Wedekindplatz: The Playwright Who Scandalised Munich
Why is it significant?
Step into the small square behind Münchner Freiheit, ringed by old houses and bars, where the streets still follow the crooked lines of the farming village Schwabing once was. The square is named after Frank Wedekind, the most notorious playwright in Munich around 1900.
Key Facts
| Place | Wedekindplatz: The Playwright Who Scandalised Munich |
|---|---|
| Address | Wedekindplatz, 80802 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.16150, 11.58900 |
| Part of Walk | Munich's Schwabing: Blue Riders, Bohemians and Banned Poets |
| Generated | Generated |
Step into the small square behind Münchner Freiheit, ringed by old houses and bars, where the streets still follow the crooked lines of the farming village Schwabing once was.
The square is named after Frank Wedekind, the most notorious playwright in Munich around 1900. He had a restless life behind him: born in Hanover, raised in a castle in Switzerland, and for a while writing advertising copy for the Maggi soup company. His play Spring Awakening, written in 1891, shows teenagers destroyed by adults who refuse to tell them anything about sex. It was so shocking that it waited fifteen years for its first performance, in Berlin in 1906. His Lulu plays, about a woman who wrecks every man who tries to possess her, caused scandal after scandal.
Wedekind was a performer too. In 1901 he joined the Elf Scharfrichter, the Eleven Executioners, one of the very first cabarets in Germany, in a small hall on Türkenstraße. There he stood with his guitar and sang his own ballads, harsh, funny and grim, in a flat, unsettling voice. Audiences were half appalled, half enchanted, and his spell behind bars for the Simplicissimus poem had only made him more famous.
When Wedekind died in March 1918, a young student called Bertolt Brecht, who had admired him in Munich's theatres and taverns, wrote a moving farewell. Much of Brecht's own style... the ballads, the guitar, the cold, mocking eye... grew out of what he learned from Wedekind. Brecht studied in Munich in those years, and in 1922 his first play to reach the stage, Drums in the Night, opened at the Munich Kammerspiele.
So in a way, the whole of twentieth-century political theatre has a grandfather on this little square. Look around at the bars that fill it on warm nights. The scandal has moved on, but the tradition of the late, loud, slightly dangerous evening has not. Now follow Feilitzschstraße east towards the edge of the English Garden, for the last stop.