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By Root 1080 0

an almshouse, in his Sunken Bell Heinrich’s wife drowns herself in a lake and he drinks a poisoned goblet, in Rose Bernd the title character, seduced and deserted, strangles her newborn child, in Henschel the title character hangs himself after betraying his dead wife by marrying a tart who lets his child die of neglect, in Michael Kramer a sensitive son is driven to suicide by an overbearing father, a popular theme in Germany rich in such fathers. In Sudermann’s Magda only the father’s fatal stroke prevents his shooting himself and his daughter, who needless to say is illegitimately pregnant, the invariable fate of the German heroine. An endless succession of them were driven in the grip of this circumstance to hysteria, insanity, crime, prison, infanticide and suicide. In Sudermann’s Sodoms Ende, which varies the pattern if not the end, a dissolute young artist, corrupted by the wife of a banker, drives his foster sister to suicide and dies himself of a hemorrhage. In Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen (Spring’s Awakening), first effort of a playwright who was to exceed all the rest, the discovery of sex by adolescents conflicting with the prurience of adults produces total catastrophe: the fourteen-year-old heroine, being with child, dies, apparently of a mismanaged abortion; the boy is expelled from school and sent to a reformatory by his parents; his friend, unable to bear life, commits suicide and reappears in a graveyard with his head under his arm in a closing scene of opaque symbolism. In the course of the action a third boy, in a scene of explicit auto-eroticism, addresses a passionate love declaration to the picture of a naked Venus which he then drops down the toilet. First produced in 1891, the play was a sensational success and in book form went into twenty-six editions.

Born in the same year as Strauss, Wedekind was a writer of satanic talent who had been an actor, journalist, circus publicity agent, singer of grisly ballads for Überbrettl and while on the staff of Simplicissimus served a term in prison for lèse majesté. “I have the imagination of disaster—and see life as ferocious and sinister” exactly described him, though it was Henry James who said it of himself. Frühlings Erwachen, if taken as a plea for sex education, at least had a social message and a quality of pity, but thereafter Wedekind saw nothing but the ferocious and sinister. In the same years in which Freud was carefully arriving at his discovery of the subconscious, Wedekind saw an awful vision of it and stripped off every covering to show it as purely malignant. From 1895 on, his plays plunged into a debauch of the vicious and perverse which seemed to have no argument but that humanity was vile. Erdgeist (Earth Spirit) and its sequel, Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box), take place in a world of pimps, crooks, harlots, blackmailers, murderers and hangmen surrounding the heroine, Lulu, who represents sensuality incarnate both heterosexual and lesbian. Her adventures proceed through brothels and dives, seduction, abortion, sadism, necrophilia and nymphomania in what a contemporary critic called “a torrent of sex foaming over jagged rocks of insanity and crime.” It was sex, not creative in its primal function, but destructive, producing not life but death. Lulu’s first husband dies of a stroke, her second, bedeviled by her perfidy, cuts his own throat, her third on discovering her infidelity committed with his son is killed by her. After prison, degradation and prostitution, she ends, logically, slashed to death by a Jack the Ripper in a final lethal explosion of that erotic power which Shaw, a very different playwright, was celebrating at the same time as the Life Force.

The all-pervasive influence of Nietzsche was at work. Shaw’s Man and Superman distilled from it a philosophic idea, but the Germans took Nietzsche literally. His rejection of conventional morality, which he meant as a steppingstone to a higher ground, they embraced as a command to roam the gutter. Sudermann quoted Nietzsche’s words, “Only in the savage forest of vice can