Congress of Vienna and measures such as the Carlsbad decrees, which expanded censorship and sought to purge the universities of political radicals (Piper 2010: 88). Unsurprisingly his patrician attitude alienated the younger generation restless under political oppression. The writer Thomas Mann, in his novel Lotte in Weimar, wrote ‘at the bottom of his heart he was opposed to the War of Liberation altogether, and to the agitation it brought in its wake’ (Mann 1968 [1939]: 108–9, 146).
Indicative of his political elitism was Goethe’s approach to the theatre as the classic public-political artistic form (Tocqueville 2003 [1835–1840]: 567–72). ‘Plays’, the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville observed, ‘represent, even among aristocratic nations, the most democratic element of their literature’ (Tocqueville 2003 [1835–1840]: 567). The theatre had to have broader popular appeal, and made the upper classes mix with other classes where there was the need to fill its seats. Accordingly, ‘The pit has often made laws for the boxes’ (Tocqueville 2003 [1840]: 568). When an aristocratic ethos ruled the theatre, its character showed the aristocratic control of society (Tocqueville 2003 [1835–1840]: 569). Tocqueville could be outlining Goethe’s directorship of the Weimar theatre and his political outlook as described by his Victorian biographer G. H. Lewes (Lewes 1908 [1864]: 434–50).
Yet Goethe’s Faust recognised the danger of a cultured elite holding the people in contempt (Goethe 1808 ‘Prelude’ in Wayne 1949: 31–37). The ‘spur of truth’ should draw from human drama and should not be cut off from life. Likewise philosophical methods of governance, drafted remotely and imposed remotely onto societies, excluded a living human spirit. ‘How shall our counsel serve to lead mankind?’ Faust’s assistant Wagner asked, if conceived ‘through a glass, remote and ill-defined’ (Goethe 1808 ‘Night’ in Wayne 1949: 49). Even in the theatre, Goethe was accused of being remote from the public and showing an aristocratic ‘contempt for the masses’ (Lewes 1908 [1864]: 442). Goethe was ‘no dramatist’, his Victorian biographer Lewes contended. His plays were either dramatic verse or dramatic novels rather than theatre drama, while his selection of stage productions represented ‘poetic works and antique restorations’ appealing to the ‘cultivated few’ (Lewes 1908 [1864]: 310, 435). He did not succeed in developing a popular national theatre. For that depended on drama, and drama required a popular rebellious element and a public audience acting as a jury on the work. Conversely his audience was chilled by the ‘pernicious’ courtly influence on the theatre and its acting—not least Goethe personally silencing lively students attending his plays (Lewes 1908 [1864]: 335, 338). As such, his Faust Prelude represented the tensions Goethe felt between his poetic ideals and the demands of the public. He made ‘the error of supposing a magnificent dome could be erected without a basis on our common earth’ (Lewes 1908 [1864]: 436). The final straw ending Goethe’s theatre directorship was his fallout with Weimar’s Duke Karl August over demands for a performing poodle on stage (Lewes 1908 [1864]: 448–50). That the demonic should fatally enter Faust’s dwelling in the form of a poodle was therefore apt!
Goethe’s later reactionary political views contrasted with those of his friend and collaborator Friedrich Schiller, whose writings on aesthetic education wanted to expand ideals of individual and political freedom (Miller 1970 [1959]; Schiller 1967 [1795]). ‘He preached the gospel of freedom’, Goethe observed, ‘while I defended the rights of nature’ (Goethe 1995 [1820]: 130). After their deaths, the public remembered the liberal Schiller more fondly than his patrician friend. Symbolically, a statue to Schiller was sponsored before a statue to Goethe (Piper 2010: 102–3). For all Goethe plumbed the depths of human nature, Schiller better understood political freedom, not just economic security, was important for our human dignity.
Faust’s afterlife in the European imagination
Goethe’s popularity waned somewhat among the younger generation because he was aligned with the repressive authorities. The writer Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) was among those who saw Goethe as reactionary (Sammons 1979: 98–104). His Dr Faust ballet returned to the more traditional conflict between the spiritual and the sensual, and a Faust losing his soul to a satanic female Mephistopela rather than saved by the good feminine spirit (Sammons 1979: 287–91). Heine disliked Goethe’s Faust II with its enlightened dictator (Sammons 1979: 288). Instead his friend Karl Marx gave Faust II a radical interpretation combining political and material self-determination. Marx and Engels’ attack on German idealism took up Faustian deeds over words in their calls for more than philosophical thinking, and turn to revolutionary action to change the world (Marx and Engels 1998 [1845–1846]: 569–71). They condemned Faust’s enlightened despotism, transforming Mephistopheles’ misanthropic grave digging into the famous metaphor of capitalism unwittingly creating its own gravediggers (Marx and Engels 2002 [1848]: 233). Capitalism was like the sorcerer’s apprentice who could not control the powers he summoned out of the underworld (Marx and Engels 2002 [1848]: 225; Goethe 1948 [1797]: 276–9). Marxist themes were taken up in the Russian writer Anatoly Lunacharski’s 1918 play Faust and the City and his hopes for the Russian Revolution (Lunarcharski 1923). The Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov was sceptical of the Russian revolution and Soviet Communism. His novel Master and Margarita, like Goethe’s Faust, rejected ideas of radical evil (Bulgakov 2007 [1940]). His Satan and his familiars satirise the evils of modern bureaucracy. Bulgakov’s protagonists were closer to Faust’s rebellious Byronic child, for whom political and individual freedom was paramount, and material security no substitute.
Twentieth-century interpretations of Faust became more pessimistic against world war and totalitarianism. Spengler’s 1918 The Decline of the West considered Western decline was already evident in the different characters of Goethe’s Faust Part I and Part II (1932 [1918]). Spengler affirmed the Faustian spirit of the Gothic cathedral, and its longings for the infinite, but deplored the commercial spirit of modern civilisation—a spirit he saw as invading Faust Part II. Spengler distinguished culture and civilisation, picking up a German wartime theme, identifying an authentic German culture against a decadent French and Anglo-American civilisation. The idea was ironically traceable back to the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau’s distinction. Rousseau attacked the corruptions of civilisation and wrote of recovering a purer human nature and culture, echoing the fall of humanity from the Garden of Eden (Rousseau 1984 [1755]). His account of modern civilisation was embraced by German intellectuals in their reaction against the cultural domination of French enlightenment models and political domination under the Napoleonic wars and occupation. The cultural reaction of Goethe’s generation spurred humanist and reformist thinking, seeking humanly meaningful changes against abstract models (Lukacs 1968 [1947]). Conversely late nineteenth-century anti-humanist strands interpreted Faust in ways retreating from Goethe’s universalism towards racist imperial projects and social Darwinian ideas of the survival of the fittest. Other Faustian tales responded to these social currents. Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde addressed the dangers of purism and how the drive to cleanse oneself from impurity could create its own monsters (Stevenson 2003). Nietzsche’s heroic superman in Thus Spoke Zarathustra was very much a Faustian figure reaching out to the infinite (Nietzsche 2003 [1891]). A Faustian spirit runs through his writings: ‘Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge!’ (Nietzsche 2001 [1882]: 161). He scorned the Victorian social moral reformers exemplified by the English female novelists who would domesticate and oppress man’s nature (Nietzsche 1997 [1889]: 53, 75). Yet he also wrote ‘What is great in man is that he is a bridge, not an end’ (Nietzsche 2003 [1891] Book 1 ‘Prologue’ 4: 9). He reviled chauvinist movements and reductive biological accounts of humanity submerging the individual into the herd. Nor did he want followers. People should think and act for themselves (West 2017). However, his writings on the superman lent themselves to appropriation by European imperialism, Nazism, and the totalitarian submergence of individuals into unfree masses. The superman figure resonated with the expansive ambitions of a Rhodes or a Stanley claiming continents to exploit (Arendt 1968 [1950]: 211–21).
Goethe
