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Frank Wedekind (1864-1918) | |
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German dramatist, poet, and short story writer, a forerunner of expressionism and the theatre of the absurd. Wedekind's most famous works include the two-part drama, Der Erdgeist (1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (1904), originally written as a whole. Its amoral central character, the archetypal femme fatale Lulu, inspired George Pabst's expressionist film Pandora's Box (1929), starring the Hollywood actress Louise Brooks, and Alban Berg's unfinished opera Lulu. Was schiert mich das Theater! Unsere kühne Benjamin Franklin Wedekind was born in Hanover, the second of the six children born to Friedrich Wilhelm Wedekind, a physician, and Emilie Kammerer, a German singer and actress. During the early period of his life, Wedekind's father had served as physician to the Sultan of Turkey. A fierce democrat, he participated in the 1848 Revolution, and next year escaped to America, where he made a fortune in land speculation. In San Francisco he married Emilie; she was twenty-three years his junior. Two years later he returned to Germany, but disgusted by Bismarck's nationalist policies, he eventually emigrated with his family to Switzerland. Wedekind grew up in Lenzburg, where his father, a disappointed veteran of the revolution, had purchased a castle. In his youth Wedekind had a serious clash with his father, who at that time disagreed with his wife's more liberal views and spent most of his time in his own quarters. After actually striking the father, Wedekind had left home, assuming, wrongly, that he would never be forgiven. In 1884 Wedekind entered the University of Lausanne, and then moved to the University of Munich. He studied law and literature, but abandoned his studies and took a job as a publicity agent for the Swiss soup company Maggi. Gerhart Hauptmann, the leading dramatist of his generation, portrayed in Friedensfest (1890) the Wedekind family as full of hatred and mistrust, revealing some strictly confidental details. Wedekind replied with a short play, which satirized Hauptmann's naturalist school of drama. In Zürich Wedekind befriended the Swedish playwright August Strindberg. With Strindberg's wife Frida Uhl he had an affair and as the result an illegitimate child in 1897. Wedekind's father died in 1888, and left him a sizable inheritance. For a period Wedekind worked as a secretary to a circus, the Herzog, before settling in Munich, his home until his death. The influence of circus art is seen in Wedekind's dramatic vision. In Munich, the artistic and cultural centre of Germany around the turn of the century, Wedekind led a bohemian life. He also visited Paris and London, and in 1895 he traveled in Switzerland, where he gave readings from Ibsen's plays under the pseudonym Cornelius Minehaha. Wedekind's first full-length drama of importance, Frühlings Erwachen (1891) appeard in book form in Zürich before it was produced by Max Reinhardt fifteen years later. It dealt with the theme of adolescent sexuality and had the reputation of being far too obscene to be performed. Although this poetic tragedy did not completely break with naturalism, the last act in which one of the characters rises from grave carrying his head under his arm, inviting the hero to join him in death, demonstrated Wedekind's growing interest in grotesque and fantastic. The play, in which the fourteen-year-old girl is killed by abortion pills, created a scandal and marked the beginning of Wedekind's many struggles with censorship and accusations of pornography. Wedekind was a cofounder of the satirical journal Simplicissimus. Accused of lèse majesté for a satire published in the journal, Wedekind fled abroad for a short period. The satire had ridiculed Kaiser Wilhelm II's journey to Palestine. Upon his return to Germany, Wedekind was imprisoned for six months in the fortress of Köningstein, where he wrote the story 'Minehaha'. König Nicolo, oder So ist das Leben (1911), was written in the aftermath of his prison sentence, but not produced until 1919. Oaha, die Satire der Satire (1908) was a comedy drawing on Wedekind's experiences with Simplicissimus. During the carnival of 1901, Wedekind paraded with artists, students, actors, and writers through the streets, denouncing the censorship. Eleven of the demonstrators established a cabaret called Die 11 Scarfrichter (the Eleven Executioners), where Wedekind performed his own poems and accompanied himself on the lute. However, the star of the cabaret was Marya Delvard. One of her popular songs, written by Wedekind, was about a young girl, who concludes melancholically: "When I no longer rouse desire, / Well, then I might as well be dead." Cabaretistic elements became an integral part of his plays, which drew on pantomime, circus, funfair, vaudeville, grand-guignol. Wedekind's tragicomedies, in turn, had an influence on Expressionism, Dadaism, Brecht, and the theatre of absurd. Wedekind's central themes are moral hypocrisy and sexual freedom. Like Freud, or later D.H. Lawrence in Britain, Wedekind saw that there is a profound conflict between human sexuality and the pressures and requirements of society. Thus he set out to liberate instincts from the constraints of rational Self. In his later dramas Wedekind dealt with suffering, religion, and ethical problems. These works have not enjoyed similar appreciation as his Lulu cycle and Der Marquis von Keith (1900), about a zestful opportunist, who pretends to be a a wealthy marquis, and his tutelage, a young idealist. Wedekind himself acted in his own plays, and in this play he had the role of the swindler. On the stage Wedekind often collaborated with the actress Tilly Newes, whom he married in 1906. In Vienna they had acted together in Pandora's Box-Tilly played Lulu and Wedekind took the role of Jack the Ripper. The marriage was stormy and disturbed partly due to Wedekind's jealousy; he was twenty years her senior. Eventually in 1917 she tried to commit suicide. "Clear, precise voice of the woman," wrote Franz Kafka on Tilly in his diary after seeing Der Erdgeist in 1912. "Narrow, crescent-shaped face. The lower part of the leg branching off to the lefet when she stood quietly." Wedekind died in Munich on March 9, 1918. During the Nazi period, his works were forbidden. Wedekind's diary, Die Tagebücher: ein erotisches Leben, was published in 1986. Wedekind's uncompromising plays, full of rebellious energy, have always fascinated new generations of directors and actors, among others in Finland, where Lulu was successfully staged in 2006 by the students of The Theatre Academy. Wedekind's stock of characters vary from pillars of society to prostitutes, outcasts, beggars, and criminals. The most famous creation, Lulu, is a force of nature, a wild, beautiful beast, the embodiment of pure female sexuality, who destroys weak men around her until she is stopped by Jack the Ripper. "She was created to stir up great disaster," said Wedekind himself of Lulu. The main reason why the Lulu plays were divided into two separate works was that the last two acts involved lesbianism and prostitution, which were at that time too touchy subjects for the stage. In Pabst's silent film masterpiece Lulu has spirit and dignity, she is not mean. At the end her death suggest a salvation; basically she is the victim of weak men. The original running time of Pabst's film was 131 minutes. In Britain the scene between Lulu and the lesbian Countess Geschwitz at Lulu's wedding was cut. Alban Berg began to compose Lulu in 1929. The definitive version of Berg's adaptation of Die Büchse der Pandora did not premiere until 1979, because the composer's widow, a spiritualist, prevented the completion of her husband's work. Berg's opera, influenced by Nietzsche's theory of "eternal return", is not a moral tale; also Berg do not condemn Lulu, who cannot help being the target of desires. For further reading: Frank Wedekind: Sein Leben und seine Werke by A Kutscher (1922-31); Frank Wedekind und das Theater by G. Seehaus (1964); Frank Wedekind by S. Gittleman (1969); Frank Wedekind by A Best (1975); The Sexual Circus: Frank Wedekind's Theater of Subversion by E. Boa (1987); The Ironic Dissident: Frank Wedekind in the View of his Critics by Ward B. Lewis (1997); The Elusive Transcendent: The Role of Religion in the Plays of Frank Wedekind by Fred Whalley (2002) Selected works:
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