Palimpsestus: Frank Wedekind's Theatre of Self-Performance

Abstract

Frank Wedekind's theatre art is usually approached through his dramatic writing: but the argument of this article is that the clearest understanding of the dramatist's career is to be gained through an encounter with his work as a performer. The stage was for Wedekind 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.’ In the following article, David Kuhns seeks to demonstrate the complicated nature of ‘performance’ as the term is applied to Wedekind – for his controversial plays and essays, scandalous satirical poems, cabaret appearances, and acting for the legitimate stage were all eclipsed by the notorious public persona which they constituted. This persona, Kuhns argues, became, even for Wedekind himself, inseparable from his self-perceived identity: it was both the real subject of his dramatic art and the essential character he performed. In short, Wedekind's career from beginning to end pursued a performative autobiographical dialectic of self-inscription and self-revision. The author, David Kuhns, teaches theatre history, dramatic literature, and performance theory at Washington University in St. Louis.