The Knife

1. The Knife • From the first scene, where Andres and Woyzeck are cutting wood with knives, which are clearly connected with Woyzeck’s hallucinations and foreshadow the murder of Marie with a knife. Woyzeck uses a razor to shave the Captain, where he is being abused and made a figure of fun. Marie tells him, when he discovers her affair with the Drum Major. ‘Rather a knife in my body than your hand on mine’, forerunning future action. When Woyzeck begins to fall into the madness that leads him to kill Marie, it is ‘Stab, stab the bitch’ which is his automatic reaction. From this point onwards he is determined to stab her with a knife. The scene where he buys the knife from the Jew accentuates this, with the jokes made about it being an ‘economical’ death. The murder of Marie is concentrated on the stabbing by the number of times he stabs her and ensures that she is dead. The final glimpses of Woyzeck are his attempts to reclaim the knife and conceal it by throwing it into the water, only to find that it is never deep enough to concealed.

2. The Bible • The religious background and overtones are felt all through the play and emphasise the hopelessness of the individual and the lack of meaning in religion. In the very first scene, Woyzeck’s hallucinations are linked to the Bible, with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (the fire travelling across the sky and the din of trumpets, ending in silence as if the world were dead). This is repeated in the next scene with Marie (smoke coming from the land). • Early on, Marie decides ‘We’re all going to Hell, man and woman’. When Woyzeck is accused by the Captain of having a child without the blessing of the church, Woyzeck quotes ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me’. Marie becomes Mary Magdalene when Woyzeck accuses her of ‘a big fat sin’. The first journeyman’s speech in Scene 12 is a mock sermon. Marie assumes the role of Mary Magdalene again when she tries to pray for forgiveness and wishes she could anoint Christ’s feet. • At times, though, she represents the Madonna figure when she is with the baby, although she does expose him to the depraved Drum Major. Woyzeck’s son is called Christian, but it is Woyzeck himself who is the Christ-like figure, just like all men, crucified by life.

3. Animals • Graphic animal imagery is used from the start in the play. In Woyzeck’s first few lines, the head about which he hallucinates is likened to a hedgehog is likened to a hedgehog and Andres’ song is about hares. Marie sees the Drum Major as a ‘lion’. This ties in with the fairground scene, when the monkey is dressed as a soldier, ‘the lowest form of humanity’. There is also an ‘astronomical horse’. When the Drum Major and the Sergeant speak of Marie in this scene, it is in terms of ‘foaling a cavalry regiment out of her’, thus ensuring that the sexual is always on an animal level, an attitude carried throughout the play.

4. Animals continued… • In the next scene, the horse is extremely important, cautioned by the Showman ‘to put human society to shame’. It is used as satire on the worst in humans and a comment on the stupidity of fighting. • The scene where Marie and the Drum Major meet alone is presented in purely bestial terms: ‘ Chest like a bull, beard like a lion’ and ‘ we’ll set up a stud farm for drum majors’. The Drum Major calls Marie a ‘wild animal’. • The Doctor scolds Woyzeck for ‘pissing against the wall like a dog’. Woyzeck begins to refer to Woyzeck as ‘bitch’. In the inn scene, watching Marie dance with the Drum Major, Woyzeck argues against fornication: ‘Man and woman, man and beast, in broad daylight, on the backs of your hands like flies’. • When the Doctor shows Woyzeck to his students to demonstrate the success of his experiment, the cat is presented as superior to Woyzeck. Woyzeck is made to wiggle his ears and that he is turning into a donkey. The cat can run away, Woyzeck can’t.

5. Children Woyzeck’s son is innocent , but will become as guilty as the rest of the world. He hides his eyes when Marie is guiltily trying on the earrings, and Marie tells him to shut his eyes, warning him he will go blind if he sees the sandman running across the wall. He becomes a symbol of immorality when the Captain accuses Woyzeck of having no morals, and Woyzeck refers to him in Biblical terms as ‘the little worm’. He is illegitimate, his mother is whore and his father mad, and so he has no chance in life from the beginning, and is fated to poverty and disaster in the same way as his parents. In the fairground scene, a child dances to the hurdy- gurdy and Woyzeck comments ‘Poor child’, emphasising the idea that all the poor and destined to suffer and take what fate deals to them. Children are used to comment on Margaret’s reference to all women being whores (‘and the girls had all red stockings on’. They also serve to prompt the Grandmother’s fairytale, about the little child to whom everything proved a disappointment and who was left all alone, probably the most important philosophical statement in the play, echoing Buchner’s view that life is all disappointment and that all men are alone in facing their destiny, with no external help from supernatural beings.

6. Heat and Cold • Woyzeck’s growing madness is characterised by bouts of heat and dizziness, emphasising its physical origins. Heat is linked to apocalyptic visions of fire (think Woyzeck in the first scene ‘smoke coming from the land like an oven’. Heat and sweat are also associated with the idea of poverty and hard work; the child is described as ‘There are beads of sweat on his forehead. Nothing but work under the sun. We even sweat in our sleep. We poor folk’. Woyzeck describes Marie’s sin as ‘a big fat sin – it stinks so much you could smoke out all the angels from Heaven with it’. • The Doctor is portrayed as cool ‘My pulse is its usual 60 and I tell you with the utmost coolness…’ Woyzeck replies ‘When the sun is at its highest point in the sky and it is as if the whole world is on fire – that’s when a terrible voice spoke to me’. When Woyzeck tries to explain his feelings to Andres, he says that his head is ‘swimming’ and that he must go out because ‘It’s so hot in here’. • It is in the scene where he kills Marie that this imagery comes to a head. ‘Are you cold, Marie? And yet you’re so warm. What hot lips you’ve got. Hot whore’s breath…Are you cold? When you’re cold you won’t feel cold anymore. The morning dew won’t make you feel cold’. When he reaches the inn after the murder, he tells Kathe that he is hot. Physical states mirror mental psychological ones throughout the play.

7. Colour • Red and black are constant points of reference in the play. Woyzeck’s visions of fire are red, linked to the later descriptions of blood. Red also becomes symbolic of the sin of sexual lust, with Marie identified as the scarlet woman and her attempts to repent through her reading of the bible. • Marie is described as the ‘weight of all that black hair would drag her down’. It is Marie’s ‘red mouth’ that symbolises her guilt for Woyzeck. Echoes of Macbeth ripple through Woyzeck’s last words. ‘Am I still bloody? I must wash. There’s one stain. And there’s another’. • The gold of the earrings too emphasises the fact that poor people can never become rich in a moral way. They are associated with guilt and she even makes the baby hide his eyes from them.