Doctor Johannes Faust - Germany / Federal Republic of Germany 1979 - 60 Pfennig

He must have been an extraordinary, a captivating and at the same time offensive person, for nearly half a millennium, that Doctor Johannes (or even George) Faust, whose meagerly documented life and work gave so much impetus to poetry and myths. In 1480 he was born in Württemberg, around 1539 he is said to have died after an erratic wandering life, in the call of a true magician, astrologer and alchemist. Soon the legend spread that he had been in league with the devil and had been fetched at the end by evil ... In 1587 the first literary composition of the material was the Volksbuch, the Historia by D. Johann Fausten, the broad-witted magician and Schwartzkünstler «: Faust, says the unknown author, had dedicated his soul to the devil, explored with the help of his infernal servant Mephistopheles the secrets of this world and the otherworld, performed all sorts of magic acts and conjuration of spirits and finally with Helena, the most beautiful woman of the pagan Antiquity, connected - until he fell victim to hell after the pact of the pact, as a deterrent example of a quest for insight, the conventionally minded thinking in this transitional period still had to be suspected as arrogance against God. A few years later, Doctor Faust, in a spiritualized and tragically deepened conception, came on stage in England, through Shakespeare's great contemporary Christopher Marlowe; and there were, in addition to a few shorter or longer editions of the "Volksbuch," above all the exploitation and discarding of the English play by the traveling theater and puppet theater, which also kept the material alive in Germany. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Lessing, in the search for a new German drama, resorted to the Faust legend, to whom he wished to give a conciliatory and rational conclusion in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Quite different is the generation of the Sturm und Drang, which Faust celebrated as the archetype of the titanic genius of power and attempted several times to make poetic works. At the turn of the nineteenth century history must have been so fashionable that an "anti-Faust" could count on understanding. At that time the most important and most effective of all Faust poems of the public was known only as a fragment: Goethe's tragedy, which the old poet was able to complete in 1832, shortly before his death. Goethe's Faust does not commit himself to the devil; instead of the pact a bet is made, and at the end of the journey through the small and the great world is not the journey of hell, but the benevolent knowledge of the inadequacy of all earthly striving, that of theologically speaking, of grace and salvation is needed. Goethe's Faust, however, has become quite popular because of the episode which the poet has imprinted on his subject from his own view of life and almost no trace of tradition: the tragedy of Faust's beloved and abandoned girl who becomes a child murderer, a drama that Illustrators and composers in the episode has stimulated even more than the ancestral parts of Faust-Vita. In addition to Goethe's work, alternative forms of material such as Grabbe's drama, in which the Grübler Faust is juxtaposed with the joyful Don Juan, or Lenau's play, which shows Faust as a tormented individualist, had difficulty in winning an independent right; not without reason did Paul Valéry give his polemical title »Mein Faust« to his fragments of cognitive skepticism. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Goethe's interpretation (and misinterpretation) dominated the fine arts, music, and theater, wherever Faust was concerned; and in the course of a national ideology Faust, the ideal of incessant striving for action and knowledge, as believed by Goethe, was stylized into a representative of German nature, Oswald Spengler's "Faustian" as the soul of Western civilization. The destruction of this German myth did not happen until German politics had long devoted itself to the devil and the fate of the German people seemed too similar to a hellish trip. When the Second World War came to an end, Thomas Mann wrote his "Doctor Faustus" in exile in the United States The life of a German composer in the 20th century as a representation of German contemporary history and at the same time as a repetition and visualization of that fate that the Doctor Johannes Faust had taken in the sixteenth century. (Text: Josef Tutsch, Bonn)