Werner Herzog's Woyzeck and German Progress

Woyzeck I am fascinated with German cinema. I feel that German cinema has historically been a very artistic, abstract expression. In the United States, I feel that we all too often try to analyze or rate film through a lens of realism. For example, one might say, “I hated that movie; the ending would’ve never happened like that in real life.” However, I believe that Germany has always allowed for a level of surrealism in their films. Werner Herzog, a renowned German director, has made many films that invite the audience to contemplate meanings and expressions. He is not as concerned with depicting narratives of the everyday life. Rather, he searches margins for stories of exceptionality to bring to light. Exceptionality does not necessarily, however, indicate success or happiness for Herzog. Rather, Herzog seeks to bring life to those who have been trampled on. He allows subjecthood and personhood to some of the most desperate characters ever imagined. While his films Nosferatu and Aguirre are arguably his best known pieces in his series that features Klaus Kinski, I chose to write about Woyzeck because (1) I had never seen it before and (2) it takes place in Germany.
Again, while I love German Cinema, I rarely find myself fascinated with historical or military-based narratives such as Woyzeck. I believe this film might be the most dark depiction of humanity I had seen by Herzog, but it was very well made and acted, and reflects a creativity unbeknownst to typical American cinema. The way in which Germany is articulated in the film reflects a deeply mechanical, stern, cold, efficient understanding of the country. Woyzeck, the main character, is a soldier who is made into a disturbed, unsettling, primitive, sincerely problematic man on whom a scientist conducts experiments such as finding out how long a man can survive on peas alone, and how much his body composition shifts. Herzog deploys a narrative here that allows for the audience to understand the historic German military practices as inhuman, disturbing, and destructive. I understand this film to thoroughly renounce holding scientific gain above humanity.
While I do not understand these films to have necessarily influenced my decision to travel to Germany, they have allowed me to reimagine the beliefs and cultural practice of Germany. However, as the article “Movie Induced Tourism” suggests, the film has allowed me a certain type of gaze in which I give subjecthood to the trampled German people that history often leaves behind, and view the historic government and societal structure of Germany to be understood as objectified forces, alone. In this understanding, coupled with an understanding of Germany at the time this film was released (1979), I am urged to believe that this film is a marker of Germany’s understood transition into modernity after thorough regrets about its militaristic and inhumane past had been expressed.
Although this film does not necessarily express understandings of tourism or invasion-by-foreigners, I feel as though I can reflect on my anticipation for going abroad using this film as a historical document specifically relating to the “transition” of Germany. This film, because of the implicit messages within it along with an understanding of the year in which it was released, I think fosters my warm feelings towards Germany. Germany has marked itself “progressive” and humanistic, and these characteristic are of the utmost importance to me. By moving beyond its apparently overwhelmingly cold and mechanic past, Germany has reiterated its embrace of being a global leader in the fight for equality and human dignity. I can only hope, though, that these expectations don’t put me at too large a risk for being let down.