Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening

The play Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind, first published in Germany in 1891, explored many different controversial and radical ideals for the time period, including sexuality, rape, and suicide. Even controversial in today’s society, Wedekind’s characters experience many life-altering events

at very young ages. This play depicts the loss of their innocence throughout their teenage lives, and how their parents attempt to shelter their children in order to keep them in a state that is as young and childlike as possible.

The themes in this play explore certain issues at hand that people in that time period didn’t generally discuss in their day-to-day lives. The most prominent of these is sexuality. The direct introduction to sexuality and experimentation begins in the second scene of the play and is noted and expanded upon throughout the piece. The sexual aspect of the play immediately makes the work as a whole an extremely radical work. This in turn led to decades of censorship and omission of scenes and lines throughout the play. However, I don’t think that Wedekind used the idea of sexuality to shock his audience. Rather, I believe that he meant for the play to evoke thought and questioning. One of the most controversial aspects of this topic is Wedekind’s inclusion of homosexuality. This idea was frowned upon in society, and in Germany, you could be jailed for it. Fortunately, the acceptance of homosexuality in society has dramatically increased since that time period, and, though not embraced in totality by all, sexuality is now something that people are quite comfortable discussing regularly.

Another theme that really stuck out to me while I was reading this play was the difference between parents and their children. In Spring Awakening, relationships between parents and children are somewhat unsuccessful. All the parents in the play attempt to bring up their children to live as they did, yet almost all of their efforts seem futile. Moritz commits suicide, Wendla dies, Martha’s parents abuse her consistently, almost to a point where she seems to want to murder them, and Ilse’s parents are entirely absent. For parents that want to shelter their kids from the outside world and prevent them from growing up and learning too fast, they don’t do a great job. Many of the children end up having their own ideas about how they will form their families and raise their children-and they seem to be entirely different from their parents’ ideas.

Overall, the play touched on many different aspects of life that seemed too radical to think about in the 19th century. However, it is interesting to note that, while most of these ideals have been accepted in our modern day society, we still have some trouble discussing other ideals, even ones that are less controversial, such as race. It is noteworthy to mention that the ideas that a society finds controversial reflects on the time period as a whole, which I found very interesting while reading this play.