A play (actually just a fragment) by Georg Büchner, who died in 1837 while working on it. Revolutionary for its time because up until that period, tragedy as a genre was reserved for stories about the upper classes. Its companion piece is Büchner's play Leonce and Lena, which conversely is a scathing comedy about the upper classes — a concept that was just as taboo.
Franz Woyzeck is a soldier with a child out of wedlock. To help make his living, he does odd jobs for his commanding officer and participates in "medical" experiments. He's gone completely crazy — seeing apocalyptic visions everywhere — but no one seems interested in that. When his wife, out of a mixture of boredom and hopelessness, begins seeing a Drum Major, Woyzeck lashes out.
The unfinished manuscript was edited and "completed" by Karl Emil Franzos in 1879, and this version was first performed on stage in Munich in 1913. Alban Berg adapted the play into the Opera Wozzeck, which received its first complete performance in Berlin in 1925.
In 1979, Werner Herzog had just finished filming Nosferatu the Vampyre. After almost spending a week without making a movie, he got to work on Woyzeck with Klaus Kinski. It became one of his most beloved films.
Tom Waits and Robert Wilson have written a Rock Opera based on the play, the songs from which were featured on Waits's album Blood Money. Waits' song "Children's Story" from Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards was also lifted from "Woyzeck".
The unfinished drama by Georg Büchner provides examples of:
- All of the Other Reindeer: Throughout this grim tragedy, every person Woyzeck encounters only give him a hard time.
- Ax-Crazy: In the end, Woyzeck himself lashes out and kills Marie, the only woman he ever loved.
- Based on a True Story: Woyzeck is based on the case of the real-life soldier Johann Christian Woyzeck (1780-1824), who was executed in Leipzig after murdering a widow out of jealousy and a lengthy trial and several expertises on his mental state. Büchner however also incorporated elements from other murder cases that happened during his lifetime and the experiments conducted by Justus von Liebig with a pea diet.
- Female Gaze: "She [Marie] gazes through seven pairs of leather pants!" Said by another woman.
- Mad Doctor: Woyzeck is going crazy partly because he volunteers for some very unusual medical experiments conducted by the Doctor and a few other medical professionals, such as the peas-only diet mentioned below.
- Mildly Military: The military doesn't seem to do anything but drive Woyzeck crazy.
- No Name Given: Drum Major. The Doctor. The Captain. The Workmen. This is important in the case of the first three, as they are authority figures who wield power over Woyzeck.
- One-Word Title: As a Last name of Protagonist Title.
- Protagonist Title: His last name, making this a One-Word Title.
- Test Subject for Hire: the titular character earns extra money for his family by agreeing to take part in medical experiments conducted by a doctor. At one of these experiments, the doctor tells Woyzeck that he must eat nothing but peas, which causes his mental health to break down and he begins to experience a series of apocalyptic visions.
- There Are No Psychologists: Woyzeck is clearly mad because of the abuse he's under, but no one seems to care, least of all The Doctor. His best friend tries to get him to go to the infirmary, to no avail. Justified in that psychology kind of didn't exist yet.
- Tested on Humans: Woyzeck's pea diet is based on an actual experiment conducted by chemist Justus von Liebig: For three months a number of soldiers of the Hessian army were fed nothing but pease porridge (in order to test if peas could be used as a cheap source of protein), resulting in symptoms very much like those displayed by Woyzeck in the play.
The opera by Alban Berg provides examples of:
- Kick the Dog: The morning after Wozzeck stabs Marie to death and then drowns himself in the lake, the neighborhood children cruelly tell their now-orphaned son that his mother is dead. The little boy seems oblivious and, after playing a bit on his hobby horse, follows the other children as they run to look out the body.
The movie by Werner Herzog provides examples of:
- Kick the Dog: The Drum Major beats up the tiny, underfed Woyzeck after he finds out Woyzeck knows about his wife's affair. And the Doctor throws his cat out the window to see how it lands on its feet.
- Nietzsche Wannabe: The Doctor:Doctor: Didn't I tell you that the Urethral Sphincter is subject to the will!?
- Oddly enough, he seems to be the most cheerful of all the characters.
- In Alban Berg's opera, he's listed as a buffo bass. Buffo.
- Oddly enough, he seems to be the most cheerful of all the characters.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: A string quartet plays the same song over Woyzeck's humiliating PT in the opening credit, Marie dancing with the Drum Major, and Woyzeck's murder of Marie.
