Woyzeck

Woyzeck is an unfinished stage play by the German writer Georg Büchner, composed in German between July and October 1836; Büchner died in February 1837 before completing it, and the fragmentary manuscript was not published until 1877, in a heavily revised edition prepared by the editor Karl Emil Franzos, with the play not receiving its stage premiere until 8 November 1913 at the Residence Theatre in Munich. The drama draws on the true story of Johann Christian Woyzeck, a former soldier and wigmaker executed in Leipzig in 1824 for murdering a widow, and follows a poor, exploited soldier driven toward violence by poverty, medical experimentation and social humiliation. Büchner's microscopic, faded handwriting required chemical treatment before later editors could fully decipher the manuscript, and its incomplete, fragmentary state has invited numerous divergent reconstructions and adaptations, helping make Woyzeck one of the most influential and frequently performed plays in the German language.