This German playwright born on July 24, 1864 in Hannover, died in Munich on March 9, 1918. Son of a doctor and an actress/singer, he attended university in Munich and Zurich. His first works were strongly influenced by Hauptmann's naturalist prose, although he would later renounce this theory in favor of the styles of Swede August Strindberg and German Georg Büchner.

A bohemian dogged by censorship, Wedekind at times sang his own poems in cabarets in order to scratch up a living. His adventures took him to to Munich, Zurich, London and Paris, until he finally settled in Munich in 1908, where he found a job at the satirical magazine "Simplicissimus".

Some of his plays include The Young World (1890), The Awakening of Spring (1891), Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora's Box (1902). The latter is considered to be his masterpiece, a straightforward condemnation of the hypocrisy of his time, which survived the scandal it triggered thanks to the fact that other artists translated the story into other formats: Alan Berg to the opera Lulú, and Wilhelm Pabst to the movies with Pandora's Box, and Louise Brooks in the role of Lulú.