Act I, Scene 1, in the captain’s room. Wozzeck is shaving him and the bored captain lectures him: he is a good man, but he has no morals, because he has a child without the blessing of the Church. Wozzeck answers that morals are for people with money. If the poor ever got to heaven, he says, they would have to help make the thunder there too; and if he were a gentleman, with a hat, a watch and an eyeglass, and could talk refined, he would be virtuous as well. In Wozzeck (Alban Berg, premiered in Berlin in 1925), based on the Woyzeck that Georg Büchner left unfinished at his death in 1837, this private soldier in a German garrison town lives by serving others. To earn a little more, he submits to the experiments of a doctor who makes him eat nothing but beans and studies his symptoms like those of a laboratory animal. He has visions, hears voices and feels that the ground is hollow beneath his feet. His companion, Marie, the mother of his child, yields to the advances of the drum major, who later beats Wozzeck up in the barracks. Wozzeck takes Marie for a walk by a pond, sees a red moon rise that looks to him like a bloodied blade and kills her with a knife. He returns to the tavern, where someone sees blood on his hand. He goes back to the pond to look for the knife, throws it into the water, wades in to push it further away and drowns. The next morning, some children tell Marie’s son that his mother is dead. The boy carries on playing with his hobby horse.
// The theoryCrime as the product of exploitation
Radical criminology, or the new criminology, was born with The New Criminology (1973) by Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young and with the work of Richard Quinney in the United States. Inspired by Marxism, it holds that crime is neither an individual trait nor a disease, but the product of a society based on class exploitation. Poverty, humiliation and alienation push the poor into crime, and the penal system criminalizes their behavior while leaving that of the powerful unpunished. For radical criminology, the question is not what is wrong with the offender, but what is wrong with the society that produces him.
Everyone uses him
Every character in the opera exploits Wozzeck in a different way. The captain humiliates him morally, the doctor turns him into an object of experiment, the army pays him just enough not to starve and the drum major takes Marie from him and beats him. Wozzeck has no money, no health, no dignity and no one to listen to him. Radical criminology would read his crime as the last link in that chain of exploitation: the result of a society that has taken everything from him, until the only thing he has left is violence. Büchner, a revolutionary in his time, wanted the audience to see that.
// The subjectA real case
Büchner was inspired by the case of Johann Christian Woyzeck, a former soldier and barber who in 1821, in Leipzig, stabbed to death his partner, the widow Johanna Christiane Woost. His case sparked one of the first great debates in German forensic psychiatry: the physician Johann Christian August Clarus examined Woyzeck and declared him responsible for his actions despite his hallucinations, and he was publicly executed in 1824. Büchner, who was a doctor, turned that report into a denunciation: the doctor in the play is a caricature of a science that examines the poor without seeing them.
Berg spreads the exploitation across separate scenes that fit together like pieces. In Act I, Scene 4, the doctor takes his pulse, checks his eyes and scolds him for urinating against a wall, because according to his theory man is free and can govern his bladder; then he works himself up thinking of his discovery, his fame and his immortality. In Act II, Scene 1, Wozzeck hands Marie the money he has scraped together: his pay, plus what the captain and the doctor give him. It is what he earns for shaving one and serving as the other’s guinea pig. And in Act III, Scene 4, as Wozzeck drowns in the pond, the captain and the doctor pass nearby, hear the water and decide to walk on. The two men who have used him most are also the last to turn their backs on him.
Wozzeck
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// The crackThe forgotten victim
The radical reading of Wozzeck has an obvious blind spot: the victim is Marie, a woman as poor as he is, with a child to care for and no more resources than his. The radical criminology of the 1970s was criticized by the left realism of Jock Young and John Lea for that very reason: for romanticizing the poor offender and forgetting that most crimes are suffered by other poor people. Wozzeck does not rebel against the captain or the doctor; he kills the person closest to him.
The feminist critique adds that Wozzeck’s crime is also a femicide out of jealousy, with the same structure as Don José’s in Carmen. Class exploitation explains his despair, but not why that despair is unloaded onto a woman.
The debate over responsibility
The real Woyzeck case still raises the question argued in the courts: how far is someone responsible who has a serious mental disorder and lives in extreme conditions. Today’s forensic psychiatry distinguishes between criminal responsibility, the capacity to understand and control one’s own acts, and the circumstances that mitigate the sentence. The lesson of the case, which Büchner understood two centuries ago, is that a medical report that ignores the life of the accused is not neutral.
Three key ideas
- Radical criminology (Taylor, Walton and Young, 1973; Quinney) sees crime as the product of class exploitation, and the penal system as an instrument that criminalizes the poor.
- Wozzeck, a soldier humiliated by his captain and used as a guinea pig by a doctor, kills his partner Marie when she betrays him; Büchner was inspired by a real case of 1821.
- The crack: the victim is another poor person, Marie, and left realism and the feminist critique reproached radical criminology for forgetting the victims.
Sources · further reading
- Taylor, I., Walton, P. and Young, J. (1973). The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- Quinney, R. (1977). Class, State, and Crime. David McKay.
- Lea, J. and Young, J. (1984). What Is to Be Done About Law and Order?. Penguin.
- Büchner, G. (1879). Woyzeck (posthumous ed. by K. E. Franzos).
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Wozzeck?
Wozzeck is a villain from Opera, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. The captain reproached him for having no morals.
Why does Wozzeck become a villain?
Radical criminology looks for crime in exploitation, and Wozzeck is exploited by the captain, the doctor and the army. The knife, however, ends up in Marie’s throat.
Which criminological theory explains Wozzeck?
Wozzeck's case is analysed through Radical criminology / New criminology. Radical criminology, or the new criminology, holds that crime cannot be understood without class relations, and that exploitation and poverty produce both the crime of the poor and its criminalization. Wozzeck, the protagonist of Alban Berg’s opera (1925), based on Georg Büchner’s unfinished play, is a soldier humiliated by his captain, subjected to the dietary experiments of a doctor who pays him for them and obsessed by visions. His partner, Marie, with whom he has a son, yields to the drum major. Wozzeck kills her with a knife by a pond and drowns trying to get rid of the weapon. Büchner was inspired by a real case of 1821.
