Woyzeck is an unfinished stage play written by George Buchner. At the the time of his death in 1839 he left four fragmentary drafts of the play. There is no definitive version of the work, which was only produced for the first time over 60 years after his death. Each news production picks and orders the scenes it will use. This process underscores the play's preoccupation with instability in society and individual minds.

Buchner was only 24 when he died. In the previous years he had been so dangerously immersed in revolutionary politics that he had to flee Germany. The frightening possibility of being denounced, arrested and imprisoned form a background to his writing. At the same time he had attended medical school, and was particularly interested in nervous disorders. Woyzeck reflects his interest in the dire straits of the proletariat under industrial capitalism, and the kind of insanity that can lead to murder.

Breaking with Aristotelian tradition Woyzeck treats its proletarian protagonist as a tragic not a comic figure. The style and the form of the play are also considered revolutionary and Woyzeck has been hailed as a forerunner of surrealism, German expressionism, social realism, and modernism.