“The flesh has its own spirit”
The life choices that the adolescents wrestle with in Spring Awakening are very much those that Frank Wedekind himself experienced in his own life. During our conversation in the podcast, Karen mentioned that the play had its origins in Wedekind capturing verbatim testimonies from young people, which gives the voices of the young characters a recognisable authenticity. Wedekind was also familiar with the pressures school children face, having known personally the trauma of two school friends who had killed themselves. He was a maverick figure himself at school, his letters from that age revealing a precocious interest in many of the issues raised in the play: sex, the family, education, religion and death.

Karen also referred to the difficult relationship Wedekind had with his father, which was severed by his decision to abandon law for literature. He was only 26 when he wrote Spring Awakening, so this breach would have been very much in his mind when he drafted his denunciation of parenting and traditional education.

It is also not surprising that Wedekind subsequently embraced the Masked Man’s invocation to fully explore “every single thing of interest in the world” in his own life. While living in Paris in the 1890s he worked in the circus, and later became a renowned cabaret performer in Munich. As Karen pointed out, the character of the Masked Man is suggestive of the ringmaster who orchestrates the panoply of acts on display.

It was while Wedekind was in Paris that he wrote the other plays that he is best known for: Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, known together as the Lulu plays. Their story of the life of the young dancer, Lulu, is equally frank in its depiction of sex and violence, including even an encounter with Jack the Ripper, a role Wedekind himself played in several productions. It was in one of these shows that he met and married the actress who played Lulu, Tilly Newes, who was 22 years younger than him. He and his wife continued to perform together, but their relationship was stormy, his promiscuity and perverse jealousy driving her to attempted suicide.

Wedekind clearly lived by his own motto: “the flesh has its own spirit”, a force that animates the irrepressible sexual urgings of the young people in Spring Awakening. The author apparently even designed his own personal coat of arms, which featured three women’s legs in different colours. This may be apocryphal, as sadly Google does not yield any examples of his artwork. Nevertheless, it sounds like a suitably vivid and provocative image for the maverick playwright.