Fist project

The Faust project is a project for schools based on the original text of Goethe's Faust 1 and Faust 2 . The project sponsor is the Fondazione L'Unione Europea Berlin , which has already developed the non -profit project as a non-profit teaching project for schools in Europe.

Editorial team

A team of authors from Incontri Europei is responsible for the development of the Faust project and the editing of the Faust adaptation .

The German version

The objective was to create a text that allows schools to deal with the two parts of Goethe's Faust 1 and 2 on the basis of the original text, and which at the same time enables school-internal performances in the format of a chamber play. The editorial team selected a total of 21 text passages: from Faust part 2 one passage from each of the five acts, from Faust part 1 several passages up to the dungeon scene.

The team of authors agreed on the principle of exactly reflecting the Goethe text in the order of the selected scenes and telling the story of Goethe's Faust from the end. The principle was to arrange the selected parts of Goethe's text in reverse order and to strictly adhere to this reversal, i.e. not to jump, not to use Goethe's text as a quarry and not to depict it in a modernist arbitrary manner in the form of a newly formed collage . The new version begins with a quote from Mephisto from Act 5 of Faust Part 2, which is the motto of this modern version of Faust:

“ Chorus It's over.

Mephisto over ! a stupid word. Why over? Gone and pure not, complete monotony! What should eternal creation do for us! To take what has been created to nothing! It's over there. What can you read about it? It's so good as if it wasn't. And still drifts in circles as if it were. I loved the eternal emptiness for it "

- The colors of chess Edition Fondazione L'Unione Europea Berlin 2015, p. 9.

The episode with the four grays from Faust part 2 appears as the second sequence. The prologue in turn from Faust Part 1 mutated into the penultimate episode. The new version of Faust ends with the last two lines from the attribution from the beginning of Faust Part 1:

"I see what I own in the distance, and what has disappeared becomes realities for me."

- ibid p. 147

The sequences and text passages, rearranged in this rotated form, result in a new sense of their own in the sequence of the game. As a five-person piece (Faust, Mephisto, Margarete, Marthe, Valentin), the upturned Faust is a chamber play that can be performed in schools in one and a half hours without a break - including scenic. In terms of content, the reverse sequence of the passages in this Faust version ensures that Margarete stays alive and can therefore play a counterpart to the male duo Faust & Mephisto together with Marthe until the end .

The French version

The present German text The Colors of Chess was developed in a further step by the team of authors in French - title: Les Cahiers de Perséphone , whereby the authors stuck to the translation by Gérard de Nerval , which appeared in 1827, and which for Young people today seem more suitable than the more recent translation by Jean Lacoste and Jacques Le Rider Éditions Bartillat from 2009.

Editions and dedication

The printed editions for the Faust project are documented as a German version with the title The Colors of Chess and as a French version with the title Les Cahiers de Perséphone - both in the edition of the Fondazione L'Unione Europea Berlin . The editions for the Faust project are dedicated to the Berlin art sponsor Peter Raue , one of the most important companions of the foundation's nono project.

The Faustian

With Faust I and II, Goethe left a legacy of the inevitability of mankind's path to the apocalypse - in the name of the Weimar Classic as a frame of reference for future generations. Anyone who deals with Goethe's Faust and the Faust material is confronted with the multifaceted concept of the Faustian , which on the one hand is shaped by Goethe's work, and on the other hand also finds its fatal roots and its devastating consequences in German history. Goethe's Faust is the drama of an everlasting dystopia , a future-pessimistic scenario in the backward-looking character of the Weimar Classic.

Against this background, the initiative for the Faust project by the Fondazione L'Unione Europea Berlin is to be understood as an invitation to remove the Faustian from one's own life planning and at the same time to address the problem of the complex work of Goethe's Faust I and II in a manageable time frame capture. Accordingly, the preface to the editions The Colors of Chess and Les Cahiers de Perséphone says:

“In an oral tradition from the luggage of a wise man, it is said that emptiness is free from everything, including emptiness itself - except love, although this too is free from inherent existence. This assignment from the perspective of wisdom, which is a unity of emptiness and love, seems worth thinking about carefully. Perhaps in this way many misunderstandings that Goethe left behind in his longer treatises in Faust I and II could be understood and eliminated. "

- ibid p. 5

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ Title fist adaptation: The colors of chess
^ Pedro Alcalde, Barcelona | Vereina Folcher, Orsay | Jürgen Petzinger, Berlin | Stefan Sander, Berlin - Editing: Karsten Evers, Baden-Baden
↑ Incontri Europei is the founder of the Fondazione L'Unione Europea Berlin
↑ It is interesting that Gérard de Nerval , the authoritative French translator of Goethe's Faust Part 1 and Part 2, ends his Faust 2 precisely with this passage and the quotation from Mephisto, and thus the French viewer and reader obviously to reflect on the eternal emptiness would like to stimulate - cf. Gérard de Nerval, Les deux Faust de Goethe Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion Paris 1932, p. 495 (Quote: MÉPHISTOPHÉLÈS Passé! Un mot inepte. Pourquoi passé! Ce qui est passé et le pur néant, n'est-ce pas la même chose? Que nous veut donc cette éternelle création, si tout ce qui fut créé va s' engloutir dans le néant! C'est passé! Que faut-il lire à ce texte? C'est comme si cela n'avait jamais été! Et pourtant cela se meut encore dans une certaine région, comme si cela existait. Pourquoi?. .. j'aimerais mieux simplement le vide éternel ). Goethe, on the other hand, ends his Faust 2 with the text passage: The eternal feminine draws us to it .
↑ The Colors of Chess Edition Fondazione L'Unione Europea Berlin 2015, p. 12
↑ ibid p. 131
↑ ibid p. 3
↑ Bruno Ganz , who played Faust in Peter Stein's production , in a newspaper interview Die Welt on April 17, 1996 - What is Faustian? [1]
↑ The project sponsor and the team of authors of the Faust project understand the term emptiness used in the foreword in the sense of the basic category Shunyata of Buddhist teachings - in the tradition of Shantideva and his main work Bodhicharyavatara and Nagarjuna - with reference to the verse of Nagarjuna: “There is no thing that did not arise in dependence. That is why there is no thing that is not devoid of its own existence. ”(Ders. In Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way , quoted from the Dalai Lama ( Tenzin Gyatso ), recognizing wisdom, increasing it and practicing it day by day - OWBarth / Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 200 - combined with the commentary foreword, ibid, pp. 7-17, as well as the reference to the quote: "Even emptiness itself is devoid of independent existence.", Ibid, p. 55, and the quote: "Was exactly do we mean when we say that things and occurrences are empty? Because the origin of all things and occurrences is due to the accumulation or accumulation of causes and conditions - factors other than themselves - therefore they are empty: without an independent one This absence of an independent nature or of a self-existing reality is synonymous with emptiness, but if we were to assume that emptiness was its own, separate from things and events e ontological category, we would be wrong. ", ibid pp. 161-162). What is essential here is not just to know that things and phenomena are empty, what is important is to know and experience how they are empty. In this context, Goethe's work might suggest that it is a valid source for explaining things and phenomena within the framework of the laws of the universe and of human life. His world view, his life and his political and professional attitude first clues to justifiable doubts as to show closer analysis of his lyrics that Goethe concepts like the eternal void and Love used as moments of poetry that one about the value of semantic attitude of do not point out the poetic tradition of Goethe's time.

[1] Title fist adaptation: The colors of chess

[2] Pedro Alcalde, Barcelona | Vereina Folcher, Orsay | Jürgen Petzinger, Berlin | Stefan Sander, Berlin - Editing: Karsten Evers, Baden-Baden

[3] Incontri Europei is the founder of the Fondazione L'Unione Europea Berlin

[4] It is interesting that Gérard de Nerval , the authoritative French translator of Goethe's Faust Part 1 and Part 2, ends his Faust 2 precisely with this passage and the quotation from Mephisto, and thus the French viewer and reader obviously to reflect on the eternal emptiness would like to stimulate - cf. Gérard de Nerval, Les deux Faust de Goethe Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion Paris 1932, p. 495 (Quote: MÉPHISTOPHÉLÈS Passé! Un mot inepte. Pourquoi passé! Ce qui est passé et le pur néant, n'est-ce pas la même chose? Que nous veut donc cette éternelle création, si tout ce qui fut créé va s' engloutir dans le néant! C'est passé! Que faut-il lire à ce texte? C'est comme si cela n'avait jamais été! Et pourtant cela se meut encore dans une certaine région, comme si cela existait. Pourquoi?. .. j'aimerais mieux simplement le vide éternel ). Goethe, on the other hand, ends his Faust 2 with the text passage: The eternal feminine draws us to it .

[5] The Colors of Chess Edition Fondazione L'Unione Europea Berlin 2015, p. 12

[6] . 131

[7] . 3

[8] Bruno Ganz , who played Faust in Peter Stein's production , in a newspaper interview Die Welt on April 17, 1996 - What is Faustian? [1]

[9] The project sponsor and the team of authors of the Faust project understand the term emptiness used in the foreword in the sense of the basic category Shunyata of Buddhist teachings - in the tradition of Shantideva and his main work Bodhicharyavatara and Nagarjuna - with reference to the verse of Nagarjuna: “There is no thing that did not arise in dependence. That is why there is no thing that is not devoid of its own existence. ”(Ders. In Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way , quoted from the Dalai Lama ( Tenzin Gyatso ), recognizing wisdom, increasing it and practicing it day by day - OWBarth / Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 200 - combined with the commentary foreword, ibid, pp. 7-17, as well as the reference to the quote: "Even emptiness itself is devoid of independent existence.", Ibid, p. 55, and the quote: "Was exactly do we mean when we say that things and occurrences are empty? Because the origin of all things and occurrences is due to the accumulation or accumulation of causes and conditions - factors other than themselves - therefore they are empty: without an independent one This absence of an independent nature or of a self-existing reality is synonymous with emptiness, but if we were to assume that emptiness was its own, separate from things and events e ontological category, we would be wrong. ", ibid pp. 161-162). What is essential here is not just to know that things and phenomena are empty, what is important is to know and experience how they are empty. In this context, Goethe's work might suggest that it is a valid source for explaining things and phenomena within the framework of the laws of the universe and of human life. His world view, his life and his political and professional attitude first clues to justifiable doubts as to show closer analysis of his lyrics that Goethe concepts like the eternal void and Love used as moments of poetry that one about the value of semantic attitude of do not point out the poetic tradition of Goethe's time.