‘Elasticity’ and the Masked Man
In one of the most popular songs Wedekind wrote for the Eleven Executioners cabaret, a young girl called Ilse sadly concludes: ‘When I no longer rouse desire, well, then I might as well be dead.’ The name evokes Henrich Heine’s Harz Journey, in which the river Ilse is a girl, challenging the poet to savour life and all its delights. Ilse in Spring Awakening offers a way back to life for Moritz by appealing to his curiosity. It is a call to excitement and intensity of experience from someone blithely unconcerned about any moral code and rhapsodising about her bohemian life, while cheerfully admitting that her lifestyle may lead to no good: ‘By the time the rest of you have grown up, I’ll be in the gutter.’ She is the prototype for the high libido women, like Lulu, who in Wedekind’s plays seem destined for an orgiastic death. For all the freedom of the outsider she represents – and the ‘supernatural’ element in her encounter with Moritz that is hinted at in the last scene – Ilse is a mundane link in a symbiotic relationship that connects a thriving artistic cottage industry – via boys masturbating in lavatories – to secret drawers in the desks of the well-to-do. It is clear that the mercurial Hans Rilow – he might also be Hans von Rilow – comes from ‘good stock’. To him ‘virtue is an elegant suit of clothes’ – though a size too big for himself and Ernst. The reproductions of nudes that he uses for self-gratification include a number of items stolen or inherited from other connoisseurs: his elder brother, his governess, and his father. The defenders of public morality (with whose standpoint Herr von Rilow would no doubt have associated himself) were very concerned in Germany about art reproductions of a certain genre falling into immature hands. Since the 1860s technical developments in the printing industry had made cheap reproductions of art works available to the lower classes and middle-class youths. Both these groups were considered by society’s moral guardians to lack the education required to view such art in a properly ‘disinterested’ manner. Therefore, even though the originals were openly on show in museums, the German police regularly confiscated cheap reproductions of nudes by artists like Titian, Giorgione, Corregio, Rubens, Veronese, van Dyck and Ingres.
By showing what Hans gets up to in the lavatory, Wedekind mischievously confirms the authorities’ worst fears. But he also shows how the anti-bourgeois vie de bohème epitomised by Ilse and her companions owes its existence to the hypocritical closet voyeurism of the repressed bourgeois male. The artists survive by selling their erotic drawings and photographs, while Ilse – barely out of school – survives by sitting for the portraits and sleeping with the painters. Meanwhile, the fact that the pictures Hans needs for arousal can be retrieved from a secret drawer in his father’s desk explains why he is less inclined than his schoolmates to take the older generation’s moral strictures seriously.
The instinct for survival that Ilse represents takes a very different shape when, in the final scene, it is Melchior’s turn to contemplate suicide. ‘I resisted terminating the play among schoolchildren,’ wrote Wedekind, ‘without the prospect of life among adults.’ Under a November night sky, in freezing temperatures that add a comic urgency to the proceedings, a Masked Man strolls into a cemetery, argues with a headless ghost and leaves again with the boy he has come to save. Who is this muffled intruder? Wedekind pointed out that the argument of the scene contained elements of the philosophy of Nietzsche. Eric Bentley, translating the play in the 1960s, thought Wedekind had Goethe in mind. At the core of Goethe’s philosophy was the promotion of physical and emotional development as equal to and harmonious with the intellect – which brings us back to the influence of Heine and the busts of Rousseau and Pestalozzi. It is highly probable though that, prompted by earlier references to the Gretchen story in Faust, German audiences confronted with the Masked Man would immediately think of Mephisto. Wedekind describes Mephisto in Thoughts on the Circus as Faust’s suppressed alter ego, emerging at moments of crisis. It is Mephisto who draws Faust back from the brink of despair and offers to show him ‘what no man has yet seen’.
But in contrast to that devilish pact, there are no conditions in the Masked Man’s courting of Melchior (apart from ‘trust me’) and no contract in blood. If one abandons the search for literary prototypes, the Masked Man simply represents, in a small town with conservative tastes, the lure of modern life with all its possibilities, its obstacles and pitfalls, its ‘restless, agitated steeplechase’. For good or ill, he voices the promise of life, experience and exploration beyond anything Melchior has known, and of a saner adult world free of the restrictive morality of school and fathers.
His confrontation with the ghost of Moritz can also be read as a projection of a struggle in Melchior’s mind. Moritz, clumsily inadequate in life, acquires in death (and in Melchior’s imagination) the authority of a verbal virtuoso. From the gentle poetic musings of his exhausted brain in Melchior’s study there is a quantum leap to the seductively rhythmic imagery by which he lures Melchior to oblivion. His sheer range of expression makes him, even when steeped in the odours of decay, one of Wedekind’s most life-enhancing figures. By contrast, the Masked Man’s responses are, at best, laconic and, at worst, glib, as when he answers Melchior’s anguished question about morality with a pseudo-mathematical formula – ‘the real product of two imaginary numbers’ – which is no more reassuring to Melchior’s tortured conscience than his curt dismissal of the recently buried Wendla: ‘That girl would have given birth beautifully.’ But the Masked Man’s appeal needs no poetic embellishment, for it taps directly into what Melchior has and the sensitive Moritz has not: ‘elasticity’, the ability to bounce back, a survival instinct.
Wedekind dedicated the play to the Masked Man and, in Max Reinhardt’s original production, played the role himself, completely forgetting his lines on the first night. He took to the stage cloaked – metaphorically – in language that ideals among adults, he made the resulting disfigurement of children seem all the more unnecessary and absurd. No wonder he influenced the ‘epic theatre’ of another subversive writer who admired him enough to attend his funeral and write him a glowing obituary: Bertolt Brecht. For neither Wedekind nor Brecht is the tragedy inevitable. Satire contains an implicit call for change. How extraordinary, then, that when so much has changed in Western culture and educational practice since 1891, this tender and tragicomic portrayal of the vicissitudes of puberty can still seem so achingly relevant.
Spring Awakening on Stage
Frühlings Erwachen premiered at the Kammerspiele (chamber theatre) of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin on 20th November 1906. Max Reinhardt’s production used gauzes and the recently invented revolving stage to facilitate fluent changes between the myriad indoor and outdoor settings. It could only go ahead with significant changes demanded by the censor. The teachers’ caricatured names were replaced with inoffensive ones. Act I Scene 5 was rewritten to exclude Melchior’s beating of Wendla, and three whole scenes were cut: the borstal scene, the kissing of Hans and Ernst, and Hans’s monologue which was so decimated by the censor that author and director decided to leave it out. While praising what was left of the play, the liberal critic Siegfried Jacobssohn, who had read the whole text, took Wedekind to task for wanting to show ‘how deviants of sexual love such as sado-masochism, masturbation and pederasty are sown and develop in children’ and thanked the censor for having the scenes cut, ‘though I trust Herr Reinhardt would have left them out anyway.’ But another critic, Karl Strecker, deplored the loss of the scene between Hans and Ernst, calling it ‘a delightfully charming Hellenic idyll which only dirty minds can interpret in a dirty manner’. The production ran for 351 performances and Reinhardt’s company took it on tour from 1907 onwards. A rival production in Hamburg that year by the leading Expressionist director Leopold Jessner reinterpreted the final scene as Melchior’s nightmare, and staged the play, in the playwright’s words, as ‘the angriest, stoniest tragedy’. ‘Until Reinhardt’s production this play was regarded as pure pornography,’ complained Wedekind
. ‘Still nobody finds any humour in it.’ Reinhardt responded to the author’s disgruntlement by encouraging him to direct his plays himself.
However, it was not until the 1920s, in the liberal Weimar Republic that Wedekind did not live to see, that a less heavy approach was applied to Spring Awakening. The leading actor/director Gustaf Gründgens (a famous Mephisto in Goethe’s Faust) staged it with the lightness of touch demanded by its author, but seemingly undermined the impact by taking the role of the teenage Moritz himself, and playing it with a sentimentality and melancholy pallor that in the view of one critic evoked ‘the spring tragedy of an already autumnal person’. The most controversial interpretation of the era was in 1929 at the Berliner Volksbühne, which – to save the play from the supposed ridicule of a more knowing generation – updated and transposed it to contemporary Berlin. The girls discussed fashionable bobs, Martha Bessel spoke Berlin dialect, and Melchior and Wendla’s encounters in the forest and the hayloft were relocated to the stairwell and loft space of a Berlin tenement block. Brecht actors Carola Neher and Kurt Weill’s wife Lotte Lenya (Polly Peachum and Jenny from the legendary Threepenny Opera of the same year) played Wendla and Ilse, with Peter Lorre as Moritz. The same year saw Richard Oswald produce a silent film version.
In general, the 1920s saw a veritable surge of enthusiasm for his work, but the advent of National Socialism put an abrupt end to the Wedekind boom. His plays were not publicly burned by the Nazis along with other ‘degenerate’ works, but quietly made to disappear. UFA, the largest German film company, offered to film The Marquis of Keith (Wedekind’s favourite of his plays, about a charlatan and conman who collects vast sums for a fraudulent project), provided the title character could be portrayed as a Jew. This proposal was rejected by Wedekind’s widow Tilly. Post-war, like other pre-Nazi writers, Wedekind was temporarily forgotten as thirteen years of Western culture swept over Germany, demanding instant digestion. There was a revival of interest in the 1960s. Peter Zadek’s innovative 1965 production of Spring Awakening in Bremen, with Moritz nonchalantly carrying his head like a football, finally restored all the censored passages.
The first performance in English, The Awakening of Spring – with entrance by subscription only to circumvent censorship – was given in 1917 in New York under the auspices of a progressive medical magazine, The Medical Review of Reviews. The city’s Commissioner of Licenses denounced it in advance as pornographic, and only after a last-minute court injunction was it allowed to proceed for a single matinee performance, to a riotous reaction in the stalls and headlines such as ‘All Childhood Shamed’ and ‘Spring Offensive’ in the New York press. The play did not return to the United States until 1958 at the University of Chicago.
As for the UK, a translation by Stephen Spender and Frances Fawcett published in Five Tragedies of Sex in 1952 was still missing the scenes Reinhardt felt obliged to censor at the Berlin premiere a half-century earlier. The first known airing in Britain – apart from a single performance by the Sunday Theatre Club in 1931 which prompted the Daily Telegraph critic to write, ‘Thank heaven we in England have always grown up too slowly’ – was in two Sunday-night performances at the Royal Court Theatre in 1963, with Nicol Williamson taking the role of the Masked Man, in a translation by the Royal Court’s Literary Manager Tom Osborn that was played, according to Bamber Gascoigne in The Spectator, ‘under a light blanket of burlesque’. After negotiations between the Office of the Lord Chamberlain (responsible for censorship in the theatre until 1968) and the National Theatre Literary Department led by Kenneth Tynan, who promoted the play as ‘a sensitive and profoundly moral work’, the play was granted a provisional licence as long as there was ‘no kissing or caressing between boys’, the words ‘penis’ and ‘vagina’ were omitted and an alternative was found to the masturbation game in the borstal. Despite recommendations from Tynan and Laurence Olivier, the National initially rejected the play, with Osborn quoting an NT spokesman as saying the play was ‘all right for some poky experimental theatre in Sloane Square’, and it was not until 1974 that the first complete uncensored performance in Britain was given in London by the NT at the Old Vic, in a translation by the playwright Edward Bond, directed by Bill Bryden, with Michael Kitchen as Moritz and Cyril Cusack as the Masked Man. The Royal Shakespeare Company weighed in with a new translation from the poet Ted Hughes, directed by Tim Supple at the Barbican in 1995.
Audiences in France, apart from an unsuccessful outing in 1908, also had to wait until the 1970s, with a 1974 Paris premiere at the experimental Théâtre Récamier in a translation by François Regnault. A Soviet production in 1923 drew this response from the Symbolist poet Alexandr Blok: ‘It is too small for a Russian soul. Stupid parents and teachers, spoiled children. Our life is higher and bigger than that.’
As for opera and music theatre, Wedekind’s Lulu plays had inspired Alban Berg’s unfinished lyrical masterpiece Lulu from 1935, finally premiered in Paris in 1979, and an opera version of Spring Awakening in French – L’Éveil du printemps – was commissioned from the Belgian composer Benoît Mernier to a libretto by Jacques De Decker and premiered in 2007 at the Théâtre Royal de La Monnaie in Brussels. The youngsters’ domestic settings were picked out as tiny, claustrophobic cells of activity, with the adults heard only offstage and picked out as looming, terrifying shadows. The Broadway musical Spring Awakening, with book and lyrics by Steven Sater and score by Duncan Sheik, winner of eight 2007 Tony Awards including Best Musical, had all the adult characters played by two actors (dispensing altogether with the Masked Man) and, with the brilliant device of modern hand-held mics retrieved from the youngsters’ tight-fitting nineteenth-century school jackets, magnificently evoked pent-up teenage fury in the numbers ‘The Bitch of Living’ and ‘Totally Fucked’. The musical opened in London at the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith in February 2009 before transferring to the Novello Theatre in the West End, and winning four Olivier Awards, including Best New Musical.
Wedekind: Key Dates
1864 Born in Hanover and christened Benjamin Franklin Wedekind.
1872 Family leaves Bismarck’s Germany for neutral and republican Switzerland.
1878 Precocious early attempts at poetry.
1884 Studies law at father’s request.
1886 Declares intention to be a writer and leaves home after a fight with his father. Earns his keep as advertising manager for the Maggi soup firm and secretary to a circus.
1887 In Zurich joins Young Germany movement of exiled German writers and meets leading Naturalist Gerhart Hauptmann.
1888 Death of father Friedrich Wilhelm. Inheritance allows him to set up as a writer in Munich.
1889 Completes Children and Fools, satirising Naturalism and Hauptmann, later published as The World of Youth.
1891 Writes Spring Awakening and publishes it at his own expense. Leaves Munich for Paris.
1894 Visits London but is unimpressed: ‘At midnight, the police send you to bed.’
Saved from destitution in Paris when his inheritance runs out by employment as secretary to Danish art forger Willy Gretor (‘the most inspiring person I have ever met’).
1895 Writes the first Lulu play Earth Spirit. Using stage name ‘Cornelius Minehaha’ gives readings in Zurich from Ibsen’s Ghosts.
1896 Affair in Munich with Strindberg’s wife, the writer Frida Uhl. She bears his son, Friedrich Strindberg. Helps found satirical magazine Simplicissimus.
1897 Writes one-act play The Tenor (also translated as The Court Singer).
1898 Dramaturg at the Ibsen Theatre in Leipzig. Premiere of Earth Spirit with Wedekind playing Dr Schön. Flees the country after poems mocking the Kaiser appear in Simplicissimus and police find originals in his handwriting.
1899 Returns to Leipzig to face charges of lèse majesté. Imprisonment (relatively comfortable) in Königstein fortress.
1900 Released from gaol and returns to Munich. Writes The Marquis of Keith.
1901 Satirical cabaret The Eleven Executioners
launched in Munich with Wedekind as star performer. Premiere of The Marquis of Keith in Berlin – ‘a laughable failure’ according to its author.
1902 Premiere of King Nicolo, or Such is Life.
1905 The second Lulu play Pandora’s Box is staged by Karl Kraus in Berlin. Premiere of Karl Hetmann, the Dwarf Giant in Munich.
1906 Premiere of Spring Awakening in Berlin. Marries Lulu actress Tilly Newes. Birth of daughter Pamela.
1908 Premieres of Music and Censorship. Publication of The Dance of Death.
1909 Appears in a seven-play cycle of his plays in Munich.
1910 Publication of Castle Wetterstein.
1911 Birth of second daughter Kadidja.
1912 Premiere of Franziska, about a female Faust figure.
1914 Honoured on fiftieth birthday with publication of The Wedekind Book, with contributions by every major literary figure except Hauptmann.
1915 Writes historical drama Bismarck. Despite Wedekind speech supporting the war, several of his plays are considered subversive and withdrawn from the repertoire.
1916 Death of Wedekind’s mother Emilie. In Zurich, the Café Voltaire opens and Dadaism is born. Wedekind’s songs are sung on the first programme.
1918 Dies in Munich of post-operative complications aged fifty-three.
For Further Reading
The four main plays (Spring Awakening, Earth Spirit, Pandora’s Box, The Marquis of Keith), plus the one-act farce The Tenor (in which a famous opera singer receives a series of unwelcome guests in his hotel suite), can be found in English in one volume in Frank Wedekind: Four Major Plays, translated by Carl R. Mueller (Smith and Kraus, 2000). Published versions of the Lulu plays include those by the playwrights Peter Barnes: Lulu, A Sex Tragedy (Heinemann, 1971) and Nicholas Wright: Lulu (Nick Hern Books, 2001), while The Marquis of Keith, which Wedekind considered his greatest play, is also available with the Lulu plays in versions by Steve Gooch for Absolute Classics (1990). Also from Absolute Classics: Franziska, translated by Philip Ward and adapted by Eleanor Brown (1998), in which a young girl makes a Faustian pact with the Devil to discover what it is like to live as a man. Musik, adapted by Neil Fleming, is available in Oberon Modern Plays (2005).
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