Suicide
During the late 1890s students yearned to understand the world around them, just as Wendla wants to understand and feel things she knows little about. Sexual frustration and generational conflict were the largest contributing factors to the rising tide of youth and student suicide. This prime cause of correlation between youth suicides and student suicides was the excessive pressure placed on students to succeed while handling the brutal treatment of teachers and parents at the same time (Taylor 61). Oftentimes, just the fear of being punished or punishment itself was enough cause for a student to commit suicide.
Youth suicides most commonly occurred during the end of year exams and time of promotion. “The association of youth suicide with student suicide confirmed for many that the cause of the rising tide of suicide resulted from excessive pressures placed on and brutal treatment of students by parents and teachers. Spring, observed Privy Council Adolf Matthias, the time of hope and new life, was also the time of anxiety over exams and a dramatic increase in student suicide” (62). A note that was found by the body of a young boy who committed suicide said, “Because I didn’t pass my exam I had no other choice” (62). The school system became a “pain center” for which students could only use suicide to escape, because parents were not a resource to go to for comfort. Suicide became the ultimate comfort for students because they could escape all destructive aspects of their life.
The parents are harsh and neglectful towards their own children in moments during the musical, but they also want their children to have a successful and happy future. Frau Bergman sees this happen with her older daughter, as she mentions in Act 1 Scene 1 that the stork has brought Wendla’s sister another baby girl. With the addition to the family there is a strengthening of the patriarchy of the family. The parent characters struggle with the fear that their children will be failures. The parents rest the shame on their own shoulders as seen in Act 1 Scene 9 when Herr Stiefel learns about his son, Moritz, failing out of school. Instead of discussing what the family should do for Moritz, Herr Stiefel asks his son what he and his mother should do about showing their face to other adults in town.
A major generational conflict between parents and children occurred when young men in their twenties to early thirties returned back home after completing their university studies. This caused much tension between parents and children, as young men were economically dependent of their parents once again because of the tightening job market and decrease of employment opportunities (68). From age twenty-three to thirty, sociologist Max Weber was forced to live with his parents in Berlin while he trained to be a Referendar, an advisor to an executive government official. In a letter he wrote to his fiancée stating:
You know, it is strange feeling to gradually outgrow your student shoes but still have to wait a long time before being your own master, at least for me, and I must nonetheless swallow the idea almost daily. I am also incapable of convincing myself that the feeling is unjustified, because one’s own bread, for the man is the foundation of happiness, the lifelong goal of the majority of great men. It was for centuries the point around which the history of the world turned. (68-69)
Parents intensified school pressures on their children at a young age to help improve the chances for their child to succeed in finding a job once their university studies were completed. The parents do not question the integrity or harshness of the teachers because they believe that the other adults are doing what is best for their children while also being aware of how tight the job market was at that time.
The overburdening of information placed on the mind of young children lead to leaders questioning, “Is our race degenerating?” (67). The increase of articles dealing with suicide and suicide rates among young children and teenagers lead people to view youth suicide as an epidemic (67). The loneliness children experienced and lack of concern they received from adults lead to the widening generation gap as authoritarians grew stronger. “Deprived of youth’s traditional agency of sexual education, the peer group, German middle-class boys and girls found their stage of dependency an extraordinarily lonely, disturbing experience” (59).
Sources:
Taylor, Tom. "Images of Youth and Family in Wilhelmine Germany: Toward a Reconsideration of the German Sonderweg." German Studies Review 15 (1992): 55-73. Web. 17 Aug. 2014.
Youth suicides most commonly occurred during the end of year exams and time of promotion. “The association of youth suicide with student suicide confirmed for many that the cause of the rising tide of suicide resulted from excessive pressures placed on and brutal treatment of students by parents and teachers. Spring, observed Privy Council Adolf Matthias, the time of hope and new life, was also the time of anxiety over exams and a dramatic increase in student suicide” (62). A note that was found by the body of a young boy who committed suicide said, “Because I didn’t pass my exam I had no other choice” (62). The school system became a “pain center” for which students could only use suicide to escape, because parents were not a resource to go to for comfort. Suicide became the ultimate comfort for students because they could escape all destructive aspects of their life.
- “In 1883 sixty-four male students out of 32,000, and mostly in the Prussian gymnasia, committed suicide. In other European counties the proportion was only four in 100,000” (64).
- Starting in the 1890s stories in newspapers detailed shocking accounts of tragic deaths from such young children: “In Danzig a twelve-year-old girl poisoned herself because she was punished for stealing an armband…a thirteen-year-old boy from Pauen, fearful of punishment, jumped in front of a train…the nineteen-year-old son of a good family was found lying on the pavement below his third story window this morning at approximately 8:30 AM. His skull shattered. Efforts by a doctor to save him failed” (61).
- Ludwig Gurlitt was a gymnasium teacher and educational reformer, who argued that the majority of student suicides were school boys from “good families” not “proletarian children who suffer from hunger or parental abuse” (62).
- "When one gymnasium director was informed that one of his students had committed suicide, his only reaction was one of relief that it had not occurred in the school, in which case he would have suffered the stigma of official embarrassment and the burden of submitting a thick batch of official reports" (Fishman 177).
The parents are harsh and neglectful towards their own children in moments during the musical, but they also want their children to have a successful and happy future. Frau Bergman sees this happen with her older daughter, as she mentions in Act 1 Scene 1 that the stork has brought Wendla’s sister another baby girl. With the addition to the family there is a strengthening of the patriarchy of the family. The parent characters struggle with the fear that their children will be failures. The parents rest the shame on their own shoulders as seen in Act 1 Scene 9 when Herr Stiefel learns about his son, Moritz, failing out of school. Instead of discussing what the family should do for Moritz, Herr Stiefel asks his son what he and his mother should do about showing their face to other adults in town.
A major generational conflict between parents and children occurred when young men in their twenties to early thirties returned back home after completing their university studies. This caused much tension between parents and children, as young men were economically dependent of their parents once again because of the tightening job market and decrease of employment opportunities (68). From age twenty-three to thirty, sociologist Max Weber was forced to live with his parents in Berlin while he trained to be a Referendar, an advisor to an executive government official. In a letter he wrote to his fiancée stating:
You know, it is strange feeling to gradually outgrow your student shoes but still have to wait a long time before being your own master, at least for me, and I must nonetheless swallow the idea almost daily. I am also incapable of convincing myself that the feeling is unjustified, because one’s own bread, for the man is the foundation of happiness, the lifelong goal of the majority of great men. It was for centuries the point around which the history of the world turned. (68-69)
Parents intensified school pressures on their children at a young age to help improve the chances for their child to succeed in finding a job once their university studies were completed. The parents do not question the integrity or harshness of the teachers because they believe that the other adults are doing what is best for their children while also being aware of how tight the job market was at that time.
The overburdening of information placed on the mind of young children lead to leaders questioning, “Is our race degenerating?” (67). The increase of articles dealing with suicide and suicide rates among young children and teenagers lead people to view youth suicide as an epidemic (67). The loneliness children experienced and lack of concern they received from adults lead to the widening generation gap as authoritarians grew stronger. “Deprived of youth’s traditional agency of sexual education, the peer group, German middle-class boys and girls found their stage of dependency an extraordinarily lonely, disturbing experience” (59).
Sources:
Taylor, Tom. "Images of Youth and Family in Wilhelmine Germany: Toward a Reconsideration of the German Sonderweg." German Studies Review 15 (1992): 55-73. Web. 17 Aug. 2014.