Nightmare: Georg Buchner’s Woyzeck

A short fragmented text, fragmentary in design but dazzling, that I read when I was twenty-two and studying German literature at university under the apartheid state, moving between Schiller, Brecht, Heine and Heinrich von Kleist. Living through the last years of a racist nightmare. Here is the medical student Buchner undoing the scientific mindset of his time. The cruelty towards animals that are more human than the characters depicted, more and less human becuase to be human is to be nothing. There is the Captain, the Doctor, the Drum Major, charcaters who are their professions, their social roles, filling them with vitality and horrifying verve. There is the poor confused figure of Woyzeck, barber and soldier, whose lover Marie is unfaithful to him with the Drum Major The world is the new brutal world of the Enlightenment, as irrational and heartless and secret as the old animalistic and totemic ancient world, the world Woyzeck tries to decipher from the patterns of toadstools growing and overheard voices on a fiendish wind, the secrets of the Freemasons who are hidden but powerful, driving Woyzeck further  along the brown road of insanity. There is a child hearing a fairytale of abandonemnt, the universe empty and the stars like flies, the moon just rotten wood, the sun a wilting sunflower, a dying and empty universe in which the child in the Marchen is utterly alone. And as the grandmother’s fairytale ends without comfort, a tale of terror, Woyzeck goes out to kill Marie by the pond in the grwoing darkness. He sees her throat slit after he has killed her and thinks she has on a necklace of rubies from her lover. The red wound of her throat is a mystery, it taunts him.

 

As I thought in recent months about the daughter kept underground in an Austrian cellar for 24 years, forced to raise her own children, those incestuous children who were also her sisters and brother, in darkness and with only the flickering light of the television screen as guide to another reality left behind — the text and crazy brilliance of Woyzeck came back to me. Lucid madness found right at the heart of the Enlightenment, ‘the scream that fills the whole horizon and that is known by humankind as silence’ – 

 

The young Georg Buchner in Leipzig, inventing a new genre of writing, ranting against the insanity of his times, leaving this unfinished fragment to history at his death aged 23. Extraordinary and because of Buchner we read Thomas Bernhard with opened eyes. The Sleep of Unreason contuinuing into eras of historical optimism.