Frank Wedekind

Frank Wedekind (1864-1918), German playwright, whose experiments with unusual themes and stage effects made him an important forerunner of Expressionism in Germany and of the Theatre of the Absurd. He was born in Hanover and educated at the universities of Munich and Zurich. He came under the influence of the German playwright Gerhart Hauptmann for a short while in the late 1880s. Later he rejected Hauptmann's Naturalism in favour of styles developed by the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg and the German poet Georg Büchner. Wederkind led a wandering Bohemian life in Munich, Zurich, London, and Paris. In the 1890s, lack of money forced him to sing his own ballads in cabarets and to act on the stage. Finally he joined the staff of the satirical magazine Simplicissimus. After his marriage in 1908, he settled in Munich.

Wedekind's first plays, Die junge Welt (The Young World, 1890) and Frühlings Erwachen (1891; trans. 1909), depict frankly the sexual maturing of adolescents in a world of unsympathetic adults. These works and Der Erdgeist (The Earth Spirit, 1895) established his reputation but were financially unsuccessful. In other plays, notably Die Büchse der Pandora (1904; Pandora's Box, 1918), he portrayed the depraved conduct that arises, in his view, from society's attempt to suppress the sex drive. The grotesque quality of his plays is designed to shock his audience, but his works were often censored because they were thought to be attacking middle-class morality.