Goethe: His Faustian Life—The Extraordinary Story of Modern Germany, a Troubled Genius and the Poem that Made Our World
Whether you have read just one or both parts—or none—of Goethe’s epic poem Faust, this exegesis and commentary by A. N. Wilson will enrich your mind and spirit. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) worked on Faust off and on for over 60 years, adding insights he gained from the great authors of Westen civilization—from the ancient Greeks to Shakespeare to the rule-breaking novelists and dramatists of 18th and early 19th century Britain and France. Steeped in Western culture, Goethe also respected and integrated what he learned from Chinese and Indian philosophy and the Quran.
A scientist as well as a literary giant, Goethe read and wrestled with Isaac Newton on light and color. He was an actor as well as a theatrer director—all while serving as privy counsellor for the Duke of Weimar, supervising his roads, mines, and army. From his twenties to old age, Goethe had dalliances—or sought them—with both genders. At 39 he began living with a 23-year-old middle-class woman, Christiane Vulpius, and finally married her. For many decades they shared love and several bottles of wine each day. They produced five children, though only one survived infancy. Their son died in his 40s, like them, addicted to spirits.
Goethe’s lifetime witnessed the birth pang of the Modern—the arrival of democracy as a political possibility in the United States, attempts to replicate this republican experiment in Europe, and coming to terms with the rising commercial class. Merchants replaced marquises as the most powerful men in England, Scotland, France, and Germany. Men and women began to doubt the old religious certainties.
Against this background of vital change, literature reflected the fact that this was an age when the Individual, the Private Personality, emerged as a subject of consideration. Novels came into being—not like previous romances or myths, about dragons, kings and queens, but stories about men and women with sexual feelings, falling in love, or, like Dr. Faust, searching for it.
Wilson sees Faust as the first great modern work of literature, a supreme poetic masterpiece, that reveals us to ourselves, challenges and disturbs and consoles us—sometimes as if by magic, into the preoccupations of a generation that worries about the way in which the world is governed and how we respond to Nature.
Part One of Faust illustrates the place played in our lives by love, sex, and the exploitation of the weak by the powerful in the sexual realm. Part Two anticipates concern about what humans are doing to the planet and the capitalist development of investment economics. The pursuit of the Imagination in Life, the holding sacred of the Imagination and its power to redeem and explain our predicament, these, and so much more are the creation of the aged poet who—peeved no one asked him to take part—refused to attend the first staging of his play. He stayed home alone in his museum of a house while the rest of Weimar flocked to the theater.
At the end of Part Two, the old man Faust’s hunger to possess the last bit of coast for his land reclamation scheme leads to a terrible act of triple murder by Mephistopheles and Faust’s henchman. True, Faust did not intend the murder, but he did nothing to prevent it—the same, says Wilson, that could be said of those Germans who found themselves with Adolf Hitler wherever their Fűhrer took them.
Faust touches us, Wilson writes, because it is about us. “It is not just a supremely great poem, studded with insights into the human condition, into science, into love, religion, politics, even into economics. It is both a history and a prophecy of how Western humanity has viewed itself since the early modern period to our own. Goethe, a man of the Enlightenment, mythologized Faust, a man of the Renaissance. He used Faust’s inner journeyings as a way of exploring his own contemporaries’ attitudes—to science, to philosophy, to the structure of society, to revolution, to war, to Nature.
“The great figures of Goethe’s time—Napoleon, Byron, Kant, Hegel—might not be named in Faust, but they are all there. What makes Goethe different from any of them is that he saw the way that their actions and attitudes were going to shape later worlds—the world of newspapers and mass media, the world of international power politics, the world which had taken leave of God but did not know how to live—to understand its most fundamental ethical concerns—without him. Faust, moreover, a man-in-Nature—to this extent a figure as materialist as any produced in the eighteenth century—is not happy to be so. The thought of the sheer pointlessness of his attempts to master science—in the sense of understand, in the sense of control the world of Nature—drives him close to suicide.”
Goethe’s first bestseller explained how the young Werther, frustrated in love, ended his life, But Goethe kept striving—in all domains—into his eighties, claiming that the “eternal feminine” pulls us on.
Wilson may persuade you to learn German to read Goethe’s writings in the original. If you start to do this, consult the bilingual paperback edition of Faust translated and edited by the late Princeton philosopher Walter Kaufmann. You can then move on to the 17 volumes of Goethe’s collected works in German.