Wedekind, Frank

(Benjamin Franklin Wedekind, 1864-1918)

   Playwright, actor. Wedekind was a seminal figure in the German theater's transition to modernism. His departures, both formal and material, were radical, utilizing a cabaret sensibility to disrupt bourgeois expectations of theater performance. The dialogue in his plays was characterized by Aneinandervorbeireden, which characters "spoke past each other." These characters were often disquieted adolescents, murderers, confidence men, pimps, nymphomaniacs, bank presidents, or lesbians, all of them jumbled into an environment with realistic contours. Beneath the surface lurked profoundly controversial topics intended to agitate moral certitude. Wedekind's first play, Frühlings Erwachen (Spring's Awakening, 1891), scandalized audiences, critics, and producers; it and nearly all his other plays remained unperformed except for private audiences: the Lulu plays Erdgeist (Earth Spirit) premiered in 1898 and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandoras Box) in 1903; Der Kammersänger (The Court Tenor) premiered in 1905. Spring's Awakening opened in 1906—and ran for 117 performances, by far the longest run of any Max Reinhardt production that season. Most observers had considered it pure pornography; Reinhardt had to cut the homosexual and masturbation scenes in order to get it past the police censor. It featured 26-year-old Alexander Moissi as the 15-year-old Moritz and Wedekind himself as the Man in the Mask. Throughout the Wilhelmine period, Wedekind continued to shock audiences as a playwright, cabaret performer, and political commentator. Many scholars have since hailed him as a forerunner to Expressionism, though his preoccupations with sexuality, sexual relationships, androgyny, bisexuality, and tendencies toward the scatological distinguish Wedekind most clearly as a Bürgerschreck ("scourge of the bourgeoisie"), determined to erode and subvert the era's moral convictions.