German playwright Frank Wedekind (1864–1918) was one of those rare artists whose work lies at the nexus of several major movements – in his case expressionism, modernism, and epic theatre – while never quite conforming to strict definitions of what those movements have come to mean. He suggests other, more famous artists to follow, like Brecht and Genet, but can also quite seriously lay claim to a movement of his own; without the sharply satirical cabaret known as Die Elf Scharfrichter in which Wedekind starred back in 1901, Christopher Isherwood would most likely not have been captivated by the kind of entertainment that led to his Berlin Stories (1945). It’s tempting to think that the decadent sexual liberation of Weimar sprang unseeded from an earlier, more repressed time, the result of a natural post-World War I euphoria, but Wedekind’s work proves that this kind of deeply unsettling anti-authoritarianism was well in play in Germany decades before.