• Born 1864
• 1887 in contact with socialist group, ‘Young Germany’
• 1890 - Writes Spring Awakening
• 1898 - First performance of Earth Spirit
• 1899 - Imprisoned for satirical poetry
• 1901 - Joins The Eleven Executioners
• 1904 Pandora’s Box
• 1906 - First Performance of Spring Awakening
• 1918 - Dies

 Bertolt Brecht on Wedekind in 1918:

‘His vitality was his finest characteristic.
… A few weeks ago at the Bonbonniere he sang his songs to guitar accompaniment in a brittle voice, slightly monotonous and quite untrained. No singer ever gave me such a shock, such a thrill. It was the man’s intense aliveness, the energy which allowed him to defy sniggering ridicule and proclaim his brazen hymn to humanity, that also gave him this personal magic. He seemed indestructible.’ (1977: 3)

“Last Saturday night we sang his songs to the guitar as we swarmed down the Lech under the star-dusted sky... On Sunday morning we were horrified to read that Frank Wedekind had died the day before... Without actually seeing him buried I cannot conceive that he is dead. Like Tolstoy and Strindberg he was one of the great educators of modern Europe.
His greatest work was his personality”.
Bertolt Brecht 1918

“After the long orations Lautensack (one of the Eleven Executioners) forced his way to the grave, threw a wreath into it, broke down and cried: “Frank Wedekind! Your last pupil, Lautensack!’ Then he jumped into the grave. A few days later he was shut up in a mental asylum, where he died the following year.
Edward Bond 1980

• Based on truth - two of
Wedekind’s classmates committed suicide
•
“The boy wasn’t mine” - spoken by a father at the funeral

•
‘I began writing without any plan, intending to write what gave me pleasure. The plan came into being after the third scene and consisted of my own experiences or those of my school fellows. Almost every scene corresponds to an actual incident.’ (Wedekind, quoted in Bentley 2002: xxi)
• Wedekind, like Moritz, struggled at school and was held back a year.
• The young Wedekind came close to suicide himself after two classmates shot one another in a suicide pact in 1880.
• In 1881, another classmate killed himself:
•
‘Last Friday Frank Oberlin cut school. Saturday morning at 4 o’clock he took his history book and went to the embankment to review his history lessons. Two hours later at 6 o’clock his body was found washed up on the banks of the Aare River.’ (Wedekind, letter to Adolf Vögtlin, quoted in Ham
2007: 52)
•
A fourth classmate, Moritz Dürr, killed himself in 1885.

• 1891: Publication.
• 1906: Theatrical premiere of Spring Awakening in Berlin.
• 1908: Banned in Germany (ban subsequently revoked).
• 1910: Private performance in England by the Stage Society.
• 1912: First US production, given in German in New York.
• 1917: First full English-language production, also in New York.
• 1963: English Stage Society produce two Sunday night performances at the Royal Court Theatre.
• 1974: First uncensored English-language performance at the National Theatre, in a version by Edward
Bond.
• 2006: Adapted into a rock musical on Broadway.

•
“I found there a really horrible tragedy in the grandest dramatic style. I tried to do the most I could to bring out the sense of humour, especially in the scenes with Wendla, and in all the scenes with her mother, as well as in the last scene: I tried to develop the intellectual, the playful elements and to dampen down the passionate elements, including those in the last scene at the churchyard. I believe the play is more gripping the more harmless, sunny, laughing the performance.”

•
‘By the end of the century… an increasing number of young people remained in school for longer periods of time, during which they were expected to behave like children although their bodies and drives were fully developed. An increasing number of social disorders attended this peculiar custom, the most dramatic of which were student suicides. … Adolescent suicide soon became one of the leading subjects of German dramas and novels. And, as might be expected, the growing host of school reformers became preoccupied with this problem as well. They saw the increase in suicides as the direct result of an evil and outdated educational system.’ (Fishman 1970: 172)

•
‘By Wedekind’s day, an incredible forty percent of male adolescent suicides were attributed to undue stress and failure in school’ (Ham 2007: 51).
• Aspects of schooling included attempts to instil unquestioning respect for authority
(through discipline) and competition between pupils (through ensuring a set proportion of failures).
• Fishman paraphrases an article by educational reformer Ludwig Gurlitt:
•
‘The most vicious aspect of the German educational and bureaucratic system… is its impersonality. Every administrator, teacher, and student becomes part of a vast, impersonal apparatus. Each day students are herded into pedagogical barracks and disciplined by state pedants. No attempt is made to understand the nature and needs of young people.’ (Fishman 1970: 177)

• Short, terse scenes
• Nameless characters
• Unrealistic/poetic language
• Juxtaposition of indoors/outdoors, light/dark, children/adults, boys/girls

• Structural features:
• Moving from one mode (naturalism?) into another (expressionism?)
• Episodic form – principle of montage and juxtaposition
• Patterns and parallels:
• Act One: mostly outdoors; children dominate.
• Act Two: mostly indoors; moved towards monologues.
• Act Three: mostly institutions; adults dominate.
•
Violent climax to each act Moritz and Melchior’s moments of choice.
•
Typography (e.g. hayloft scene, Moritz’s suicide, graveyard scene)
• Symbolism:
• Movement through spring, summer and autumn.
• Woods (like fairy tales)
• Wind / storm

•
‘More boldly than any other dramatist Frank Wedekind has laid bare the shams of morality in reference to sex, especially attacking the ignorance surrounding the sex life of the child and its resultant tragedies. … Never was a more powerful indictment hurled against society, which out of sheer hypocrisy and cowardice persists that boys and girls must grow up in ignorance of their sex functions, that they must be sacrificed on the altar of stupidity and convention which taboo the enlightenment of the child in questions of such elemental importance to health and well-being.
’Emma Goldman, The Social
Significance of Modern Drama, 1914:

Melchior.
You are ——my father?
The Masked Man.
Wouldn't you know your father by his voice?
Melchior.
No.
The Masked Man.
Your father seeks consolation at this moment in the sturdy arms of your mother.
——I will open the world to you. Your momentary lack of resolution springs from your miserable condition. With a warm supper inside of you, you will make fun of it.
Melchior.
( To himself.
)
It can only be the devil! ( Aloud.
) After that of which I have been guilty, a warm supper cannot give me back my peace!
The Masked Man.
That will follow the supper!
——I can tell you this much, the girl had better have given birth. She was built properly. Unfortunately, she was killed by the abortives given by Mother Schmidt.
——I will take you out among men. I will give you the opportunity to enlarge your horizon fabulously. I will make you thoroughly acquainted with everything interesting that the world has to offer.
Melchior.
Who are you? Who are you?
——I can't trust a man that I don't know.
The Masked Man.
You can't learn to know me unless you trust me.
Melchior.
Do you think so?
The Masked Man.
Of course!
——Besides, you have no choice.

• First performance at the Berlin Kammerspiele, 20th
November 1906, directed by Max Reinhardt.
• Reinhardt had opened the Kammerspiele earlier that year with a production of Ibsen’s Ghosts.
•
J. L. Styan describes the production as ‘an historic event in the growth of expressionism’ (1982: 33).
•
‘His [Reinhardt’s] production, with its masterly use of the most up-to-date staging-techniques (revolving stage, no ‘realistic’ sets, gauzes) set a precedent for later productions of a work soon regarded in the
German-speaking countries as the spearhead of a new concept of drama.’ (Skrine 1989: 77)
• Wedekind himself played the Man in the Mask (left).

•
‘What my plays cannot stand is a naturalistic approach, with hands in pockets and the words sloppily mumbled so that nobody can catch them. And please spare me your psychological subtleties: there is no such thing as “psychological” style – the psychological dimension goes without saying and will emerge of its own accord if my characters are presented consistently. Their psychology is my business, it is not the business of my characters, still less of the actors playing them.’ (quoted in Skrine 1989: 72)

• Spring Awakening has been heavily censored for most of its theatrical life.
• Scenes 2.3, 3.4 and 3.6 were usually cut in their entirety, from the very first performances until the
1970s.
•
Censored elements in Reinhardt’s production included the teachers’ names, Melchior’s beating of
Wendla, and the three scenes mentioned above (two of them removed by the censor, while Wedekind and Reinhardt chose to lose Hänschen’s monologue after the censor’s cuts).
• Reinhardt wrote to the police appealing against the censorship of the play:
•
‘In this work it is not merely a question of new material, but also of an original form of psychological presentation, and the theme (the mental and physical struggle of adolescent youth) is approached with such moral seriousness, honesty, sense of value and tragic weight, is so far removed from the frivolous, so entirely free from ugly suggestion, that the chance of giving any offence to a sensitive viewer seems quite out of the question.’ (Styan 1982: 35)

•
The play’s first English-language performance was a single matinee in New York in
1917. The producers had to go to court to get an injunction to allow them to go ahead.
•
Following this, a Supreme Court Justice declared that it had ‘no proper place on the stage of a public theatre’ and that it did ‘infinitely more than harm than good’:
•
‘Apparently the young are to be equally enlightened without giving the parents a prior choice of some less turgid channel of education. Some may find a beneficial moral in this play, but the majority, particularly the younger element, would find in the portrayal only what is portrayed – a pruriency attributed as typical of youth – to which type, happily, many do not conform.’ (New York
Times, 3 May 1917)

•
Stacy Wolf has argued that the musical version ‘offers a tacked-on celebrate-the-day ending that differs from its source material, even more jarring since it follows the suicide of one character and the death from a botched abortion of another’ (2011: 217).
• The rape of Wendla is omitted
•
The ‘tidied-up’ ending (losing the Masked Man) is perhaps reminiscent of those of the musicals
Les Miserables and Rent.
• Edward Bond wrote in 2009:
•
‘Actors act onstage as if they were playing theatre in a TV studio but no drama school teaches them how to act in “the public place of drama”. Designers decorate theatre spaces but no design school teaches them how to create “the public place of drama”. And now Spring Awakening is made into a musical. Musicals are for those who are locked into the toyshop.’ (2009: xvi)

• Expressionism is a term that was first coined in 1901 to distinguish paintings done by neo-impressionists who tried to capture the appearance of objects under a particular light and moment
• Expressionism in painting emphasizes strong inner feelings about an object
•
Portrays life as modified, twisted, and distorted by the artist’s personal perception of reality
• Does not try to imitate reality, but transform it.

• Expressionism seeks to discover and examine the essence of life, the internal, eternal meanings of facts, objects, and people.
• Expressionism seeks to find a deeper reality than on the surface

FROM MORN TO
MIDNIGHT

This painting is often interpreted as an
EXPRESSION of Munch’s personal torment and mental illness.

• Before the Expressionist period artists showed people in anguish, just as they would appear to a rational, objective viewer. With Munch and the other Expressionists, this changed. They showed the world as viewed through the eyes of people in anguish. When seen that way, the colors and shapes of familiar objects change. Trees, hills, houses, and people are pulled out of shape and take on new, unexpected colors.

• [Munch] used curved shapes and colors that are expressive rather than realistic. Everything is distorted to make you feel a certain way…there is no mistaking the fact that the person in this painting is terrified. The body bends and twists as a scream builds and erupts from deep within. It is a scream so piercing that the figure clasps its hands tightly over its ears. The entire scene vibrates with the intensity of this scream – it echoes across the landscape like ripples across still water (Mittler. Art in Focus. 538).

• The childhood of Edvard Munch was marked by tragedy. His mother died when he was five, and one of his sisters died when he was fourteen … The fear, suffering and death of loved ones that he experienced in his own life became the subject matter for his art
(Mittler. Art in Focus. 537).

• On June 28, 1914, Franz Ferdinand, the Austro-Hungarian heir to the throne, is assassinated
• Germany allies with Austria-Hungary
• On August 3rd, 1914, Germany declares war against France, and
German soldiers invade Belgium, seizing towards France
• By August 27th, Germany sends forces to the eastern front

• The Trench is built on the western front- the battle in the west becomes a war of attrition
• Forces on the eastern front trapped by Russian forces
• May 31, 1916, the U.S. enters the
War, after having ships attacked and sunk by the German navy

• March- September, 1918:
The Allies surge Germany and push them back from the western front
• Germany has lost 1,000,000 soldiers, leaving them with an army of 2.5 million
• The German army is down
191 divisions to the 400-500 of the Allies
• Bulgaria (Germany’s ally) is defeated in late September
• German army is defeated

• Throughout the war, Germans had been led to believe by government propaganda that they were winning the war
•
Germany literally being starved of food due to Britain’s blockade of
Northern ports
•
Germany’s leader- William II, forced to abdicate
• The Social Democratic Party comes into power, led by Friedrich
Ebert
• SDP announces that Germany is now a republic

• Ebert completely unable to control Berlin, establishes the
“Weimar Republic”
• Soldiers returned from war still armed, blaming the government
(although it was not Ebert’s fault that Germany had lost the war)
• 2 million soldiers killed. Because these soldiers had been
Germany’s workforce, the country’s economic situation plummeted

• Economic disaster
• Loss of manpower
• Complete disrespect for the government
• Thousands of armed, disillusioned soldiers roaming streets
• A civilian population devastated and traumatized by the impact of war
• A political revolution, transforming the nation into a republic led by an unpopular and opposed government

Egon Schiele (Austrian 1890-1918), Self-Portraits, 1911

Oskar Kokoschka (Austrian 1886-1980), (left) Self-Portrait (Der Sturm), 1910
Kokoschka, Murder, Hope of Women, 1909, poster and drawing for his play
First Expressionist play intended as blasphemy; OK called it a "gesture of defiance" against the bourgeois audiences of his time.

George Grosz (German 1893-1959), Dedication to Oskar Panizza, 1917-18
Grosz, Fit for Active Duty, ink on paper, 1916-17

George Grosz (German 1893-1959), Grey Day, 1921, oil on canvas
(right) Grosz, from series, The Face of the Ruling Class, 1920

GROPIUS - THE TOTAL-
THEATRE

•
“An anthropomorphic view of existence,” expressionism projected human views and emotions into inanimate objects.
• Expressionists sought truth in human spirituality rather than in external appearances

• Expressionists rejected realism, believing that it focused only on the surface of life, implying a fixed and materialistic nature of society, not the real truths of the universe.
• Expressionists believed that external reality is malleable, and should be changed until it is in harmony with human spirituality, the only significant truth

• Expressionists viewed the society in which they lived as one which mechanized and distorted the human spirit, preventing the attainment of truth and happiness
• Some expressionist dramatists, thus, took this militant view into their art and sought to transform social and political conditions and effect change.

• Expressionist Truth was subjective
• New artistic means were needed in order to express these new perspectives and bring audiences beyond the surface:
• Distorted line
• Exaggerated shape
• Mechanical stage movement and body language
• Abnormal coloring of set and lighting

• Often expressionist plays were shown through the perspective of the protagonist
• Seeing a piece of theatre through the eyes of the protagonist alters emphasis and imposes dramatic interpretations on the event, story, character, and thus the audience’s perception of the piece.

• Generally Episodic
• A central idea creating unity in a piece, often questioning the idea of a future Utopia, and the possibility of such
• The struggle between old values and new conventions
– The Beggar by Reinhard Johannes Sorge
(1912) tells the story of a visionary poet striving for fulfillment in a harsh and materialistic society.
• The journey to find fulfillment and truth in life

• Georg Kaiser (1878-1945)
• His trilogy of expressionist plays reveal his perception of the world as it recedes into despair, paralleling the state of Germany:
• Coral (1917): Protagonist comes to understand the soul- fails, but is optimistic about the future.
• Gas I (1918): Son on a journey to regenerate society- fails but is left optimistic about the future.
• Gas II (1920) : Desperation of mankind- the world is self-destructing at the end of the play

• At the beginning of World War 1, foreign film companies dominated the industry.
• By the end of World War 1, the German Film Industry flourished. It was propelled by a population desperate for a diversion from their daily struggles.

• Expressionism manipulated sound, lighting and stage design to reveal emotions and realities in an abstract manner.
• Stage sets were very artificial and were made to appear as “paintings come to life”. All realism was removed from sets in order to allow them to become symbols of specific emotions and conditions.
• Angular structures were utilized to exploit stage design and influence the mood of a picture.

• Expressionism conveyed a tone of dissonance by effectively abolishing normal relationships between objects and focusing upon the abstract.
• Expressionist techniques aimed to conjure feelings of mystery, alienation, disharmony and destabilization.
• Plots incorporated dream sequences, flashbacks and distorted chronology to promote instability.

•Expressionist actors engaged in harsh and amplified movements that were often stiff or jerky to represent inner turmoil.
•Overstated costumes and makeup contributed to an actor’s ability to portray inner realities and tumultuous emotions.

• The technique of “chiaroscuro” was employed in expressionism.
Chiaroscuro is an artistic technique in which light and darkness are manipulated to achieve a heightened illusion of depth.
• Expressionist directors contrasted light and dark to create shadows and other effects which were intended to portray and arouse emotion.

• In order to put forth the abstract, it was necessary for the
Expressionist filmmaker to obliterate nature and eradicate the natural world.
• Expressionist filmmakers believed landscapes should emit a soul and should be considered as significant as a character in the film.

•Since its origin, many films have been labeled as works of
Expressionism.
•The “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” a German horror classic directed by
Robert Weine, best personifies the Expressionist film genre.

This scene demonstrates the effect created through the
Expressionist technique of using angular structures to help represent a disjointed mood and a nightmarish atmosphere.

THE CABINET OF DOCTOR
CALIGARI

“Nosferatu”, directed by F. W.
Murnau, became a vampire classic which featured many expressionist elements.

Expressionism and the use of shadows became became widely associated with the film “Nosferatu”.
In some Expressionist films, silhouettes were used in place of shadow.

NOSFERATU: A SYMPHONY OF
TERROR

“Metropolis”, directed by Fritz Lang, used
Expressionist elements to depict a futuristic city.

METROPOLI
S

THE BLACK
RIDER

SHOCK-HEADED
PETER