Kids (Page 2)

Benjamin Franklin Wedekind was neither pornographer nor polemicist. He was a dramatic revolutionary who threw over bathetic Neo-Romanticism and plodding Realism, which he disdained as glorified stenography; its writers, one of his characters notes, would in the future "earn their living as members of the secret police." His fragmented narratives and caroming subjectivities presaged Expressionism and the Theater of the Absurd. Brecht worshiped, and imitated, him.

Like his work, and his era--martial, imperialist Germany, where a radical artistic and sexual counterculture flourished--Wedekind was a man of prodigious political and sexual contradiction.

Born in 1864 to erstwhile expatriates who never firmly established their son's citizenship, he was a naturalized cosmopolitan. Yet this lifelong leftist and pacifist, once jailed for lèse-majesté, later mystified and enraged his friends by delivering a widely circulated speech glorifying the Fatherland.

He embraced the margins, befriending circus acrobats, clowns and strongmen, who throughout his oeuvre symbolize daring, eccentricity and wild humor, as well as "elasticity," a joyfully free balance of spirit and body that described his ideal of sexuality. In Paris, Zurich and Munich, he delighted the bohemian with art forms from bird imitation to lute songs and appalled the bourgeois with performances featuring onstage urination and masturbation. Censorship demoralized and impoverished him, but it also secured his reputation for innovation and integrity. Spring Awakening and, later, the Lulu plays (from whence came the Berg opera and Pabst film) made him famous--but acclaim seemed to dull him. Trotsky sarcastically sympathized. "That is the tragedy of success," he wrote. "It shows the author that people are no longer afraid of him." As if to re-establish his street cred, in 1910 Wedekind wrote Schloss Wetterstein, a theatrical precursor of the snuff film, which disgusted supporters and foes alike. Finally accepted by the bourgeoisie, he needed to remain the épateur.

Sex was Wedekind's subject, his cause and his vexation, and the vexation of his interpreters. An acute critic of the economic and sexual exploitation of women, he nonetheless scorned the feminist movement, and his diaries are a compendium of assignations with prostitutes. He fancied himself a satyr, yet he was plagued by impotence. One striking exception was a three-day one-man orgy involving a vision inspired by Kraftt-Ebbing, of prepubescent girls walking on their hands, catching bills between their legs, taking "kindly encouragement" from "a slender switch," then bedding down with the family dogs. He mused about a similar regime to "educate" his own future daughters. Yet Spring Awakening is as sensitive a cry for children's sexual rights as any in history.

He detested conventional marriage, as modeled by an authoritarian father who married a beautiful, free-spirited singer half his age, then made her relinquish her career and moved the family to a remote Swiss hillside. Yet Wedekind married the beautiful, free-spirited actress Tilly Newes, also half his age, then forbade her to take the stage with anyone but him. He fathered a baby with Strindberg's wife, and according to Tilly was uninterested in marital sex, yet he tormented her with unwarranted jealousy.

In his work, women are masochistic and cruel, victims and femmes fatales--sometimes, like Lulu, all of the above. His "elasticity," though an androgynous utopian ideal, was a feminine attribute, incompatible with the single-minded aggression of masculine sexuality, argues Gerald Izenberg in Modernism and Masculinity. This created a problem not only for the intimate Wedekind but for his characters as well. In Spring Awakening, writes German drama scholar Elizabeth Boa, "Moritz, a 'feminine' type weighed down by his father's demands, likes to imagine the greater pleasure girls must feel in their passivity during sexual intercourse as they are forced to submit to what is wrong, and finally punishes himself in a grim coalescence of masculine sadism and feminine masochism."

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.