SOURCE: Lamport, F. J. “Goethe's Faust: A Cautionary Tale?” Forum for Modern Language Studies 35, no. 2 (April 1999): 193-206.

[In the following essay, Lamport investigates the role of guilt and redemption in Faust.]

Goethe's Faust being what it is, the life's work of Germany's greatest poet, and German literary criticism being what it is, intimately bound up with the catastrophic “Sonderweg” of German history over the past two centuries, it was inevitable that Faust criticism should have become highly politicised. The history of Faustian interpretation has indeed been, as Hans Schwerte called it, “ein Kapitel deutscher Ideologie”;¹ indeed not one but several, and more are being added all the time. In particular, interpretations of the so-called “perfectibilist” school have been repeatedly appropriated to serve the ideological purposes of a succession of aggressive and/or authoritarian political regimes, from the Bismarckian Second Empire of 1871 through the National Socialist Third Reich of 1933 to the German Democratic Republic of 1949-90. The perfectibilist school holds that Faust is “saved” because of his never-satisfied striving, and that the poem is an unqualified vindication of that endless “Tätigkeit” which the Lord in the Prolog im Himmel appears to commend as the proper way of life for humanity, and which critics of this school see as the driving force of human, or perhaps distinctively German, progress in general. This line of interpretation does have to contend with or somehow explain away what appears to be the obvious and heinous moral guilt which Goethe's Faust incurs in the course of the poem; but it remains a fact that, contrary to the traditional legend and to most if not all of its previous literary treatments, Goethe does choose to save rather than to damn Faust at the end of his earthly career.

Some of the most confident exponents of the perfectibilist view in recent years have indeed been the Marxists, inside and outside the former GDR. The very existence of the GDR and the character of official GDR Faust criticism perhaps encouraged Western critics to take a more sceptical, ostentatiously abstract or unpolitical view of Goethe's poem; and the GDR's ignominious demise seems to have tipped the balance decisively away from perfectibilist readings. Scepticism now seems to be the order of the day, and the poem is read not as a celebration of human striving but as a criticism, even a satire upon it. The Prolog im Himmel itself is subjected to sceptical and ironic readings: thus Alwin Binder writes that the Lord's pronouncement “Es irrt der Mensch so lang' er strebt” is “keine Goethesche Weisheit, sondern eine Persiflage auf zeitgenössische Pseudo-Theodizeen”,² and David Luke, who in 1987 described the Lord as “the impressive spokesman of the mature Goethe's positive and life-affirming view of things”,³ appears in 1994 much more doubtful of “the unassailable optimism of the Lord in the ‘Prologue in Heaven’”.⁴ Albrecht Schöne is probably expressing something like a contemporary consensus when he writes of Goethe's portrayal of the “tiefe Fragwürdigkeit der strebend-irrenden menschlichen Existenz”.⁵

Of the critics specifically concerned to attack the perfectibilist view, particularly in its Marxist incarnation, none has been more insistent than Hans-Rudolf Vaget.⁶ Vaget virtually equates the optimistic with the Marxist view of Faust, implicitly suggesting that in the latter years of the 20th century only a Marxist could hold such a view and that, now that the intellectual currency of Marxism has been “first depreciated and then withdrawn from circulation by the very power that was supposed to guarantee its value—history itself” (p. 173), any such view is totally untenable: “We must let go of old reading habits and learn, again, how to read Faust as a kind of cautionary tale—cautioning against striving for striving's sake” (p. 174). Without necessarily subscribing to any specifically Marxist reading. I think that Vaget in particular overstates his objections to the perfectibilist case in a way which seems to me just as much an ideological appropriation as the Marxist interpretation whose alleged corpse he sets out to dissect.

As I have said, the perfectibilist view of Faust does have some fairly substantial objections to counter in the shape of the formidable burden of moral guilt which Faust incurs at least in two of the major episodes of his earthly career—in the Gretchen tragedy which occupies the second half of Part I and in the “Herrschertragödie”, the tragedy of power or, to borrow Marshall Berman's term, the “tragedy of development”,⁷ which takes up the last two Acts of Part II. In both these episodes, Faust ends up with innocent blood on his hands, and if we take the perfectibilist view, then it looks as though we are being asked to condone this in some way. There is a major paradox here. We do not know whether in 1770, or whenever it was when he first took up the subject, Goethe already intended his Faust to be saved rather than damned; but it certainly appears that from the start he intended to remove the tragedy from traditional or specifically Christian categories of good and evil. The opening sequence of what, despite Schöne's justifiable objections (2, 81-3), I think we are going to go on calling the Urfaust—the opening monologue leading to the conjuration of the Erdgeist and the scene with Wagner—bears a strong resemblance in its general outline to the corresponding sequence in its principal source, the traditional puppet or marionette plays, and indeed to that of their ultimate source, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, though Goethe appears not to have known Marlowe's work at first hand until 1818. The crucial differences are the absence of the two voices, Marlowe's Good and Bad Angels, who respectively warn and tempt Faust,⁸ and the fact that the “schreckliches Gesicht” summoned up by Goethe's Faust is not the Devil, or Mephostophilis as in Marlowe (“I charge thee to return and change thy shape, / Thou art too ugly to attend on me”), but an amoral or perhaps even divine force of life and death, activity, creation and destruction, ultimately engaged in weaving “der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid” (l. 509). Yet, and here is the paradox, once embarked on his course of action Goethe's Faust becomes embroiled in much more serious objective guilt, at any rate from a modern or not specifically Christian point of view, than do his predecessors in the puppet plays, in Marlowe, or indeed in Goethe's other principal sources, the Faust chapbooks, which were of course specifically (or at any rate ostensibly) designed as cautionary tales. To a literal believer in the Christian devil, selling one's soul to him and engaging in congress with him and with other evil spirits must rank as mortal sin; so too must the desire to “alle Gründ am Himmel vnd Erden erforschen”⁹ or to pursue knowledge forbidden to mankind by divine command—which was of course the “original sin” of Adam and Eve. But the traditional Faust's actual earthly exploits are really no more than mischievous pranks or conjuring tricks, like slapping a pair of antlers on a gentleman's head, or selling a horse-courser a beast which turns into a “bottle of hay”.¹⁰ The traditional Faust's sins which earned him damnation were, so to say, theological rather than moral. Goethe's Faust seduces an innocent girl, kills her mother and her brother, deserts her when she is pregnant and thus leads her to commit infanticide and herself to suffer death in punishment for it; and I think one must say that objectively—that is, irrespective of any particular religious or moral code one may subscribe to—this is moral guilt of a high order. Goethe has evidently tried to put his Faust beyond good and evil in the traditional or Christian sense, but evil in a much more objective or universal sense has got in again immediately by the back door. This has been interpreted specifically as “the tragedy of post-Christian man, of self-conscious modernity”,¹¹ but it is perhaps more radical than that: Goethe now appears to be saying that evil is an essential constituent of the real world—the world outside Faust's study—and that we cannot live in that real world without coming into contact with it, without becoming embroiled with it or even causing it, whether or not we so consciously intend.

By the time Faust, Part I, was published in 1808, together with the prefatory material—Zueignung, Vorspiel auf dem Theater and Prolog im Himmel—for the as yet unwritten and only vaguely conceived whole, Goethe does appear to have decided that his Faust was to be saved, and he indicates as much in the Prolog, with the Lord's confident acceptance of Mephistopheles' challenge, his approval of human “Streben” and “Tätigkeit”, and with the reference at the end of the scene to the all-embracing power of divine love, which seems to anticipate the redemptive function which love is to perform at the end of Part II. In the dedicatory verses which he prefaced to the 1775 edition of Werther, Goethe had written, “Ach, der heiligste von unsern Trieben, / Warum quillt aus ihm die grimme Pein?”.¹² And in Blanckenburg's account of Lessing's plan for Faust's salvation, published after Lessing's death in 1784, the angels redeem Faust with the declaration that “Die Gottheit hat dem Menschen nicht den edelsten der Triebe gegeben, um ihn ewig unglücklich zu machen”¹³ though by that phrase, if it is indeed authentic, Lessing would emphatically not have meant sexual love, but the traditional Faustian desire for wisdom and knowledge. But Goethe certainly does nothing to gloss over the “Pein” and “Jammer” which arise from Faust's desire for Gretchen. Indeed, when in the final scene of Part I Gretchen kisses Faust, she first cries out, as in the Urfaust, “O weh, deine Lippen sind kalt”, and then, in what if we are to think of Faust as meriting redemption through love is surely a very significant as well as poignant addition to the original text, “Wo ist dein Lieben / Geblieben?”. Faust, originally drawn to Gretchen by mere desire, had discovered love—“Mich drang's so g'rade zu genießen, / Und fühle mich in Liebestraum zerfließen!” (ll. 2722-3). But it has gone again—he has become loveless. And at the end Gretchen, now herself saved by the “Stimme von oben”, seems to repudiate Faust when she declares “Heinrich! Mir graut's vor dir”. Yet at the beginning of Part II the elves wipe Faust's conscience clear: “Ob er heilig? ob er böse? / Jammert sie der Unglücksmann”. On the one hand Goethe seems to emphasise Faust's guilt, on the other to tell us that we, like Faust, are not to be distracted by moral judgements from what really matters; and that, as Faust proclaims in the magnificent monologue which follows, is “Zum höchsten Dasein immerfort zu streben” (l. 4685).

Moral judgements certainly seem to be of little concern in the opening “macro-sequence”, as David Luke terms it,¹⁴ of Part II; that is, in the first three Acts. Certainly the charlatanries of Act I are not morally comparable with what has gone before—though again, if we compare them with the exploits of the traditional Faust, we might think that tricking the Emperor into adopting a bogus inflationary cure for the Empire's ills was a matter of more consequence than stealing the Pope's dinner from under his nose (indeed, a zealous Protestant might even think that stealing the Pope's dinner was quite a praiseworthy exploit).¹⁵ And in Acts II and III Faust turns away from action in the real world—the sublunary realm in which the categories of good and evil apply, and in which, as we have seen, evil may be unavoidable—to undertake a quest through the world of the imagination, in which such categories are at least temporarily set aside. It is perhaps here that Faust appears in his most positive guise, as the rescuer of Helen—imaginatively compensating, as it were, for his role as the destroyer of Gretchen. It is true that even here Faust evidently needs the helping hand of Mephistopheles, but notwithstanding his catalytic function and his repeated cynical comments, Mephistopheles fails to introduce moral categories into the conversation, and the only act to which the category of guilt or, literally, transgression would seem to apply is that of Euphorion, who destroys this world of the imagination by trying to fly beyond its limits. Goethe's sketch of 1800, the so-called Paralipomenon No. 1 (Schöne, 1, 576), with its contrast between the “Genuß […] in der Dumpfheit” and “Leidenschaft” of Part I and the “Genuß mit Bewußtseyn” and “Schönheit” of Part II, leading on to “Schöpfungs Genuß von innen”, might even suggest that at this stage in Goethe's thinking about the destiny of his hero it was Helen, rather than Gretchen, who was to be Faust's Beatrice, leading him into Paradise, and that Faust's encounter with her, in the realm of the imagination, was to be his great redemptive or educative experience. Here we find ourselves at the greatest possible remove from the traditional cautionary tales of Faust, where Faust's intercourse with Helen of Troy, or more precisely with an evil spirit or succuba in the shape of Helen of Troy, marked another decisive step on his road to damnation.

The scheme outlined in the Paralipomenon, dating as it does from the period of Goethe's collaboration with Schiller, looks in fact very much like Schiller's plan for the “redemption” or education of mankind through art and beauty, as expounded in his Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen of 1795. Aesthetic experience, as Schiller conceives it, emancipates men (as individuals, and ultimately mankind as a whole) from the limitations of their physical existence (Goethe's “Dumpfheit” and “Leidenschaft”) and enables them to fulfil their moral destiny: “Der Mensch in seinem physischen Zustand erleidet bloß die Macht der Natur; er entledigt sich dieser Macht in dem ästhetischen Zustand, und er beherrscht sie in dem moralischen” (24. Brief).¹⁶ In the second “macro-sequence” of Part II, that is in Acts IV and V, we certainly find Faust determined “die Macht der Natur zu beherrschen”, in a very literal sense. Whether he can be said to be in a “moralischer Zustand” is another question; it is indeed the crucial question for those critics, such as Vaget, who concentrate on Faust's conduct in these two Acts in their concern to show that Faust can only be saved despite, and not because of, his restless and insatiable activity. Purely intratextually the transition from Act III to Act IV does seem very abrupt, and it is not immediately obvious that Faust has learnt any practical or moral lessons from his “classical education” in Act II,¹⁷ or, despite Mephistopheles' sarcastic observation that “Man merkt's du kommst von Heroinen” (l. 10186), that he has progressed in any quasi-Schillerian sense as a result of his encounter with the absolute of Beauty in Act III. The elements, and in particular the sea, have been ecstatically hymned in the great erotic “Meeresfest” which concludes the “klassische Walpurgisnacht” of Act II, and again in the wonderful elegiac choruses at the end of Act III, when Helen's attendants dissolve back into the various realms of nature from which they originated. Faust himself, interestingly enough, was not present on either of those occasions; if he had been, one is tempted to suggest, he might have adopted a less antagonistic attitude towards elemental nature than he does in the subsequent concluding phases of the action. In the geological debate between Faust and Mephisto which makes up the middle section of the scene “Hochgebirg”, Faust does admittedly take up something of a “Neptunist” position (ll. 10095ff.), as against the “Vulcanism” predictably and unequivocally espoused by Mephisto; and it can be plausibly argued that this opposition can be transferred on to the plane of practical action, so that Faust's land-reclamation scheme can itself be seen as “Neptunist” in spirit (Williams, p. 185; Schöne, 2, 650), that is as standing for the kind of evolutionary development which Goethe saw as ideally operating in the human as well as in the natural world. On the other hand, fighting the sea is an age-old topos of overweening pride and presumption: we think of King Canute and his flattering courtiers, or of Xerxes ordering the Hellespont to be flogged for frustrating his imperialistic designs. Faust's resolution, “Da wagt mein Geist sich selbst zu überfliegen (l. 10220), has surely an unmistakably hubristic ring about it, and his preceding observation

Da herrschet Well auf Welle kraftbegeistet,
Zieht sich zurück und es ist nichts geleistet.
Was zur Verzweiflung mich beängstigen könnte,
Zwecklose Kraft, unbändiger Elemente!

(10216-19)

sounds all too like the objection of an “instrumentalised reason”, “starr zweckgerichtet”, as diagnosed in the Dialektik der Aufklärung.¹⁸ But even here, extra-textual evidence can be found to support a more positive reading, namely in Goethe's reaction to the North Sea floods of 1825, and in the essay Versuch einer Witterungslehre of the following year, in which he writes that “Die Elemente sind daher als kolossale Gegner zu betrachten, mit denen wir ewig zu kämpfen haben, und sie nur durch die höchste Kraft des Geistes, durch Mut und List, im einzelnen Fall bewältigen”—so that fighting the elements, as Schöne comments in quoting this passage (2. 664), is not to be seen as necessarily in conflict with the basic laws of nature, to which man in Goethe's view remains subject. We may also note in this connection Goethe's evidently positive interest in technological progress, as evidenced by his possession of a model of Stephenson's “Rocket”, or his commendation to Eckermann on 21 February 1827 of such ambitious, even futuristic schemes as the Suez and Panama Canals.

However, it is not so much Faust's scheme in itself as the means which he adopts to achieve it to which critics of the perfectibilist view of the work and its hero have taken objection. In David Luke's words, “In the final, 1831 stage of the work, in the months in which he writes the whole of Act IV and the Philemon and Baucis scenes, Goethe presents Faust in so negative a light that the effect of the macro-theme [previously defined as ‘the heroic self-assertion of the human spirit against nature's negative forces’] is prejudiced, and in the view of some critics destroyed.”¹⁹ Vaget (p. 164) also emphasises the point that Act IV and the opening scenes of Act V (the Philemon and Baucis scenes) were in fact the last parts of the poem to be written, after the actual conclusion (the scenes from “Mitternacht” to the end), which had already been completed, and these latest scenes do cast a very dark shadow over Faust's achievement and over his final vision. It is almost as if, having already written his optimistic conclusion with Faust's eventual salvation, Goethe had now changed his mind about it—or was at any rate determined to emphasise up to the very last minute just how difficult and paradoxical it was, just as he had emphasised Faust's guilt at the end of the Gretchen tragedy only to have it painlessly expunged by the elves at the beginning of Part II. In the Prolog im Himmel the Lord had said of Faust, “Wenn er mir jetzt auch nur verworren dient: / So werd' ich ihn bald in die Klarheit führen” (ll. 308-9); now it seems that “Verwirrung” reigns and “Klarheit” has infinitely receded, for as Goethe wrote in his last letter to Wilhelm von Humboldt on 17 March 1832, only a few days before his death, “Verwirrende Lehre zu verwirrenden Handel waltet über die Welt” (as quoted by Schöne, 1, 812). But Faust's salvation has still not been abandoned, and he is still to be led upward, out of the darkness of “Mitternacht” and “Grablegung”, into the light at the end.

The principal weight of Vaget's argument against the perfectibilist reading of Faust rests, however, on the protagonist's conduct in Acts IV and V. Firstly, regarding the civil war sequence in Act IV, Vaget claims that Faust's siding with the Emperor in the war brands him as a reactionary and “renders untenable all attempts to make [him] an agent of progress” (p. 160). He goes on to argue that if Goethe had wished Faust to be seen in a positive light, he would have made him side with the Gegenkaiser, of whom “there is no doubt that a positive assessment […] is indicated”, while the Emperor “has invalidated his legitimacy by failing to maintain order and to guarantee justice” (p. 161). This is a superficially attractive view; it is certainly the case that the Emperor, by failing to maintain order, has encouraged rebellion, just as the French kings Louis XVI and Charles X had in Goethe's view provoked the revolutions of 1789 and 1830 by their maladministration. Whether a government legitimately constituted by recognised procedures, be it an hereditary monarchy, an elective monarchy like that of the Holy Roman Empire, or even some form of parliamentary regime, can actually “invalidate its legitimacy” is, however, another question: a very serious question of political philosophy and, indeed, of practical politics, which had much exercised those who had lived through the French Revolution and its consequences, and which finds its literary reflection in such works as Die natürliche Tochter and several of the plays of Schiller, notably Wallenstein and Maria Stuart. Kant, while acknowledging the inevitability and even the beneficial effects of the French Revolution, continued to maintain that in principle even an unjust ruler was entitled to demand obedience from his subjects, who might for their part legitimately protest, but not offer resistance to his government;²⁰ and Goethe, his personal admiration for Napoleon notwithstanding, was, as is well known, a firm opponent of all forms of revolutionary activity.²¹ There is also another simple reason why Faust has to support the Emperor. One of the most important, perhaps the most important of all the poetic strands which serve to unify the Second Part of Faust is a historical allegory, albeit complex and overlaid with other meanings, of Goethe's own life and times, from his entry into the service of the Duke of Weimar in 1775, through the period of his Italian journey and the French Revolution to the rise and fall of Napoleon and the post-Napoleonic restoration of the ancien régime.²² The main allegorical reference of Act IV is plainly to the Napoleonic wars, and in 1815, for good or ill, the real-life Gegenkaiser had been defeated and the old order had, with some changes of nomenclature, been reinstated. In order to gain his fiefdom, Faust has, obviously, to back the winning side; thus, in order to be faithful to the historical allegory, he has to support the legitimate Emperor. It is, as the Marxists would say, a historical necessity—even if not quite in the grandiose philosophical sense which they would attach to that phrase. Faust secures the victory of the Emperor by the use of Mephistophelian black magic; history, in the final phase of Napoleon's career, had moved in a mysterious way to bring about a result of which Goethe, from the vantage-point of 1830, in general approved (and which he was alarmed to see threatened by the renewed revolutionary violence of that year): “Es sei nun wie ihm sei! uns ist die Schlacht gewonnen” (ll. 10849). However we may judge his ultimate goals, and irrespective of the black magic he employs in their pursuit, Faust's support of the Emperor is not in itself evidence against a positive reading of this stage of his career.²³

Moving on to Act V, we find that several years have apparently elapsed and that Faust's great work of land reclamation has reached an advanced stage of completion. We are given an eloquent description of it in the opening scene of Act V, from which it appears that Faust's work is indeed a great and positive achievement, which has brought prosperity and well-being to large numbers of people. Ironically, in the light of subsequent events, it is none other than Philemon himself who enthusiastically describes Faust's creation to the Wanderer in these terms:

Das Euch grimmig mißgehandelt,
Wog' auf Woge, schäumend wild,
Seht als Garten ihr behandelt,
Seht ein paradiesisch Bild
[…]
Schaue grünend Wies' an Wiese
Anger, Garten, Dorf und Wald
[…]
Rechts und links, in aller Breite,
Dichtgedrängt bewohnten Raum.

(ll. 11083-106)

Philemon even says that if he had been younger, he would have joined in the work himself: “Älter, war ich nicht zu Handen, / Hülfreich nicht wie sonst bereit” (ll. 11087-8); he also insists on the legality of Faust's proceeding, his authority deriving from the Emperor (ll. 11115-18), and he reports that Faust has offered himself and Baucis “Schönes Gut im neuen Land” (l. 11136). This scene of the old couple and their visitor is a very convincing little vignette of old age, and one can readily imagine that Philemon and Baucis have had this conversation before, perhaps several times before, with Philemon expressing himself happy or at any rate willing to accept Faust's offer and to enjoy a rather less strenuous retirement (it is Baucis who characteristically assures the Wanderer that “Langer Schlaf verleiht dem Greise / Kurzen Wachens rasches Tun” [ll. 11061-2]). Nor do I think that Vaget is justified in doubting the sincerity of Faust's offer (p. 164): after all, Philemon and Baucis resettled on Faust's reclaimed land would become a part of his creation, rather than being perceived as a threat or a challenge to it. Baucis however has resisted, as she does again here—and it is her resistance, justified or not, which tragically leads to their destruction, when Faust in the very next scene finally loses his patience and discovers “Daß man, zu tiefer grimmiger Pein, / Ermüden muß gerecht zu sein” (ll. 11271-2). It is, of course, true, and once again to Faust's discredit, that he wants to remove Philemon and Baucis not for any altruistic or even utilitarian reason, but simply because they, their hut, their chapel and their trees are not his, and so constitute an affront to his absolutist ambitions: “Die wenig Bäume, nicht mein eigen, / Verderben mir den Welt-Besitz” (ll. 11241-2). Their forcible removal and indeed elimination by Mephistopheles is horrific and deplorable. But if it is not justifiable, it may for all that be inevitable. It is indeed the tragedy of progress that it destroys those who stand in its path. It happens under all sorts of ideological banners, not only, as Vaget seems to imply, under totalitarian or soi-disant socialist ones; it is indeed, as Vaget himself says, “the larger project of Western culture […] to achieve progress via the subjugation of Nature” (p. 158). Are we then to take Goethe's poem as it stands—for this is what Faust's damnation would certainly have implied—as a radical critique of that whole project?

If so, then I think we are entitled to ask whether Goethe shows us any plausible alternative to it. Faust himself had asked Mephistopheles a similar question, way back in the “Hexenküche” scene, when, already committed to his pursuit of “was der ganzen Menschheit zugeteilt ist” in the company of Mephisto, he was still reluctant to accept the necessary means to his end, the magical rejuvenation which would open up all these possibilities to him. Mephistopheles offered him on that occasion what indeed remains today the radical alternative to “the larger project of Western culture”, the pursuit of organic self-sufficiency:

[…] ein Mittel, ohne Geld
Und Arzt und Zauberei zu haben:
Begib dich gleich hinaus auf's Feld,
Fang' an zu hacken und zu graben,
Erhalte dich und deinen Sinn
In einem ganz beschränkten Kreise,
Ernähre dich mit ungemischter Speise,
Leb' mit dem Vieh als Vieh, und acht' es nicht für Raub,
Den Acker, den du erntest, selbst zu düngen;
Das ist das beste Mittel, glaub,
Auf achtzig Jahr dich zu verjüngen!

(ll. 2351-61)

Faust replies, “Das enge Leben steht mir gar nicht an”—as indeed he must, for the breaking out of “Enge” is the very essence of Faust's frustrated striving at the beginning of Part I, where we see him lamenting his confinement in his “hochgewölbtes, enges gotisches Zimmer,²⁴ Mephistopheles also gives the Emperor similar advice, knowing full well that it will not be taken, at a similar initiatory point in the action of Part II: “Nimm Hack' und Spaten grabe selber, / Die Bauernarbeit macht dich groß” (ll. 5039-40). And in Philemon and Baucis, at the very end of Faust's earthly career, Goethe shows us what that life “in einem ganz beschränkten Kreise” might have been like. Looking at it from the outside, it appears to have much to be said for it, and this positive impression is retrospectively (one might almost say, nostalgically) reinforced by the horrific way in which it meets its end. But given the choice again between this self-sufficient. Good Life and the “larger project of Western culture”, there is little doubt that Faust, like the great majority of the inhabitants of that culture, even knowing all that he and we by now know or ought to know about the consequences of that decision, would make the same choice again. At all events, the choice is now made, and once made is irreversible—and that. I believe, is the true meaning and point of Goethe's poem. Paradoxically, although the little world of Philemon and Baucis is the product of honest hard work and the world of Faust is the product of black magic (in the language of the poem: that is, the product of technology, of progress, of civilisation), it is now Faust's world that is real and theirs that is an illusion.

I think it is important to stress the reality of Faust's brave new world, and Philemon's positive description of it, because negative critics of Faust tend to argue that his final speech, with its vision of “Räume vielen Millionen […], Grün das Gefilde, fruchtbar; Mensch und Herde / Sogleich behaglich auf der neuen Erde” (ll. 11565-6) is itself nothing but the representation of an illusion. Again there is, or seems to be, much in the immediate dramatic context to support this view. The aged, blinded Faust comes groping his way out of the palace, “tastet an den Türpfosten” (stage direction at l. 11539), thinks that he hears “die Menge, die mir frönet”, when in fact the “Geklirr der Spaten” is caused by Mephisto and the Lemuren digging his grave; and it is in this profoundly ironic situation that he delivers his final speech. But if we consider the description that we have heard from Philemon of what Faust has already created, then we cannot so easily dismiss it. The very terms which Philemon and Faust himself use are remarkably similar: first, “grünend Wies' an Wiese / Anger, Garten, Dorf und Wald”, then “Grün das Gefilde, fruchtbar”; first, “Dichtgedrängt bewohnten Raum”, then “Der Völker breiten Wohngewinn” (l. 11250). And while the immediate visual context of Faust's final vision and death is provided by Mephistopheles and the Lemuren, the wider context is the “paradiesisch Bild” which Philemon has described for us and which Faust, and we, can in principle still visualise. When today we read Faust's lines “Ein Sumpf zieht sich am Gebirge hin, / Verpestet alles schon Errungene”, we can cheerfully dismiss Walter Ulbricht's view that this refers prophetically to the foul swamp of capitalism threatening to engulf the achievements of the GDR (Vaget p. 151 and note; Schöne, 2, 760-1); but we must remember that Faust has in fact achieved a great deal, and I think that Goethe did believe, or at any rate hope, while fully recognising the price that might have to be paid, that the human spirit would go on to further positive achievements in the future. We do not have to believe Mephistopheles that the hostile elements will win and that it will all be destroyed (ll. 11549-50), even if the more radical of today's eco-pessimists might regard this as a consummation devoutly to be wished. Nor, I think, do we have to agree with Vaget that Faust's description of his envisioned future humanity in such terms as “Menge, Millionen, Gewimmel, Völkerschaft, Mensch und Herde” is “contemptuous” (p. 169). It is strongly reminiscent of Tasso's vision of the Golden Age, “Da auf der freien Erde Menschen sich / Wie frohe Herden in Genuß verbreiteten” (Torquato Tasso, ll. 981-2: HA 6, 100), which must surely be taken positively, even if we view Goethe's Tasso as another tragic visionary, unable in his case to do anything at all to bring about the realisation of his vision.²⁵ It also recalls Prometheus' evocation of his human creatures:

Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei,
Zu leiden, weinen,
Genießen und zu freuen sich […]

(HA 1, 46)

Not least, the figure of Faust, able to envision but not actually to share the earthly paradise which his efforts are bringing into being, is also intended by Goethe to recall the figure of the dying Moses, able to see and to lead his people to the Promised Land but not to enter it (Schöne, 2, 751-2 and 764-5). To Vaget's view that “Only a self-deluded scholarship, intoxicated by the heady dogma of the perfectibility and the historically mandated progress of the Faustian spirit, would find a positive, all-redeeming message in Faust's dying vision” (p. 171), I would reply that only a post-1990 Western scholarship all too eager to kick the Marxists when they are down could so radically deny all positive elements in Goethe's depiction of the dying Faust. “All-redeeming” it may not be, but “Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, / Den können wir erlösen”.

It is, of course, by no means clear what the notion of “Erlösung” can actually mean to a “dezidierter Nichtchrist” like Goethe,²⁶ and neither can his remark to Eckermann on 6 June 1831 about “scharf umrissence christlich-kirchlichen Figuren und Vorstellungen” be taken at face value. The other elements involved in Faust's “Erlösung” seem to be no less problematic than “Streben”, possibly even more so. The concept of “Liebe” is obviously of vital significance: the “Bergschluchten” are described by the opening chorus (complete with echo) as a “heilige[r] Liebesort”, and the word “Liebe” and its derivatives occur more than a dozen times in the closing sequences of the poem. But the relationship between this evidently heavenly, “ewige Liebe” and its earthly equivalent, the desire from which such “grimme Pein” results, is, as suggested above, in no way less paradoxical than that between human striving and the “Irren” which the Lord in the “Prolog” recognises as its inseparable concomitant. It is Faust's love for Gretchen which leads him to commit what are arguably worse crimes than the removal (for that was all he intended) of Philemon and Baucis. To say that “What saves Faust, in Goethe's eyes, is love” (Vaget, p. 172). while it may be partly true, seems to me to beg at least as many questions as to assert that Faust is saved because of his striving. And the concepts of “Buße” and “Reue” which come creeping into the text from about l. 11942 onward seem to me even more alien to the spirit of Faust himself and to the spirit of the whole poem, if not indeed utterly un-Goethean, at any rate if taken in any Christian (or even Schillerian) sense. The nearest Faust comes to anything like repentance in the closing sequences of Part II is in his soliloquy in the “Mitternacht” scene, before his confrontation with Sorge:

Könnt ich Magie von meinem Pfad entfernen
Die Zaubersprüche ganz und gar verlernen;
Stünd ich, Natur! vor dir ein Mann allein
Da wär's der Mühe wert ein Mensch zu sein.

(ll. 11404-7)

But while Faust may regret his dependence on magic (and even though he does indeed hold back the “Zauberwort” which might have banished Sorge, we soon discover that Mephisto is not so easily to be got rid of), these words are not a renunciation but rather a reaffirmation of the ideal of unaided human striving. And if the roses of love with which the angels scorch Mephisto and his cowardly legions in “Grablegung” have really come, as we are now told, “aus den Händen / Liebend-heiliger Büßerinnen” (ll. 11942-3), then the inhabitants of Heaven, even the penitent ones, must have considerably more of a sense of humour than Mephistopheles in the Prolog (l. 278) had given them credit for.

Even at the time of completion of Part I, when Goethe seemed to have settled on Faust's eventual salvation, he described his work as “eine Tragödie”. Schöne, voicing the current sceptical or anti-perfectibilist consensus, contends that “Als vorgeordnetes Lesezeichen blockiert die Gattungsangabe Faust. Eine Tragödie von vornherein ein geschichtsoptimistisch-teleologisches Verständnis des Binnengeschehens” (2, 17). Even if we agree with this (and it might be objected that a good many tragedies, from the Oresteia to the plays of Hebbel, do seem precisely to invoke some such teleological perspective), I think we must also state that the designation “tragedy” also precludes the reading of Faust as a “cautionary tale” in any simplistic sense. It makes a statement about human life, human striving and human action, without suggesting that there is any straightforward Gottschedian “moralischer Lehrsatz” to be deduced from it. It shows us unflinchingly the pain, suffering and guilt attendant upon any attempt on man's part to break out of his “ganz beschränkten Kreise”, but it is also the Devil who puts forward the apparent alternative of staying within it.²⁷ If there is a “moral” to Goethe's poem, then I think it can only be the “Faustian” one, the one which Faust himself enunciates in the face of the blinding and potentially paralysing onslaught of Sorge: “Im Weiterschreiten find er Qual und Glück, / Er! unbefriedigt jeden Augenblick” (ll. 11451-2). And we can only hope that in the end God will forgive us, because, as Heine said, that's his job.

Notes

1. Hans Schwerte [alias Hans Ernst Schneider], Faust und das Faustische. Ein Kapitel deutscher Ideologie (Stuttgart, 1962). Cf. also John R. Williams, Goethe's Faust (London, 1987), pp. 47-54; Faust. Annäherung an ein Mythos, ed. F. Möbus et al. (Göttingen, 1995), pp. 299-342. On Hans Ernst Schneider and his Faustian metamorphosis into Hans Schwerte, see Möbus, p. 327.

2. Alwin Binder, “‘Es irrt der Mensch so lang er strebt’. Der ‘Prolog im Himmel’ in Goethes Faust as satirische ‘Homodizee’”, Goethe-Jahrbuch 110 (1993), 243-60 (p. 251).

3. David Luke, Introduction to Faust. Part One (World's Classics: Oxford, 1987), p. xxx.

4. Luke, Introduction to Faust. Part Two (World's Classics: Oxford, 1994), p. xix.

5. Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, Frankfurter Ausgabe, 1. Abteilung, Vol. 7/1 and 7/2: Faust, ed. Albrecht Schöne (Frankfurt/Main, 1994), Vol. 2, p. 785. Faust is quoted here according to this edition, cited throughout as “Schöne”.

6. Hans Rudolf Vaget, “The GDR Faust: A Literary Autopsy”, Oxford German Studies 24 (1995), 145-74. Quotations are from this version; see also “Goethe's Faust Today: A ‘Post-Wall’ Reading”, in Interpreting Goethe's “Faust” Today, ed. Jane K. Brown et al. (Columbia, SC, 1994), pp. 43-58, and cf. Vaget's review of Schöne's Faust edition in Goethe Yearbook 8 (1996), 271-87.

7. Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air. The Experience of Modernity (London, 1983), pp. 37-86 (original edition, New York 1982).

8. Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. John D. Jump (Manchester, 1979), p. 10 (scene i); Doktor Johannes Faust. Puppenspiel, ed. Günter Mahal (RUB 6378[2]: Stuttgart, 1991), pp. 9-10, 67.

9. Historia von Dr Johann Fausten, ed. Hans Henning (Halle/Saale, 1963), p. 14.

10. Marlowe, scene xv (ed. cit., p. 79). In the corresponding episode of the Historia (ed. cit., p. 96) Faust sells a swineherd “5. Säw”. Ian Watt has observed that in the earlier versions Faust's life “between the fateful compact and the dreadful reckoning passes before us like something no more guilty than an exceptionally extended post-doctoral sabbatical” (Myths of Modern Individualism. Faust Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe [Cambridge, 1997], p. 43).

11. Nicholas Boyle, Goethe. Faust, Part One (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 15, 36, 54.

12. Goethes Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe (henceforth HA), Vol. 6 (Hamburg, 1963; 5th edn), p. 528

13. Lessing, Werke, ed. Herbert G. Göpfert et al. (Munich, 1970-79), Vol. 2, p. 780.

14. Luke, Introduction to Faust. Part Two, p. lv.

15. Marlowe, ed. cit. p. 59 (scene ix); Historia, ed. cit., p. 67.

16. Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Gerhard Fricke & Herbert G. Göpfert, Vol. 5 (Munich, 1967, 4th edn), p. 646.

17. Thus Williams (Goethe's Faust, pp. 141-63) designates Act II.

18. Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente, Taschenbuchausgabe (Frankfurt/Main, 1988), p. 36.

19. Luke, Introduction to Faust. Part Two, p. lv.

20. Kant, Werke, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Wiesbaden, 1956-60), Vol. 4, p. 438. Cf. H. S. Reiss, “Kant and the Right of Rebellion”, Journal of the History of Ideas 17 (1956), 179-92.

21. Williams (p. 185) observes that Faust's “Neptunistic” intervention “will be frankly conservative and counter-revolutionary”. Cf. also Williams, “Die Deutung geschichtlicher Epochen im zweiten Teil des Faust”, Goethe-Jahrbuch 110 (1993), 89-103, esp. pp. 98-101.

22. Cf. Nicholas Boyle, “Some Current Views of Goethe's Faust”, GLL [American University Studies I: Germanic Languages and Literature], 36 (1983), 116-47, esp. pp. 137-8.

23. Vaget also introduces what is in my view a complete red herring at this point by citing Richard II, in which Shakespeare allegedly “replaces the legitimate but unfit king by the usurper Bolingbroke, who, as Henry IV, turns out to be an efficient and worthy ruler” (p. 160)—itself contestable as a reading of Shakespeare's English history plays—and then going on to suggest that “Goethe deliberately departed from the Elizabethan model” (p. 162), a “model” which I do not think there is any evidence that Goethe had in mind here.

24. For an extended discussion of the significance of the motifs of “Enge” and “Weite” in Faust I, see Paul Requadt, Goethes Faust I: Leitmotivik und Architektur (Munich, 1972). Nicholas Boyle argues that Gretchen in Part I represents “the perfect manifestation of the possibility of human happiness and goodness within the ‘constricted life’” (Faust, Part One, p. 62), but the other inhabitants of Gretchen's “kleine Welt” do not offer much hope for her continued happiness and goodness if she were to remain within its confines.

25. Cf. R. Stephan, “‘L'Arcadie’ de Goethe et l'idée d'un monde meilleur”, Études germaniques 31 (1976), 258-80, and my article, “Tasso: the Poet and the Golden Age”, PEGS [Publications of the English Goethe Society] 63 (1994), 97-106, esp. pp. 101-2. The “frohe Herden” of Goethe's Tasso, which might perhaps be thought “contemptuous”, obviously derive from the “amoroso gregge” of the original Aminta. In the light of this parallel, Schöne's (and following him, Vaget's) attempts to pin down the term “frei” at this point to a specific and legalistic question of land-ownership (Schöne, 2, 748) appear less than convincing.

26. Cf. David Luke, “‘Vor deinem Jammerkreuz’: Goethe's Attitude to Christian Belief”, PEGS 59 (1990), 35-58.

27. Watt (Myths of Modern Individualism, p. 206) objects to what he sees as Goethe's moral indifferentism: “The only operative principle of value is endless motion, a quality it shares with modern physics, the Protestant ethic [!], jogging, and the Marquis de Sade”. Faust and the works of the Marquis are also frequently invoked in Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge. From Prometheus to Pornography (New York, 1996), and Goethe's “cosmic leniency” is compared unfavourably with the “keener and more courageous” moral judgement (p. 98) of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: “In comparison to her insistent cautionary tale, Goethe's Faust floats in ambivalence” (p. 330).