Grand Passions of Humble Folk: Woyzeck and the Jews’ Beech

Abstract

With Franz Woyzeck and Friedrich Mergel members of the lowest social classes step into the forefront of German literature for the first time (1837 and 1842). However, the end of both heroes, or anti-heroes, has effects on the reader traditionally reserved for great tragedy. Or, to put it more precisely, the authors Georg Büchner and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff probably intended their works to have effects of this sort, but their intentions have gone unheeded and been misunderstood. For this was not what was conventionally expected of works written in prose about people of humble origin. Moreover, the traditional concept of tragedy is out of place in our modern age and has been long since discussed to death by literary scholars. In this context, both works have overtaxed the cultural, historical and particularly the religious knowledge of the academics and their feeling for art. This has led to their misinterpreting specifically the endings of both works.

“It will befall thee as thou didst unto me.”