Four Plays by Frank Wedekind

TRAGEDIES OF SEX TRAGEDIES OF SEX BY FRANK WEDEKIND Translation and Introduction by SAMUEL A ELIOT, Jr. Spring’s Awakening (Fruhlings Erwachen) Earth-Spirit (Erdgeist) Pandora’s Box (Die Buchse der Pandora) Damnation 1 (Tod und Teufel) FRANK HENDERSON ftj Charing Cross Road, London, W.C. 2 CAUTION.—All persons are hereby warned that the plays publish 3d in this volume are fully protected under international copyright laws, and are subject to royalty, and any one presenting any of said plays without the consent of tho Author or his recognized agents, will be liable to the penalties by law provided. Both theatrical and motion picture rights are reserved. Printed in the TJ. S. A. CONTENTS PAGE Introduction vii Spring’s Awakening (Fruhlingserwachen) 1 Earth-Spirit (Erdgeist) Ill Pandora’s Box (Buchse der Pandora) . 217 Damnation! (Tod und Teufel) ...... 305 INTRODUCTION Frank Wedekind’s name is widely, if vaguely, known by now, outside of Germany, and at least five of his plays have been available in English form for qui^e some years, yet a resume of biographical facts and critical opinions seems necessary as introduction to this—I will not say authoritative, but more care- ful—book. The task is genial, since Wedekind was my special study at Munich in 1913, and I translated his two Lulu tragedies the year after. The timidity or disapprobation betrayed in this respect by our professional critics of foreign drama makes my duty the more imperative. James Huneker merely called him “a naughty boy !” Percival Pollard tiptoed around him, pointing out a trait here and a trait there, like a menagerie-keeper with a prize tiger. Viereck once waxed rapturous over Reinhardt’s pro- duction of Spring's Awakening (that gave me my own first inkling of what Wedekind might mean for me), but my friend Moderwell tossed him off in less than a page of The Theatre of Today as an immoral joker out of Simplicissimus. It is true that Wede- kind is by no means easy to grasp or tabulate, true 4hM greater men, such as Strindberg, have suffered from similar slighting and ill-considered estimates he^-e, before they were suitably interpreted ; but vii : viii INTRODUCTION Wedekind has been dead five years, and the time for a fair and thoughtful, if very inexhaustive, judg- ment of him has surely come. Although he was of the same generation as the naturalistic dramatists who everywhere came to the fore in the 1890’s—Hauptmann, Chekov, Brieux, etc. —Frank Wedekind was not of them, but far ahead of them. They are now all but out-moded ; his influence has barely begun. He did not fit his time: the first twenty years of his active life, in fact, were spent in continuous friction with the contemporary world. He experienced the rancor and contempt, the smart of injustice and the hopeless hatred, of most outcasts from society. Hostility toward bourgeois civilization is the keynote of many of his works. He is—against, I think, his natural tendency—a pessi- mist—all the blacker for the flame of strange, Utopian ideals still flaring up in his most savage scenes. The wrestle of contradictory wills within him is what gives his writing its abnormal tensity, what drives him often to overstrain each dramatic idea till its analogy to life is so distorted most people find it morbid. He yearns to annihilate the crude, the coarse, the ugly and the weak. He has declared, “The reunion of holiness and beauty as the divine object of pious devotion is the purpose to which I offer my life: toward which, indeed, I have striven since earliest childhood.” Physical beauty, he means a sort of Pagan worship of the body—its lowest impulses and its highest development. But in every direction he found that reunion obstructed by INTRODUCTION ix his all-too-well regulated German civilization. Like his own Marquis of Keith he feverishly pursued the joy of life and could never enjoy his life: when about to strike a splendid blow for his Promised Land he would see a spike-helmetcd angel with a police-club sentinel at Eden’s gate. Only in the present century —only, indeed, after the Great War had determined, for the Continent, what the outstanding character- istics of the twentieth century were to be — did Wedekind, the Expressionist, who despised literature and thrust raw life upon the stage, arrive at his present commanding position and win the admiration alid disciplcship of many of his countrymen. Though he died in March, 1918, he had incor- porated in many a play before then both the sensa- tional content and the free, direct, spasmodic form which German literature, especially German drama, was to show in the post-War turmoil and distress. Georg Kaiser and the other Expressionists so prized to-day can make no secret of their debt to him, and the wild rush they represent and play to—to con- template naan’s lowest impulses, the roots of will and feeling, the instincts, not the ideals that actuate con- fused and drifting peoples, and having studied them in crude, disordered life to set them down in baldest, swiftest speech, in rank but penetrating truth—this rusjj that is observed in all the Continental countries but most among the Germans did there alone possess a guide and prophet in the dead author, analyzer, wry and bitter thinker, Wedekind. Less than a twelvemonth after his decease, a des- X INTRODUCTION perate, revolutionary era found suddenly in this perverse and pessimistic man, in his harsh world of whores and swindlers, ruthless materialists and broken poets, its own true shape and pressure. At the same time the former standards of good taste, and theatre-censorships, were swept away ; the ban which had lain heavily on Wedekind throughout his stormy life, the legal ban and the far more significant disfavor of the “good citizens,” arbiters of general opinion, whom he had outraged so in their smug goodness, their virtuous ideals, their bourgeois self- esteem,—these now’ were lifted from his wo;-ks: Pandora's Box became — imagine it — a popular attraction; from him w’ho had so foreseen the break- down of conventional formula* and unreal modes of thought all men now feverishly sought some intima- tion of what society, dazzled with commotion, must yet look forward to. For us in America, confirmed, not shattered, in our previous illusions and conceit by the war’s outcome, there is less reason to embrace this scornful sooth- sayer, this emissary (one is tempted to believe) from Mephistopheles himself,—now cold and condescend- ing, and again intent with hectic hate. For all the foolish outcry over the freer manners, perhaps the looser morals, of our youth, we are still certain in America of our subjective health, of some objective verities at least, of “progress,” of “ideals,” of man*/ metaphysical abstractions which Wedekind distrusts, shows up, derides. Ambassador Gerard, innately, sensibly, was most American. In his Four Years in INTRODUCTION XI Germany he mentions shudderingly our author’s name, points to the fact that Berlin still was going, over and over, to performances of Earth-Spirit as but one more indictment of a degenerate, odious nation, and plainly shows us what must be the straight American’s reaction to this volume—if such “straight,” normal readers should ever take it up. But none the less it is important for America to ques- tiorfrand to try, to root, if need be, hog-like, to the bottom of our civilization’s pile, and recognize the gross and primitive, the basely human, that under- lies, each separate soul of us and all our deeds. Naturalism of one type or anothei nineteenth-century literalness or twentieth-century explosiveness •—is for us the necessary form our Art must take; for only through the pitiless representing of home truth can the easy sentimentalism, so hostile to real literature, be combated, and America given self- knowledge and real grounds for spiritual leaps in after-years. O’Neil in drama, Masters in poetry, Anderson, Lewis, Frank and many more in fiction, these undetected observers of our seamier sides, pre- pare the way for the full appreciation due to Wedekind. They are more literary, more artfully self-conscious than he in his best work. Technique concerns them more. But it is not merely for the light his drama throws on dominant European inter- ests of the moment, it is also for the impulse he may give to further, similar probing and expression here at liome that these four plays' have been prepared —revised or newly now translated—for eager and : xii INTRODUCTION earnest readers and (who knows?) it may be, for the stage. They are linked together, these four culled from the score of Wedekind’s writing, not solely in theme (for though they arc recognized in their own land as the Gesclilechtstragddicn par excellence, there are other tragedies of sex from Wedekind’s later years), but in sequence too, chronological, philosophic. What an echo, for instance, of the freshness and- the fervor of Spring’s Awakening we hear in the scenes where Hugenberg, the schoolboy of Eartli-Spirit, Act IV, and Pandora's Box, Act I, reveals his vir- ginal, enthusiastic, adventurous, devoted flush of lift. How subtly is Lulu foreshadowed in the vivid sketch of Use in Spring’s Awakening buoyant, unmoral, —simple in her acceptance of life complete, more likable than Lulu in her pity, too, for those not so full-blooded. How keenly Casti-Piani piques our interest, in Pandora's Box, Act II ; how satisfyingly his life is summed and closed in Tod und Teufel— verily Damnation! The four plays hang together, and present compactly Wedekind’s own growth of mind—from ardor, almost missionary

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