Werner Herzog's Debt to Georg Buchner

Franz A. Birgel Muhlenberg College

The filmmaker Wemcr Herzog has been labeled eve1)1hing from a romantic, visionary idealist and seeker of transcendence to a reactionary. regressive fatalist and t)Tannical megalomaniac. Regardless of where viewers may place him within these e:-..1reme positions of the spectrum, they will presumably all admit that Herzog personifies the true auteur, a director whose unmistakable style and wor1dvie\v are recognizable in every one of his films, not to mention his being a filmmaker whose art and projected self-image merge to become one and the same. He has often asserted that film is the art of i1literates and should not be a subject of scholarly analysis: "People should look straight at a film. That's the only \vay to see one. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates. And film culture is not analvsis, it is agitation of the mind. Movies come from the count!)' fair and circus, not from art and academicism" (Greenberg 174). Herzog wants his ideal viewers to be both mesmerized by his visual images and seduced into seeing reality through his eyes. In spite of his reference to fairgrounds as the source of filmmaking and his repeated claims that his ·work has its source in images, it became immediately transparent already after the release of his first feature film that literature played an important role in the development of his films, a fact which he usually downplays or effaces. Given Herzog's fascination with the extremes and mysteries of the human condition as well as his penchant for depicting outsiders and eccentrics, it comes as no surprise that he found a kindred spirit in Georg Buchner whom he has called "probably the most ingenious writer for the stage that we ever had" (Walsh 11). It was not Buchner the revolutionary author of Der hessische Landbote, or as East German critics claimed, Buchner the precursor of Marxism, who appealed to Herzog, the least politically active filmmaker of the New German Cinema, but rather, Buchner the fatalistic determinist and satirist of scientific empiricism. Living in a small village in Bavaria where he spent much of his time reading and then later studying literature for a brief period, Herzog's ex-perience of Buchner apparently constituted a literary Urerlebnis which functioned both as an inspiration in his onn creative process and as a confirmation of his own worldview. Both Biiclmer' s Woyzeck and Herzog's films are characterized by short, dense lines of dialogue and visionary images, whereby the director's apocalyptic "\isions bear more than a _ 6 Annual ofForeign Films and Literature (/ 998) superficial resemblance to Wo~-Leck ' s hallucinations. Like Buchner's protagonist. Herzog's heroes are, on the basis of narrati\'c and character motivation. largely inaccessible and enigmatic outsiders who arc out of sync with society and engage in a fai1ed rebellion against e;o..1crnal forces detcnnining their fate and against the indifference of the cosmos. And like Woyzeck, their isolation forces them to retreat into silence and into their own Yisionary inner world. Gh·en his admiration for the ninteenth-century author, Herzog's spiritual pilgrimage on foot from Munich to Paris in November and December of 1974 (so that the ailing Lone Eisner would recover) may even be interpreted as a reenactment of Johann Michael Reinhold Lenz' winter travels as described in Buchner's biographical novella Lenz. However, this fascination with Buchner constitutes not only a personal preoccupation but also a part of a strategy to gain acceptance. On several occasions. Herzog placed himself and the other filmmakers of the New Gennan Cinema in the tradition of what he calls legitimate German culture, "in the sense that Kleist, Buchner and Kafka are legitimate" (Kent 19). Woyzeck constituted a literary subtext in many of Herzog's films long before he eventually filmed the play. References to Buchner aboWld already in his first feature film, Lebenszeichen (Signs of Life, 1968), in which the protagonist's name Stroszeck alludes to Woyzeck, especially if one thinks of Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck. Very loosely based on von Arnim 's Der tolle Jnva/ide aufdem Fort Ratonneau, the film owes, except for the main characters and the basic dramatic situation, more to Buchner than to von Amim. In the play, Woyzeck says to the Doctor: ''Wenn die Sonn in Mittag steht und es ist, als ging' die Welt in Feuer auf, hat schon eine fiirchterliche Stimme zu mir geredt" (Buchner 120). Like Woyzeck., the displaced soldier Stroszeck inLebenszeichen appears to hear that voice, and during what seems to be an eternal high noon, he rebels against the ~ppressive landscape, the s~rc~ng heat and suffocating atmosphere. He 1s the first of many whose tltamc yet absurd revolt against the cosmos is destined for failure. The circle, which appears as an objective correlative to Woyzeck 's increasing madness, as he sees Marie dancing with the drum major and the wor~ "i~er zu" (BUchner 125} are repeated first by Marie ~s the couple turns m ctrcles and later by Woyzeck-·tltis circle can be found m almost. all of Herzog's films as his recurring trademark leitmotif. Although 1t cannot be argued that the circle motif is specifically bo •ed •\ hn · · ITO\\ f. rom BuC ~r, 1t IS noteworthy that both the writer and the filmmaker use u ~sa negati\'e symbol. Fr~m the whirling windmills in Lebenszeichen (\\here they c:ause Stroszeck s insanity) to the turning flags in Cobra Verde ( 1987). the cucle reappears as an image of stasis and stagna t.1on as we JJ as F Birge/: Werner Jlerzog 's Debt to G. Biichner 7

of chaos and madness. 1 Herzog's version of the Kaspar Hauser story (commonly known in the U.S. as The 1\~vstery ofKaspar Hauser and in England as The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, 1974) begins with a slightly modified line from Buchner's Lenz: "Horen Sie dcnn nicht die entsetzliche Stimmc, die um den ganzen Horizont schreit und die man gewohnlich die Stille heifit'' (Buchner 84) while one sees a panorama shot of tall wheat being blown by the wind--a beautiful yet enigmatic image. Already the actual title of the film, Jeder jiir sich und Gott gegen aile (Everyman for Himself and God against A/f) refers to humanity's alienation in a hostile universe. Like H'oyzeck, this film presents a protest not only against society, but also against the cosmos. Herzog himself has described the universe as a ''glatte Fehlleistung ... ein absoluter Murks ... keine hannonische Weltordnung .. nur Murks ... ein Durcheinander'' (Rost 92)? After Kaspar is attacked for the first time, there is a cut to a shot of clouds, as if to ask the heavens for an answer. and after the second attack, the film cuts to a swan in a pond and then to a shot of grass and trees blowing in the wind, implying nature's indifference to what has just happened. Images from Woyzeck echo throughout the film, such as Kaspar being put on display at the fair and the image of the horse and monkey, two creatures the barker at the fair in the play presents in his ironic commentary on human nature and the progress of civilization. After Kaspar, the young Mozart, and Hombrecito run away from the fair (in a scene reminiscent of the Keystone Cops-style chase in Murnau's Nosjeratu, a film remade by Herzog in 1978), the to\\-11 scribe proudly proclaims: "Ein schones Protokoll, ein genaues Protokoll! lch werde ein Protokoll schreiben, "ie man es nicht aile Tage erlebt." These words recall the equally ironic courtroom scene which is sometimes staged as the final scene of JVoyzeck when the clerk states: "Ein guter Mord, ein achter Mord, ein schoner Mord, so schon als man ihn nur verlangen tun kann; \vir haben schon lange so keinen gehabt" (Buchner 254 ). One of the most obvious thematic parallels is the negative depiction of science. Both Woyzeck and Kaspar become objects of scientific investigations, whereby they are dehumanized and elicit our empathy. For Herzog, the metaphysical world of dreams and the imagination hold more truth than positivistic or empirical knowledge. The director's rejection of modern scientific investigation is perhaps best presented inNosferatu where Van Helsing argues that vampires cannot exist from a scientific standpoint. Like Lucy who sacrifices herself in this film, the viewers are lead, as she Annual of Foreign Fi lm5 and Literature (1 998) savs. •·to believe tllose things which'' they .. kllow to be untrue.·· In Jeder flir si ~h und Got/ gegen aile, the satire on science reaches its climax in the to\\n scribe's writing down of the autopsy report concerning Kaspar's defonncd brain as if it were an explanation for his unusual behavior. The film 's final spoken words arc those of the scribe who begins his statement with the now familiar words: ''Ein schones Protokoll. cin genaues Protokoll! lch werdc zu Protokoll geben. dafi man an Hauser Defonnationen entdeckt hat. Wir habcn endlich fur diesen befremd.lichcn Menschen eine Erklarung, \\ie man sie bcsser nicht finden tw1 kann., . Here Herzog not only presents an indictment of society's search for simple solutions, but also of its absurd penchant for keeping meticulous written records. Since he had already twice appropriated the words of the courtroom scene for Jeder fUr sich und Gott gegen aile, Herzog did not include this scene later in his filmed version of Woyzeck, but rather superimposed the words on the top half of the screen before it goes black. (It is interesting that while working with Clemens Scheitz on the film, Herzog became such a fan of the diminutive actor, that he \van ted him to have the last words in the film. The night before the closing scene was to be shot on the last day of filming, Herzog Vt'fote the final lines [Rost 66-67]­ -an indication that under pressure he relies on Buchner's words.) After the completion ofJeder fUr sich und Gott gegen aile, Herzog originally planned to film Woyzeck \\ith Bruno S., but then decided that Bruno was not the right actor for the role. He then told Bruno that he would invent a story for him, a work which h~ described as "not a Woyzeck, but something \\ith a basic feeling like Woyzeck in it" (Walsh 12). At the 1993 Philadelphia Film Festival, Herzog stated that he completed writing Stroszek nithin two weeks. The film could be called "Woyzeck comes to America... Soon after their arrival in Railroad Flats, Wisconsin, the naive misfit Bruno and his two friends get steamrolled by America's buy-now­ pay-later consumer culture. His girlfriend Eva reverts to prostitution and abandons him not for a drum major, but for a truck driver, America's 1970s symbol of virility. Made in 1976, theyearofthe U.S. bicentennial, Stroszek was planned in part as a response to the strong domination of American films and culture in Western Europe, intending to correct Germany's romantic view of America . . . When Herzog's adaptation of Woyzeck finally came to the screen. th~ cnttcal response was mixed. Many thought that the film was done qwckly, almost ~s an afterthought to Nosferatu . The general impression was that he had Just completed the latter in July of 1978, still had leftover film st~k as well as the cast of that film with him on location in the Czech Repubhc and then, after a break of five days, began work on Woyzeck, F Birge/: Werner Herzog's Debt to G. Biichner 9

filming it in 18 days. 3 Among the positive re,·iewers were Hans C. Blumenberg and Jack Kroll. both of whom considered the film to be a faithful adaptation of the play. Blumenberg wrote in Die Zeit that Herzog did not deserve the boos and \vhistles which he received at Cannes. calling the film ';ein Nebenwerk. Keine Pleite" (210). Jack Kroll of Newsweek praised it as ''probably as definitive a version of Georg Buchner's fragmentary masterpiece as we are likely to get for a long time" (102). (Other positive reviews were \\Titten by Vincent Canby for the New York Times and Andrew Sarris for The Village Voice.) However, most critics. scholars and audiences tended to be less sympathetic. A few months before he made the film, Herzog described audiences used to more conventional realistic films as viewers ''coming toward [his} \VOrk with plans for certain sorts of 'prefabricated houses' in their minds, ... [expecting that his ·work) should follow exactly the pattern of those prefabricated mobile homes which they happen to have sticking some\vhere in their brains" (Walsh 7). With his earlier films, Herzog created a certain horizon of expectations, and with Woyzeck he disappointed even his ideal audiences, in whose minds he himself had erected these "prefabricated houses." The viewers had learned to look for the unusual: expeditions to exotic places, bizarre situations and slow meditative images of nature evoking a sense of the sublime. Few of these expectations were met by Woyzeck. By adapting one of the best known plays of German literature, Herzog also had to deal with definite expectations on the part of German scholars who had preconceived ideas of how the play should have been filmed. Readers of this nearly complete fragment of a play had certain notions not only about its characters and their motivation, but also about the play's structure, how the scenes should be ordered, as well as which scenes belong to the play proper (and should be included) and which ones belong to the manuscript fragments or drafts (and should be excluded). 4 For those familiar with Herzog's other films, there was a sense that cinematically, Woyzeck's visions would have permitted ample space for non-diegetic inserts (as inJeder filr sich und Gott gegen aile) or point of view shots from the characters' insane perspective (as in Aguirre). In short, both Herzog's fans and German scholars approached the film with these "prefabricated houses., in their minds. With his static camera and lack of point of view shots, Herzog, it has been argued, deviated from Buchner's intentions by not evoking sympathy for his characters. 5 The viewers are not permitted 10 Annual of Foreign Films and Literature (1998) to see the world through the eyes ofWoyzeck or Marie, but rather. they are placed in the position of distant obsen·crs which allows little identification with the characters. By presenting them in such a detached manner as if he were presenting a case study, Herzog created a sense of alienation instead of empathy which frustrated many viewers' e;o.,:pectations. In support of Herzog's approach to the play, Canby writes: "Mr. Herzog is a poet for whom neither Marx nor Freud supplies all the answers. He cherishes as well as guards the mystery at the heart of Woyzeck" (C 14). Klaus Kinski 's acting and the camera work reinforce the enigmatic nature of the protagonist but do not deprive him of a sense of dignity in his oppression. As Herzog said of the Son of Sam murderer, "One has to acknowledge him as a human being and to respect his dignity even in his madness'' (Kent 30). Reminiscent of several scenes in the Kaspar Hauser film, the opening establishing shot of TVoyzeck is a pan from left to right across an idyllic \\ide tree-lined pond, sho\\ing a few scattered houses and the tmvn on the other side. Then from above the city, the camera pans from right to left, stops and holds the shot longer than one would e>.:pect, long enough for the viewer's eyes to focus on the courtyard of the barracks and to realize that something is wrong behind this picturesque set. The nex1 shot shows Woyzeck performing calisthenics under the command of a drill sergeant whose face is off-screen, only the lower half of his body is visible when he steps on Woyzeck after he collapses from exhaustion. Herzog adds this scene of physical brutalization in the barracks to the other fonns of physical and psychological oppression in the film: the hallucinations, the ridicule and moralizing by the Captain, Woyzeck' s functioning as a malnourished guinea pig for the Doctor, Marie's betrayal, and the beating by the Drum Major. The first spoken words, the Captain's "Langsam, Woyzeck, langsam" ironically appear to dictate the pace for the rest of the film. This sto,,ness culminates in the final murder scene which in its slow motion stylistically elevates the work into an operatic conclusion. Only when Woyzeck is sho\\n killing Marie and running across a field of tall flowers, whose blossoms have yet to bloom, do the viewers see images they have come to ex-pect of Herzog. Herzog's minimalist realism with its claustrophobic framing and s~atic camera captures the characters within the tight frame, underscoring Vlsually that not only Woyzeck and Marie are trapped, but also that the Captain and the Doctor cannot transcend their conceptual frameworks. The Captain voices society's cliches about morality (''Moral das ist wenn man moralisch is.t''), a~d the Doctor is obsessed \\ith the ill~sion of~rfonning research '\vhich mil make him immortal. In contrast to Woyzeck, who, like many of Herzog's protagonists, has difficulties ex"J'ressing himself, their use F B1 rgel: lf'erner Herzog 's Dehtto G. Biichner 11

of language is a form of domination. of controlling Woyzeck. And as in many of Herzog's films, the leaders of society are presented as suffering from obsessions themselves. Hearing voices and seeing \isions. Woyzeck. as played by Klaus Kinski. is often looking off into the distance. staring outside the frame and avoiding eye contact \\ith the other characters as an CA-prcssion of his alienation. Occasionally he directs his look straight at the audience, as if he were implicating it in his oppression. When Woyzeck says that smoke is rising from the city, the camera pans to it. but one sees no smoke coming from the same picturesque cit)· which was shonn in the opening shot. In the same manner, when the voices speak to him, urging him to kill Marie. one does not hear them. Woyzeck's hallucinations would have been more cinematic ifHerzog had actually presented them on the screen as he did in Aguirre ·when the conquistadors see the ship on the top of a tree (but then. that would also have increased the film's budget.) The scenes in Woyzeck take on the form oftable.aus unconnected by cinematic continuity: Herzog subverts eyeline matches, and in key sequences the camera does not move in for a close-up shot to engage the viewers. Often the characters are presented with their backs to the audience, not wtlike the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, who inspired some shots inJeder fir sich undGott gegen aile. With the exception of Woman at the Window (1822) which shows his wife looking out the \\indow, most of Friedrich's characters are outside, being either dwarfed by or engulfed in awe-inspiring landscapes. However, in Herzog's Woyzeck, similar images are ones of entrapment. Throughout the film Woyzeck and Marie are presented as passive victims. This is also evident in the acting of Eva Mattes' Marie who is not Marie, but obviously playing Marie in an almost Brechtian sense, perfomting the role in an unmelodramatic. passive acting style. In the Bible reading scene. for example, from which Herzog cut several lines, Marie does not cry out, and she recites the nihilistic fairy tale of the grandmother without any intonation in her voice. Although aware of the social revolutionary elements in Buchner's play, Herzog do\\nplays them. Just as he rejects a Marxist understanding of the pia}', so too, does he inhibit any psychological insight into what is going on in the inarticulate Woyzeck's mind. Not only the people around Woyzeck oppress him, but also nature becomes an agent in his destruction, and it is nature which compels him to kill. In his madness, Woyzeck revolts against nature and all his oppressors by killing the person who is closest to him. His insane visions reflect the nineteenth century's growing disbelief in a stable and ordered unjverse. Woyzeck says the earth is hollow underneath: ''Hohl, horst du? alles hohl da unten!" (Buchner l 15)·-one could fall through its thin crust. For Herzog, the universe is an outright 12 Annual of Foreign Films and Literature ( 1998) mistake. a botched-up job. a muddle \\ithout a harmonious world order. and only his hallucinating heroes can see this chaos behind the veil of order imposed on it by reason and common sense. As Michael Bloom argues in his intepretation of Jeder fur si ch und Gott gegen aile. "if JVoyzeck is a protest against the universe~ Herzog's \Vork is a condemnation of it" (229). The only possible responses for Herzog's oppressed and alienated protagonists in a chaotic world are either a silent withdrawal or a rebellion destined for failure (such as when Stroszek in Lebenszeichen attacks the sun by shooting fireworks into the air, fighting fire \\ith fire). Considering the common existential view of both authors, Herzog's film of Buchner's Woyzeck is not only a cinematic adaptation depicting the story of an isolated, suffering character who rebels against a hostile world, but also the filmmaker's personal statement about the human condition, about humanity's disorientation in what he perceives as an indifferent cosmos.

NOTES

1 For a discussion of the circle in Lebenszeichen andAgui"e, der Zorn Gottes, see Dana Benelli, ''The cosmos and its discontents," esp. pp. 95-98. 2 Herzog expressed a similar sentiment to Amos Vogel who reports: "Herzog, privately, refers to Hieronymous Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights; his paradise, too, 'contained God's fatal errors from the start .. . visible only in corners, so that the painter would not be branded a heretic'" (45-46). 3 Brigitte Peuker surmises that "Herzog's haste--and the probable exhaustion of all concerned-may account for some of the film's problems" (190). Although Herzog omitted the phrase "ein Bart wie ein LOw" (Buchner, p. 120) from the conversation between Marie and the clean­ shaven Drum Major {played by Josef Bierbichler), there is still a continuity pro~lem wh~n the Captain and Doctor tease Woyzeck about his possibly findi~g a ~.atr from t~e beard of a drum major in his soup. In Woyze~k m Focus: Werner Herzog and His Critics " which ap~~ after this ~per was originally presented, Victoria M. Stiles com1ncmgly argues m support of Herzog's intepretation and arrangement of the scenes 5 See, f~r example, the arguments presented by Julie D. Prandi and Waltraud Mitgutsch .. F. Birge/: Werner J!erzog 's Debito G. Bilchner 13

BIBLIOGRAPIN

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