The elusive transcendent : the role of religion in the plays of Frank Wedekind

• Main Author: Whalley, F. A.
• Published: Swansea University 1996
• Subjects: 830
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.636582

This work demonstrates that Frank Wedekind was preoccupied with Christianity and the search for transcendence, a fact that has been largely overlooked by Wedekind research to date. Using hitherto little-known material (his unpublished notebooks) and close readings of his works, both major and minor, I argue that Wedekind was engaged on a quest to discover the role and purpose of religion in a post-Nietzschean world. His first plays reject conventional beliefs and yet themselves display elements of the search for transcendent value. The Lulu-plays explore the possibility that sexual liberation might provide an answer, but conclude the opposite; <I>Der Marquis von Keith </I>considers whether it is possible or worthwhile to believe in Christianity without God. In <I>Hidalla, </I>Wedekind portrays a Christ-figure for the <I>Wilhelmine </I>era, whose gospel of a new sexual morality is deeply flawed. In this Christ-figure, Karl Hetmann, Wedekind also places elements of himself and this becomes a characteristic of his later plays, in which successive not-quiteWedekind characters seek their own form of transcendence and fail: Buridan, for example, the protagonist of <I>Die Zensur, </I>extols reason but ultimately capitulates to the God of mere superstition. In his last plays, Wedekind presents further versions of himself in Messianic characters who are involved in a cycle of quest and failure within an artistic realm. This suggests that he sees his role as that of martyr to an uncomprehending society: his plays become secular rituals, in which the suffering artist is the redeeming sacrifice necessary for ordinary, bourgeois life to continue; but the impossibility of finding transcendence in any of the strategies developed by his protagonists means he is doomed to repeat the same cycle over and over again.