Professor David Peimer
Goethe’s Faust
Summary
Professor David Peimer discusses the work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), primarily his tragic play Faust (1808).
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
I mean, what’s interesting is that it’s a little bit contradictory because he was, he couldn’t really smash Goethe all for that matter, Beethoven or Mozart, any of the others because he was so at the centre of the German language, German poetry, literature for what became, let’s say in the 20th century, working class, middle, upper class. So, he had to, I think, play it a bit carefully. So, I don’t know if his comments are more, you know, sort of politically engineered like that as opposed to direct. There’s very little that he says about it. You know, he talks more as we all know, you know, this Aryan madness and this Aryan crazy hell, he puts it more that that perspective, I think. It’s a great idea though, to research.