Frank Wedekind

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The German dramatist, cosmopolite, and libertarian Frank Wedekind (1864-1918) was a foe of middle-class hypocrisy and a moralist eager to reform the world through sexual emancipation.

Frank Wedekind was born Benjamin Franklin Wedekind on July 24, 1864, in Hanover, Germany. He was the son of a German 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. 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 le‧se 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.

Further Reading

The first full-length study in English of Wedekind is Sol Gittleman, Frank Wedekind (1969). It has a useful chronology and a selective bibliography. Wedekind's dramas are analyzed at length in Alex Natan, ed., German Men of Letters, vol.2 (1963). A brief introduction is in Hugh Garten, Modern German Drama (1962).

Additional Sources

Best, Alan D., Frank Wedekind, London: Wolff, 1975.

Wedekind, Frank, (Hanover, 1864-1918, Munich), (Benjamin Franklin, pseudonym Hieronimus Jobs), the son of a doctor and former member of the Frankfurt Parliament who in 1849 emigrated to the USA where he married the Hungarian-born actress Emilie Kammerer. Wedekind, born after the couple's return to Europe, was brought up at the family seat Schloß Lenzburg (canton Aargau, Switzerland). He briefly studied Germanistik in Lausanne, then, at his father's wish, tried law studies in Munich, where he made his first contacts with the city's literary and artistic circles. Obliged to earn his own keep from 1886, he worked for a time as advertising manager for the Maggi concern, then as secretary to the travelling circus Herzog (an experience from which he drew motifs of symbolic significance), and as a journalist in Zurich (Neue Zürcher Zeitung). Here he was in touch with the literary circle Das junge Deutschland representing G. Hauptmann's Naturalism. He next went to Berlin, where he established contacts with the Friedrichshagener Kreis, then for two years to Munich before moving to Paris (1891-5). On a visit to London he met Dauthendey, and in Paris Strindberg, whose work attracted him, and Lou Andreas-Salomé, though neither encounter led to the relationship he had hoped for. He also acted as secretary to the Danish painter and renowned faker Willy Grétor before returning to Berlin, where the publisher A. Langen employed him as a collaborator for the satirical Simplicissimus. When some of his poems, notably ‘Im Heiligen Land’ (later retitled ‘König David’), occasioned by Wilhelm II's visit to Palestine, offended the Kaiser, he fled the country, but returned to face trial and, convicted of ‘Majestätsbeleidigung’, was held for six months in prison at (Festung) Hohenasperg (1899-1900). From 1901 he worked at the Munich cabaret Die Elf Scharfrichter, performing mainly his own ballads which he set and sang (he also took the lead in a one-acter by E. von Keyserling), subsequently transferring to the Berlin cabaret Das Überbrettl. Yet he was acutely conscious that he was not recognized for his true talents and intentions as a moralist.

His breakthrough came in 1906 when Max Reinhardt, with K. Kraus a notable supporter, produced Frühlings Erwachen at the Kammerspiele, Berlin. Subsequently banned from the theatre, it was novel in the treatment of its theme, the sexual awakening of the young, and in its employment of a variety of styles ranging from realism to Surrealism. Described as a ‘Kindertragödie’, it is remarkable as a penetrating psychological study of the effects of puberty on the young who are prudishly kept in ignorance about their physical development. This false sense of propriety in turn forms the basis of Wedekind's relentless criticism of Wilhelmine middle-class society, parents, teachers, and grammar schools. The exposure of the hypocrisy of middle-class morality and his appeal to the sensuous aspects of life, notably the beauty of the body and its natural right to enjoy the pleasures of sex which, like nature itself, represents the spirit of life, is of fundamental relevance to his entire work and perception of human dignity that earned him the respect of H. Mann. It is central to his tragedies Erdgeist (1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (1902) which in 1913 appeared together as Lulu; they were with similarly lasting success turned into an opera by Alban Berg (premièred 1937 in Zurich). The programmatic verse of the prologue to Erdgeist introduces Lulu as a serpent, the true, wild, and beautiful animal (‘Das wahre Tier, das wilde, schöne Tier’), created to seduce, to poison, and to murder. But Lulu, the embodiment of the elemental female instinct, becomes herself at the end of the second play victim of brute male force. Wedekind demonstrates his ‘moral of amorality’ again in the form of a bitter satire, but it is the destructive side of nature on which he relies for the plays' tragic effect. Diffuse, but amazingly inventive, their stylistic variations include the grotesque in scenes that anticipate the theatre of the absurd. Having published the comedy Der Kammersänger (1899), on the conflict between the worlds of art and of commerce, Wedekind resumed this theme in Der Marquis von Keith (1901) which, the climax of his satirical dramatic art, particularly impressed Th. Mann, the author of Die Bekennt-nisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull. None of the later plays (more than a dozen, including one-acters) achieved the success of these early works on which his reputation as an immediate forerunner of Expressionism is mainly based. Banned from the theatre until the end of the Wilhelmine era in 1918, they were also rejected by the public. Wedekind died an outsider, and was mourned by outsiders whose literary representative he was in prose and in verse.

The other plays include Der Schnellmaler oder Kunst und Mammon (1889), Kinder und Narren (1891, rev. as Die junge Welt, 1897), Der Liebestrank (1899), So ist das Leben (1902, rev. as König Nicolo oder So ist das Leben, 1920), Hidalla oder Sein und Haben (1904, as Karl Hetmann, der Zwergriese, 1911), known as a persiflage on A. Langen, Totentanz (1906, as Tod und Teufel, 1909), Oaha (1908, reworked as Till Eulenspiegel, 1916), Die Zensur (1908), Der Stein der Weisen (1909), Schloß Wetterstein (1910), Mit allen Hunden gehetzt (1910), Franziska (1911), Simson oder Scham und Eifersucht (1914), Bismarck (1916), a satire on power politics, Überfürchtenichts (1917), Herakles (1917), and Ein Genußmensch (1924). The strikingly frequent revision of his plays shows his efforts to make them acceptable to the censorship and the public. His narrative work includes notably Mine-Haha oder Über die körperliche Erziehung der jungen Mädchen (1901), the fragment of a satirical novel which is the title-story of a collection of 1955. In 1905 Wedekind published a volume of poetry, Die vier Jahreszeiten, though his most influential political verse is contained in the collection of his ballads, Lautenlieder (1920, ed. A. Kutscher and H. R. Weinhöppel). Revitalizing Heine's poetry and Büchner's drama from the perspective of conditions around the turn of the century, he was not without influence on Sternheim (whose third wife his daughter Pamela became in 1930), but especially Brecht, an admirer of his poetry as well as of his dramatic technique.

Gesammelte Werke (9 vols.), ed. A. Kutscher and R. Friedenthal, appeared 1912-21, Gesammelte Briefe (2 vols.), ed. F. Strich, 1924, Der vermummte Herr. Briefe Frank Wedekinds aus den Jahren 1881-1917, ed. W. Rasch, 1967; diaries, Die Tagebücher, ed. G. Hay, 1986. A comprehensive edition of Werke (8 vols.) by E. Austermühl, R. Kieser, and H. Vinçon appeared 1993 ff.

Frank Wedekind in 1883.

Benjamin Franklin Wedekind (Hanover July 24, 1864 – Munich March 9, 1918), usually known as Frank Wedekind, was a German playwright. His work, which often criticizes bourgeois attitudes (particularly towards sex), is considered to anticipate expressionism, and he was a major influence on the development of epic theatre.^[1]

Contents 1 Life and work 2 Quotations 3 Major works 4 Works cited 5 References 6 See also 7 External links

Life and work

Wedekind lived most of his adult life in Munich, though he had a brief period working in advertising, for the 'Maggi' soup firm, in Switzerland in 1886.^[2] He had an affair with Frida Uhl who bore him a child.^{[citation needed]} Having initially worked in business and the circus, Wedekind went on to become an actor and singer. In this capacity he received wide acclaim as the principal star of the satirical cabaret Die elf Scharfrichter (The Eleven Executioners), launched in 1901.^[3] It was thanks to Wedekind's success that the tradition of German satirical writing was established in the theatre, producing the cabaret-song satirists Kurt Tucholsky, Walter Mehring, Joachim Ringelnatz and Erich Kästner among others, who invigorated the culture of the Weimar Republic; "all bitter social critics who used direct, stinging satire as the best means of attack and wrote a large part of their always intelligible light verse to be declaimed or sung."^[4] At the age of 34, after serving a nine-month prison sentence for "lèse-majesté" (thanks to the publication in Simplicissimus of some of his satirical poems), Wedekind became a dramaturg (a play-reader and adapter) at the Munich Schauspielhaus.^[5]

Wedekind's first major play, Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening, 1891), which concerns sexuality and puberty among some young German students, caused a scandal, as it contained scenes of homoeroticism, (implied) masturbation, and suicide, as well as references to abortion. In 2006, it was adapted into a successful Broadway musical, Spring Awakening.

The "Lulu" plays Erdgeist (Earth Spirit, 1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box, 1904) are probably his best known works. Originally conceived as a single play, the two pieces tell a continuous story of a sexually-enticing young dancer who rises in German society through her relationships with wealthy men, but who later falls into poverty and prostitution.^[6] The frank depiction of sexuality and violence in these plays, including lesbianism and an encounter with Jack the Ripper (a role which Wedekind played himself in the original production),^[7] pushed the boundaries of what was considered acceptable on the stage at the time. The plays formed the basis for G W Pabst's acclaimed silent film Pandora's Box (1929), starring Louise Brooks as Lulu, and Alban Berg's incomplete opera Lulu (1937), which is considered to be one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century opera.^[8]

Der Kammersänger (The Court-Singer, 1899) is a one-act character study of a famous opera singer who receives a series of unwelcome guests at his hotel suite. In Franziska (1910), the title character, a young girl, initiates a Faustian pact with the Devil, selling her soul for the knowledge of what it is like to live life as a man (reasoning that men seem to have all the advantages). Wedekind's symbolist novella Mine-Haha: The Corporal Education Of Young Girls (1901) was the basis for the film Innocence (2004) by Lucile Hadzihalilovic and The Fine Art of Love (2005) by John Irvin.

Quotations

• "Search fearlessly for every sin, for out of sin comes joy."

Major works

Frank Wedekind

• Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening / Spring's Awakening, 1891)
• Erdgeist (Earth Spirit, 1895)
• Die Kammersänger (The Court-Singer or The Tenorist, 1899) [one-act play]
• Der Marquis von Keith (The Marquis of Keith, 1901)
• Mine-Haha: The Corporal Education Of Young Girls (1901) [novella]
• König Nicolo oder So ist das Leben (King Nicolo, or Such is Life, 1902)
• Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box, 1904)
• Musik (Music, 1906)
• Totentanz (The Dance of Death, 1908)
• Schloss Wetterstein (Castle Wetterstein, 1910)
• Franziska (1910)
• Bismarck (1916)
• Herakles (Heracles, 1917)

Works cited

• Banham, Martin, ed. 1998. "Wedekind, Frank." In The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521434378. p.1189-1190.
• Boa, Elizabeth. 1987. The Sexual Circus: Wedekind's Theatre of Subversion. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell. ISBN 0631142347.
• Brecht, Bertolt. 1965. The Messingkauf Dialogues. Trans. John Willett. Bertolt Brecht: Plays, Poetry, Prose Ser. London: Methuen, 1985. ISBN 0413388905.
• Mueller, Carl R. 2000. Introduction to Frank Wedekind: Four Major Plays, Vol 1. Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus.
• Willett, John. 1967. The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht: A Study from Eight Aspects. Third rev. ed. London: Methuen, 1977. ISBN 041334360X.

References

1. ^ See Banham (1998) and Willett (1959). In his Messingkauf Dialogues, Brecht cites Wedekind, along with Büchner and Valentin, as his "chief influences" in his early years: "he," Brecht writes of himself in the third person, "also saw the writer Wedekind performing his own works in a style which he had developed in cabaret. Wedekind had worked as a ballad singer; he accompanied himself on the lute." (1965, 69).
2. ^ Willett (1959, 98n).
3. ^ See Banham (1998) and Willett (1959, 87).
4. ^ Willett (1959, 87).
5. ^ Willett (1959, 87, 106).
6. ^ Carl R. Mueller, Introduction to Frank Wedekind: Four Major Plays, Vol 1, Lyme, NH: Smith and Krauss, 2000
7. ^ Willett (1959, 73n).
8. ^ Kobbe's Opera Book, New York: G.P.Putnam, 1987 edition, p. 875.

See also

• Pandora's Box (film), 1929 German silent melodrama based loosely on Erdgeist (Earth Spirit, 1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (1904)
• Innocence (2004 film), 2004 French film adaptation of Wedekind's novella "Mine-Haha or the corporeal education of girls"
• The Fine Art of Love: Mine Ha-Ha, 2005 Italian film adaptation of Wedekind's novella "Mine-Haha or the corporeal education of girls" (German: "Die Büchse der Pandora") is a German silent melodrama based loosely on Frank Wedekind's plays Erdgeist (Earth Spirit, 1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (1904).

External links

• Frank Wedekind MySpace page including list of English-language translations
• www.leveilduprintemps.com Beautiful version of Frühlings Erwachen, playing now in Paris

Persondata
NAME	Wedekind, Frank
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Wedekind, Bejamin Franklin
SHORT DESCRIPTION	German dramatist, playwright
DATE OF BIRTH	July 24, 1864
PLACE OF BIRTH	Hannover, Lower Saxony, Germany
DATE OF DEATH	March 9, 1918
PLACE OF DEATH	Munich, Germany, buried in the Waldfriedhof were his wife and daughter also were laid to rest.

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