Spring Awakening: A Children’s Tragedy

The second of the three main protagonists, Moritz is a 15-year-old boy tormented by the demands of school and his exploding sexuality. Under pressure from his parents to succeed in school, Moritz feels trapped by a world of demands he did not choose but must meet. In this conformity, and in his ignorance of sex, Moritz is a foil to his best friend, Melchior, who despite being a year younger than Moritz knows more about sex. Melchior’s high academic standing affords him the time to notice and rebel against his parents’ hypocrisy, whereas because Moritz is enslaved to homework—“The only way I know how to grind is to be as dull as an ox,” he says (14)—he doesn’t even think to question his parents’ onerous demands, leaving him imprisoned by his fear of failing them.

Moritz is a tragicomic character. Next to Melchior, he is comically serious in his fixation on homework and ridiculous in his hyperbolic description of his sexual desires provoking a “fear of death” (12). However, it’s tragic that he cannot look to his parents or to his school for help. Even Melchior doesn’t understand or sympathize with Moritz’s fear of failing in school or his shame in his sexual desires. Like the other teenagers of Spring Awakening, Moritz is isolated in the bubble of himself. Overwhelmed by the expectations placed on him and without anyone left to turn to, he decides to take his own life. His suicide is made more tragic by his ignorance of the full extent of his decision. His resolution to think of whipped cream when he shoots himself is both darkly comic in its dissonance and tragic in its indication of his naivete.

While an extension of Moritz, his ghost merits consideration as a somewhat distinct character. The main difference is the amount of sympathy each character evokes, which is the result of their age. Moritz is sympathetic as a teenager caught between his demanding parents and a sexually repressive culture, and his decision to take his own life is a tragic example of what these pressures can do. However, Moritz’s ghost is less sympathetic. His entrance into an eternal afterlife peopled by ghosts with similarly scornful outlooks depersonalizes Moritz, presenting him as a personification of a cynical and defeatist attitude rather than as a tormented teenager. Moritz’s ghost blames his parents for his tragic fate, refusing to accept that despite their demands, it was he, not they, who ultimately decided to take his own life. Moritz’s ghost stands as a warning against the dangers of scorn and pessimism, showing how easy it is to use the detached pleasure of schadenfreude as both a shield against suffering and a substitute for joy.

Another of the three main characters of Spring Awakening, Wendla is a 14-year-old girl whose mother keeps her in complete ignorance of sex and reproduction. Despite this, Wendla is not the stereotypical naïf: She knows when her mother is lying and challenges her mother for it, pleading with her to teach her about sex. While the tone of Wendla’s pleas is ingenuous, her methods suggest precocious intelligence: She invents a story about a giant to show her mother how preposterous it is to continue telling her teenage daughter fantastical stories about where babies come from. With this innocent wit, Wendla deftly exposes the hypocrisy and absurdity of refusing to teach teenagers about sex. Her tragic fate stands as a stark warning of one of the potential Impacts of a Sexually Repressive Culture.

Wendla’s masochism is another psychological impact of her sexually repressive culture. She loves and wants to be loved by her mother, who chastises her when she asks about sex; as a result, Wendla must suppress her innate curiosity about sex. In her prudish culture, no one sees the torment of Wendla’s predicament, leaving her alone in her suffering. In contrast, Wendla, Thea, and Melchior all acknowledge the pain and wrongness of the physical abuse Martha suffers from her parents. Wendla’s dream of being a beggar girl beaten daily by her father is a fantasy of switching places with Martha and suffering in a way that others acknowledge and pity. By provoking Melchior to beat her, Wendla makes herself a worthy victim in her own and her culture’s eyes. This beating is also a rebellion against her mother’s prudery; there is a sexual connotation to Wendla’s lifting her skirts so that Melchior can beat her harder.

There is an element of similar, though unwitting, rebellion in Act II, Scene 4. In her total ignorance of sex and reproduction, Wendla doesn’t even know the extent to which she’s rebelled against her mother. In Act III, Scene 5, Wendla tells her sister that she “wouldn’t have thought it was possible to feel so good” (71), although she goes on to say that a feeling of sickness and a dread of her imminent death invade this happiness. Her unhappiness stems partially from her pregnancy symptoms—which she fears are the symptoms of a fatal disease—and the distress she feels she’s causing her mother: “Every time I wake up, I see Mother crying. Oh, that hurts me so much—I can’t tell you, Ina!” (71). These are the only two sources of distress Wendla can name: Lacking knowledge of rape and pregnancy, she attributes her mysterious bad feelings to facing imminent death and having caused her mother pain. Like the other teenagers in Spring Awakening, Wendla is a character study in the different ways a sexually repressive culture shapes its youth.

Hansy is one of the teenage students in Spring Awakening. Like the other teenagers, he’s ashamed of his budding sexuality. His belief in the immorality of the desires excited by Vecchio’s painting of a chaste Venus provokes him to enact a “murder” of Venus—throwing her picture in the toilet. Venus’s immobility distresses Hansy, who longs for a real sexual partner. He satisfies this need in a fling with his classmate Ernst Röbel, whose feelings are stronger than Hansy’s. In rebellion against the Christian morality of his upbringing, Hansy envisions a future full of sex and money. His sexual insatiability during his rendezvous with Ernst suggests his hedonistic dream won’t bring the happiness he imagines. Hansy exemplifies the folly of reacting to sexual repressiveness by fleeing to the opposite extreme; hypersexuality is one Charybdis people can fall into when escaping the Scylla of sexual repression.

Wendla’s mother, Mrs. Bergmann, exemplifies the difficulty of escaping the inherited cycle of unhelpful parenting. She is torn between Wendla’s pleas to learn about sex and her fear that she’ll be punished for doing so. Ultimately, her fear wins out and she continues withholding the truth. Ironically, she blames Wendla for her pregnancy, though Melchior is the culpable party. Like Mrs. Gabor, Mrs. Bergmann ultimately chooses to hide her child’s plight at their expense, and she gets Wendla an abortion to avoid the ignominy of an extramarital child—a decision that ends in Wendla’s death. Mrs. Bergmann personifies the tragic impact that a sexually repressive culture can have on children despite a parent’s best intentions.

Mrs. Gabor is Melchior’s mother. She prides herself on her progressive parenting and is a dissenting voice to the conservative and sexually repressed culture the play indicts. However, in both high-drama and low-drama moments, she acts against her progressive ideals. This suggests the influence her conservative upbringing and environment still exert on her. For example, she decides to send her 14-year-old son to a reformatory despite believing it will harm him because she is shocked by his crime of raping Wendla and worried others will find out about it if they don’t send Melchior away. The duality between Mrs. Gabor’s progressive ideals and her conservative actions defines her character.

Her response to Moritz’s pleading letter exemplifies this duality. Her opposition to judging students on their grades is of no consolation when she responds to Moritz’s threat to kill himself by telling him to buckle down and bear it: “So chin up, Mr. Stiefel!—Similar crises of one kind or another befall each and every one of us and simply have to be survived” (44). Her letter’s stilted diction—which is more formal and antiquated than any other language in the play—characterizes her as a conflicted person who dresses up her stern conservatism with cheeriness.

Ilse is an older girl who went to the same school as the rest of the teenagers. Still living at home, she rebels against the sexual repression of her provincial upbringing by making trips to a nearby city, where she does sex work and models for a group of painters she jokingly calls the Priapus Club. Her sense of humor demonstrates her rejection of her humorless upbringing and distinguishes her from the other teenagers, who are stuck thinking about the world in their parents’ terms. For example, she teases Moritz for his sexual immaturity when he pretends not to understand the implication of her invitation to her house. Her openness in talking about and pursuing sex contrasts sharply with the sexlessness the adults try to enforce; she is a foil to the adults and their sexually repressed culture. Nevertheless, her acceptance of sexually abusive and exploitative relationships suggests that she hasn’t escaped the distorted worldview of her upbringing.