“What should the soldier have lived on if God had not endowed man with the necessity to kill himself?” A post-apocalyptic world on the edge of nowhere. It contains the characters from Büchner's Woyzeck, in a self-sustaining system full of mutual dependencies, supported by a survival of the fittest logic. Woyzeck, at the bottom of the food chain, looks for an outside in Marie, but ultimately succumbs to the culture of violence in his surroundings.

Woyzeck's place is where, far from the main roads, the rubble that was thrown up during the construction of the industries remains. Too late, too early: what exists here is a stunted, worn-out past and a dully threatening, at the same time already half-missed future. Overaged conditions (...) endlessly stretching dripping of empty time of reproduction.
(...) Hardly ever a moment of happiness, of liberation, even of breathing again (...), body and thoughts are cramped, activity is reduced to the laborious monotony of fruitless drudgery, which allows no more than just continuing.

In all this, there are a few glimpses: for example, the love for Marie, the friendship with Andres. But the moments in which, for a short time, the glow of something else flashes promisingly at the edge of the road of time - a fair, perhaps, a tenderness - are quickly swallowed up. Yes, they bring danger with them. For the inert persistence, (...) is at the same time salvation, security. Routine prevents the thought of meaninglessness, insensibility covers despair. Anger and aggression are latently inscribed in this world. It is coincidental when it breaks open, whom it hits. Not entirely by chance, certainly, that it is the woman. But under other circumstances, at other times, other victims are conceivable. (...)

Woyzeck is under surveillance. Controlling gazes organize the world in which a murder will happen to him. The gazes are everywhere, the surveillance state is realized through an uncanny network of mutual spying. (...) On earth, people like the doctor measure, register, observe the bodies, living and dead substances. Under the earth watch eyes and ears, mysterious forces and "connections". No impulse leads out of this system - almost. (...) Woyzeck has found a tiny escape line. It is called imagination.

From: Hans-Thies Lehmann, Das Politische Schreiben, Berlin 2012 (p.154f).