Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening and the Tragedy of Adolescence

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, bolstered by an expanding urban middle class, rapid technological advancement, and the influence of Darwin and Freud, realism became entrenched as a springboard for Western theatre to examine topics that had previously been unexamined or taboo. Accepted standards for what had constituted drama that had held sway since Aristotle’s Poetics were vigorously challenged as new character types became fodder for dramatic investigation, hitherto unheralded characters moved to the forefront, and the classic distinction between “tragedy” and “comedy” became less distinct. Among the emerging topics for serious consideration were youth and the issues that concerned them. Prior to the twentieth century, the traditional argument held that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet qualifies as tragedy, not because it deals with the deaths of two children, but because the fate of the two children illustrates the tragic downfall of two powerful and noble families. Frank Wedekind’s Fruhlings Erwachen: Eine Kindertragodie, which translates as Spring Awakening: A Children’s Tragedy, suggests that not only are the children’s problems important but that they might even constitute tragedy. Spring Awakening is a harbinger of the youth culture that became the focus for much of twentieth-century dramatic art and literature. It examines the emerging concept of adolescence as the liminal period in which children transition from their raw and primitive identities to the cultural idea of a “civilized” state. Wedekind, who seems to have cultivated a perpetual rebellious youth mentality, takes a stand clearly on the side of the raw and primitive and challenges the rules of traditional drama in ways that resonated among his successors and continue into the twenty-first century.

Benjamin Franklin Wedekind (1864–1918) was conceived in California, born in Hanover, Germany, and died in Munich. His first play, Spring Awakening, was written in 1890–91 and finally received its first, controversial, production in 1906. In the years between the play’s composition and its first staging, Frank Wedekind managed to serve time in a German prison for the crime of lese-majeste—basically, treason—for some poems that he published. By the time that Spring Awakening was eventually produced, Wedekind was no stranger to provocation and challenge to authority, and he seems to have relished the role of “bad boy” throughout his lifetime. “Where nineteenth-century drama had been characterized by extreme discretion, particularly in the treatment of sex, Wedekind became the man prepared to deal openly with the unspeakable.”¹ The German dramatist and theatre critic Julius Bab assessed him as “not the kind of artist who creates his work over years and days but a tragic clown, a mental eroticist, a mathematical dreamer, who is a genius of the moment.”²

Spring Awakening, a fin de siècle play dealing frankly and outrageously with youth culture and the issues of masturbation, rape, suicide, abortion, homosexuality, and mental and physical child abuse, was bound to ignite outrage in certain quarters in its time. The most disturbing part for the adult audience, however, may have been its condemnation and merciless satire of a bumbling education system, adult bureaucratic ineptitude, and criminally ignorant parenting. The play’s controversy continues to churn into the twenty-first century even as it spawned a pot-boiling, award-winning, and very loosely adapted rock musical adaptation on Broadway in 2006.

The play focuses on Melchior, a blithe but worldly and atheistic fourteen-year-old boy to whom the other boys come for information and insights and who is the object of the admiring longing of the girls. Melchior’s friend Moritz is a confused and troubled teen who is on the verge of failing his exams and not being moved forward in the oppressive school they attend, partially because there are not enough chairs in the next level to accommodate all the boys. Melchior addresses Moritz’s shy curiosity about sex and his unwillingness to discuss it face-to-face by writing for him a clinically detailed paper, with illustrations, explaining sex between a man and a woman. The third principal character, Wendla, is a naive girl who still...