Changing European Visions of Disaster and Development. Vanessa Pupavac
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 was sympathetic to the cosmopolitan outlook of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who outlined a vision of peaceful international cooperation among states and world citizenship as an ideal committed to a duty of hospitality to strangers. He cultivated a cosmopolitan outlook opposing national hatred, ‘where a person stands to a certain extent above nations, and feels the weal or woe of a neighbouring people as if it had happened to his own’ (Eckermann 1930 [7 March 1830]: 361). He wrote enthusiastically about a common humanity across east and west. His 1819 West-East-Divan series of poems put an occidental and oriental poet into dialogue (Goethe 2010 [1819]). The work exemplified the ideals of world literature as a field conceived by Goethe to bring together human creative achievements. Like world literature, his study of language revealed the essential unity of humanity and sought to identify a hidden grammar shared between languages (Pupavac 2012: 104–6). Goethe’s cosmopolitan ideals were marginalised during the 1914–1918 wartime propaganda, while his confidence in technology looked naïve given the technologically enhanced brutal means of warfare.
As another war loomed in the 1930s, dread grew over Europe descending into hell. The German Jewish philosopher Edmund Husserl’s 1935 lecture on the ‘Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man’ feared ‘a barbarian hatred of spirit’ taking over Europe (Husserl 1965 [1935]: 192). A ‘great weariness’ marked European culture in which its earlier spiritual strivings cultivating human reason and creativity were becoming suppressed (ibid.). The Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža’s essay ‘Europe Today’ anticipated Europeans being flung at each other like lead soldiers in another war and individuals of conscience again being ridiculed, martyred, or exiled. Yet the European Faustian intellect was immured in unresolvable philosophical questions (Krleža 1956b [1935]). Europe’s historical borderlands have had their own interpretations of the Faust legend linked to national attempts to escape being the Faustian puppets and frontier guards of empire, and become independent countries enjoying national self-determination, as exemplified by Krleža’s 1938 novel The Banquet in Blitva (2002), discussed later.
During the 1930s Goethe was studied as a humanist cosmopolitan thinker against the rise of Nazi ideology (Willoughby 1933). Again after the Second World War, he was turned to in efforts to revive German and European culture (Mann 1950). His international cultural legacy could offer continuity to the nation and act as a bridge between Germans and the world (Brockmann 2004: 116–117; Meinecke 1950 [1946]). He offered a progressive optimistic humanism, and his Faust presented the triumph of good over evil. The bicentenary of his birth in 1949 precipitated fierce competition between the two post-war German states over his cultural legacy and the meaning of being German. The 1949 anniversary mattered to the rival West and East Germanys (Brockmann 2004: 115; Neumann 1999). In East Germany, Goethe was harnessed to economic progress. In West Germany, Goethe embodied culture against extreme politics and the individual’s inner emigration in oppressive times against Nazism (Kremer 2016: 130). The Goethe Institute became its core cultural institutional presence abroad. Goethe’s model of political stability through material well-being also fitted with West Germany’s economic miracle of the first three post-war decades. The political rivalry between the two states encouraged their rival official cultural deifications of Goethe.
Some voices warned against making a cult of Goethe. There was intellectual disquiet over ‘Goethe-idolatry’