Woyzeck

himself, ‘Why does Man exist?’ ‘Why does Man exist?’

He puts his ear to the ground.

Individually, the scenes can seem trivial or meaningless: their power comes only when the play is taken as a whole.

In Büchner’s world, Woyzeck has the dignity not of high rank or reputation, but which belongs to all human souls, and his tragedy is that he is unable to see it, is blind to his own worth and relies instead on something outside himself, his relationship with Marie.

Have you seen how they grow in patterns on the ground? If a man could only interpret them.

Rather, it is a kind of collage, in which each new piece changes the total picture, by juxtaposition rather than development. This method became standard in the arts of the twentieth century – examples are film montage, ‘block construction’ in classical music, ‘epic theatre’ in drama, cubism in painting – but in 1836 it was unprecedented.