SPRING AWAKENING - Segerstrom Center for the Arts

ights. In 1895 she co-drafted a petition for the abolition of the
Law of Association prohibiting women from joining political
organizations and is credited as primary organizers of the Union of
Progressive Women’s Associations established in 1899.
Raised in a middle class home much like that of the characters
in Spring Awakening, Emma Trosse was one of the first women
admitted to attend lectures as a guest at the Friedrich Wilhelms
University of Berlin. There is no evidence she was ever allowed to
become a full time student. Yet she did become a teacher. It is safe
to assume as eventual head of a boarding school she was nothing
like her counterpart in the play, the rigid headmistress.
Minna Cauer
The expansion of education, entertainment, and access to
newsreels brought information about progressive social
movements to the masses. Fleeing a seriously exploited landscape,
large populations emigrated from the rural German countrysides
to its cities, where literacy promoted new ideas about personal
freedom. While people still respected and looked to parents for
guidance, the idea that children’s perspectives on important topics
should necessarily mimic their forbearers’ was quickly becoming
extinct.
Along with social and cultural reforms Germany was becoming
a world industrial power as well. Through the mid-19th century,
Britain had dominated economically and militarily. In the late
1800s, however, things were about to change. By the end of the
century Germany, with its burgeoning military/industrial complex,
had overtaken it and would soon become the greatest power on
the continent. World Wars I and II are traced by some historians
to this period.
Emma Trosse
While all of this captured the imagination of sophisticated city
residents, older rural Germans left behind clung tightly to traditional
ways. Their children, however, were very much aware that
something exciting was going on beyond the narrow confines of
their village. It is in this setting that Frank Wedekind, author of the
original 1891 play, Spring Awakening, placed his characters. Born in
Munich, a center of progressive thinking, his work often criticized
middle class attitudes toward sex and the repression of German
youth. Considered too suggestive for the theatre, the play was not
performed until 1906; large sections of it were cut by censors.
The topics addressed in the play and the musical are timely even
today—teen sex, suicide, incest and child abuse, abortion and the
general difficulties confronting adolescents in an adult controlled
world. If history indeed repeats itself, the story is a mirror of its
times—then and now.
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