By Stephen Orr

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I believe in the derangement of the senses: in Rimbaud, William Burroughs, Huysmans, Genet, Celine, Swift, Defoe, Carroll, Coleridge, Kafka.

J.G. Ballard, What I Believe (1984)

The world is chaos. Nothingness is the yet-to-be-born god of the world.

Georg Büchner; Danton’s Death, Act 4 Scene 5

This is about the writer’s obsession with the world in his or her head – a world that satisfies certain conditions, and arises out of certain necessities. In this sense, all good writers are the same, and all bad writers are the same, but I’m interested in good writing, necessary writing.

These worlds aren’t just word-pictures of existing worlds, but worlds made inside the brain, by the brain, for the brain. Naked Lunch, Finnegans Wake, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, but also, and more subtly, Juan Rulfo’s village of the dead (Pedro Paramo), Robert Walser’s school-for-butlers (Jakob von Gunten), Prague’s winding alleyways as a map of Kafka’s brain (The Trial), the plotless world of Beckett’s Molloy – places emptied of meaning in an attempt to find meaning. So that, like William Blake, the person and vision are interchangeable.

I’d like to talk about the German poet, playwright and anatomist Georg Büchner (1813-1837). I’ll begin with a biographical sketch, then an examination of his final play-in-fragments, Woyzeck, followed by an excursion into related texts-of-the-mind.

My aim is to understand stories that seem mad (the voices, the visions, knives glinting in the moonlight); drugged (Lowry’s mescal-poet, Burroughs’ ‘pushers of souped-up harmine’); lacking some reason-to-be (except that being is a reason in itself); obsessed with sex, murder and cruelty. Authors capable of describing golden elms and telling stories about alcoholic detectives who, instead, write books about the smell of decomposing squirrels.

For these people, all that matters is the world rattling around inside their skull. Not what form it takes, what audience, what popularity follows. Small outputs, posthumous publications, fringe audiences (although their supporters are always loyal), poverty, shortened lifespans, addictions and (what to us are) unhealthy obsessions. The twentieth century, with its own mental problems, was kind to these people.

Unfortunately, since then, and in the face of a mindless mass culture, things have gotten tougher for mind-artists. Still, none of this matters. To paraphrase, they make apples because that’s what apple trees do. It’s silly to think apple trees would stop making apples, or start growing mandarins.

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If we go to heaven they’ll put us to work on the thunder, Captain.

Georg Büchner, Woyzeck, Scene 1

I’m interested in writing as necessity. Writers as introverts, social isolates, homosexuals, paedophiles, thieves, agitators, whiners, miserable bastards borne of bad genetics and unsatisfactory childhoods. I don’t want to understand damaged brains (as Büchner did), but how visions are summoned, characters pimped, storms invoked, the screams of chemical imaginations. Like Büchner, part medical student, part lecturer and anatomist of fish (and human weaknesses), part revolutionary (although he’d given this up by 1835), author of a dissertation on the nervous system of the barbel fish (Mémoire sur le Système Nerveux du Barbeaux (Cyprinus barbus L.),1836).   

Georg Büchner was born on 17 October 1813 in Goddelau (now Riedstadt). At the time of his death from typhus, aged 23, he had never seen any of his work performed onstage. His only publications were his Mémoire and a limp satire of the German nobility. Sixty years after his death, a fellow medical student said, ‘Frankly we didn’t care for this Georg Büchner. He wore a tall hat, always pushed far back on his neck, constantly had a distasteful expression like a cat in a thunderstorm, held himself completely apart.’

Büchner was considered (but didn’t consider himself) part of the ‘Young Germany’ movement, a group of artists and writers (including Heinrich Heine) who called for improvements to the lot of women, the emancipation of Jews and the separation of church and state.

All that comes down to us today is a sketch of the author, a few letters and reminiscences, his 1835 French Revolution play Danton’s Death, a novella (Lenz), Leonce and Lena, Woyzeck, a banned political pamphlet and two 1833 Victor Hugo translations-for-money. A small body of work but one which, given another twenty or thirty years, might have delivered the world its next Goethe, or Schiller.

Büchner’s father was Goddelau’s well-respected district physician, and Georg was destined for the same profession. In 1816, the family moved to Darmstadt where Büchner’s five siblings were born.

The young Büchner was initially educated at home by his mother, later attending the Ludwig-Georgs-Gymnasium. He was an avid reader of Shakespeare, Homer, Goethe, listened to his mamma singing Hessian folksongs (which appear in Woyzeck as a calming counterpoint to the protagonist’s growing madness): ‘The sun shines bright at Candlemas / The corn stands full and high / Down in the meadow, two by two / They all come dancing by.’ (Georg Büchner, Woyzeck, Scene 21)

Aged 18, he left to study medicine in Strasbourg. He nursed his landlord’s daughter, Minna Jaeglé, through an illness, and the pair became engaged. To the University of Giessen to continue his medical studies, complete exams and matriculate. He found the town’s provincial air frustrating. ‘The wretched people patiently pull the cart on which the princes and liberals play their monkey tricks.’

Here he met the evangelical theologian Friedrich Ludwig Weidig, instigator of the failed 1833 ‘Frankfurter Wachensturm’, a typically German putsch designed to trigger a nationwide revolt. For Weidig, Büchner wrote his 1834 pamphlet The Hessian Courier, a tract condemning corruption in th Grand Duchy of Hesse.The text reflects the young man’s revolutionary zeal:

This paper is supposed to report the truth to the Hessian state, but whoever tells the truth will be hanged, yes, even those who read the truth will perhaps be punished by perjury judges. Therefore, those to whom this sheet comes must observe the following:

1. They must carefully keep the sheet away from the police outside their home;
2. They must tell it only to faithful friends …

… The life of the rich is one long Sunday. They live in fine houses, they wear elegant clothes. They have well-fed faces and speak a language of their own. But the people lie before them like dung on the fields.

In July 1834, two of Büchner’s friends were arrested in possession of 150 copies of the pamphlet. Büchner and Weidig were charged with treason, and Weidig was tortured and died in prison. Büchner’s room was searched, letters confiscated but he was released due to a lack of evidence.

He returned to live with his parents in Darmstadt. Here (as he wrote, ‘annihilated by the dreadful fatalism of history’). In early 1835, he completed Danton’s Death in five weeks. An uneasy relationship with his father, soon to be explored in the character of Woyzeck’s Doctor, feeding Woyzeck a diet of peas to test their effect. Germanic sternness, formality, the never-far-away humiliation accorded the lower classes:

… another case of progressive donkeyfication, a frequent result of feminine upbringing and the use of the German language. Your mother’s been pulling out your hairs for souvenirs – it’s getting quite thin these days.

According to Victor Price, ‘[Büchner] wrote the play in his father’s laboratory, hiding the manuscript under medical books when his father came in. His brother Ludwig acted as a lookout on the stairs, and there was a ladder behind the house in case Georg had to climb over the garden wall in a hurry.’

Hearing of his impending arrest, Büchner fled Darmstadt in March 1835 and joined Minna in Strasbourg. Soon after he started writing Lenz:

At first there was an urge, a movement inside him, when the stones and rocks bounded away, when the grey forest shook itself beneath him and the mist now blurred its outlines [. . . ]

Lenz shows a (necessary) change of direction from the purely political, from an outer to inner search, a fascination with the mind, with madness, via the story of the ‘Storm and Stress’ poet Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792). The poet’s psychosis, a journey across the mountains, finding refuge with reformer Pastor Johann Friedrich Oberlin. Calmness versus madness; country versus city; Büchner as wandering poet who ‘saw his own mental crisis in that of the gifted, passionate, finally unbalanced Lenz.’ Here, a modernist sensibility charting the decline of the mind, a precise, scientific, but fragmentary journey towards an inevitable tragedy. According to Büchner:

I find a terrible uniformity in human nature, an inexorable force, conferred upon all and none, in human circumstances. The individual: mere foam on the wave [. . . ] a ridiculous struggle against an iron law [. . .]

After Lenz, Büchner kept busy learning Italian and English, translating Hugo’s Marie Tudor and Lucrece Borgia, writing Leonce and Lena and possibly starting Woyzeck. Additionally, he completed his thesis on the barbel fish:

What is the relation of the cerebral nerves with the spinal nerves, the cranial vertebrae and the enlargements of the brain? Which of them are the first at the bottom of the scale of vertebrate animals? What are the laws according to which their number is increased or diminished [. . .]

Safer than writing political pamphlets, more acceptable to his father, the chance of a solid job and income (and after all, why let a perfectly good brain go to waste?). He sent his thesis to the natural philosopher Lorenz Oken at the University of Zürich, who offered him a lectureship. In January 1837, he fell sick with what he thought was a cold. He wrote to Minna: ‘I have no desire to die and am as healthy as I ever was.’

But he did die, from typhus, on 19 February 1837.

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‘Only one thing abides: an infinite beauty that passes from form to form, eternally changed and revealed afresh.’

Georg Büchner, Lenz

Johann Christian Woyzeck (1780-1824) was a German wigmaker and ex-soldier who stabbed his landlady, 46-year-old Christian Woost, to death in 1821.

Like Büchner’s Woyzeck, Johann Woyzeck was nervous, heard voices, almost certainly suffered from schizophrenia. Unlike Büchner’s Woyzeck, he’d been raised in poverty, a drifter, passing from job to job – barber, servant, soldier, tailor.

His case convened on 3 June 1821 in Leipzig and lasted three years. During this time, his lawyer, Dr Clarus, argued diminished mental capacity (the first time this defence had been used in a German court).

Ultimately, the court decided Woyzeck did understand right from wrong and sentenced him to death. On 27 August 1824, he was publicly executed in Leipzig’s town square. It’s likely Büchner, as a young boy, would’ve heard of the case, discussed at school, in the streets, at home, the details made clear in an 1825 profile published in a journal to which his father subscribed.

Did this story stay with the boy? Something more than a morality tale, a true crime freakshow? A warning to the deep-thinking child, and adolescent? And later, Büchner’s own flight from arrest, his recurrent fear and guilt, voices reminding him of his friend, Minnegerode, tortured to death for keeping a few pamphlets? Woyzeck’s grey matter stirring, a scribbled plan, as he started writing his play in late 1836.

Hungry, tired after a day’s lecturing, shouting and laughing from the streets below, but the vision, the ghosts emerging fully formed. One scene per night, or faster, the whole lot disappointing him, burning them, starting again? All the time, Woyzeck’s mental state close to his own? The idea of writing his way out of illness?

Either way, a series of fragments as powerful today as they were 190 years ago. The sharp, frenetic dialogue reflecting Woyzeck’s psychosis; the excision of everything unnecessary; the contrast of dialogue and folksong; the unheard voices, all leading to the inevitable. According to Matthew Wilson Smith:

[. . . ] the play introduces a new form of aesthetics, one that operates directly and materially upon the nervous system of the spectators in much the same way that the play’s eponymous character is operated upon by his environment.

The drama begins in a small room in Woyzeck’s army barracks, the private preparing to shave the tyrannical Captain, who explains: ‘Woyzeck, you always look so worked up. A decent chap doesn’t look like that, I mean a decent chap with a clear conscience.’ Woyzeck repeating, ‘Yes, sir … yes, sir.’

Now we have our hero, who eventually tells the Captain: ‘Oh, self-control. I’m not very strong on that, sir. You see, the likes of us just don’t have any self-control.’ The first scene anticipating the final, beside the pond, beside Woyzeck’s wife’s, Marie’s, body.

All at once we’re in Büchner’s head, too. The scene moves to the countryside, Woyzeck and his friend Anders are cutting sticks. No rural idyll here, instead, what we’ve already suspected about Woyzeck: ‘Do you see the light patch on the grass over there [Anders]? Where the toadstools are. That’s where this head comes rolling down every night. Somebody picked it up once, thought it was a hedgehog. Three days and three night later he was in his coffin.’

According to Victor Price: ‘[Woyzeck’s] symptoms are depicted with brilliant economy … he is the first clinically observed case of psychosis in literature.’According to Sybille Fuchs: ‘Georg Büchner’s research into the central nervous system was path-breaking in its time, and its results remain valid today.’

Imagine, Büchner stopping at a tavern on the way home from a day’s lecturing, pulling out a sheet of paper and writing: ‘Scene III. The town. MARIE, sitting at a window with her child on her arm.’ Dashing off a scene in which Marie and her friend sit at a window watching the handsome and virile Drum Major march past. Margaret tells Marie, ‘And everybody knows you can see your way through a pair of leather breeches.’

Marie slams the window shut, calls her friend a bitch, says to her son: ‘Come on, boy. Let them talk. You’re only a whore’s brat but I love your bastard’s face.’ A few words to create a whole history, poor Woyzeck, already half-mad, coming in and saying: ‘It followed me right to the edge of town. Something we can’t grasp, something we can’t understand, something that drives us mad.’

Büchner’s thoughts, perhaps? Each of us trapped in our own personality, our own history, by our own hard-wired brain – the inculcated beliefs, the angry fathers and loving mothers, the compassionate omas, the graceful gods, the cruelty, the deviance, the overthinking and madness? A Protestant fog hanging heavy, small-holdings versus factories, peace versus revolution, village versus city, mill-owner versus worker, the dichotomies of early nineteenth century life. The boy Büchner sitting in church on a hard pew swinging his legs, his pappa scolding him, the pastor thundering:

And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them for the battle [. . . ]

The Revelation made real, over and over, until it was part of the boy’s still fusing, still forming brain-box and beliefs. As though such a world existed, such a battle might happen. The boy Büchner wondering if this was story-telling, or real life. Jesus bleeding on the walls, the harmonium wheezing, Bach sung flat and solemn and out-of-tune. No surprise that Büchner, that any of us, might internalise a faulty view of the world?

Back at the University of Zürich, Büchner scribbles: ‘Scene VII. At the DOCTOR’s.’ The Doctor scolds Woyzeck for pissing in the street. ‘And me giving you threepence a day.’ For, we discover, a medical trial in which Woyzeck eats nothing but peas. Here, the Doctor a critique of science. ‘No, Woyzeck, I am not angry. Anger is unhealthy. Unscientific.’

Meanwhile, Woyzeck explains: ‘Doctor, have you ever seen nature double? When the sun’s at noon and it’s like the whole world was going up in flames? That’s when a terrible voice spoke to me.’ The Doctor isn’t concerned. ‘A classic case of aberratio mentalis partialis of the second order.

Nicely developed, too.’ Woyzeck’s life – his wife, his son, none if it meaning anything to the Doctor. ‘Eating your peas? … You’re an interesting case.’ The Doctor (and Captain) figures of military, social, perhaps intellectual authority, though never moral. The dichotomy of how things appear, and how they function, beneath the skin, the skull. Woyzeck full of faint dog whistles: an anti-war tract, a satire of the middle-class, an examination of the limits of science, and philosophy. And yet, none of these. According to Victor Price:

[Woyzeck] is neither slice-of-life naturalism, nor larger than life expressionism, though it has been claimed as a forerunner of both. Nor is it an anti-militarist tract … It is something far more complex than any of these, a unique work, organically conceived, which defies any attempt to put it in a category.

Büchner as the first writer whose neuroses and obsessions were central to his work. But not the last. Edgar Allen Poe writing The Tell-Tale Heart, six years after Woyzeck:

And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over acuteness of the senses? – now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man’s heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.

Three decades later, 16-year-old Arthur Rimbaud describing his own ecstatic visions in ‘The Drunken Boat’:

I know the skies bursting with lightning, and the waterspouts

And the surf and the currents; I know the evening,

And dawn as exalted as a flock of doves

And at times I have seen what man thought he saw:

Or William Burroughs, rounding out the 1950s, hooked on his own regime of drugs, a modern anatomist critiquing his hallucinations via a stream of consciousness:

In the City Market is the Meet Café. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III [. . .]

William S. Burroughs, The Naked Lunch, 1959

In the end, Woyzeck is about a man’s refusal to accept the world as he finds it. A world of part truths and lies; of economic inequality, unearned privilege, failed relationships. Scene X, Woyzeck confronting an unfaithful Marie. ‘A sin like that. A great fat one. It stinks first to smoke the angels out of heaven. You’ve got red lips, Marie. And not a blister on them.’

A few days before his death, a delirious Büchner explained: ‘We do not have too much pain, we have too little. Because through pain we arrive at God.’ But also, at the truth of the matter. The figure of the Christ-like truth-teller winding his or her way through the history of literature.

Finally, Woyzeck takes Marie to the pond beside the woods, stabs her to death. ‘Take that. And that. Why can’t you die?’ He returns to the tavern, dances in his bloodied clothes, sings of infidelity (‘My daughter, oh my daughter / What were you thinking of / Hanging round grooms and coachmen / And giving them your love?’). Questioned by the landlord, he runs away, returns to the pond, silences his voices and tells Marie, ‘Your sins were black. Did I whiten you again?’ Throws his knife in the water, but not far enough, wades in to retrieve it.

Büchner took his time over Woyzeck, continually rewrote it. After his death, his brother Ludwig, unable to make out the handwriting, excluded it from a collection of Büchner’s writings. Writer-publisher Karl Emil Franzos eventually found the manuscript with its ‘microscopically small’ handwriting, chemically treated the faded pages and, in 1877, published an excerpt (of what he misread as ‘Wozzeck’) in the Berlin literary journal Mehr Licht.

Soon after, he included a heavily-edited version in Büchner’s 1879 collected works. The play was first produced by Max Reinhardt at Munich’s Residenztheater in 1913 in time for Büchner’s hundredth anniversary. Since then, the fragments have been performed, adapted, set to music (most notably, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck) hundreds of times. A problematic play for problematic times, perhaps? According to Sybille Fuchs:

What is it about Woyzeck that continues to fascinate us? [It] is performed again and again, and also inspires film and television versions—for better or worse. For one thing, the play’s subject matter and themes are as meaningful today as they were in Büchner’s day. 

Through Büchner, the tragic figure in German drama becomes a small, mumbling soldier, surviving on a diet of peas, trying to understand his wife’s infidelity, his superiors’ contempt, all the time, seemingly unaware of the nothingness in his own life. In this sense, Büchner prefigured the emptiness and absurdism of much of twentieth century literature.

It wasn’t until the mid-1880s that critic Gerhard Hauptmann explained: ‘Georg Büchner’s spirit now lived with us, in us, amongst us.’ And so many ‘skull-poets’ who followed: the Roberts Walser and Musil, Flannery O’Connor’s mistletoe and murderers, Jean Genet’s pimps and prostitutes, Malcolm Lowry’s dead dog, David Foster Wallace’s lobsters, glass bees, books of imaginary beings. 

Büchner as a memory artist, a poet of the small terrors of life. The darkness so important, so critical and central and bone-marrow-mawing to the human experience – and that’s us, small, big, skinny, fat, wheezing, stinking, rude, arrogant, compassionate, gracious creatures dragging our sorry arses through life.

And yet all of this might come to nothing. Every discordant symphony, every insane tract, every paint splatter washed away with the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The brain as machine, controlled by an algorithm, each day, week, year, becoming more effective at stealing our thoughts, pumping them into a vat and mixing them with every other thought, producing something Büchner and Shakespeare wouldn’t recognise.

If we’re not careful, the future will belong to the 28-year old wearing a North Face jacket, studying a PhD in machine learning, working for Microsoft, unaware (unlike Büchner) of his or her own nothingness. Far better the rough edges, the fragments and stuttering thoughts of a Büchner, Don Quixote, Jorge Luis Borges telling us: ‘All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.’

The student writing his Orwell essay, his persuasive piece; the teenager set on her first novel; none of them will be writers. That will fall to the machines. According to author and illustrator Rob Biddulph:

Art ‘is all about translating something that you feel internally into something that exists externally … true art is about the creative process much more than it’s about the final piece. And simply pressing a button to generate an image in not a creative process.’

 A few weeks before his death, Woyzeck wrote to his family: ‘Only a total misunderstanding of our social conditions could make people believe that a total restructuring of our religious and social ideas could be achieved through the medium of topical literature.’ This doesn’t mean Büchner believed his efforts had been wasted, or would come to nothing.

The final stage direction of Woyzeck (‘He drowns’) wasn’t Büchner’s. It was added by Franzos thirty years later. Büchner never said that Woyzeck drowned at the end of the play.

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