47 pages • 1 hour read
Frank WedekindSpring Awakening: A Children’s Tragedy
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1891A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Act III, Scenes 1-4Act Summaries & Analyses
Act III, Scene 1 Summary
The school’s professors—Schmalz, Blodgett, Starver, Brockenbohn, Fitztongue, Killaflye, and headmaster Hart-Payne—meet to manage the fallout of Moritz’s suicide. It is the latest in an epidemic affecting their school and others. The professors are concerned about protecting the name of the school and shielding themselves from blame. Hart-Payne is indignant, believing that students have broken their duty to their education by killing themselves. He proposes expelling Melchior—whose explanation of sex was found in Moritz’s things—and blaming Moritz’s suicide on Melchior’s corruptive influence.
Hart-Payne summons Melchior. He explains to Melchior how his document, entitled “Copulation,” was analyzed to identify his handwriting. Whenever Melchior tries to speak, Hart-Payne barks at him to remain silent as he excoriates him for the document.
Melchior confirms that he wrote the document but challenges the headmaster to identify a single obscenity in it. Melchior argues that the document merely contains facts about sex that the professors also know. Hart-Payne reprimands Melchior for his disrespect and indecency: “You have as little respect for the dignity of your assembled teachers as you have a sense of decency regarding the deeply rooted human feeling for the discretion of the modesty of a moral order!” (58). He orders Melchior to be taken away.
Act III, Scene 2 Summary
In the pouring rain, Reverend Bleekhead leads Moritz’s funeral. Bleekhead preaches that Moritz is going to hell for his threefold crime against God: rejecting divine grace, succumbing to sexual desires, and spurning Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Crying, Moritz’s father, Mr. Stiefel, renounces his son, claiming he disliked him even as a child.
Hart-Payne makes a convoluted, circular argument that because suicide is the gravest moral offense, it is proof of that very moral order. Other adults attending the funeral all cruelly denounce Moritz, questioning how a son could wrong his parents so cruelly.
Bleekhead reassures Mr. Stiefel with a misattributed passage from the Bible: “for those who love God all things work together for the best (I Corinthians 12.15)” (60). (The passage is from Romans.) The professors assure Mr. Stiefel that they most likely would have failed Moritz or held him back the following year. Mr. Stiefel disowns his son.
After the adults leave the gravesite, the rain lessens. Moritz’s classmates who attended—including Ernst and Hansy, but absent Melchior—debate whether Moritz hanged or shot himself. The other boys ridicule Ernst for saying Moritz was found without a head. One boy, Otto, says Moritz owes him money for betting he wouldn’t fail. Hansy blames Otto’s insults for Moritz’s suicide; Otto blames Moritz for not studying enough. The boys discuss their upcoming homework and leave.
Martha and Ilse, who attended the funeral from a distance, rush to the grave to place a wreath and a cascade of anemones. Martha plans to transplant the roses from her parents’ garden to the grave, knowing her parents will beat her regardless; Ilse promises to water the roses.
Ilse tells Martha that Moritz killed himself because of stress over his homework: “Parallelepiped!” Ilse exclaims, referring to the geometric figure Moritz mentioned as a reason he refused her sexual invitation. Ilse produces the gun Moritz used and refuses to give it to Martha despite her pleas, saying she’s going to keep it as a souvenir. When Ilse retrieved the gun—having heard the shot through the trees—she found Moritz with his head blown off and “his brains […] hanging in the willows” (63).
Act III, Scene 3 Summary
Mr. and Mrs. Gabor argue over sending Melchior to a reformatory. Mr. Gabor argues that all they can do to preserve their “spotless consciences” as parents is to send Melchior to the reformatory; after that, the law of the weak and the strong will determine whether he flourishes or withers. He believes his wife can’t see the “moral insanity” in Melchior’s explanation of sex because, as a woman, she is unfit to judge such things. She retorts that only a man could treat his son with such heartlessness; only a “totally soulless bureaucrat or hopelessly narrow-minded” man could see immorality in such a naive action (65). She believes the professors are scapegoating Melchior to deflect attention from the suicide epidemic. Mrs. Gabor worries the reformatory would turn Melchior into the criminal that his father and the school are treating him as, and she promises to divorce her husband if he sends Melchior there.
Mr. Gabor reveals that Mrs. Bergmann brought him a letter she found, written by Melchior to Wendla, in which their son confesses his remorse for raping her. Mr. Gabor’s brother also telegrammed, saying Melchior confided in him and asked for money to escape to England. The Gabors refuse to believe their son could do such a thing; however, they agree to send Melchior to the reformatory, as much to hide Melchior’s crime as to reform him (Mr. Gabor convinced Mrs. Bergmann to give him Melchior’s confession so she would not retain proof of his crime).
Act III, Scene 4 Summary
At the reformatory, a group of boys bet who will orgasm first as they masturbate in a circle. Melchior doesn’t join in, despite knowing that he risks making himself an outcast. A fight breaks out over the winner, and the boys chase each other away. Alone, Melchior envisions his escape from the fourth floor down the lightning conductor and over the crumbling facade. He imagines working for a newspaper to support himself after his escape.
Melchior thinks Wendla hates him because he “stole her freedom” (69) and acknowledges there is no way around the fact that he raped her. He returns to planning his escape; he exits just as the grand inquisitor, Dr. Procrustes, enters.
Dr. Procrustes orders a locksmith to build wrought-iron grates around the fourth-floor windows, explaining that the “degenerates” aren’t deterred by the height or the stinging nettles planted under the windows.
Act III, Scenes 1-4 Analysis
In the first part of Act III, Wedekind uses dialogue, naming, and setting to characterize authoritarian adult figures and expand the motif of the fear of shame.
The names of the professors, the reverend, and the grand inquisitor at the reformatory are aptronyms—they identify these flat characters by their defining traits. The names of the professors who punish Melchior indicate their harsh characters: Blodgett (blood get), Starver, Brockenbohn (broken bone), and Hart-Payne (heart pain). (The translator adapted the original German names for English readers.) The professors’ protracted argument over opening a window satirizes administrative inefficiency. Headmaster Hart-Payne’s diction satirizes administrative language while revealing the inhuman cruelty of such institutions: “[The suicide epidemic] has hitherto defied all attempts to require students to adhere to the requirement that they exist required by the requirements of their required education” (54). The tragic irony is that Moritz’s strict adherence to educational requirements led to his suicide.
Reverend Bleekhead is also an aptronym: his description of mortal sin and hell and his condemnation of Moritz for killing himself all illustrate his bleak view of the world. None of the adults at the funeral are distraught over Moritz’s death or question why he killed himself; instead, they rail against him for causing them suffering. Their condemnations and the grim setting of the cemetery in the pouring rain illustrate the bleak, uncaring world Moritz found himself trapped in.
Bleekhead condemns Moritz on the grounds that he sinned against God; however, the passage he quotes to Mr. Stiefel undermines his authority. He attributes the quote “for those who love God all things work together for the best” as coming from I Corinthians when it is actually from Romans (60). This reveals him as the judgmental, fallible man he is, not the figure of moral authority others see in him. The quote itself has potential for irony, as it might suggest either that Mr. Stiefel doesn’t love God, leading God to take his son, or that God doesn’t exist, because despite loving God Mr. Stiefel still lost his son. The third, unironic, and scripturally traditional interpretation is that Mr. Stiefel loves God, and God exists, thus Moritz’s death will nevertheless lead to some higher good as part of God’s plan. However, by the end of the play, even this third interpretation will not have borne out.
Wedekind uses imagery, dialogue, and naming to illustrate that the reformatory is a place of punishment, not reform. “Grand Inquisitor Dr. Procrustes” is an aptronym referring to both the brutality of the Spanish Inquisition and the cruelty of Poseidon’s sadistic son, Procrustes. Descriptions of the reformatory reinforce that Dr. Procrustes’s mission is punishment, not reform: He orders bars put on the windows and plants stinging nettles under them. He also refers to the adolescents there as “degenerates.” The reformatory is a place that adults such as the Gabors use to contain and punish adolescents who do things they don’t understand, don’t know how to address, and don’t want to associate with.
