Spring Awakening: A Children’s Tragedy

“We’re terribly soft.—I don’t think you dream at all if you sleep on a hard bed.”

Both Moritz (who speaks here) and Melchior talk about giving up their soft beds to avoid the sexual dreams that they are both ashamed of. Moritz suggests the bourgeois comfort his parents raised him in is to blame for this tormenting corruption. He plans to rectify this in his own children, who will play and work outside all day and sleep on hard beds. Ironically, though Moritz plans to avoid repeating his parents’ mistake, their belief in the possibility of repressing sexuality persists in his own plan. This shows the difficulty of escaping the “sins of the father.”

“Sometimes I think they’d feel something was missing if they didn’t have a nasty little brat like me.”

Martha expresses a feeling that many of the adolescents in Spring Awakening experience with their parents or other adults blaming them for their own problems. This is one way in which each generation perpetuates its sexual repression to the next generation. Though Martha’s home is the most extreme example in the play, all the adults treat the teenagers as “brats” to be controlled and reformed.

“When I have children, I’m going to let them grow up like the weeds in our flower garden. Nobody pays any attention to them, and they’re so tall, so thick—and meanwhile the roses on their stakes, in their planting boxes, get scrawnier every summer.”

Martha’s analogy captures the self-defeating nature of the controlling style of parenting that predominates in the play. Like Martha’s mother with her over-tended roses, the adults treat children as things to be grown in a controlled way toward a desired end.