Fist cloth

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Faust in his study of Georg Friedrich Kersting , 1829

The Faust , the story of Doctor Johann Faust and his pact with Mephistopheles , one of the most widely used materials in European literature since the 16th century. The incomplete knowledge of the historical Johann Georg Faust (probably around 1480–1541) and his spectacular end favored the formation of legends and gave writers who dealt with his life some leeway. Properties of the Faust material, which recur in the most varied of versions, are Faust's striving for knowledge or power, his pact with the devil and his erotic ambitions.

While older ideas of Faust as a fool and charlatan persisted in popular culture , there has been a literary appreciation of Faust material since the 18th century. The human conflict between the power of belief and the certainty of scientific knowledge became a major theme. Faust is the person who strives beyond his limits and finds himself in the conflict between egocentric self-realization and social recognition in a world that is still shaped by religion.

Faust as a literary figure

role models

Several ancient, medieval and modern figures are combined under the name of the historical Faust: Prometheus (who challenges the gods), Pygmalion (the artist who wants to bring his work of art to life), allegories of the mortal sin pride (which were seen in the medieval theater , cf. Vice ), Don Juan (the arrogant womanizer) or the figure of the Dottore from the Commedia dell'arte (the learned talker). But the gnostic and heretic Simon Magus , the church father Cyprian of Carthage and the magician Merlin known from the Arthurian legend may also belong to these historical and mythological models with archetypal functions.

In the Middle High German Vorauer Novelle from around 1200, an early treatment of the subject matter can be seen.

Renaissance and Baroque

Title page of the People's Book
Version from 1695
Editing of the "Faust" material from 1726 by a "Christian Meynenden"

Magic books ( grimoires ) contained so-called Höllenzwänge (magic spells) since 1500 , which were ascribed to a Johann Faust. As the belief in miracles waned, the interest in Faust became literary. As a symbol of a person who freed himself from medieval humility , but whose self-confidence turns into hubris , it became a popular symbol of vanitas . Usually he remained a fool or a villain .

A first comprehensive work that dealt with the life of Johann Faust appeared in 1587. The printer Johann Spies published the Historia by D. Johann Fausten , also referred to as a people's book by older researchers . It contains a variety of stories and anecdotes, many with legendary elements. Spies' book tells of Faust's theology and medicine studies, his preoccupation with sorcery and his alliance with the devil, who finally takes Faust with him to hell. The author's Christian attitude can be clearly seen. The book conveys a negative image of the fist and an admonition to live a godly life. It achieved great notoriety. Between 1588 and 1611 it was translated into English, Dutch, French and Czech. The fist fabric also got abroad.

In 1589 the Englishman Christopher Marlowe created a dramatized version of the "Historia". The tragic story of Doctor Faustus contains all of its essential material elements. The Faust figure, however, bears clear traits of a Renaissance figure. Faust presumptuously demands power over the world and despises theology and its hereafter orientation. He devotes himself to magic and the devil, which also leads to his evil end here. Nevertheless, Marlowe's sympathy for his protagonist is clearly recognizable. It is the first edition of Faust that has shown positive aspects in the figure of Faust.

Marlowe's drama was brought to Germany by groups of English actors around 1600 and taken over by German traveling theaters . In the following time, however, it was played down and reduced to comical elements. Faust became a comic character , comparable to the puppet in the impromptu comedy .

The fist figures of the numerous stage versions of the material move between the joke figure and the demonic monster. They often serve as a pretext for a circus spectacle between puppet shows , dressage , ballet and fireworks .

The Augsburg showman Rudolf Lang traveled through Austria and Germany with a dog show on the subject of Faust 1717-21 and once had to seriously defend himself against the allegation of witchcraft .

The two English fist pantomimes at the beginning of the 18th century are famous : Necromancer by John Rich and Doctor Faustus by John Thurmond (both London 1723). They are a collection of vanitas motifs: contracts, forecasts, music, dance, money lending, prostitution, pagan antiquity are colorfully put together under the motto of nullity and presumption.

In his dramatization from 1725, Josef Anton Stranitzky contrasted the figure of Faust with the Viennese Hanswurst .

Since 1750

An increasing division between high culture and popular culture can be seen in the use of fist material . In the Age of Enlightenment , attempts began to justify and fundamentally revalue the Faust figure. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing published in 1759 in his 17th  literary letter some scenes of a Faust drama planned by him. Faust is represented here as a renaissance man striving for knowledge . It is precisely because of this pursuit of knowledge that he is saved from the devil's pact. The enlightened artist and scientist whom Faust increasingly symbolized should no longer be a fundamentally negative figure. Lessing never completed this work. Many young poets dealt with the subject. Faust embodied in them the will for spiritual and sensual adventure in a monotonous, over-civilized and alien world. Paul Weidmann wrote an allegorical drama in which Faust is visited by his parents and turns back. Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz describes in his poem a fragment from a farce called the Hell Judges, an imitation of the βατραχοι of Aristophanes Faust's life without love as hellish torment. In popular culture there is still the old, consistently negative Faust figure, its downfall is portrayed as morality : In Hamburg, for example, a pyrotechnician named Girandolini performed a musical and physical open-air spectacle by Doctor Faust's Höllenfarth in 1785 . This older meaning of the fist material was also used for Enlightenment satires . Friedrich Maximilian Klinger's novel Fausts Leben, Thaten und Höllenfahrt (1791) is a mixture of enlightenment satire and Sturm und Drang novella.

Ary Scheffer : Faust et Marguerite - The French versions of the Faust material since Gounod's opera mostly focus on the Gretchen tragedy .

This tradition merges seamlessly into the stage melodrama of the 19th century. Worth mentioning in this context are Ferdinand Kringsteiner's Johann Faust (1811) and Ernst August Klingemann's Faust (1815) as popular gruesome dramas. Still Louis Spohr searched the material for his opera Faust (1818) rather a lurid hanger for his music as an important content. That the vanitas symbolism could no longer be taken seriously in the 19th century is shown in travesties such as that of Franz Xaver Gewey in 1815: The objects in Faust's study, skulls, skeletons, tomes, weapons, celestial spheres, maps begin there as in a Disney movie and singing in unison.

In the more recent history of reception, however, the ennobling of the fist figure has displaced its older meaning, although it remained unchanged in popular culture. Goethe's Faust was published in 1808 . The first part of the tragedy . Goethe tried to take away the pessimism of the subject. He gave his Faust a timidly hopeful ending without submitting to the religious. This work became the most important of all Faust poetry. The second part , published in 1832, is at times more of a culture-critical essay than a stage play. Goethe dealt with the Faust material for almost 60 years. He portrayed Faust as a Renaissance man and a humanist , as a modern intellectual who has freed himself from church patronage. His Faust arrangements concentrate on Faust's desire for knowledge and diversity of experience (“That I know what holds the world together in its innermost being.” Faust I , v. 382/383). The scholarly tragedy reached a climax when Faust had to admit that he was unable to achieve the knowledge of the world he wanted on his own. Goethe thus justified the devil's pact with an attitude that was not fundamentally reprehensible. Lessing already described the thirst for knowledge as the noblest human instinct. Goethe also combined Faust's search for knowledge with the Gretchen tragedy . Gretchen, who was seduced by Faust, is confronted with Faust to personify pure innocence (Mephistopheles: "I have no power over them", v. 2626).

1836 appeared with the drama The consummate own or Romanien in Jawor by Jens Baggesen a satire on Goethe's Faust fragment. The Goethe parody by Friedrich Theodor Vischer Faust. The third part of tragedy (1862) could not prevail. However, the fist fabric remained present in numerous versions on the ballet and opera stage. Most famous was Charles Gounod's enthusiastic, sensitive Faust of 1859. Out of respect for Goethe, the opera was called Margarethe in the German-speaking region . The first US musical, The Black Crook (1866), used the fist material as a hook for an entertaining stage spectacle.

20th century

The tightening of the Faust figure into the “Faustian”, as it has been customary since the fin de siècle , especially with a nationalistic undertone, cannot be traced back to Goethe. Oswald Spengler's ominous statements about the “Faustian culture” in Man and Technology (1931) are related to this . Successful and unsuccessful German coming to terms with the past meet in an irritating way when dealing with the subject of Faust, as the German career of Hans Ernst Schneider , who obtained his habilitation through Faust after changing his identity , has shown.

In the 20th century, the final fall of the Ancien Régime and the experience of the world wars shaped the preoccupation with fist cloth. In Professor Unrat (1905) Heinrich Mann again created a negative, presumptuous and ridiculous figure of a fist. His brother Thomas Mann ties in with the “Historia” of 1587 with his novel Doctor Faustus , published in 1947 . He shifts the plot to the period from 1900 and criticizes the German bourgeois class with the figure of Faust. Mikhail Bulgakov's satire The Master and Margarita parodies life in the Soviet empire. In Hanns Eisler's opera libretto Johann Faustus from 1952, which has not been set to music, Faust reveals the rights of the oppressed in the peasant wars around 1525.

Also in the 20th century, the Faust figure in puppetry experienced a revival after the puppet theater had risen from a fairground entertainment to a recognized form of theater thanks to the Hohnsteiner Puppenbühne under Max Jacob . Prominent authors and players of Faust puppet shows were Max Jacob Friedrich Arndt ( Hohnsteiner Kasper ), Walter Büttner (Der Heidekasper) and Otto Schulz-Heising (Ulenspeegel puppet theater). Tradition-conscious puppeteers still show a fist play today, for example Gerd J. Pohl ( Piccolo puppet shows ), Andreas Blaschke (Cologne puppet theater), Harald Sperlich (Hohenloher puppet theater), Dr. Johannes Minuth ( Freiburg Puppenbühne ), Frieder Paasche ( Vagantei Erhardt ) and Stefan Kügel.

21st century

The fist fabric remains popular in the 21st century. For example, in the anime Mahō Shōjo Madoka Magika, Dr. Faustus embodied by the student Madoka, while Kyubey embodies Mephistopheles and tries to persuade Madoka to a pact in which she has a wish, but has to hunt witches forever in order not to become one herself.

Black Butler , another anime, also covers the fist cloth. The young Lord Ciel Phantomhive who played the role of Dr. Faustus takes over and seeks revenge on the person who killed his parents. He therefore conjures up the demon Sebastian Michaelis, who takes on the role of Mephistopheles. Sebastian poses as Ciels Butler and is committed to fulfilling every wish of his master until the main goal is achieved and he receives his master's soul.

The film adaptation Faust by the Russian director Sokurow combines a free interpretation of Goethe's Faust with surrealist and expressionist film images that are reminiscent of the silent films of German expressionism of the 1920s.

Works related to fist material

Dramas

Writings, stories

See also: Infernal Force , List of Magical Writings

music

Classic

Pop and rock music

Movie

Audio book

Pictures and illustrations

reception

See also

literature

Chronologically:

  • Carl Kiesewetter : Faust in history and tradition . Leipzig: Spohr 1893. Reprint Hildesheim: Olms 1963
  • Fritz Brukner , Franz Hadamowsky : The Viennese Faust poems from Stranitzky to Goethe's death. Vienna 1932
  • Karl Theens: History of the figure of a fist from the 16th century to the present . Meisenheim 1948
  • Elizabeth M. Butler: The Fortunes of Faust. New edition of the first edition from 1952. Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park 1999, ISBN 978-0-271-03011-1 .
  • Karl Theens: Faust on the puppet theater . Knittlingen 1957
  • Hans Schwerte : Faust and the Faustian . Klett, Stuttgart 1962
  • Andreas Meier: Faust libretti. History of fist material on the European music stage […]. Frankfurt am Main: Lang 1990. ISBN 3-631-42874-X
  • Horst Jesse: 'Faust' in the fine arts . Munich: Utz 2005, ISBN 3-8316-1202-1
  • Herfried Münkler : The pact with the devil. Doctor Johann Georg Faust . In: H.Münkler: The Germans and their Myths , pp. 109–140. Rowohlt, Berlin 2009. ISBN 978-3-87134-607-1
  • Jochen Golz: Faust and the Faustian. A closed chapter of German ideology? In: Journal for German-speaking Culture & Literature, 23: 2014, pp. 407–427
  • Frank Baron: The Myth of the Faustian Devil's Pact. History, legend, literature. De Gruyter, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-11-061289-9 .

Web links

Wikisource: Faust  - sources and full texts
Commons : Faust  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rüdiger Bernhardt: Faust - A Myth and Its Adaptations , Bange Verlag, Hollfeld, 2009, p. 13
  2. ↑ Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz : Fragment from a farce called the Hell Judges, an imitation of the βατραχοι of Aristophanes ( online )
  3. ↑ Elisabeth Frenzel : Fabrics of world literature - a lexicon of poetry-historical longitudinal cuts , Kröner, Stuttgart, (1st edition from 1976), p. 262
  4. ^ Wilhelm Zobl: The dispute about the revolutionary reorganization of the Dr. Faustus . In: Wolfgang Fritz Haug (Ed.): Argument special volume . tape 5 . Argument-Verlag, Berlin 1975, ISBN 3-920037-25-1 , p. 236-255 .
  5. ↑ List of classical Faust settings based on Goethe in Jochen Schmidt: Goethe's Faust - Part One and Two - Basics, Work, Effect. CH Beck, 2nd edition, Munich 2001, p. 327ff.
  6. ^ Hans Joachim Kreutzer: Faust - Myth and Music , CH Beck, Munich 2003, p. 28.
  7. ^ Badische Zeitung: The dark power never gives up - Art - Badische Zeitung . ( badische-zeitung.de [accessed on March 10, 2018]).