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A young, academically high-achieving teenager leaves her social circle to hang out with a homeless man with whom she has upprotected sex, and begins drinking heavily. What has led her to go so far off the rails? We try to locate the turning points in the family and societal conflicts that she faced, and to show how, in many respects, these conflicts find an echo in Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, a play that dramatizes the consequences of sexual repression, by an author whom Bertolt Brecht considered one of the greatest educators in modern Germany.