Spring Awakening E-Book

Frank Wedekind

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Drama Classi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 154

Beschreibung

The NHB Drama Classics series presents the world's greatest plays in affordable, highly readable editions for students, actors and theatregoers. The hallmarks of the series are accessible introductions (focussing on the play's theatrical and historical background, together with an author biography, key dates and suggestions for further reading) and the complete text, uncluttered with footnotes. The translations, by leading experts in the field, are accurate and above all actable. The editions of English-language plays include a glossary of unusual words and phrases to aid understanding. Frank Wedekind's famously banned German play, Spring Awakening, was written in 1891 and focuses on a group of classmates and explores adolescent sexuality and the emotional consequences if suppressed.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

SPRING AWAKENING

by

Frank Wedekind

translated and introduced byJulian and Margarete Forsyth

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Wedekind: Key Dates

For Further Reading

Translator’s Note

Dedication

Characters

Spring Awakening

Notes on this Translation

Textual Cuts

Structural Changes in Performance

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Frank Wedekind (1864–1918)

Playwright, satirist, actor, cabaret singer, terror of the German bourgeoisie and, in Bertolt Brecht’s words, ‘one of the great educators of modern Europe’, Benjamin Franklin Wedekind was conceived in California, born in Hanover and christened in honour of his parents’ courtship in the Land of the Free. His mother Emilie (née Kammerer) was a young singer at the German theatre in San Francisco whose reputed beauty and talent were matched by her independent spirit. She had sailed alone from Germany aged sixteen to join her married sister in Chile, surviving a rape attempt on the way. En route to a new life in California, she had buried her sister at sea when she succumbed to yellow fever, and then taken on the burden of supporting her in-laws with her earnings as a performer. The German physician in San Francisco who treated her for exhaustion promptly fell in love with his young patient. Dr Friedrich Wilhelm Wedekind was an idealistic, radical democrat, who had emigrated to the States after the failure of the 1848 revolution in Germany and made a fortune in land speculation during the gold rush. The fact that he was also twenty-four years older than Emilie was, son Franklin observed later, ‘not entirely devoid of significance’. A condition of their marrying was that his young wife give up her stage career.

The marriage appears to have been fraught, with the husband suffering frequent bouts of jealousy. The couple returned to Germany but, disillusioned once more with politics under Bismarck, the doctor uprooted his young family again to Switzerland, where he purchased an isolated castle on a hill, thus extricating his wife from the attentions of flirtatious young men, and Franklin and his elder brother from future conscription to the new Imperial Army. It was here, retired from practice and increasingly eccentric and withdrawn, that Dr Wedekind lived out his life in the castle’s upstairs quarters like the Prussian landed gentry he had despised in his youth, stamping on the floor whenever he needed attention.

To Franklin, his mother seemed like a living rebuke to the prudish pieties of German-Swiss small-town life. When not arguing spiritedly with her husband, Emilie devoted her energies to managing the castle and initiating her six children (Franklin being number two) into the bohemian world of her past. She encouraged them to put on music-hall acts and little plays in which she was a keen participant. Her profound influence on him was aided and abetted by some interesting female friends. Olga Plümacher, a self-taught philosopher with a published book on Schopenhauer, engaged the teenage boy in ‘pessimistic discussions’ and became his ‘philosophical aunt’. With Bertha Jahn, a widow twenty-five years his senior who looked very much like his mother, he almost certainly developed a less platonic relationship, dubbing her his ‘erotic aunt’.

‘Franklin the American’, as he was known at school, agreed to study law at his father’s behest. It soon became apparent that he was neglecting his studies to pay regular visits to theatres. When his father confronted him, Franklin declared his intention of becoming a writer. He and his father came to blows, his allowance was stopped, and he was forced to leave home for Zurich. There he took on a variety of jobs, including writer of jingles for the newly established Maggi Soup and Spice Company, and a stint as secretary to a travelling circus – an experience which would influence much of his later writing. Otherwise he eked out a living contributing articles, poems and sketches to the Zurich press while trying his hand at playwriting. His diaries record with relish his erotic adventures, mainly with prostitutes – with at least one of whom he had a more or less stable relationship – but also betray his early concerns about impotency (‘“Piccolo” is docile. I can’t think what’s the matter with him’).

Zurich was a haven for German expatriate writers fleeing restrictive censorship at home. It was here that Wedekind fell in with the ‘Young Germany’ movement of liberal writers and scientists and its literary leader, the Naturalist playwright Gerhart Hauptmann. He soon fell out with them again, and not only because of his impatience with Naturalism as a genre. He had confided in Hauptmann about his parents’ rocky marriage and his guilt at striking his own father, and the playwright promptly worked these details into a play with the subtitle A Family Disaster. An outraged Wedekind took revenge with a play of his own about women’s emancipation, The World of Youth, which featured a writer (clearly based on Hauptmann) who goes through life with a notebook and pencil noting down everything that may one day be of use. The line with which Wedekind twisted the knife is spoken by the play’s most articulate female character: ‘When Naturalism has had its day, its practitioners can earn a living in the secret police.’

Financial struggles – and a grovelling letter to his father – led to reconciliation and resumption of his legal studies, but within a few months his father’s sudden death left him with a modest inheritance and the chance to pursue his literary ambitions full time. He wrote Spring Awakening, which he subtitled A Children’s Tragedy, at the age of twenty-six in 1890-91. He published it at his own expense, well aware that in the conservative moral climate of the time there was little chance of performance for a play that dealt so candidly with the subject of puberty. It was fifteen years before Germany’s leading theatre director Max Reinhardt decided to risk it in Berlin.

By then, Franklin – now calling himself plain Frank – had achieved considerable fame or, to some, notoriety. As the star performer of The Eleven Executioners, a political cabaret in Munich, he sang cynical ballads to the guitar about seduced virgins, murdered aunts, and the pleasures of free love. As major contributor to the popular satirical magazine Simplicissimus, he served a nine-month prison sentence for two scurrilous poems about the Kaiser. And with a steady job at last as a theatre ‘dramaturg’, he wrote the Lulu plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, which chart the career of a childlike femme fatale through a succession of lovers who meet violent deaths. She ends as a prostitute in Victorian London, murdered with her lesbian companion by her last client, Jack the Ripper. Both plays were repeatedly rejected and banned before being finally printed and staged in club performances in the early 1900s, with Wedekind himself playing Jack the Ripper. He also played Lulu’s third husband Dr Schön, whom she shoots five times in the back before declaring that he is the only man she has ever loved.

In Pandora’s Box this femme fatale was played by the nineteen-year-old Tilly Newes. In 1906, the year of Spring Awakening’s premiere, she and Frank were married. She was twenty-two years his junior. He proposed after Tilly made a suicide attempt, jumping in a river in the dead of winter when pregnant with his child. She was to try again a decade later, taking mercury in despair at his unfounded jealousies. As his plays achieved greater recognition and toured throughout Germany, he made her give up her independent acting contract so she could appear on stage only with him. While his wife had something of his mother’s vivacious personality, Frank found his father’s paranoia and eccentricity re-emerging in himself in modified form. Male visitors to the Wedekind apartment would be directed to a strategically placed armchair, find themselves staring at a nude portrait of Tilly, and try to hide their discomfort under the beady eye of the host. One family friend recalled Frank’s curious domestic persona as a disconcerting mixture of artistic gipsy and pedantic pater familias. But despite the tensions in the marriage, the two daughters Tilly bore him, Pamela and Kadidja, described him in later life as the perfect father, with qualities that in pre-First World War Germany, with its emphasis on a strict and disciplined upbringing, must have been rare in relations between parents and children: humour, tolerance, and the ability to communicate with children as individuals in their own right.

It is doubtful whether moral conservatives in Wedekind’s day would have considered the author of Spring Awakening to be a suitable parent at all, let alone the paragon of parental virtues described by his daughters. Three scenes in the play which would barely raise an eyebrow today were considered so shocking at the time that they were omitted from the Berlin premiere at the insistence of the censor (and from most subsequent productions until the 1960s). Yet to more liberal minds, his plays were a fresh breeze blowing into the stuffy cultural atmosphere of the late nineteenth century. With an impish desire to shock, he savaged conventional bourgeois morality and argued that, in the modern age of electricity and steampower, man must live without metaphysical illusions. Yet at heart he was a moralist himself, and was well aware of the paradox. He lauded the courage of women who followed their natural instincts, yet many of his characters who live by that principle come to a sticky end.

Wedekind’s plays were too much the product of his own unique personality to generate a movement or ‘school’. Nevertheless, Spring Awakening did inspire a series of outstanding early Expressionist dramas of revolt in the years running up to and during the First World War – Sorge’s The Beggar, Bronnen’s Patricide, Hasenclever’s The Son. His work had a profound influence on the early Brecht, Carl Sternheim and Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and his vaudeville act with the Eleven Executioners blazed a trail for the bitingly satirical songs of the political cabarets of the Weimar Republic which the Nazis were so keen to close down.

He did not live to see the Republic, nor the end of Empire that preceded it. Tilly recalled in her memoirs Lulu, The Role of My Life that in 1917 she and Frank found themselves occupying the very flat in Zurich in which he had written the first draft of Spring Awakening. Frank, in poor health and finding the coincidence ominous, told a friend: ‘The wheel has come full circle. I shall be dead within a year.’ He died in Munich in March 1918 from complications after an abdominal operation. He was fifty-three. The funeral in Munich was sufficiently bizarre to occupy several paragraphs in his obituaries. The family friends and artists among the mourners were augmented by low life and ladies of the town. They had turned out in force to pay their respects to this friend of tightrope walkers and prostitutes, and they scampered across the graves in advance of the funeral party in the hope of getting the best view. A wild-looking figure, continuously shouting and gesticulating, tried to film the proceedings, and at the climax one of the ‘Eleven Executioners’ forced his way to the graveside, announced that he was the last disciple of Wedekind the Messiah, and threw himself into the grave, whence he was escorted to the local lunatic asylum. To one of the mourner/obituarists, the twenty-year-old Brecht, it seemed utterly fitting that a man who had created such controversy in his life should go anything but quietly with this grimly humorous enactment of his last rites.

Spring Awakening: What Happens in the Play

The action is set in a provincial German town in the 1890s and portrays a group of adolescent boys and girls as they discover their sexuality. In this process they are hindered rather than helped by their parents and teachers, who for the most part see natural instincts as sinful and even the mention of sex as immoral.

As a result, fourteen-year-old Wendla Bergmann, who has been kept in innocence by a mother who still talks of babies being delivered by the stork, becomes pregnant without realising it. Her classmate Martha Bessell, whose harmless girlish vanity is to thread coloured ribbons through her nightdress, is punished for such ‘lewdness’ by beatings from her father. The girls’ former friend Ilse, meanwhile, has quit school to sleep around with painters and earn a living as an artist’s model.

As for the boys, Moritz Stiefel, who struggles to cope with parental pressure and the academic rigors of school, finds his concentration fatally undermined by the unexpected erections that are his personal spring awakening. Hans Rilow acts out Othello’s murder of Desdemona in his lavatory at home, while masturbating over reproductions of classical nudes stolen from his father’s desk. And the gifted and precocious Melchior Gabor, whose enlightened mother and strictly authoritarian father are modelled on Wedekind’s parents, triggers disaster by taking Wendla’s virginity and composing an illustrated tract on sex to enlighten his friend Moritz.

Mrs Bergmann, who treats her daughter as a child though she is already an adolescent, fears disgrace and calls in the local abortionist. Mrs Gabor, who treats her son as an adult though he is still an adolescent, joins battle with her lawyer husband for the future and well-being of Melchior, but ultimately agrees to the most extreme punishment. As for Moritz, he fails at school and, to spare his parents’ feelings, blows his brains out, anguished most of all that he will die without ever making love. The school authorities, terrified by the prospect of a suicide epidemic, pin all the blame on Melchior’s tract and have him expelled in disgrace. Hans Rilow, the most sceptical among the youngsters of the moral posturing of his elders, discovers love with his classmate Ernst. Wendla, believing she was suffering from dropsy, dies at the hands of the abortionist without ever understanding how she became pregnant.

At the end, Melchior escapes from the borstal to which his parents have sent him. Cold and starving and conscience-stricken by his part in Wendla’s death, he is enticed to suicide by the headless ghost of Moritz. But a mysterious Masked Man intervenes and escorts him from the graveyard where his two young friends are buried, promising him a good square meal and a whole new world of possibilities.

The Background

The unification of Germany from the patchwork of kingdoms, duchies and principalities that had existed until 1871 unleashed an extraordinary upsurge of energy and massive industrialisation that over the next forty years saw the German Empire, dominated by Prussia, overtake Britain in productive capacity and turn from a mainly rural country into Europe’s chief industrial power. A population explosion and migration from the countryside led to a vast increase in the number and size of cities. However, economic crises in each of the last three decades of the century contributed to an underlying insecurity that, under the ‘Iron Chancellor’, Bismarck, entrenched a conservative morality and imperial control embodied in the Kaiser, the ‘father of the nation’.

The foundation of Germany’s industrial power was a school system that promoted moral values while developing the scientific know-how that fuelled the great chemical industries. While the technical schools trained an educated work force, the Gymnasia (whose nearest British equivalent was the grammar school) combined a ‘Classical’ education (founded in Latin and Greek) with mathematics and the sciences to nurture a professional and bureaucratic elite. German ‘Classicism’ theoretically emphasised humanist values and the cultural development of the individual at the expense of the collective. However, in a time of political and social upheaval it was inevitably subject to re-interpretation and appropriation. In practice, the schools that Frank Wedekind’s generation attended trained children for their future economic roles, instilled respect for authority and conventional morality, and stimulated competition by ensuring a proportion of failures.

The heady years of economic growth also saw a rapid expansion of the middle-class reading and theatregoing public, and an equally rapid increase in the number of publishing houses, journals and theatres that catered for it. Between 1870 and the end of the century the number of proper theatres in Germany (as opposed to vaudevilles and music halls) increased threefold to about six hundred. The majority of these were commercial enterprises that competed for the rights to stage successful works. The potential financial rewards encouraged an expansion in the already swollen ranks of writers, artists and actors. This free market was welcomed as breaking the chains of princely and aristocratic patronage that had dominated cultural life before unification. But as publishers recognised the extent to which profitability was dictated by public demand, they increasingly sponsored a Trivialliteratur that catered for unadventurous tastes.

For the generation of writers that came of age with Wedekind, this dose of commercial reality was culturally and socially unsettling. Many of them came from well-to-do, though hardly wealthy bourgeois families. The twin titans of their literary heritage, Goethe and Schiller, had taught them that art was the highest accomplishment of man and that drama was the supreme form of art. But in a fiercely competitive marketplace, there was little public demand for the kind of idealistic theatre (envisaged by Schiller) that would educate and enlighten rather than merely entertain, and a dramatist seeking an audience had to tailor his output accordingly. The standard fare was German imitations of French farces and comedies of manners depicting the foibles of the upper middle classes. Adultery was a common theme, but sexual titillation was packaged in a reassuringly conservative moral framework and happy endings upheld traditional family values.

For aspiring writers, the tarnishing of youthful ideals that such compromises entailed was compounded by social insecurities. As they competed desperately for low-paid journalistic assignments or translating or acting work to pay the bills, they effectively joined what increasingly became known as the ‘literary proletariat’. Unsurprisingly, many of them developed an intense longing for bourgeois stability mingled with a hatred of the ‘philistine’ commercial middle classes. This ambivalence was further compounded by doubts, expressed by Wedekind and others, as to the value of art when measured against material productivity and scientific progress. Those were the benchmarks by which the nineteenth-century German middle classes measured themselves against the traditional manly and military virtues of the Prussian Junkers, the landed aristocracy. As creators of society’s wealth, the newly prosperous business class extolled the marketplace as the moral equivalent of war, requiring similar qualities of courage and initiative. By these criteria, art, as the domain of feelings and sensibility, was highly suspect, even effeminate.