Benjamin Franklin ("Frank")
Wedekind is best known for his plays - which gave rise, among other interesting ventures, to an American musical (Sheik/Sater's 2006 "Spring Awakening", still running on Broadway at time of this writing), and to perhaps one of the last operas worthy of that name (Alban Berg's unfinished 1937 "Lulu"). Wedekind was renowned on the Munich Kabarett [political cabaret] scene and (in)famous for his liberal – or, as earlier times were fond of saying, licentious – depictions of sexuality. The photograph opposite shows Wedekind in the last year of his life (and of World War I).
The jest of the poem - which presents Wedekind from one of his lighter and less well known sides - is what molecular biochemists term "steric hindrance", in this case involving one of those "lock-and-key" structures on which they and their life processes depend and of which they are thus justifiably enamored. But the real joke lies elsewhere.
The key phrase of the poem – hence the one I took care to translate literally, even if that necessitated a tenuous rhyme – is "they could not get together". Now, the original German phrase "sie konnten zusammen nicht kommen" is well known to most Germans from an old folk song that starts with this quatrain:
"Es waren zwei Königskinder,
Die hatten einander so lieb,
Sie konnten zusammen nicht kommen,
Das Wasser war viel zu tief."
(Roughly translated:
There once lived two royal children
who were deeply in love with one another.
They could not get together:
the water [between them] was far too deep.)
Have a look at this old folk song, augmented by English and Latin tranlations. The basic narrative, of course, is much older and best known as the Old-Greek tale of Hero and Leander - which was, inter alias, picked up by Ovid and by Christopher Marlowe. It has also been dramatized by Franz Grillparzer in his classical play "Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen" (roughly translated: Waves of the sea, waves of love).
Walter A. Aue: Waves
(Detail of relief on the Grillparzer Monument in Vienna's Volksgarten: Hero finding the drowned body of Leander in "Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen")
