Spring Awakening: A Children’s Tragedy

Spring Awakening indicts the sexually repressive culture of provincial fin-de-siècle Germany and sexually repressive cultures in general. The adult characters avoid talking to their children about sex out of discomfort stemming from generational moral scruples. None of the parents intend to hurt their children by doing so, yet this avoidance harms every teenager in the play.

Part of Wedekind’s critique relies on exposing the absurdity and hypocrisy in trying to keep sex and reproduction a secret from pubescent teenagers. As Moritz expresses in Act I, Scene 2, sex is “the most obvious question about life” for a teenager (14), yet the topic is conspicuously absent from their school curriculum. The teenagers see sex everywhere in both their own and their parents’ worlds—to the extent that Melchior laments “the whole world revolves around penis and vagina” (33)—and yet their parents refuse to talk to them about it. Wendla exposes the absurdity of this refusal in her gag about a giant outside her window: “A man, Mother—three times bigger than an ox!—With feet like steamboats…!” (36). Mrs. Bergmann ignores Wendla’s implication that giants belong in the same realm as baby-bearing storks and chides Wendla for not “showing good sense” (37).