German literature

German authors
  • Angelus Silesius
  • Heinrich Böll
  • Bertolt Brecht
  • Karl Georg Büchner
  • Hans Magnus Enzensberger
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Günter Grass
  • Brothers Grimm
  • Hans von Grimmelshausen
  • Peter Handke
  • Gerhart Hauptmann
  • Heinrich Heine
  • Heinrich der Glïchezäre
  • Johann Gottfried von Herder
  • Hermann Hesse
  • Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann
  • Friedrich Hölderlin
  • Uwe Johnson
  • Siegfried Lenz
  • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
  • Thomas Mann
  • Robert Musil
  • Novalis
  • Jean Paul Richter
  • Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling
  • Friedrich von Schiller
  • Arthur Schnitzler
  • Georg Trakl
  • Frank Wedekind
  • Christa Wolf

Frank Wedekind, 1864 - 1918

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.