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Frank Wedekind (1864-1918) |
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German dramatist, poet, and short story writer, a forerunner of expressionism and the theatre of the absurd. Frank Wedekind's most famous works include the two-part drama, Der Erdgeist (1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (1904), originally written as a whole. Its amoral central character, the archetypal femme fatale Lulu, inspired George Pabst's expressionist film Pandora's Box (1929), starring the Hollywood actress Louise Brooks, and Alban Berg's unfinished opera Lulu. "A girl's pleasure, Melchior, is like the rapture of the gods. A girl's natural disposition makes her put up a fight. She keeps herself free from any kind of bitterness right until the last second, so she can suddenly be transported straigh to Heaven. A girl is still afraid of Hell at the very moment she feels a paradise blossoming. Her perceptions are as fresh as a spring that rises up out of rock." (in Spring Awakening: A Children's Tragedy by Frank Wedekind, translated from the German by Jonathan Franzen, Faber and Faber, 2007, p. 34) Benjamin Franklin Wedekind was born in Hanover, the second of the six children born to Friedrich Wilhelm Wedekind (1816–1888), a physician, and Emilie Kammerer, a German singer and actress (1840-1916). During the early period of his life, Wedekind's father had served as physician to the Sultan of Turkey. A fierce democrat, he participated in the 1848 Revolution, and next year escaped to America, where he made a fortune in land speculation. In San Francisco he married Emilie; she was twenty-three years his junior. Two years later he returned to Germany, but disgusted by Bismarck's nationalist policies, he eventually emigrated with his family to Switzerland. Wedekind
grew up in Lenzburg, where his father had purchased a
castle. A disappointed veteran of the revolution at that time, he
disagreed with his wife's more liberal views and had became isolated
from the rest of the family. At school Wedekind was well liked by
his schoolmates. He wrote plays and poems and to the horror of his
teachers, he become an atheist. After having a serious clash with his father and actually striking him, Wedekind left home, assuming wrongly, that he would never be forgiven. 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 and took a job as a publicity agent for the Swiss soup company Maggi. Gerhart Hauptmann, the leading dramatist of his generation, portrayed in Friedensfest (1890) the Wedekind family as full of hatred and mistrust, revealing some strictly confidental details. Wedekind replied with a short play, which satirized Hauptmann's naturalist school of drama. In Zürich Wedekind befriended the Swedish playwright August Strindberg. With Strindberg's wife Frida Uhl (1872-1943) he had an affair and as the result an illegitimate child in 1897. Their son, Friedrich Strindberg, became a journalist. During WWII he helped a number of Jews, who lived underground in Berlin. Wedekind's father died in 1888, and left him a sizable inheritance. For a period Wedekind worked as a secretary to a circus, the Herzog, before settling in Munich, his home until his death. The influence of circus art is seen in Wedekind's dramatic vision. In Munich, the artistic and cultural centre of Germany around the turn of the century, Wedekind led a bohemian life. He also visited Paris and London, and in 1895 he traveled in Switzerland, where he gave readings from Ibsen's plays under the pseudonym Cornelius Minehaha. Wedekind's first full-length drama of importance, Frühlings Erwachen (1891, Spring's Awakening) appeard in book form in Zürich before it was produced by Max Reinhardt fifteen years later. It dealt with the theme of adolescent sexuality and had the reputation of being far too obscene to be performed. Although this poetic tragedy did not completely break with naturalism, the last act in which one of the characters rises from grave carrying his head under his arm, inviting the hero to join him in death, demonstrated Wedekind's growing interest in grotesque and fantastic. This work, in which the fourteen-year-old girl is killed by abortion pills, created a scandal and marked the beginning of Wedekind's many struggles with censorship and accusations of pornography. The play had its first uncencored production in English in 1974. Wedekind was a cofounder of the satirical journal Simplicissimus. Accused of lèse majesté for an article in which he had ridiculed Kaiser Wilhelm II's journey to Palestine, Wedekind fled abroad for a short period. Upon his return to Germany, Wedekind was imprisoned for six months in the fortress of Köningstein, where he wrote the story 'Minehaha'. König Nicolo, oder So ist das Leben (1911), was written in the aftermath of his prison sentence, but not produced until 1919. Oaha, die Satire der Satire (1908) was a comedy drawing on Wedekind's experiences with Simplicissimus. During the carnival of 1901, Wedekind paraded with artists, students, actors, and writers through the streets, denouncing the censorship. Eleven of the demonstrators established a cabaret called Die 11 Scarfrichter (the Eleven Executioners), where Wedekind performed his own poems, accompanying himself on a lute or a guitar – he was a lifelong guitar player. (If he had lived today, he would have probably been a rock star.) However, the star of the cabaret was Marya Delvard. One of her popular songs, written by Wedekind, was about a young girl, Ilse, who concludes melancholically: "When I no longer rouse desire, / Well, then I might as well be dead." ("Und wenn ich keinem mehr gefalle, / Dann will ich gern begraben sein.") Cabaretistic elements became an integral part of his plays, which drew on pantomime, circus, funfair, vaudeville, grand-guignol. Wedekind's tragicomedies, in turn, had an influence on Expressionism, Dadaism, Brecht, and the theatre of absurd. Wedekind's
central themes are moral hypocrisy and sexual
freedom.
Like Freud, or later D.H. Lawrence in Britain, Wedekind saw that there
is a profound conflict between human sexuality and the pressures and
requirements of society. Thus he set out to liberate instincts from the
constraints of rational Self. "None knows better how to show the
peculiarities of a neurotic woman, or to betray a man's weakness by a
few short sentences," wrote Wedekind's English translator, Francis J.
Ziegler. "The demonstration is direct and thorough, and we watch it
fascinated, as we might the work of a skilled vivisectionist." ('A Poem for Prudes', in The Awakening of Spring: A Tragedy of Childhood, translated by Francis J. Ziegler, Nicholas L. Brown, 1916, p. xiii) In his later dramas, such as in Musik
(1908) Wedekind dealt with
suffering, religion, and ethical problems. Described by the author as a
depiction of morals in four pictures, it told of the misfortunes of a
young girl, Klara Huhnerwadel, who is madly in love with her singing
teacher. At the end she raves in hysteria by the bedside of their dead
baby. "She'll be able to sing a song," says one of the characters
before the fall of the curtain. These works have not enjoyed similar appreciation as his Lulu cycle and Der Marquis von Keith (1900), about a zestful opportunist, who pretends to be a a wealthy marquis, and his tutelage, a young idealist. Wedekind himself acted in his stage productions, and in this play he had the role of the swindler. When Spring's Awakening was performed in Berlin, he appreared as the Masked Man. The so-called Lulu plays, Erdgeist (Earth
Spirit) and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box),
Wedekind reworked several times. Together they made up ein Monstretragödie (a
monster tragedy). Erdgeist was
first produced in Leipzig in 1898, with Leonie Taliansky as Lulu and
Wedekind as Dr Schön, who rescued the young Lulu from street life. The
last two acts of the original Lulu play plus one new act was
produced in 1905 under the title Pandora's Box. On the stage Wedekind often collaborated with the actress Tilly Newes,
whom he married in 1906. She met him when she was
nineteen. They acted together in Pandora's Box in
Vienna at a private performance - Tilly
played Lulu, but this time Wedekind took the role of Jack the Ripper,
and the writer Karl Kraus
played Kung Poti. Mostly due to Wedekind's jealousy, the
marriage was stormy and disturbed. He was twenty years her senior
and reacted to her as if she were the real Lulu, though she submitted
to his every demand. Wedekind forced Tilly to give up
her independent acting contract. The couple had two children. Tilly's father said, "Frank can't be surprised about anything, he has married Lulu, after all." (Modernism and Masculinity: Mann, Wedekind, Kandinsky Through World War I by Gerald N. Izenberg, 2000, p.80) Moreover, Wedekind's son wrote a play in which a son falls in love with his father's young wife. In 1917 Tilly tried to commit suicide, just a few month's before her husband's death. "Clear, precise voice of the woman," Franz Kafka noted on Tilly in his diary after seeing Der Erdgeist in 1912. "Narrow, crescent-shaped face. The lower part of the leg branching off to the lefet when she stood quietly." (The Diaries 1910-1923 by Franz Kafka, edited by Max Brod, 2000, p. 176) Wedekind died in Munich on March 9, 1918, from complications of abdominal surgery. Prostitutes, members of the bohemian circles of artists and intellectuals, his fans (including Bertolt Brecht) and friends, crowded the funeral. As
a young man, before becoming famous with his plays, Brecht
idolized Wedekind. Shortly after hearing of his death, Brecht
wrote in a eulogy in the newspaper Augsburger Neueste Nachrichten:
"There he stood, ugly, brutal, dangerous, with close-cropped red hair,
his hands in his trouse pockets, and one felt that the devil himself
couldn't shift him. He came before the curtain as ringmaster in a red
tail coat, carrying whip and revolver, and no one could forget that
hard dry metallic voice, that brazen faun's head with 'eyes like a
gloomy owl' set in immobile features." (Brecht on Theatre: The Bevelopment of an Aesthetic, edited and translated by John Willett, Hill and Wang, 1964, p. 3) During the Nazi period, Wedekind's works were forbidden. Die
Tagebücher: ein erotisches Leben, his diary, was published in 1986. Wedekind's
uncompromising plays, full of rebellious energy, have always fascinated
new generations of directors and actors. A rock-musical version of Spring Awakening opened on Broadway in 2006. In Finland, Lulu was successfully staged in 2006 by the students of
The Theatre Academy. Wedekind's stock of characters vary from pillars
of society to prostitutes, outcasts, beggars, and criminals. The most
famous creation, Lulu, falls from the heights of
society into poverty and prostitution. She is a force of
nature, a wild, beautiful beast, the embodiment of pure female
sexuality, who destroys weak men around her until she meets
her death at the hands of Jack the Ripper. "She was created to stir up great disaster / To entice, to seduce, to
poison / To murder, with no one being the wiser," wrote Wedekind of
Lulu in the prologue to the second edition of the drama. (Modernism and Masculinity: Mann, Wedekind, Kandinsky Through World War I by Gerald N. Izenberg, 2000, p. 24) At
a lecture in May 1905, Karl Kraus said, that she became the
destroyer of all, because she was destroyed by all. "The great
retaliation has begun, the revenge of a man's world which has the
audacity to punish its own guilt." (The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross, Picador, 2007, p. 224) Although Wedekind was an advocate of women's rights, in his notebooks and works he criticized the feminist movement. The main reason why the Lulu plays were divided into two separate works was that the last two acts involved lesbianism and prostitution, which were at that time too touchy subjects for the stage. In Pabst's silent film Lulu has spirit and dignity, she is not mean. At the end her death suggest a salvation; basically she is the victim of weak men. The original running time of Pabst's film was 131 minutes. In Britain the scene between Lulu and the lesbian Countess Geschwitz at Lulu's wedding was cut. Alban Berg began compressed Lulu plays into a single musical work in 1929, which portrays the rise and fall of its protagonist in a symmetrically mirrored arch. Noteworthy, Berg had been in 1905 present at a performance of the second part of the drama, introduced by a lecture by Karl Kraus. The definitive version of Berg's Die Büchse der Pandora did not premiere until 1979, because the composer's widow Helene Berg, a spiritualist, prevented the completion of her husband's work. At the time of his death in 1935, Berg had not finished the orchestration of Act III - the three-act version was put together by the Austrian composer Friedrich Čerha. This version premiered in Paris under Pierre Boulez. Berg's opera, influenced by Nietzsche's theory of "eternal return", is not a moral tale; also Berg do not condemn Lulu, who cannot help being the target of desires. Erik Bentley's The Wedekind Cabaret, based on the author's poems and songs, was published in 1993. Music was composed by William Bolcom, Arnold Black, and Peter Winkler. For further reading: Frank Wedekind: Sein Leben und seine Werke by A Kutscher (1922-31); Frank Wedekind und das Theater by G. Seehaus (1964); Frank Wedekind by S. Gittleman (1969); Frank Wedekind by A Best (1975); The Sexual Circus: Frank Wedekind's Theater of Subversion by E. Boa (1987); The Ironic Dissident: Frank Wedekind in the View of his Critics by Ward B. Lewis (1997); The Elusive Transcendent: The Role of Religion in the Plays of Frank Wedekind by Fred Whalley (2002); Satirische Elemente im dramatischen Werk Frank Wedekinds by Mona Hashem (2005); Frank Wedekind und die Anfänge des deutschsprachigen Kabaretts by Georg W. Forcht (2009); Reincarnation; Or, How Bertolt Brecht Recreated Frank Wedekind by Jonathan Robert Glass, Jr., thesis, Trinity University (2009); Frank Wedekind und die Volksstücktradition: Basis und Nachhaltigkeit seines Werkes by Georg W. Forcht (2012); Elastizität: The Poetics of Space, Movement and Character in Frank Wedekind's Theater by Jennifer Ham (2012); "Ernst ist das Leben, heiter die Kunst": Das Humor-Konzept im Dramenwerk Frank Wedekinds by Joanna Firaza (2013); Wedekinds Welt: Theater, Eros, Provokation, edited by Manfred Mittermayer and Silvia Bengesser (2014); Taken by the Devil: The Censorship of Frank Wedekind and Alban Berg's Lulu by Margaret Notley (2020) Selected works:
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