Woyzeck
A poor soldier, exploited by his captain and used as a guinea pig by a doctor, murders his unfaithful lover. Buchner died at twenty-three and left it unfinished; the fragments were published decades later. It's the first working-class tragedy in European theater and reads like it could have been written yesterday. Alban Berg turned it into the opera Wozzeck.
A large share of low-rated reviews come from readers who only opened it because a class assigned it, and the resentment shows: “it just really got on my nerves,” one writes, and another can only muster “best thing i can say about this is that atleast it's short”. The plot is genuinely hard to follow on a first pass; the Doctor gets talked about constantly without ever explaining why he matters, prompting one reader to write him off as simply “the doctor was a funny fella.” Buchner died before settling a final text, so some editions splice together every surviving draft, forcing readers back through the same overlapping scenes more than once. Others say the jumped-around, hallucinatory style leaves them wondering “what Büchner was on when he wrote that”, treating the disjointedness as baffling rather than artful.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
