A Scene from an Unpublished Version of Frank Wedekind's Lulu-Tragedy

A SCENE FROM AN UNPUBLISHED VERSION OF FRANK WEDEKIND'S LULU- TRAGEDY INTRoDucnoN BY KADIDJA WEDEKIND-BIEL THE STORY OF LuLu as known from Frank Wedekind's two plays Eart~ Spirit and The Box of Pandora was originally written as one play in five acts, beginning with the scene in the painter's studio where Lulu's picture is painted, and ending in a London garret where she is murdered by Jack the Ripper. In the later versions-the ones which were published-the author made changes which are mainly a sort of heartbreaking and desperate compromise with the moral and theatrical standard of his time. Wedekind was not the man to whom making a compromise would come easily. Consequently, by this unfortunate procedure the meaning of the original creative idea was well-nigh obliterated. Since after the completion of the original version, several scenes, particularly in the last act, were objected to as unproduceable, the author decided to take the play apart. He took the first three acts, and he wrote a new act to precede the one which now is the last act of Eart~Spirit. To this play in four acts he wrote a prologue. The title "Earth-Spirit" is taken from the Greek Giia, another name of Pandora. To the last two acts of the original version, which were now left over so to speak, Wedekind wrote a new first act, mainly in order to inform the audience of what has happened in Earth-Spirit. Now he had a play in three acts, and to this, too, he wrote a prologue which has in fact nothing at all to do with the plot but which is a dramatization of the author's difficulties with the offices of censorship. To this play he gave the title The Box of Pandora. In the original version Lulu is not the "femme fatale" she is in Eart~ Spirit. Wedekind had by then made the acquaintance of August Strindberg , and it seems that Strindberg's view of the female sex influenced Wedekind when he subtly but considerably changed the character of Lulu. Perhaps it is even more important that Wedekind had also met Strindberg's second wife, soon to be divorced, with whom during the following years he formed a relationship which was not a happy one for either of them. In the original version Lulu is a personification of the material pring '{ 98 MODERN DRAMA May ciple. She is Pandora, who was created by the gods to present man with that fatal gift for an illusion of happiness which invariably turns into the realities of destruction. The fact that every man calls Lulu by a different name is significant, for everyone sees something different in her, and yet to all of them she is the same. Like a mirror, she reflects the strongest desire and the deepest fear of everyone of them. Although the play carries an ethical, even a religious message, much of it is written in a light and playful vein, with the banter, the gaiety, the Parisian frOfl,-frou of the late nineteenth century, the days of young Toulouse-Lautrec and old Renoir, of tragic and captivating personalities like Oscar Wilde, King Ludwig of Bavaria and Friedrich Nietzsche , the days, too, of Bertie, Prince of Wales, pushing sixty and paying undaunted homage to French diseuses, the days of August Strindberg, already famous, and of a struggling young dramatist by the name of Frank Wedekind. The following scene is taken from the first act of this hitherto unpublished version. It takes place in a painter's studio. Eighteen-yearold Lulu, dressed as a pierrot, is posing on a rostrum. Black, a young painter, is busily working away at his easel, completing Lulu's picture. He is ill at ease as his work, as well as his model, is being watched and commented upon by the two men-about-town, Goll and Schon. Goll, Lulu's husband and old enough to be her grandfather, is a charmingly ugly old buck with a tremendous appetite for life, a medical man by profession and an enthusiastic ballet fan. Schon, owner and publisher of several newspapers, is a man of consequence and...