Talk:Spring Awakening (play)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Is there definitive evidence that all of these characters are in the original play? The names of the minor characters seem to be strange anglicizings, and just a bit odd. Rcharman 01:02, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

The artical states.

'Wendla Bergmann: A girl, who turns 14 at the beginning of the play. In the second act of the play, she is raped by Melchior without the knowledge of reproduction.'

I would question the use of the term 'raped'. Surely the point of that scene between Wendla and and Melchior is that the sex has been consented to. The point of the play is that the younger characters are doing what comes natural to them not what society dictates. (Scribe) Llewscribe01 (talk) 15:58, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

...which certainly makes more sense than "she is raped by Melchior without the knowledge of reproduction" -- whatever that means. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.190.207.35 (talk) 02:03, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

I disagree. Wendla is at that point unaware of the consequences of her actions. Melchior is the only character who is fully aware of sexual intercourse in the play and is shown to be the most mature in this respect. I doubt consent ever came into the question: Wendla herself is not shown to have given it. How could she? She is an innocent child just as eager as the other children to explore their bodies. This might help: http://www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/springawakening/themes.html The Missing Piece (talk) 01:36, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

I am at a loss to understand why this page is called "Spring Awakening." The name of the original German play is "Spring's Awakening." I am not an experienced user of this site, so I don't know how to go about making such a major correction, but I am a former Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst fellow who spent 1973-74 in Munich, in part researching Wedekind at the Wedekind Archiv (I hoped to write a dissertation on him), my German was excellent and is still pretty decent, and I can assure you that the title of the play, Frühlings Erwachen, means Spring's Awakening. The phrase, "more accurately," is mine, replacing "sometimes," but the title of the page itself should be changed. When I have the time, perhaps I'll compare the German, which I have, with the synopsis here, but obviously that would be a major undertaking. Simplizissimus (talk) 05:15, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

There is a photo of Peter Lorre as Moritz and Lotte Lenya as Iise in a 1929 Berlin production of the play. M Bateman-Graham 203.171.196.129 (talk) 10:15, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

I just want to jump in and point out, first of all, (in reference to the rape discussion) that the character of Melchior refers to himself as having raped Wendla (In Act 3 Scene 4). In regards to some other things on this page, I'm confused as to what exactly the sort of criteria is supposed to be here for which characters get on the character list and which don't? There seem to be some characters (Lammermeier comes to mind) that seem to be of the same level of importance (or unimportance as the case may be) as some characters that are listed, and yet they're not there. Also, in the comparison of the masturbation scenes in the Differences section, I'm wondering if there is not at least some metaphorical referencing to killing the figure in the play as well? Speaking of that section, there are also some other things that might be worth mentioning -- such as the sexual abuse of Martha and Ilse (going off of the song "The Dark I Know Well" in the musical) vs. no mentioned parental abuse of Ilse and no implied (as far as I can tell) sexual abuse of Martha in the play. I'm not confident enough about what I'm doing to touch any of this myself, but I wanted to put these thoughts out there if someone else might want to consider them. 72.131.49.119 (talk) 04:39, 13 February 2008 (UTC)