzeck, who has returned to the scene of the crime. Furthermore, Dedner continues, H1,18 reflects the immediate, sensational reaction to the murder, which would have diminished somewhat by the following morning, and it gives Woyzeck time to get from the inn to the pond (Dedner 155-57).

As for other problematic passages, Dedner notes that even though the Captain's reference to Marie's infidelity in H2,7 is represented in H4,6, he still thinks it probable that Büchner would have added Woyzeck's appearance in H4,9, but he would have had to change it to agree with the new situation in which Woyzeck has already seen the Drum Major with Marie or leaving her house (154-60). Dedner seems to agree with Poschmann that H3, or at least H3,2 (The Idiot. The Child. Woyzeck) was written after H4, that H3,2 authorizes the murder sequence H1,14-21, and that it corresponds to an increasing tendency on Büchner's part to “individualize figures from the folk.” In Dedner's view, H3,2 should follow H1,20, Woyzeck's entry into the pond, to which the Idiot supposedly refers with his finger-counting game. With respect to H3,1, The Doctor's Courtyard, Dedner agrees with Müller-Seidel, Paulus, and Richards that this scene cannot be placed before the end of H4, where it no longer has any purpose. Since the comic content of H3,1 is on a lower level than that of H4, it appears that H3,1 precedes H4 and was superseded by it (161-63).

In a paper presented at a 1987 colloquium at the University of Aalborg, Denmark, and published in 1988, Swend Erik Larsen identifies three components in the phenomenon of power and powerlessness in Woyzeck and Lenz:

—the concrete event in which power and powerlessness meet and where the strength of power is tested,

—the structures that determine the forms of confrontation,

—consciousness which the parties or persons involved possess of the connection between structure and event.

(1988, 176; author's emphasis)

Larsen claims that reflection about oppression and the abuse of power emanates from every sentence in the play. The event he chooses to analyze in detail is the scene in which Woyzeck shaves the Captain (H4,5). In this scene Woyzeck is clearly inferior and subordinate to the Captain, who demonstrates his superiority in various ways: he gives orders, comments on Woyzeck's private life, makes fun of him, and instructs him. During the course of the scene, however, Woyzeck gains the upper hand, which distresses and confuses the Captain. His replies to the Captain, which are at first short and automatic, become longer, and his participation in the dialog becomes more active. He gives an unexpected twist to the Captain's religious allusions, for example, and raises the issue of money in relation to morality (176-77).

The Captain's loss of ground is manifest also in the use of personal pronouns. He begins addressing Woyzeck in the third person singular “Er” rather than with the “Du” or “Sie” that would be used with a person of similar status. Accepting his inferior role, Woyzeck avoids the use of pronouns in addressing the Captain: to refer to the Captain as “Sie” would presuppose considering himself as an “ich,” Larsen claims, as a person with a right to speak. Only when Woyzeck begins to seize the initiative in the conversation does he address the Captain as “Sie” and begin, tentatively at first, to assert his own individuality: after first speaking about poor people in general and using the plural pronoun “wir” and the impersonal “man,” he finally speaks in the first person singular. The scene ends with the Captain apparently accepting the “partial identity” between himself and Woyzeck, both of whom are “good men.” Thus the hierarchy breaks down on the verbal level, according to Larsen, and, because his power stands on shaky feet, the Captain identifies with Woyzeck. Woyzeck does not take advantage of the Captain's weakness in order to undermine his power, however, but to define his own difference and in a subjective way to confirm the hierarchy of power. Woyzeck is conscious of and accepts his position in the power-structure (177-78).

Because of their cynical arbitrariness, writes Larsen, the representatives of power are dangerous, and because of their neurotic narrow-mindedness, they are also ridiculous. They possess real power, but it is power they have not earned and do not deserve. It is a “perverse-routinized extension” of a power that may once have served a useful purpose but has now lost its meaning and function in a new and different social context, where it continues to function for its own sake. When power is no longer part of a total structure and no longer contains any vision, Larsen writes, those who exercise that power live in a “partial universe” that only includes themselves and not the totality. Hence we experience them in the “here and now” where they are threatened by that which they would dominate, the Captain by Woyzeck and his craftiness, the Doctor by nature and arbitrariness. For his part, Woyzeck also identifies with the Captain, Larsen maintains, and behaves like him as the master in his own partial world. And just as the Doctor views Woyzeck as his property, so Woyzeck views Marie as his. When Marie asserts her independence, Woyzeck's identification with the other persons of power moves him to kill her (179-81).

Conclusions similar to Larsen's are reached by Richard T. Gray, who, borrowing a phrase from Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, analyzes the “dialectic of enlightenment” in Woyzeck. While the Enlightenment purports “to provide the means for the emancipation of humanity from the obscurity of myth,” according to Horkheimer and Adorno, it “ultimately reveals itself to be a more insidious manifestation of myth itself” (1988, 79). Büchner had similar insight, Gray maintains, and this manifests itself in his skepticism toward the transition from a holistic science to the purposive-rational approach that was coming into prominence in his time. He finds confirmation for his “worst suspicions about the potential inimicality of reason to life” in Clarus's report on Woyzeck, which was not only the source of Büchner's play but the “true impetus behind the entire conception of the work.” Büchner is less interested in Woyzeck himself than in the way Clarus portrays him. The aim of Büchner's fragments, Gray writes, “is to reflect critically on the ‘dogmatism of reason’ as manifest in the Clarus report with the goal of bringing enlightenment to reflect on itself” (80-81).

In his diagnosis of Woyzeck's motivation to commit murder, Clarus asserts the dominance of reason over emotion in the same absolute manner as Büchner's Doctor, a caricature of Clarus. Like the Doctor in Woyzeck, Clarus valorizes “freedom of will” and “the free use of reason” without ever questioning the appropriateness of these values for the uneducated and underprivileged Woyzeck; he condemns Woyzeck based on Enlightenment conceptions about human beings. Clarus assumes that Woyzeck is capable of reasonable thinking and that his will is free, but that he misuses his reason in a perverse manner. Whereas pure insanity, the complete absence of reason, may be accepted, the hybrid between reason and unreason, the “confusion of subjective feelings with objective conceptions,” in the words of Clarus, undermines the integrity of reason itself and threatens to overturn the relationship between subject and object on which scientistic reason is based (81-82).

Clarus's position, Gray argues, “can be read as an unwitting condemnation of the socioeconomic order responsible for Woyzeck's ‘limited means.’” Clarus objects to Woyzeck's “inherently underprivileged status in society, his lack of formal education, his poverty, his ‘moralische Verwilderung’ [moral degeneration].” According to Gray, Clarus reveals in his report that he is possessed of the very qualities he condemns in Woyzeck, namely, a specific set of prejudices, false judgments, and errors. Consequently, when he passes judgment on Woyzeck as a curious hybrid of reason and unreason, he is also passing judgment on himself. He exemplifies the “merging of myth and enlightenment, or the reversion of enlightenment to myth” that is the central thesis of Horkheimer's and Adorno's critique of enlightenment (82-83).

Gray suggests that Büchner's reading of Clarus's report was similar to his own reading based on theories of Horkheimer and Adorno. In Woyzeck Clarus's pedagogical and scrutinizing gaze is itself subjected to a scrutinizing gaze, “the gaze of dramatic spectatorship.” Büchner's drama “assumes the spectatorial gaze of enlightened reason only in order to turn it against this reason itself.” In this regard the carnival scenes are of central importance. Carnival inherently involves inversion and destabilization of authoritative values, and it possesses revolutionary potential. In his carnival scenes Büchner introduces dominant societal values in a context that mocks and overturns them. Clarus's idealized vision of rational human beings is mocked by the grotesque hybridization of reason and unreason as represented by a variety of trained animals. The Barker's ironic praise of reason in this scene is simultaneously its denunciation. This figure therefore embodies the “dialectic of enlightenment” in the same way Clarus does and provides skeptical comment on the attitudes he represents. The “self-ironization and self-condemnation of reason is put on display” in this scene, and the audience is “invited to witness this event in all its grotesqueness.” The Captain and the Doctor are noncarnivalesque counterparts of the Barker and represent in stylized exaggeration the enlightened bourgeois values of Clarus (84-85).

When we critically overturn Clarus's metaphysical privileging of reason in the classical duality of reason and unreason, free will and necessity, “then Woyzeck's hybridization ceases to signify the failure of enlightenment and instead indicates its incipient and insidious victory.” Woyzeck's murder of Marie does not indicate the failure of reason to control passion, Gray argues, but becomes an expression of the enlightened will to mastery. Woyzeck thus represents the “attempted coming to enlightenment of myth.” Following a different line of argument, Gray reaches a conclusion similar to Larsen's: in reaction to his exploitation and oppression Woyzeck appropriates the “same structures of mastery and control under which he suffers as a strategy for his own liberation.” Marie's behavior toward her child constitutes a similar attempt at mastery and control. It is behavior characteristic of most of the figures in the play: the oppressed become the oppressors (88-90, 94).

An increasing tendency among critics who emphasize the play's socially critical content has been to identify Dr. Clarus as a callous, inhumane, and morally rigid practitioner of medicine and as a servant of the state and the people with power who stand to benefit from keeping the common people poor and powerless. In the extreme, this criticism has considered the Doctor in Woyzeck, and by implication the historical figures he caricatures—the anatomist Johann Bernhard Wilbrand and the chemist Justus Liebig, both of whom were professors at the University of Giessen when Büchner was a student there, as well as Clarus himself, who was also a university professor—as precursors of the doctors who carried out grotesquely inhumane experiments on people in Nazi concentration camps. Dorothy James places this matter in the proper perspective in a 1990 essay by considering Clarus's judgment and the positions represented by him and by Büchner's Doctor in the context of the time in which Büchner was writing. While the play's form belongs more to the twentieth century than to Büchner's time, she writes, it contains “real and documentable threads” that connect it to both time periods (119), a claim she supports with ample documentation.

Woyzeck was indeed an “interesting case” in his own time, James argues, a time in which the nature of man and his behavior was the topic of considerable disagreement and debate. On one side of the issue was Dr. J. C. A. Heinroth, a supporter of Dr. Clarus's conclusions, who was convinced that man stands above the animals because he has reason and can choose to be free. Consciousness and reason can lead him to God; if he does not take this path, it is his own fault and a sin. Heinroth considers illness to be the result of sin, which agrees with Clarus's conclusion that Woyzeck's dissolute life led to his downfall. When he committed the murder, Woyzeck was not controlled by a “necessary blind and instinctual drive,” that upset his “free use of reason,” Clarus concluded. He therefore exercised free will and was responsible for his action (113-14).

Clarus and Heinroth represented a minority position even in their own time, according to James, who cites Professor Johann Christian August Grohmann as a leading proponent of the opposing side of a heated debate. Grohmann maintained that the human being is not “essentially free” or “essentially rational.” He may have raised himself above the animals by virtue of his intellect and reason, but he has not eliminated the animal forces in himself. His animal nature is particularly evident in the various drives aimed at the survival of the species. The will is influenced by physical as well as intellectual needs: circumstances can brutalize men and incline them to the bestial side of human nature. In such circumstances, the human being no longer exercises free will but is rather the victim of sickness that attacks not only the body but also the spirit and the will, upon which it has a brutalizing effect. “Is the death penalty possible in such circumstances as punishment,” he asks, “or is the animal simply to be sacrificed?” Grohmann disagreed with Clarus's verdict on Woyzeck, and he certainly opposed the punishment, which was described by J. B. Friedrich, a contemporary authority on criminal justice, as “a terrible judicial murder” (115-16).

James notes that the diagnosis of Woyzeck provided by Büchner's Doctor is not unreasonable in the context of contemporary systems of classifying mental disease, though his “outspoken relish in pronouncing his diagnosis to the disturbed man himself” is unreasonable, even grotesque. “Fixed ideas” were considered at the time to be partial mental disturbances or madness. Particularly in the early part of the nineteenth century they were associated with melancholy, which was defined by the French authority Dr. Philippe Pinel as a “delirium attached to an object.” As James writes, fixed ideas “involved a confusion of the subjective and the objective, the subject being convinced that a given fantasy attached to an object was literally true. It was much debated whether a person's derangement could really be limited to one area or object.” If so, could a person be considered sane in all other aspects of his life? If a person suffered from partial or periodic insanity associated with fixed ideas, he presumably could not be held accountable for acts committed when in that state, but what about behavior during the periods in which the person's behavior appeared to be normal and responsible? Clarus addressed this point in his report and concluded that Woyzeck's reason was never overpowered by “an incorrect or over-wrought concept of the objects of the physical or transcendental world or by the conditions of his own physical and moral personality” such that the “free perspective for other conditions was distorted and the proper assessment of them obscured.” In other words, he did not suffer from fixed ideas and was therefore accountable for his actions. Had Clarus's diagnosis agreed with that of Büchner‘s Doctor, Woyzeck's life would have been spared, which is not to say that Büchner is not mocking the Doctor and his disregard for the well-being and humanity of his fellow men (105-107).

James proposes an additional model for Büchner's Doctor, the one he was closest to and knew best: his own father, who also functioned as a court doctor and wrote expert opinions for the court, some of which were published (109-110).

Finally, James discusses the debate taking place in Büchner's time concerning the nature of animals, in particular the seemingly human attributes of animals that perform tricks, as do the animals in Büchner's carnival scene. Do animals have souls, imagination, feeling, free will, a form of language, or are they simply machines? This debate connects to the emerging evolutionary theory that appalled defenders of free will such as Heinroth and Clarus (117). “It is not a coincidence,” James writes,

that Grohmann, who viewed Woyzeck as a victim of social and environmental circumstances and of physiological determination, was “evolutionary” in his thinking, rejecting as early as 1820 teleological explanations of evolution which Büchner later mocked in his Woyzeck, and which he seriously combatted in his lecture “Über die Schädelnerven.”

(118)

As a number of critics have pointed out, the focus on Woyzeck given by the play's title is an editorial construct, since there is no mention of a title in the manuscripts or any of Büchner's letters. It is conceivable that Büchner's title for the play would have included Marie's name along with Woyzeck's, as is the case with Leonce und Lena. And while Woyzeck has certainly been at the center of most criticism, a number of critics have recognized the tragic dimension of Marie's fate and have exonerated her and placed the blame on Woyzeck and society, which has instilled in him the notion of erotic possessiveness. Those efforts have not been enough for feminist critics, however, who consider criticism of the play to be unbalanced in favor of Woyzeck and a patriarchal view of the world, and who turn their attention to Marie.

Taking her cue from a performance of the play in Sydney, Australia in which the actor playing Woyzeck rammed his knife up between Marie's legs and later commented in an interview that “it felt good to kill Marie in this manner because he, Woyzeck, had been dependent on Marie's sexuality for too long” (294), Kerry Dunne sets out in an article published in 1990 to demonstrate that Marie is as much a victim as Woyzeck. In her sexuality Marie is subject to the demands of her nature just as Woyzeck is when he pisses on the wall or when he creates a child without the blessings of the church. In addition, she is also a victim of her sexual attractiveness and desirability. In Dunne's view, Büchner's aim is to rehabilitate sexuality as a meaningful and natural part of human existence, but to do so would have required that Woyzeck be brought to trial and sentenced, which would have repudiated the societal values upon which the murder was based, namely, the assumption that women are men's possessions (294, 304-7).

Noting the recent attention given to love and sex in Büchner's works and to the female figures as those most clearly linked with love and the depiction of sexuality, Dunne intends to fill what she considers to be the need for a more detailed study of the play's sexual imagery. She considers Marie to be a parallel figure to the Drum Major and the Sergeant: each uses animal imagery and refers to parts of the body in responding to the physical appeal and animal vitality of the other. Marie's reference to the Drum Major's beard, for example, has symbolic associations with male virility and public hair, Dunne maintains, which betray the erotic nature of her interest. The Sergeant's comment about her heavy dark hair shows he is “responding to her sensual appearance and his statement that its weight could pull her down, indicates not only the abundance of hair, but is also perhaps an indirect expression of his desire to see her lying beneath him.” The Sergeant's stress on the blackness of Marie's eyes suggests “the physiological response of enlarged pupils during sexual arousal,” Dunne interprets rather fancifully. The reference to her hair dragging her down also implies that her sexuality could be her downfall, and the reference to her black eyes introduces the notion of death (296-97).

The Drum Major amplifies on his colleague's implied innuendoes when he compares looking into her eyes with looking into a chimney or a well, “images which suggest an underlying image of the vagina.” Also having vaginal connotations, according to Dunne, are references to Marie's mouth and lips. As he is about to kill her, Woyzeck refers to her hot lips and the attraction they still have for him. Earlier, when he begins to suspect her, he refers to her red mouth and looks at her lips for a blister that would be evidence of her infidelity. “Blisters are traditionally a symbol of deceit,” Dunne writes, but could also be an allusion to a lesion from a sexually transmitted disease. In killing Marie, Woyzeck is not inflicting punishment for sin—he says he would forgo heaven in exchange for kissing her—he is acting out of sexual jealousy, as is indicated by his repeated stabbing of her body with the knife, which also suggests to Dunne “the phallic revenge on female sexuality that has castrated the owner (by preferring another lover)” (296-99, 304).

Most of these images point to a positive view of sexuality, Dunne writes. Since the imagery used in connection with Marie is similar to that used for the Drum Major, one cannot say that Marie or women are denigrated in Büchner's portrayal. His view of Marie and her fate is also indicated by his choice of her name, which refers both to Mary Magdalene and to the Virgin Mary. The choice of this name “suggests an authorial caution to the reader/viewer against the division of women into the pure and the carnal.” It has been suggested that Marie exploits her attractiveness and sexuality, the only bargaining power a poor woman has in a class-ridden, patriarchal society, to gain financial support from Woyzeck and to better her social standing through the Drum Major. But while Marie has indeed exploited her sexuality to obtain financial support from Woyzeck, Dunne argues, the images she uses to describe the Drum Major indicate that her involvement with him is not motivated merely by a desire to better herself but also by her sexual needs (298-99).

Dunne identifies two different types of cultural knowledge that determine the moral views of the play's characters: one derived from folk-songs, in which the existence of female sexuality is acknowledged and in part celebrated, and which reflect “the existence and power of sexuality in a relatively playful, non-judgmental manner,” and one derived from Christianity, which regards female sexuality as threatening and evil. It is the latter that prevents Büchner from rehabilitating the physical and sexual. Woyzeck and the Drum Major share the Christian view: the Drum Major asks whether the devil is in her, and Woyzeck views her as a sinner. Licentiousness, evil, and destruction are linked in Woyzeck's vision of Sodom and Gomorrah in the beginning scene, in his reaction to seeing Marie and the Drum Major dancing, and in his linkage of female sexuality with the devil in the final inn scene. The reason Woyzeck kills Marie rather than the Drum Major, Dunne writes, is that he acts not merely out of jealousy but as the instrument of punishment in a patriarchal society that considers female sexuality to be especially sinful and threatening and in which women are regarded as possessions. Even Marie herself is unable to embrace her sexuality in an unfettered way, as Marion does in Dantons Tod. Following her conflict with Margret, her neighbor, she accepts society's attitude toward her in referring to her child as a “whore's child,” and following Woyzeck's discovery of her with the earrings she calls herself a whore (ein schlecht Mensch). And when she cannot resist the Drum Major's advances, she longs in vain to be able to follow the example of the repentant Mary Magdalene (295, 300, 302-6).

Countering the devaluation of the physical and sexual within society is the admonition by the Barker to accept our animal nature. Woyzeck is torn between the two views: in defending himself against the Captain and the Doctor, he considers his poverty and the demands of his nature to be excuses for his “immoral” behavior, but he accepts the views of society as represented by his oppressors when he punishes and takes revenge on Marie for her sin. Without explaining how or why, Dunne claims that if Woyzeck were to have been “brought to trial and sentenced, then not only would the overall importance of societal values be different but Woyzeck would be punished,” an outcome resulting in a view of sexuality more in accordance with that represented by Marion (302-306).

Writing in the same year as Dunne, Elisabeth Boa, too, notes the incongruity between Woyzeck's appeal to nature in defense of his performance of bodily functions and his inability to see Marie's transgression in the same light, namely, as nature “in revolt against a life denuded of pleasure,” but Boa places greater blame on class structure and social conditions. In her view, both Marie and Woyzeck are subject to brutal assertions of power by those who treat them as instruments to be exploited: the power of knowledge and science represented by the Doctor and the power of a repressive morality represented by the Captain. Another contributing factor is the “antithetical structuring of masculinity and femininity,” which includes the sexual division of labor in which Woyzeck and Marie are caught up—he to provide for his family, she to mother their child—and the sexual antagonism that is created by this division. In a patriarchal society, men have exclusive right of ownership of the female body, and mothers are not supposed to feel sexual desire. The allocation of power to men provokes Marie's reaction and her willingness to use her sexuality as a vehicle of power, though internalized religious teachings make her feel guilty. Furthermore, Boa writes, the sexually active woman in a patriarchal society provokes a violent reassertion of male dominance and the barbaric reassertion of his masculinity, as is the case when Woyzeck murders Marie. As long as the sexes remain divided, social justice is impossible (1990, 174-77).

Contrary to Dunne's reading of the folk songs as an affirmation of sexuality, Laura Martin sees them in an article published in 1997 as representing an ideology according to which loose women represent a social problem. Martin claims that Marie's sexual promiscuity “indicates her belief in herself as a free agent,” which goes against patriarchy's ownership of women. Woyzeck is not destabilized by his diet of peas or the other abuse he suffers as a poor man but by Marie's refusal to be controlled by him, or by “her ignorance that she is to be considered his property, his chattel” (436). The contribution of Christianity is not different from that of the folk songs, according to Martin, though it is less light-hearted, and it introduces the concept of sin and retribution. In applying the Biblical concepts, Woyzeck becomes “the prophet of the apocalypse” (436-37).

With reference to René Girard's book Violence and the Sacred, Martin considers Marie to be an example of the scapegoat whose sacrifice Girard considers to be the foundation of every religion. The scapegoat must be similar to the real or potential perpetrators of violence in order to substitute for them, but it must also be different enough not to threaten the commonality. “What better victim, then, than a woman?” Martin asks. “A woman is the same, but different, other.” The scapegoat must be sufficiently other for its sacrifice not to require revenge, a demand fulfilled, Martin claims, by the loose woman. The “sacrificial crisis” preceding the act of sacrifice is a communal situation in which distinctions have been erased, according to Girard. Martin finds such a loss of distinctions in the play's repeated equation of animal and human, and in the supposed loss, or at least confusion, of class distinctions that occurs here in the false application of bourgeois morality to a member of the proletariat. The Doctor's and Captain's “nagging” of Woyzeck is inappropriate and misplaced, Martin maintains, “for it assumes a sameness of outlook and lifestyle between these two classes which simply does not exist.” In fact, Marie and Woyzeck have no need to be as “moral” as the Doctor and the Captain, since “Kantian moral free will is … contingent on class and upbringing.” Finally, distinction between the sexes also begins to blur: Marie is “uncharacteristically active for a woman character.” She is closer to Faust than to Gretchen in her masculine will to experience pleasure. Woyzeck, on the other hand, is passive, lacking in will power, and effeminate. He is easily victimized by the real men in what Martin calls their “thirst for violence” (437-38, 441).

Martin weakens her argument by pointing out that the act of sacrifice in Girard's sense is a communal activity, whereas Woyzeck acts alone. “The Girardian sacrificial crisis cannot ever be resolved in the play, for there is no unanimity in the choice of the victim: at times it appears to be Woyzeck himself, yet he chooses his own victim in the form of Marie.” Thus the choice of Marie as scapegoat, which Martin has considered so obvious, is

not unproblematic, and it is in fact on this paradox that the play turns. Only if all those involved were to agree on the necessity of her death could the play be a tragedy in the ancient sense of that word. All the evils threatening the social order would be heaped upon Marie's shoulders and Woyzeck would be the hero for ridding society of the unclean thing.

(439)

But of course Woyzeck himself is an outcast whose deed is not celebrated by society but condemned and punished. In our time of “objective justice,” the sacrifice of an ignorant and unstable fool like Woyzeck can no longer be accepted as a legitimate means of eliminating violence from society. Thus, neither Woyzeck nor Marie can serve as a proper scapegoat. The conclusion, then, with respect to Girard's theory is that it is impossible to find the perfect victim in a society that lacks “consensus and a community of faith” (439).

Martin nevertheless tries to defend her hypothesis by claiming that Marie succeeds in her role as victim. She is the only one of Woyzeck's tormentors to accept any guilt for the effect her actions have on him, and in saying that she could stab herself, she reveals a readiness for self-sacrifice. Readers and audiences seem willing to recognize her suitability as a sacrificial victim: “violence against a woman is disapproved of, yet understood, and therefore actually effectively condoned.” The community that condemns Woyzeck is the same one that spurred him on to the deed. Marie's spilt blood becomes a purifying libation to the gods. She becomes “the scapegoat for crimes not committed by her, but by her supposed social superiors, if anyone. Woyzeck then is not so much about the victimization of the hero as it is the portrait of the development of the violent criminal—or of the accession to manhood in our rotten society” (439-40, 442).

In a study of Woyzeck published in 1991, Edward McInnes comes closer to Boa than to Dunne in the emphasis he places on the social dimension of Marie's attraction to the Drum Major. With his fine clothing and ability to give her a valuable gift—she thinks the earrings could be gold—he represents for her a higher social standing and affirms her view of herself as equal to the grand ladies. According to McInnes, the Drum Major senses from the beginning a strong impulse of revolt in Marie's responses to him, and he is able to exploit it for his own ends. In strutting before her and referring to the Prince's admiration of his manliness, he impresses on her that he is socially sophisticated and successful and that he is at ease in all strata of society. The gift of the earrings confirms his status as a man of some means. In seducing her, he is able to take advantage of her dissatisfaction with her social status and her frustration with her narrow and demeaned existence. In yielding to his seduction, McInnes argues, Marie not only expresses her strong sensuality, she also reveals a strong impulse of social rebellion and revolt (1991, 21-23).

As opposed to his emphasis on the social dimension of Marie's situation, McInnes considers the murder to be an entirely personal matter concerning Woyzeck and Marie alone, and he downplays the importance of the Captain and the Doctor as vehicles of social protest. They may be seen to “embody a strong socially enforced authority,” he writes, but “both are in reality anguished men, each in his own way ravaged by a deep sense of existential horror and apprehension.” They are “torn by feelings of inner emptiness and of their estrangement from a world in which they can see no ultimate sustaining meaning.” Büchner seeks through them “to lay bare a disabling sense of metaphysical desolation which neither can fully articulate much less confront” (31, 47).

In his 1994 Georg Büchner: The Shattered Whole, the first book-length study of Büchner published in English since the 1970s, John Reddick follows a trend of recent scholarship to establish more fully and accurately the intellectual, cultural, social, and political contexts that provide a background for evaluating and interpreting Büchner's works. Reddick discusses in four introductory chapters some of the primary elements of Büchner's thought and art. Although Büchner's artistic vision is disjunctive with its insistence on fragments and particles, he believed in the fundamental unity and wholeness of nature, and this, Reddick claims, locates him in the German tradition of Naturphilosophie, which was already outdated at the time (9). Consequently, Reddick considers Büchner to be “hopelessly remote from the prevailing spirit of his time” in his “reliance on idealist, poetical, mystical notions” and his rejection of rationalist philosophy and mechanistic science (39-40). The manner of his writing is “inexorably un- and anti-classical,” but “the faith and vision that underlies it is classical almost to the point of anachronism” (13). Reddick considers Büchner to be involved in a “Rearguard Action,” as his second chapter is entitled, and dismisses Büchner's often-quoted pronouncement on fatalism as “the sonorous trumpeting of a transient mood” (29), a reading that is based not on evidence from the text but on the fact that Büchner did not cease his political activity after supposedly gaining this shattering insight. He identifies a similar contradiction or paradox in the discrepancy between Büchner's scornful dismissal of intellect and learning and his relentless pursuit of knowledge. Reddick finds similar inconsistencies in the main figures of Büchner's works; they appear to be part of the fullness and quickness of life Büchner wants to capture in his art and that he opposes to the marionettes of idealist art, whose mechanistic obsessions and behavior he caricatures in such figures as King Peter in Leonce und Lena and the Doctor and the Captain in Woyzeck (50).

Fundamental to Büchner's thought, Reddick writes, is his affirmation of life and his emphasis on the individual, each of which is a valuable manifestation of a primal law and exists in and of itself. (“Everything that exists, exists for its own sake” [II.292].) He is antagonistic to every kind of anti-life force or process. King Peter in Leonce und Lena is satirized for his anti-life philosophizing, the Doctor, Büchner's “most savagely satirical stooge,” for his “anti-life scientizing” (43, 46). The Doctor sacrifices his patients to an excess of science. He is not interested in helping suffering individuals but rather in promoting his own self-interest. At the same time, he is also a laughable victim, who is demented by his own version of the fixed idea he diagnoses in Woyzeck. In speaking of freedom of will to the man he has enslaved, he contradicts and refutes his own theories, as he does also in praising individuality while denying the existence of individuals, who for him are reduced to the status of specimens or cases (46-49).

The Captain represents a variant on the comic model of power, according to Reddick. He plays a role similar to King Peter's: both figures occupy the supreme power position within their respective plays, Reddick writes, “but in comic contrast to the might and mantle of their positions, both of them are puny and petrified, and utterly dwarfed by their ostensible victims.” Both are easily thrown into confusion, and they share a sense of fear, which is at once existential and the product of thinking. As has been frequently pointed out, the Captain is more complex and interesting than the Doctor, since he is “stricken by glimpses of an abyss that in varying forms critically affects the destinies of all Büchner's central characters.” Because he fears infinitude and eternity, time appears monstrous to him. As opposed to Woyzeck, he behaves as an abject coward in his avoidance of the abyss and in his attempts to seek refuge in artificial constructs such as specious morality and a measured routine of unhurried activity (50-52).

Reddick cautions against taking any particular speech or argument as the play's ultimate truth. The statements by Woyzeck and Marie relating to poverty, for example, are not sufficient, in his view, to characterize the play as a social drama. In fact, Büchner's Woyzeck is much better off than his historical counterpart: he has some income, a place to stay, and a familial relationship with Marie and their child, none of which was true for the historical Woyzeck. The first draft of the play contains no sign of poverty, the second, not much more. In H4 Büchner thematizes poverty and projects it in class terms, but it is not a central issue. Furthermore, Reddick continues, Woyzeck contradicts himself no less than does the Doctor: in defending himself against the Captain for his illegitimate child and against the Doctor for his inability to control his bladder, he cites the demands of nature, but, as the feminist critics point out, he condemns and punishes Marie for yielding to the demands of her nature. Likewise, the words of the Barker relating to the animal nature of man and the words of the Journeyman concerning the teleological view of life are not meant to be swallowed whole. At issue in the play, according to Reddick, are “questions of civilization as against nature; moral choice as against animal compulsion; responsibility and accountability; crime and punishment; sin and retribution.” Büchner conjures up a context that “challenges the very idea of humanity, society, civilization” (304-308).

Büchner's concern is with the nature of man; the whole play can be seen as a kind of “Ecce homo.” According to Reddick's count, the word “Mensch” (man, mankind), which, apart from proper nouns and titles, is the most frequently used noun in all Büchner's poetic writings, appears 78 times in Woyzeck, which is considerably more than in Dantons Tod (29 times) and Leonce und Lena (34 times). The personae are not presented as “quirky individuals caught up in the specificity of their particular personality and history, but emblematically, as archetypes” (336). (Reddick sees the interspersion of song fragments as a device that encourages us to see the story in archetypal terms [337-44].) Woyzeck's story can be understood in the terms of the child's questions in the Grandmother's tale as to the what and the why of man. He is more profoundly tormented than any other of Büchner's protagonists by the gulf “between thinking and knowing, between subject and object, between the lonely, errant, solipsistic mind and the objective reality of the world outside” (350).

It is not surprising, given Büchner's background and the direction of his study, that illness, especially psychological illness, appears in all his works and is of primary importance in Lenz and Woyzeck. Analysis of the illnesses he portrays and their treatment, or lack of it, and the relationship of Büchner's position to the medical knowledge and practice of his time has been the object of two published dissertations in the nineties: Sabine Kubik's Krankheit und Medizin im literarischen Werk Georg Büchners (Sickness and Medicine in the Literary Works of Georg Büchner) was written as a dissertation at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich in 1990 and published in 1991; and Büchner and Madness: Schizophrenia in Georg Büchner's Lenz and Woyzeck by James Crighton, a retired medical doctor, was presented as a dissertation at the University of Leicester in 1994 and published in 1998.

Kubik agrees with Dorothy James that Büchner's play was not written merely as a counterargument to Clarus but also and even more as a critique of the scientific view of medicine and the scientific method of investigation that were becoming predominant at the time. According to Kubik, Woyzeck is not presented unequivocally as organically sick or as a psychopathic murderer. The play contains no explicit diagnosis of Woyzeck's condition, and the question of his accountability remains open. In his awareness of the complexity of human behavior, determined as it is by hereditary and social factors, Büchner does not consider a clear judgment to be possible, and he is therefore critical of the unequivocalness that is a central postulate of forensic and juridical discourse. Emphasizing the inadequacy of the means of evaluation in those fields, he begins his investigation or presentation where medicine and justice reach their limits (167-70).

Kubik finds support for her argument in her study of the sequence of manuscripts, from which she concludes that Büchner gives greater emphasis in the second stage of the play's composition (H2) to Woyzeck's pathology and the origins of his illness. Through the introduction of the Captain and especially the Doctor, Büchner establishes a causal connection between Woyzeck's illness, the severity of which is increased in H2, and the socially superior figures who exploit and abuse him. The Doctor's interest in Woyzeck is limited to his diagnosis of Woyzeck's illness and to the contribution he may be able to make to the progress of science. He makes no attempt to treat or heal him. On the contrary, his experiments contribute significantly to Woyzeck's destabilization, Kubik assumes. Unfortunately, Kubik relies for most of her evidence on two scenes whose inclusion in the final version is questionable, namely, H2,7, in which the Doctor makes Woyzeck the victim of his scientific observations, and H3,1, in which Woyzeck is treated no better than an animal, and in which his symptoms can “undoubtedly” be attributed to the diet of peas the Doctor has subjected him to (64-71).

In his lack of humanity and medical ethics, the Doctor represents a type of scientist that was not uncommon in an era when positivistic, empirical scientific investigation was replacing the romantic, speculative Naturphilosophie as the dominant mode of discovery and in which science was becoming less human. Kubik refers to the similarity between Justus Liebig's nutritional experiments on soldiers and the Doctor's experiment on Woyzeck, and she also cites the example of doctors who dissected their own relations, including one Philip Meckel who dissected three of his own deceased children and used his eight-year-old nephew as his assistant (181-83, 189).

Though Büchner is seen by many critics as a precursor of modern literature, and though his influence on writers in the twentieth century has indeed been widespread and profound, Büchner belonged very much to his own time in dealing with actual problems of the new positivistic science, according to Kubik. His doctor is the first in German literature to be oriented to the natural sciences, and he is the only one in the century to be treated critically, Kubik claims: the other doctor figures in this period are heroized and idealized in keeping with the new faith in the progress of science. Not until the expressionists in the twentieth century were doctors again seen with a similarly critical eye (250-58).

James Crighton's study is similar to Kubik's in its historical review of philosophical and medical theories of madness and of the occurrence of madness in works of literature. In keeping with his medical background and his diagnosis of Woyzeck, however, he gives greater emphasis to the symptoms and medical descriptions of what later became known as schizophrenia. Unlike Kubik, he does not consider the Doctor, who is but one part of Woyzeck's threatening and unfathomable world, to be responsible for Woyzeck's breakdown. According to Crighton, the roots of Woyzeck's madness lie in his “resistance (defiance would be too strong a word) to the relentless forces which have shaped the world he lives in and which have condemned him to subjection.” Andres and Marie inhabit the same world, but they are protected by their passivity. Woyzeck attempts to understand the world and to cling to the woman who gives his life meaning and stability. In his attempt to find meaning in life and in nature, he is driven ever deeper into unreason. Finally he sees only chaos in the world and he sees himself devoid of all freedom. In what he calls “double nature” Woyzeck perceives an unbridgeable gap between appearances and reality, most painfully in the person of Marie. His suffering is “caught in this gulf between the essence of things and their appearance,” a gulf also evident in his relationship to Marie, his mate and the mother of his child, in whom he discovers a whore (284, 275-76).

Works Cited

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Guthrie, John. Lenz and Büchner: Studies in Dramatic Form. Frankfurt: Lang, 1984.

James, Dorothy. “The ‘Interesting Case’ of Büchner's Woyzeck.” In Patterns of Change: German Drama and the European Tradition: Essays in Honour of Ronald Peacock. Ed. Dorothy James and Sylvia Ranawake, 103-19. New York: Peter Lang, 1990.

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Kubik, S. Krankheit und Medizin im literarischen Werk Georg Büchners. Stuttgart: M. & P. Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1991.

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