FAUST OR HAMLET? THE GERMANS have identified passionately with one or other archetype at different times. But why these particular figures, whose heroism is so problematic, rather than less flawed tokens of Teutonic virtues? Faust remains the obvious choice. His story surfaced in 1587 in an anonymous German chapbook, Historia von D. Johann Fausten. Shortly thereafter, Christopher Marlowe wrote his play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, beginning Faust’s metamorphosis from a legend to a myth and, finally, a meme.
For the predominant place of Faust in German culture we have, of course, Goethe to thank. Throughout his long life, the subject would not leave him in peace. His Urfaust was drafted in the early 1770s; Faust: A Fragment was published in 1791; the finished verse play Faust: A Tragedy (later known as Part One) appeared in 1806, to be followed in 1832 by the posthumous Part Two. Goethe’s Hauptwerk has inspired countless others, especially composers: Schubert and Liszt, Berlioz and Gounod, Mahler and Busoni. For his 1995 opera, the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke ignored Goethe and went back to the original 1587 text.
Now that Faust has come full circle, one of the few early variations on the theme that is not derivative of Goethe deserves to be rescued from oblivion. One of his friends and contemporaries, the soldier-poet Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, that bridged the gap between the Enlightenment and Romanticism.
