Johann Wolfgang von Goethe has long been regarded as a true master of German literature. While few anglophone readers today are familiar with Goethe’s entire body of work, its influence, especially Faust, echoes in modern books, movies, classical and contemporary music, opera, and more. His first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, was one of the most important books created during the Sturm und Drang period, followed by the equally enticing Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. While these two novels alone could have established a lasting legacy, Goethe accomplished so much more. Besides the novels, he was a polymath, writing about everything from poetry and short stories to scientific texts on botany and anatomy. His brilliant mind was always whirring, it seems.
Yet, as theologian Natalie K. Watson recently put it in the Church Times, a British publication, Goethe is likely to be “the greatest writer whose work you have never read.” However captivating his stories are, and however widely accepted it is that he is important, educated English speakers seldom actually read him. That’s what makes A.N. Wilson’s Goethe: His Faustian Life such a fascinating read. The biographer recognizes, like Watson and others, that Goethe “is, surely, among all the truly great writers of this world, the least read in the English-speaking world.” His new book, therefore, serves as an introduction and reintroduction to this great writer’s life and ideas.
There are intriguing sections about Goethe’s passion for literature, art, philosophy, and the sciences. Wilson covers the writer’s love of ideas, his general disillusionment with religion, and his interest and theories about the nature of color, which was later published as a book. We learn about his brief career in law, which was rather unpleasant and mercifully short, plus his personal influences, including William Shakespeare, Homer, Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, and contemporaries such as Johann Gottfried Herder. However, the most important thing in the book is Goethe’s 60-year odyssey to create his magnum opus, Faust.
“Faust touches us because it is about us,” Wilson writes. The mammoth, two-part play was an enormous undertaking. Part 1, which was published in 1808, focuses on the bet made between the demon Mephistopheles and God that the former could sway Faust from his righteous path. A subsequent deal with the devil is made between Faust and Mephistopheles, which leads to a “catastrophic love affair” between Faust and his beloved Gretchen. Faust was designed as a “closet drama,” or something that’s supposed to be read rather than performed onstage. The first draft, Der Urfaust, was written in 1774 and performed at the court in Weimar to an enthusiastic response. (The original manuscript was lost, but a copy was discovered in 1886.) Part 2, which was released posthumously in 1832, is the continuation of Faust’s life in the ancient world, his romance and marriage to Helen of Troy, and the final battle between God and Mephistopheles for Faust’s soul and eternal salvation.
With this masterwork, Goethe established a “myth of modern humanity,” Wilson writes, “which was percipient, prophetic.” This was accomplished “partly by returning to the source of so much Western truth, the Greek mythologies.” As a writer, Goethe “was endowed with the most prodigious linguistic and imaginative gift … [he] was writing things which are as burningly alive today as when he wrote them.”
What caused Goethe’s near-lifelong interest and obsession with Faust? Johann Georg (or Johannes) Faust has long been a strange entity in German folklore. Wilson notes that “Faust would pass through so many revisions in Goethe’s imagination before its completion that it is sometimes easy to forget that, in its origin, it was a meditation on an actual or semi-historical figure.” He posed as an alchemist, astrologist, and magician in the early 16th century. He cast horoscopes for prominent individuals such as the Bishop of Bamberg. He even claimed to be “in league with the devil.” While it’s pretty clear that Faust was a charlatan and conman, it was an unusual story that intrigued young and old alike.
Johann Spies, a German printer, published several Faust books. Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, written in either 1592 or 1593, was a popular Elizabethan tragedy. There were also children’s adaptations in the form of puppet shows. The latter medium is likely where Goethe, born in Frankfurt in 1749, first became acquainted with Faust.
“There was no shortage of puppet shows, at the fairs and in the marketplaces of this prosperous medieval town,” Wilson points out, and the “story of Faust was one of the most popular in the repertoire.” Likely, a young Goethe first encountered the story in puppet form.
A fragment of verse Goethe “doodled” about his lifelong obsession, Faust, as reprinted in Wilson’s superb book, helps explain why it pays to go to the primary source:
Our human life is not unlike this poem.
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It has a start, all right, it has an end.
Only a finished whole — that it is not.
Michael Taube, a columnist for the National Post, Troy Media, and Loonie Politics, was a speechwriter for former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.