Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening: Comedy or Tragedy?

The Problem of Generic Classification

There is an all-too-apparent human drive to classify and categorize things no matter how much they seem to resist such classification. This is especially evident in the sciences, where the ordering of the elements into the Periodic Table is still heralded as one of the most important achievements in chemistry, and the taxonomy of life undergoes continual changes and revisions as genetic evidence suggests new relationships and abolishes old ones. In science, however, new laws of classification are established that guide this reordering process. The same is not true in more subjective disciplines such as the study of literature. Though many works can be easily categorized, others stridently resist the limitations of any single categorization. This is not true only of fiction, but also of many other forms of literature, including plays.

Spring Awakening as Melodrama and Beyond

One such play is Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening. This controversial play centers around a group of adolescent German schoolchildren in the late nineteenth century who must deal with their burgeoning sexuality entirely on their own, as no one is willing to explain or guide them through the changing thoughts and desires of puberty. The play is often considered a form of melodrama, but definitions of this genre can be vague and uncertain. Much more certain are the classifications of comedy and tragedy, yet Spring Awakening contains elements of both comic and tragic drama, making it difficult to classify along either line. Recalling the old adage that life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think can help illuminate where this play fits on the spectrum. The intellectual argument in the final scene, and the Masked Man's dry assertion that "in the end everyone has his part," suggest that this is a thinking play, and thus is best understood as a comedy (Wedekind 58).

There are, of course, other elements throughout the play that support this reading. The scene in which Melchior ends up severely beating Wendla is obviously full of high emotion — of the feeling that leads to tragedy — but it also reveals the degree of intellectualism that these characters bring even into their emotional distress. Wendla almost begs Melchior to beat her because she "can hardly imagine what it's like to be beaten" (Wedekind 15). This suggests that it is an intellectual understanding of her friend's beatings, and not true emotional empathy, that she seeks. Though the scene is most definitely disturbing, approaching it with the same intellectual curiosity the two adolescents bring to it transforms it into an episode of horribly dark humor. The fact that Wendla can be so naïve as to desire an intellectual understanding of child abuse reveals her complete lack of appreciation for the situation's reality, and is thus a comic — not necessarily humorous, but comical nonetheless — moment.

Intellectualism Versus Emotion in Dark Scenes

This dynamic aligns with broader scholarly discussions of dark comedy as a genre, in which humor emerges not from lightness but from the painful gap between characters' detached reasoning and the gravity of their circumstances. Wedekind exploits this gap repeatedly, inviting audiences to observe adolescent rationalism colliding with experiences it cannot fully comprehend.

The end of a play is also one way to determine whether a particular work is a comedy or a tragedy. The fact that Moritz and Wendla are both unnecessarily dead at the end of the play at first seems to suggest tragedy, as does Melchior's expulsion. When characters end up worse than they were at the start of the action, it usually indicates a tragedy. But this is not actually where Spring Awakening leaves off. Instead, Melchior returns to his village — or at least its graveyard — and encounters Moritz and the Masked Man. This scene is not only highly intellectual, as noted above, but Melchior's final observation before walking away into the night is that perhaps when he is older Moritz will "be closer to me again than all the people who share my life" (Wedekind 58). Melchior has grown and become better for the incidents in the play, and this outcome suggests a more typical comedy than a tragedy.