- published: 16 Jan 2016
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Benjamin Franklin Wedekind (Hanover July 24, 1864 – Munich March 9, 1918), usually known as Frank Wedekind, was a German playwright. His work, which often criticizes bourgeois attitudes (particularly towards sex), is considered to anticipate expressionism, and he was a major influence on the development of epic theatre.
He was born on July 24, 1864 and lived most of his adult life in Munich, though he had a brief period working in advertising, for the Maggi soup firm, in Switzerland in 1886. He had an affair with Frida Uhl who bore him a child. Having initially worked in business and the circus, Wedekind went on to become an actor and singer. In this capacity he received wide acclaim as the principal star of the satirical cabaret Die elf Scharfrichter (The Eleven Executioners), launched in 1901. It was thanks to Wedekind's success that the tradition of German satirical writing was established in the theatre, producing the cabaret-song satirists Kurt Tucholsky, Walter Mehring, Joachim Ringelnatz and Erich Kästner among others, who invigorated the culture of the Weimar Republic; "all bitter social critics who used direct, stinging satire as the best means of attack and wrote a large part of their always intelligible light verse to be declaimed or sung." At the age of 34, after serving a nine-month prison sentence for "lèse-majesté" (thanks to the publication in Simplicissimus of some of his satirical poems), Wedekind became a dramaturg (a play-reader and adapter) at the Munich Schauspielhaus.
Actors: Kurt Jaggberg (actor), Bruno W. Pantel (actor), Josef Moosholzer (actor), Robert Naegele (actor), Heinz Weiss (actor), Philipp Sonntag (actor), Bernd Fischerauer (actor), Hans Stadtmüller (actor), Jörg Hube (actor), Volker Prechtel (actor), Helmut Fischer (actor), Maria Stadler (actress), Mathias Eysen (actor), Alexis von Hagemeister (actor), Georg Althammer (writer),
Genres: Comedy, History,