(Spring Awakening follows the lives of three teenagers, Me...)
Spring Awakening follows the lives of three teenagers, Melchior, Moritz, and Wendl, as they navigate their entry into sexual awareness. Unlike so many works that claim to tell the truth of adolescence, Spring Awakening offers no easy answers or redemption.
(Lulu has been rescued by the rich newspaper publisher Dr ...)
Lulu has been rescued by the rich newspaper publisher Dr Schon from a life on the streets with her alleged father, the petty criminal Schigolch. Dr Schon has taken Lulu under his wing, educated her and made her his lover. Wishing however to make a more socially advantageous match for himself, he has married her off to the medic Dr Goll.
(In this extraordinary play, Franziska, a 'female Faust', ...)
In this extraordinary play, Franziska, a 'female Faust', is consumed by a deep thirst for self-knowledge. She makes a pact a Mephistophelean impresario who grants her two years of pleasure and brilliant success in her operatic career as long as she becomes his wife and vassal. But, in an unusual twist, Franziska is not destined for eternal damnation.
(Includes the Earth Spirit, The Marquis of Keith and Pando...)
Includes the Earth Spirit, The Marquis of Keith and Pandora's Box. In Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box, better known as The Lulu Plays, we see Lulu's rapid descent into degradation, culminating in her violent death. She has destroyed a succession of bourgeois males, both disturbed and attracted by her lack of inhibition. In The Marquis of Keith, the eponymous hero destroys his most meaningful relationship through his single-minded pursuit of satisfaction, both sexual and financial.
(In these intimate journals, Frank Wedekind shows himself ...)
In these intimate journals, Frank Wedekind shows himself to have been in life what he is in his plays, a subversive artist and merciless critic of bourgeois morality.
Frank Wedekind, a German dramatist, cosmopolite, and libertarian, was a foe of middle-class hypocrisy and a moralist eager to reform the world through sexual emancipation. Nowadays he is particularly known for his two-play series Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box, and his play Spring Awakening.
Background
Ethnicity:
Frank Wedekind was a son of a German father and a Swiss mother.
Frank Wedekind was born Benjamin Franklin Wedekind on July 24, 1864, in Hanover, Germany. He was the son of Friedrich Wilhelm Wedekind, a German physician who had emigrated to America, practiced medicine in San Francisco, then returned to his home in Germany. Dissatisfied with Otto von Bismarck's Prussian policy, the elder Wedekind left again and settled in Switzerland, where his son grew up. Frank’s mother, Emilie Kammerer, was a German singer and actress.
Education
In 1884 Wedekind entered the University of Lausanne, and then moved to the University of Munich. He studied law and literature, but abandoned his studies.
After working as a freelance journalist, an advertising copywriter, and a secretary for a circus, and spending long sojourns as a painter in England and France, young Wedekind moved to Munich, joining the staff of the satirical magazine Simplizissimus, in which his first political poems appeared. He remained in Munich until his death, occasionally making guest appearances in his own plays, giving public readings, and reciting and singing his ballads in a famous cabaret called Die Elf Scharfrichter (Eleven Executioners).
Wedekind's psychological insight into daydreams, emotions, and conversations among adolescents is reflected in his first successful play, Frühlings Erwachen (1891; The Awakening of Spring). Here he developed his own dramatic style and technique, characterized by many short and loosely connected scenes, calling to mind George Büchner's Wozzek and, in his frank exposure of sexual problems, anticipated many of the later insights of modern depth psychology.
Wedekind's next major work was a "monster tragedy" consisting of two parts: Erdgeist (1893; Earth Spirit) and Büchse der Pandora (1906; Pandora's Box). Significantly, its central character, Lulu, the femme fatale, has no second name; indeed, even her first name changes with each suitor. Representing pure instinct, lust, desire, and flesh, she destroys each man who pursues her. It was the final act of part II, set in London and written in English for reasons of censorship, with Lulu as a prostitute supporting her father and her lover Alwa, which won for Wedekind his reputation as an immoralist and pornographic enemy of society.
Of Wedekind's plays, one relatively widely known in the United States is his character study, Der Kammersänger (1897; The Tenor). In a hotel room the hero, the famous tenor Gerardo, receives in turn a number of unwelcome guests: a 16-year-old girl admirer, an old composer anxious to get his opera produced, and finally a married woman who, refused by Gerardo, commits suicide.
Der Kammersänger was followed, in 1900, by a full-length play in five acts, Der Marquis von Keith, which deals not with an adventurer in love but with an adventurer of life, a reckless swindler and social climber involved in shady financial dealings. These five works mark Wedekind's first and most important creative period.
After the turn of the century, he became more and more autobiographical, feeling an urge to "explain" himself and his work and to defend his ideas against the attacks leveled against him from all sides. Among the plays of this period are Karl Hetman der Zwergriese (1900; Hidalla) and König Nicolo oder So ist das Leben (1905; Such Is Life). These years were marked by critical abuse, censorship (he once spent 6 months in jail for lèse majesté), and difficulties with his publishers.
After the publication of Nicolo, Wedekind's dramatic art deteriorated. Totentanz (1905; The Dance of Death) and Schloss Wetterstein (1910; Hunted by Every Hound) both deal with prostitution, while Zensur (1907; Censorship) is purely autobiographical. His last play, Bismarck (1916), is hopelessly dull and undramatic.
Wedekind is also remembered for his short, pointed tales, reminiscent of Heinrich von Kleist and Guy de Maupassant. Here again, as in his dramas, his theme is love and eros. One of the best prose tales in modern German literature is his story Der Brand von Egliswyl (1905; The Fire of Egliswyl), which reveals his psychological insight into the relationship between arson and sexual anxiety. And he was a master, as well, of slightly frivolous, mocking, flirtatious love songs and ballads, some of which call to mind Heinrich Heine. Wedekind died in Munich on March 9, 1918.
Frank Wedekind became an intense personal force in the German artistic world on the eve of World War I. A direct forebear of the modern Theatre of the Absurd, Wedekind employed episodic scenes, fragmented dialogue, distortion, and caricature in his dramas, which formed the transition from the realism of his age to the Expressionism of the following generation.
(Includes the Earth Spirit, The Marquis of Keith and Pando...)
Views
Quotations:
"Monuments are for the living, not the dead."
"The laws of this world are for children."
"God made man in his own image, and man returned the favour."
"Any fool can have bad luck; the art consists in knowing how to exploit it."
"I didn't ask to be born, and I don't owe God anything."
Personality
Wedekind developed a reputation for promiscuous behavior - he frequented prostitutes, contracting syphilis. He had an affair with Frida Uhl, the former wife of August Strindberg. She eventually gave birth to his child. He mixed with a group of bohemian artists and political activists including Erich Mühsam, who was a strong advocate of free love.
Connections
On the stage Wedekind often collaborated with the young Austrian actress Tilly Newes, 22 years his junior. In 1906, Wedekind married Newes, rejected his previous promiscuous behaviour and became intensely jealous of his young wife. The marriage produced two daughters, Pamela and Kadidja.
