The Drama of the Case: Making the Case of Woyzeck

“What’s the point of all that writing”—according to the psychiatric report by Dr. Johann Christian August Clarus, these are the words the murderer Johann Christian Woyzeck used to answer the question of why he had not been more cooperative before.¹ “What’s the point of all that writing” can—retrospectively—also be read as an ironic commentary on the complex discourse network in which the wigmaker Woyzeck has become entangled since he murdered his girlfriend, the widow Johanna Christiane Woost, on June 21, 1821. Yet the deed itself is a veritable trigger for the production of written documents: investigations begin