SOURCE: Richards, David G. “Recent Criticism: 1980-1999.” In Georg Büchner's ‘Woyzeck’: A History of Its Criticism, pp. 111-42. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2001.

In the following excerpt, Richards surveys criticism of Woyzeck published in English and German during the last two decades of the twentieth century.

Two events mark the beginning of a new period in Büchner scholarship: the founding of the Georg Büchner Gesellschaft in May 1979 and Gerhard Schmid's publication of a facsimile edition of Woyzeck in 1981. Also in 1981, in a second special volume of Text und Kritik devoted to Georg Büchner, Thomas Michael Mayer, a founder of the Georg Büchner Society, announced in a review entitled “Some New Tendencies of Büchner-Scholarship” that the society's annual publication, the Georg Büchner Jahrbuch, would “serve as an organ for taking stock of the current state of scholarship and for new contributions, for...