industrialisation under its particular socialist model of workers’ self-management. Socialist Yugoslavia followed Goethe’s solution of material progress as the key means to ensure political legitimacy and a peaceful stable society. Yugoslavia enjoyed relative independence during the Cold War and was a leading member of the Non-Aligned Movement.
The fate of Tesla and Krleža’s homeland has remained intertwined with the wider European and international context. Its internal weaknesses became exposed under the less favourable international climate and external structural adjustment requirements of the 1980s, and the country did not survive the end of the Cold War. Four decades on from Krleža’s novel, Slobodan Šnajder’s play The Croatian Faust was written in the renewed political fears of the 1980s following President Tito’s death. The play was set in wartime Croatia about a theatre company staging Goethe’s Faust, and explored the Faustian pact of the Croatian wartime state with the Nazi regime (Šnajder 1983, 1986; Baković 2011; Marjanović 1985; Radosavljević 2009). The Croatian Faust depicted Goethe’s Faust legitimising a genocidal regime. Šnajder recognised different interpretations of the Faust story, including its emancipatory potential against its fascist use, and the importance of political freedom against censorship and intolerance (Marjanović 1985: 224; Radosavljević 2009: 441). His invocation of the Faust story to pursue taboo topics echoed how in the 1960s the former political leader and writer Milovan Djilas translated Milton’s Paradise Lost into Serbo-Croat while in prison for dissident political views (Djilas 1958: 402–3). Šnajder’s father was an ethnic German writer, whose family had lived in Croatia for centuries, while his mother was a Yugoslav Communist also from Croatia. During the Second World War his father was mobilised as an ‘involuntary volunteer’ to the Prince Eugene unit, the most notorious German SS forces in the area, and managed to desert when the unit was sent to the Eastern Front and return after being with Polish partisans (Šnajder 2019: 43–105). His father was one of the few ethnic Germans to remain in post-war socialist Yugoslavia when most ethnic Germans were collectively expelled from the country. In creating a one-party state and ruling out political doubt, the new regime, with its utopian socialist ideals and secular doctrine and inquisition, pathed a road to hell with good intentions (Šnajder 2019: 118). The conflicted Krleža was reluctant to play the public role of devil’s advocate, a role when properly understood concerned strengthening faith and conviction. If there was a devil’s advocate, Šnajder suggests, it was Djilas, the former ideologue-turned-dissident (Šnajder 2019: 118).
Goethe’s humanist legacy was dismissed by many in the earlier post-war generation as too complacent over his treatment of evil. Others argued that his ‘complex and contradictory’ idea of the demonic fruitfully questioned our misanthropic complacencies (Brown 1992: 475–6). The original accounts of the Faust legend recognised humanity as flawed and the human condition as tragic. They expressed humanist possibilities of advancing human self-determination and cultural and spiritual realisation beyond tragic fatalism. Goethe’s Part I accepted the traditional tragedy. His Part II offered a hopeful progressive vision of national development in Faust the Developer. Two centuries later, a degraded view of humanity prevails in European intellectual and policy circles. Today’s views are closer to Mephistopheles’ anti-humanism, rather than Faust’s ambitious hopes for humanity. The loss of trust in our humanity is a fundamental obstacle for human freedom and progressive development humanising the world. Consequently we are witnessing the erosion of states being or becoming countries where citizens prosper protected from disaster. This cultural pessimism is encroaching upon the freedom and security of European countries, while its global interventions are failing states catastrophically, testifying again to that old adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In their wake, we see the disintegration of countries, regions, and communities, and citizens leaving behind their homes and turning into migrants. Such a future is becoming the lot of Tesla and Krleža’s compatriots today. Krleža’s generation had wanted to mobilise citizens to a national development vision and make the attractions of emigration redundant. However, the legitimacy of post-war Yugoslavia was undermined by the scale of citizens becoming foreign guest workers, and Croatia’s legitimacy was founded on reversing these historical patterns of emigration (Salt and Clout 1976: 147–54). Symbolically, the Velebit Mountain region of Tesla’s birth and the migratory corridors between Bosnia and Slovenia are among the areas which the European rewilding movement want re-established as wildernesses. The optimistic Faustian vision of a free land enjoyed by free people has receded in our New Europe. An increasingly marginal migratory existence is now the fate of many across the continent, and newcomers arriving to its shores, pinning their hopes on the past promises of Europe. Even Croatia, as the EU’s newest member is marked by Euro-pessimism (Krastev 2017; Žižek and Horvat 2013).
International development has long been circumscribed by European cultural antipathy towards industrialisation. In the face of this antipathy, there has been a renaissance of economic development in Asia and Africa, suggesting Faust the Developer is active outside Europe. Goethe’s Faust has been reported as a favourite work of the Chinese President Xi Jin Ping. China’s spectacular national industrial development of the recent decades has taken a Faustian industrialising path, ignoring the prevailing international non-industrial development models. This industrial development allowed China and the world to reach key Millennium Development Goals, raising millions more out of poverty than the prevailing international development approaches were achieving (UNDP 2015: 15, 21). China’s economic growth has been a catalyst for growth elsewhere outside of the international sustainable development framework (Sörensen 2010; Lai and Seng 2007). Its Belt and Road Initiative is conceived as a New Silk Road, establishing international commercial land and maritime routes from Asia to Africa, the Middle East, and Europe (Frankopan 2018; O’Trakoun 2018). While facilitating closer relations, the initiative has been accused of being a grand strategy expanding Chinese power with echoes of the European imperial East India companies. For there are strategic implications of foreign infrastructure projects having potential dual security uses (Rolland 2017). China’s economic rise is reshaping the international order, and its expanding economic and political role in Asia and Africa has been greeted ambivalently with accusations of neocolonialism and ‘debt diplomacy’ (Bräutigam 2018; Green 2019). Certainly there are problems with the Chinese Faust the Developer, as with earlier Faustian developments, characterised by ‘pro-growth authoritarianism’ and potential coercive debt restructuring relations (Kwan and Yu 2005; Lai 2010; Wang and Zheng 2013). The Western spectre of a Chinese grand strategy, though, is sometimes overplayed, and reflects West’s own sense of stasis, although China’s position on non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs is weakening (Jones and Zeng 2019; Zou and Jones 2019). Accusations of new colonialism among European development circles do not only concern external exploitation but are also linked to European cultural alienation from its own Faustian industrial modernity. If Faustian enlightened dictatorship is prevailing in Asia, post-Faustian dictatorship prevails in Europe, wary of political and individual freedom in its own way. Today’s Europe is estranged from Faustian ideas of self-determination and freedom from material necessity. Yet there is a new political restlessness in Europe among those frustrated with a stunted puppet condition and the continent’s prevailing political and economic settlement (Anderson 2009; Apeldoorn et al., 2009; Bieler and Morton 2018).
The Faustian spirit and European humanism’s future
Our study offers an account of changing European development and disaster thinking inspired by this key work of European literature. Goethe’s Faust offered a vision of humanity enjoying freedom and prosperity through the transformation of nature. Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air invoked Faust:
to develop a series of visions and paradigms that could enable people to explore their own experience and history in greater detail and depth [… towards writing …] a book that would be open and stay open, a book in which readers would be able to write chapters of their own. (Berman 1988 [1982]: 9)
Taking Goethe’s Faust as its starting point, our study offers some chapters of our own, exploring changing European disaster and development approaches and people’s strivings to be subjects of modernity
