Goethe's Faust, Keller's Romeo Und Julia Auf Dem

Home , Daniel and the Devil

Modernity’s Pact with the Devil: Goethe’s Faust, Keller’s Romeo und Julia auf dem

Dorfe, and Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter as Tales of Forgetting

Thesis

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts

in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Dennis Schaefer, B.A.

Graduate Program in Germanic Languages and Literatures

The Ohio State University

2018

Thesis committee:

Robert C. Holub, Adviser

John E. Davidson

Dennis Schaefer

2018

Abstract

In this MA thesis, I argue that the deal with the devil, as it manifests in 19th century German literary texts like Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Faust: Eine Tragödie, Gottfried Keller’s

Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe, and Theodor Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter, negotiates the experience of modernity and mediates the experience thereof through offering moments of forgetting. Upon approaching modernity with help from Jürgen Habermas, Friedrich

Nietzsche and Karl Marx, the thesis explores the existential importance of Glück and forgetting according to Nietzsche’s second Untimely Meditation, Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fürs Leben. Subsequently, I posit that the deal with the devil, as an explicit component and, later on, implicit undercurrent of 19th century German texts, takes on the role of facilitator of moments of such forgetting. Goethe’s masterpiece Faust lays the foundation for this conflux of developments, motifs, and experiences in the wager its protagonists strikes with the devil Mephistopheles and in the various escapades that take

Faust out of the Gothic halls of the university to the changing feudal world, where he encounters his lover Gretchen. The experience of Glück that he significantly does not seal with her drives him, first, away into the classical spheres of Greek Antiquity, where he cannot rest to be with Helen of Troy, and, second, into a proto-capitalist dam project through which he intends to atone for his failings with Gretchen and congeal the otherwise insubstantial forgetting. In Keller’s Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe, the devilish Black

Fiddler offers Sali and Vrenchen, the two losers of an unfolding modernity, the chance for a tainted forgetting, an offer they do not take. In Der Schimmelreiter, the deal with the

devil materializes from the winning, bourgeois end to Hauke Haien, who builds a dam for purposes palpably similar to Faust’s.

Dedication

Für Fred.

iii

Acknowledgements

To be fair, dedicating nine months of my life to a thesis might not rival the difficulties and rewards of a full-fledged doctoral dissertation, but I could not begin this Magisterarbeit without acknowledging the support I received from a variety of people or institutions. First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor Robert Holub for his unfaltering honesty in all academic, professional, and personal matters, his untiring patience with all my linguistic and argumentative acrobatics, and his uncanny pace at reading papers and answering emails even at late hours of the night. His graduate seminars on Nietzsche and

Marx steered my scholarship into the direction it will take in the future. I owe similar gratitude to my co-advisor John Davidson, who read whatever I gave him with a constructive eye for detail and provided more than one useful piece of advice along the way. Matthew Birkhold, when he read parts of the thesis, thoughtfully engaged my ideas, and further comments from Katra Byram, Sigrid Lange, May Mergenthaler, and Kristina

Mendicino brought the project on course. Helpful friends, readers, and interlocutors, both in Columbus and abroad, include Stephan Ehrig, Kathrin Frenzel-Luke, Tina Grundmann,

Hannah Luge, Clint Morrison, Caro Müller, Birte Pietsch, Mona Schubert, Evan

VanTassell, and the participants and presenters of the German Graduate Student

Conference “Reading Exhaust | Erschöpfende Lektüren” that was held in October 2017 at

Brown University. Hannah Fergen deserves special mention for her invaluable assistance with the final formatting of this document. Moreover, I remain deeply indebted to the

Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures for awarding me a Dr. Henry Kratz Jr.

Summer Research Fellowship, which gave me a summer off to focus on a variety of academic projects from which this thesis eventually emerged, and for funding my journey

to Providence, so that I could present my research. Oftentimes, this rigorous intellectual, professional, and personal support made my job incredibly easy, and whenever it didn’t, everybody here helped me to proceed successfully – and convincingly, I hope – from one text to the other, from one argument to the next.

Columbus, OH, 30. März 2018

Vita

July 2011……………………………… Europaschule Langerwehe Gesamtschule, DE

2013 to 2014…………………………... Visiting Student, University of Warwick, UK 2016…………………………………… B.A. German Studies / English Studies, University of Cologne, DE 2016 to present………………………... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, The Ohio State University

Fields of Study

Major Field: Germanic Languages and Literatures

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... i Dedication ...... iii Acknowledgements ...... iv Vita ...... vi

Preface ...... ix

Chapter 1: Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This): Historical, Theoretical and Conceptual Premises ...... 1 Moments of Modernity: Towards a Definition of Modernity with Nietzsche and Marx ...... 1 The Prospect of Perfection: The Meaning of Forgetting as Glück...... 17 Figurations of the Teufelspakt at the Crossroads in the 19th Century...... 23

Chapter 2: Never Gonna Love Again: Goethe’s Faust on the Dos and Don’ts of Modern Life ...... 30 A Diagnosis of the Modern Condition: Revisiting the Gelehrtentragödie...... 30 A Simple Life? With Faust and Gretchen to the Cusp of Modernity ...... 40 “Arkadisch frei sei unser Glück“: The Quest for Forgetting in the Sphere of the Classical ..... 50 Endgame: Faust’s Enactment of Capitalist Modernization for the Sake of Forgetting ...... 66

Chapter 3: I Got You Babe: The Case of Romeo and Julia auf dem Dorfe ...... 83 Traces of Urbanization: The Impact of Modernity on the Seldwylian Hinterland ...... 83 “[G]egen Abend werden wir dann schon einen Tanzplatz finden”: Sali’s and Vrenchen’s Exhaustion of Glück ...... 93

Chapter 4: My Boy Builds Coffins: Turning the Tides of Time in Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter ...... 105 The Beautiful Mind of Hauke Haien: The Chains of Socratic and Bourgeois Modernity ...... 105 The Devil’s Last Laugh: The Specter of Temporality ...... 115

Coda: The Deal with the Devil as a Metaphor for Modern Life ...... 127

Bibliography ...... 131

vii

She looked ahead, at the haze that melted rail and distance, a haze that could rip apart at any moment to some shape of disaster. She wondered why she felt safer than she ever felt in a car behind the engine, safer here, where it seemed as if, should an obstacle rise, her breast and the glass shield would be first to smash against it. She smiled, grasping the answer: it was the security of being first with full sight and full knowledge of one’s course – not the blind sense of being pulled into the unknown by some unknown power ahead. It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust, but to know. (220) – Ayn Rand: Atlas Shrugged

LEONATO. Well, then, go you into hell? BEATRICE. No, but to the gate, and there will the devil meet me, like an old cuckold, with horns on his head, and say 'Get you to heaven, Beatrice, get you to heaven. Here's no place for you maids!' So deliver I up my apes, and away to Saint Peter fore the heavens. He shows me where the bachelors sit, and there live we as merry as the day is long. (179-180) – William Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing

Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds and contrary tides. I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life’s voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn’t I give now for a never- changing map of the ever constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds. (384) – David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas

viii

Preface

“To make a deal with the devil”, “faire un pacte avec le diable” or “einen Pakt mit dem

Teufel eingehen” are common figures of speech in many languages that may be employed across several genres – we may think of political commentary, historiography, or even literary scholarship – to denote an ethically questionable deed by an agent to accomplish something that would otherwise be out of reach. It should come as no surprise that the literary motif of the deal with the devil, in which Satan or somebody very much alike makes exactly the kind of precarious offer that the English, French or German idiom implies, enjoys an astonishing popularity in the present day. Even if I were to restrict the scope of my work to the modern age, it would take an exceedingly erudite survey of cultural history, well beyond the capabilities of a thesis or even a dissertation, to collect and evaluate the many incarnations of the deal with the devil, that exist alongside him across (not only) the

European lands. When it comes to critical engagement with the deal with the devil in

German literary studies, we can discern a remarkable disparity: On the one hand, Goethe’s

Faust: Eine Tragödie tells the story of a deal with the devil that receives an overwhelming amount of critical attention, since the play is recognized across the board as the pinnacle of German literature. In fact, Goethe’s play has invited prominent philosophers like

Friedrich Nietzsche, György Lukács, and Marshall Berman and major contemporary critics, such as Nicholas Boyle, Jane K. Brown, Lutz Koepnick, Martin Swales or David

Wellbery, to laud it for embodying the very watershed moment of modernity. On the other hand, recent research on the deal with the devil in other 19th century German texts, post-

Goethe, is scarce, to say the least. Though comments on the seduction through the devil are dispersed across many pieces of secondary literature, Volker Hoffmann’s article

“Strukturwandel in den ‘Teufelspaktgeschichten’ des 19. Jahrhunderts” stands, to my knowledge, as the sole piece of critical engagement with this motif on a broader scale;

Hoffmann mentions en passant how the motif migrates at the time from dramatic texts like

Faust to novelistic prose works (117). Yet it is my contention that not every deal with the devil falls under the Faustian paradigm, for there is something peculiar at work in Goethe‘s

Faust: Over the course of their bet, Mephistopheles grants three wishes that emphasize, as

Harald Weinrich reminds us, the power of forgetting: “Der Teufel will immer nur das eine: die Seele, und dieses Ziel erreicht er, so ist sein Kalkül, dann am besten, wenn er […] den

Doktor Faust durch einen tollen Wirbel von Ereignissen von einem Vergessen zum nächsten treibt, bis dieser am Ende – vielleicht – sich selber vergißt.” (155) The experience of modernity is therefore linked to the burning desire for forgetting that is presented by the deal with the devil, and I would identify Keller’s Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe and

Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter as examples where the motif operates along the same lines.

To fruitfully analyze and discuss all these three literary encounters with the devil, I will first expound on the notion of modernity with reference to the German intellectual tradition by drawing on the writings of Jürgen Habermas, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx, then proceed to a consideration of forgetting according to Nietzsche, and finalize my theoretical introduction with the general tendencies of the deal with the devil in literary history. In my analysis of Faust, I will progress from an interpretation of the Gelehrtentragödie to the love story between Faust and Gretchen, his astounding escapades with Helen of Troy herself, and his capitalist exploits in the final two acts of his play. The analyses of Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe and Der Schimmelreiter each revolve first around the particular workings of modernity in these texts and then investigate forgetting through uncanny devil

figures. All three texts articulate a general discontent with modern life; all protagonists wish to escape it in some way or another, but none of them may succeed. This I wish to explore.

Chapter 1: Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This): Historical, Theoretical and Conceptual Premises Moments of Modernity: Towards a Definition of Modernity with Nietzsche and

Marx

From the writing cabinets of European intelligentsia to the factory halls of capitalist industrialism: in the modern age, the human outlook on the world perceives conditions that are theoretically challenging and intellectually uplifting, practically riveting and morally depressing all at once. The tapestry of modernity interweaves strands from intellectual and social history, literary accounts and economic thought and its very fabric intertwines lived experiences with concurrent, projective or retrospective interpretations and personal destinies with transnational developments the likes of which were never seen before. These conditions are as much affected by irrevocably changing trends in thought and action as they are themselves responsible for their very enactment and stir its activities into one direction only: Vorwärts. For this reason, modernity denominates many complex and interrelated motions – and commotions – in intellectual, political and cultural history. To understand modernity means to understand a transformative stage of intellectual as well as material history that philosophical narratives as well as literary texts negotiate and contest most ardently until today. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas conceives, in his

Adorno prize lecture “Die Moderne – ein unvollendetes Projekt,“ of modernity more broadly as the acknowledgment of a present moment that has grown different from an idealized antiquity: “Mit wechselnden Inhalten drückt ‘Modernität’ immer wieder das

Bewußtsein einer Epoche aus, die sich zur Vergangenheit der Antike in Beziehung setzt, um sich selbst als Resultat eines Übergangs vom Alten zum Neuen zu begreifen.“ (33) Yet this self-image of modernity undergoes a fundamental change under the rule of the 1

Enlightenment which overemphasized and claimed a fleeting sense of actuality; Habermas writes: “Als modern gilt nun, was einer spontan sich erneuernden Aktualität des Zeitgeistes zu objektivem Ausdruck verhilft.” (34) As Habermas looks back at the trajectory of modernity, which for him means to look back at a trajectory of promise and excitement, but also of failure and disappointment, this conceptual change in the idea of modernity does not remain without consequences and produces an ambivalence that runs like a red thread through the ceaseless activities the modern spirit inspires:

Die anarchistische Absicht, das Kontinuum der Geschichte aufzusprengen, erklärt die subversive Kraft eines ästhetischen Bewußtseins, das sich gegen die Normalisierungsleistungen von Tradition auflehnt […], süchtig nach der Faszination jenes Erschreckens, das vom Akt der Profanisierung ausgeht – und zugleich auf der Flucht vor deren trivialen Ergebnissen. (35-36)

Habermas understands this “Akt der Profanisierung”, that shatters any sense of stability within the modern consciousness, as the process of enlightenment rationalization for it facilitates the “Ausdifferenzierung der Wertsphären Wissenschaft, Moral und Kunst.”

(41)1 As the realms of science, law and aesthetics – the three realms of the Kantian critique, if you like – gain more and more autonomy,2 they distance themselves from the lives of those they want to impact, and it becomes, for Habermas, increasingly difficult to believe in the positivity of modernity as a force of rationalization, especially with the disastrous events of the 20th century in mind (42). To circumvent this apparently pessimistic imprint on modernity and engage the continuous incongruity of a spirit forever caught in the friction between “Faszination” and “Flucht” (35f), it is my concern to engage modernity

1 Even though this constitutes an observation to be followed through another time, this procedure appears somewhat analogous to the rationalization that is inherent to the social design of reification that Lukács describes in his essays on Das Phänomen der Verdinglichung. 2 With Adorno and Horkheimer’s Der Begriff der Aufklärung borne in mind (34), this also necessitates the separation of aesthetics and science (and, by implication,2 morals) from one another.

through the writings of two eminent philosophers from 19th century German intellectual history, who bore witness to modernity as an ending or turning point in unprecedented historical developments: Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx.

The notion of modernity is ingrained deeply into the philosophies of Marx and

Nietzsche. Marx seems an obvious choice for any consideration of modernity as the era of modernity is oddly intertwined with the notion of capitalism, probably as much as his theses are indispensable for any sophisticated analysis of capitalism (Cf. Freedman xii, 17).

Yet in All that is Solid Melts into Air, his seminal treatise on modernity, Marshall Berman specifically credits both Nietzsche and Marx in particular as individuals who “experienced modernity as a whole at a moment when only a small part of the world was truly modern” and proposes to utilize their unique perspective on modernity for an understanding of our own time, for an understanding of what modernity constitutes today (36).3 As Nietzsche outlines in Die Geburt der Tragödie, the influence of Socratism, i.e. a particular attitude of mind that valorizes rational thinking, wanes after holding Western thought and imagination under its thrall for several millennia, and with its overcoming, modernity might revitalize the ancient poetic experience of the Dionysian. After retracing Friedrich Nietzsche’s discussion of modernity in Die Geburt der Tragödie, the paper takes a more material turn by paying close attention to evocations of modernity and descriptions of its procedural workings in writings by Karl Marx. Deeply invested in what became known as historical materialism, Marx observes a paradigmatic shift in modernity in the rise of capitalism and

3 My approach towards Nietzsche and Marx with regard to modernity differs somewhat from other examinations, as for example undertaken by the political theorist Nancy S. Love. In Marx, Nietzsche, and Modernity, Love relates Marx’s critique of capitalism to Nietzsche’s critique of asceticism (3-4), whereas I intend to delineate their concepts of modernity for a literary reading and focus more on their aesthetic dimension 3

the inevitable demise of traditional modes of production. By navigating the conflicting views of Nietzsche and Marx, I do not intend to oppose one view with the other, but to find a complementary common ground to realize what the idea of modernity entails, and where its progressivity might led, or has lead, for that matter.

Nietzsche’s first philosophical treatise Die Geburt der Tragödie constitutes probably the most extensive commentary on modernity in his writing. To understand its particularly aesthetic dimension, it is important to recapitulate the aesthetic forces from antiquity that Nietzsche, philologist in Basel at the time, integrates into his deliberations.

Ancient Greek tragedy is regarded as the aesthetic product of two complementary forces, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian constitutes the force of the image, a force that separates individuals from one another; the Dionysian on the other hand implies an orgiastic ecstasy that tears down the respective differences between individuals (25-28).

In their coming together, the Apollonian mediates the otherwise unhindered frenzy of its

Dionysian counterforce; in other words, the former provides the rapture of the latter with a shape through the work of art (31). From this initially dissonant, yet ultimately harmonious interplay, tragedy, the aesthetic peak of classical civilization allegedly emerges. Nietzsche states: “Nach dieser Erkenntnis haben wir die griechische Tragödie als den dionysischen

Chor zu verstehen, der sich immer von neuem wieder in einer apollinischen Bilderwelt entladet” (62). Eventually – and sadly in Nietzsche’s view – the cultural apex of antiquity leads downhill when the Dionysian and its aesthetic paradigm are banished into the obscurity of history by the advent of Socrates and Euripides, with what Nietzsche labels

Socratism. With Socrates, the “Typus des theoretischen Menschen” (98) soon enraptures

Western imagination. As a theoretical individual, the Socratic man appears purely invested

in the pursuit of Wissenschaft which encompasses not only the “Suchen der Wahrheit”, but the delusion “dass das Denken das Sein nicht nur zu erkennen, sondern sogar zu corrigieren im Stande sei” (99), i.e. the optimistic belief in human betterment through critical or scientific thinking. Socratism continues to infect individuals who, as theoretical men and as educators of the potential Genius, put themselves into the service of Wissenschaft and thereby of human betterment (101). Repeatedly, Nietzsche designates the ideal of the

Socratic age as “den mit höchsten Erkenntniskräften ausgerüsteten, im Dienste der

Wissenschaft arbeitenden theoretischen Menschen, dessen Urbild und Stammvater

Sokrates ist.“ (116) The implications for modernity are twofold. On the one hand,

Socratism finds its truest and most powerful expression in the improvement of humanity to which the Sapere Aude of European Enlightenment aspires; we may only briefly consider the dictum in Kant’s seminal essay Was ist Aufklärung?: “Habe Mut, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen! ist also der Wahlspruch der Aufklärung.” (53) It stands to reason – no pun intended – that Socratism would consider the Enlightenment, and the modernity it heralds in, as a golden age. On the other hand, Nietzsche first dismisses the

Socratic will for knowledge as nothing but greed; second, in the modern age, the unhindered Socratism ironically reaches a dead end as soon as its zenith has been achieved.

Nietzsche concretely speaks of the “Urleiden der modernen Cultur […], dass der theoretische Mensch vor seinen Consequenzen erschrickt und unbefriedigt es nicht mehr wagt, sich dem furchtbaren Eisstrome des Daseins anzuvertrauen“ (119). More to the point,

Nietzsche considers the Socratic individual as forever enraptured by the need to consume, which holds him under its thrall even in the modern age: “er bleibt doch der ewig

Hungernde.” We might take from Nietzsche a significant characteristic of modernity that,

as Nietzsche nonchalantly articulates, is an amplified characteristic of Socratism: a hunger that knows no bounds. Once the separation of the aesthetic from religion –as Habermas conceives of it – has been achieved, Socratic ambition turns into desperation.

A slight generational and a considerable ideological gap separates Nietzsche and

Marx. Nietzsche attempts a praise of Richard Wagner, whose music is said to resurrect the

Dionysian and in whose the glory ancient tragedy may shine again. And in his attempt to praise Richard Wagner, at whom the work was directed, Nietzsche proclaims quite enthusiastically: “Ja, meine Freunde, glaubt mit mir an das dionysische Leben und an die

Wiedergeburt der Tragödie!” (132) In a paradox that Nietzsche does not explore, modernity’s hunger – or much rather the insatiable hunger of the exhausted Socratic individual – will reinvigorate the Dionysian and resurrect aesthetic production as it once concluded in Greek antiquity. In that sense, modernity could be thought of as a threshold from which an older and purer way of life may emerge again. However, Nietzsche’s attempt to conceptualize modernity from an aesthetic angle ignores, or necessarily has to ignore, the material conditions on which modernity is founded. For example, Marxist critic

György Lukács rightly observes how significantly different modernity is from antiquity and how significantly different philosophical and aesthetic production therefore have to be, for they are deeply rooted in a life that no longer attains any naïve simplicity: “Denn im

Leben der Gegenwart ist es nicht mehr, wie in der Antike, möglich, alle Bestimmungen des Gedankens und der dichterischen Gestaltung unmittelbar vom Menschen aus zu entwickeln.” (127) Specifically Marx’s Kritik der politischen Ökonomie informs Lukács’s observation; here, Marx acknowledges how the splendor of Greek mythology can only be made sense of within the technological simplicity by which they are necessitated: “Ist die

Anschauung der Natur und der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse, die der griechischen

Phantasie und daher der griechischen [Mythologie] zugrunde liegt, möglich mit Selfaktors und Eisenbahnen und Lokomotiven und elektrischen Telegraphen?“ (641) Enticing as this may be, Marx specifically argues for the irretrievability of these conditions which life in the modern age forecloses, but he does not necessarily subvert the graecophilic impulse to which Nietzsche, among many others, subscribes: “Der Reiz ihrer Kunst für uns steht nicht im Widerspruch zu der unentwickelten Gesellschaftsstufe, worauf sie wuchs. Ist viel mehr ihr Resultat und hängt vielmehr unzertrennlich damit zusammen, daß die unreifen gesellschaftlichen Bedingungen, unter denen sie entstand und allein entstehen konnte, nie wiederkehren können.” (642) From a more Habermasian perspective, Nietzsche would intend to revoke specifically the separation of the aesthetic from the Lebenswelt, even if he would consider this not as a result of Enlightenment, but as part of a far more long-term process and hence as a retrieval of Ancient aesthetics. Marx, as will be shown presently, rather intends to formulate new promises for a new era. For Marx, modernity will be a threshold from which the proletarians can overcome capitalist society who will not go back to Antiquity but go forward.

Marx’s observations about the nature of modernity are steeped deeply in the concept of historical materialism. Claims about the material undercurrents of society and philosophy pervade a great deal of his writings, from (not only) the Kritik der Hegelschen

Rechtsphilosophie to his magnum opus Das Kapital, yet the most poignant conceptualization of Marx’s historical materialism can be found in the preface to his Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. The historical significance of these key statements should not be underestimated even though its treatment and status within (Western) Marxism appears

somewhat ambivalent: Robert C. Tucker deems the preface the “locus classicus of historical materialism” (3) whereas Tom Rockmore falls not short of pointing out that historical materialism was never a notion coined by the grand master himself (553). No matter how critics view the historical status of the preface: the veracity of its claims remains incontestable even today. Concretely, Marx considers relations of production to be the very cornerstone of every human society: “In der gesellschaftlichen Produktion ihres Lebens gehen die Menschen bestimmte, notwendige, von ihrem Willen unabhängige Verhältnisse ein, Produktionsverhältnisse, die einer bestimmten Entwicklungsstufe ihrer materiellen

Produktivkräfte entsprechen.” (8) Social organization is therefore not the repercussion or ramification of random historical events, but can always be traced back to a certain stage in the field of production; this gives shape to what Marx deems “ein juristischer und politischer Überbau” (8) or put more concretely: “Die Produktionsweise des materiallen

Lebens bedingt den sozialen, politischen und geistigen Lebensprozeß überhaupt. Es ist nicht das Bewußtsein der Menschen, das ihr Sein, sondern umgekehrt ihr gesellschaftliches

Sein, das ihr Bewußtsein bestimmt.” (8-9) Other instances in his writings echo these statements; in Die deutsche Ideologie, for example, Marx points out: “Die Produktion der

Ideen, Vorstellungen, des Bewußtseins ist zunächst unmittelbar verflochten in die materielle Tätigkeit und den materiellen Verkehr des Menschen, Sprache des wirklichen

Lebens.“ (26) Marx proposes to make sense of consciousness and all of its expressions, whether they are social, political, intellectual or, most relevant for my purposes, aesthetic, through comprehending the material realities which enforce their production. These remarks can, of course, be read in a crude fashion which would turn historical materialism into an affirmation of determinism in human affairs; but Marx, as should be borne in mind,

argues that the conditions an individual confronts determine the choices they have and not necessarily the choices they make.

In Marx’s framework of historical materialism, modernity represents a wide transformative rift that ruptures through the socio-economic and intellectual tissues of the

Western World and comprises the seam that harmonizes seemingly disparate and yet interconnected developments at the same time. According to Die deutsche Ideologie, the modern age results, in logical succession, from large scale demands in production that were triggered by the processes of colonization and that only industry, or rather the all- encompassing process of industrialization, could satisfy: “Diese den Produktionskräften

über den Kopf wachsende Nachfrage war die treibende Kraft, welche die dritte Periode des

Privateigentums seit dem Mittelalter hervorrief, indem sie die große Industrie […] erzeugte.“ (56) This substantive change in production enforces industry to remodel the relations of production for new distributions of private property. In a most vivid description in Die deutsche Ideologie, industry appears simultaneously destructive and creative and enforces modernity’s determination to change:

[Die Industrie] zwang durch die universelle Konkurrenz alle Individuen zur äußersten Anspannung ihrer Energie. Sie vernichtete möglichst die Ideologie, Kultur, Moral etc., und wo sie dies nicht konnte, machte sie sie zur handgreiflichen Lüge. […] Sie vernichtete überhaupt alle Naturwüchsigkeit […] und löste alle naturwüchsigen Verhältnisse in Geldverhältnisse auf. Sie schuf an der Stelle der naturwüchsigen Städte die modernen, großen Industriestädte, die über Nacht entstanden sind. (66)

Industry drives home the transformative thrust of modernity and fully executes its will to consume on economic grounds. It therefore stands to reason that industry, being equipped with a hunger that knows no bounds, correlates to the hunger of the Socratic man in his modern entrapment (Nietzsche, “Die Geburt der Tragödie”, 119). In this sense, Marx and

Nietzsche agree on the stakes of these battles and their specific parts in it, whether the fight is over the resurgence of the Dionysian or between feudalism and capitalism: “Ach! Es ist der Zauber dieser Kämpfe, dass, wer sie schaut, sie auch kämpfen muss.” (102)

Ultimately, the material forces of production in their continuous development reach a limit when the social organization no longer facilitates, but hinders the forms of interaction that were previously necessitated. Marx’s preface to the Kritik der politischen

Ökonomie reads accordingly: “Auf einer gewissen Stufe ihrer Entwicklung geraten die materiellen Produktivkräfte der Gesellschaft in Widerspruch mit den vorhandenen

Produktionsverhältnissen […]. Es tritt dann eine Epoche sozialer Revolution ein.” (9) In these particular historical moments of social revolution, the superstructure reflects not only the dominant shape of production as it relies on certain forms of social interaction, but similarly opens the ideological battleground for the various participants of the social revolution:

In der Betrachtung solcher Umwälzungen muß man stets unterscheiden zwischen der materiellen, naturwissenschaftlich treu zu konstatierenden Umwälzung in den ökonomischen Produktionsbedingungen und den juristischen, politischen, religiösen, künstlerischen oder philosophischen, kurz ideologischen Formen, worin sich die Menschen dieses Konflikts bewußt werden und ihn ausfechten. (9)

Located within these socio-economic transformations and their competing ideological manifestations, Marx’s thought and writing partakes in these revolutionary struggles as a necessary consequence of modernity whenever he describes it, and any piece of literature, as an inherently ideological product of the superstructure, reflects the ongoing interplay between struggle and stabilization. The engine of modernity has been fueled, as stated probably nowhere as clear and concise as in the Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, by the actions of the “aus dem Untergang der feudalen Gesellschaft hervorgegangene moderne

bürgerliche Gesellschaft” (463), and Marx lauds their meticulousness: “Die Bourgeoise

[…] hat alle feudalen, patriarchalischen, idyllischen Verhältnisse zerstört. […] Sie hat, mit einem Wort, an die Stelle der mit religiösen und politischen Illusionen verhüllten

Ausbeutung die offene, unverschämte, direkte, dürre Ausbeutung gesetzt.” (464-465)

Taking a stand against the wide array of theoretical considerations that ignore this particular dimension of Marx’s thought, Marxist critic Karl Korsch stresses the substantive role of the revolution in Marx’s theory that functions only as “eine alle Gebiete des gesellschaftlichen Lebens als Totalität erfassende Theorie der sozialen Revolution” (90).

Even a (literary) text of the modern age that might not move towards a social revolution on the surface level still portrays the severity of the conditions of a life impacted by bourgeois modernity that will eventually destroy it.

Despite the negativity Marx and Nietzsche attach to modernity and its rippling effects on their lives and the lives of many others, the unfolding of modernity might appear darkest just before the dawn. Nietzsche’s disillusion with Wagner’s Der Ring des

Nibelungen in Bayreuth is famous, (Safranski 102-103), and he did not see to see the revival of the Dionysian in his own lifetime – or at least during his sane existence. For

Adrian Del Caro, the Apollonian and the Dionysian “are Nietzsche’s modern extrapolations of what Apollo and Dionysus meant to the pre-Socratic Greeks; hence what we find appealing about The Birth of Tragedy is […] a philosophical ‘invention’ of intellectual and aesthetic properties attributed to the ancients but relevant to moderns.” (57)

Nietzsche’s stipulations appear considerably tainted by spirit of modernity that gives – or fails to give – life to them. In his autobiography Ecce Homo, Nietzsche himself looks back at his writings, produced when he was twenty-seen years of age, and recants some, but not

all of it quite explicitly: “Ein Psychologe dürfte noch hinzufügen, dass was ich in jungen

Jahren bei Wagnerischer Musik gehört habe, Nichts überhaupt mit Wagner zu thun hat; dass wenn ich die dionysische Musik beschrieb, ich das beschrieb, was ich gehört hatte, – dass ich instinktiv Alles in den neuen Geist übersetzen und transfigurieren musste, den ich in mir trug.“ (313-314) One should note the important shift in Nietzsche’s autobiographical account: Wagner could never have brought forth the Dionysian, so allegedly, Nietzsche experienced the primal force of antiquity all by himself and he alone remains as a testimony to its retrieval and eventual emerge in modernity. In sum, the possibility of glimpsing into a world beyond Socratism still exists, even if Nietzsche mistakenly located its riveting fascination in the serendipity of Wagner’s opera to make sense of his experience. On the one hand, he expresses the unfaltering hope that the return of the Dionysian is not foreclosed – if it resurfaced once, it might resurface again and eo ipso give meaning to its first resurgence. On the other hand, Nietzsche appears to have felt the hunger he attached to modern man very much as his own.

Marx similarly articulates the hopeful potentialities of modernity when, in the

Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, he and Engels famously predict the pending proletarian revolution. This follows logically from the destruction of feudalism; hence it appears well within the developmental route of (capitalist) modernity: “Die Waffen, womit die Bourgeoisie den Feudalismus zu Boden geschlagen hat, richten sich jetzt gegen die

Bourgeoisie selbst. Aber die Bourgeoise hat nicht nur die Waffen geschmiedet, die ihr den

Tod bringen; sie hat auch die Männer gezeugt, die diese Waffen führen werden – die modernen Arbeiter, die Proletarier.” (468). The workers of modernity exist in a complete state of alienation – another product of the entrapment within modernity – and they grow

more and more in numbers the poorer they become. Conversely, the richer and richer the bourgeoisie becomes, the more their numbers dwindle and more of their members feed into the proletariat. (472-473). To quote Carl Freedman: “No system that depends upon limited resources for unlimited expansion can endure forever. Capitalism is in effect a gigantic pyramid scheme, and, [...] when growth finally halts, the pyramid collapses.” (5) Similarly, surplus value cannot be created ex nihilio; as much as it may account for the unhindered frenzy that is capitalist production, it will also result in its eventual – and inevitable – folding. In that collapse, the proletariat will not redistribute private property, as it always happened in the past, but abolish the notion of private property in toto. Out of the ashes of capitalist modernity, a richer – but not more prosperous – and freer society will rise that is the complete mirror image of bourgeois society and realizes the promises of modernity:

“An die Stelle der alten bürgerlichen Gesellschaft mit ihren Klassen und

Klassengegensätzen tritt eine Assoziation, worin die freie Entwicklung eines jeden die

Bedingung für die freier Entwicklung aller ist.” (482) For their unfaltering optimism, Marx as well as Engels were at the receiving end of much interpretative scrutiny. Eric Hobsbawn admits quite frankly in How to Change the World that a lot of what Marx wrote – or thought

– might be outdated or “no longer acceptable” as of today (12). Arguably, the same could be stated of Nietzsche’s thoughts on modernity in one way or another; his stipulations about

Socratism would certainly not hold up to any serious consideration of cultural history. Yet they both point out the depravity that the change of modernity, despite all its positivity, brings forth.

The notion of modernity is of a richly pervasive and enduringly fascinating ambivalence. Through its relentless will to consume and its uncompromising will to

transform, modernity constitutes a constant awareness that the world has become fundamentally different from what it once was, in the same way it profoundly impacted and irreversibly defined the face and shape of Western Europe from the 18th century onwards on a personal level as well as on a global scale. In their views on modernity,

Nietzsche and Marx might constitute less of a binary, but more a chiasm of some sort.

Aesthetically, the former understood modernity as a point of departure; economically, the other intended to see it through until the end. But both captured their insights into modernity when it emerges from its infancy and their delineation of unhindered rationality and excessive capitalism might account for two seemingly disparate, but not entirely unrelated problems. Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Der Begriff der Aufklärung plays a tune similar to Nietzsche in its critique of Enlightened rationalism: “Das Wissen, das Macht ist, kennt keine Schranken, weder in der Versklavung der Kreatur noch in der Willfährigkeit gegen die Herren der Welt.“ (20) And they draw a connection between this Enlightenment attachment to technology to the meticulous exploitation in capitalism: “Technik ist das

Wesen dieses Wissens. Es zielt nicht auf Begriffe und Bilder, nicht auf das Glück der

Einsicht, sondern auf Methode, Ausnutzung der Arbeit anderer, Kapital.“ (20) Despite a pessimistic view that would appear so apparent, neither Nietzsche nor Marx appear able to dismiss or escape from modernity in any way; much rather, they understood modernity as the moment during which man could achieve a richer and fuller experience of life by either regaining a previously unreachable aesthetic or laying claim to their own economic agency.

Accordingly, Habermas also sees no reason to give up on modernity just yet: “Ich meine, daß wir eher aus den Verirrungen, die das Projekt der Moderne begleitet haben, aus den

Fehlern der verstiegenen Aufhebungsprogramme lernen, statt die Moderne und ihr Projekt

selbst verloren geben sollten.” (49) In this respect, Habermas taps into a similar sense of optimism in his attempt to ensure that modernity’s trajectory meets its promises. Quite specifically, he locates the possibility of altering the course of modernity in the field of aesthetic criticism that in his opinion should enter the Lebenswelt to overcome the boundaries that modernity has demarcated around the areas of law, science and art so far

(50-51). I cannot promise that my project will satisfy the demands that Habermas puts on aesthetic criticism in general and on literary criticism in particular, but it will investigate the potentials of modernity alongside the tensions that my literary examples convey. From all three literary texts soon to be under discussion – Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Faust,

Gottfried Keller’s Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe and Theodor Storm’s Der

Schimmelreiter – that flicker of hope I extracted within Marx, Nietzsche, and Habermas emanates in an attempt to define and utilize the experience of modernity for individual fulfilment as it has become possible with the fall of the Ancien Régime. Concordantly, they illustrate the many misgivings and uncertainties of life under the material conditions of an exhausted Socratism and search for a way to endure them purposefully without necessarily succeeding.

A major repercussion of modernity is the phenomenon of secularization. As the famous historian Jürgen Osterhammel points out in his historic overview of the 19th century, the term initially denoted transfer of land from the church to lay owners; “[t]hen it acquired a new meaning: the decline of religious influence over human thought, the organization of society and government politics.” (880) Implicated in the venture of the –

Socratic – Enlightenment as well as in the necessities of an emerging capitalism, secularization constitutes the crucial point in which the domains of thought and economics,

indistinguishably from one another, galvanize the project of modernity. It spearheaded the process of rationalization that Habermas holds responsible for the differentiation and autonomization of science, law and art through the dissociation of religion (41). This process affects, as goes without saying, all realms of cultural production. In particular, secular modernity draws on the notion of Glück. In Zur Kritik der Hegelschen

Rechtsphilosophie, Marx observes: “Die Kritik der Religion endet mit der Lehre, daß der

Mensch das höchste Wesen für den Menschen sei.” (385) Though freed from the addiction to the “Opium des Volkes” (378), modern man (and woman, of course) is not freed from the existential demands that religion once satisfied. When religion, as an institution of power, loses its overbearing significance, the existential needs it once placated are relocated from the Jenseits into the Diesseits, from the afterlife to the life here on Earth.

More specifically, Marx writes about the effects the Aufhebung of religion implies: “Die

Aufhebung der Religion als das illusorischen Glücks des Volkes ist die Forderung seines wirklichen Glücks.” (379) To understand Glück as essential component of the modern experience of love in particularly, I may draw upon Nietzsche’s second Unzeitgemäße

Betrachtung, Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fürs Leben, in which he considered forgetting, at its most powerful, as a of Glück.

The Prospect of Perfection: The Meaning of Forgetting as Glück

Auf die Frage, was denn die Menschen vor allem erreichen wollen, denke ich mir, dass das erste Ziel der Menschen doch das Glück ist. Unter dem Glück stelle ich mir einen Zustand vor, der daraus besteht, dass die Tatsache des Existierens für den Menschen gar keine Qual bedeutet, dass man gerne lebt und einem das Leben sogar Freude macht. (193-194)

Thus comments Fritz Zorn’s autobiographical account Mars on the simplicity of Glück that allegedly legitimizes as well as motivates most, if not all, human activity. Primarily, the actions of any human revolve around the obtainment and sustenance of something that

Zorn deems Glück and that he diagnoses, unknowingly, as the principal objective of his modern day and age. While there is a constant dialogue with ideas and concepts of Friedrich

Nietzsche in Mars, Zorn forgets in his critical assessment of Glück its principal component that Nietzsche sees at work there, both in and outside of modernity: the notion of forgetting.

Nietzsche himself describes the volatile quality of Glück in his second Untimely

Meditation, Von Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fürs Leben, where he outlines the human condition on the basis of memory and the necessary contrast to animals that this implies.

According to Nietzsche, animals exist in a state of permanent forgetting, whereas human beings are bound to their memory and are therefore bound to a precarious inability to forget for longer, if not perpetual, periods of time. Hence, man looks at animals from a paradoxical position of jealousy: “[D]as will er allein, gleich dem Tiere weder überdrüssig, noch unter Schmerzen leben, und will es doch vergebens, weil er nicht will wie das Tier.”

(“Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen“, 248) Unlike all animals, human beings are caught in a feedback-loop between forgetting and remembering which Nietzsche illustrates in the metaphor of a leaf: “Fortwährend löst sich ein Blatt aus der Rolle der Zeit, fällt heraus, flattert fort – und flattert plötzlich wieder zurück, dem Menschen in den Schoß.“ (248-249)

Nietzsche observes a frustration that emerges from this disparity between animals and humans and between a life with and without the burden of remembrance respectively: “So lebt das Tier unhistorisch; denn es geht auf in der Gegenwart, wie eine Zahl, ohne daß ein wunderlicher Bruch übrigbleibt, […] kann also gar nicht anders sein als ehrlich. Der

Mensch hingegen stemmt sich gegen die große und immer größere Last des Vergangenen.“

(249) For man, an unhistorical existence, located at the very intersection between past, present and future, constitutes an ignorant state upon which he looks only “als ob er eines verlorenen Paradieses gedächte.” For that matter, this particular quality of humanity is not only polygenetic, but also ontogenetic in nature, i.e. an aspect of our species being and of man’s individual coming of age: “Dann lernt [das Kind] das Wort ‘es war’ zu verstehen, jenes Losungswort, mit dem Kampf, Leiden und Ueberdruß an den Menschen herankommen, ihn zu erinnern, was sein Dasein im Grunde ist – ein nie zu vollendendes

Imperfektum.” Yet human beings, in their propensity to remember, do of course not only encounter the likes of “Kampf, Leiden und Ueberdruß,” for Nietzsche recognizes another aspect of human existence that fractures the unhindered terror our lives would otherwise constitute. Like Zorn, Nietzsche calls it Glück and locates within it the possibility to reconcile our human nature with the loss of animalistic, unhistorical serenity, to pause or even escape the pandemonium of linear temporal progression, if only for a moment, and to thereby (re)discover the prospect of perfection.

Qua forgetting, the idea of Glück indicates a way out of the predicament of humanity’s continuous remembrance. Nietzsche designates Glück our very raison d’être, as the one thing that returns human beings to the state of animalistic blissfulness and in so doing, releases us from our temporal imprisonment: “Bei dem kleinsten aber auch bei dem

größten Glück ist es immer eins, wodurch Glück zum Glücke wird: Das Vergessen-können oder, gelehrter ausgedruckt, das Vermögen, während seiner Dauer unhistorisch zu empfinden.” (250) Glück reconstitutes our unhistorical comprehension of the world and moves us out of phase with the temporal alignment that so burdens our existence by making us, as simple as it sounds, forget all about it. Forgetting does, however, not necessarily terminate temporal progression in any way, but merely removes the burden of tempus fugit temporarily from all our lives. Without this, Nietzsche argues, human existence would probably come close to representing nothing but a pitiless, endless struggle with the unforgettable weight of the world on our shoulders, for the only real alternative for forgetting would be death: “Bringt endlich der Tod das ersehnte Vergessen, so […] drückt

[er] damit das Siegel auf jene Erkenntniss, dass Dasein nur ein ununterbrochenes

Gewesensein ist, ein Ding, das davon lebt, sich selbst zu verneinen und zu verzehren, sich selbst zu widersprechen.“ (249) Hence, Nietzsche does not sentence human beings to the completely meaningless state of an ever-fleeting present and of an ever-disrupting self- contradiction. Looked at it through the lens of Glück, all life appears worth living (as well as re-living, for that matter).

As Nietzsche points out, the experience Glück can be shared with others; in fact, he inscribes mutuality into the very experience of Glück, for one cannot infect somebody else with a happiness beyond compare without having experienced the vivaciousness of the lost and abandoned ‘tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ oneself: “Wer sich nicht auf der

Schwelle des Augenblicks, alle Vergangenheiten vergessend, niederlassen kann […], der wird nie wissen, was Glück ist, und noch schlimmer: er wird nie etwas thun, was Andere glücklich macht.” (250) Forgetting does not have to happen to an individual alone, as we

may infer from its double nature as both an aspect of our individual existence and of our nature as homo sapiens. In addition to our shared burden of memory, one human being can connect with another through a foundational common ground of something that unmakes what we are. In his seminal L'Insoutenable légèreté de l'être, Milan Kundera speaks of the power of co-feeling – also called co-sentiment in French or Mitgefühl in German – which he regards as “la plus haute capacité d’imagination affective” or even as “le sentiment suprême” (37). I would propose that Glück manifests in a significant manner as such an instance of co-feeling. It may, but does not necessarily have to, constitute solely an experience of an individual, but establishes a link with another individual or group that does not rely on a shared entrapment of temporality, but a shared defiance thereof – a return to sweet ignorance and incomparable bliss. Glück therefore energizes a mode of unhistorical existence that, in its motionlessness, remains oblivious of the transitoriness without which its glory would of course bear no meaning. For an individual as well as for a people or a culture, it might be the ecstasy of experiencing a miracle of historical proportions. Anybody can probably think of an instance where time stopped for all the right reasons; it may simply be the pleasure of falling in love or, from a much grander perspective, a moment of communal harmony and similar magnificence, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall for example. Because of that, occurrences of Glück, however, do not exist singularly in their unhistorical detachment, but play a grander role in the historical scheme of things.

The notion of Glück is paramount for any human action. Nietzsche writes: “Zu allem Handeln gehört Vergessen: wie zum Leben alles Organischen nicht nur Licht, sondern auch Dunkel gehört.” (250) But at the same time, Nietzsche stresses how the

interplay of Vergessen with the remembering it tries to overcome is of the utmost significance: “Die Heiterkeit, das gute Gewissen, die frohe Tat, das Vertrauen auf das

Kommende – alles das hängt, bei dem einzelnen wie bei dem Volke, davon ab, daß […] man ebenso gut zur rechten Zeit zu vergessen weiß, als man sich zur rechten Zeit erinnert.“

(252) Accordingly, Nietzsche considers forgetting as well as remembrance

“gleichermassen für die Gesundheit eines einzelnen, eines Volkes und einer Cultur nötig.”

Yet forceful and heartfelt as it is, only the human ability to experience infinite happiness in an infinitesimal moment of forgetting actually stimulates human growth and development: “[W]ir werden also die Fähigkeit, in einem bestimmten Grade unhistorisch empfinden zu können, für die wichtigere und ursprünglichere halten müssen, insofern in ihr das Fundament liegt, auf dem überhaupt erst etwas Rechtes, Gesundes und Grosses, etwas wahrhaft Menschliches wachsen kann.” In his study Lethe, Harald Weinrich comments on the interplay between Nutzen and Nachteil in Nietzsche’s title and the implications it has for his appraisal of forgetting: “Einem geringen Nutzen steht also ein gewaltiger Nachteil der Historie für das Leben gegenüber, und im Streit zwischen dem

Gedächtnis und dem Vergessen erhält das Vergessen den Zuschlag.“ (163) Not surprisingly, Nietzsche calls forgetting the “Geburtsschooss nicht nur einer ungerechten, sondern vielmehr jeder rechten That” (253); it constitutes the very basis for great and otherwise unimaginable deeds, for he says: “[K]ein Künstler wird sein Bild, kein Feldherr seinen Sieg, kein Volk seine Freiheit erreichen, ohne sie in einem derartig unhistorischen

Zustande vorher begehrt und erstrebt zu haben.” (253-254) In the light of Glück, all actions immediately appear necessary and justified because of the magnificence from which they emerge, so by implication, forgetting also forms the very basis for great and otherwise

unimaginable evil. By this very quality, we continuously fall from paradise by forgetting only to possibly regain it someday (and only for some day).

Despite their undeniable grandiosity, Glück, and the forgetting that it implies, raise questions about the nature of its textual or aesthetic representation, for forgetting inhabits a peculiar position in relationship to language. To quote Weinrich one more time: “So bedarf es […] keiner schulmäßigen Definition des Wortes vergessen. Was dieses Wort bedeutet, weiß man schon und kann dies am wenigsten vergessen.“ (12) Weinrich of course only implies the literal meaning of forgetting from which I would not so much divorce the

Nietzschean idea, but refine it nonetheless. It stands to reason that no instance of forgetting can actually comprise the enormity of a moment of Glück, and by the same token, neither can any instance of Glück contain at its core the full power of forgetting. But any true instance of Glück in the Nietzschean sense, as it glorifies forgetting so entirely, shares the very self-evidence and unforgettableness of the literal meaning of forgetting that Weinrich speaks of. On the one hand, it goes without saying that a moment of Glück can in itself never be forgotten. In a mutually reinforcing duality, forgetting reigns within the moment and constitutes an echo powerful still post facto; all that stays from the act of forgetting cannot be forgotten, yet humans remember or even make sense of it only in its absence.

And on the other hand, Glück denotes, in its suspension of finitude, something so plain and therefore so immediately recognizable that language itself can fade before the expression of its ineffable magnitude and its comprehensible simplicitly that is so easily transmittable through co-feeling. This leaves me with two implications for the representation of forgetting in literature of the modern age. In a literary text, I propose, we may search and uncover these moments of Glück and forgetting; they are first denoted merely through the

occurrence of lexical items like vergessen and Glück themselves, thereby speaking to and of that instance of co-feeling by which we immediately know what they imply. But above all else, they invigorate and energize an aesthetic expression that strives to speak of their mesmerizing intensity, the immediate recognition thereof, and the destitution upon losing it, as in texts such as Goethe’s Faust, Keller’s Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe, and Keller’s

Der Schimmelreiter where they go hand in hand with a devil’s pact.

Figurations of the Teufelspakt at the Crossroads in the 19th Century

The pact with the devil holds a certain sway over Western culture and it goes without saying that the different shapes and forms of the deal with the devil in cultural history are inexorably intertwined with the various incarnations of the devil and the different conditions that empower him (or her).4 Even though his origins have long been lost in the mists of time, Peter Stanford’s The Devil: A Biography makes an educated guess as to where this decidedly negative figure originated: “The Devil has been around for some

2,000 years in the New Testament and may be for a good deal longer in various other guises and incarnations. Indeed exact details of the birth, parentage, and education of this doughty time traveler are impossible to come by.” (1) Stanford conjectures that the devil migrated from the Near Eastern cultural sphere into the West and conceives of him as a representative figure of evil as a particularly Christian notion (1-3). An investigation by

Eda Sagarra echoes this: “Das Prinzip des Bösen, Teufel genannt, übte seit Beginn der

Geschichte der christlichen Kirche eine Faszination auf die Gläubigen aus.” (129) Yet the entry on “Teufelsbündner” in Elisabeth Frenzel’s Motive der Weltliteratur refines these

4 Over the course of my deliberations, I will make use of deal with the devil, pact with the devil, and Teufelspakt interchangeably. 23

observations with a preciser differentation: “Diese Zuordnung zum Reich des Bösen kannten allerdings nur Völker, die ein deutlich dualistisches Weltbild besaßen, wie die orientalischen Nationen, unter denen gerade das Judentum die Vorstellung einer gegengöttlichen Macht pflegte und an das Christentum weitergab.“ (669) Regardless of a specifically Judaic or Christian attachment of evil, we can locate the devil as a figure who stands at the very inception of what we may conceive of as Western culture; he has plagued the Occident from its very beginning, and so has the enticing temptation to give up on God for whatever thing conceivable that he may have to offer.

The motif of the pact with the devil has proven popular from late antiquity to the early and late modern era. Every epoch redefines what he has to offer according to the spiritual restrictions and requirements that are placed on an individual. The usual characteristics of the motif, as Frenzel points out, therefore appear redundant and out of place in the context of a pre-Christian world: “Das für das Teufelsbündner-Motiv typische

Moment des Verrats an der göttlichen Welt, die Verpfändung des Seelenheils, fehlte in der

Antike.“ (669) Notably, the willing decision to give up one’s soul, and one’s spiritual salvation along with it, occurs mostly out of some spiritual, if not romantic, or even material gain. Frenzel surmizes further: “Der Teufelsbündner genießt zunächst die Vorteile der

Partnerschaft und hofft außerdem meist, sich den eingegangenen Verpflichtungen entziehen zu können, zur Not mit unlauteren Mittel. […] Im Tauziehen der Partner liegt der Spannungsreiz des Motivs.“ (669-670) Walter Haug draws a similar line of continuity of the Teufelspakt from early Christian lore into the cultural imagination of the Middle

Ages (187-189). Yet he paints a more sophisticated picture of what issue is actually at stake when a literary text represents a pact with the devil of some sort:

Die Thematik […] wurzelt in einem theoretisch-anthropologischen Problem, dem Problem des menschlichen Verhältnisses zum Bösen, wobei es jedoch erzählerisch unter einem spezifischen Aspekt entwickelt wird: dem Aspekt seiner Verführungskraft, seiner produktiven Möglichkeiten, seiner Funktionalisierbarkeit. […] Der Teufelspakt […] bringt also […] ein Problem auf den Punkt, das theologisch nur mit großer Zurückhaltung angegangen worden ist: die Frage der Positivierung des Negativen (185).

Usually through magical or fantastic means, a pact with the devil offers the possibility to advance one’s own personal destiny against the limitations of one’s own existence or to escape an otherwise inexorable situation or predicament. In this instance, the devil as the very embodiment or even epitome of evil takes on his most positive shade and appears to be quite ambivalent given the possibilities his mere presence opens up. However, the very means of exceeding or cheating the boundaries of one’s life oftentimes come back with a vengeance; when the world order one threw out of balance realigns, the life of the

Teufelsbündner is thrown into even further disarray or returned to the status quo. The

Teufelspakt makes achievements possible or even enjoyable as much as it ultimately ensures that you may not keep what you gained. To take Haug’s stipulation one step further, it appears noteworthy on the one hand that the question of the “Positivierung des

Negativen” is seldom answered in the affirmative; whenever the pact with the devil results in the inescapable tarnation of the mortal who entered it, the ethical and theological perspective suggests that the end never justify the means and that nothing justifies turning away from God or higher moral values of humanity. On the other hand, the deal with the devil opens up the possibility that, vain as any granted wish may appear, there is unequivocally something on earth that appears worthy enough to give up one’s soul and that, concordantly, is so fulfilling that surrendering of one’s most precious gift from God might be exactly the price worth paying. With every new incarnation, the deal with the

devil questions the dogmatic belief of Christianity in the priceless worth of salvation and finds a new way to make this life worth more than the afterlife. As conservative and didactic as the inevitable repentance may be, the deal with the devil continuously hones the possibility of the ultimate defiance of the Godly world order because it outlines what a given society might deem most despicable and most desirable at the same time.

With the advent of modernity, one might expect the Teufelspakt to go out of fashion, but the motif much rather undergoes certain mutations correlating to the new secular era of Enlightened rationality and capitalist achievements. Especially for the 19th century, we can notice two general tendencies. Hans Richard Brittnacher’s Ästhetik des

Horros notes a significant modernization of the Teufelspakt in the Romantic period (236).

Through the visage of the devilish philistine, the deal with the devil expresses what

Brittnacher calls the “Gesetz des bürgerlichen Zeitalters: Seele gegen Geld” and the deal becomes all the more significant, the less exorbitant and more life-like its supernatural instigator appears (241). Brittnacher’s stipulation especially applies to fantastic Romantic novellas like Adalbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte or

Ludwig Tieck’s Der Runenberg. Volker Hoffmann’s previously mentioned essay

“Strukturwandel in den ‘Teufelspaktgeschichten’ des 19. Jahrhunderts” posits that the deal with the devil appears in a subgenre of the “negative Lebensgeschichte” (120) where, in a critical moment of transition, the seduction of a devilish force throws the life of a protagonist into disarray. With the progression towards late realism, the protagonists grow less and less aware of what the agreement they enter actually constitutes: “Die realistischen

Geschichten gehen bis an die Grenze des Plausiblen, d.h. des realistisch Erzählbaren, um

dieses Bewußtseinsdefizit ihrer zentralen Figuren dem Leser verständlich zu machen.”

Frenzel’s Motive der Weltliteratur argues along similar lines:

Trotz der zunehmend realistischen Geschmacksrichtung brach die Tradition des Teufelsbündner-Motivs nach dem Ablinken der Romantik keineswegs ab. Es gehört zu jenen irrationalen Motiven der Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts, die mit ihrer symbolisierenden Funktion ein Gegengewicht gegen den Detailrealismus bildeten. (678)

In other words, the deal with the devil goes underground with the decline of Romanticism and is seemingly woven into the texture of late 19th century literary works with a borderline disregard for the aesthetic postulates of Realism. Consequently, we might argue that the motif not only successfully transitions from the feudal world into the world of modernity, but remains true to its pre-modern figuration of material or immaterial surplus and attains a particular significance as a platform for critique of the new world order. Slavoj Žižek defines this phenomenon as “historical trans-functionalization: in a changed historical constellation, a remnant of the pre-modern past can start to function as the symbol of what is traumatically unbearable in extreme modernity.” (13) The deal with the devil, freed through the processes of secularization, comes to represent the simultaneity of promise and betrayal that make up the adventure of living in modernity, and this evolution is, of course, no random occurrence.

Undoubtedly, we can locate the modern-day locus classicus of the motif in

Goethe’s Faust: Eine Tragödie. The play constitutes the invigoration of the motif in the modern age along more general lines, but in particular ranks as a pivotal, but not first or only evocation of the story of the infamous charlatan Faust. Already in the Historia von D.

Johann Fausten, the Faust material incorporates a variety of materials that are connected to the lore of the deal with the devil. Haug retraces the different routes of the Teufelspakt

from early Christian mythology to the Legenda aurea (188) and of the several ways the

Fauststoff took until it reached Goethe (187).5 Goethe’s treatment of the Faust story and the pact he makes with Mephistopheles constitutes the latest turning point in the history of the motif not because of the way it looks back on the motif or significantly contributes to its increase in popularity, but because of the way the two Faust plays carry it forward into the modern age and essentially invalidates the previous, religiously impregnated incarnations of the Faust material. Literary texts about a deal with the devil that follow the

Faustian prototype – and of which there are, as I would argue, only a few – aesthetically negotiate the impact of modernity, with which the Goethean example is entangled, by ascribing a single function to it. Characters in such texts task a Teufelspakt with facilitating a moment of Nietzschean Glück that comes to constitute the prime achievement of modern life, but in a bizarre twist of logic that is so appropriately represented in the deal with the devil, only because it achieves an escape from it. An individual might wish to locate the prospect of Glück and forgetting in its modern world, but being unable to find it, the deal with the devil constitutes the only avenue of its achievement and concordantly the only avenue of escape from the hardship that a modern existence might constitute otherwise. In the attempt to realize that demand, the conflux of modernity, the deal with the devil, and

Glück ties the triad of Faust, Romeo and Julia auf dem Dorfe, and Der Schimmelreiter together in a chain of intertextual progression.6 Both novellas follow the thread of

5 What might go hand in hand with this development is the increasing popularity of the motif at the end of the Middle Ages (Frenzel 672), for which older materials with a similar theme were included in order to enrich the Faust theme further. 6 Other literary texts of the period contain deals with the devil and connect it to an experience of forgetting. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Das Fräulein von Scuderi for example not only provides us with the devilish figure in the form of Cardillac (Füllmann 56), but – en passent – with a deal between him and his assistant Olivier that similarly provides oblivion for the latter and Cardillac’s daughter Madelon, with whom he is infatuated: “Zuweilen war es mir, als sei ich selbst Cardillacs Mordgehülfe geworden, nur in Madelons Liebe vergaß ich die innere Pein, die mich quälte, nur bei ihr konnte28 es mir gelingen, jede äußere Spur namenlosen Grams

forgetting that runs, as a search for stillness, through the story of the Teufelspakt according to the Goethean example as an immediate repercussion of modernity and of the secularization subordinate to it. In this motif, modernity finds, if not the most prominent, then at least the most appropriate expression of the dialectic complications that make up the experience of simultaneous temptation and deprivation in modern life. The deal with the devil, in its concatenation with Glück, ultimately questions whether the unhindered chances of modernity can be their own rewards.

wegzutilgen.” (53) Missing from this engagement, in my view, is the repercussion of modernity that this deal mediates. 29

Chapter 2: Never Gonna Love Again: Goethe’s Faust on the Dos and

Don’ts of Modern Life

A Diagnosis of the Modern Condition: Revisiting the Gelehrtentragödie

As the story of a man who makes a wager with the devil, Goethe’s Faust: Eine Tragödie has come a long way. For critics past and present, the play inhabits a pivotal position in literary criticism and cultural history as an engagement and reckoning with the notion of modernity through its multi-layered employment of the deal with the devil. In the departure from the realm of the scholastic, Faust’s experience of interpersonal love, classical aesthetics, and economic development stimulates, one after the other, an examination of modernity as a moment of irrevocable and fundamental change. Yet Faust does more than represent the inherently complex, but not incomprehensible fabric of modernity; Faust executes key moments of the modern age, and in Goethe’s choice of the deal with the devil, embraces the tantalizing ambivalence of this irrevocable experiment. For this purpose, the play diagnoses the equally negative and positive potentialities of a life in the modern era as much as it documents the relentless processes of modernization and the price at which they are set into motion. One of the most prominent observers of the former characteristic of the play would undoubtedly be Friedrich Nietzsche: In Die Geburt der Tragödie,

Nietzsche acknowledges Goethe’s Faust for its portrayal of a Socratic individual who realizes the futility of his perpetual search for knowledge. In this context, Nietzsche explicitly alludes to the famous opening lines of the play (“Habe nun, ach…”, V. 354):

Wie unverständlich müsste einem ächten Griechen der an sich verständliche moderne Culturmensch Faust erscheinen, der durch alle Facultäten unbefriedigt stürmende, aus Wissenstrieb der Magie und dem Teufel ergebene Faust, den wir nur zur Vergleichung neben Sokrates zu stellen haben, um zu erkennen, dass der

Mensch die Grenzen jener sokratischen Erkenntnislust zu ahnen beginnt und aus dem weiten wüsten Wissensmeere nach einer Küste verlangt (116).

In his opening soliloquy, to which Nietzsche refers here, Faust spells out all the ideals of

Socratic optimism: His studies led him far and wide (“Philosophie, / Juristerei und Medizin

/ Und leider auch Theologie” V. 354-356) and his teaching passes on this wealth of knowledge, without any judgment about his pedagogical qualities, on to his students: “Und ziehe schon an die zehen Jahr‘ / […] Meine Schüler an der Nase herum” (V. 361-363). Yet

Faust despairs upon realizing the futility and inadequacy of the traditional modes of scholarly research in which he is so invested (“Und sehe, daß wir nichts wissen können! /

Das will mir schier das Herz verbrennen.“ V. 364-365) and thereby articulates a strong discontent with what Nietzsche conceives of as the Socratic.

Even if one does not completely accept Nietzsche’s quasi-historical explanation and for example much rather would regard Faust’s comments as a general dissatisfaction with the Sapere Aude that so strongly pervades European Enlightenment, this does not alleviate the significant observation Nietzsche makes in this brief allusion: the modern individual, embodied and epitomized by Faust, has arrived at the end point of an era that measured success and fulfillment in life by the amplification of reason. As it is represented in Faust, the onset of modernity produces a desire to overcome old paradigms, a readiness to face new challenges and the willingness to achieve anything by whatever means necessary. For

Nietzsche, the “dem Teufel ergebene Faust” (116) is arguably the most significant expression of this new raison d’être of the modern age and his decision is one of despair, for in the opening soliloquy, another aspect shines through which Nietzsche does not mention: Faust regrets his study of theology (“leider auch Theologie”, V. 356) and asserts the inadequacy of religious discourse to serve as a compass to navigate the bigger picture. 31

Incorporating the modern indebtedness towards religion and the simultaneous divorce from it, the deal with the devil offers the only way to keep up with the propulsive movement of modernity in thought as well as in action. Faust conceptualizes modernity as a deal with the devil that is not so much entered voluntarily, but out of necessity.

A frustration with religion invigorates the early monologues and dialogues of the play in which the disillusion with reason is so prominent; his professional crisis as a professor and scholar emerges from a primarily theological concern, Faust’s deeply troubled relationship to God. When the Erdgeist taunts him (“Du gleichst dem Geist, den du begreifst, / Nicht mir!” V. 512-513), Faust asks one thing and answers it ironically right away: “Wem denn? / Ich Ebenbild der Gottheit!” (V. 515-516). He questions the very validity of Gen 1:26, where God and His angels create man in their image, and the rest of the Gelehrtentragödie profoundly echoes this sentiment: “Den Göttern gleich’ ich nicht!

Zu tief ist es gefühlt. / Dem Wurme gleich’ ich, der den Staub durchwühlt” (V. 652-653).

The summoning of the Erdgeist marks an almost allegorical moment through which the play diagnoses a problematic on a much grander scale: As Jane K Brown reminds us,

“Faust comprehends far-reaching changes in philosophy, science, political and economic organization, industrialization and technology that might best be summarized as Europe’s confrontation with the impact of secularization” (“Faust”, 84). Once modern man in

Western Europe reaches – or realizes – the edge of reason, the dogmatic hold of Christianity loses all its strength. The intellectual dilemmas of the scholar in his somber “Mottenwelt”

(V. 659) reveal an almost existential dissatisfaction with life in the purely secular domain:

“Hier soll ich finden, was mir fehlt? / Soll ich vielleicht in tausend Büchern lesen, / Daß

überall die Menschen sich gequält, / Daß hie und da ein Glücklicher gewesen?” (V. 660-

663). Engaging the material of the scholarly world, i.e. reading books as well as pondering the thoughts they contain, proves insufficient. They only tell him about Glück in the rarest of instances and do not grant any access to it anymore. In its turn towards secularization, modernity obliterates the position of man in the grander picture whose severity, as Faust’s and Wagner’s attitudes indicate, is realized in full force by some and unwillingly ignored by others. With no happiness in front of him and an agonizing purposelessness inside him, suicide consequently becomes Faust’s single means of escaping the mayhem of a modern existence: “Der letzte Trunk sei nun, mit ganzer Seele, / Als festlich hoher Gruß, dem

Morgen zugebracht” (V. 735-736); as the modern Omega to the ancient Alpha of Socrates, he decides to poison himself like his Greek predecessor did, according to legend, with the hemlock, but is not allowed to do so. Somewhat contingently, but all the more significantly for the course of the play and the direction of modernity, “[d]es Osterfestes erste

Feierstunde” (V. 745) descends upon the scenery. The Chor der Engel, inexplicably, rescues Faust from suicide and reminds him of the “Klang der Jugend” (V. 769), yet he points out: “Die Botschaft hör’ ich wohl, allein mir fehlt der Glaube” (V. 765). Faust listens to, but no longer believes in this moment of simple, sacral aesthetic, an aesthetic that is subsequently divorced from the notion of the religious.7 The implications for modernity, as they are (re)enacted here, are twofold. Faust first realizes the nihilism that is at work in secularization and that subsequently exists and unfolds within the modern condition; he realizes what Nietzsche’s fool in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft articulates for him decades later: “Gott ist todt! Gott bleibt todt! Und wir haben ihn getödtet!“ (481) Second, the divorce of the religious and the aesthetic represents, according to Jürgen Habermas, one of

7 I partially owe these observations to comments by and33 a discussion with Dr. Kristina Mendicino.

the defining moments of the project modernity itself (41) which Faust finalizes here in full force. The murder of God that Nietzsche’s fool speaks of happens in front of our own eyes, whenever we watch the sacred and the aesthetic part ways on stage here in Faust: Eine

Tragödie.

Nietzsche’s “an sich verständlich moderne Culturmensch” (116) Faust, in his singularity, does not form any link to those individuals around him that still reside in a world not yet fully modern. Faust’s disciple Wagner, prominent especially at the beginning of the play, possesses a Socratic optimism that is still uncorrupted by the spirit of modernity

(“Mit Eifer hab’ ich mich der Studien beflissen, / Zwar weiß ich viel, doch möcht’ ich alles wissen” V. 600-601) and whom Faust hence deems the “ärmlichsten von allen

Erdensöhnen” (V. 609). Modernity produces a desire to exceed the restrictions of corporality not in the next life, but already in this; it appears to be the demand the Death of

God placed on the modern individual, for Nietzsche’s fool speaks quite frankly: “Ist nicht die Grösse dieser That zu gross für uns? Müssen wir nicht selber zu Göttern werden, um nur ihrer würdig zu erscheinen?” (481) In Vor dem Tor, Faust explicates the increasingly reiterated desire to move beyond the confines of his profession (“aus diesem Meer des

Irrtums aufzutauchen”, V. 106) with the most poetic description of a sunset in which he articulates the wish to grow a pair of imaginary wings so that he can pursue the journey of the sunset around the globe: “O daß kein Flügel mich vom Boden hebt, / Ihr nach und immer nach zu streben!” (V. 1074-1075). The “schöner Traum” (V. 1089) of chasing the sunset, of undertaking a voyage that takes him out of the seclusion and the darkness of the

Gothic halls of the university into the welcoming warmth of the sun’s light, constitutes a more rewarding experience for the famous “Zwei Seelen […] in meiner Brust” (V. 1112).

In his reference to sun and sunlight, we might read this as a somewhat misplaced affirmation of Enlightenment ideals. But when Faust – unwillingly – looks back at his work as a scholar, he shows only disdain for the life he once lived in the university, for the life that was so fully invested in the Socratic: “Mußt ich nicht mit der Welt verkehren? / Das

Leere lernen, Leeres lehren? / […] Und, um nicht ganz versäumt, allein zu leben, / Mich doch zuletzt dem Teufel übergeben.” (V. 6229-6238) The alliterative and almost homonymous combination of Leeres, lernen, and lehren suggest fundamental equivalence among these terms which are all evoked by the Socratic they implement and the

Enlightenment they represent, and the necessity of the deal with the devil that emerges from their enactment. As he spells out for Mephistopheles later on, Faust feels not only disgusted by knowledge, but disconnected from nature in general: “Vor mir verschließt sich die Natur / Des Denkens Faden ist zerrissen, / Mir ekelt lange vor allem Wissen.” (V.

1747-1751) Long before Adorno and Horkheimer publish their seminal Begriff der

Aufklärung, Faust’s critique of Enlightenment – and modernity by implication – sounds eerily similar to their allegations towards Enlightenment: “Die Menschen bezahlen die

Vermehrung ihrer Macht mit der Entfremdung von dem, worüber sie die Macht ausüben.”

(25) Wagner does not share or even understand this wish of Faust’s for an elevating, total experience (“Doch solchen Trieb hab’ ich noch nie empfunden” V. 1101); instead, he reasserts his commitment to the collection of – purely bibliographical and hence, nonsensical – knowledge: “Wie anders tragen uns die Geistesfreuden / Von Buch zu Buch, von Blatt zu Blatt.” (V. 1104-1105) Only by departing the university will Faust come into contact with individuals that fascinate him by adequately responding to and reciprocating his new way of life; only when he swallows the proverbial red pill can the poodle that

transforms into the devil Mephistopheles reach out to him and the girl that is his first – and only – love, Gretchen, forever change him.

Faust’s relationship to the devil Mephistopheles appears paradoxical only at first glance, for it emerges from the mind-set of a secularized West. Faust is easily and yet profoundly enthralled by the possibilities of the Teufelspakt as soon as he learns of the rules that seemingly bind Mephistopheles and his actions and the possibilities that might offer him: “Die Hölle selbst hat ihre Rechte? / Das find’ ich gut, da ließe sich ein Pakt, / Und sicher wohl, mit euch, ihr Herren, schließen?” (V. 1413-1415) Faust – being, as he states himself, “zu alt, um nur zu spielen, / Zu jung, um ohne Wunsch zu sein.” (V. 1546-1547)

– self-diagnoses the problem of his condition, that makes the deal with the devil all too easy, accordingly: “Und so ist mir das Dasein eine Last, / Der Tod erwünscht, das Leben mir verhaßt.” (V. 1570-1571) Modern man is stuck in the world that he has created as much as it created him, because the afterlife has become an ontological impossibility in the secularized age and the nihilistic attitude that almost forced Faust into suicide now will pave the way to even grander atrocities. Faust reliance on a representative of a belief system he considers invalid indicates that modernity, post-religious as it may be, owes more to the pre-modern than it admits, and the only way modernity can make sense of itself is by constantly evoking what it is not, or much rather, what wants to be no longer. Critics note paradigmatic shifts in the representation of the devil that are implemented and reenacted in

Goethe’s Faust.8 Especially Eda Sagarra considers the “Distanz, die [Mephistopheles] von

8 For Rolf-Peter Janz, Goethe “had to get rid of most of the attributes traditionally ascribed to this opponent of God” and his play much rather “explore(s) the enormous multiformity of Mephistopheles as the modern version of evil, appropriate for the nineteenth century” (32). According to Peter Huber, whose text is published in the same volume as Janz’s, the devil in Faust is a resonance of Wotan, the Nordic deity (44), and “pre-Christian gods and nature daemons which had been declared devils by Christianity” (48). E 36

der uralten Tradition der christlichen Teufelsdarstellung trennt“ (130) as the obvious consequence of Enlightenment thought; Mephistopheles becomes the “Helfershelfer in der menschlichen Suche nach Glückseligkeit” (134) which immediately legitimizes his presence in the secular world. In a world that slowly comes to terms with the Death of God, the devil no longer affirms the validity of religion but embodies the relationship of man towards Glück and, in turn, the spirit of capital.

Outlining the conditions for his wager with Mephistopheles, Faust imagines a mode of Carpe Diem that disregards the possibility of an afterlife and looks for the definitive relish, wanting to go out with a blast, if you like: “Kannst du mich mit Genuß betrügen, /

Das sei für mich der letzte Tag.” (V. 1696-1687) Consequently, the (in)famous formulation of the wager between Faust and the Devil interlaces the notion of beauty and the aesthetic, that constitutes or at least contains the ultimate Genuß, with the ending of temporality:

Werd’ ich zum Augenblicke sagen: Verweile doch! du bist so schön! Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen […] Die Uhr mag stehn, der Zeiger fallen Es sei die Zeit für mich vorbei! (V. 1700-1706)

Only when – or some critics rather say if – the moment acquires a quality of such beauty that he wishes to tarry and linger to have even more of it, will Faust be willing to switch places with Mephistopheles and thereby admit the existence of a world in which he no longer believes. Michael Jäger consequently argues that Faust articulates the drive of the modern condition in toto: “Es ist evident, dass aus diesem Verbot des Verweilens hervorgeht ein Kult der Geschwindigkeit, der rastlosen Innovation, des permanenten Bild- und Sensationswechsels.” (171) Yet this sentiment factors out the essential nature of the deal with the devil as it is at work here: By envisaging a “Verbot des Verweiles”, Faust

does not articulate what modernity despises, but what it craves most of all. His new raison d’être echoes what Jürgen Habermas in his “Die Moderne – ein unvollendetes Projekt” surmises as the undercurrent as the “Gesinnung der ästhetischen Moderne” (34), i.e. a longing for lingering in face of continuous degradation: “In der Aufwertung des

Transitorischen, des Flüchtigen, des Ephemeren, in der Feier des Dynamismus spricht sich eben die Sehnsucht nach einer unbefleckten, innehaltenden Gegenwart aus.“ (35) The possibility to decelerate the increasing and ever-so-fleeting velocity of modernity becomes all the more precious the more difficult it becomes to achieve it. “Es sei die Zeit für mich vorbei!” (V. 1706) constitutes the ending point of Faust’s quest in the sense that on the one hand it contains a moment in which time has effectively ended or been suspended and on the other hand the very end of his mortal, feeble existence. Even though Verweilen may not be Vergessen, the key formulation of the wager bespeaks how a longing for tranquility underlies the locus classicus of modernity and I argue that we see the vitalizing power of forgetting, of an all-encompassing present of Glück, which has become all the more precious, at work here. Faust yearns in his desire to navigate the currents of modernity for the possibility to overcome it in the experience of Glück, a forgetting that is wholly saturated with the complete loss of the self in timelessness. For Faust, the deal with the devil constitutes the primary means to make sense of and, as paradoxical as that may sound, give meaning to living in a secularized, modern world. In its step out of the ivory tower,

Faust moves from the theological concerns of secularization to its worldly application and thereby mirrors modernity’s progression from intellectual to social history, from the theoretical trepidations of Enlightened intelligentsia to the practical ramifications of a

collapsing feudal world order. It moves the achievement of Glück from the purely speculative domain to empirical reality.

Mephistopheles provides Faust with access to unlimited amounts of money; with

Mephistopheles at his side, anything he wants to be, Faust can be, anything he is not, Faust can automatically become, for the devil argues so convincingly: “Wenn ich sechs Hengste zahlen kann, / Sind ihre Kräfte nicht die meine? Ich renne zu und bin ein rechter Mann, / als hätt‘ ich vierundzwanzig Beine.“ (V. 1824-1827) Marx himself, in the Paris

Manuscripts, reads the effect of this quite poignantly: “Was ich qua Mensch nicht vermag, was also alle meine individuellen Wesenskräfte nicht vermögen, das vermag ich durch das

Geld. Das Geld macht also jede dieser Wesenskräfte zu etwas, was sie an sich nicht ist, d.h. zu ihrem Gegenteil.” (565) What Marx deems the “Verbrüderung der

Unmöglichkeiten” (567) we see at work in the power couple that is Faust and

Mephistopheles; Faust’s deal with the devil, then, collocates money and modernity. Upon the departure from the university, one of Faust’s and Mephistopheles’ first stops would be the Hexenküche in which Faust is rejuvenated, as Cyrus Hamlin argues, mostly for the sake of plot and the legitimization of his love story with Gretchen (370). Significantly, Faust cheats middle age with the potion from Mephistopheles’ witch because he does not want to be subject to manual labor for his rejuvenation in any way: “[I]ch kann mich nicht bequemen, / Den Spaten in die Hand zu nehmen.” (V. 2362-2363) So, the deal with the devil enacts the nature of money in a seemingly fantastical manner, but, as pointed out by

Marx himself, realistically represents the regularities that make up its power. Already at this early point, Faust no longer works for himself, but exploits the work of others and it appears that Mephistopheles is modeling him to be a true capitalist. The wager between

Faust and Mephistopheles transacts the unholy alliance between Enlightenment rationality and the forces of the capital in Faust’s turn from the idealistic to the materialistic, carried out when he abandons the word for the deed in his translation of λόγος: “Ich kann das Wort so hoch unmöglich schätzen, / Ich muß es anders übersetzen.” (V. 1226-1227) Taking up the deal with the devil from here, Faust grows less concerned with what modernity initially is than with what it eventually becomes, and its theoretical argument must end eventually to explore the practical results of this development. “Wohin soll es nun gehen?” is what

Faust asks, quite cluelessly, and Mephistopheles answers accordingly: “Wohin es dir gefällt / Wir sehen die kleine, dann die große Welt.” (V. 2051-2052). The small world in which the duo first sets out for is, of course, the world of none other than Gretchen. In the enactment of three wishes, Faust will either experience, escape or fully embrace the potentialities of modern life as it increasingly spirals out of his control.

A Simple Life? With Faust and Gretchen to the Cusp of Modernity

The second half of Faust I negotiates many of the unprecedented ramifications of an unfolding modernity by situating them on a very personal level through the love story between Faust and Gretchen. With the inclusion of Gretchen in the Faustian lore, the play unlocks the potentials for the fulfilment of an individual life through the deal with the devil, but simultaneously tests the boundaries of the newfound social and personal mobility. As the play’s second protagonist, Gretchen shares Faust’s indignation of entrapment and the wish to surpass the pre-modern life for the vast and alluring potentiality of the modern.

Initially, she appears deeply confined to the restrictions of patriarchal order: In her famous first two lines of the play, she rebuffs Faust’s advances (“Bin weder Fräulein, weder schön,

/ Kann ungeleit nach Hause gehen.” V. 2607-2608), and as Mephistopheles himself admits:

“Es ist ein gar unschuldig Ding, / Das eben für nichts zur Beichte ging; / Über die hab’ keine Gewalt!“ (V. 2625-2626). For the seduction Gretchen, Faust draws on

Mephistopheles’ almost natural awareness of and propensity for gold, jewels and what they represent: “Ich kenne manchen schönen Platz / Und manchen altvergrabnen Schatz” (V.

2675-2676). As the focus of Faust’s passion and receiver of a casket of jewels by

Mephistopheles’ design, Gretchen appears utterly implicated in this economics of seduction: “Margaretlein zog ein schiefes Maul, / Ist halt, dacht’ sie, ein geschenkter Gaul”

(V. 2826-2827). Even shortly before the end of Faust’s and Gretchen’s relationship, Faust still utilizes the Mephistophelean access to money and gold: “Mir tut es weh, / Wenn ich ohne Geschenke zu ihr geh’.” (V. 3674-3675). The play thereby incorporates the modalities of the bourgeois tragedy, which Lukács rightly considers, especially in the case of the

Gretchentragödie, to be “ein Fall unter den vielen Übergriffen des verkommenden

Feudalismus” (177). In the material elements of the seduction of Gretchen, we can observe how the deal with the devil changes the flow of money and thereby transforms the ways in which relationships are constructed, just like modernity inflicts a rupture on the feudal world that will have a rippling effect throughout the play and the world it portrays and then changes. Effectively, at the center of the enlightened, proto-capitalist world of Faust I no longer stands religious salvation, but the prospect and acquisition of Glück.

For Faust, Gretchen opens up an opportunity to exceed the materiality of books and escape their empty happiness by engaging and growing through the immaterial experience of the emotionality – and sexuality – that Gretchen can offer him instead. Secretly brought into her room by Mephistopheles, Faust conceives of Gretchen as “so göttergleich” (V.

2707) and thus imagines the effect this has on her domain: “Die Hütte wird durch dich ein

Himmelreich” (V. 2708). Through Gretchen, or rather through the imaginative possibilities she unlocks, Faust can reconnect to the ethereal energies he so missed in his Gothic study; yet it constitutes an experience that is implicitly tainted by Mephistopheles’s machinations and achieved by the devilish touch of money. Regardless, Gretchen still gives Faust answers to questions the scholar never posed and poses questions he does not know how to answer: The famous Gretchenfrage (“Glaubst du an Gott?” V. 3426) can on the one hand be thought of a simple girl’s desire to conciliate Faust’s dissonant nature with her own system of belief. On the other hand, the credo scene proves Gretchen’s remarkable emotional intelligence that forces Faust to admit how in his modern search for Glück, God has become only of secondary importance: he envisages mainly a possible route towards something transcendental: “Erfüll davon dein Herz, so groß es ist, / Und wenn du ganz in dem Gefühle selig bist, / Nenn es dann, wie du willst, / Nenn’s Glück! Herz! Liebe! Gott!“

(V. 3451-3454) Gretchen is not fooled by Faust’s pantheistic profession: Her prosaic response (“Das ist alles recht schön und gut,” V. 3459) is soon followed by a trenchant observation that reveals as much of her character as it exposes, from a Christian perspective, how Faust’s religious sentiment is a sham: “Wenn man’s so hört, möcht’s leidlich scheinen, / Steht aber doch immer schief darum; / Denn du hast kein Christentum.”

(V. 3466-3468) Gretchen not only recognizes that Faust’s quest for happiness is not necessarily a quest for a God he once lost, but a quest for something that merely has to be like God. She moreover realizes that he achieves this only through the support of the deal with the devil. Her instinctive hatred of Mephistopheles (“Der Mensch, den du [Faust] bei dir hast, / Ist mir in tiefer innrer Seele verhaßt/ […] Man sieht, daß er an nichts keinen

Anteil nimmt” V. 3471-3487) appears not only a keen observation, but shows how his somewhat oxymoronic position as the devil of atheism and therefore as the bringer of forgetting without any “Anteil” troubles her deeply.

While Gretchen fundamentally questions Faust’s religious sentiment, she responds at the same time eagerly to his commitment for the discovery of Glück. Some might regard her as nothing more than a simple girl who lives a very simple life; Mephistopheles certainly makes that interpretive effort when he comments on the kleines reinliches Zimmer accordingly: “Nicht jedes Mädchen halt so rein” (V.2686). Maike Oergel, however, makes a convincing case that Faust and Gretchen, through their remarkable ambition, are alike in their difference from anybody else: “Margarete and Faust share a readiness to rebel, to break out of their confined and unsatisfying lives, to break all the rules, and to dare the ultimate (i.e. a violation of the most sacred rule of their respective worlds) in pursuit of self-realisation.” (45) Hence, Gretchen showcases an almost Faustian self-awareness throughout the play which, ironically, she herself does not fully realize: “Bin doch ein töricht furchtsam Weib!”, (V. 2778), “Bin doch nur ein arm unwissend [!] Kind, / Begreife nicht, was er an mir find’t.” (V. 3215-3216) The attraction to Faust offers a way for a character that is, according to Martin Swales, “precisely conceived as a figure from the pre- modern world” (“Goethes Faust or the Drama of European Modernity”, 88) to finally break the entrapment of her ordinary life and hence, the possibility to live a life that is anomalous, more liberated and sequitur quod, more modern. But as Faust might come to experience the unhindered possibilities of the deal with the devil that is modern life, Gretchen’s fate ranks alongside his to reveal the boundaries of modernity as they are fatefully exceeded.

Gretchen neither needs nor possesses many words to express the complexity of her situation. The virtuos simplicity of the song she sings Am Spinnrade illustrates this strikingly: “Ach dürft ich fassen / Und halten ihn, / Und küssen ihn, / So wie ich wollt’ /

An seinen Küssen / Vergehen sollt’!” (V. 3405-3413). The three modal verbs dürfen, wollen and sollen, as they are so seamlessly employed here, express societal regulation, innermost desire and eventual downfall respectively that are all subsumed under

Gretchen’s personal fulfilment in the character of Faust. Yet Gretchen neither forgets how she finds her exaltation in her physical relationship with Faust (“Und ach sein Kuß!” V.

3401), nor does she ignore or omit the inner turmoil she experiences upon realizing that the transition, the change of a modern life, happens inside her first of all: “Meine Ruh’ ist hin, / Mein Herz ist schwer; / Ich find sie nimmer / Und nimmermehr.” (V. 3374-3378)

Goethe needs just one scene – Am Brunnen – to outline the cause for this particular turmoil:

Gretchen’s friend Lieschen recounts the story of their mutual acquaintance Bärbel who, even before becoming pregnant, was infamous and condemned by the other girls for her sexual proclivities: “Wenn unsereins am Spinnen war, / Uns nachts die Mutter nicht hinunterließ, / Stand sie bei ihrem Buhlen süß.” V. 3562-3565). This confronts Gretchen with both her own complicity in patriarchal condemnation (“Wie konnt’ ich über andrer

Sünden / Nicht Worte gnug der Zunge finden!” V. 3579-3580) and how her conviction which has fundamentally changed due to her infatuation with Faust: Not only does she identify with his secular elevation of the self through Glück where everything is inherently justified: “Doch – alles, was mich dazu trieb, / Gott! War so gut, ach war so lieb.” (V.

3385-3386) On her personal avenue towards modernization, Gretchen reaches a point of no return even before their sexual encounter (“Ich habe schon so viel für dich getan, / Daß

mir zu tun fast nichts mehr übrig bleibt.” V. 3519-3520) and definetely afterwards: “Sonst hab’ ich dir ja alles zu Lieb’ getan.” (V. 4577) Faust himself is aware of the problematic nature of this newfound comfort for he owes as much to Gretchen and her subliminal inspiration, as he owes it to Mephistopheles and his dubious machinations: “Und diese

Glut, von der ich brenne, / Unendlich, ewig, ewig nenne / Ist das ein teuflich Lügenspiel?”

(V. 3064-3066) The play captures the symptomatic impacts of modernity with an incomparable sense of immediacy and urgency and its initial dissatisfaction with knowledge, religion and God migrates into fundamental issues of love and the frailty of human relationships in the times of that change. Faust even considers the eventual destruction of Gretchen as a price he is most willing to pay: “Sie, ihren Frieden mußt’ ich untergraben! / Du, Hölle, mußtest dieses Opfer haben! […] Mag ihr Geschick auf mich zusammenstürzen / Und Sie mit mir zugrunde gehn!” (V. 3360-3361, 3364-3365) As

Barbara Becker-Cantarino reads it, “[h]er death sentence and her final willing acceptance of her fate clear the way for Faust to continue his creative experimentation with life without being burdened by Gretchen's ‘small world.’ Faust has incorporated, as it were, woman's story into his own.” (16) Yet both and not merely one of them hear the call of Glück that gravitates them towards catastrophe. And when Gretchen reaches the end of her road in

Kerker, her fate is bound to Faust’s, but not by it.

From today’s perspective, one might judge Faust’s and Gretchen’s sexual misadventures as nothing but illicit episodes, yet both pave their way to heaven with bad deeds as well as good intentions. In Kerker, a mentally unstable Gretchen provides us with conflicting narratives of her time sans Faust: Before she comes to recognize him, she presents herself as innocent: “Laß mich nur erst das Kind noch tränken. / Ich herzt’ es die

ganze Nacht; / Sie nahmen mir’s, um mich zu kränken, / Und sagen nun, ich hätte es umgebracht.” (V. 4443-4446) As soon as Faust, however, sets out to actively release her from her prison, she tells the story quite differently and explicitly counts matricide and infanticide among her sins: “Meine Mutter hab ich umgebracht, / Mein Kind hab ich ertränkt.” (V. 4507-4508). For Faust, none of it matters: he wishes for Gretchen to accompany him despite everything that occurred: “Laß das Vergangene vergangen sein, /

Du bringst mich um!” (V. 4518-4519) He repeatedly insists that she follows him out into the world (Cf. V. 4498-4500) and his motivation might be far from selfless. Gretchen exalts the possibility for him to terminate his quest for forgetting and give meaning to their relationship, but to achieve this evocation of Glück, she has to give up her life just like him.

Once more borrowing the words of Marx’s Paris Manuscripts, I would propose that they meet outside of the realm of economic transactions and come together as purely as one human can meet another: “Setze den Menschen als Menschen und sein Verhältnis zur Welt als ein menschliches voraus, so kannst du Liebe nur gegen Liebe austauschen, Vertrauen nur gegen Vertrauen etc.“ (567) In Kerker, this equal exchange is tested to the utmost, and fails. As much as Gretchen’s fate programmatically preempts the eventual failure of Faust’s deal with the devil and the project of modernity, their union transpires, retrospectively, as an instance of forgetting nonetheless: “Mich an deine Seite zu schmiegen, / Das war ein süßes, ein holdes Glück!/ Aber es will mir nicht mehr gelingen; / Mir ist’s, als müßt ich mich zu dir zwingen.” (V. 4530-4533) According to Nicholas Boyle, Faust experiences with Gretchen especially in Garten, yet for me especially in its consummation realized off- screen, “a single moment of union, in which time is annulled within time” that “reveal[s] to him […] a good that transcends the wager altogether” (Boyle 232). In this sense,

Gretchen and Faust’s love begets a Glück that, in its removal from the modern duress of a ceaselessly progressing time, recuperates similarly the contingent basis of economic affairs on which their relationship would be solely based otherwise. Here, she first invites Faust, thought to be her executioner, into a shared prayer (“O laß uns knien, die Heil’gen anzurufen!” V. 4453), but quickly abandons her religiosity because of the mere consolation of his voice: “Durch den grimmigen, teuflischen Hohn / Erkannt ich den süßen, den liebenden Ton.” (V. 4468-4469) In that sense, everything seems fine and well in their secular experience, but the exchange that soon follows is all the more significant in that regard:

FAUST. fortstrebend. Komm mit! Komm mit! MARGARETE. O weile! Weil’ ich doch so gern, wo du weilest. (V.4479-4480)

Gretchen wholly identifies with Faust’s new dogma of “Verweile doch, du bist so schön”, i.e. his doctrine of modernity, and in her view, his return to her alone would be reason enough to tarry, reason enough to remain and to recognize their reunion in the prison as a moment of the aesthetic and finally as a moment of Glück that it might have been all along.

According to Jane K. Brown, Gretchen “seeks to stop time” and “surreptitiously offers

Faust the opportunity to transcend the temporal flux of the real world” (“The German

Tragedy”, 102-103).

The deal with the devil, however, plays a cruel trick on Faust. Not only is Faust’s experience as such tainted to the core by his “längst entwohnter Schauer” (V. 4405) upon entering her domain; it also goes against the very dilemma of Faust’s perpetual state of being fortstrebend. If Faust were to take Gretchen up on her offer, he would fall into the clutches of the devil (Brown “The German Tragedy”, 102). Hence, Faust will never

experience anything but approximation and therefore, he cannot reciprocate her love anymore, nor can he uphold his newly-found, quasi-religious commitment to love: “Wenn sonst von deinen Worten, deinen Blicken / Ein ganzer Himmel mich überdrang.“ (V. 4485-

4489) Before the relationship between Gretchen and Faust can achieve its most meaningful peak in the mutuality of forgetting, they subsequently part ways because Faust does neither share Gretchen’s freedom to cherish it as an instance of aesthetic contemplation, nor does she share his freedom of complete and utter choice devoid of any consequences – the kind of choices that come, if you like, from his access to money and Mephistopheles. Therefore,

Faust cannot respond in the way she needs him to, and that makes her efforts null and void in the process. Gretchen is not bound by this predicament and remains free to do as she chooses and can, which might be another cruel trick of modernity, even surpass the modern in this one sense, even if not in any of the others. Elke Kegyes therefore knows nothing but praise for Gretchen’s strength of character: “Sie hat genug Kraft, die Verantwortung für ihre Taten zu ertragen, sie trifft bewusst Entscheidungen, um dem Teufelspakt entgehen zu können.” (218) Remarkably, Gretchen does not need Faust in any way to be freed from her chains: “Das war des Freundes Stimme! Sie springt auf. Die Ketten fallen ab.” (V. 4461)

Gretchen ultimately faces the consequences of her actions and the other side to the freedom of modernity, the responsibility that Faust forgets during his unhindered activity. Hence, she does not follow him out into the world despite his repeated insistence (Cf. V. 4498-

4500). Instead, she reasserts her commitment to the modern project and her willingness to take responsibility for her actions and, in so doing, turns away from Faust in word (“Laß mich! Nein, ich leide keine Gewalt! / Fasse mich nicht so mörderisch an!“ V. 4576-78) and deed, indicated by one of the very few stage directions in Goethe’s play: “Sie wendet sich

von ihm.” (V. 4497) She articulates the price of her sweet blissfulness with Faust: “Sie [the mother] schlief, damit wir uns freuten. / Es waren glückliche Zeiten.” (V. 4572-4573) The text collocates Gretchen’s experience of Glück with her most heinous crime of matricide; through the lens of the former, the demand of latter appears not only necessary, but becomes inherently justified. The Gretchentragödie reveals in no uncertain terms that the synergy at the core of the modern experience is inherently destructive.

Gretchen’s final moments in the play are moments of significant change. The Faust that comes to her is not the innocuous and appealingly untainted lover who has been with her before, even if he still appears very much like that to her: “Oh weh! deine Lippen sind kalt, / Sind stumm / Wo ist dein Lieben / Geblieben? / Wer brachte mich drum?“ (V. 4493-

4497), “Mir ist’s, als müßt’ ich mich zu dir zwingen, / als stießest du mich von dir zurück

/ Und doch bist du’s und blickst so gut, so fromm.” (V. 4533-4535) Utterly heartbroken,

Gretchen realizes that Faust cannot be with her completely, and hence comes to understand the futility of her commitment to forgetting and of her attempt to live fully in the modern; she cannot do it with him, and has no reason to do it without him. The mutuality and subsequent amplification of forgetting, as Faust instilled it in Gretchen, proves therefore to be nothing but the dead end of her development; his hesitation and his desire to pull her with him into the clutches of Mephistopheles nullifies the worth of their relationship. From this emotional realization, Gretchen can articulate the very nihilism of the modern condition herself through which she, implicitly, exposes any dedication to Glück as a cover- up of the transcendental void modernity has created: “Stumm liegt die Welt wie das Grab!”

(V. 4595) Consequently, Gretchen turns away from secularization and modernity and reasserts her belief in Christianity and the pre-modern; the “Stimme von oben” that ensures

us of her salvation allows her to do so (“Ist gerettet!”, V. 4612).9 In the end, she transforms the dungeon into a “heiligen Ort” (V. 4603) and subsequently banishes Mephistopheles as the facilitator of the modern spirit from it as much as she casts out Faust and his modernity from her domain. The greatest love story in (modern) German literary history therefore ends unhappily. In the second part of the play, Faust will change this world that has destroyed her once he recovers from the loss of Gretchen – if not for Gretchen, then at least for himself. But before almost anything of the first part is said and done, during Trüber

Tag, Feld, i.e. the unavoidable hangover to the Walpurgisnachttraum, Mephistopheles asks his master Faust: “Warum machst du Gemeinschaft mit uns, wenn du sie nicht durchführen kannst?” (138) When Faust cannot answer another question from the devil that eventually follows – “Wer war’s, der sie ins Verderben stürzte?” – it indicates that Faust does not know why he entered the deal with the devil in the first place, as much as modernity itself does not know why it destroys the destinies on which it capitalizes.

“Arkadisch frei sei unser Glück“: The Quest for Forgetting in the Sphere of the Classical

In the point of departure from the Gretchentragödie, we find Faust sleeping and aimlessly resting, or in other words “ermüdet, unruhig, schlafsuchend” (V. 4613), in the Anmutige

Gegend, as if he were still resting for the tour de force that will soon become Faust: Der

Tragödie zweiter Teil, without any indication as to when, why or how he ended up there.

With the descent of nightfall, Ariel, the Shakespearean spirit once in service of The

Tempest’s Prospero, and an entourage of fairies purify the inner turmoil that so evidently

9 Through adding this voice from above at a later point in the play’s conception (ca. 1808), Goethe integrates the Gretchentragödie into the larger philosophical discourses50 of the play (Lukács 137).

plagues Faust by using the power of the mythological river Lethe; Prospero’s former servant instructs the fairies accordingly: “Besänftigt des Herzens grimmen Strauß / Entfernt des Vorwurfs glühend bitter Pfeile, / Sein Inneres reinigt von erlebtem Graus. / […] badet in ihm Tau aus Lethes Flut.” (V. 4523-4629) By his own admission, Ariel’s psychedelic intervention intends to give Faust back to “dem heiligen Licht” (V. 4633) One should take notice of Mephistopheles’ absence in this brief scene, but given Ariel’s earlier appearance during the Walpurgisnachttraum (Cf. V. 4239-4242, 4391-4194), the spirit might be implicated in the Mephistophelean agenda and therefore stand in the service of the deal with the devil. Evidently, Faust now forgets all about the time passed, the pain of

Gretchen’s death, and more importantly for my purposes, he forgets about the Glück, the very forgetting he and Gretchen once shared and almost sealed. When he awakens at break of dawn (Cf. V. 4670-4671), Faust, being as refreshed as the Anmutige Gegend around him, finds himself imbrued with a newfound desire for activity: “Des Lebens Pulse schlagen frisch lebendig, […] Du, Erde warst auch diese Nacht beständig / Und atmest neu erquickt zu meinen Füßen, / Beginnest schon, mit Lust mich zu umgeben, / Du regst und rührst ein kräftiges Beschließen, / Zum höchsten Dasein immerfort zu streben.“ (V. 4679-

4685). The actions of the fairy do not simply reset modern man as a tabula rasa of some sort, nor do they restore the Faust from before the Gretchentragödie so that he can start his quest anew. However, quite a few people would – as Wolf-Daniel Hartwich does in his analysis of Faust’s amnesiac condition – judge accordingly: “Faust drinks from the river

Lethe and thus forgets about Gretchen’s tragic end.” (72) And allegedly, Gretchen loses her significance for the remaining duration of the play (until she prominently reappears in

Bergschluchten, that is). Yet the great forgetting he once experienced can only be covered

up; it cannot be washed away and much rather leaves a noticeable impact on his character and in the same sense, the motion of modernity continues. The sense of forwardness to which Faust has already succumbed now leads him away from what he wanted out of modernity in Vor dem Tor; now, he no longer wishes to face or even follow the sun on a pair of wings, but proclaims instead: “So bleibe denn die Sonne mir im Rücken!” (V. 4715)

Even if the fairies – standing in the service of Mephistopheles – release him from the knowledge and guilt of the havoc he once caused in Gretchen’s small world, Faust has fundamentally changed as much as the world around him has.

The processes of secularization as they are felt throughout the first part of the play go hand in hand with the proliferation of capitalism which is almost in full swing by the beginning of the play’s second part; an intermezzo at the court indicates how the intricacies of capitalist modernity resonate even in its infancy. When a financial crisis hits the emperor’s court – and pre-modern economy thereby reaches a dead end –, Mephistopheles and Faust readily introduce paper money to the feudal court whose security constitutes more Schein than Sein: “Und fragt ihr mich, wer es zutage schafft: / Begabten Manns Natur- und Geisteskraft.” (V. 4899-4900) Initially, the Kanzler identifies the devil’s work as a force of secularization and hence, as signs of pending – and unstoppable – modernity:

“Natur und Geist – so spricht man nicht zu Christen / Deshalb verbrennt man Atheisten, /

Weil solche Reden höchst gefährlich sind / Natur ist Sünde, Geist ist Teufel.“ (V. 4897-

4900) Yet even the chancellor comes to believe in the allure of the “schicksalsschwere

Blatt, / Das alles Weh in Wohl verwandelt hat” (V. 6055-6056) and succumbs to the prospect of a capitalist world order. The introduction of paper money results in a frenzy of unhindered, ceaseless activity and production and consumption alike: “Die halbe Welt

scheint nur an Schmaus zu denken, / Wenn sich die andere neu in Kleidern bläht. / Der

Krämer schneidet aus, der Schneider näht.” (V. 6091-6094) The emperor buys readily into the newly-found capitalist commotion and fails to recognize the fundamental change that the abstraction of finance has achieved: “Ich hoffte Lust und Mut zu neuen Taten; / Doch wer euch kennt, der wird euch leicht erraten. / Ich merk’ es wohl; bei aller Schätze Flor, /

Wie ihr gewesen, bleibt ihr nach wie vor.” (V. 6151-6154) While the emperor may mistakenly accept the frenzy of capitalist activity, it essentially constitutes the world that

Faust cannot bear to live in anymore, even if he does not remember why. Notably, in the judgment of Lutz Koepnick, the inception of capitalism focalized early 19th century identity politics through the vein of the classical – a crossroads of modernity at which, as should of course come as no surprise at this point, Koepnick positions Faust (2-3). For Koepnick, modernity draws on the cultural reservoir of antiquity to “account for the phantasmagorical moment inherent in modern capitalist societies” (20). Mephistopheles himself, derogatory as ever, connects the production of paper money with Faust’s desire to revitalize the specter of antiquity: “Denkst Helenen so leicht hervorzurufen / Wie das Papiergespenst der

Gulden.” (V. 6197-6198) Initially, Faust intends to conjure her up solely at the request of the emperor, i.e. after the capitalist mode of economy has been activated at the feudal court and now craves exactly this cultural model: “Der Kaiser will, es muß sogleich geschehn, /

Will Helena und Paris vor sich sehn; / Das Musterbild der Männer so der Frauen / In deutlichen Gestalten will er schauen.” (V. 6184-6187) And he makes sure that

Mephistopheles delivers on his part of the bargain through cunning and successful blackmail and manipulation: “[S]ehe wohl, daß du den Teufel kennst” (V. 6257). It bears mentioning that during his manipulation, Faust mentions the Hexenküche once, but calls it

“längst vergangenen Zeit” (V. 6230). Faust has successfully been cleansed from any knowledge of Gretchen, but his resentment towards Mephistopheles mars his unrelenting desire to make use of the deal with the devil at the same time. While he may continue on his sojourn towards the mothers soon enough, there is something else at work in Faust’s next escapade; the story of Gretchen, though obscured from view, makes itself known in the desire to behold and possess something just like her.

As soon as she steps on stage, Helen of Troy constitutes the next cornerstone of

Faust’s quest for the captivating moment of forgetting. Even if the introduction of Helen quickly motivates all of Faust’s actions and all of the play’s plot developments until its conclusion in the third act, she appears an almost spontaneous and somewhat contingent addition to the play. Faust brings forth Helen and Paris alike and finds himself enthralled beyond relief with the illusory apparition: “Hab ich noch Augen? Zeit sich tief im Sinn /

Der Schönheit Quelle reichlichstens ergossen?“ (V. 6487-6488) Helen’s beauty exceeds even the once exquisite and beguilling vision from the Hexenküche: “Die Wohlgestalt, die mich voreinst entzückte, / In Zauberspiegelung beglückte, / War nur ein Schaumbild solcher Schöne!” (V. 6495-6497); accordingly, she becomes the very spiritus rector for his pursuit of the aesthetic: “Ich lebe nicht, kann ich sie nicht erlangen.” (V. 7445) Arguably, her beauty may either outshine Gretchen’s, whom Faust remembers, if not vividly, then at least subconsciously at this point, or it much rather appears the only thing that stands a chance of adequately substituting for what Glück Faust lost when he lost Gretchen and then all memory of her. The modern quest for the aesthetic of forgetting, as an attempt to replace the transcendental security of Christianity, takes a big leap forward from the mode of bourgeois tragedy – quickly forgotten and easily discarded – to many different genres,

forms and materials in search of something like it. Subsequently, the play evokes an intertextual plentitude that drowns Faust the play, Faust the character, and the reader in a flood of intertextual echoes that respond to his refreshed desire for a more pleasing and fulfilling aesthetic in the attempt to mend the fracture from which they rise. The play grows dissatisfied as soon as a new citation and reference has been made and continues to look for the meaningful in the abundant while almost overlooking the significant within the plenty.

As soon as he finds himself in the Klassische Walpurgisnacht, the question of

Helen’s whereabouts is all that is on Faust’s mind: “Wo ist sie? – Frage jetzt nicht weiter nach.” (V. 7070) It forces him to part company with Mephistopheles and Homunculus, and subsequently, he comes to breathe “die Luft, die ihre Sprache sprach” (V. 7073) in a phantasmagoria of figures, motifs and allegories that taps into the cultural diversity of classical civilization. In his search for Helen, Faust confers with sphinxes and sirens (“Ihr

Fraunbilder müßt mir Rede stehn: / Hat eins der Euren Helena gesehn?” V. 7195-7196) as well as nymphs (“Wir säuseln, wir rieseln, / Wir flüstern dir zu.” V. 7269-7270) until he finally meets the centaur Chiron, who supposedly knows about Helen’s whereabouts.

When Faust confronts with his detailed knowledge of Helen’s mythological background

(“Erst zehen Jahr!…” V. 7426), Chiron mocks the exactitude and the philological mind- set that still speaks of a Socratic attitude: “Ich seh’, die Philologen, / Sie haben dich so wie sich selbst betrogen.” (V. 7426-7427). Chiron’s dismissal somewhat echoes Nietzsche’s disdain for that particular raison d’être of the modern spirit. Nietzsche says it is

umsonst dass man die ganze ‘Weltlitteratur’ zum Troste des modernen Menschen um ihn versammelt und ihn mitten unter die Kunststile und Künstler aller Zeiten hinstellt, damit er ihnen, wie Adam den Thieren, einen Namen gebe: […] der

‚Kritiker’ ohne Lust und Kraft, […] der im Grunde Bibliothekar und Corrector ist und an Bücherstaub und elend erblindet. (120)

In this sense, Faust appears to be far too modern: One might read the engulfing intertextual vastness of the Faustian text as nothing but a reaffirmation of the Socratic impetus; in a circular motion, the quest to overcome the modern predicament leads Faust, inescapably, right to the point from where he started. Socratism pervades even Faust’s most subliminal experience, such as the one in Wald und Höhle for example, where Mephistopheles falls not short of reminding him: “Dir steckt der Doktor noch im Leib” (V. 3277). Faust: Eine

Tragödie itself not only documents this everlasting quest for the aesthetic, but openly participates in it. Not for nothing, David Wellbery praises Faust, in relation to modernity, as “a document of staggering erudition” and for being “a book that interconnects many books in a vast and intricate semantic network. The space it charts is that of European cultural memory.” (“Faust and the Dialectic of Modernity”, 548) Hence, the text remains true to its modern agenda by not so much abandoning the exhausted Socratic, but rerouting the impulse so inherent in it – and to the modalities of a capitalist society to which

Socratism gives cultural or intellectual expression – into a new direction. On the one hand, the peak of “cultural memory” as Wellbery calls the eventual by-product of

Enlightened/Socratic and capitalist impulses appears as the ultimate inability to forget and therefore as the ultimate inability to recreate something as simply invigorating as the intellectual stimulation of Faust’s union with Gretchen or, to think along more Nietzschean terminologies, the Dionysian. On the other hand, Faust needs to pass through these untenable modes of intellectual excess and remembrance to uncover something that might not recreate, but rival the Dionysian and the forms of forgetting instead. Consequently,

Faust is misunderstood by Chiron – and by implication, by Nietzsche – since he does not 56

merely search for an intangible knowledge or memory of her; it is the actual Helen of Troy whose power he wishes to replicate: “Du [Chiron] sahst sie einst; heut hab’ ich sie gesehn,

/ So schön wie reizend, wie ersehnt so schön.” (V. 7442-7443) And his wish will be granted: At the end of the Klassische Walpurgisnacht, the frenzy of Homunculus’s and

Galatea’s orgiastic union heralds in the reign of Eros himself: “Die Körper, sie glühen auf nächtlicher Bahn, / Und ringsum ist alles vom Feuer umronnen; / so herrsche denn Eros, der alles begonnen.” (V. 8477-8479). The amalgamation of the modern Homunculus and the classical Galatea through the “Pulsen der Liebe” (V. 8468) brings forth the hypostasis of Eros himself and shortly thereafter, the epitome of beauty in persona with whom he wishes to escape into a simpler material reality.

Faust’s move from the orgiastic frenzy of the Klassische Walpurgisnacht progresses to a more defined recreation of classical mythology that itself migrates towards an allegorical sphere that is, sui generis, flawed by the predicament of modernity.

Beginning the third act in medias res drastically changes the focus of the play from Faust’s and Homunculus’s exploits to Helen of Troy, who speaks in hexameter and appears aware of how her story will be retold and reworked in the coming millennia: “[V]iel geschehen, was die Menschen weit und breit / So gern erzählen, aber der nicht gerne hört, / Von dem die Sage wachsend sich zum Märchen span.” (V. 8513-8515). Yet, there is an element that severely taints the classical vision, an element which cannot the vocalized in teichoskopy:

“Was ich gesehen, sollt ihr selbst mit Augen sehn, / […] Doch red’ ich in die Lüfte; denn das Wort bemüht / Sich nur umsonst, Gestalten schöpferisch aufzubaun.” (V. 8663-8690).

Helen speaks of Phorkyas, who is none other than the Mephistophelean spirit of modernity

in disguise,10 and her, or much rather his, presence constructs a pertinent and recognizable contrast between the ugly and the beautiful and allegedly, between the modern and the classical: “Wie häßlich neben Schönheit zeigt sich Häßlichkeit.” (V. 8810) The experience of the classical and the absolute beauty the play evokes and represents in Helen appears fundamentally tainted and irrevocably affected by the mere presence of Phorkyas’s whose ugliness represents the modernity that summons and recreates her in the first place. The text activates an enormous amount of mythological self-reflexivity by presenting characters with a self-awareness that would almost fringe on the modes of parody if the play did not so vividly seek their acknowledgment.

The play does not present the meeting of the ancient Helen and the modern Faust as instantaneous, but as carefully administered and reconciliatory climax. In the form of

Porky’s, Mephistopheles can continue his part of the devil’s bargain by explicating Faust’s presence in Menelaus’s kingdom through an act of retroactive continuity: “Dort hinten still im Gebirgtal hat ein kühn Geschlecht / Sich angesiedelt, dringend aus cimmerischer Nacht,

/ und unersteiglich feste Burg sich aufgetürmt, / Von da sie Land und Leute placken, wie’s behagt.” (V. 8999-9002.), Successfully, this narrative integrates Faust into the Spartan lands which might appear as far-fetched to contemporary readers as it does to Helen: “ganz unmöglich scheint’s” (V. 9003). Magically, Phorkyas / Mephistopheles then moves Helen and the chorus to Faust’s castle so that his wish can be fulfilled: “Du sprichst das letzte, sagst mit Ernst vernehmlich Ja! / Sogleich umgeb’ ich dich mit jener Burg.” (V. 9048-

9049) Nothing else seems necessary, for Helen is immediately enchanted by the strange

10 Careful readers will of course remember the meeting of Mephistopheles with the Phorkyaden, in which Mephistopheles dons Phorkyas’s dress (“Der Dritten BIldnis mir zu überlassen, / Auf kurze Zeit.” V. 8017- 8018). 58

quality of Faust’s language or rather by what Faust deems the “Sprechart unsrer Völker”

(V. 9372). Hence, she invites him to sit with her (“An meine Seite komm! Der leere Platz

/ Beruft den Herrn und sichert mir den meinen.“ V. 9367-9368) to inquire the peculiarity of his verses and the nature of his rhymes: “Doch wünscht ich Unterricht, warum die Rede

/ Des Manns mir seltsam klang, seltsam und freundlich. / Ein Ton scheint sich dem andern zu bequemen, / Und hat ein Wort zum Ohre sich gesellt, ein anderes kommt, dem ersten liebzukosen. […]” (V. 9366-9371). As the product of another time and a different age,

Faust confronts Helen with an aesthetic that is as baffling to her as it appears all-the-more enticing: “So sage denn, wie sprech’ ich auch so schön?“ (V. 9377) Being “Verehrer,

Diener, Wächter all’ in einem!” (V.9364), Faust has, of course, no other option than to instruct her:

FAUST. Das ist gar leicht, es muß von Herzen gehn. Und wenn die Brust von Sehnsucht überfließt, Man sieht sich um und fragt – HELENA. wer mitgenießt. FAUST. Nun schaut der Geist nicht vorwärts, nicht zurück, Die Gegenwart allein – HELENA. ist unser Glück. FAUST. Schatz ist sie, Hochgewinn, Besitz und Pfand; Bestätigung, wer gibt sie? HELENA. Meine Hand. (V. 9378-9384)

First and foremost, this moment of mutual recognition, as it is brought forth by the machinations of the devil, constitutes quite literally (Cf. V. 9382) another moment of Glück for Faust. When she completes the “Wechselrede” (V. 9376) that Faust initiates for the purposes of her practice, Helen learns to rhyme and thereby integrates a modern form of lyric so different from her own into her speech pattern. And when he insists that one only unlocks the vitality of his rhymes through tapping into one’s inner emotions and in its reciprocity, Faust casts Glück as the catalyst of this amalgamation between himself and his 59

new beloved. Faust’s and Helen’s exchange reenacts the idyllic intimacy and the utopian communication that David Wellbery’s The Specular Moment considers so pertinent in the

Erlebnislyrik that Goethe once instigated in his youth (9). That poetic quality, as it so potently cascades into the realm of the ancient, is of course nothing new in the course of the play.

In the reciprocity of their poetic production, Helen and Faust expand on a moment of forgetting similar to his former Glück with Gretchen. When he passes the modern form of lyric on to her, Helen experiences a renewed sense of perplexity out of that inexplicable mutuality: “Ich scheine mir verlebt und doch so neu, / In dich verwebt, dem Unbekannten treu” (V. 9415-9416). With the realization of his relationship to Helen, Faust vocalizes a newfound commitment to life: “Dasein ist Pflicht, und wär’s ein Augenblick.” (V. 9418)

The word Augenblick bears crucial significance here, for it brings back the terminology of the wager; Mephistopheles comes close to provide Faust with a raison d’être in the form of forgetting that does not emerge within the framework of modernity, but this time completely outside from it. For this reason, the exchange between Helen and Faust compares so nicely to scenes with Gretchen, who in Garten for example continued Faust’s rhymes or had her own rhymes continued by him (Cf. V. 3124-3125); her seemingly unsophisticated tenor appeared to be the only means to make sense of the complexity of the issues she was faced with and functioned counterpunctually to the erudition with which

Faust could not deal any longer. The way Faust epitomizes the beauty of Helen and her exquisite speech thereby appears analogous to his appropriation of Gretchen’s simple aesthetic; his attempt to substitute Christianity no longer with the pantheistic fulfilment of individual love, but the quasi-religious force of the polytheistic Greek Antiquity poetically

fashions a moment of precedented Glück and appears as doomed to fail as his previous experiment. In this respect, the appearance of the vile messenger Phorkyas /

Mephistopheles, who suddenly imitates the rhyme pattern Faust just passed on to Helen to announce the approach of Menelaus (Cf. 9419-9434), corrupts the Apollonian virtuosity of the classical scenery by whose serendipitous texture Faust has been so absorbed, and tenaciously confronts Faust again with the modernity whose inescapable clutches he wishes to avoid: “Du Häßlichste gar, nur schlimme Botschaft brings du gern.” (V. 9438) This reminds us once more of Helen’s ultimate irretrievability and of the reckoning that is at hand; all the deal with the devil can facilitate for Faust is an approximation – of love, of beauty or, most important for my purposes, of forgetting – yet without the deal with the devil, even that approximation would be completely impossible.

But Faust is far from helpless and draws on the synergies that his forgetful union with Helen brings forth. While the poetic harmony of their union may affect Faust’s ability to breathe and utter “das Wort” (V. 9413), its mesmerizing intensity, recovered from the ideological scrutiny of his earlier translations, lets him forget the spatiality and temporality of reality itself: “Es ist ein Traum, verschwunden Tag und Ort.” (V. 9414) Out of this disbelief in reality, Faust unlocks and taps into the poetic energies of forgetting and escapes the onslaught of modernity (and Menelaus, for that matter, Cf. V. 9426) by moving deeper into forgetting into a peaceful, completely allegorical realm that the figurative potency of his lyric creates solely by describing it: “Läßt nun der Fels sich angegrünt erblicken, / Die

Ziege nimmt genäschig kargen Teil. / Die Quelle springt, vereinigt stürzen Bäche / Und schon sind Schluchten Hänge, Matten grün. / Auf hundert Hügeln unterbrochner Fläche /

Siehst Wollenherden ausgebreitet ziehn.” (V. 9528-9533). This locus amoenus presents a

place in which “alle Welten” (V. 9561) interlock, the realm of immortality (“Ein jeder ist an seinem Platz unsterblich”, V. 9552), and a pastoral demesne where, almost indistinguishably, gods walk freely among mortals: “noch immer bleibt die Frage: / Ob’s

Götter, ob es Menschen sind? / So war Apoll den Hirten zugestaltet, / Daß ihm der schönsten einer glich” (V. 9556-9559). The stage direction reminds us – almost ironically

– that this evocative description contains anything but mere poetic vision and produces a scenic reality: “Der Schauplatz verwandelt sich durchaus.” (V. 9574). The space into which Faust’s words alone transform the Spartan lands leaves behind any burdens of the past (“Vergangenheit sei hinter uns getan!” V. 9563), and by implication any impact from the future. As this new domain is inherently removed from the clutches and hardships of temporal progression, the deal with the devil comes dangerously close to completion and fulfilling its promise to Faust, for this new sanctuary encapsulates the promise of complete

Arcadian blissfulness beyond the temporal predicaments of modern busyness: “Arkadisch frei sei unser Glück.” (V. 9573) Yet the deal with the devil, following in its own internal logic, has to produce chaos alongside harmony and always concatenates happiness with tragedy; it may achieve the elysian balance of tranquility and forgetting so vividly described and brought to life here, but cannot maintain it.

At first, all seems to go well for Faust, Helen, and their entourage. Phorkyas /

Mephistopheles narrates the events that have transpired in the indeterminable time span between the transformation of the landscape and the awakening of the Chorus: “So vernehmt: in diesen Höhlen, diesen Grotten, diesen Lauben / Schutz und Schirmung war verliehen, wie idyllischem Liebespaare, / Unserm Herrn und unsrer Frauen.” (V. 9586-

9588). As with all things transpiring in the third act, all that is needed in the Arcadian realm

of forgetting is for the poetic word to be uttered to then make it so. As they become like

Tristan and Isold in their Minnegrotte, who rely solely on love for sustenance, Faust and

Helen, as they have momentarily escaped from the clutches of time, give birth to

Euphorion, who, as he grows up immediately upon entering the world, generates a whole concert of hypnotic sounds through the most simplest of actions: “Doch auf einmal ein

Gelächter echot in den Höhlenräumen / […] das Gekose, das Geständel, / Töriger Liebe

Neckereien, Scherzgeschrei und Lustgejäuchze / Wechselnd übertäuben mich.“ (V. 9599-

9602) Thus engulfed, Phorkyas narrative proceeds to define Euphorion as “künftigen

Meister alles Schönen, dem die ewigen Melodien / Durch die Glieder sich bewegen” (V.

9626-9627). In the production of their son as the spirit of poetry himself, Faust and Helen reach the eventual apex from which it must go downhill. Marx himself convincingly argues in the introduction to the Politik der Politischen Ökonomie how no modern poetry can achieve the splendor and simplicitly of Antiquity: “Hört das Singen und Sagen und die

Muse mit dem Preßbengel nicht notwendig auf, also verschwinden nicht die notwendigen

Bedingungen der epischen Poesie?“ (641) Soon enough, Euphorion’s ambitions for greatness because of his simultaneity of modernity and antiquity upset the serenity of the

Schattiger Hain. Rapidly, Euphorion grows up and matures to the “Genius ohne Flügel”

(V. 9603) he was in Phorkyas / Mephistopheles’s story, yet in the chorus’s telling of his exploits he becomes not only “[g]leich dem Schmetterling, / Der aus starrem Puppenzwang

/ Flügel entfaltend behendig schlüpft” (V. 9657-9659), but commits a variety of acts to the gods of the Greek Pantheon that are of almost Promethean grandeur (Cf. 9662-9677). His parents are so in tune with each other on a formal level that they either speak completely in tandem, i.e. either together or never more than the other. Yet Euphorion wishes to leave

his corporal existence on the earthly plane behind (“Ich will nicht länger / Am Boden stocken” V. 9724) and intends to hone the urges and desires that his parents ask him to reign in: “Nur euch zu Willen / Halt’ ich mich an.” (V. 9741-9742) The chorus quite explicitly critiques his belligerent imaginations as the fateful disruption of the realm of forgetting: “Wer im Frieden / Wünschet sich Krieg zurück, / Der ist geschieden / Vom

Hoffnungsglück.” (V. 9839-9842) And Euphoria’s wish to depart from the confining enclave of the idyllic realm of Glück causes his parents nothing but sorrow: After his fall from flying too close to the sun, he calls only for his mother to accompany him (“Laß mich im düstern Reich, / Mutter, mich nicht allein!” V. 9905-9906), and she follows readily and willingly: “Persephoneia, nimm den Knaben auf und mich!” (V. 9944) For Faust, it seems, there is no place left but in the modernity to which he must now return.

Notably, the deal with the devil never perpetuates Helen’s return to the modern world as she will have no inclination to stay anyway. But before Faust would be completely lost and alone, Phorkyas / Mephistopheles steps in again, instructs Faust to hold on to

Helen’s garment that will carry Faust away (“Es trägt dich überalles Gemeine rasch / am

Äther hin” V. 9952-9953) to the eventual meeting with his Mephistophelean servant: “Wir sehn uns wieder, weit, gar weit von hier.” (V. 9954). On the one hand, Phorkyas /

Mephistopheles confirms Helen’s clothes as a true vestige of the divine (“Die Göttin ist’s nicht mehr, die du verlorst / Doch göttlich ist’s” V. 9949-9950) and hence acknowledges that Faust’s endeavor truly revitalized the potency of the religious so lost in secular modernity. On the other hand, when Helen leaves Faust, again, by himself without a purpose, she reveals in her final lines how the project of combining the aesthetic with Glück has been doomed from the outset: “Ein altes Wort bewährt sich leider auch an mir: / Daß

Glück und Schönheit dauerhaft sich nicht vereint.” (V. 9939-9940) Faust may rediscover

– yet not stabilize – the religious in the appreciation and indulgence of the pure classical aesthetic, but remains unable to replicate the Glück that he longs for. Even the beauty of consummating his relationship with Helen of Troy herself or of his son, the aesthetic incarnate, does not allow Faust to fully revel in an experience of Glück for which he would then intend to linger and cry out the magic words of “Verweile doch, du bist so schön!” because, once more, the deal with the devil, his very instrument of achievement, stops him from fully escaping the modern and attaining the state he wants most; how else are we to read the revelation of Phorkyas’s true identity as Mephistopheles in the end: “um, insofern es nötig wäre, im Epilog das Stück zu kommentieren” (V. 10038). As if aware of the

Faustian predicament, Nietzsche’s praise of Goethe and Weimar Classicism goes hand in hand with their immediate mitigation: “[Dass] es solchen Helden, wie Schiller und Goethe, nicht gelingen durfte, jene verzauberte Pforte zu erbrechen, die in den hellenischen

Zauberberg führt“ (131). For Nietzsche, the complete revival of the Dionysian in modernity was completely impossible even for the likes of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, until his own or

Wagner’s time at least. Yet if not even the mutuality of the poetic ingenuity between Helen and Faust possesses the means to bring forth the unbridled beauty of the Dionysian, one might wonder how deep down we have to go into the Hellenic magic mountain to finally tear open its gates. Nietzsche would, rightly of course, hold against the splendor of Helen’s and Faust’s joining that it still emerges from the Socratic hunger he so despises. Yet what he does not account for is the fact that upon its return into the modern world, the Dionysian will also be – or has already been – a product of the modernity that Socratism in its favorite

Enlightened progeny has produced. Forever fleeting, the Dionysian might not have been

anything but the full advance of forgetting into the life world, which Faust has not yet achieved; but he will have nothing to worry: The wager with Mephistopheles is far from over and will quickly gain upon him again.

Endgame: Faust’s Enactment of Capitalist Modernization for the Sake of

Forgetting

Sans Mephistopheles, Faust returns from his expeditions to antiquity and comes to rest on the Hochgebirge, and the vestige of Helen’s divine dress, after carrying him around the globe (“an klaren Tagen über Land und Meer geführt”, V. 10042), abandons him:

“Entlassend meiner Wolke Tragewerk […] / Sie löst sich langsam, nicht zerstriebend, von mir ab.” (V. 10042-10044). Faust remains vividly captivated by the magical cloud when it changes form in its movement eastwards: “Nach Osten strebt die Masse mit geballtem Zug

/ […] Sie teilt sich wandelnd, wogenhaft, veränderlich. / Doch will sich’s modeln.“ (V.

10044-10047) He beholds “ein göttergleiches Fraungebild” (V 10049) in which he recognizes “Junonen, Leda’n, Helenen” (V. 10050) while it rests “[a]uf sonnbeglänzten

Pfühlen herrlich hingestreckt” (V. 10048) Through this parting gift, the play reaches a point again in which the treatment of modernity as well as the trajectory thereof considerably changes course. In Vor dem Tor, Faust articulated his yearning for a pursuit of the sun and set out to explore modern life, as he did initially with Gretchen; in Anmutige Gegend,

Ariel’s intervention turned his gaze away from the sun and prepared Faust’s way to escape modernity, as he did intermittently with Helen. Faust now sets out to turn modernity on its head; in its mesmeric splendor, the cloud forces him to gaze back at the rising sun, back towards days long gone (“spiegelt blendend flücht’ger Tage großen Sinn” V. 10054) and

in turn, reminds him again where his true north lies. Another vision presently dovetails with the departure of Helen’s divine energy from the earthly plane and, as if triggered by it, takes possession of Faust’s inmost being when it reassembles: “Doch mir umschwebt ein zarter lichter Nebelstreif / Noch Brust und Stirn, erheiternd, kühl und schmeichelhaft.

/ Nun steigt es leicht und zaudernd hoch und höher auf, / Fügt sich zusammen.” (V. 10055-

10058) At first, Faust questions the reliability of this apparition and cannot distinguish between its delightful truthfulness (“Täuscht mich ein entzückend Bild…?” V. 10058) and its masterful imitation of the memory of Gretchen, carefully deemed “jugenderstes, längstentbehrtes höchstes Gut” (V. 10059). Soon enough, its facticity stands without doubt;

“Des tiefsten Herzens frühste Schätze” (V. 10060) enrapture Faust’s imagination and he remembers “[d]en schnellempfundnen, ersten, kaum verstandnen Blick, / Der, festgehalten,

überglänzte jeden Schatz.” (V. 10062-10063) For Dieter Arendt, this apparition and its role as peripety of the play seems doubly questionable: “Eine doppelte Frage liegt nahe:

Gretchen? Und: Weckt die Anamnese kathartische Kräfte?” (322). Arndt’s hesitation probably comes from the fact that what Faust remembers exactly remains obscured; still, I would answer both of these questions in the positive: At the peripeteia of his second part,

Faust comes to remember Gretchen and the Glück from which Ariel and the fairies liberated him before, the Glück as it consumed him once and consumes him now.

With the vision of Gretchen, Faust has to re-experience the trauma of her passing with which every memory of her, even at its most beautiful peak, is inexorably intertwined.

Perhaps the memory brings back the heavenly excitement of being in Gretchen’s kleines, reinliches Zimmer for the first time; perhaps the apparition in the eastern skies resembles

Gretchen’s angelic “holdes Himmelsangesicht” (V. 3182) in their mutual recognition of

love; maybe her final and fatal unwillingness to follow his lead suffocates him again (“Laß das Vergangne vergangen sein, / Du bringst mich um.” V. 4518-4519); or perhaps all these conflicting strands of memory converge in a moment of heartbreak from which there is no coming back. Undoubtedly, we can infer the tumultuous effect of the vision from its eventual departure: “Löst sich nicht [!] auf, erhebt sich in den Äther hin / Und zieht das

Beste meines Innern mit sich fort.” (V. 10065-10066) Not his experience of sweet blissfulness and forgetting remains when “die holde Form” (V. 10063) departs, but a sense of insufferable regret consumes his every being. During his journey, he tried to recover forgetting in his illustrious adventures with Helen, but failed to sustain the amalgamation of the modern and the classical from which she rose. What drove him there was the desire for an untarnished experience of forgetting, such as the one he did importantly not embrace when Gretchen invited him to tarry and thereby exhaust the blissfulness of Glück. This now feeds a will for destruction that guides his every action. As Lawrence reads the play: “[A]ll of [Faust’s] actions on the great historical stage were in fact attempts to reach out with a mighty fist and destroy, for the sake of a new and better world, the narrow world that first suffocated and then destroyed Gretchen.”11 (51) In so doing, Faust may put his own interpretation on Gretchen’s dying wish: “Ich will dir die Gräber beschreiben / Für die mußt du sorgen / Gleich morgen” (V. 4521-4523) After remembering the forgetting that he has, in itself forgotten, Faust will no longer use the deal with the devil to navigate or avoid the intricacies of modern life. Instead, he now reroutes Mephistopheles’ power

11 Lawrence claims that this is a decidedly Marxist reading of the play and apparently takes that from Georg Lukács’s Goethe und seine Zeit, but does not provide any accurate indication as to where in the study he finds such a claim. I have consulted Goethe und seine Zeit and have been unable to locate any conclusive evidence in which Lukács identifies Gretchen’s death as Faust’s motivation for the destruction of the feudal world in the manner that Lawrence outlines it here. Even though other aspects of Lukács study inform parts of my reading of the play, I therefore treat this particular68 idea as Lawrence’s only.

towards the destruction of the pre-modern world and thereby intends to surpass modernity in an ultimate moment of Glück, for the prospect thereof gives him the strength to do so.

What drives all his actions now is what Nietzsche’s second Unzeitgemäße Betrachtung calls the “Recht dessen, was jetzt werden soll” (254).

For this purpose, Mephistopheles is, of course, not long in the coming: Emerging out of a pair of Siebenmeilenstiefel, the devil immediately describes the peculiar nature of the Hochgebirge and recounts its position in the greater, cosmological scheme of things:

“Steigst ab in solcher Greuel Mitten / Im gräßlich gähnenden Gestein? / Ich kenn’ es wohl, doch nicht an dieser Stelle, / Denn eigentlich war das der Grund der Hölle.” (V. 10069-

10072.). Faust deems Mephistopheles’s primordial narrative nothing but “närrischen

Legenden” (V. 10073), but it is noteworthy that Gretchen’s farewell occurs in the very place of Mephistopheles’s ascendancy. Being the master in this realm, but Faust’s good servant nonetheless, Mephistopheles inquires, as if on cue, for another task to fulfil: “Doch, ungenügsam wie du bist, / Empfandest du wohl kein Gelüst?” (V. 10132-10133) Faust, with a newfound self-confidence, stretches Mephistopheles’s patience to the limit by not stating his newest wish outright, but making the devil guess: “Und doch! ein Großes zog mich an. / Errate!” (V. 10133) A certain logic is at work that Sarah Colvin observes: “The sudden arrival of a spirit that grants wishes is a familiar element in folk storytelling; three wishes are the norm, and the third traditionally destroys anything achieved by the first two.

[…] Abandoned by their misty remains in the Hochgebirge, Faust makes his third and most destructive request.” (164) Afflicted with such an unbearable regret over Gretchen that he now shuts himself off from all feelings, Faust utilizes the deal with the devil one more time.

Mephistopheles offers him the prospects and blessings of power (Cf. 10135-10154) and

sex (Cf. 10160-10175) and even surmises that only the glory of adventures on the moon might satisfy Faust’s newest fancies (Cf. 10177-10188), but Faust remains adamant, for modernity has still much left for him to do: “[D]ieser Erdenkreis / Gewährt noch Raum zu großen Taten. / Erstaunenswürdiges soll geraten, / Ich fühle Kraft zu kühnen Fleiß.” (V.

10181-10184) Given Colvin’s remarks, we seem to have reached the point when

Mephistopheles’ power about Faust should be at its peak, when the deal of the devil has taken hold of him to the fullest, for he no longer knows any wish for fame and glory, but falls completely under the thrall of the deed: “Die Tat ist alles, nichts der Ruhm.” (V.

10188)

Unlike Paris, who was given the impossible choice between Hera, Athena and

Aphrodite and between power, valor and love respectively, Faust finds a fourth option to satisfy his whims. Apparently, his newest fancy is to merely take control over the tides and in so doing, to wrest land away from the sea:

Mein Auge war aufs hohe Meer gezogen; Es schwoll empor, sich in sich selbst zu türmen, Dann ließ es nach und schüttete die Wogen, Des flachen Ufers Breite zu bestürmen. Und das verdroß mich ; wie der Übermut Den freien Geist, der alle Rechte schätzt, Durch leidenschaftlich aufgeregtes Blut Ins Mißbehagen des Gefühls versetzt. Ich hielt’s für Zufall, schärfte meinen Blick: Die Woge stand und rollte dann zurück, Entfernte sich vom stolz erreichten Ziel; Die Stunde kommt, sie wiederholt das Spiel. […] Da herrschet Well’ auf Welle kraftbegeistet, Zieht sich zurück, und es ist nichts geleistet, […] Da wagt mein Geist sich selbst zu überfliegen; Hier möcht ich kämpfen, dies möcht ich besiegen. […] Da faßt’ ich schnell im Geiste Plan auf Plan: Erlange dir das köstliche Genießen, Das herrische Meer vom Ufer auszuschließen (V. 10198-10229)

The impetus of the Enlightenment, in the capitalist expression that it finds here in Faust, claims the Adamic dominion over nature. Hence, a dictum from Adorno’s and

Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung almost reads as a prosaic articulation of this sentiment: “[D]er Verstand, der den Aberglauben besiegt, soll über die entzauberte Natur gebieten.” (20) Yet in this vivid description of the to and fro of the waves itself, we may discern an unwillingness to accept the perpetual and therefore senseless progression of time itself; his utmost resentment towards the futility of this everlastingly repeated movement encapsulates in the same manner a desperation with the unreachability of forgetting, the former of which Faust wants to put behind himself. What Faust seemingly wishes to gain from this project is, first and foremost, to acquire an instance of (private) property:

“Herrschaft gewinn’ ich, Eigentum!” (V. 10187) But by the same token, the subjugation of time and the congealment of Glück lies as the second, subversive and most significant intention beyond this new endeavor. Even if for anyone but him this might appear to be nothing short of a pointless experiment, Faust heralds exactly the kind of forces that are needed on this new battleground of his choosing. While even the devil himself, in the beginning, seems not to care about this third wish in the least (“Da ist für mich nichts Neues zu erfahren / Das kenn’ ich schon seit hunderttausend Jahren.” V. 10210-10211),

Mephistopheles is bound by blood to comply to give Faust what he wants. In what probably ranks as one of the most ironic moment of the play, Faust looks at a world in which there is nothing left to gain for him and moves his prospects towards the generation of land through the exploitation of labor, and Mephistopheles, having been in league with the forces of capitalism all along, is more than happy to comply. “Von Schritt zu Schritt wußt’ ich mir’s zu erörtern; / Dies ist mein Wunsch, den wage zu befördern!” (V. 10232-10233):

With the utterance of this his final wish, Faust becomes, on the one hand, once again the document of an unwaveringly unfolding modernity when Faust turns into the capitalist into which Mephistopheles, as we saw already during the seduction of Gretchen, tried to transform him all along. In the Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, Karl Marx equates

“die moderne bürgerliche Gesellschaft, die so gewaltige Produktions- und Verkehrsmittel hervorgezaubert hat,“ with a “Hexenmeister, der die Unterirdischen Gewalten nicht mehr zu beherrschen vermag, die er heraufbeschwor.“ (467) And in All That Is Solid Melts Into

Air, Marshall Berman identifies this conjuror as none other than Goethe’s Faust himself

(40). This speaks of the cultural moment of an imminent capitalist modernity that Faust expresses and exposes through Goethe’s very choice of motif and incorporates into the workings of its plot: Not surprisingly, Georg Lukács reads the second part of the play as the imploding of feudalism through the unstoppable foray capitalism: “Goethe […] gibt ein tiefes und umfassendes Bild vom Verfall des Feudalismus […] zugleich mit der

Aufzeigung jener Kräfte, die ihn wirklich in die Luft sprengen: mit der Entwicklung der

Produktivkräfte durch den Kapitalismus.” (142) On the other hand, Faust uses modernity and the deal with the devil that connects him so severely to it as a means to an end and fashion post facto a world in which he could have, like Gretchen, freely said the magical words of “Verweile doch, du bist so schön” and enjoy the full rapture of forgetting in which these words cascade.

Of course, Faust’s wish is Mephistopheles’s command, and consequently, the deal with the devil is more than ready to provide Faust with the necessary resources. As if they have been in waiting all along, “Trommeln und kriegerische Musik” (309) immediately echo through the theatric space of the Faustian performance. We may recognize them as

the instruments to transform the world for the sake of modernity and the prospect of Glück, for Mephistopheles welcomes their – well-timed – appearance: “Wie leicht ist das! Hörst du die Trommeln fern?” (V. 10234) He recounts how he and Faust are themselves responsible for the anarchy and disarray that will serve their needs:

Als wir [den Kaiser] unterhielten, Ihm falschen Reichtum in die Hände spielten, Da war die ganze Welt ihm feil […] Er selbst genoß, und wie! Indes zerfiel das Reich in Anarchie, Wo groß und klein sich kreuz und quer befehdeten Und Brüder sich vertrieben, töteten, Burg gegen Burg, Stadt gegen Stadt, Zunft gegen Adel Fehde hat, Der Bischof mit Kapitel und Gemeinde; Was sich nur ansah, waren Feinde. (V. 10244-10266).

Effectively, Faust and Mephistopheles have ended up right in the middle of a social revolution of their own making, given their introduction of paper money at the feudal court, on the one hand, yet also at the final stages of the bourgeois revolution as it shapes and defines the secular modernity from which Faust’s initial struggles have arisen on the other hand. Even if “Burg gegen Burg, Stadt gegen Stadt” (V. 10264) is one facet of this revolt, a class struggle (“Zunft gegen Adel, […] Der Bischof mit dem Kapitel und Gemeinde”, V.

10265-10266) underlies the all-consuming violence: “Denn leben hieß sich wehren.” (V.

10271) The insurgency results in a call for stability that comes not from the upper echelons, but from a certain part of society underneath: “Die Tüchtigen, sie standen auf mit Kraft /

Und sagten Herr ist, der uns Ruhe schafft.” (V. 10278-10279) With the “Tüchtigen”, the text denotes the subaltern class of the workers who, in this Goethean narrative of revolution, demand an end of the revolutionary struggles. For this exact purpose, the forces of feudalism, according to Mephistopheles, rise for their Ragnarök: “Und unser Kaiser,

den wir froh gemacht, / Zieht sich hierher, vielleicht zur letzten Schlacht” (V. 10287-

10288). Mephistopheles urges Faust to crush the bourgeois revolution for the advancement of his own agenda: “Erhalten wir dem Kaiser Thron und Lande, / So kniest du nieder und empfängst / Die Lehn von grenzenlosem Strande.“ (V. 10304-10307) Necessarily, Faust sides with the powers of restoration and seemingly hollows out the full success of modernity to advance his own endeavor: a “grenzenlosem Strande” to solidify unlimited forgetting. And with the Teufelspakt on his side, it is as easily said as it is done: “Schon manches hast du [Mephistopheles] durchgemacht, / Nun, so gewinn auch eine Schlacht!”

(V. 10307-10308)

As part of his truce with the forces of restoration, Faust and Mephistopheles manipulate the forces of history themselves. The appeal of their assistance to the emperor appears glaringly obvious: He has to deal with the movement of the masses as unrecognizable forces guide them (“Die Menge schwankt im ungewissen Geist, / Dann strömt sie nach, wohin der Strom sie reißt.” V. 10381-10382) to follow the lead of another emperor: “Und auf vorgeschriebnen Bahnen / Zieht die Menge durch die Flur; / Den entrollten Lügenfahnen/ Folgen alle. – Schafsnatur!“ (V. 10403-10406) The the

“ungewissen Geist” (V. 10381), “Schafsnatur” (V. 10406), and the “vorgeschriebnen

Bahnen” (V.10403) all indicate a problematic agency on the part of the masses; in the description of the emperor, they merely move on the material currents of history instead of guiding its course. Faust, the “Nekromat von Noria” (V. 10439), now – as acknowledged and lamented by the archbishop later on (Cf. V. 10981-10984) – offers him a deal with the devil, so much like his Mephistophelean alter ego has he now become. Faust intervention in these events, as it is catalyzed by the powers of magic, redirects the natural course of

history, for the emperor himself remarks: “Naturgemäß geschieht es nicht.” (V. 10583).

His impressive role in altering the currents of history thereby evidences above all else the ferocity of his commitment to Glück; it gives him both power in its remembrance from the past and through the possibility of its attainment in the future. Ultimately, modernity’s advancement may not be thwarted, but only temporarily halted, for a redistribution of property within the empire still occurs: Concretely, the emperor honors the newly appointed Erzmarschall, Erzkämmerer, Erztruchseß and Erzschenk as well as the

Erzbischof / Erzkaiser by rearranging the parts of his kingdom accordingly: “Nun aber, was das Reich in seinem Ganzen hegt, / Sei, mit Gewalt und Kraft, der Fünfzahl auferlegt.”

(V. 10935-10936) While this may serve, at first glance, the conservation of power structures on behalf of the feudal empire, Faust still obtained the beach of the kingdom to do with as he pleases; the introduction of capitalism, though momentarily suspended, will be unstoppable. Modernity, as the consumption of the world through capitalism, will finds its way through the backdoor nonetheless.

In Faust’s fifth act, Faust’s striving for Glück has resulted, almost as a by-product, in the subsequent changes that we might recognize as inherently modern. His creation of land, i.e. the production of (private) property was a full success: When the Wanderer comes by to behold the lovely seaside he once visited in his youth, he expects a place most fitting for prayer and religious contemplation: “Und nun laßt hervor mich treten, / Schaun das grenzenlose Meer, / Laßt mich knien, laßt mich beten, / Mich bedrängt die Brust so sehr.”

(V. 11075-11078) However, the coast has long been changed beyond recognition (“Laß ihn rennen, ihn erschrecken, / Denn er glaubt nicht, was er sieht.” V. 11091-11092) and no longer does it provide a sanctuary for pantheistic worship, or a refuge for the troubled

modern mind. The Socratic lust for power and control emerges in the reign of the industrial(izing) deux ex machina of Socratism, in Nietzsche’s “Gott der Maschinen” (115) and in Faust’s dam. It stands as a shrine for the rationalizing spirit of the machine and subsequently, as a site of terrible horror. Philemon and Baucis outline the transformation of the coast with a sense of utmost urgency:

Kluger Herren kühne Knechte Gruben Gräben, dämmten ein, Schmälerten des Meeres Rechte, Herrn an seiner Statt zu sein. […] So erblickst du in der Weite Erst des Meeres blauen Saum, Rechts und links, in aller Breite, Dichtgedrängt bewohnten Raum. (V. 11091-11106)

As described by and to the last vestiges of an old world, the Faustian project unleashes the power of alienated labor (“Kluger Herren kühne Knechte”, V. 11091) and in so doing, facilitates processes of urbanization in the creation of a modern cityscape (“Dichtgedrängt bewohnten Raum”, V. 11106) that will realize the ideal of a liberal society. It echoes the grandeur with which Marx and Engels acknowledge the unprecedented proportions of bourgeois busyness in the Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei: “Die Bourgeoisie hat in ihrer kaum hundertjährigen Klassenherrschaft massenhaftere und kolossalere

Produktionskräfte geschaffen als alle vergangenen Generationen zusammen.” (467) To the mere spectator, the unleashed, culminated laborers act with magical and uncanny efficiency, for the capitalist endeavor reaches its goals almost overnight: “Tag umsonst die

Knechte lärmten, / Hack und Schaufel, Schlag um Schlag, / Wo die Flämmchen nächtig schwärmten, / Stand ein Damm den anderen Tag.“ (V. 11123-11126) And Philemon and

Baucis do not fall short of pointing out the depravity and suffering that had to be paid – by somebody – in the process when their account turns all the more drastic and graphic: 76

“Menschenopfer mußten bluten, / Nachts erschall des Jammers Qual.” (V. 11128-11129)

In this sense, the dyke project appears far removed from the blissful experience of Glück that is supposed to generate, but it is in the nature of the deal with the devil that it cannot create an inherently positive moment without casting a grander cruelty alongside it. As with Gretchen, Faust’s success is paid for in blood.

Philoemon and Baucis appear as the dissonance in the almost perfect harmony of

Faust’s capitalist empire; as the vestige of a life before rationalization and hitherto, they remain the one element that prevents Faust’s utopian promise from fully unleashing its dystopic horror. Even the insatiable Mephistopheles considers the project a full success:

“Dein Ufer ist dem Meer versöhnt / Vom Ufer nimmt, zu rascher Bahn, / Das Meer die

Schiffe willig an; / So sprich, daß hier, hier vom Palast / Dein Arm die ganze Welt umfaßt.”

(V.11222-11226) Hence, even the devil believes that Glück has finally been achieved: “Mit ernster Stern, mit düstrem Blick / Vernimmst du dein erhaben Glück.” (V. 11219-11220)

Yet Faust’s whims are not met to full satisfication: The new space taken away from the sea does not fully satisfy his appetite: “Die Linden wünscht’ ich mir zum Sitz, / Die wenig

Bäume, nicht mein eigen, / Verderben mir den Weltbesitz.” (V. 11240-11242). On the one hand, the acquisition of Philemon and Baucis’ hillside represents the triumph of capitalist grandeur, (“So sind am härtesten wir gequält / Im Reichtum fühlend, was uns fehlt.” V.

11250-11251), for, as little and admittedly comical as it may be, it remains the final piece of private property in Faust’s line of sight not yet in his possession and therefore the final piece of the mosaic to be completed. On the other hand, Philemon’s and Baucis’s religiosity epitomizes another way of living, a mode of existence weirdly out of tune with the full capitalist modernity the deal with the devil has shaped and formed, for they are, essentially,

in a disturbing harmony with time: “Wie schaff’ ich mir es vom Gemüte! / Das Glöcklein läutet und ich wüte.” (V. 11257-11258) These two aspects do not stand in contradiction to each other, but plague Faust’s perfect experience in their duality. As a testimony of the pre- modern, they awaken that sense of regret and remorse that lingers on, as Mephistopheles falls not short of pointing out, and a feeling of indignation and fury that Faust himself does not forget:

MEPHISTOPHELES. Als wäre zwischen Bim und Baum, Das Leben ein verschollner Traum. FAUST. Das Widerstehen, der Eigensinn Verkümmern herrlichsten Gewinn, Daß man, zu tiefer, grimmiger Pein, Ermüden muß, gerecht zu sein. (V. 11268-11272.)

So as if to add insult to injury, the deadly fate of Philemon and Baucis at Mephistopheles’s hand has been a foregone conclusion since Faust first laid claim to the beach upon which they lived. The moral costs of this whole enterprise surpass the intended recognition of his achievement (“Ein Luginsland ist bald errichtet, / Um ins Unendliche zu schaun.” V.

11344-11345), the final glimpse into the “Unendliche” of forgetting. Yet is achieved under a capitalist modality that upsets Faust deeply: “Tausch wollt’ ich, wollte keinen Raub” (V.

11371); in the world of this capitalist modernity, however, one necessarily implies the other and Faust has not realized that yet.

Upon (re)experiencing the power of Sorge – i.e. upon being blinded by her –, Faust awakens his workers for one final undertaking. In his final task, the end is more or less nigh:

Was ich gedacht, ich eil’ es zu vollbringen; Des Herren Wort, es gibt allein Gewicht./ Vom Lager auf, ihr Knechte! Mann für Mann! Laßt glücklich schauen, was ich kühn ersann. […] Daß sich das größte Werk vollende, 78

Genügt ein Geist für tausend Hände. (V 11501-11510).

In the fulfilment of this his final vision, Faust hopes to break the confines and restrictions of alienated labor, obviously proclaimed here in the concationation of “ein Geist für tausend Hände”. He hopes to mend the divide between the capitalist and the worker, so that they may share the glory of the capitalist product and valorize the commodification of labor in its end-product: the conquest of the waves and of time itself. As it congeals in the new product, it will become the definitive and purest achievement of modernity. Yet what actually comes to pass is not the construction, but the eventual destruction of the erected dam, as Mephistopheles, now turned into the Aufseher of the capitalist enterprise, desires it: “Die Elemente sind mit uns verschworen, / Und auf Vernichtung läufts hinaus.” (V.

11549-11550) The ghostly workers of the capitalist engine on the other hand, the Lemuren are as much attracted to the project (“Es gilt wohl gar ein weites Land, / Das sollen wir bekommen.” V. 11517), as Faust wants their labor to be exploited and implemented at any cost: “Arbeiter schaffe, Meng’ auf Menge, / Ermuntere durch Genuß und Strenge, / Bezahle locke, presse bei!” (V. 11552-11554) When both stand in the service of Glück, the capitalist and the worker act completely in concert, even though it is the point at which their harmony of spirit and action is nothing but a sham. Hence, the deal with the devil appears more in effect than ever as the engine of the immense falsity within modernity: where Faust wrongly believes that the construction will substantiate his domination over the sea and time (“Wie das Geklirr der Spaten mich ergetzt! / […] Das Meer mit strengem Band umzieht.” V. 11539, 11543), what is brought forth by the workers’ commotion is, in fact, the fine, but substantial difference between Graben and Grab (V. 11559) with which

Mephistopheles proves himself, once more, the deceiver.

Faust’s dam spawns a ‘brave new world’ that encompasses the possibility of both freedom and Glück. In this sense, it seemingly keeps all of modernity’s promises: “Eröffne ich Räume vielen Millionen, / Nicht sicher zwar, doch tätig-frei zu wohnen.” (V. 11563-

11564) For Berman, the new cityscape will be a domain that buzzes with activity, true to the one side of the meaning of tätig-frei or in other words “a community that thrives not on the repression of free individuality in order to maintain a closed social system, but on free constructive action in common to protect the collective resources that enable every individual to become tätig-frei.” (66) Yet the description of the “paradiesisch Land” (V.

11569) made by the “aufgewälzt kühn-emsige Völkerschaft (V. 11568) can also be read differently; instead of a freedom for activity, tätig-frei may likewise denote a freedom from activity, for it echoes the serenity with which Faust once evoked the prelapsarian, pastoral realm he and Helen conjured up: “Grün das Gefilde, fruchtbar; Mensch und Herde /

Sogleich behaglich auf der neusten Erde, / Gleich angesiedelt an des Hügels Kraft.” (V.

11565-11568) It may be exactly this interpretative indecisiveness that informs Faust’s formulation of “der Weisheit letzter Schluß” (V. 11574): “Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben, / Der täglich sie erobern muß.” (V. 11575-11576) In this sense, Faust blindly beholds the utopian vision of a society that appears both free from and free for activity, a society that can be involved in activity within the perpetual present tense of forgetting: “Und so verbringt, umrungen von Gefahr, / Hier Kindheit, Mann, und Greis sein tüchtig Jahr. / Solch ein Gewimmel möcht’ ich sehn, / Auf freiem Grund mit freiem

Volke stehn.” (V. 11577011580) Faust’s utopia makes its offering to a free people in which

“Kindheit, Mann, und Greis” exist in the virtual interchangeability of freedom that forgetting might bring forth once the dam would hold off the water and thereby suspend

time. In the knowledge of this alone, Faust utters his delight in the legendary “Verweile doch, du bist so schön!” (V. 11582). On the one hand, this exclamation effectively finishes the modern quest of attaining independence for the aesthetic sphere from the religious, as

Habermas has inscribed it into the modern project of rationalization and as it has earlier on commenced in Nacht. Moreover, Faust has now realized the promises of modernity by shaping a world that Gretchen never had by creating a world where the power of his forgetting will resonate ad infinitum: “Es kann die Spur von meinen Erdetagen / Nicht in

Äonen untergehn.” (V. 11583-11584) On the other hand, Faust significantly only perceives the “Vorgefühl von solchem hohen Glück” (V. 11585); Faust is so sure that Glück and the forgetting that it implies will await him at the end of the line that it should come as no surprise to anyone when it actually does.

Faust’s final scene Bergschluchten projects the genesis of a promisingly new day that heralds in a post-modern12 age by surpassing modernity through Glück, but without the flaw of the deal with the devil. The angels soon proceed to save Faust, as the famous lines go, not because he actually achieved any of his goals, but because he tried nonetheless: “Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, / Den können wir erlösen.” (V. 11936-

11937) In general, the inhabitants of the heavenly realm of Bergschluchten voice their excitement about Faust’s ascension; in particular, the Selige Knaben recognize in him a potential teacher: “Doch dieser hat gelernt, / Er wird uns lehren.” (V. 12082-1208) Right here and there, Faust seemingly returns to his previous life and finds himself once more the scholar, the pedagogue, and the Socratic individual. The life full of experiences that gathered of one aesthetic mode after another gives Faust one purpose above all: passing it

12 I must apologize for using a term steeped in so much philosophical, cultural and sociological gravitas. It is, as should be noted, meant in the very literal sense of81 the word that implies a life that comes after modernity.

on. Bergschluchten does therefore not condemn Faust to “the inactivity of heaven” (462), as Astrida Ore Tantillo considers it as work here, but accepts him into a space in which

Lehren and Lernen are no longer imbrued with the Socratic (Ewig-)Leere and much rather focalized in the ethereal beauty of the Ewig-Weibliche. Outside any Mephistophelean ménage-á-trois, Faust and Gretchen are reunited within an ephemeral sphere that offers the opportunity to be tätig-frei after all. The Mater Gloriosa instructs Gretchen to lure Faust upward, so that he may find his way into exaltation through her: “Komm! Hebe dich zu höhern Sphären! / Wenn er dich ahnet, folgt er nach.” (V. 12094-12095) Faust’s apotheosis follows the trajectory of the Ewig-Weibliche which, as the words of the Chorus Mysticus remind us, has a magnetic pull over those under its thrall: “Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns hinan.” (V. 12110-12111) In its the culmination of ethereal beauty that completely permeates Bergschluchten and fully discharges in the verses of the Chorus Mysticus, we might locate the world of Faust’s vision in this ethereal world beyond the dilemmas of modernity and of which the “Vorgefühl” von solchem hohen Glück” (V. 11585) seemed so aware. Beyond modernity lies an aesthetic experience that, promisingly, electrifies a perpetuity of forgetting and Glück.

Chapter 3: I Got You Babe: The Case of Romeo and Julia auf dem Dorfe

Traces of Urbanization: The Impact of Modernity on the Seldwylian

Hinterland

Gottfried Keller’s Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe weaves the subtle, but unrelenting effects of modernity into the fabric of its story which presents the hapless existence of the losers in this increasingly modernized world. From the outset, remarks about the constituting changes circulate in the story and thereby, the ramifications of the slowly instating modern life create the backdrop against which the lives of the novella’s protagonists unfold in the most dramatic fashion. As idyllic and tranquil as the novella’s opening might appear, Sali’s and Vrenchen’s childhood occurs not before the inception of social change, but during the peak of its development; when Marti and Manz discuss the possibility of the Black Fiddler entering the community of the village, the former notes:

“Wir sind schon überbevölkert im Dorf und brauchen bald zwei Schulmeister!” (7) What might appear as nothing but a throwaway line in the context of their conversation, indicates, when viewed on a much larger scale, an unprecedented growth in population that the small village community cannot sustain without a change to their way of living. Soon enough,

Marti and Manz both violate the meadow that lies between theirs and turn parts of it into their own:

Als nun, mit der letzten Furche zu Ende gekommen, der Knecht des einen halten wollte, rief sein Meister: “Was hältst du? Kehr noch einmal um!“ „Wir sind ja fertig!“, sagte der Knecht. „Halt’s Maul und tu, wie ich dir sage!“, der Meister. Und sie kehrten um und rissen eine tüchtige Furche in den mittlern herrenlosen Acker hinein, dass Kraut und Steine flogen. (10)

Critics read this encroachment on the alleged property of the Black Fiddler with varying degrees of gravitas. T. M. Holmes points out how the idyllic scenery of the novella’s 83

opening “can be used to mask the reality of constant economic struggle” (70), and Martin

Swales speaks quite explicitly about the specific societal conditions under which the issue of the story unfolds even from the beginning (“Gottfried Kellers ‘Romeo und Julia auf dem

Dorfe”, 54). Michael Schmitz, however, dismisses such readings and sees “eine prinzipiell menschliche Verhaltenskategorie” (69) at work here, closely following an argument made by the text itself: “Die meisten Menschen sind fähig oder bereit, ein in den Lüften umgehendes Unrecht zu verüben, wenn sie mit der Nase darauf stoßen.“ (12) Yet Marti’s remark to Manz about the exploding population in the immediate hinterland of Seldwyla is the last thing either of them say before they both, in unspoken agreement, enlarge their fields at the cost of the fallow land. If not to remedy the increasing duress on their community, they act in implicit response to the increasing demands of a capitalizing economy, i.e. out of a pattern of human behavior that is germane to the specific material conditions Manz and Marti live in. Interestingly, the growth of the children runs concurrently with the decrease of the field, of which the text makes us aware quite explicitly as well: “Es kam eine Ernte um die andere, und jede sah die Kinder größer und schöner und den herrenlosen Acker schmäler zwischen seinen breit gewordenen

Nachbarn.” (11) Sali and Vrenchen are, as goes quite literally without saying, the products of that increasing overpopulation, i.e. the children of modernity.

Sali’s and Vrenchen’s childhood appears both shielded from these economic forces and positioned right at the crucial point where they intersect. Upon bringing their fathers a little snack, the children undertake an expedition into the wilderness: “Die beiden Kinder

[…] zogen ihr Fuhrwerk unter den Schutz der jungen Linden und begaben sich dann auf einen Streifzug in dem wilden Acker, da derselbe mit seinen Unkräutern, Stauden und

Steinhaufen eine ungewohnte und merkwürdige Wildnis darstellte.“ (7) Sali and Vrenchen do not enter any ordinary meadow; the entire, sexually charged description of their unruly activities there lends itself easily to psychoanalytic readings, such as those undertaken by

Robert C. Holub (122ff.) or Sonja Boos (189-192), who consider Sali’s and Vrenchen’s counting of each other’s teeth as a sexual awakening of some sort. The counting, however, has equally significant implications for their alleged detachment from the realm of economics because of their shared inability to count successfully or even properly (10).13

Not only are they hence removed from economic exactitude; on more existential level, they do not yet possess any awareness of the progression of time. As children, Sali and Vrenchen exist, to employ a more Nietzschean terminology, in a state of childish forgetting which they vitalize, in some macabre ritual, with every year that passes: “Wenn [Sali und

Vrenchen] auch sonst keinen Verkehr mehr miteinander hatten, so schien diese jährliche

Zeremonie umso sorglicher gewahrt zu werden als sonst nirgends die Felder ihrer Väter zusammenstießen.” (11) In the same vein, their fathers continue to take some part of the

“herrenlosen Acker” and illegally acquire some of it for their own; with every year that

Sali and Vrenchen continue on towards adulthood, the field grows smaller and wilder and thereby becomes more precious at the same time. In an irony of all ironies, the realm of

Sali’s and Vrenchen’s childhood constitutes the cost at which their fathers are able, with the coming of every harvest, to satisfy the increasing demands that the presence of their children necessitates, if not legitimizes. The text deems this a “Frevel”, a crime upon Sali’s

13 Sali does of course have some basic knowledge on how to count correctly but is unable to come up with the number of thirty-two that, allegedly, Vrenchen’s teeth comprise. The text therefore refers to him as “den kleinen Rechenmeister” (10) not without some sense of patronizing irony. While he may have some idea of counting, he does not do so successfully. 85

and Vrenchen’s childhood, but also upon the Black Fiddler, who allegedly owns the piece of land in the first place, and the narrative will punish them accordingly.

Manz’s eventual acquisition of the vacant property gravely upsets the balance in the small village community. For both Sali and Vrenchen, it means the end of their blissful childhood. As there is a first time for everything, Sali is now drafted as a worker on his father’s farm: “Dies war eine Änderung in seinem Wesen, dass er den kaum elfjähigen

Jungen, der noch zu keiner Arbeit angehalten worden, nun mit hinaussandte, gegen die

Einsprache der Mutter.” (14) Vrenchen also hears a call to work and joins in the weeding of the Acker and in the “letzte Freudenfest auf dem Unglücksfelde”, i.e. the burning of the wilderness it once contained. During their dancing, Sali and Vrenchen experience a special bond: “[U]nd es war beiden Kreaturen, wie wenn dieser herrliche Tag nie enden müsste und könnte.” Keller’s choice of words is significant here, for he refers to Sali and Vrenchen as Kreaturen and stresses the animalistic nature of their union in front of the fire. The termination of their last gasp of a child-like existence within forgetting lacks any necessity whatsoever (müsste) and is conceived of as an ontological implausibility (könnte) at the same time, but that does not mean that this termination does not have to unfold eventually or has not already. Vrenchen similarly experiences a sudden eruption of brutality on the part of her father that has been unbeknownst to her until now: “Zugleich zeigte sich Marti

[…] und, seine Tochter gewahrend, pfiff er derselben schrill und gebieterisch durch den

Finger […] und er gab ihr, ohne zu wissen warum, einige Ohrfeigen.“ (14-15) And Marti is not the only one who does not know why he acts in a certain manner: The feeling of being “vergnügt” remains as equally mysterious to Sali and Vrenchen as is their sorrow upon losing it. Everybody feels the shift in the economic make-up of their domain; what

Sali and Vrenchen experience as the loss of forgetting and the end of their existence as children constitutes, for the fathers at least, the tremor of a significant mutation in the property relations in their village in which modernity makes itself known.

After the incorporation of the field, neither Manz’s nor Marti’s luck holds. As they might have acted in complete concert during its slow and sleazy takeover, the third field now becomes their bone of contention: A part of the field that Marti previously claimed for his own is used by Manz as a dumpster for all the stones that populated the abandoned land. But the economic ramifications of this argument reach much farther, for the legal proceedings Manz and Marti push them over the precipice into financial ruin: “So ging es gewaltig rückwärts mit ihnen, und ehe zehn Jahre vorüber, steckten sie beide von Grund aus in den Schulden […]. Aber wie es ihnen auch erging, der Hass zwischen ihnen wurde täglich größer, da jeder den anderen als den Urheber seines Unsterns betrachtete.” (17) As cause and effect appear far more transparent than before, changes in the economic disposition of the two farmers again translate into extreme emotional agitation which considerably affects the way they treat each other as well as the members of their family.

As a consequence, Sali and Vrenchen soon lose sight of each other (20); whatever excitement they might have known at one point, it has faded into oblivion and whatever forgetting they may have shared has similarly been forgotten. Eventually, ruin hits Manz’s household with full force: “Doch war […] Manz nun der Erste von beiden Feinden, der sich nicht mehr halten konnte und von Haus und Hof springen musste. […] Manz aber wusste nichts anderes anzufangen, als […] in die Stadt zu ziehen und da sich als Wirt aufzutun.“ (21) So far, the novella has put a great deal of detail into the description of the demise of the two families and thereby represents the series of events that led up to Manz’s

bankruptcy and move towards the city as the result of very specific circumstances and peculiar character traits. At the same time, however, the narrator stipulates that Manz’s fate does not constitute an individual fallacy, but follows a much more general trend: “Es ist immer betrüblich anzusehen, wenn ein ehemaliger Landmann, der auf dem Felde alt geworden ist, mit den Trümmern seiner Habe in eine Stadt zieht […].“ (21) Correlatively,

Marti, who has remained in the village, is not much better off than his former competitor and himself stands on the cusp of bankruptcy: “Dem auf dem Lande zurückgebliebenen

Marti ging es inzwischen auch immer schlimmer […]. [E]s war sonst keine Seele mehr da und wurde auch keine gebraucht, da Marti das meiste Land schon verloren hatte und nur noch wenige Äcker besaß […]“ (27). Even if the story’s apparent concern remains the individual story of Romeo and Juliet in the context of Swiss small-village peasantry, of which the novella never loses sight, the central conflict emerges from the socio-economic commotions that frame them.

In the move of the Manz family from the idyllic village to the urban hothouse

Seldwyla, Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe bears witness to the upheavals of a modernizing economy. Marx most eloquently describes their severity in Der achtzehnte Brumaire des

Napoleon Bonaparte. According to Marx, the transformation of feudalistic, agricultural property relations during the Napoleonian period paved the way for the exploitation of the peasantry through the urban centers of capitalism: “[I]m Laufe des neunzehten

Jahrhunderts trat an die Stelle des Feudalen der städtische Wucherer [….] Die Parzelle des

Bauern ist nur noch der Vorwand, der dem Kapitalisten erlaubt, Profit, Zinsen und Rente von dem Acker zu ziehen und den Ackerbau selbst zusehn zu lassen, wie er seinen

Arbeitslohn herausschlägt.“ (201) The gravity of Keller’s description of Seldwyla

profiteering population (16-17) even bears a striking similarity to Marx’s equation of the bourgeoisie with the vampire: “Die bürgerliche Ordnung […] ist zum Vampyr geworden, der ihr Herzblut und Hirnmark aussaugt und sie in den Alchemistenkessel des Kapitals wirft.” (201) In Seldwyla, the exploitation through the loan sharks does not end, but traps

Manz and his family in a state of cursed passivity: “Sie […] hockten so in ihrem Kneipchen, ohne leben noch sterben zu können.” (25) In France alone, Marx counts five million poor people “die an dem Abgrunde der Existenz schweben und entweder auf dem Lande selbst hausen oder beständig […] von dem Lande in die Städte und von den Städten aufs Land desertieren” (201).14 Even though the protagonists of Keller’s novella are of course from

Switzerland, the two families are not the only peasant who falls prey to the increasing demands of his new capitalist masters, but follow a general trend by being, in essence, the losers of modernity. Manz, Marti, and their families succumb to the merciless transformation of nineteenth century Western society and seemingly fall through the cracks of the constituting capitalist world order as it lays waste to the rural establishment and in so doing, liberates its former subjects for all the right and wrong reasons.

The inability to sustain the overpopulating village population leads to the expulsion of those who fail to keep up. The novella thereby documents as much two individual destinies as it captures a far-reaching transformation that probably produces numerous

14 Manz and Marti meet exactly at the intersection between countryside and cityscape when their mere hunger forces them to go fishing. For Manz, this might constitute the ultimate abasement: “Wenn man Manz vor zwölf Jahren, als er mit einem schönen Gespann pflügte auf dem Hügel über dem Ufer, geweissagt hätte, er würde sich einst zu diesen wunderlichen Heiligen gesellen und gleich ihnen Fische fangen, so wäre er nicht übel aufgefahren.” (26) Hence, Keller describes Manz as a “Schatten der Unterwelt”, for his indignity and the indignity of his son goes even further when they are forced to catch the fish with their bare hands whereas Marti indulges it actively, but also given the economic depravity he is faced with: “Dem auf dem Lande zurückgebliebenen Marti ging es inzwischen auch immer schlimmer und es war ihm höchst langweilig dabei, sodass er, anstatt auf seinem Felde zu arbeiten, ebenfalls auf das Fischen verfiel und tagelang im Wasser herumplätscherte.“ (27) 89

stories that are merely implied but follow from the logic that is at work in the text.

Significantly, Keller chose not to assign a name to the village where Sali and Vrenchen grew up which does not underscore its insignificance, but its representative status; Manz and Marti’s story and the story of their children could be told from any of the overpopulating and therefore imploding villages around Seldwyla. All the other children of the rural area that Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe exhibits become – or have already become – the inheritors of Goethe’s Gretchen. Marshall Berman casts their fates with an unwavering optimism: “Gretchen’s successors will get the point: where she stayed and died, they will leave and live. […] [T]housands of ‘little worlds’ will be emptied out, transformed into hollow shells, while their young people head for great cities, for open frontiers, for new nations, in search of freedom to think and love and grow.” (59) Berman posits that these liberated inhabitants of the “small worlds” will populate the Faustian utopia of liberalism where they will exist “tätig-frei” (65-66). But this freedom involves also the freedom to be exploited when the young villagers stream into the armies of workers for the factories that capitalist industrialism will soon erect and has already erected, for that matter, in the textual reality of Keller’s novella: The proprietor of the inn in which Sali and

Martin have lunch on their last day on earth holds them to be “zwei recht ordentliche

Leutlein aus den Bergen, wo die Fabriken sind.” (63) The Seldwylian hinterland already becomes aware of the effects of an industrialization that may already be underway, but that for Sali and Vrenchen at least will come far too late. On the one hand, their inability to come and stay together results from the destruction of the idyllic system from and by which they have been expelled. Marx and Engels postulate this in the Manifest der

Kommunistischen Partei: “Die Bourgeoisie, wo sie zur Herrschaft gekommen, hat alle

feudalen, patriarchalischen, idyllischen Verhältnisse zerstört. Sie hat die buntscheckigen

Feudalbande, die den Menschen an seinen natürlichen Vorgesetzten knüpften, unbarmherzig zerrissen […].” (464) Vrenchen’s lot will be the move into the city, as it is recommended to her: “Damit […] sagte der Wasservogt, der auch hier war, solle ich mir einen Dienst suchen in einer Stadt und ich solle mich heute gleich auf den Weg machen!”

(53) Similarly, she believes that Sali, with its lack of chains and inhibitions, can probably make his way successfully in the modern world: “Morgen kannst du ja dann deines Weges ziehen, und gewiss wird es dir wohlgehen, du kommst überall fort.” (76); he himself at one point at least considered the possibility of becoming a “Knecht” in “einer fremden Gegend”

(47). For both, the loss of their idyllic chains is a frightening notion, yet the imagination of

(im)possibly living in Seldwyla amongst the richest of the rich constitutes a similarly potent fancy (55). Since the famous note in the Züricher Freitagszeitung that inspired Keller to his work appeared in 1847 (“Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe”, 81), i.e. only one year before the widespread publication of Marx’s and Engel’s manifesto, the relations that the novella presents (or re-presents, much rather) might not yet correlate fully to their theoretical postulates.15 Yet the protagonists of both texts – i.e. Sali and Vrenchen and the proletarian worker – stand at the same juncture and move on to different paths.

On the other hand, a peculiar parallelism emerges from the text when an untold story seems to be retold. Upon his return home, Sali encounters Marti’s farmstead as a site of remarkable decay and neglect; an extensive description deems it a “Sinnbild der

Faulheit” (33), and now, it even appears “wie einst der herrenlose Acker, von dem alles

15 Virginia L. Lewis for examples draws attention to the fact that Keller was very much a contemporary of early Marxist theory: “Keller was writing at the same time when Marx was making his critical observation on the roles of property and power.” (76) Whereas she situates Keller and his critique of enclosures in a more global context, I situate Romeo and Julia auf dem Dorfe91 on a lower, more local and immediate playing field.

Unheil herkam.” In the repetition of these conditions, the decline of the Marti and Manz families might have a less prominent predecessor in the disappearance of the family of the

Black Fiddler, that the story does not, according to Eva Geulen, feature on the surface level:

“Über die näheren Umstände, die zum Verschwinden der Eltern geführt haben, schweigt die Erzählung.” (258) Given the depraved state of Marti’s acker, we might be led to conclude that – out of one of many individual circumstances – the parents of the Black

Fiddler were similarly swept away by the forces of modernity. Their son, most certainly, finds himself on the losing side of the economic conjuncture, as he complains to Sali and

Vrenchen how he was cheated out of the – allegedly rightful – ownership of and profit from the field’ “[I]ch bin um den blutigen Pfennig gekommen, mit dem ich hätte auswandern können.” (38) According to Herbert Uerlings, Keller’s novella realizes, especially in the figure of the Black Fiddler, one of the major demographic problematics of 19th century Switzerland in the depraved situation of the Heimatlose which remained publicly unresolved until the Mid-fifties. (145) Yet Uerlings’s somewhat brief analysis of

Keller’s critique of modernity fails to recognize the relationship of these abandoned figures

– and we have to count Sali and Vrenchen among them – to the emerging, urbanized proletariat. (154) Even though modern man might have been liberated to explore a world of unprecedented opportunities and to venture, once more in the exquisite words of

Berman, “in search of freedom to think and love and grow” (59), complete social or local mobility unfolds, in the world of Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe, only for those who have succeeded in the old world order anyway. In league with the Black Fiddler, Sali and

Vrenchen garner, to some ability, freedom and livability within the consequences of the personal disaster of modernity: “Das liebende Paar vergaß, was am Ende dieses Tages

werden sollte, und gab sich einzig der hoch aufatmenden wortlosen Freude hin, sauber gekleidet und frei, wie zwei Glückliche, die sich von Rechts wegen angehören, in den

Sonntag hineinzuwandeln.” (58) Sali and Vrenchen attempt – and fail – to excavate or at least fabricate Glück for the realization of the false promises of liberal modernity and are able to do so, most of the time, through the promises of the Black Fiddler and the deal with the devil that their alliance with him represents.

“[G]egen Abend werden wir dann schon einen Tanzplatz finden”: Sali’s and

Vrenchen’s Exhaustion of Glück

On their last fateful days, Sali and Vrenchen rediscover repeatedly, and return perpetually, to the immemorial dreamscape of their childhood. A comment by the narrator saturates the foremost quality of that dreamscape, i.e. the quality of Glück, with the experience of love:

“Denn nichts gleicht dem Reichtum und der Unergründlichkeit eines Glücks, das an den

Menschen herantritt in einer so klaren und deutlichen Gestalt […] und wohl versehen mit einem eigenen Namen, der nicht so tönt wie andere Namen.” (31) Within the frame of the text, Glück quite literally becomes, as worthwhile as it may be all by itself, incomparable when it is infused with the infatuation for another, and it appears more than understandable that Sali, driven by a familiar feeling, goes back home to Vrenchen for more. The text even draws attention to the fact that he is unable to remember exactly what she looked like during their re-encounter at the river: “[E]r habe wohl ein allgemeines Bild von ihr im Gedächtnis, aber wenn er sie beschreiben sollte, so könnte er das nicht. […] Er erinnerte sich genau der

Gesichtszüge, welche das kleine Dirnchen einst gehabt […], aber nicht eigentlich derjenigen, welche er gestern gesehen.“ (31-32) Einerseits, her image from his blissful

childhood almost appears more potent than ever; andererseits, Sali undertakes a search for exactly that which he has already forgotten and begins a quest for more of this Glück.

Merely being with or talking to Vrenchen paints Sali’s whole environment with the utmost opulence and therefore has an immediately discernible effect on him:

[U]nd die prächtige Julisonne, die fahrenden weißen Wolken, welche über das reife wallende Kornfeld wegzogen, er glänzende blaue Fluss, der unten vorüberwallte, alles dies erfüllte ihn zum ersten Male seit langen Jahren wieder mit Glück und Zufriedenheit statt mit Kummer, und er warf sich […] in den durchsichtigen Halbschatten des Kornes, wo dasselbe Martis wilden Acker begrenzte, und guckte glückselig in den Himmel. (36)

Within the web of emotional entanglements in the text, Vrenchen grants Sali access to the soothing counterforce to the hardships of modern life, who re-locates a potential refuge from them in her and in the rediscovery of their childhood blissfulness, through which, in the words of Derek Hillard, both have in the past “form[ed] a counter world to the corrupt modernity of the parents.” (363) Yet they do not maintain this reawakening for long; the

Black Fiddler, as he is severely implicated in the crime of the parents, is similarly implicated in Sali’s and Vrenchen’s forgetting both as a disruptor and catalyst thereof.

The representation of the Black Fiddler evokes, through several visual clues, the presence of the devil himself. Because of his sudden and unexpected apparition in the meadow, the text already draws him as an uncanny, even frightening figure: “einen schwärzlichen Kerl, von dem [Sali und Vrenchen] nicht wussten, woher er so unversehens gekommen” (36); his outward appeareance, constantly black as it may be, is also in a state of flux: “Dazu stand das kleine Filzhütchen ganz unheimlich, welches nicht rund und nicht weckig und so sonderlich geformt war, dass es alle Augenblicke seine Gestalt zu verändern schien, obgleich es unbeweglich saß” (37); he draws the children to follow him through a

“seltsamen Bann, dass sie nicht wagten, den schmalen Pfad zu verlassen und dem 94

unheimlichen Gesellen unwillkürlich folgten bis an das Ende des Feldes” (37). And that he leads them deeper into the abandoned meadow is of course no random occurrence; the

Black Fiddler haunts the abandoned field like a specter from days past and with him, the devil incarnate rises from a symbolic undercurrent. His borderline supernatural nature, that is dispersed throughout of his appearance and stretches the realist fabric of the text, culminates in his conversation with the children at the stone pyramid in the heavily disputed corner of the meadow:

Eine zahllose Menge von Mohnblumen oder Klatschrosen hatte sich [auf der Steinpyramide] angesiedelt, weshalb der kleine Berg feuerrot aussah zurzeit. Plötzlich sprang der schwarze Geiger mit einem Satze auf die rotbekleidete Steinmasse hinauf, kehrte sich und sah ringsum. (37)

It goes without saying that the image that Keller conjures up here is that of a devil as he stands amidst the pits of hell. Already in the 1950s, Mary E. Gilbert wrote about this scene:

“[D]er schwarze Geiger auf dem finsteren Berg, das ist das finstere Chaos, das der wilden

Leidenschaft entsteigt.“ (358) Hildegard Wichert Fife on the other hand argues against the devilish implications of Black Fiddler in general and considers the choice of color to be

“without sinister implication for the present” (117), yet some critics, myself included, do not follow her line of thought (Johnston 157, Rölleke 149). Significantly, Keller places his representative of the emissary of hell in a field of poppies and thereby associates the fiery pits of hell with an age-old symbol of forgetting (Metzler Lexikon literarischer Symbole,

273). And before he somewhat casually departs, he makes the children an offer they will soon be unable to refuse: “Item, das ist der Welt Lauf, mir kann’s recht sein, ich will euch doch geigen, wenn ihr tanzen wollt!” (38) Given Keller’s symbolical groundwork so far, taking him up on his offer constitutes nothing but entering a pact with the devil himself; its benefits will be the chance to indulge the manifold pleasures of forgetting, its price the 95

alliance with a fellow loser in the struggles of modern life. Interestingly, his connection to the forgetting appears almost contrapuntal in the effect his presence has on the children:

“denn die Erscheinung des Geigers und seine Worte hatten sie aus der glücklichen

Vergessenheit gerissen, in welcher sie wie zwei Kinder auf und ab gewandelt,” (38) – until they literally forget all about him, that is. The Black Fiddler has effectively tainted their

Glück and even if he evidently does not hold a grudge against them, they are from then on unable to fully sustain it without him. By usurping the blissfulness of the children, it seems that the Black Fiddler gets revenge on their fathers all along.

Two symbolically charged incidents indicate that Sali and Vrenchen’s forgetting might be severely limited from their encounter with the Black Fiddler onwards. First, the counting of their teeth recurs:

„Alle deine weißen Zähne hast du noch!“, lachte er, „Weißt du noch, wie oft wir sie einst gezählt haben? Kannst du jetzt zählen?“ „Das sind ja nicht die gleichen, du Kind“, sagte Vrenchen, „jene sind längst ausgefallen!“ Sali wollte nun in seiner Einfalt jenes Spiel wieder erneuern und die glänzen Zahnperlen zahlen; aber Vrenchen verschloss plötzlich den roten Mund […].“ (38)

For Sali, Vrenchen, and the mindful reader, counting each other’s teeth is of such pivotal importance because it signifies the return into the animalistic spirit of forgetfulness, though with a twist. The counting of the teeth bridges the gap to a life devoid of economic calculability and temporal progression. Sali attempts to recreate that experience fully by – ridiculous as it may be – proposing that her teeth are still the same to which Vrenchen responds by addressing Sali as “du Kind” to mock the foolishness of his remark. Yet she buys fully into his artifice: since they are no longer unable to count their teeth, she has to remain unwilling so that the spell can banish time from their reestablished paradise.

Second, right before the counting, Sali hauls Vrenchen, as part of their tender quarrelling,

right into the red poppies of the wild meadow: “bis Sali erbost und kühn genug war,

Vrenchens Hände zu bezwingen und es in die Mohnblumen zu drücken.” (40) In a noteworthy gesture, Keller concatenates Sali and Vrenchen, as done numerous times before, with the symbol of forgetting, to whose rapture they succumb so completely. But another symbolic layer should not go unnoticed, for Sali literally plunges them into the color red where, soon enough, it will become all too hot and all too hellish: “Himmel, wie heiß ist es hier!” (40) Now that the flowers have been tainted by the Black Fiddler, this creates the image of Sali bathing Vrenchen, and himself alongside her, in the fires of hell and in the blood of forgetting at the same time, and indeed, he will. When Vrenchen‘s father is enraged about her fraternization with Sali and delivers “eine Ohrfeieg, [..], dass der rote Kranz herunterflog“ (42-43), Sali responds with his own act of utter violence:

“Ohne sich zu besinnen, raffte [Sali] einen Stein auf und schlug mit demselben den Alten gegen den Kopf, halb in Angst um Vrenchen und halb im Jähzorn.” (43) Sali not only forgets himself while doing so, but consequently casts Marti into an inescapable state of forgetting, an aberration of his Glück with Vrenchen: “[E]s zeigte sich immer deutlicher, je mehr [Marti] sprach, dass er blödsinnig geworden […]. Er erinnerte sich nur dunkel an das Geschehene und wie an etwas sehr Lustiges […], lachte immer wie ein Narr und war guter Dinge.” (44) Needless to say, this complicates Sali’s and Vrenchen’s search for an unhistorical sanctuary even further; one might even assume that, in the workings of the plot, it becomes nothing short of impossible without a pact with the Black Fiddler.

Sali’s and Vrenchen’s situations considerably worsen after his brawl with Marti.

Marti’s property is quickly seized by the “Bauer, welcher die zwei Äcker des Manz gekauft” (45); he takes advantage of Marti’s mental degradation, ends the juridical

contentions, and acquires his already mortgaged fields. Finally, Marti also undertakes his move into the city, though under curiously different circumstances than Manz: “Die

Versteigerung fand statt; Marti wurde von der Gemeinde in einer Stiftung dergleichen arme

Tröpfe auf öffentliche Kosten unterbracht. Diese Anstalt befand sich in der Hauptstadt des

Ländchens“ (45). The text likens this journey of Marti’s to Seldwyla to the “letzten Gange zu dem lebendigen Begräbnis” (45); following his departure from the realm of the sane – or the realm of the remembering, if you prefer – Marti might as well be thought of as dead both for the continuation and the economic network of the narrative. Sali reports at the same time how his father has become entangled with the Seldwylian criminal underworld:

“Bei uns geht es jetzt hoch und herrlich zu; der Vater hat einen Einzug und Unterschleif von auswärtigem Gesindel und ich glaube, soviel ich merke, ist er ein Diebeshehler geworden.” (47) This confronts Sali with the complete and undeniable extent of his family’s moral degradation and he becomes unable to uphold the bourgeois morality that has ingrained itself so deeply into his moral compass – and Vrenchen’s, for that matter.16

In his affiliation with criminals, Manz has similarly become a shadow of the seemingly honorable man he once was. Given these deplorable circumstances, Sali and Vrenchen now wish to circumnavigate the onerous intricacies of their economic decline and in so doing, alleviate the burden of memory through unraveling the full potentialities of Glück that the text designates the “glückseligen Empfindung […], die sich über allen Gram erhob” (48).

In a gesture of far-reaching significance, Sali sells his watch and its silver chain for a couple of Gulden; on the one hand, he thereby trades off his temporal existence for an immaterial

16 Vrenchen cannot stand the fact that Sali might draw upon money from his father to fund their dancing: “Doch nicht von deinem Vater, von – von dem Gestohlenen?” (49) as much as he vigorously refuses to accept even one Gulden from his father (51). 98

gain, or in other words: “um das Glück damit zu erkaufen” (50). On the other hand, he invests in “das vergnügteste Geschäft, das er je betrieben” (51) by purchasing a concrete material object, i.e. a pair of dancing shoes for Vrenchen. His wish to fulfil a dream of hers focalizes this oscillation between an immaterial and materialized manifestation of happiness: “Es träumte mir, wir tanzten miteinander auf unserer Hochzeit, lange, lange

Stunden!” (48), “denn das Tanzen aus dem Traume steckt mir immerfort im Sinn!” (49)

According to the law of emerging capital, nothing is free of charge; even the proverbial

‘stuff that dreams are made of’ has to be purchased before it can be put to good use.

Longingly, the two lovers engage in a variety of activities before they encounter the Black Fiddler again, for whom they have saved their very last dance. Yet before, they fully embrace an unlocatable existence solely founded on pledged and borrowed time: “sie vergaßen, woher sie kamen und wohin sie gingen” (61). Mareike Giesen sees the fact that

Vrenchen has sold her bed and Sali his watch as a depature from time and space alike:

“[I]ndem sie sich mit diesen Verkäufen sinnbildlich aus Zeit und Raum ausklinken, erhält das vermeintlich unbekannte Dunkle deutliche Konturen: Tote brauchen weder Uhren noch einen Platz zum Schlafen.“ (75) Indeed, the text collocates forgetting with a loss of locality as much as forgetting in the form of Glück implies a loss of temporality and thereby leads

Sali and Vrenchen to those with whom they can embrace the former at the price of the latter: the Heimatlosen in the Paradiesgärtlein who, by implication, exist outside space – and time – because they exist outside the realms of property and economics. It is at this non-place that Sali and Vrenchen come into contact with the Black Fiddler again and thereby achieve a foretaste of their fulfilled dream of dancing and forgetting:

Sali erschrak auch, als er den Geiger erblickte; dieser grüßte sie aber auf das Freundlichste und rief: “Ich habe doch gewußt, daß ich euch noch einmal aufspielen 99

werde! So macht euch nur recht lustig, ihr Schätzchen, und tut mir Bescheid!” […] [N]un waren sie [Sali und Vrenchen] froh, hier einen Bekannten zu haben und gewissermaßen unter dem besonderen Schutze des Geigers zu stehen. Sie tanzten nun ohne Unterlaß, sich und die Welt vergessend in dem Drehen, Singen und Lärmen […]. (69)

By entering the protection of the Black Fiddler, Sali and Vrenchen take him up on his offer, but do not yet seal their deal with him, the devil of the homeless losers of modernity. In so doing, they can finally have the dance for which they have been preparing all day and succumb fully to the beauty of Glück. Yet any Teufelspakt demands either immediate or subsequent retribution; the price Sali and Vrenchen will have to pay for their forgetting soon enough is the expulsion from proper bourgeois society. To the people at the celebratory Kirchweihe earlier on, the two lovers appear “in dieser rückhaltlosen

Hingebung und Selbstvergessenheit dem rohen Völkchen ebenso fremd […] wie in seiner

Verlassenheit und Armut” (67); Keller syntactically concatenates Sali’s and Vrenchen’s forgetting – and its mutuality – with their economic duress and depravity and thereby illustrates their alienation from the rest of bourgeois society. And it is a logical conclusion that, being no longer welcome under the auspices of the church, Sali and Vrenchen find shelter among its diametrical opponent the devil as much as they now have to dwell among those banished existences who have lost touch with the restrictedness of temporality and locality, those who appear just as fremd to the peasants as Sali and Vrenchen are to them now. In Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe, the deal with the devil again represents the simple possibility to escape the failings of modernity.

The Black Fiddler’s representation as the symbolical fallen angel taps into a rich cultural reservoir. Johnston for example identifies the Black Fiddler as Pluto who resides

“beyond the river of forgetfulness”, i.e. Lethe (158). Given the Black Fiddler’s earlier

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appearance amongst the poppies and his fulfilment of Sali’s and Vrenchen’s dream at the instance quoted above, we might equally think of him as a Morpheus figure, as the bringer of dreams. These shades of pagan religion and Greek mythology all diverge in the image of the devil that the Black Fiddler purports; one figure might prove significant above all of them, for critics oftentimes recognize the Black Fiddler as a descendant of Dionysus and as a bringer of the Dionysian. Holub for example remarks: “Later, in the Paradiesgärtchen, this Satanic imagery is supplemented with Dionysian overtones. The wine at the Fiddler’s foot […], the frenzied dancing, and the orgiastic atmosphere suggest a bacchanalian celebration.” (128) If we take one look at Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie, this might be anything but far off: According to Nietzsche, we can achieve an easy access to the frenzy of the Dionysian through the “Einfluss des narkotischen Getränkes, von dem alle Menschen und Völker in Hymnen sprechen” (28-29). Hence, the description of the Paradiesgärtlein constructs an enclave of Dionysian drunkenness, for it is a place in which the vines are superimposed on faded, dream-like – Apollonian? – imagery: “Aber alles war verwischt und undeutlich wie ein Traum und überdies reichlich mit Weinreben übersponnen, und blaue reifende Trauben hingen überall in dem Laube.“ (68) When Sali and Vrenchen join the dancing to unlock their forgetting, they tap into the power of the Dionysian that continues on in a Walpurgisnacht-like festivity:

[S]obald der Mond aufging und sein Licht quer durch den Estrich des Paradiesgärtels warf, tanzten sie im Mondschein weiter […]. Das seltsame Licht machte alle vertrauter, und so konnten Sali und Vrenchen nicht umhin, sich unter die gemeinsame Lustbarkeit zu mischen und auch mit andern zu tanzen. (71)

Sali and Vrenchen now experience the peak of their Glück as the full removal from the thralls of modernity in a moment of co-feeling with all the other excluded souls that share their forgetting with the two lovers. To fully uncover the power of Glück means, as the text 101

implies, to resurrect and then fully unleash and embrace the Dionysian. Sali and Vrenchen share the experience of how the Dionysian delight, in Nietzsche’s own words, tears down all boundaries between humans: “Unter dem Zauber des Dionysischen schließt sich […] der Bund zwischen Mensch und Mensch wieder zusammen.” (29) In essence, they solidify their return to a primordial – or immemorial – way of existing, yet this resurrection of ancient glory and rapture appears tainted and imperfect, as Gerhard Kaiser observes:

“Dionysius, der die heidnische Naturlist ins christliche Paradies trägt, ist zur Teufels- und

Koboldgestalt des schwarzen Geigers verkommen.” (28) The Dionysian in the modern age is located at the fringes, in the domain of the homeless and disenfranchised, that harbor it from its counterforce, the Socratic and capitalist will to dominate, and constantly resuscitate it in the desire to defy the conventionality of a capitalized West that has turned its eye away from them. It remains dubious at best if the Dionysian, broken as it appears here before the Nietzschean prophecy, can rise again from this reservation.

Despite the orgiastic splendor of the celebrations in the Paradiesgärtlein, Sali and

Vrenchen are hesitant and reluctant to seal their pact with the Black Fiddler. As the ecstasy of the dancing subsides, Sali and Vrenchen feel once more the implications of their dilemma: they are as much unwilling to part ways as they are unable to return to the world from which they parted: “Sie mochten so gern fröhlich und glücklich sein, aber nur auf einem guten Grund und Boden, und dieser schien ihnen unerreichbar, während ihr wallendes Blut am liebsten gleich zusammengeströmt wäre.” (72) At this point, the Black

Fiddler makes his offering one last time:

Kommt mit mir und meinen guten Freunden in die Berge, da braucht ihr keinen Pfarrer, kein Geld, keine Schriften, keine Ehre, kein Bett, nichts als euren guten Willen! [….] [E]s macht mir zwar Vergnügen, euch da angekommen zu sehen, wo

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ihr seid; allein damit bin ich zufrieden und werde euch behilflich und dienstfertig sein, wenn ihr mir folgt. (73)

What obviously occurs here is described most adequately in the words of Heinz Rölleke:

“Nach der Tanzszene bietet der schwarze Geiger den Liebenden eine Art Teufelspakt an.”

(155) The Black Fiddler’s choice of words – speaking of “Pfarrer” first and then of “Geld”

– is highly calculated, because it hints at the sacrilege in religious or theological and in bourgeois or economic frames of thought. Once more, the Black Fiddler refers to the series of events that lead to the eradication of the two families and shows a genuine interest in an alliance with the two “ratlosen Verlassenen” (75); we might conclude that they are given the same choice that his parents were given in the past. Yet in contrast to the fates of his parents, no unclaimed heritage will remain of them: By the time the narrative commences, the village from which they originated might still exist – evidence by the present tense of

“liegt” (3) – whereas the three meadows are already a thing of the past (“lagen vor Jahren drei prächtige lange Äcker”) and those who once owned them are, by implication, similarly swept away and forgotten. At first, it seems that they follow the Black Fiddler and take him up on his offer: They undergo some macabre, ersatz wedding ceremony– “eine spaßhafte

Zeremonie […], welche eine Trauung vorstellen sollte” (74) – and the other festive

Heimatlosen instigate a “tolle nächtliche Zug durch die stillen Felder und durch das

Heimatdorf Salis und Vrenchens” (75) in honor of the newlyweds. In this instance, we learn what the services of the Black Fiddler might fully entail: “[O]ben strich der schwärzliche Kerl die Geige noch einmal so wild, sprang und hüpfte wie ein Gespenst, und seine Gefährten blieben nicht zurück in der Ausgelassenheit, sodass es ein wahrer

Blocksberg war auf der stillen Höhe” (75). This confronts Sali and Vrenchen fully with the cost at which their Glück would be put into motion, for it entails a risk they are not willing 103

to take and makes the Teufelspakt a price they are not willing to pay: “[Sali] war zuerst zu sich gekommen. Er küsste [Vrenchen], da es sich ganz vergessen hatte und laut sang.” (75)

The partying company easily forgets about the two lovers and as much as the other couples in the entourage fail to keep their faithfulness to each other, and that appears fully unconceivable: Vrenchen herself says “Wo es aber so hergeht, möchte ich nicht sein” (74).

At the same time, to forget about and not with one another constitutes an unconceivable notion: “‘Du must mich vergessen!’ ‘Das werde ich nie! Könntest denn du es tun?’” (76)

To succumb to the hypnotic spectacle of Dionysian passion would mean to divorce forgetting from Glück and to consequently forget about each other in the process; that would be the price they would have to pay for the forgetting that their deal with the Black

Fiddler would fabricate for them. Wistfully, Sali and Vrenchen commit suicide as the ultimate form of forgetting, seal their Glück, and turn away from the Teufelspakt after all.

In their fatal escape from modernity, Sali and Vrenchen chose, above all else, never to be heartbroken.

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Chapter 4: My Boy Builds Coffins: Turning the Tides of Time in Storm’s

Der Schimmelreiter

The Beautiful Mind of Hauke Haien: The Chains of Socratic and Bourgeois

Modernity

Der Schimmelreiter’s protagonist Hauke Haien moves almost intrinsically along the trajectory of modernity whose gravitational pull absorbs and carries his unwilling home village forward with him. In his daring to know, Hauke‘s characterization draws on the positive characteristics of the Enlightened individual; the text – or much rather the

Schulmeister who tells the story within it – designates him “einen Deichgrafen, der von

Deich- und Sielsachen mehr verstand, als Bauern und Hofbesitzer sonst zu verstehen pflegen” (9) and furthermore introduces him as an autodidact if ever there was one: “[W]as die studierten Fachleute darüber niedergeschrieben, davon hatte er wenig gelesen; sein

Wissen hatte er sich, wenn auch von Kindesbeinen an, nur selber ausgesonnen.” From this idealization, the narrative progresses to portray Hauke with the desire to pose the – admittedly petulant – question “warum denn das, was [der Vater] eben hingeschrieben hatte, gerade so sein müsse und nicht anders sein könne.“ Hauke possesses the willigness to surpass the limited mathematical knowledge of his father to the extreme: “Willst du mehr wissen, so suche morgen aus der Kiste, die auf unserem Boden steht, ein Buch; einer, der Euklid hieß, hat’s geschrieben; das wird’s dir sagen! […] Der Junge war tags darauf zu

Boden gelaufen und hatte auch bald das Buch gefunden“ (10). The text integrates Hauke in a long line of continuity with other mathematically minded or scientifically inclined individuals like the ancient scholar Euclid whose writings have, as a matter of fact,

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informed the teaching of plane geometry well into the 20th century (Hazel 97-98).17 And once Hauke has stuck his teeth into Euclidian mathematics, he does not intend to let go:

“[D]en Euklid hatte er allzeit in der Tasche, und wenn die Arbeiter ihr Frühstuck oder

Vesper aßen, saß er auf seinem umgestülpten Schubkarren mit dem Buche in der Hand.”

(11) All this relates Hauke to his own grandfather, who once possessed the book, and connects him to the dreams of freedom and liberality through the power of self-education that underlies the Enlightened agenda. Other acknowledgements of Hauke’s notorious and childish joy about calculating are dispersed throughout the text and they represent a possibility to soon supersede and demolish his Heimat as it is so plagued by the inhibitions of more traditional ways of life. From early, then, we might consider Hauke Haien as a child of Socratic modernity, of what Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie chastises as the meaningless “sokratische Lust des Erkennens” (115), that will soon pursue the move of the

Enlightened theorems into the material world of economics, a poor man’s Faust or Wagner, if you like. His father Tede Haien appears aware of the dangers this emerging modern desire in his son might pose: “Das wird ihn vom Euklid kurieren” (11) is what he hopes for when he sends his son to work on the dyke and the seaside, but quite the contrary will be the case. Hauke’s remarkable enthusiasm for scientific conduct may not reach any Faustian erudition, nor any Faustian despair over knowledge, but leads to a similar predicament:

Hauke Haien is forever caught in the calculative, alluring web of numbers and rationality, of an emerging capitalist mind-set. From early on, Hauke appears so modern that he and his wife Elke, in a decisive contrast to Sali or Vrenchen from Keller’s Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe, appear incapable of forgetting in any Nietzschean sense of the word.

17 And at least by name, there is connection between Socrates and another Euclid, who preceded the mathematician and was a close friend of the latter (Hazel106 98).

Sharing his inclination for mathematical precision, Hauke’s wife Elke Volkerts appears as a more than appropriate match to his ambitions and aspirations and equally invested in his modern mind-set. Essentially, Hauke and his wife-to-be are of like minds:

“Elke, die kann rechnen” (24) admits the young Hauke before he goes and offers his services to the Deichgraf, and she similarly praises his intellectual skill set over his physical vitality: “[U]ns dienen zwei feste Augen besser als zwei feste Arme!” (26) More importantly, Hauke’s appointment with the Volkerts results in a remarkable shake-up of the seemingly stable relations of employment at the Deichgraf’s household, and of the relations of property in the coastal village later on. Initially, Hauke’s position as

Kleinknecht in the household correlates well with the traditional organization of work, as evidenced by the negotiations between the two patriarchs: “[Tede Haien] began dann noch einige Vergünstigungen bei dem Mietkontrakt sich auszubedingen, […]. [S]o wollte er selbst ihn im Frühling acht Tage bei der eigenen Arbeit haben” (28). But Hauke does not prove to be a Kleinknecht in the traditional sense and neither is he, as stated by Marie-

Thérèse Ferguson, an entirely “self-made, modern man” (191); given his mathematical talents, especially Elke soon makes it a point to involve Hauke more in the administrative and abstract parts of the upkeeping of the dyke instead of the manual labor, much to the later chagrin of the Großknecht Ole Peters: “Ein Glück war es für ihn, dass Elke selbst oder durch ihren Vater das meistens abzustellen wusste. […] [S]ie waren beide geborene

Rechner, und das Mädchen konnte ihren Kameraden in der groben Arbeit nicht verderben sehen.” (29-30) With Hauke’s stronger involvement in the affairs of the Deichgraf, the narrator now notes how such “ein lebhafterer Geschäftsgang” (34) takes hold of the administration of the dyke that Elke herself later on refers to Hauke as the Deichgraf in

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anything but name only (“Werd nur nicht rot, Hauke; du warst es ja doch eigentlich, den der Oberdeichgraf lobte!”); she even praises his involvement in the affairs above her own:

“Ich kann ja auch nur rechnen; du aber siehst draußen alles, was der Deichgraf doch wohl selber sehen sollte” (36). However, Hauke still appears as a parvenu who is more than ready to take over the business against all odds; not for nothing, Thomas Baltensweiler notes “dass bereits Haukes Aufstieg an sich weniger dem 18. als dem 19. Jahrhundert zugehört” (16). Concordantly, we may situate the slowly evolving relationship between

Hauke and Elke at a time of pending change which the general village populace experiences, subtle as it may be, in the changing trends of the dance and the introduction of a “Zweitritt, der eben erst hier in die Mode gekommen war” (47). Hauke and Elke will soon make sure that all of the village will dance according to that changing tune when they drag the coastal community through the changes of a more modern life.

Hauke and Ellen essentially disrupt the organization of work as much as they re- organize the distributions of property to their own benefit. Interestingly, Maximilian

Bergengruen observes a decline of intellectual capacity in the novella’s two main families that ranges from Hauke’s grandfather to his father and also applies to Elke’s family (82), but along the same lines notes a rising ambition in the Haien family that the older generation passes on to the other (87-88). For this exact purpose, Hauke’s father has already made a futile effort to provide his son with the inheritance necessary to take over the office de jure and not merely de facto: “Es ist nicht viel; doch hast du mehr dann, als du bei mir gewohnt warst.” (52) Even though Tede thereby secedes from the restrictiveness of the usual social organization for the sake of modernity and the mere chance of allowing his son a more befitting lifestyle, Hauke appears nowhere near a position to lay a claim to

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the office of the Deichgraf: “[I]hm fehlt das, was man hier ‘Klei unter den Füßen’ nennt

[…].” (63) The relations of property in the village of the future Schimmelreiter appear rigid and exclusive; essentially, those already in certain positions of wealth or power sustain the status quo. Luckily for Hauke, Elke is, for a short, but significant period of time, the

“jetzige Herrin dieses großen Marschhofes” (60) and, in one swift move, announces her engagement to Hauke with which she levels out the harshly stable and inhibiting property relations:

‘Ja, liebe Jungfer’, sagte [der Oberdeichgraf] endlich, ‘aber wie steht es den hier im Kooge mit den ehelichen Güterrechten? Ich muss gestehen, ich bin augenblicklich nicht recht kapitelfest in diesem Wirrsal!’ ‘Das brauchen euer Gnaden auch nicht’, entgegnete des Deichgrafen Tochter, ‘ich werde vor der Hochzeit meinem Bräutigam die Güter übertragen. Ich habe auch meinen kleinen Stolz‘, setzte sie lächelnd hinzu; ‘ich will den reichsten Mann im Dorfe heiraten!’ (65)

Elke successfully circumnavigates the juridical trouble in the “ehelichen Güterrechten” that her marriage to Hauke would have faced and that would have complicated, if not prohibited, his rise to the office of the Deichgraf. In so doing, she devaluates the patriarchal guidelines and restrictions of the establishment by endorsing and instigating a free – and consequently far-reaching – movement of money from one individual to the other. While she masks this transaction as purely an act of self-adulation and as an acknowledgement of the strong attraction of financial prowess in her fiancé, Elke successfully secures the financial and economic success of her father’s enterprise against the forces of the old order that evidently would have granted her some financial freedom, but no self-determined aspirations to continue his legacy herself. This transaction, as the stepping stone of Hauke

Haien’s curriculum vitae, is thereby seen as a fundamental step towards modernity according to a reading by Johannes Harnischfeger, with which I concur: “Die Karriere von

Hauke Haien veranschaulicht den Aufstieg des Bürgertums, so wie sein Vorgänger […] 109

die überkommene feudale Ordnung repräsentiert.” (24) The Oberdreichgraf openly acknowledges the ingenuity of Elke’s financial scheme accordingly: “dass ein Deichgraf von solch junger Jungfer gemacht wurde, das ist das Wunderbare an der Sache!” (65) But by the same token, Elke’s actions present the family relations as what they have come down to in the modern age, if we take Marx’s and Engel’s word for it and look at what they stipulate in the Manifest: “Die Bourgeoise hat dem Familienverhältnis seinen rührend- sentimentalen Schleier abgerissen und es auf ein reines Geldverhältnis zurückgeführt.”

(465) Elke prepares the stage for her husband’s project of the economic mobilization of the village community and the modernization thereof at the same time.

The married life of Hauke and Elke Haien provides the picture-perfect image of bourgeois industriousness. The narrator presents Hauke and Elke in a favorable, but similarly pitying light:

[A]ber auf der Bank […] sah man abends meist nur die junge Frau, einsam mit einer häuslichen Arbeit in den Händen; […] der Mann aber hatte anderes zu tun, als Feierabend vor der Tür zu halten; denn trotz seiner früheren Mithülfe lagen aus des Alten Amtsführung eine Menge unerledigter Dinge […]; so sahen sich die beiden Eheleute […] meist nur bei[m] […] Mittagessen und beim Auf- und Niedergang des Tages. (66)

In the Haien houseshold, one activity begets another and even after a time-jump forward

“um mehrere Jahre”, their work has not lessened considerably. However, the text itself guides our interpretation in a certain direction when it summarizes in conclusion the description of Hauke’s and Elke’s busyness as “ein Leben fortgesetzter Arbeit, doch gleichwohl ein zufriedenes.” Hence, Chenxi Teng recognizes the lifestyle of the Haien family as “the incurable workaholism avant la lettre” (111). Even before its full bloom,

Hauke and Elke persist in a modern, proto-capitalist sense of activity as they disperse a particular frenzy of activity among the unwilling villagers in the form of the “neuen 110

Deichlasten”: “[A]lle Sielen und Schleusen, die sonst immer gehalten hätten, seien jetzt reperaraturbedürftig” (66-67). It goes without saying that the villagers meet these new arrangements with nothing but displeasure which they voice in their dismissive annoyance over Hauke’s allegedly unmerited position; his arch-rival Ole Peters provides a good example for that: “Ja […], das ist nun so bei uns, und davon ist nichts abzukratzen: der alte wurde Deichgraf von seines Vaters, der neue von seines Weibes wegen.” (67) In other words, the villagers respond to the new property distribution, that the Haien marriage has transacted, and the modern re-arrangements of the capital that this newly allocated property represents with the utmost scrutiny. Hence, the interpretation of Hauke’s and Elke’s satisfaction with their lifestyle, offered by the Schulmeister narrator above, appears more than contradictory to the actual emotional distress that it causes and that is conveyed in the text. Significantly, the new life of the Haiens offers no real chance for rest, for calculation and other dyke-related activities, meant to multiply money, permeate one day after the other, and therefore, they lack any opportunity to escape the unrelenting effects of their bourgeois ambition through any sort of Glück of which Hauke in his Socratic mentality, as was noted before, has been unable throughout the narrative so far. Oddly enough, Hauke will attempt to interface these incompatible aspects of their lives to garner the lack of temporal stagnation through and not at the cost of the overly dominant conduct of reason and rationality.

Hauke’s overly ambitious dyke project emerges from two conflicting, but congruent moments in which the power of forgetting and the control of capital interlock most potently. As he is himself aware, Hauke gains legitimacy in the middle-class only thanks to his wife, which serves as a constant reminder how severely isolated he is from

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the rest of his community because of it: “[S]ie sollen nicht mehr sagen, dass ich nur

Deichgraf bin von meines Weibes wegen!” (68) Consequently, the project of erecting a new dam to the sea appears as the next necessary step to legitimize his own position qua the modernization of the coastal area. Hauke grows confident about confining the perpetual movement of Ebbe and Flut by practically employing his theoretical knowledge of the subjugation and creation of space:

‚Das läßt sich dämmen!‘, sprach Hauke bei sich selber, nachdem er diesem Spiele eine Zeitlang zugesehen; dann blickte er auf, und von dem Deiche, auf dem er stand, über den Priel hinweg, zog er in Gedanken eine Linie längs dem Rande des abgetrennten Landes, […]. Die Linie aber […] war ein neuer Deich, neu auch in der Konstruktion seines Profiles, welches bis jetzt nur noch in seinem Kopf vorhanden war. (69)

To stop the movement of the waves in the form of a dam constitutes the pinnacle of the modern spirit. But before that, the dyke project necessitates “[e]ine andere Kalkulation”

(69), meaning the intricate workings of property relations that are of vital importance to make it happen: “[E]r began zusammenzuzählen, wie viele Anteile er von seinem, wie viele er von Elkes Vater überkommen, und was an solchen er während seiner Ehe schon selbst gekauft hatte” (69-70). Seemingly, Hauke is overcome by the desire for profit that his dyke would create, the “Werte, wenn das alles von seinem neuen Deich umgeben war.” With the erection of the dyke, Hauke’s life, as follows logically, will be saturated even more with the need for and necessity of calculation to maximize success. Even though this might entail “ein Haufen Arbeit, Kampf und Ärger”, Hauke appears utterly driven by the prospect of capitalist revenue: “Welch treffliches Weide- und Kornland musste es geben und von welchem Werte, wenn das alles von seinem neuen Deich umgeben war!” (70). Jost

Hermand makes a convincing case to consider this monumental project of Der

Schimmelreiter as a document of the Gründerzeit ethos during which it was produced 112

(255). And according to Kate Rigby’s ecological reading of it, the novella’s 1750-setting bears similar significance: “After 1750 the hydrological projects undertaken throughout the German region were far larger, with correspondingly greater impacts, and oriented toward enhancing the wealth and power of territorial states.” (159) Hence, Gerd Eversberg surmizes: “Storm hat die Handlung also in die Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts gelegt, dabei aber menschliche Verhaltensweisen beschrieben, die typisch für Verhältnisse hundert Jahre früher waren.” (18) The story thereby between two central moments of modernity but proceeds to present a force counter to it: Hauke’s contention to carry home what he considers to be “einen großen Schatz” (70) could speak of money as well as something intangible and far more precious that is at play here: forgetting.

As much as the dyke project stands in the sign of capitalist control over the coastal area, it procures the chance of forgetting which we may consider the underlying desire of

Hauke’s project. Before his ride into the coast, the narrator hints at a certain thought that occupies his mind apart from the ceaseless repairs of the old dyke: “Ein anderer Gedanke, den er halb nur ausgedacht und seit Jahren mit sich umhergetragen hatte, der aber von den drängenden Amtsgeschäften ganz zurückgetreten war, bemächtigte sich seiner jetzt aufs

Neue und mächtiger als je zuvor, als seien plötzlich die Flügel ihm gewachsen.“ (68) There is a significant Leerstelle of course as to what thought exactly Hauke remembers here, but it stands to reason that he remembers in particular a crucial moment of his childhood: While he is working on the seaside, Hauke sits on the verge of the coastline and comes to witness the continuous crashing of the waves: “[W]as er allein hier sah, war der brandende Saum des Wassers, der, als die Flut stand, mit hartem Schlage immer wieder dieselbe Stelle traf und vor seinen Augen die Grasnarbe des steilen Deiches auswusch.” (11) During his

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notorious engagement with the Euclidian concept of space, Hauke essentially uncovers, not unlike his Goethean predecessor, the actuality and inevitability of an ever-so-fleeting progression of time in the restless casting of the waves which so ceaselessly smash against the dyke. In the imagination of a new and better dyke, Hauke locates the prospect of ultimate forgetting in the subjugation of the sea and the concomitant conquering of the progression of time. In Zum Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben, Nietzsche himself even uses at one point the metaphor of the sea to describe the vitalizing and isolating thrust of forgetting when it emerges, as if to describe the point at which Hauke makes his choice: “Es ist der ungerechteste Zustand von der Welt, eng, undankbar gegen das Vergangene, blind gegen Gefahren, taub gegen Warnung, ein kleiner lebendiger Wirbel in einem todten Meere von Nacht und Vergessen” (253) As much as it makes possible the subversion of time and the attainment of forgetting, Hauke can only achieve this, strange as it may appear, through the precision of mathematical calculation and the conquest of space and sea via economic means. This contradiction is ingrained in the moment where that thought comes back to him, for it is, above all else, as much a moment of remembering as it constitutes a moment of forgetting in the more mundane sense of the word: “[A]ber nicht lange war er gegangen, so war die Schleusenreparatur vergessen.” (68) Accordingly,

Hauke wishes to simultaneously reach and subvert the achievements of modern consciousness; frantically, he will have to navigate the Scylla of economic calculation and the Charybdis of forgetting for he can savor the latter only through embracing the former.

The only way to successfully endure, negotiate and convene this opposition of the simultaneous triumph and defiance of modernity lies, as should come as no surprise at this late point in my analysis, in a deal with the devil.

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The Devil’s Last Laugh: The Specter of Temporality

In its representation of the Teufelspakt, Storm’s novella makes a decisive effort both to conceal the deal with the devil in the deepest level of the narrative and to create the aura of an uncanny presence haunting the village and the text as a whole. The deal with the devil occurs the moment after Hauke’s superiors granted their approval about the new dyke project (“voll Freude über die gute Nachricht, die der Oberdeichgraf mir gegeben hatte”,

83); somewhat casually, Hauke recounts a meeting at the city gates that has tremendous implications for the rest of the tale: “Da, auf dem Damm, hinter dem Hafen, begegnet mir ein ruppiger Kerl; ich wusst nicht, war’s ein Vagabund, ein Kesselflicker oder was denn sonst.” Two aspects of the meeting with this “ruppiger Kerl” bear further mentioning: First, it is relegated to an additional level of the intricate narrative layout of the novella. For

Volker Hoffmann’s consideration of the deal with the devil in Der Schimmelreiter, this may rightly appear as a “zweitrangige Episode” (Hoffmann 353), but it occurs in an act of narration by Hauke himself. Through recounting this episode and burying it even deeper into the narrative fabric of his tale, Hauke newly legitimizes his position as Deichgraf and his overall endeavor while he – and this would be the second aspect – simultaneously self- fashions his modern existence as inherently transgressive. Second, this encounter occurs during Hauke’s departure from an urban space for the rural area of his home or, to be more exact, at a point of transition in the form of a dyke. John Hamilton points out how this liminality logically follows from the setting at the coast: “Die Küstenlinie ist eine augenscheinliche Grenze, eine, die sich sehen und anerkennen lässt, eine Unterscheidung, die nicht unmittelbar angezweifelt werden kann.“ (169) Hence, Hamilton rightly considers

Hauke Haien as a liminal figure (177). In the spatial organization of the recounted 115

encounter, Hauke not only presents his liminality, as he traverses the threshold of relegated, but interconnected – and maybe even increasingly interconnected – domains of cityscape and countryside, but further positions himself on the dyke to substantiate the connection between the events that unfold there and the venture that comes out of them. Essentially,

Hauke and the stranger converse at the intersection where the fantastic elements of the texts emerge from an all too familiar symbolical layer: The stranger’s vocation as Kesselflicker constitutes a remarkable echo of the story world of Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe, whose narrator similarly identifies the Black Fiddler as a tinkerer: “er trieb allerlei Handwerk, meistens Kesselflicken” (37).18 In other words, Hauke encounters another secular descendant of the devil, and, like his Mephistophelean predecessor, he insofar facilitates – or rather pretends to facilitate – an experience of forgetting as he helps Hauke to solidify his vision of the dam.

The actual deal unfolds not as an offering of service on the part of the devil, but first and foremost as a seemingly mundane economic transaction. On the surface level, the two men merely haggle over the prize of a horse:

‚Was soll’s denn kosten?’, rief ich, da auch das Pferd mich wiederum wie bittend ansah. ‚Herr, nehmt’s für dreißig Taler!‘, sagte der Kerl, ‚und den Halfter geb ich Euch darin!‘ Und da, Frau, hab ich dem Burschen in die dargebotne braune Hand, die fast wie eine Klaue aussah, eingeschlagen. So haben wir den Schimmel, und ich denk auch, wohlfeil genug! Wunderlich nur war es, als ich mit den Pferden wegritt, hört ich bald hinter mir ein Lachen, und als ich den Kopf wandte, sah ich den Slowaken, der stand noch sperrbeinig, die Arme auf dem Rücken, und lachte wie ein Teufel hinter mir darein.‘ (84)

18 Once, of course, Der Schimmelreiter’s` Kesselflicker is identified as being of Slovak decadency (84), this, admittedly, removes him from any further genealogical116 connection to the Black Fiddler.

Anybody but the inattentive reader might note that more than the ordinary acquisition of a horse takes place here. The description of the Kerl employs two interesting comparisons:

His hand looks “wie eine Klaue” and when laughing, he sounds “wie ein Teufel”; by inserting the small, but significant adverb wie, Hauke – and through him the text at large – successfully evokes and simultaneously subverts the presence of the devil, as if to sustain the realist coating of the text at all costs without losing the aura that the motif lends to the story.19 In this respect, the Teufelspakt neither ventures into any fantastic territory nor removes it from the secular domain of modernity, but encodes an incredibly daring moment in which modernity makes Hauke Haien its biggest offering: the possibility of Glück, as it lies beyond the dyke upon which Hauke stands and beyond the dyke he wishes to build.

Hauke may never sell anything – neither his soul, nor his mortal or bourgeois existence, as we have seen with the cases from before – and buys the support of the devil like any other commodity, when he purchases the magical Schimmel that manifests the bestiality of the devil throughout the rest of the story. Hauke considers this transaction above all else a

“Priesterhandel“ (84), which on a literal level refers to the cheap bargain he makes here and on an ironic level to the cultural mode of the Teufelspakt he inverses to provide his administrative authorization with a symbolic one. Hauke feels the most intimate connection to the poor animal both at the moment of purchase (“[D]as Tier aber hob den Kopf und sah mich aus blöden Augen an; mir war’s, als ob es mich um etwas bitten wolle; ich war ja auch in diesem Augenblicke reich genug.” 83) and afterwards: “Aber nicht allein an jenem

Abend fütterte er den Schimmel; er tat es fortan immer selbst und ließ kein Auge von dem

Tiere” (84). Surely, the acquisition occurs in of a moment of sympathy for the suffering

19 A similar technique is used in Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe, when the Black Fiddler jumps “wie ein Gespenst” (75). 117

Schimmel, for it begs to be released, but the “blöden Augen” (83) provide the animal with its textual import: Hauke can obtain the possibility of Glück through an animal because animals, as Nietzsche points out so famously in Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie furs

Leben, exist only unhistorically; therefore, it surfaces, as will be shown presently, out of a significant temporal displacement.

Carefully, the novella couches the deal with the devil with an extensive excursion into the gossip of the village community. This is caused by the mysterious and inexplicable presence of a skeleton on the islet of Jeverssand that lies close to the Haien household:

“[D]as Gerippe eines Pferdes, von dem freilich niemand begriff, wie es dort hingekommen sei, wollte man, wenn der Mond von Osten auf die Hallig schien, [auf der Jeverssand] erkennen können.” (75) Eerily discernible only in the moonlight and the subjunctive mood of wollte, the Gerippe inhabits a virtual No-Man’s-Land and its presence alone constitutes a disruption of the systems of panoptic control on which the small village functions; and as much as nobody knows where the skeleton comes from, no-one appears able to locate it: “[D]as Pferdsgerippe, das sonst dabeilag, wo ist es? Ich kann’s nicht sehen!” (77) The horse that does appear to have taken the skeleton’s place (“Sieh nur, nun reckt’s den Hals zu uns hinüber? Nein, es steckt den Kopf; es frisst! Ich dächt, es wär dort nichts zu fressen!”, 76), is of course the Schimmel Hauke has previously bought; it feeds on grass at a place where there should be none, and the villagers themselves draw up the connection between the horse and Hauke’s devilish transaction: “’Nein Herr, es geht noch; aber den

Schimmel reit’ der Teufel!’ ‘Und ich!’, setzte Hauke lachend hinzu.” (86). There is a considerable amount of time spent on outlining the macabre coincidence of the horse’s appearance and the skeleton’s disappearance, as it frames the entire pact scene, and the

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narrating Schulmeister discloses his reason for re-telling it so elaborately: “[W]as ich […]

Ihnen jetzt vorzutragen habe, das war derzeit und ist auch jetzt noch das Geschwätz des ganzen Marschdorfes” (75). In terms of cultural memory, this inexhaustible chit-chat amongst the villagers could be merely considered as wrong or even intentionally falsified, creating a line of continuity between a dead horse and a living horse where none exists or between a skeleton that was never there and a living horse that may only resemble one:

“[E]s war rauhaarig und mager, dass man jede Rippe zählen konnte, und die Augen lagen ihm matt und eingefallen in den Schädelhöhlen.” (81) Hauke’s Knecht himself interprets this horse as a resurrection of the skeleton: “Es steht in unsrem Stall; da steht’s, seit es nicht mehr auf der Hallig ist.” (87) While this barely holds up with the anti-fantastic direction of the deal with the devil, with which these moments are very precisely put into sequence, it does still find a more than eager audience amongst the villagers: “Hier fand er andächtige

Zuhörer für seine Geschichte von dem Teufelspferd des Deichgrafen” (87). The horse functions as a symbolic locus of Hauke’s project of forgetting; the myths around it express a wide fear of the temporal dislocation amongst the villagers for which it is put to good use. In the internal logic of the text, the horse may appear in the present as a remnant from the past and an echo from the future at the same time. It may be the skeleton of the horse once it has passed with its master in the cataclysmic flood, for then, it returns again:

“[J]enes weiße Pferdsgerippe ist nach der Flut wiederum, wie vormals, im Mondschein auf

Jevershallig zu sehen gewesen; das ganze Dorf will es gesehen haben.” (144) In the remembrance of the villagers, the horse / skeleton can return here because temporal dissonance is ingrained into its very purpose. As the instrument of Hauke’s forgetting, its presence alone dissolves and disrupts the laws of temporality; by being both there and not

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there, it supersedes linearity through discontinuity, for it could potentially disrupt progression through forgetting. In the Schimmel, Hauke’s deal with the Kesselflicker emblematically re-emerges, and when horse and rider still haunt the Hauke-Haien-Koog over a century later, they are both cursed with a continuous presence as ghosts that are, like the forgetting which they pursue, never to be forgotten.

With his dyke project, Hauke walks the fine line between the necessary continuation of his modern project on the one hand and an unwilling indebtedness towards pre-modern reservations on the other hand. Against the will of the villagers, Hauke pushes for the project with an unwelcome sense of urgency: “’Die Frühlingsarbeit steht vor der

Tür, und nun soll auch ein millionenlanger Deich gemacht werden – da muss ja alles liegen bleiben.’ ‘ Das könnt ihr dieses Jahr noch zu Ende bringen’, sagte Hauke” (88). He himself describes the hardship of implementing his ideas of modern innovation as a Sisyphean labor of some sort: “[A]ber ich selber muss die Räder schieben und froh sein, wenn sie nicht zurückgehalten werden!” (92) Ole Peters voices much spite about the way this especially benefits Hauke Haien: “[Hauke] versteht zu rechnen; er hatte schon die meisten

Anteile, da wusste er auch mir die meinen abzuhandeln, und als er sie hatte, beschloss er, diesen neuen Koog zu deichen!” (93) And these difficulties result from either past or present re-arrangements of property that impact the share of profit and work that the villagers have to put up with now. Peters, especially after he inherits the position of

Deichgevollmächtiger (102), advocates the standpoint of tradition in this venture, continuously countering Hauke’s propositions, but to no avail. The definite redistribution of properties in the village, as Hauke’s and Elke’s marriage already initiated them, are now re-enacted and fully executed on the larger scale. During the construction of the dyke, the

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villagers react to this newly established status quo by referring to Hauke as “[d]er

Schimmelreiter” (95) and thereby actively drawing attention to his agreement with modernity. Likewise, Hauke’s removal from the fold of the village culminates in his atheistic denial of god’s omnipotence that quickly spreads through the village and stimulates the villagers’ imagination: “Er war ein Gottesleugner; die Sache mit dem

Teufelspferde mochte auch am Ende richtig sein!” (100) In the conflation of the horse and the heretic prayer to God, the pre-modern mind-set of the villagers casts a semantic net over Hauke, and his project and wishes in order to comprehend the unprecedented process to which it is exposed through familiar cultural schemata that themselves have become volatile. As Ulrich Kittstein observes, the deal with the devil in this sense constitutes for the villagers “ein vertrautes Deutungsschema” (283) that functions counterpunctually to the enlightened interpretation and retelling of the Schulmeister, yet in my view, it emerges as an equally potent and in no way secondary testimony to the power of modernity.

The local habits and customs around the building of the dyke, and Hauke’s defiance thereof, complicate the construction process considerably. In the past, a dyke has always incorporated a sacrifice, i.e. the burial of a living being, as Elke herself reminds Hauke:

“[W]enn ein Damm dort halten solle, müsse was Lebigs da hineingeworfen und mit verdämmt werden; bei einem Deichbau auf der andern Seite, vor wohl hundert Jahren, sei ein Zigeunerkind verdämmet worden, das sie um schweres Geld der Mutter abgehandelt hätten“ (72). Hauke’s project wishes to surpass these pre-modern beliefs, and manifest the new– and therefore of course inherently better – progressivity of modernity in its superior structure. Hence, he is not only opposed to the sacrifice of a child, but also opposed to the sacrifice of a mere dog within it: “’Halt! sage ich’, schrie Hauke wieder; ‘bringt mir den

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Hund! Bei unserem Werke soll kein Frevel sein!’” (105) The villagers respond to this with the self-confidence of tradition: “Ein Kind ist besser noch; wenn das nicht da ist, tut’s auch wohl ein Hund!” (107) Hauke’s unwillingness to commit any sort of Frevel – one may think back at Marti’s and Manz’s self-evident crime – resonates among the villagers: They respond to Hauke with “abergläubische Furcht” (106); the Fuhrknecht for example responds eagerly to Hauke’s commands – “wie mechanisch” (107), to be exact. Yet the whole episode reveals, at least to Irmgard Roebling, the most astounding contradiction.

She considers Hauke story to be a “beinahe klasssische Geschichte eines modernen männlichen Helden” (328) and remarks critically about Hauke’s unwilligness for sacrifice:

“In diesem Augenblick auf dem Deich scheint sich das Verhältnis von Aberglauben und technisch-rationalem Naturverhalten umzudrehen. Denn die ursprünglich abergläubische

Vorstellung, dass etwas Lebendiges eingemauert werden muss […], könnte als erstaunlich modernes kritisches Bild für das naturwissenschaftlich-technische Projekt der Moderne gelesen werden.“ (344-345) In this sense, the new dyke project mirrors the weird confluence of superstition and profit in the Teufelspakt motif in particular. But as a whole, it constitutes the indecipherable conflux of pre-modern and modern attitudes and a significant reflex within the superstructure; the moment when Hauke saves the dog instead of sacrificing it could be thought of as exactly the kind of moment during which the bourgeois revolution emerges out of that contradiction in the modes of production and consequently eradicates any remnants of the feudal world. The deal with the devil brings forth its instrument, deemed “das neue Werk der Menschenhände” (108), which stands as a testimony to the power of Enlightened – or Socratic – rationality and to the congealed and exploited labor of the villagers in an age of the emerging capital. In this process, Hauke

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Haien functions less as an actor and more as an instrument of these tantalizing forces of modernity. However, he may appear one step ahead of them nonetheless: While he navigates these frictions and tensions, he erects the monument of modernity first and foremost as a new stronghold against the tides of time or in other words, to advance the success of his own vision of forgetting.

Though the dyke is soon completed, Hauke’s forgetting, the payoff for his ceaseless

Bemühen, appears long in the coming and the longing for an unhistorical existence appears widely disturbed. The newly instated Carolinenkoog, which denominates the new fields for cultivation upcountry, is soon re-christined Hauke-Haien-Koog, and this has a remarkable effect on its namesake: “’Hauke-Haien-Koog!’, wiederholte er leis; das klang, als könnte es allzeit nicht anders heißen! […] Der Schimmel ging in stolzem Galopp; vor seinen Ohren aber summte es: ‘Hauke-Haien-Koog! Hauke-Haien-Koog!’” (110) Hauke finds reassurance in an attitude that Nietzsche would probably consider an instance of a monumental Historie: “Und doch erwachen immer wieder einige, die sich, im Hinblick auf das vergangene Grosse […], so beseligt fühlen, als ob das Menschenleben eine herrliche

Sache sei, und als ob es gar die schönste Frucht dieses bitteren Gewächses sei, zu wissen, daß früher einmal Einer stolz und stark durch dieses Dasein gegangen ist“ (259-260). In falling for this monumental history, Hauke, it seems, almost aligns his intentions with that of the economic forces for whose success he acts and therefore almost turns away from the prospects of forgetting, which, however, may enter his household in an unexpected way nonetheless. The narrator observes a new state of peacefulness in the Haien household, yet attaches a significant relative clause to the description of that “Frieden”: “den auch das stille Kind nicht störte.” (111) In fact, Wienke’s intellectually disabled state of mind causes

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some powerful frustration in the Haien’s newfound tranquility. Elke herself despairs over

Wienke’s debility: “[E]s wird für immer ein Kind bleiben, O, lieber Gott! es ist schwachsinnig” (117) Both in terms of rationality and in the view of economics, their child is essentially dysfunctional, for Wienke revels, in a generational inversion of Keller’s

Marti, in a state of eternal peacefulness or in other words, of tranquil forgetting. Unlike

Hauke, she will never experience the imaginative and speculative possibilities of her father’s calculative endeavors. We may note that the horse walks with “stolzem Galopp”

(110) during the inspection of the dyke; even though Hauke has met his part of the bargain, he does not get what he wants out of the deal with the devil, as even the narrator himself remarks: “[W]äre das Kind nicht da gewesen, es hätte viel gefehlt.” (118) According to the twisted logic of the Teufelspakt, Hauke’s reward comes back with a vengeance.

Though completed in terms of mere construction, Hauke’s ambitious project proves to be unstable. The full alignment of the old dyke with the new causes further troubles:

“[N]icht nur der alte Deich musste hier verstärkt, auch dessen Profil dem des neuen angenähert werden” (123). And from the perspective of Ole Peters, the new dyke itself makes matters even worse: “[D]ein neuer Koog ist ein fressend Werk, was du uns gestiftet hast! Noch laboriert alles an den schweren Kosten deiner breiten Deiche; nun frisst er uns auch den alten Deich, und wir sollen ihn verneuen!” (126) Hauke’s project, finished as it may have appeared, is far from completion; Hauke realizes himself that the two dykes in tandem could not possibly withstand the full force of a storm flood: “[d]er alte Deich, er würde den Stoß nicht aushalten, der gegen ihn heraufschosse! Was dann, was sollte dann geschehen? Nur eines, ein einziges Mittel würde es geben, um vielleicht den alten Koog und gut und Leben darin zu retten. […] [D]er Hauke-Haien-Koog müsste preisgegeben und

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der neue Deich durchstochen werden!“ (124) For Hauke, this would be an impossible choice to make; it would mean to sacrifice the success of the new for the sake of the old, to break the agreement he once made and to necessarily forfeit all chances to finalize his childhood idea, his adult vision, and the forgetting for which they both strive. When that storm does come in the end, Hauke wishes to do anything but pierce the old dyke, but somebody is already ahead of him:

‘Wir sollten den neuen Deich durchstechen, Herr! damit der alte Deich nicht bricht!’ ‘Was sollt ihr?’ – ‘Den neuen Deich durchstechen!’ ‘Und den Koog verschütten? – Welcher Teufel hat euch das befohlen?’ ‘Nein, Herr, kein Teufel; der Gevollmächtigte Ole Peters ist hier gewesen; der hat’s befohlen!’ (139)

Seemingly, any association of Ole Peters with the devil is denied during this curse-filled exchange; yet there is an interesting parallelization that occurs: “Welcher Teufel hat euch das befohlen? […] [D]er hat’s befohlen!” The devil returns, but instead of the form of a real actor (or a Kesselflicker), he appears as an echo hiding beneath the textual surface.

Where previously the lexical item wie opened the cracks of the door, now the devil is let in sub rosa on the level of syntax. Ole Peters seemingly acts as an instrument of the pre- modern forces: “[H]ätte Ole Peters’ böses Maul [Hauke] nicht zurückgehalten” (140). Yet in the end, the old dyke bursts with cataclysmic consequences (“eine Sündflut war’s, um

Tier und Menschen zu verschlingen”, 142) whereas the new dam remains at the cost of the old. Both have been betrayed: Unfairly, Ole’s notoriously traditional way of living will be swept away regardless, and Hauke does not attain any sense of bliss in his lifetime and is condemned to haunt his Koog as a ghostly apparition. In Der Schimmelreiter, the deal with the devil constitutes the transaction necessary to achieve his economical enterprise on the

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one hand, and the transaction fundamental to passing on towards an unhistorical existence none the greater on the other hand. For this reason, modernity unleashes the chaotic catalyst of the deal with the devil so that it can inevitably succeed; despite Hauke’s willing self- sacrifice, modernity prevails regardless of what is thrown in its way: “Aber der Hauke-

Haien-Deich steht noch jetzt nach hundert Jahren” (144). We may remember that the macabre stranger from whom Hauke buys the Schimmel laughs “wie ein Teufel” (84) upon the completion of the transaction; while the laughter of the stranger appears uncannily like the devil’s and even if he is merely reduced to a specter, his potency goes, as it re-emerges close to the end, undisputed. This may ultimately preempt the success of Hauke’s mission, for what he unknowingly sells – and necessarily has to sell – on this liminal moment on the dyke, at the very crossroads on the road to modernity, is his eventual profit from his enterprise, the forgetting he longs for all along. The devil, it seems, will always have the last laugh.

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Coda: The Deal with the Devil as a Metaphor for Modern Life

This MA thesis has argued that the deal with the devil, as it manifests in Goethe’s Faust,

Keller’s Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe, and Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter, negotiates the experience of modernity through offering precious moments of forgetting. According to

Jürgen Habermas, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx, modernity constitutes either the separation of religion from the spheres of reason, art, and moral, the culmination of

Socratism, as it reigned for thousands of years, or as the disruption of the feudal world order through the forces of capital; seemingly disparate and interdependent nonetheless, these three process point to the same rupture that modern life has brought forth, among others through one of its prime progenies: secularization. The tremors of secularization vividly impact the possibility of what Friedrich Nietzsche deems forgetting or Glück:

Nietzsche posits that forgetting crystalizes most potently an interruption of the progression of time or, in other words, an unhistorical way of being which Nietzsche denotes as Glück and which lays for the foundation for any actions big or small and, which would be my addition, for the way the deal with the devil as a literary motif takes shape in the modern age. While the devil has had a prominent career since the commencement of the Christian and ergo Western world, the deal with the devil carries over into modernity where it lives on with a remarkable afterlife as the devil so potently provides in times of rapid change the possibility of forgetting and Glück.

In Goethe’s Faust: Eine Tragödie, these three aspects coalesce in the most sophisticated fashion, and continue from there. Faust’s wager with Mephistopheles develops not only through the manifold manifestations of modernity, but focalizes the desire for forgetting as a corollary of modern life as such. As Faust embarks into a world

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in which the concerns of modernity drift from the speculative to the transformative, the love affair with Gretchen becomes the first milestone and the first defeat of Faust’s quest for Glück; bound differently to the deal with the devil, she can actually embrace forgetting whereas he has no choice but to turn away from it and her. Consequently, even if he forgets about Gretchen before he can come fully to terms with his regret over her passing, Faust utilizes his deal with Mephistopheles to resurrect Helen of Troy and escape with her from the unbearable present into a pre-modern sphere where his forgetting and his Glück, inherently tainted by the modernity that produces them, collapse before they fully cascade.

Upon his return into the turmoil of the modern world, Faust, imbrued with the regained memory of Gretchen, tasks Mephistopheles with his third and final wish for forgetting: to help build a dam as a barrier against the currents of time and to demolish the pre-modern world for the sake of a better and freer world in the process; while Faust’s venture and his attempt to get the better of the devil prove unsuccessful in the end, he transpires onto the divine and blissful realms of Bergschluchten under the auspices of Gretchen nevertheless.

In its multi-layered transposition in Faust, the motif of the deal with the devil provides an inexhaustible fuel for any of Faust’s escapades and undergoes a substantive transformation at the same time, for it now carries the weight of modernity and the solace of forgetting on its shoulders. Both novellas, in their representation of the Teufelspakt, follow the trends and tendencies of the Faustian bargain. In Keller’s Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe, the deal with the devil operates like an almost faded echo of its Faustian template: As they find themselves on the losing side of an unfolding modernity, the Black Fiddler’s offer to Sali and Vrenchen is an offer of unparalleled, yet tainted forgetting that may never live up to what they want which is why they choose suicide in the end. In Storm’s Der

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Schimmelreiter, the deal with the devil materializes from modernity’s bourgeois end, as

Hauke Haien wishes to overcome the increasing burden of bourgeois busyness through the erection of a dam which appears palpably similar to Faust’s and which, finally, turns him into an unwilling pawn in the confrontation between the modern and pre-modern forces of control.

In their critique, these three tales of forgetting all express the increasing desire to ease the weight of modern life through the consolation of Glück the more modern individuality becomes subject to the forces of capital and rationalization. The impact of secularization leaves Goethe’s Mephistopheles as nothing but a trickster, though with a remarkable set of tricks up his sleeve, and it exiles his novelistic descendants into purely symbolic territories where they attain all the necessary freedom to roam their own story worlds and others. We might consider this an attempt to bottle up the potency of the deal with the devil. Yet as a remarkable cultural expression, the deal with the devil gives voice to a longing for transcendental stillness in the modern age and to the instrumentalization of this longing through the modern spirit. The move of Faust, Hauke, Sali and Vrenchen – and Elke and

Gretchen by romantic implication – towards forgetting through a Teufelspakt is used to either spearhead modern processes, as in Faust or Der Schimmelreiter, or to streamline the fatality of its impact, as with Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe. The protagonists of the former two tales enter, knowingly or unknowingly, their deal with the devil in the hope that they can circumnavigate the eventual inevitability of its failure; Keller’s Romeo and

Juliet however, the least sophisticated in the group, know instinctively that this will not be the case. My three literary examples, through which the motif passes successfully from the

Goethezeit to early and late Realism, activate the deal with the devil not to indulge a false

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nostalgia for pre-modern superstitions, as more fantastic texts may attempt to do so. In the figure of speech with which I began my exploration, the play and the two novellas provide a metaphor for the obtainment of Glück in modernity which likens, in and by itself, to a deal with the devil. Possible as it may be, the achievement of forgetting necessitates the severity and the full impact of its unavoidable absence – the fall from the unhistorical heights in which great deeds may be borne, but in whose inescapable absence the miseries of modern life, in the end, become even harder to bear than they already are. This opens up the question whether the evolution (or revolution) of modernity continuously depletes forgetting’s enchanting power or whether modernity’s progress decreases or even nullifies the devil’s potency. Faust achieves his final forgetting only by surpassing his corporal existence and his alliance with Mephistopheles in the spheres of Bergschluchten; Sali and

Vrenchen realize the fallacy of an agreement with the Black Fiddler for the sake of blissful forgetting; and Hauke Haien appears to be most severely tricked out of his forgetting by the bargain he strikes. Hence, we may surmise that with every new deal, every new tale, and every new reading forgetting in modernity moves further and further out of our reach.

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