ABSTRACT
Volker Klotz’s Closed and Open Form in Drama had an important influence on critical receptions of Georg Buchner’s work as it allowed scholars to identify Woyzeck as an ‘open’ drama due to its episodic construction and fragmentary status. Woyzeck impresses with a narrative simplicity which borrows from the folk-tale and ballad tradition of European literature: the natural and spiritual worlds coalesce in the story of a poor man who wrestles with his enemies and murders his lover in a fit of jealousy. The fragmentary drama of Woyzeck employs aesthetics of deconstruction which can be compared to the principle of dissonance in music, the rejection of harmony in musical form which demands a more conscious way of listening. Philosophically and scientifically, Buchner’s work displays an interesting tension between idealism and empiricism. His aesthetic method of fragmentation embodies a ‘logic of disintegration’ which was to become the hallmark of the modernist work of art many decades after Buchner’s death.
