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.
Themes
The Impact of a Sexually Repressive Culture
Spring Awakening indicts the sexually repressive culture of provincial fin-de-siècle Germany and sexually repressive cultures in general. The adult characters avoid talking to their children about sex out of discomfort stemming from generational moral scruples. None of the parents intend to hurt their children by doing so, yet this avoidance harms every teenager in the play.
Part of Wedekind’s critique relies on exposing the absurdity and hypocrisy in trying to keep sex and reproduction a secret from pubescent teenagers. As Moritz expresses in Act I, Scene 2, sex is “the most obvious question about life” for a teenager (14), yet the topic is conspicuously absent from their school curriculum. The teenagers see sex everywhere in both their own and their parents’ worlds—to the extent that Melchior laments “the whole world revolves around penis and vagina” (33)—and yet their parents refuse to talk to them about it. Wendla exposes the absurdity of this refusal in her gag about a giant outside her window: “A man, Mother—three times bigger than an ox!—With feet like steamboats…!” (36). Mrs. Bergmann ignores Wendla’s implication that giants belong in the same realm as baby-bearing storks and chides Wendla for not “showing good sense” (37). The irony is that it is Wendla’s mother, not Wendla, who lacks good sense in not teaching her daughter about sex.
Steeped in this culture since their own childhoods, the adults in Spring Awakening mistake repressiveness for a natural human tendency when in fact sexual curiosity is natural. Headmaster Hart-Payne voices this belief when he condemns Melchior for writing an explanation of sex: “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). Hart-Payne’s characteristic nonsensical wordiness indicates that the morality he and the other adults enforce is really nothing but an elaborate language of judgment and repression. He cites morals such as dignity and modesty as he scapegoats Melchior to distract from his own failure to address the suicide epidemic. Wedekind exploits this hypocrisy to ironic effect throughout the play, but nowhere is it as egregious and self-serving as in this instance.
Rejecting Death, Embracing Life
Best friends Melchior and Moritz respond in contrasting ways to their personal struggles, culminating in two contrasting fates that emphasize the preciousness of life. The fundamental difference between the two boys is that Melchior understands and accepts that he is ultimately responsible for his actions, whereas Moritz blames his parents for his tragic fate. Melchior personifies the empowering message that while people are limited by their environment and affected by their past, they can ultimately choose how (and whether) they want to live their life.
Moritz’s ghost hyperbolizes the adults’ habit of judging others while evading responsibility for themselves. To Melchior, Moritz describes how, as a ghost, he sees folly in the behavior of everyone, from emperors to beggars, God to the Devil. By retreating from life and doing nothing but judging and laughing at others, Moritz’s ghost thinks he escapes suffering:
We’re no longer reachable for anything, neither good nor evil. We stand high, high above terrestrial concerns—each one of us for himself alone. We don’t fraternize with each other, because it’s too boring for us. None of us has anything left to lose. In our infinite sublimity, we are as far from sorrow as from rejoicing. We’re satisfied with ourselves, and that’s what counts! (78).
Moritz’s reappearance as a ghost marks a transformation of his character: From a teenager completely committed to the demands of his parents, he becomes a ghostly figure who cares about nothing. Being a ghost is a metaphor for fleeing the Scylla of conformity for the Charybdis of scorn. Moritz exemplifies both the extreme of this phenomenon—suicide—and the less dramatic attempts to protect oneself from the hardship of “terrestrial concerns” that result in a colorless existence “as far from sorrow as from rejoicing.” As Kafka is quoted as having said, “You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world [...] but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid” (Kafka, Franz. The Zurau Aphorisms, 2011). In trying to escape his suffering in life, Moritz secures an eternity of suffering by rejecting the world.
The surreal quality of the final scene indicates that the Masked Man and Moritz’s ghost are a dramatization of Melchior’s internal struggle, not a literal depiction of reality. The Masked Man is the proverbial angel on Melchior’s shoulder—the voice of choice; Moritz is the devil—the voice of scorn and fatalism, a figure who exists in a private hell. Melchior’s predicament is not knowing who is who: “Only one of them can be the devil!” he exclaims to himself (81). The Masked Man is the advocate of Melchior’s free will: Unlike the typical tragic hero inexorably doomed to their fate, Melchior authors his own fate.
Wedekind’s metafictional casting of himself as the Masked Man creates a link between the world of the play and real life. In the actual world, we tell ourselves a story about our life, sometimes making the prophecy we have invented inevitable. Contrary to Moritz’s belief that his parents were responsible for his tragic fate, the Masked Man asserts that they did not doom Moritz to a certain fate—in the end, he chose his tragic end. When Moritz complains that the Masked Man didn’t visit him prior to his suicide, the man replies, “You don’t remember me? Even at the last instant you were still standing between death and life, weren’t you?” (83). The Masked Man personifies personal responsibility and free will; he personifies turning toward life in all the struggle, suffering, and joy that it entails. Moritz’s ghost personifies turning away from life, both in suicide and in the detached and scornful attitude his ghost adopts, laughing at others’ struggles to avoid struggling himself.
The Social Construction of Morality
Spring Awakening juxtaposes the Christian morality of its adults with the naive amorality of its teenagers to illustrate that people, not God, create and enforce moral codes. The adults bend or discard their prudish morality to fit their own actions and judge the teenagers’ behavior. These ethical gymnastics span from the bankrupt—Headmaster Hart-Payne scapegoating Melchior, Reverend Bleekhead lambasting the dead Moritz, Grand Inquisitor Dr. Procrustes punishing the boys at the reformatory—to the misguided—Mrs. Bergmann refusing to teach Wendla about sex because her own mother did the same with her, Mrs. Gabor criticizing Melchior for reading Faust. Despite the failures of Christian morality, the play still presents morality as an essential framework for living with yourself and others.
Spring Awakening presents morality as a set of socially agreed-upon mores, not a tablet of divine commandments. This means that the individual can challenge the existing moral order with their own ideas about right and wrong, as when Mrs. Gabor opposes her husband over sending Melchior to a reformatory for writing about sex. At first, Mr. and Mrs. Gabor disagree about whether Melchior did something wrong:
MR. GABOR: He has committed an offense!
MRS. GABOR: He has not committed an offense! (66)
The scene depicts morality as an argument between two people over right and wrong, not a set of divine laws to be followed. That morality is argued at the interpersonal level means that it is subject to dispute and change; morality is more mutable than the adults in the provincial German town believe.
Wedekind satirizes the view of morality as an immutable, preexisting order by which human actions can be judged. At Moritz’s funeral, Headmaster Hart-Payne delivers this argument as he throws dirt on the coffin:
Suicide as the most serious imaginable offense against the moral order constitutes the most serious proof imaginable of the moral order, in that the perpetrator spares the moral order the necessity of pronouncing its verdict and thus confirms its existence. (59)
Hart-Payne’s nonsensical statement conceals circular reasoning: By his logic, suicide is the worst offense against the moral order, proving that the moral order exists. With no external justification for this moral order, the condemnations of Moritz are revealed as expressions of grief, fear, and anger from misguided and sometimes cruel adults.
The final lesson in morality comes from the Masked Man, who states, “Morals I understand to be the real product of two imaginary quantities. The imaginary quantities are Supposed To and Want To. The product is called Morals and its reality cannot be denied” (82). This conception of morals allows that people rarely make choices solely according to what they’re supposed to do. If people adhered strictly to a set of morals, human behavior would be predictable. But morality is not a lofty set of ideals; it is a compromise between a sense of ideals and rules on the one hand and desires on the other. Though Wedekind wrote Spring Awakening 30 years prior to Freud’s development of his personality theory, the Masked Man’s moral formula resembles Freud’s idea of a tripartite psyche consisting of the id (desires), the superego (moral conscience), and the ego (the mediator between the two).
