Wedekind, The Actor: Aesthetics, Morality, and Monstrosity

Abstract

According to his good friend and first biographer, Artur Kutscher, Frank Wedekind decided to become a professional actor because he felt that his plays were being misrepresented to the public by actors who didn't understand the characters he had created. Specifically, the failure of the first performances of Der Marquis von Keith [1899] in 1901 spurred Wedekind, the chagrined playwright, to brush aside any hesitations that had previously deterred Wedekind, the amateur and occasional actor. Wedekind was a man of intense contradictions. He increasingly would aspire to the respectability of middle-class family life; yet his self-assumed, dogged notoriety as a bohemian was to frustrate this ambition to the end of his life. He was a playwright who both celebrated the awakening of human sexual vitality and at the same time probed its inherent life-destroying potential. In rendering his own unique understanding of human nature, the totality of expression to which he aspired as a playwright hurtled him, as an actor, right into the torrid center of the dramatic world he had created.