About the work
Frank Wedekind's „Frühlings Erwachen" („Spring Awakening") was written in 1891, but only premiered in 1906 by Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater Berlin — and immediately banned by the censor. The work is a key text of early Expressionist theatre and one of the most-discussed German plays on adolescent sexuality.
Plot
A small provincial town, late nineteenth century. The 14-year-old Wendla Bergmann asks her mother where children come from — and receives only embarrassed evasion. Her schoolmate Melchior Gabor explains it to her in writing, but more out of duty than feeling. The shy Moritz Stiefel struggles with school and puberty; his classmate Hänschen Rilow masturbates to art reproductions. In a rainy hayloft Melchior and Wendla have sex — without her really understanding what is happening. Moritz fails school and shoots himself. At his funeral the parents accuse the surviving boys of a moral conspiracy. Melchior is sent to a reformatory; Wendla, secretly pregnant, is killed by an abortion her mother arranges. In the cemetery scene Melchior — escaped from the reformatory — meets the dead Moritz, who urges him to suicide, and a Masked Man who urges him to live. Melchior chooses life, follows the Masked Man.
Cultural significance
Frühlings Erwachen is one of the most important works of early modernism on adolescent sexuality, school violence and parental hypocrisy. The play was for decades banned or censored in many German theatres. The 2006 musical „Spring Awakening" by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater on Broadway brought the work to a young generation worldwide. Productions by Frank Castorf, Falk Richter and Nuran David Calis are reference performances. The play remains required school reading and contemporary.