Professor Durrani's study is the first in a new series of volumes devoted
to the manner in which certain key figures are absorbed into our cultural awareness. Few
individuals have remained as influential as the legendary doctor, in whom we have a
character-sketch of modern man that is still valid today - restlessly inquisitive,
overloaded with information, obsessed with the exploration of the world and space, and
addicted to amorous conquests, all of which, as he himself realises, must fail to satisfy
his deeper, spiritual needs. Each generation has developed it own strategies to make Faust
an example of the extremes of brilliance and villainy of which the misguided genius is
capable. How and why did the erstwhile transgressor come to attract sympathy during the
Age of Reason? Wherein lay his appeal to Romantic poets, composers, and painters? Why did
both National Socialists and Communists claim him as their own in the propaganda battles
of the twentieth century? How is he viewed in Ireland, America, Russia and Japan? These
and other issues are thoroughly investigated in a series of chapters devoted to the
evolution of Faust's career from earliest times to the present, and to its recent impact
on theatre, music, visual arts, and popular imagination in Europe and across the globe.
The volume is accompanied by extensive bibliographies, numerous illustrations and a new
verse translation of key scenes from Goethe's drama. Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Note on Author and Contributors
Editor's Preface
Introduction
Acknowledgements
Chapter One: Faust's Ancestors: The Earliest Sources
The Myth is Born; The Rise of the Magus; An Itinerant Fortune-Teller; Luther's Demons;
Literary Devils
Chapter Two: From Superstition to Scepticism
The Scholar as Villain; The History of Doctor John Faustus;
The Villain as Hero; Faust in Prose
Chapter Three: An Icon is Born
Doctor Faustus Recycled; Faustus becomes Faust
Chapter Four: Romantics to Realists
Restless Titans; Impassioned Romantics; Goethe's Faust Revisited
A Literary Parody; The Social Novel
Chapter Five: Humanists and Brown Shirts: Fausts for the
Twentieth Century
The Collective Ideal; The Invention of 'Faustian Man'; Faust and Fhrer; Trapped
in a Meaningless Universe; Faust under Socialism; A Postmodern Faust
Chapter Six: From Bare Boards to Computer Graphics:
Faust in Performance
First on the Stage: Marlowe in London; Return to Continental Europe; From Scene
Selection to Total Theatre; National Drama of the Reich; From Farce to Spectacle and back:
English-language Productions; New German Minimalism; The Socialist Stage; Puppet Shows,
Experimental Theatre, Commedia dell'arte, Laser Spectacular
Chapter Seven: Musical Fausts: Broadsheet to Rock Opera
The Devil's Tunes; Ballads and Ballets; Lied and Singspiel;
Symphonic Fausts; Grand Opera; From Chromatic Scales to Rock Musical
Faust as Rock Opera by Paul M. Malone
Chapter Eight: From Woodcut to Manga: One Hundred Images
of a Magus
Early Illustrators; Substitutes for Drama; 'De luxe' Editions;
The Twentieth Century
Chapter Nine: The Moving Image
A Challenge for Illusionists; The Golden Age; Postwar Glitz;
Foreign and Arthouse; Horror and Pornography
Jan Svankmajer's Faust by Derek Katz
Chapter Ten: Faust Globalised
The Anglo-Saxon World; North American Fausts;
Three Irish Fausts; Faust in Verse; Across the Continents
Faust and the Russian Revolutionary Hero by Rolf Hellebust
Chapter Eleven: The Popular Imagination
Science and Politics; Faust for Tourists: Museums, Memorials, Festivals;
Merchandising; The Leisure Industry; Exhibitions and 'Fringe' Theatre
Chapter Twelve: Cartoons and Comics
Retold in Pictures; Kids' Stuff: Educational Comics;
Comics for Grown-ups; Rewritten for Laughs
Faust through the Eyes of a Japanese Cartoonist by Yoko Riley
Conclusion: Faustus and the Potters by Derek Sellen
Postscript: 'Some little well-made Flask'
Index
Biographical note on Author and Contributors
Osman Durrani holds a D.Phil. from the
University of Oxford, where he completed a thesis on Faust and the Bible. He lectured at
Durham, UK, before becoming Professor of German at the University of Kent at Canterbury.
His research has focused on many aspects of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the
twentieth century, and includes Anglo-German relations, popular culture, cabaret, and
computer-assisted learning. Fictions of Germany. Images of the Nation in the Modern Novel
was published by Edinburgh University Press in 1994.
Rolf Hellebust is an Associate Professor in the
Department of Germanic, Slavic and East Asian Studies at the University of Calgary. He has
written articles on Russian literature and culture for journals including Style, the
Slavic Review, the Russian Review, and the Slavic and East European Journal. His book
Flesh to Metal: Soviet Literature and the Alchemy of Revolution was published by Cornell
University Press in 2003, and he is currently completing a monograph on the
nineteenth-century literary tradition in Russia.
Derek Katz is an Assistant Professor of Music
History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has specialised in Czech music
and culture, especially the operas of Leos Jan 1ek. He has written on music for The
New York Times, the Bard Festival, the San Francisco Opera and Lincoln Center in New York,
and has given pre-concert lectures at venues across America, including the Ojai Festival
in California and at the Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall in New York.
Paul M. Malone is an Associate Professor of German
in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He
holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of British Columbia and is
a certified translator. In addition to his book, Franz Kafka's The Trial: Four Stage
Adaptations (2003), he has published on literature, film, theatre-performance theory, and
virtual reality computer technology, and is the current editor of Germano-Slavica: A
Canadian Journal of Germanic and Slavic Comparative and Interdisciplinary Studies.
Yoko Riley holds an M.A. from Seijo University in
Tokyo and a B.L.S. from the University of Ottawa. She now works in the Department of
Germanic, Slavic and East Asian Studies at the University of Calgary, where she teaches
courses in Japanese civilisation, language and film. She has co-written a two-volume
multimedia Japanese language course. Her research has been on pre-twentieth-century
Japanese history and civilisation, with a focus on the Sengoku and Tokugawa periods and
their influence on present-day Japanese culture and society.
Derek Sellen lives and works in Canterbury, where he
teaches English language and literature to foreign students. His poems have been published
in various magazines and anthologies and have won national and international awards. He
has read from his works on BBC Radio Three, and his plays have been performed in
Canterbury and Brighton.
Professor Durrani's engrossing Faust sets a high standard for the
Series it inaugurates, portraying figures from myth and history who "populate the
collective consciousness and provide it with essential points of reference." Few have
invaded the public awareness as aggressively as Faust, or so accurately mirrored in their
transmutations the receiving societies.
Durrani first traces the evolution of the Faust theme, beginning with its sources in myths
of the magus, in historical "splinters" regarding itinerant charlatans, in
allusions by Martin Luther and other Reformation theologians, and in popular "devil
books" of the 16th century. From there the story follows a well-trodden path from the
chapbook of 1587 and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus to the prose versions of the 17th
century. Durrani offers reliable recapitulations of the principal texts enlivened by
extensive quotations, while assessing the differences between the German and English
chapbooks or the shift from the Christian conflict of good and evil to Marlowe's view of
Faust as tragic hero.
The thoughtful discussion of Goethe's Faust is followed by a survey of Romantic
Fausts, including the parodies of F. T. Vischer and Ida Hahn-Hahn. In the 20th century the
striving artist of Romanticism gives way to the seeker after social and political
activity. Oswald Spengler featured Faust, with his yearning for totality, as the
appropriate image of the modern age—an image perverted by Alfred Rosenberg for Nazi
expansionism and applied by Thomas Mann in Doktor Faustus. While Valary's Mon
Faust (1946) exemplified postwar existentialist pessimism, Georg Lukács and Ernst
Bloch socialized the icon for use in the GDR.
Durrani then traces the icon in non-literary modes, beginning with stage performances from
the traveling players and puppet shows to the mammoth productions of the entire Faust
at the Swiss Goetheanum or Hanover's "Expo 2000." Accounts of productions are
accompanied by enlightening quotations from contemporary reviews. A chapter on music, from
the early ballads and ballets to later symphonies, dozens of operas and hundreds of Lieder,
is followed by Paul M. Malone's capsule chapter on "Faust as Rock Opera" (by
Rudolf Volz).
The earliest images of Faust, decorating the chapbook of 1588, grew through the Romantic
depictions by Peter Cornelius and Delacroix to the Prachtausgaben of the late 19th
century and the obsessions of German Expressionists. Durrani appraises the impact of
visual images on theatrical productions and the shifting focus from Faust to
Mephistopheles to Gretchen. Faust was apparently the first book to be filmed (as
early as 1896), and even before Murnau's Faust of 1926 over thirty versions had
appeared. The appeal has continued, by way of Gorski's Faust with Gründgens,
Coghill's Doctor Faustus with Richard Burton, and István Szabó's brilliant Mephisto
down to Švankmajer's unsettling Faust of 1994 (discussed in Derek Katz's
capsule sketch).
The globalization of the theme—Faust's enormous popularity in the United States,
England and elsewhere in Europe—is exemplified by Rolf Hellebust's capsule chapter on
"Faust and the Russian Revolutionary Hero." While the modern imagination sees
Faust as the prototype of the scientist who sells his soul in order to pursue his
research, the subject also appeals to the hordes of tourists visiting museums in sites
associated with his legend, and has spawned industries, from Mephisto shoes to Faust beers
and cosmetics. Inevitably the theme has been reduced to comic books, from "Classics
Illustrated" to such raw parodies as Flix's Who the Fuck Is Faust? or Karl
Lagerfeld's trivialization featuring celebrities. The chapter ends with Yoko Riley's
account of "Faust through the Eyes of a Japanese Cartoonist" (Osamu Tezuka).
Derek Sellen's short story "Faustus and the Potters" concludes the book.
While the volume offers original insights, its main achievement is the monumental one of
assembling and integrating an enormous amount of existing material on the Faust legend,
thus providing a well-nigh inexhaustible source enhanced by bibliographies appended to
each chapter. The few comparable works are exhibition catalogues—e.g., Faust:
Annäherung an einen Mythos, ed. Frank Möbus (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1996)—whose
contributions by various hands, for all their authority, lack the coherence of Durrani's
sustained and lively view.
Prof. THEODORE ZIOLKOWSKI, Princeton University |
