Farther Away : Essays

AUTHENTIC BUT HORRIBLE

[on Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening]

Frank Wedekind was a lifelong guitar player. If he’d been born a hundred years later, he almost certainly would have been a rock star; the only small reason to doubt it is that he grew up in Switzerland. Whether you consider it a boon or a sorrow that he instead became the author of Spring Awakening, the best and most enduring German play of its era, depends a lot on what you value in a work of art. The great strengths of Spring Awakening—comedy, character, language — are mostly incidental to good rock. But the play, while lacking in mass appeal, also manages to partake of some of rock’s own strengths: its youthful energy, its disruptive power, its feeling of authenticity. Indeed, decades after the shocks of Elvis and Jimi Hendrix and the Sex Pistols have ceased to shock anyone, Spring Awakening has become, if anything, even more of a disturbance and a reproach than it was a century ago. What the playwright sacrificed in amplification he’s making up for in longevity.

Conceived in California and christened Benjamin Franklin, Wedekind was the son of an itinerant young singer/actress and a politically radical physician twice her age. His mother had left Europe at the age of sixteen to follow her sister and brother-in-law to Valparaíso, Chile. The brother-in-law soon ran into financial trouble, which the two sisters alleviated by touring as singers along the coast of South and Central America, and when the sister died, of yellow fever, Frank’s mother moved to San Francisco and supported her brother-in-law’s family by working as a performer. She was twenty-two when she married Dr. Friedrich Wedekind, who had emigrated from Germany soon after the suppressed political revolts of 1848. Returning to Germany, where Frank was born in 1864, Friedrich gave up his medical practice and devoted himself to full-time political agitation. The country’s mood was becoming increasingly hostile and Bismarckian, however, and by 1872 the family had settled permanently in a small castle in Switzerland.

Though the Wedekind marriage was a stormy one, the family was big and close-knit and intellectually sophisticated. Frank was well liked both at home and at school. By the time he finished high school, he was writing plays and poetry as well as songs that he sang to the accompaniment of his guitar. He’d become a radical atheist and was at once ruggedly well-adjusted and profoundly unfit for conventional employment and a middle-class life. He and his father argued so violently about his career that he finally assaulted the old man and left for Munich to become a professional writer. He wrote Spring Awakening in the winter of 1890–91, finishing it on Easter Day. For the next fifteen years he worked to ingratiate himself with the theater world and get his plays produced. His good friends included a shady art dealer and a circus performer, Willy Rudinoff, who was renowned as a fire-eater and birdsong imitator. Wedekind once tried to get a circus to produce his work. He founded and performed in a Munich cabaret called the Eleven Executioners. Over the years, he took to the stage himself more and more, both to forge relationships with theaters and, increasingly, to showcase the antinaturalistic rhythms with which he intended his later plays to be performed. In 1906, as success and fame were finally arriving, he married a very young actress, Tilly Newes, whom he had cultivated for the role of Lulu in his plays Pandora’s Box and Earth Spirit (later the basis for the Alban Berg opera Lulu). The couple had two daughters, who would later remember their father treating children with exceptional respect, as if there were no significant difference between them and adults.

Due partly to the rigors of acting, Wedekind sickened during the years of the First World War and died, in 1918, from the complications of abdominal surgery. At his funeral, in Munich, there was a riot worthy of a rock star. Many of Germany’s leading literary lights, including the young Bertolt Brecht, were at the cemetery, but so was a mob of the young and the strange and the crazy — members of a cultural and sexual bohemia that had recognized in Wedekind a freak with the courage of his freakdom — and these mourners stormed across the graveyard, rushing for good places beside the open grave. An unstable poet named Heinrich Lautensack, one of the other Eleven Executioners, threw a wreath of roses on the coffin and then jumped down into the grave, crying, “To Frank Wedekind, my teacher, my model, my master, from your least worthy pupil!” while a friend of his, a moviemaker from Berlin, filmed the whole thing for posterity. The exhibitionist mourner and his complicit cameraman: a rock-and-roll world was already in sight.

One useful example of the ongoing danger and vitality of Spring Awakening was the insipid rock-musical version of it that opened on Broadway in 2006, a hundred years after the play’s world premiere, and was instantly overpraised. The script that Wedekind had finished in 1891 was far too frank sexually to be producible on any late-Victorian stage. When the play finally did begin to appear in theaters, fifteen years later, no local government in Germany or abroad would let it go uncut. And yet even the cruelest bowdlerizations of a century ago were milder than the maiming that a dangerous play now undergoes in becoming a contemporary hit.

The hand-wringing young Moritz Stiefel, whom Wedekind had kill himself over a bad report card, is transformed, in the musical version, into a punk rocker of such talent and charisma that it’s unimaginable that a report card could depress him. The casual rape of Wendla Bergmann by the play’s central character, Melchior Gabor, becomes a thunderous spectacle of ecstasy and consent. And where Wedekind showed the young sensualist Hansy Rilow resisting masturbation — reluctantly destroying a piece of pornography that threatens to “eat away” his brain — we in the twenty-first century are treated to a choreographed orgy of penis-pumping, semen-slinging exultation. Wedekind, without resorting to anything more obscene than a few comically high-flown double-entendres, got Hansy’s plight exactly right. He knew that the real fuel of the masturbator’s shame is solitude, he nailed the masturbator’s weirdly personal tenderness for the virtual object, he understood the corrosive autonomy of sexual images; but this would all be uncomfortably pertinent to our porn-soaked modernity, and so the musical is obliged to sanitize Wedekind and render Hansy’s torments as something merely dirty. (The result is “funny” in the same way that bad sitcoms are “funny”: viewers emit nervous laughter at every mention of sex and then, hearing themselves laugh, conclude that what they’re watching must be hilarious.) As for the working-class girl Martha Bessel, who in the original play is beaten by her father and ardently envied for these beatings by the bourgeois masochist Wendla Bergmann: What else could she become in 2006 but a saintly young emblem of sexual abuse? Her supportive, sisterly friends join her in singing “The Dark I Know Well,” an anthem to the sorrow of being carnally interesting to grown-ups. Instead of Martha’s appalling matter-of-factness about her home life (she says she’s beaten “only if there’s something special”), there is now a dense modern fog of sentimentality and bad faith. A team of grown-ups creates a musical whose main selling point is teen sex (the first Broadway posters showed the male lead mounting the female lead) and whose female teen characters, shortly after wailing to their largely grown-up audience that they are bad-girl love-junkies, come forward to sing of how terribly, unfairly painful it is to possess a teen sexuality that fascinates grown-ups. If the path from Bratz dolls through Britneywear finally leaves a girl feeling like somebody else’s piece of meat, it obviously can’t be commercial culture’s fault, because commercial culture has such a rockin’ great soundtrack and nobody understands teenagers better than commercial culture does, nobody admires them more than it does, nobody works harder to make them feel authentic, nobody insists more strenuously that young consumers are always right, whether as moral heroes or as moral victims. So something else must be to blame: maybe the amorphous tyranny that rock and roll still imagines itself to be rebelling against, or maybe those nameless tyrants who make the stultifying rules that commercial culture is forever urging us to break. Maybe them. In the end, the only thing that really matters to teenagers is that they be taken very seriously. And here, among all the ways in which Spring Awakening would seem to be unsuitable material for a commercial rock musical, is Frank Wedekind’s most grievous offense: he makes fun of teenagers — flat-out laughs at them — to the same degree that he takes them seriously. And so now, more than ever, he must be censored.

The term Wedekind chose as a subtitle for his play, A Children’s Tragedy, has an odd, unresolvable, almost comic ring to it. It sounds as if tragedy were stooping to get through the door of a playhouse, or as if kids were tripping on the hems of grown-up costumes. Although the eleven-o’clock news may use the word tragedy when an adolescent commits suicide, the conventional attributes of a tragic figure — power, importance, self-destructive hubris, a capacity for mature moral self-reckoning — are by definition beyond the reach of children. And what are we to make of a “tragedy” in which the central character, Melchior Gabor, survives intact?

Over the years, many critics and producers have come to terms with Wedekind’s subtitle by reading the play as a kind of revolutionary systems tragedy. In these readings, the position of tragic hero is occupied not by an individual but by an entire society which is destroying the children it claims to love. The earliest German productions of Spring Awakening highlighted those aspects of the play, suggesting that Wendla and Moritz and Melchior are springlike vital innocents who fall victim to a nineteenth-century bourgeois morality that has outlived itself. For Emma Goldman, writing in 1914, the play was a “powerful indictment” of the “misery and torture” of children growing up in “sex ignorance.” For the English playwright and director Edward Bond, writing sixty years later, the play functioned as a denunciation of a “technological society” in which “everything depends on conformity to routine.” The problem with these interpretations is not that they’re factually untenable — the play does, after all, produce a couple of wrenching deaths — but that they undervalue the play’s line-by-line humor. As early as 1911, Wedekind was defending his text against overly earnest political readings, insisting that he’d intended the play to be a “sunny image of life” in which, in all but one of the scenes, he had tried to exploit a “freewheeling humor” for all the laughs that he could get.

The critic and playwright Eric Bentley, the author of one of the less inadequate English translations of Spring Awakening, grants Wedekind’s point about the laughs but offers the incriminating subtitle as evidence that the playwright was protesting too much. Leaving aside the possibility that the subtitle might simply be ironic, or that it’s echoing Goethe’s Faust, which is also hardly the tragedy that its subtitle promises, Bentley proposes that Spring Awakening be read as a “tragicomedy.” However sunny or unsunny an image of life it may present, the play is undeniably saturated, from the very first page, with premonitions of death and violence. And the word tragicomedy does, in its very awkwardness, like children’s tragedy, feel true to the doomy absurdities of young love: the laughability of adolescent sorrows, the sorrows of adolescent laughability.

What the word feels less true to is the actual action of the play. Dramatic tragedy, whether Greek or Shakespearean or modern or even half-comic, only makes sense in the context of a morally ordered universe. (This is what happens to otherwise excellent people, Mr. Hamlet, when they get too self-conscious. This is what happens, Mr. Loman, when you take the big lie of the American Dream home from work with you.) Tragedy always pays off with the affirmation of some kind of cosmic justice, however cruel, which the audience recognizes from its experience of life. And what’s really shocking about Spring Awakening—what was shocking in 1906 and, to judge from the vigor of the Broadway musical’s suppression of it, no less shocking in 2006—is how casually and thoroughly amoral the play’s action is. That both Wendla Bergmann and Moritz Stiefel are initially preoccupied with death may make their later fates seem inevitable; but tragedy requires more than just inevitability. In what morally comprehensible universe does a goofy, vivid, lovable character like Moritz Stiefel necessarily meet an untimely end? His death, like so many teen suicides, is random, contingent, meaningless — and thus fully in keeping with the worldview of his atheist friend Melchior, who, by his own account, believes in “nothing in the world at all.”

The grown-ups in charge of the play’s action are no less helpless than Moritz. You can hate Headmaster Hart-Payne and the other school administrators for their authoritarianism, but they are facing a “suicide epidemic” that they’re completely unequipped to make sense of. Their crime is being grown-up and stuffy and unimaginative; they’re insecure buffoons, not morally culpable killers. Similarly, you can hate Mr. Gabor for his coldhearted condemnation of his son, but the fact remains that his son sexually assaulted a girl he didn’t love, just for the sensation of it, and can’t be trusted not to do it again.

The only intelligible ways to judge the characters in Spring Awakening are comic and aesthetic, not moral. And so we’re thrown back on Wedekind’s insistence that his children’s tragedy is, in fact, a comedy. Moritz, on the verge of blowing his brains out, resolves to think of whipped cream when he pulls the trigger (“It’s filling and it leaves behind a pleasant aftertaste”). Ilse tells Martha that she knows why Moritz shot himself (“Parallelepiped!”) and refuses to give Martha the suicide gun (“I’m saving it as a souvenir”). Wendla, confined to bed by her swelling belly (“our terrible indigestion,” in the doctor’s words), declares that she is dying of dropsy. “You don’t have dropsy,” her mother replies, “you have a baby.” At which point Wedekind, following through on a wonderful joke that he set up ten scenes earlier, when Mrs. Bergmann told Wendla that babies come from marriage, delivers the double punch line:

WENDLA: But that’s not possible, Mother. I’m not married…!

MRS. BERGMANN: Great God Almighty—, that’s just it, you’re not married!

Mrs. Bergmann, who is herself so guileless that she lets Mr. Gabor take Melchior’s legally incriminating letter away from her, is last seen telling Wendla sugary, protective lies as she ushers an abortionist neighbor into Wendla’s sickroom. There are, to be sure, a few genuinely vile adult characters in the play — Moritz’s father, Reverend Bleekhead, Dr. Procrustes — but some of the minor male adolescent characters are no less vile, and Wendla’s friend Thea shows signs of becoming every bit as conformist and narrow-minded as her parents. The more important adult characters all reveal at least some shred of humanity, if only in the form of fear. Indeed, they not only do reveal it, they must reveal it; otherwise they couldn’t be the subject of real comedy. To laugh well at humanity, both your own humanity and that of others, you have to be as distant and unsparing as if you’re writing tragedy. Unlike tragedy, though, comedy doesn’t require a grand moral scheme. Comedy is the more rugged genre and the one better suited to godless times. Comedy requires only that you have a heart that can recognize other hearts. Although it’s true that Mrs. Bergmann’s timidity leads directly to the death of her beloved daughter, this human frailty is also what makes Mrs. Bergmann a full-blooded comic character, rather than just a stock satiric type. You’d have to be a morally absolutist teenager — or a contemporary pop-culture provider pandering to morally absolutist teenagers — not to feel compassion for Mrs. Bergmann in the world of trouble her fear has landed her in.

And just as the adult principals could not be unredeemably bad and still be funny, so the child principals could not be purely good. Moritz’s self-pity and his obsession with suicide, Melchior’s sadism and amorality, Wendla’s masochism and almost vindictively willful ignorance, Hansy’s cynical carnality: the cruelest blow that Spring Awakening delivers to contemporary pieties, the deep embarrassment that the Broadway musical seeks to camouflage with raunchier shames, is that Wedekind treats his child characters like fascinating little animals — flawed, adorable, dangerous, silly. They fall far to either side of the safe teen middle ground of coolness and righteousness. They’re at once unbearably innocent and unbearably corrupt.

Toward the end of his life, Wedekind compiled a list of adjectives to describe himself in contrast to his contemporary and rival dramatist Gerhardt Hauptmann. At the bottom of the list of Wedekind’s own attributes were the words authentic but horrible. The funniness and sadness and resignation of this self-description are the spirit of Spring Awakening.