Marc Caplan,“Woyzeck or Wozzeck? Karl-Emil Franzos and the Border Lines be- tween Eastern Europe and German Culture,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Cul- ture, Society n.s. 25, no. 1 (Fall 2019): 128–154. Copyright © 2019 The Trustees of Indiana University. doi: 10.2979/jewisocistud.25.1.05 Woyzeck or Wozzeck? Karl- Emil Franzos and the Border Lines between Eastern Europe and German Culture Marc Caplan Abstract This article juxtaposes two aspects of the career of Karl-Emil Franzos (1848–1904): his editorship of Georg Büchner’s dramatic fragment Woyzeck, which Franzos misread as Wozzeck, thereby bestowing the “incorrect” name on Alban Berg’s 1925 opera; and his work as a leading German-language chronicler of Jewish life in late nineteenth-century Galicia and Bukovina. It is apparent in Franzos’s fction that his sense of melodrama informed his editorial decisions in shaping Büchner’s manuscript. His misreading of Woyzeck as Wozzeck, by the same token, suggests both the linguistic and the percep- tual limitations of describing eastern European ethnic groups from the perspective of the imperial (German) language. Franzos’s approach to the fragmentation, alternately, of Büchner’s manuscript and of the disintegrating Habsburg Empire anticipates the theoretical insights of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno around the concept of the Trauerspiel (play of mourning) with which this discussion opens. Key words: Karl-Emil Franzos, German Jewish literature, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Trauerspiel T he world premier of Alban Berg’s operatic masterpiece Wozzeck took place on December 14, 1925, in Berlin, but it was the opera’s second performance, one week later, that marked a sig- nal event in the creation and conceptualization of German modern- ism. Berg’s opera depicts an ordinary foot soldier exploited, brutalized,