Spring Awakening

by Frank Wedekind

  Against this cultural background, the playwrights of the German Naturalist movement dared to emulate the examples of Zola and Ibsen. By depicting lower-middle and working-class protagonists using everyday speech patterns in uncompromisingly realistic contemporary settings, Hauptmann and others exposed uncomfortable truths that a late nineteenth-century public chose to ignore, and measured the cost of rapid industrial transformation in wasted human potential. The young Wedekind was passionate about many of the Naturalists’ concerns, but he was as suspicious of their narrow aims and methods as he was of the exclusively political struggles of radical democrats like his father. He thus joined his hero Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), a poet he had read avidly in his teens, in rubbishing political movements that campaigned only for full stomachs and the right to vote but left unchallenged a bourgeois morality that preached the denial of bodily pleasures.

  Estranged from his father and deprived of his allowance, struggling to survive in the literary proletariat and at odds with Hauptmann and the Naturalists, Wedekind drew inspiration from the lower echelons of the theatrical world – circus and music hall – and from the outcasts of society – the crooks, adventurers, acrobats and prostitutes who became his friends – to develop his personal creed of resilience, sexual freedom and physical vitality. His early essay Thoughts on the Circus states: ‘For us children of the late nineteenth century the old, comfortable pilgrimage has given way to a restless, agitated steeplechase over endless obstacles and pitfalls.’ What characterises for Wedekind the circus rider, the tightrope walker and the trapeze artist – suppleness, stamina, the ability to bounce back, in short, elasticity – becomes on a metaphorical level a prerequisite for thriving, as man and artist, at the increased tempo of modern life.

  Armed with this creed, Wedekind hatched his plan to explode the rules of dramatic form and, with his first major work, to attack the hypocrisy and moral cowardice of the age where he had experienced it most personally and found it most deeply entrenched: in school. He had a few scores to settle as well. In choosing his mother’s artistic path he had to some extent rebelled against his father and much of what he stood for. The irony is that, when he sat down to write Spring Awakening, he could finish it in the knowledge that, even if it took years to find an audience, his inheritance from his father would pay for its publication.

  The Play

  It is clear from Wedekind’s notebooks that his schooldays in Switzerland left a deep and lasting impression. Spring Awakening is set in a small German town, but the German-speaking Swiss Gymnasia copied the ethos and methods of those in Imperial Germany. The ‘useful citizens’ of the future lived in constant fear of failure, of being ‘provisionally passed’ or held back to repeat an academic year. Wedekind suffered both experiences. Two of his schoolfriends, Franz Oberli and Moritz Dürr, committed suicide, the latter shooting himself after advising Frank of his intentions in advance. These were by no means isolated occurrences. The historical record for the period shows a marked increase in school suicides, usually at the end of the academic year.

  In a letter of December 1891, Wedekind declared that his intention in Spring Awakening was ‘to depict poetically the phenomenon of puberty so as to facilitate more humane and rational judgements among parents and educators’. The play broke what was effectively a conspiracy of silence. It is a savage indictment of an adult world that, instead of providing growing boys and girls with a system of values to help them cope with the problems of awakening sexuality, poisons them with a stifling conformity and secrecy.

  Mindful that he was also drawing on personal experiences outside school, particularly his parents’ marital rows, Wedekind was adamant that, despite the play’s departure from Naturalism’s adherence to ‘real life’, the events depicted in Spring Awakening were not something he had invented. ‘Almost every scene is drawn from life. Even the words “That boy was no son of mine” – for which I have been accused of crude exaggeration – were actually said.’

  The play’s most bitter commentary on the flawed educational priorities of the time is in one of the rare stage directions. The teachers’ conference room in which Melchior is interrogated in Act III Scene 1 is adorned by the busts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. The writings of these great educational reformers preach a doctrine of wholeness, harmony and spontaneity, of practical and emotional as much as intellectual development, and a humane approach to reconciling the tension between the education of responsible citizens on the one hand and free individuals on the other. The teachers in Wedekind’s staffroom, caricatured and viewed through the prism of an adolescent imagination, embody none of these principles. The puerile bickering that punctuates the Headmaster’s convoluted monologue (to which none of the teachers are listening) only emphasises their impotence. They are there to provide the Head with a collective rubber stamp for disciplinary action. Wedekind presents them as half Kafkaesque courtroom, half Sixth Form end-of-term parody, identified only through the nicknames by which schoolboys have traditionally ridiculed authority.

  Such a scene would be unthinkable in a play by Ibsen or the Naturalists, who sought to shape their characters with impartial care and present even the objects of their criticism as human beings in their own right. Wedekind eschews even-handedness to portray a world out of focus. If school is a microcosm of society, then what he perceived as the fragmentation of that society – the gulf between the generations, between the sexes, between public morals and private inclinations – will be best conveyed through the fragmentation of conventional dramatic structure. So Spring Awakening lurches disturbingly from scenes of domestic conversational realism, via passages of lyrical impressionism, to episodes which are grotesque or dreamlike or surrealistic, all combining to give a fractured sensation of the experience of adolescence. Angry, savage, humorous and poetic, it is as innovatory in style and structure as in its subject matter, and stands apart from anything else that was being written for the contemporary stage.

  Such a work was not entirely without precedent in the German dramatic tradition. The plays of the radical Sturm und Drang writer J.M.R. Lenz (1751–92), which poured scorn on the stifling hierarchical structures in the fragmented German principalities, had jettisoned Aristotelian notions of unity of time and place in favour of frequent changes of locale and an episodic arrangement of scenes and tableaux, spiced by touches of the grotesque. His work inspired two playwrights of the next generation who were to die young and be forgotten for the best part of the century. Ironically, it was Wedekind’s bête noire, Hauptmann, who introduced him to the work of the recently rediscovered author of Woyzeck and Danton’s Death. Georg Büchner (1813–37), to whose grave in Zürich Gerhart Hauptmann made regular pilgrimages, was to have the greatest impact on Wedekind’s writing. From Lenz via Büchner and the equally neglected Christian Dietrich Grabbe (1801–36) he learned to exploit the dramatic possibilities of contrast and juxtaposition in an apparently random selection of tightly written scenes. Wedekind openly admitted: ‘Without Woyzeck, Spring Awakening would never have come into being.’

  The Structure

  Wedekind’s choice of subtitle – A Children’s Tragedy – may well be intentionally misleading. ‘I began to write without any plan, with the intention of jotting down whatever pleased me. The plan took shape after the third scene.’

  Act I Scene 1, in which a mother and daughter talk about clothes and a sense of foreboding is created by talk of death, echoes the opening scene of a standard of the nineteenth-century German tragic repertoire, Friedrich Hebbel’s Maria Magdalene. In that play too a pregnant young heroine is doomed to fall victim to a destructive social morality. In Spring Awakening’s first scene, however, mother and daughter talk at cross purposes. Wendla thinks the dress her mother has made for her birthday is too long. Frau Bergmann’s desire to cover her daughter from head to foot betrays an unspoken anxiety that she is now of an age to attract unwanted male attention. She fears her daughter’s growing into womanhood and, unable
to articulate that fear, wants to keep her as a child. Like the mother’s forebodings in Maria Magdalene, Wendla’s premonition of death – which is echoed a few scenes later by talk of Gretchen’s fate in Goethe’s Faust – raises audience expectations of tragic inevitability. However, the jaunty tone of Spring Awakening’s final scene – and the brisk dismissal of the waste of Wendla’s young life by the mysterious Masked Man – will not fulfil those expectations. This will not be a tragedy in any conventional sense.

  The play is, in fact, a set of variations on a theme, a juxtaposition of scenes and situations providing patterns of cross-reference and contrast (beginning with alternating scenes between boys and girls). Each of the three acts – set in spring, summer and autumn – builds steadily towards a violent climax (though the third is forestalled by deus ex machina intervention). But the plotting of each act is submerged in the evocation of atmosphere. The play’s sense of time is lyrical rather than dramatic. As the seasons move forward with the acts, atmospheric changes are theatrically heightened as, within each scene, the sun sets, the rain clears, darkness falls or a storm brews up. Natural phenomena – as experienced with heightened intensity by the mentally exhausted Moritz – intrude through an open window into Melchior’s study. Diaphanous creatures glide, the leaves whisper bedtime stories. That open window suggests the liberal atmosphere encouraged by Melchior’s mother, and contrasts with the bricked-up aperture in the staffroom that symbolically stifles the spirit of Pestalozzi and Rousseau, and the bolted skylight through which Melchior must escape from the borstal.

  In the burial scene (Act III Scene 2), the pathetic fallacy is taken to ridiculous extremes, as pouring rain and the teachers’ umbrellas suddenly give way to clear skies and showers of anemones when the children emerge to pay their respects to Moritz. Such non-naturalistic touches underscore one of the most striking aspects of the play’s composition: the lack of contact between the generations. Hardly anywhere in the play do young and old meet as equals. Melchior and his father – strong personalities who stand respectively for individual freedom and social conformity – are never brought face to face. The stark isolation of individuals is expressed in the mosaic of monologues that makes up much of Act 2. In a world where talk of emotions is banished from a social or family context, the monologues of the young become private internalised dialogues, in which Wendla for example, post-coitus, acts as both questioner and answerer, and in which inexpressible depth of feeling, as Moritz contemplates suicide, is conveyed by the breakdown of syntax. In a monologue delivered in the most confined and private space imaginable, Hans’s imagination runs riot within a framework of quotations from Othello. But the choice of text is another ironic juxtaposition: while the Moor kills because he believes Desdemona unchaste, Hans commits ‘murder’ by flushing his ‘beloved’ down the loo because he knows her chastity is unassailable.

  By switching mood and tempo from the coitus in the hayloft and the solitary eruption in the lavatory to the measured flow of Frau Gabor’s carefully worded reply to Moritz’s appeal for help, Wedekind underlines the gulf between the adult and adolescent worlds far more effectively than by a direct confrontation. Nor does he shy from being deliberately obscene when contrasting the brutality of the reformatory with the Christian sentiments expressed by Melchior’s father as justification for sending him there.

  The violence thus done to the natural development of the young by the absence of genuine communication is matched by the violence of forcibly separating body and head to protect young minds from impure urges from below. The fairy tale of the headless queen is an obvious allegory of an educational system that neglects a girl’s intellectual development and sends a boy’s mental training into overdrive, thus producing ‘headless queens’ and ‘two-headed kings’. But there are other symbolic ‘decapitations’. Martha is punished for her experiments with fashion by being tied up to her chin in a sack. Mrs Gabor rounds off her encouraging letter with the unwittingly sinister ‘Hold your head high, Herr Stiefel’. As the talk turns to how babies are made, Wendla hides her head under her mother’s apron. All these foreshadow the manner of Moritz’s suicide and his ghostly reappearance with his head under his arm.

  The Language

  Strange juxtapositions in tone and milieu are matched by a rich and deliberate inconsistency of language. The adolescents’ talk veers constantly between naivety and irony, between the colloquial and the lyrical. Their experiments with language mirror their exploration of role-play as they try out approximations of adult identity. Wedekind’s depiction of this process is as tender as it is humorous. In a technique borrowed from Heine, he punctures a poetic or sentimental mood – as when Wendla responds to Melchior’s greeting her as ‘wood nymph’ with ‘No, it’s just Wendla Bergmann’. The homework assignments that take up so much of the boys’ energies – Virgil, Homer, the Sassanid Dynasty – channel their minds to distant lands and figures of antiquity that are far removed from the immediate physical problems of adolescence. Wedekind underscores this incongruity by highlighting the teenagers’ touching and sometimes comic attempts to express their feelings and define their experiences through classical imagery. The masturbating Hans, even at the moment of ejaculation, quotes Shakespeare and Suetonius. The unisex education Moritz longingly imagines for the children he will never have is in typical neo-classical style, with an emphasis on toughness and physical discipline, the very qualities he fears he lacks. In his fevered imagination, his risky catnap in an Ancient History lesson becomes the deep sleep of the drunken Cyclops at the mercy of Odysseus and his men, while, even on the brink of blowing his brains out, he gropes for examples of self-sacrifice in classical antiquity. His torturing himself over five mistakes in Greek class in a single term is contrasted with the untroubled floundering of Wendla’s friend Thea, the very girl who finds him so embarrassing. Comically underlining the difference in academic expectations of boys and girls, she cobbles together in a single sentence four different sources – Socrates, Alexander the Great, Diogenes’ barrel and the donkey’s shadow from Aesop’s Fables – into what she thinks is one story. As for Melchior, whether self-consciously evoking Scylla and Charybdis or slipping into a sarcastic tone with his mother on the complexities of Goethe’s Faust, he assumes a pedantic manner beyond his years, the borrowed adult voice of the precocious, classically educated schoolboy warding off adolescent anxieties.

  On the one occasion when direct emotional communication is called for, it comes in a surprising place. Hans’s verbal facility, vivid imagination and sense of his own ridiculousness provide, in Act II, a safety-valve and ironic commentary to the grubby business of relieving himself. In Act III, the need and opportunity for intimacy take him beyond his lonely collection of erotica to a one-on-one situation with his classmate Ernst. The ancient Greeks that are the bane of the boys’ existence could here provide a safe cultural context for defensively ironic, homoerotic role play. Instead of that, Wedekind gives us a love declaration that is breathtaking in its truth and simplicity.

  By contrast with the lyricism and startling imagery of much of the adolescents’ speech, the language of most of the adults is deliberately stilted. In the Expressionist drama, which flourished in Germany in the years immediately before, during and immediately after the First World War, syntax and logic are often exposed as tools by which the social order curbs and denies genuine self-expression. Wedekind anticipates that development in Spring Awakening. The adults are first and foremost figures of authority: religious, academic, parental, medical. Many of them strike postures or shroud themselves in cliché to hide an inherent weakness. The Pastor, in comforting the bereaved, misquotes scripture (his text is from Romans, not Corinthians). The doctor’s white lies to a confused and pregnant Wendla are riddled with a snobbery that could hardly be less appropriate. The Headmaster’s convoluted syntax masks a lack of humane insight and a search for insurance against accusations of professional incompetence. As for Mr Gabor, he is a jurist in his own home, persuading himsel
f of the benefits of a borstal education for his son while battering his wife with legalistic argument. Wedekind acknowledged that the fight between the Gabors echoed the tone and content of his own parents’ domestic rows. Mrs Gabor’s ‘Only a man could talk like that’ castigates a mentality that treats moral principles not as ends that serve humanity but as ends in themselves with, in Mr Gabor’s case, devastating consequences for himself, his wife and his son.

  In Spring Awakening, relationships between parents and children are fraught with danger – for both parties. Mrs Bergmann is not untypical of mothers of the time in her emotional conviction that to talk about conception and childbirth to her daughter is to corrupt her innocence. An English reader unfamiliar with German language, culture and family life may not appreciate the extent to which Wedekind’s humorous and sympathetic portrait of this gemütliche Hausfrau (‘homely housewife’) – who has simply done by her daughter as her ‘own dear mother’ did by her – provides the play’s emotional core. From her lips, ‘we must put our trust in God, we must pray for His mercy, and do our part’ is frightening in its sincere desire to do the right thing for her daughter and its unawareness of the contradiction in appealing to divine providence while arranging a termination. Mrs Gabor’s acquiescence in the punishment of her son may also be viewed sympathetically when her moral stand against her husband is sapped by feelings of complicity (through neglect) in Moritz’s suicide. Even the cruelties of Melchior’s father are motivated in part by the need to pre-empt social blackmail. For all the elements of caricature, it pays to search behind the manipulative use of language for evidence of moral pressure that compels the adults to act as they do.