1. This is well illustrated in the case of one of his last plays, Simson (1914), a fairly straightforward, certainly uncontroversial adaptation of the biblical story of Samson. At its premiere, the play was both acclaimed by the Munich press and banned by the Munich censor – reactions whose extremity neither the play's pedestrian content nor its bombastic style at all supported. These disproportionate reactions, both pro and con, referenced not the play itself but rather the persona behind it. For Wedekind himself, the stage was always a deeply personal and reflexive arena. As he once wrote, ‘The critics have often reproached me that my dramas are about myself. I would like to show that it's worth the trouble to bring myself onto the stage.’ See Seehaus, Günther, ed., Frank Wedekind and das Theater (München: Laokoon Verlag, 1964), p. 613Google Scholar.

2. Often, of course, the autobiographical voice subsists in print, paint, or some other graphic and strictly spatial domain. In these cases, it speaks from something like the imperfect tense. That is, the book or painting, being a completed act of the past, is drawn into the imperfect state of past action continuing in the present by the present-tense attention of the reader or spectator. Indeed, the principle narrative feature of the genre is to mask this fact from the reader/spectator's consciousness. The more successful the autobiographer is at doing so, the more credible, immediate, and compelling is his or her narrative presence and voice. The central issue and the main character in autobiography is always the same: it is the reader/audience's crediting of the presence of the speaking voice, the autobiographical ‘I’, as much as the events narrated and the life described by that narrator, which engages, fascinates, and ultimately holds us – or fails to. It is this performing presence with whom we enter into relationship and whom we really seek to know and understand. In no other genre, including the lyric, is the expressive self, both as living presence and as historical artifact, so centrally at issue.

3. See Rybalka, Michel, ‘Sartre and French Autobiography’, unpublished paper, Department of Romance Languages, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, 1993), p. 7Google Scholar.

4. Like contemporary media personalities, Wedekind's presence, more often than not, seems to have carried with it a theatricality that transformed real-life situations into stage events. At times, an unfortunate and certainly unintended by-product was self-parody; even his funeral and interment degenerated into a histrionic circus. See Wedekind, Tilly Newes, Lulu: die Rolle meines Lebens (München: Rütten und Loening Verlag, 1969), p. 201–3Google Scholar; also, Seehaus, Frank Wedekind, p. 11.

5. Having developed the basic features of this unique performance style before 1905, he anticipates the Futurists and Dadaists by nearly a decade.

6. For a full description of the features of the Wedekindstil in performance, see Kuhns, David F., ‘Wedekind, the Actor: Aesthetics, Morality, and Monstrosity’, Theatre Survey, XXXI, No. 2 (11 1990), p. 144–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Kutscher, Artur, Frank Wedekind: sein Leben und seine Werke, three vols. (München: Georg Müller, 1931), Vol. II, p. 185Google Scholar.

8. Not surprisingly, the same Wedekind performance often prompted totally opposite descriptive accounts from reviewers. For the commentary just quoted, see Salten, Felix, ‘Wedekind als Schauspieler’, Blätter des Deutschen Theaters, XIX (1 06 1912), p. 292Google Scholar.

9. In her 1964 memoir essay on her father as a dramatist, Wedekind's youngest daughter Kadidja wrote that in his play Franziska (1911) the title character was ‘a fantasized female self – she was what he himself as a girl would gladly have become. …’ See Wedekind, Kadidja, ‘Franziska and Galatea’, in Frank Wedekind: zum 100 Geburtstag, ed. Lemp, Richard (München: Stadtbibliothek München, 1964), p. 15Google Scholar.

10. The many testimonials to Wedekind by his contemporaries as this representative figure are most comprehensively represented in Das Wedekindbuch, a collection of laudatory essays published as part of a celebration by the avant-garde community of his fiftieth birthday in 1914. As Kurt Pinthus later succinctly summarized the relationship between Wedekind and this community: ‘We all worshipped [him].’ See Raabe, Paul, ed., The Era of German Expressionism, trans. Ritchie, J. M. (Woodstock, New York: Overlook, 1974), p. 71Google Scholar.

11. Here I am referring chiefly to the Lenzburg Castle (Wedekind's family home in Kanton Aarau, Switzerland), Munich, and Berlin diaries, covering the period 1887 through early 1890. The Paris diary, spanning May 1892 to January 1894, records less of fantasy experience and more of actual sexual exploit and experimentation.

12. Die Tagebücher, ed. Hay, Gerhard (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum Verlag, 1986), p. 108–10Google Scholar.

13. Ibid., p. 235, 99–100, 103, 140, 345.

14. Ibid., p. 160.

15. Ibid., p. 108.

16. Ibid., p. 108–10.

17. According to Wedekind's older brother Arnim, who was born in America, none of the boys – he, Frank, or their younger brothers, William and Donald – were baptized because their father, who was an ardent pacifist and opponent of Prussian militarism, thought this a good tactic for protecting his sons from becoming ‘Prussian canon fodder’. See Kutscher, Frank Wedekind: sein Leben and seine Werke, I, p. 18–19. It is perhaps worth noting that the confusion about Wedekind's national identity derives from the determination of his father, Friedrich Wilhelm, himself to avoid any nationalist commitment that would compromise his staunch support of liberal democracy. Friedrich originally left Germany for America after his and other's efforts for liberal constitutional reform were defeated in 1848, and thereafter he was never able to accept Germany as his homeland. Thus the lack of, among other things, a nationalist component in Wedekind's identity – like the guilt-ridden nightmares about their quarrels – was another of the ghosts of his father that subsequently haunted him and his career.

18. The exact date of his expulsion was 4 July 1889. With ironic resignation, the entry for this date – which is also the final entry of the Berlin diary – notes that ‘it was on the anniversary of the North American Declaration of Independence that I had to leave Berlin because of my American citizenship’ (Die Tagebücher, p. 79).

19. As Wedekind wrote to his dear friend Beate Heine, wife of the noted Munich director Karl Heine, ‘Now I hope to make good use of this misfortune so that I might at long last attain a proper nationality. It's certainly not my fault that up to now I haven't had one.’ See Wedekind, Frank, Gesammelte Briefe in zwei Bänden, ed. Strich, Fritz (Munich: Georg Müller Verlag, 1924), Vol. I, p. 315–16Google Scholar.

20. Tilly Wedekind, Lulu: Die Rolle meines Lebens, p. 45.

21. Durieux, Tilla, Eine Tür steht offen (Berlin: Herbig, 1954), p. 84Google Scholar. Immediately preceding this nude photo anecdote in her memoir, Durieux comments that if another man so much as offered to help Tilly on with her coat at the end of a social gathering, Wedekind would snatch the garment out of his hand with the pronouncement that such an office was reserved to him alone. In her memoir, Tilly claims that from the start of their marriage he was obsessively mistrustful of her marital fidelity. In their private life, she recalls, ‘the conflicts began almost immediately … [because] he never trusted me.’ In his obsessive fear of cuckoldry, of course, he is exactly like the husband characters in his Lulu sex tragedies. Later, ‘because he was sick and no longer felt himself my equal’, their work together on stage became ‘a catastrophe’ for their relationship: see Lulu: Die Rolle meines Lebens, p. 52.

22. Later in their married life, Tilly writes, ‘I told him I also loved him aside from his work, simply as a man. He answered, somewhat angrily, that the two could not be separated.’ See Lulu: die Rolle meines Lebens, p. 27.

23. See Rasch, Wolfdietrich, ed., Der vermummte Herr: Briefe Frank Wedekinds aus den Jahren 1881–1917 (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1967)Google Scholar. The quote is taken from the single-paragraph introductory comment by the editor which appears as the first page of the volume.

24. See Paul Raabe, ed., The Era of German Expressionism, p. 367.

25. I have translated literally the quote, ‘Man muss mit den Wolfen heulen’, because the imagery seems an apt rendering of Wedekind's probable ironic view of nationalist rhetoric. Artur Kutscher reports Wedekind's reaction to being angrily confronted by literary colleagues on the matter of his sudden political turn-about as follows: ‘“These eggheads”, he grinned, “how important they make this. They take everything literally and are not able to watch and wait [abwarten].” Watch and wait – that was his posture at that time, a posture … that virtually adorned itself with the irony of world history.’ See Kutscher, II, p. 185.

26. Lulu: Die Rolle meines Lebens, p. 48. Recalling Wedekind's real-life obsessive fear of being cuckolded by Tilly, it is as though, after their marriage, he would not only confuse his own life with that of his dramatic characters but would read his wife's behaviour through the filter of her portrayal of his most threatening character, Lulu. Whenever he played Dr. Schön, Lulu's third husband, opposite Tilly, Wedekind was enacting the role of her most challenging conquest and hence most significant male victim.

27. See Note 9, above.

28. Lulu: Die Rolle meines Lebens, p. 44.

29. Kayser, Rudolf, ‘Das neue Drama’, Das junge Deutschland, X (1917), p. 1–2Google Scholar, reprinted in Literatur-revolution, 1910–1925, ed. Paul Pörtner, two vols. (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1960), Vol. II, p. 235.

30. Salten, ‘Wedekind als Schauspieler’, p. 292.

31. Die Tagebücher, p. 90. Here, of course, Wedekind follows in the long tradition of Rabelais and Swift.

32. Ibid., p. 86.

33. With each husband's demise, Lulu repeatedly asks what ‘will become of’ her. She quickly realizes, upon the death of her first husband, for example, that she is now very rich; and, subsequently, her ultimate objective with respect to Dr. Schön is not that he simply gratify her sexually but that he marry her. When he does he is no longer the object of urgent pursuit that formerly distinguished him from her other suitors. After she is married to Schön she takes several lovers, as she did with her other two husbands, and her sexual needs appear relatively casual and recreational, not fatally compulsive, as are his. Throughout the two plays, her fears about economic survival are at the heart of her sexual self-awareness and self-expression.

34. ‘[Er] will positiv das ursprünglich Menschentum neu verständlich machen.’ The quote, taken from Hans Hellwig's 1928 dissertation on Wedekind, is cited by Kutscher, III, p. 279.

35. Ritchie, J. M., German Expressionist Drama (Boston: Twayne, 1976), p. 30Google Scholar.

36. See Elam, Keir, Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 120–2Google Scholar. These analytical terms have been developed in the area of philosophy known as ‘action theory’ for the purpose of specifying the necessary conditions for performing an action. Essentially, the ‘agent’ is the active principle in any interaction, the source or impetus of the action who, by inference, has recourse to the power (e.g., physical, intellectual, political, spiritual, etc.) to initiate that action. The ‘patient’ is the passive recipient of the agent's initiative, ‘the object or victim of the interaction’, in Elam's words. In the reference cited, Elam discusses the semiotic adaptation of these terms for analyzing the logic of dramatic action.

37. This term of structuralist semiotic analysis was employed by A. J. Greimas to designate a limited number of fundamental oppositional role relationships underlying the variety of character configurations found throughout dramatic literature. According to Elams's gloss on Greimas, ‘a single actantial model accounts, it is claimed, for the varieties of structural configurations discovered in different narratives and plays, for, however many the individual characters (or acteurs) and whatever the form of their relationships, the underlying actants remain the same.’ See Elam, Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, p. 126–31.

38. See Jelavich, Peter, Munich and Theatrical Modernism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 81Google Scholar. See also Birrell, Gordon, ‘The Wollen-Sollen equation in Wedekind's Frühlings Erwachen’, Germanic Review, LVII (1982), p. 118–19Google Scholar. Birrell analyzes the varieties of decapitation imagery prevalent in Spring Awakening.

39. Spring Awakening, trans. Osborn, Tom (London: Calder and Boyars, 1969), p. 81Google Scholar.

40. The Marquis of Keith, trans. Gottlieb, Beatrice, Masters of Modern Drama, Block, Haskell M. and Shedd, Robert G., eds. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), p. 298Google Scholar.

41. The plays are constructed of such repetitive patterns as: Lulu's remarriages; her husbands' deaths; the recurrent image of her as Pierrot; and Alva, in Pandora's Box, writing a play about Lulu called Earth Spirit.

42. See Jelavich, Munich and Theatrical Modernism, p. 111.

43. In Wedekind, Frank, The Lulu Plays, trans. and ed. Mueller, Carl Richard (New York: Fawcett World Library, 1967), p. 50Google Scholar.

44. Edschmid, Kasimir, ‘Schauspielkunst’, in Das deutsche Theater der Gegenwart, ed. Krell, Max (Munich: Rösl, 1923), p. 118Google Scholar; Hugo Ball, ‘Wedekind als Schauspieler,’ reprinted in Pörtner, Literaturrevolution 1910–1925, Vol. I, p. 340; Kortner, Fritz, Aller Tage Abend (München: Kindler, 1959), p. 197Google Scholar.

45. ‘Power's Body: the Inscription of Morality as Style’, Interpreting the Theatrical Past, Postlewait, Thomas and McConachie, Bruce, eds. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), p. 99–118Google Scholar.