The Diary of an Erotic Life

In these intimate journals, Frank Wedekind shows himself to have been in life what he is in his plays, a subversive artist and merciless critic of bourgeois morality. He lived and worked in Wilhelmine, Germany in the 1890's, that period of economic unstability, fin de siecle decadence and artistic ferment; among the contemporaries who pass through these pages are playwright Gerhard Hauptmann and revolutionary Alexander Herzen. Wedekind shot to fame in 1895 with the first of the Lulu plays, and compounded his renown with "Spring Awakening". His plays have been claimed as typical of the Jugendstil art movement, which included Parisian art nouveau and related activity in Vienna and Glasgow, and their visionary eroticism has clear links with these diaries. This ediction includes the thirty pages of Wedekins's Paris diaries which were omitted from the German version, and numerous corrections and additions as a result of returning to the handwritten original.