Professor David Peimer
Goethe’s Faust

Professor David Peimer - Goethe’s Faust

- So, today I’m going to look at a gentleman, Mr. Goethe, and specifically his extraordinary long poem, if you like, fiction piece, “Faust”, which we all know of, and I’m sure many know to a certain degree. And I was reading it again the other day for today, it just struck me how the range of what this guy did, what he achieved, the times he lived in, you know, when gets the enormity of the name Goethe, when one takes it out of just being, I suppose, mythology or iconic and actually looks quite coldly at his life. I think the first thing I wanted to say was that I’m going to look at his life in relation to obviously “Faust” being the main project of his life, but also one of his other novels, “The Sorrows of Werther”. And, but mainly Faust and just a couple of things about his life. And to look at his actual writing itself translated into English as good as one can find it, ‘cause it is a difficult translation from Goethe’s writing into English, and I’m going to look at why. Then I’m also going to look at briefly, Freud had a very interesting insight of insights with Goethe and would constantly refer back to Goethe and even Einstein. But I’m going to look at a little bit of what Freud has to say in relation to some ideas, obviously with, in terms of Judaism. So, first of all, starting with, with Goethe, for me, in a way, he’s less close to a Shakespeare than he is to a Leonardo, I think, in Italian and European culture, I think Leonardo da Vinci perhaps comes the closest. Leonardo obviously is drawing and painting, sculpting.

So, Leonardo is visual where Goethe is verbal, but Goethe is using words and letters, and Goethe is using the enormity of his production of writings, literature, fiction, nonfiction, scientific writings, on government, on policy, on politics, philosophy. I mean, everything this guy wrote on, including nearly 20,000 letters that we have. I mean, it’s an extraordinary output whilst having a full-time job. So, there’s an incredible amount that he was, his mind was ranging over and thinking about and trying to, I suppose, come to grips with in his period, in his era. And Shakespeare, on the other hand wrote remarkably, obviously, obviously brilliant, brilliant plays, poetry, et cetera, insights into human nature. Extraordinary. But Shakespeare is more the writer, Shakespeare… Goethe is more the, is almost like a renaissance scholar and a prose writer and dramatist and poet. And yet he’s trying to understand everything about the world from fiction and non-fiction. So, for me, in a sense, the trajectory is more like a Leonardo da Vinci in our Western imagination, if you like. Certainly in Germany, as I’m sure everybody knows, Goethe is right up there at the very top of the tree. What’s fascinating, if we look at his years of, that he lived, he’s living through the French Revolution. He’s living through the Reign of Terror Robespierre afterwards, he’s living through the Napoleonic period, all the wars of Napoleon and all the endless wars against Napoleon.

Napoleon is fighting for and against, the Napoleonic reforms, emancipation of Jewish people, and all sorts of other changes and huge reforms Napoleon brings in. the massive change in Europe, post-French Revolution, the, if you like, almost the, I suppose, one of the highlights of the Enlightenment period and the period of the dreamed of, perhaps utopian triumph of rationality over superstition, reason over religion, science over faith, separation of powers, judiciary state, legislature, et cetera. All these dreams in a way are of fermenting around this time of the enlightenment plus the philosophers, the thinkers, the writers, you know, endless, endless. So, it’s, and the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic period. So, I think in a way, he in a way, is living through an extraordinary period in, certainly in European history and for German history, absolutely at the centre of everything regarded as culture, perhaps together with the Beethoven, and Mozart, you know, and others. But the writing and the thinking about everything, again, not only fiction. So, that’s why the equivalent of the British Council in Germany is called the Goethe Institute. And, you know, when one knows it through the Goethe Institutes and gets funding or anything cultural or so-called, you know, soft power related, it’s the Goethe Institute. It’s not the German Institute or the German council for the British or for other countries, perhaps.

So, he is absolutely, he was at the centre and has been placed, post-Second World War at the very centre of the unified Germany, and certainly was of West Germany before. In a way, I think he also goes way beyond Europe to America, to other parts of the world through the sheer influence. Was he a naive romantic? Was he a naive idealist? Two very important questions, and I think the answer is partly yes, absolutely, but it doesn’t deny the profundity and the importance of his insights and questions and how he and he believed in a sense, in the progress of humanity, progress of history, progress of ideas, of course, huge steps back, massive backward steps but at the same time, you know, onward, onward forward. He believed in the ancient, perhaps mythical Greek or partly Roman, but certainly ancient Greek ideal, put the slaves aside for the moment in ancient Greece, of the development of the individual character of destiny and fate, and how does one develop one’s character. The notion, the German notion of bildung, which I’m going to come to during today’s. So, it’s much broader than writing poetry, or writing novels, or some plays. He, in a way, is a renaissance mind for me, in mind, as I said, of Leonardo qualities in a way. And he’s certainly regarded as the greatest literary figure in German culture and German history. He has over 3000 drawings, as I said, so many thousands and thousands of letters, scientific papers, novels, fiction, non-fiction, et cetera, just endless writing. He is a celebrity by the age of 25, Goethe.

He comes from a prosperous family. So, he is very aware of being born into prosperity and living, you know, a good material life. He was ennobled by and lived for and with the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, let’s just say, the Duke of Weimar for simplicity’s, sake in 1782. So, quite early on, he becomes, if you like, part of the Privy Council for the Duke of Weimar. And he lives in Weimar for the rest of his life. He’s a member of the Privy Council. He sits on the war commission. He becomes in charge of almost everything from war council commission decisions to getting Prussian mercenaries to send off to fight the American revolutionaries, to casting actors in plays, to deciding where theatres can be and not, a extraordinary amount of power in, if you like, the almost city state of Weimar at the time, Saxe-Weimar. So, he has enormous power in his area and he has, but nevertheless keeps his full-time job, all the way while he’s doing all of this prodigious literary output. He is also an endless lover. So, he’s living all of these in a way, I suppose utopian, almost utopian dreams, of the Enlightenment era. And I’m going to look at what we can see today, looking back at this guy, his first main scientific work was “The Metamorphosis of Plants”. He takes a tour of Italy, he directs the theatre, he decides where the theatres will be, who the actors, as I said, he begins a friendship with the dramatist Schiller, who I’ll talk about in a couple of weeks. And he and Schiller and Beethoven, they’re all mixing at the same time and knowing each other.

He gets on very well with Schiller, but not so well with Beethoven at all. Couple of stories to come, his parents marry when his father was 38 and his mother was 17. They have quite a few children and all of them except Goethe and a sister die very young, disease. His father organisers himself and private tutors to teach him lessons in Latin, Greek, French, Italian, English, and Hebrew. He learns to speak all the languages at a very young age. He learns to read in all the languages. He’s reading the Bible in Hebrew, many early, early young ages, he’s learning all these things, not only the languages, but to read in the language. As he wrote, “I had from childhood the singular habit of plunging into the books of Moses. And there amid the scattered shepherd tribes, found myself at once in the greatest solitude and the greatest society.” This is where he is writing this at about the age of 24, 25. So, he’s able to put words together. He’s not just saying, “Okay, I read the Bible, I read the story of Moses, hello, goodbye.” He’s putting it in the language of his times, which perhaps is highfalutin, but it has a certain ring with it. And he understands the archetype of wisdom and the ancient Greek ideal of attaining some sense of wisdom, of how to live the good life, as Alexander used to say and Aristotle taught him, “How do you live the good life? How do you teach to people to live the good life? And what does it mean?” Which infuses so much of his writing. He studies Law at Leipzig University, didn’t like it at all.

And he said he kept going to literature lessons and poetry and so on. He spoke about reading Shakespeare for the first time as his, as the personal awakening of his life. He’s reading it in English as much as he can, but also reading it in German, in translations naturally. So, it’s the personal awakening of his life. He’s reading Shakespeare, it’s the light bulb moment, if you like, for Goethe when he sees what literature can really achieve, and not only how much it can achieve, but how much it can influence the thoughts of humanity for good or whatever. Then, in 1774, he wrote the book, which brought him worldwide fame at a pretty young age, 1774, the “Sorrows of Young Werther”. It was an enormous hit. Success for the times and number of people educated, of course, is fairly minimal and obviously have to be of a certain elite, educated elite. It doesn’t bring him in much money, but he has the job that I mentioned, and he comes from a prosperous family, so he’s financially set and he’s fine. Also, we need to remember that the copyright laws at the time were virtually non-existent. So, people could take his novel and do whatever they wanted, really, and without, you know, money going to the original author. He was virtually made Prime Minister in Weimar by the Duke in 1782. So, all of this has happened by 1782, he is kind of a virtual local, I suppose we call it a governor, you know, of a province or of an area of Saxe, of Weimar at the time by the Duke.

He’s head of the war commission for Saxe-Weimar He participates actively in the recruitment of mercenaries into Prussian and the British military against the American at the time of the American Revolution. So, this is a lot of complexity going on in this guy’s life and a lot of things that he’s got, a lot of pies he’s got fingers in and a lot of activities he’s involved in, and right at the top of political state. This is a picture, a painting by Moritz Oppenheim, 1864, and it’s Mendelssohn playing to Goethe. And when, in 1821, when Goethe, sorry, when Mendelssohn, when Felix Mendelssohn was 12 years old, he’s playing to a 70-something year old Goethe who was enormously impressed and compared him to Mozart, and Goethe wrote “Musical rodigies are rare. What this little man, Mendelssohn, can do in playing at sight borders on the miraculous. And it’s so early in age, he is like a Mozart to me. So, he’s aware of culture, politics, literature, history, military affairs, war revolutions, all of this. And of course the great dreams of the Enlightenment and the Renaissance. Mendelssohn later set a number of Goethe’s poems to music, as did others. Finally, he dies, Goethe dies in 1832 and his dying words are "More light, open the window, please, more light.” Which have gone down in German folklore. One can interpret it metaphorically or literally. And as far as we know, he died of heart failure. His words inspired compositions by Mozart, by Beethoven, by Mendelssohn and others.

We all know that, I’m sure the famous poem, “Do you know the land with the lemon trees bloom?”, when he went to Italy in writing the poem about Italy, “Do you know the land with the lemon trees bloom?” It may sound banal and pretty simplistic to us today, but it’s a deceptively simple language that he uses because he’s trying to incorporate folklore, German folklore, German peasant, German upper class/aristocratic language altogether in a deceptively simple vocabulary. And he’s consciously trying to pull the German language in this direction, in a way, and take German literature further, so more people can read, more people can be educated, more people can gain knowledge, and therefore, hopefully, in the enlightenment spirit, progress history. During the French Revolution, he, as I said, although he’s organising mercenaries against the American revolutionaries, he’s also writing poems pro the American Revolution, the War of Independence. “America, you’re far better off than our old, old European continent, 'O America.” So, this is a man of complexity, of contradictions, paradoxes like all of us. You know, he’s, to me in a way, a figure of a, sort of a stature of, as I said, Leonardo, or a, perhaps not quite an Aristotle, but close. Nietzsche wrote about him. “There is Epicurus, there is Spinoza, there is Rousseau, and there is Goethe. With these, I must come to terms, when I have long wandered alone. With these companions, I will not be alone.” That’s Mr. Friedrich Nietzsche about Goethe. Napoleon reads his novel, “The Sorrows of Young Werther”. He read it seven times. And we know this from Napoleon’s letter. He reads it seven times.

Goethe’s novel, Napoleon, extraordinary. Goethe saw Napoleon as having an enlightened intellect. I think we can safely say that today. And he saw his efforts to build an alternative to the old corrupt European regimes, the old corrupt, he called them regimes. He didn’t obviously use the word monarchies because he is working for a duke. But he also said, and we know this, that “The greatest moment in my life was meeting Napoleon.” That’s an extraordinary statement for a man involved with all these things. Napoleonic armies invading his part of the world, the whole of Europe, everywhere else, the greatest moment of my life is meeting this guy, Napoleon. So, I suppose the picture I’m trying to draw is the remarkable complexity and range of people he’s meeting, he’s friendly with, he’s working with, he’s engaging with not only German, but the much broader European and emerging colonial and independent American society of his times. So, in all these ways, he’s a man, not only for Germany, although he is with the language, obviously, he’s a man of world literature, which he tries to identify with as much as he can, given the era that he’s living in. He’s one of the first to start talking about world literature and what that might mean. Idealistic, yes, romantic, yes.

A dream that has gone perhaps, or a dream that perhaps we still hold onto a little bit. His ideas on evolution influence Darwin, his ideas on other scientific inventions such as Tesla, Tesla’s rotating magnetic field, ultimately the alternating current of Tesla. Tesla talks about it as coming from when he is reading Faust, he gets these epiphanies scientifically and reading other things of Goethe, Nikolai Tesla gets influenced by Goethe’s “Faust”, Beethoven, Napoleon, I mean so many. We start to see the extraordinary range of this guy’s influence. Beethoven, a fun story is Beethoven and Goethe met in what was then the Bohemian Spartan of Taitz in 1812. They didn’t get on at all. And Goethe wrote to his wife that Beethoven had, and I’m quoting here, “Beethoven had an absolutely uncontrolled and uncontrollable personality.” Beethoven wrote to his own publisher, that Goethe, “Mr. Goethe delights far too much in the court atmosphere. I cannot bear him.” There’s this constant to and fro of this love hate almost between Beethoven and Goethe and others. Schiller is the one, the dramatist Schiller, is the one that he stays really, really friendly with. There’s also a story that when they were at the spa, and this may be legend or not, but it illustrates their relationship and something bigger, that when they were at the spa, they were walking outside the little hotel building and there was some German royalty on the street. Goethe deferentially aside and removed his hat. Beethoven kept his hat on firmly and ploughed through the royal group, forcing them to make way for him, Beethoven, which they did, and they’re also, the royal entourage, they also offered Beethoven very friendly greetings. So, on the one hand, Beethoven is doing that, and on the other hand, Goethe is stepping aside, removing his hat, bowing to the royal, the royal groups.

It illustrates to me the difference between what Beethoven is pushing for, the future and individualism and human rights, individual rights, the belief in some sense of democracy, if not political, at least social and in other areas to become political. Beethoven is pushing, putting down this divine right of kings and royalty and all this nonsense. And at the same time, Goethe is being deferential. And in those two images, whether it’s legend or whether it’s true, can’t really prove it. It, I think symbolises the old and the new, the old regimes of Europe and the emerging beginning of the new post-French revolution, post-Napoleonic era, enlightenment versus feudalism, divine right of kings, the absolute hierarchy of church and state over everybody. And the beginnings rise of the middle class, the mercantile class of education, of knowledge, the spread, the printing, et cetera, et cetera. So, all of, it’s symbolising me in the contradictions between Beethoven and Goethe in that little image of them outside the spa town with a bunch of royals around. Contrast of temperaments, but also a contrast of eras and generations. Goethe belongs to the courtly past, where artists also where the client of the princes and the kings. Beethoven represents the romantic future where the princes will clamour to be associated with the artists, a radical shift in perception and their own lives.

But of course, both being aware of what that legend or truthful story would mean. Okay, so, I want to go on and talk a bit about his great book Faust. And what we can really gain, for me today, and I think what it is, we know the story of Faust in essence, is that Faust is a highly, in Goethe’s version, not Marlowe’s which is a whole different play and other versions written before and after, Mephisto, Mephistopheles, et cetera. But Goethe’s version is what obviously I’m focusing on and Faust is highly successful. And yet he’s dissatisfied, he’s not satisfied with life, with what he has. He wants more. He makes a pact with the devil. In exchange says, “Okay, look, devil, you can have my soul for eternity, but give me two and a half decades. Give me 20 year, 27 years of unlimited knowledge, power, and worldly pleasures. If you give me just 20, 30 years of knowledge, power, and unlimited pleasures of life, you can have my soul forever. That’s the deal.” Fundamentally, that’s the deal. What’s become known, of course, as the great, the Faustian bargain, which we can relate to in so many things in, in our own lives and in life today. Every single act almost is a Faustian bargain. What is Goethe saying? For every act, there is a price to pay, not necessarily financial, of course, but it might be emotional, it might be moral, it might be set, whatever. It can be many things. But at part of the human condition is that every action, every decision we make has a shadow, has a price to be paid, has a, it doesn’t come free of anything. It’s not necessarily going to cause fear or guilt, but that there’s going to be some, there’s got to be some price.

There’s got to be some deal made. And that’s the Faustian bargain. And using the metaphor of Faust, it’s a metaphor between desire and the price we pay, whatever the desire may be, it may be pleasure, it may be money, it may be ambition, it may be children, family, happiness, it may be job new, whatever, anything, for us, there’s always going to be something that’s going to come back to bite us. And that is what he’s saying is at the core of human nature and human society and experience. Yes, we may want freedom and independence, but there’s a price to pay. Freud, civilization is discontent. In order to have freedom and independence, we have to have a rule of law. We have to obey laws, we have to obey those who make the laws. We may vote them in out every five years, but we have to obey and in return, et cetera, you get, you can see the picture. We choose an economic system, a political system, a social system. What’s right, what’s wrong? Who decides? Do the the churches decide? Does religion, do the politicians? Is it decided by the social, by the vote? Who decides what’s moral and what isn’t moral? Who gives certain judges the right to decide abortion or not abortion, who, et cetera. We go on and on and on. So, we give rights and we believe in them and powers, but there’s a price, in society and in our own individual lives. And what Goethe is trying to push in the story of Faust is for us just to know this, not that we can change it, but knowing it because we can’t change it. It’s part of human nature. It’s part of the human condition and society condition.

But knowing it, we can perhaps influence it in certain ways, and certain times bigger price, and certain times less of a price. And that’s the Faustian bargain, which for Goethe is at the absolute essence of human nature and the human condition. Very different to the Aristotelian idea or the ancient Greek of fate and destiny. But he then links it in the book of Faust, where he talks about how much is Faust choosing, he gets his 27 years of power and pleasure and world knowledge, but how much is he choosing and that Mephisto, the devil, is giving him? Or how much is fate, how much is destiny? How much is choice or the interplay between the two as eternal as the ancient Greeks and human nature itself? It’s, you know, what is that interplay? There’s a beautiful poem which Buchner, the brilliant German dramatist and playwright around his time, but died very young. He wrote this poem where the water, where the water, the waves in the sea are like human nature, but the wind is fate. The wind is fate and destiny. And that’s going to move the waves whichever way it wants, but the waves are going to still try. So, it’s a constant tussle between the two using Buchner and Goethe’s image. And he in the end is trying to push more for a little bit of choice inside whatever may be fate or destiny.

So, it’s deeper questions. Not any questions about German nationalism. It’s not even about enlightenment, not even about this period. It’s questions of human nature that he’s really trying to, I think explore which transcend his period. And we all know, of course, today how we can relate to this idea. So, in the end, this is not just, the story of Faust is not just a tale of, a cautionary tale. It’s a metaphor for the discrepancy between desire and price to be paid and desire in the broadest sense, a true sense of the word desire. Obviously not any sexual desire, although that’s part of it. So, he goes on and he writes so much, he writes three of the most influential novels in European literature, memoirs of childhood, novels, essays on science, as I said, so many things, “Theory of Colours”, “Theory of Plants”, he’s working full-time. He’s also even going to meetings for the duke of Saxe-Weimar, on how to build minds in Weimar in the area insights. He’s hostile to the French Revolution and he’s pro the French Revolution. He’s hostile to the Napoleonic militarism and he’s hostile to it. He is also, whilst he’s against the French Revolution, what he leads to in terms of the, all the guillotine and the reign of terror. But he’s also utterly hostile to the spirit of German nationalism that he argued sprang up in reaction to the French nationalism coming out of the French Revolution. And it’s a fascinating idea that a German nationalism rises as a reaction to the Napoleonic French nationalistic period. And he’s against that German nationalism as much as French militarism and French Napoleonic Military nationalism. So, he, again, a man of so many contradictions, but aware of all the nuances of his own times. In the end, he was a servant to the prince, to the duke.

In the end, he remains linked to that line of authority, that line of political structure, if you like, in an age of revolution, in an age of extreme militarism, the Napoleonic period, and the, perhaps there are the emerging times of serious German nationalism, not just, you know, Prussian or local areas. It’s his poems and his writings. It’s difficult, you know, to really look at them in the English because they don’t come off well in the translation for what I said earlier, because of he was trying to, as I said, combine German folklore with ordinary language of uneducated people, of working class, a peasant class together with educated people and that totally different approach to language, to languages of all the, of Europe that he knew English, French, and so many others. So, he is trying to write in this deceptively, all I can say, is a kind of deceptively simple way. So, they make appear a little bit naive and simplistic and even bland. But when we understand the intention behind it, we understand the enormous popularity of Goethe’s writing. He’s almost beginning the modern novels, what he called the Bildungsroman, with his first novel, “The Sorrows of Young Werther”, which became the first German international bestseller, smash it. And it creates a craze for young people to commit suicide, you know, for romantic love and emulate the hero, young Werther, “The Sorrows of Young Werther”. And I’m going to go into the stories basically, you know, the suicide for romantic love, the height of romanticism, if you like, and the hero, Napoleon, not only does Napoleon read it so many times, but so many others read it. And there’s even a woman who near, in a river near Weimar, and she drowns herself in the river.

And she’s clutching a book, she’s clutching a copy of Goethe’s novel and has drowned herself because of rejection in love, inspired, or holding his novel, at least. So, the influence goes in these extraordinarily big ways. What’s fascinating is the Victorian, the English Victorian intellectuals loved Goethe, they revered Goethe. Thomas Carlyle wrote “Close thy Byron, close thy other poets and open thy Goethe, open thy eyes to read Goethe.” This is Thomas Carlyle. Matthew Arnold, one of the very important Victorian intellectuals, poets, saw Goethe as a kind of healer and a liberator. He wrote about Goethe as being the physician of the Iron Age, who could read each wound, each weakness in human nature and understand it and write about it. It’s Matthew Arnold. So, for these writers, Goethe seemed to possess a wisdom about human nature, the ability to understand the essence of human nature, and then to suggest how life should be lived, how to live the good life, which is a very ancient Greek and ancient Roman approach to writing. How do you live, Aristotle’s question to Alexander the Great, “How do you live the good life? What is it? What does it mean?” And it’s, he’s inspired and his writings are like a teaching, but they’re not didactic in the way because he’s so good with language. It is aphorisms and they are playing with words, and I’m going to show some in a few minutes, some examples, but it is precisely this ability to possess, that Goethe seems to possess this wisdom about society and human nature. His ability to understand how to be lived.

It’s exactly this quality that leads him to fall from favour in the post-Victorian age, in our 20th, 21st century age for the modernists, and I’m going to use this phrase thoughtfully, being spiritually anxious, spiritually at an unease, spiritually nauseous to use Sartre’s or spiritually the outsider of Kamut was a condition of almost intellectual respectability, before and post-Second World War. T.S. Elliot wrote, and he sums it up, “There is something so artificial about Goethe’s healthiness” And it’s this question of healthiness, how to live the healthy, good life and so on that is radically challenged by not only Elliot, but by so many in the 20th century, obviously post-the Second World War and post-the First World War, and it’s disliked by Elliot and the others. Who’s interested, how can you live a perfectly healthy human? It’s ridiculous. But others have written about Goethe in our own times or the 20th century as not looking at the perfectly healthy, but to read Goethe and understand that human nature is like a recovering invalid. And that’s a very different perception and fascinating way of seeing Goethe’s work. So, is he foreign to us today? Is he too much of an idealist? Is he too much of a romantic? I think a mixture of all these things. Thomas Mann wrote that Goethe captured a generation, his writings ran like a fever, like a frenzy over the Earth, and not only the German soil. Was he glamorising romance? Was he glamorising these ideals, these dreams, these hopes, ways of living, et cetera and not not being despairing? Perhaps. Is it naive, is it not naive? Who knows?

But in the end, I guess what really matters for me is that I, he poses these questions to us, some things to not forget, some things to perhaps still aspire to. When he went to Italy and he spent two years studying, and travelling through Italy, and studying Italian art, and the Renaissance art, that’s when he wrote the poem, “The land where the lemon-blossoms grow and through dark leaves, the golden oranges glow.” So, deceptively simple, bit of rhyme, and yet they have become so powerful and passed down, studied by kids everywhere, so many places of Europe and studied not only in Germany, but everywhere. These kind of writings, these poems, he was 37 when he went and spent two years in Italy, which he called a revelation, a rebirth, because he began to really understand the Renaissance, really understand Renaissance, the painting, the music, the culture, the literature, the politics, everything. And the concept of bildung, as I’m sure many know, which is about building character through learning and education and thinking and understanding human nature as much as we can, not only to be a goodie two shoes, but how to cultivate the self, how to cultivate maturity and the self, that’s central to Goethe and the very German notion of bildung, and that’s as ancient as Aristotle. Old age didn’t put an end to his career as a lover. 1821, he was 72, fell in love with a 17 year old girl, and the stories go on. So, on the one hand, there is Goethe, who is in a way, is connected to the ideas of the Romanticism and the Enlightenment through nature.

Shiller is more the ideas of freedom. Goethe is more complex and more contradictory with everything political almost when you read it, he’s very influenced by the Sturm und Drang period, you know, the sort of storm and angst, as given by that example of Werther, you know, romantic love and die for romantic love, et cetera. 18 in, sorry, in 1932, Einstein wrote a letter “I admire Goethe. He is a poet without peer. He’s one of the smartest and wisest men of all time.” This is Einstein in 1932. It’s an extraordinary sense of Einstein’s connection to a part of the German psyche. It’s not the other part which comes, you know, perhaps with, obviously with the Holocaust in many other things and the conditions, political, social, economic conditions and the war, and the First and the Second World War and so on. Einstein, and so many, we can maybe begin to understand how so many were caught up in this trajectory of German history and German culture. And so if we try to imagine back to the incredible shock and stunned change when it all changes, obviously, in the twenties and thirties, in Germany. Goethe on world literature, “National literature does not have much meaning nowadays, the epoch of world literature is at hand and each one of us writers must hasten it’s coming.” He’s appealing to a world literature, a world understanding, and a world compassion, a world of a bit more caring, perhaps. Romantic, idealistic, yes, but he’s appealing. He’s not, although what he’s doing with the German language is one thing in German literature. It’s another thing of what he sees the bigger picture, and Napoleon saw him as one of the great men, you know, of his times.

This is here picture, this is from Napoleon and a quote from Napoleon. “Religious wars are basically people killing each other over who has the better imaginary friend.” And Napoleon says to Goethe when they meet, “You are a man, and I’ve wanted to meet you. I have read your book seven times.” I mean, we have to, can you imagine a leader today saying to any writer, “I’ve read your book seven times”, or vice versa, who knows? So, if we just imagine this kind of thing, and this is a kind of aphorism that Napoleon comes up with, you know, whether we agree with it or not, it’s part of the enlightenment thinking of its time. Enlightenment, a brief blip in human history or not. Okay, I want to go on and and give here some ideas from his writing. And these come from Faust. “Nothing is worth more than this day.” “Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.” “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” “Magic is believing in yourselves. If you can do that, you can make anything happen.” “The coward only threatens when he is safe.” “Being brilliant is no great feat if you respect nothing.” “Few people have the imagination for reality, only by joy and sorrow does a person know anything about themselves and their destiny. They learn what to do and what to avoid.” Only by joy and sorrow, by contradictions, paradoxes, everything is a Faustian bargain. What may bring joy one day, may bring sorrow as well. “Many people will take no care of their money or their time until they come nearly to the end of it.”

These are simple little phrases all in, most of them from Faust. But it’s, you can see it’s written through the character and the fiction, but, and it’s aphorism and it’s a bit of a Chinese cookie, perhaps, lecture, but it’s also how to live a good life. How to live, what to value, and whatnot. “We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.” “Plunge boldly into the thick of life and seize it where you will. It is always interesting.” It doesn’t say it’s always remarkable, amazing, whatever, but plunge and you won’t be bored, you won’t be disinterested. “The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man, hardly anything.” There’s a wit, there’s a turn of phrase. There’s a playfulness with words. And he talks about getting it from Shakespeare and obviously he mentions “Hamlet” quite often, you know, Hamlet and the grave diggers and how they play with words and philosophy and cleverness. “As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.” Maybe a banal cliche, you know, of Chinese cookie time, but you will know how to live. It’s a way of putting it. It’s not just, you know, trust yourself, goodbye. “He who possesses art and science has religion. He who does not possess them needs religion.” That’s classic phrase for the enlightenment. What’s the last line of the whole book of Faust? Thousands of lines. “Everything past is but a metaphor.” It’s an amazing line to end the whole book of Faust with. Why?

Everything in is becomes memory, yesterday becomes memory, an hour ago becomes memory. It becomes a metaphor for our lives through which we need to interpret, understand. So, to know how we’re going to live the next hour, if we can choose it, how are we going to, so it’s including the present and the next hour or the future. Enjoy when you can, endure when you must. It’s a beautiful way of putting it in such a deceptively simple language, yet again, endure when you must, but enjoy when you can, grab it. But always there’s the Faustian double, the Faustian paradox. You may enjoy it, but at some point in the next hour or the next week or month, it’s going to be endure. The same thing. “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” And I showed this one already. And then going on here a little bit more with Faust and Mephisto, which is from 1808. And these are some contemporary images. There’ve been so many dramas and films of Faust and Mephisto, you know, to choose any would, would I think do a disservice. I’m trying to focus on his original much more. But these are some very, very powerful contemporary, very contemporary film and theatre images here, of trying to find a way. How on Earth do you represent Mephisto on stage today, that’s not ridiculous or laughable or faintly grotesque? You know, it’s tough. Or even in film, you know, that is convincing. God is God, God speaks, “Is nothing ever right on earth?”

Mephisto, “I pity men in all their misery and actually hate to plague the wretches.” He’s playing like the Greek gods are playing with humans. Yeah, God is speaking nothing ever right on Earth. I mean, for heaven’s sake, what are these humans doing? And Mephisto, they’re having a dialogue, God, because at the beginning of the book of Faust, God and the devil have a bet, they have a wager who’s going to turn Faust, turn Faust towards evil, or turn Faust towards good, or persuade him or seduce him, you know, and God and the devil take a bet, they go to their brokers and take a bet. A pity man, and we see the wit, and the intelligence with the wit inside it. Men make mistakes as long as they strive. Okay, God, finally at the end, by the way, forgives Faust because at least he strive to live not necessarily a moral, he doesn’t, he’s not a moralizer, Goethe. It’s not about moral life, it’s about living, you know, trusting yourself, your instinct in what you want and following, enjoying, and enduring as you go through. Men make mistakes, but they strive. As long as they don’t sit idle, which was one of the worst crimes for Goethe, it’s okay. “I’ve studied philosophy, the law as well as medicine, and to my sorrow, theology, I studied them all with ardent zeal. Yet here I am a wretched fool, no wiser than I was before.” That’s Faust speaking. I’ve studied it all and know it all, and too my sorrow, theology. I’ve studied them with an ardent zeal, but I’m a wretch, I’m still an idiot.

Okay, so, come on, Mephisto, gimme a deal. Whatever is the lot of humankind, I want to taste it within my deepest self. So, it’s way beyond German, any idea of German psyche, German nationalism, you know, you couldn’t, I don’t think he has time for it at all. “Whatever’s the lot of humankind I want to taste within my deepest self and thus expand my single self titanically and in the end go down with all the rest.” Say I want to expand, I want to taste, I want to live life. And in the end, of course, I’ll go down with all the rest, like Hamlet in the grave scene. Of course, everything has the Faustian bargain. I’m born, I can live, immediately comes, I’m going to die or be killed. “Once I blazed across the sky, leaving trails of flame; I fell to earth and here I lie, who will help me up again?” There’s almost like a childish, playful, but there’s a wit, but it becomes so memorable, I find in the imagination. Just to go on here, “How do you please the public. Nowadays-” This is Faust. “How do you please the public? Nowadays I find I’m in a fix; they know all the tricks. How to give them something fresh and new, that’s serious, but entertaining too.” Look, there’s a wit, there’s a playfulness, a deceptively simple use of language in all of this. “Let me dare to throw those gates open, that other men go creeping by!” You know, Shakespeare, there is a tide in the affairs of men. They’re taking the, so you know, when you got the tide, grab it, go for it with life. Let me dare to throw open those gates that other men go creeping by. Am I going to be a creeper or am I going to throw open the gates?

And whichever way I go, it’s always going to have enjoy and endure. Paradox of the Faustian bargain of life. “A hundred dark eyes seem to stare.” I just wanted to take a couple of these lines out of the poetry so we can see how he’s trying to write poetry into Faust and into his, into the language that everybody can read, everybody can access educated, or very minimally or even, or uneducated. “In in all the treetops you can feel scarcely a breath. The little birds quiet on the leaves. Wait now soon you too will have peace.” So, in the treetops, the little birds, this may be a peace there. Maybe one can quiet because the human mind is not quiet again, it’s the Faustian bargain. It’s the human mind is so full of noise. Aspiring for the quiet of the little bird. “Do you know the land where the lemon trees grow, where the gold oranges glow, a soft wind blows from the pure blue sky. Do you know it?” He’s writing about Italy and arriving in Italy. But this has become one of the most famous poems in German literature and so on in European literature. But again, I’m trying to suggest that it’s deceptively simple and it sticks, you know, and for me can be seen as really great poetry “Plunge boldly into the thick of life, seize it.” Every man seeks rest in a dear friend’s arms where the heart can express its inner pain.“ Again, there’s the Faustian deal looking for rest in a friend’s arms in the meaning of friendship in some of his other writing. What does friendship really mean, "Where his heart can express its inner pain”, his way of putting the language that the times were so radical.

This is a pre Freud, pre psychologized language, inner pain. I’m going to come back to you a little bit on Goethe and Freud, which is fascinating. But “The individual is foam on the wave of history.” This is from Buchner. Well, is the individual foam and the wave on, on the wave of history, we have to decide or is the individual the wave and Buchner and Goethe are playing with waves and foam and water who really came up with it first, or if they’ve got it from somewhere else, I’m not really sure of, but they both have it. “Wind is the water’s sweet lover, Spirit of Man, how like water you are, man’s fate, oh how like the wind.” So, our fate, our destiny is like the wind, but we strive to be like the wave, like the water. We strive to outrun out, flank, outwit, whatever fate may decree. But the invisible wind, it’s always that Faustian deal. Yet again, everything is. “You saw every feature.” This is one of the, is from one of his little love poems, which is quite nice and goes on there. And to go back to Goethe and Freud in 1930, oh, just by the way, you know, having a look at even Salman Rushdie, Salman Rushdie writes in “The Satanic Verses”, A book is a product of a pact with a devil that inverts the Faustian contract. Faust sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power, knowledge, and pleasure. So, even in Salman Rushdie “Satanic Verses”, you can find references to Goethe and to Faust. It’s just, it pervades literature everywhere.

Coming back to Freud, 1930, the day after Freud was awarded the Goethe prize, which is the highest prize in German culture, German society, the Volkischer Beobachter. You know, obviously we all know the terrible Nazi newspaper, 1930 it wrote, “The Goethe prized was presented to Professor Freud, the creator of psycho-analysis. This is the greatest scientific and literary prize in Germany. It is well known that renowned scholars have rejected the psycho-analysis of the Jew Freud as unscientific nonsense. Goethe would turn in his grave if he knew a Jew had received a prize in his name.” A complete twisting and distorting of the name and the life and history of Goethe. It’s everything obviously the Nazis found to turn it and twist it. On the one hand, I, you know, I don’t want to draw a simple polemic at all, but I just want to see trends. We can see one trend, which is so antisemitic. One trend, which is so aspiring to a nonsense myth of Aryan nationalism and madness of it all. And on the other hand, aspiring to a world literature, aspiring to understand nuance, paradox, complexity. A global sense of what it is to be human, how to live and so on. A questioning, curious, thinking mind, on the other hand, an ideologically fascist, totally destructive mind.

But what’s interesting is that Freud goes on and he talks about in “The Interpretation of Dreams”, Freud’s, he talks about he had a dream where Goethe was mentioned. I mean, he talks about this in “Interpretation of Dreams”, Goethe comes into his dream. And in it we see Freud’s desire to be accepted or assimilated into the German world. We all know the debate. Assimilate, be accepted, the, you know, to belong to the whatever aspect of European society or culture, nation, whatever. Is it Freud’s, is it his desire to be accepted into a German world, his passion to be recognised a great man, not only as an assimilated Jewish man, all these complexities come in. Where does he belong? Very contemporary question of identity for all of us today. Goethe and Freud in “The Interpretation of Dreams”, when he left Vienna, look rather when he was, when he was forced out in 1938, Freud wrote, “I have been told so often that I am not a German. Indeed I am glad I no longer need to be a German.” And then Freud goes on about Moses, the Jew who is not rarely a Jew, who belongs and yet does not really belong. And he compares Moses to the greatness of Goethe. I mean, it’s extraordinary, the links that so many people make a century after this guy’s died. And then Freud has this fantastic question, could a Jew really have been an Egyptian pharaoh? And so we go on with a Faustian bargain. However we are born. And what I’m trying to get at is that Freud is influenced by this idea of human nature and the Faustian bargain at heart.

Enjoy and endure everything that we get there’s a price, everything has its double, everything has its flip side. The two go together. Freud, Einstein, all of them coming out of, and Goethe is the one to put it in such a succinct, remarkable way with poetry and language. This idea of at heart is the Faustian bargain, at heart of human nature is the Faustian bargain. That there is a split in us. There is a dilemma to put it perhaps more tactfully or gently. It’s not, is everything transactional? Is everything emotional? Is it a mixture of the two, in relationships, desire and the price to pay, desire and rationality. The profound difference between what I want and what I need. Courage, adversity, take the job for the money, take the job for the pleasure, take the job for a bit of both. And so it goes on. Everything is a deal. To put it into contemporary godfather terms. Everything is a deal, everything has a payback, everything has a risk, everything may have a benefit, fate and choice. You know, it perhaps even goes way back to the Book of Job, which he, which Goethe certainly knew inside out and backwards and he read the books, the books of Moses. I mean, all of it, so, so well. So I’m going to hold it there and thank you very much to everybody and it’s just a bit of a taste of what I think this guy brings for us today. Okay, should we go into questions?

Q&A and Comments:

Q: Romaine, was the Faustian bargain to get addressed in the Torah at the beginning of Adam and Eve?

A: Thank you, that’s a great question. Yeah, you can we can interpret it at all as a Faustian bargain, you know, have the apple what you can get, but you’re going to be kicked out of, you know, of an idyllic paradise you have, yeah, it’s an interpretation, you’re spot on, I think Romaine, it’s a lovely connection, man. Thank you, hadn’t thought of that, fantastic.

Q: Herbert, thank you comment about Goethe being illuminated by Shakespeare. Curious about whether Moliere or Dante.

A: That’s a great question, Herbert, I think hugely influenced by Dante and I think he’s the closest, maybe even Dante as you’re suggesting is better than Leonardo da Vinci. But maybe a bit of combination 'cause it’s a similar kind of long poem of a journey and a quest, but written in the form of a long poem, a kind of dramatic, long poem like “Dante’s Inferno.” I think it’s a fantastic connection.

Moliere I don’t know, I haven’t found any connections with, pardon me, with Moliere.

Zoom user, can you make a quick comparison between Goethe, Faust and Marlowe?

Phil from Montreal, hi. I’m going to have to, I’m going to have to sit on the fence and say hold it please. Because that’s a whole, it’s a whole different story with Marlowe. I don’t want to just put Marlowe in a sentence or two because I see Goethe is writing Faust in such a different time and with such a different aim compared to Marlowe’s. You know, Marlowe’s, I do think he was probably a spy, and he’s writing with all with revenge, tragedy and pot boilers and the passion of revenge and who’s going to get snakes and ladders,, up the power down the power, you know, who’s betraying who. And you know, these were the fantastic smash hit pot boilers of the times, which Marlowe was brilliantly aware of.

Q: Paula, what did Goethe think of John Locke?

A: Great question. And I have to check that I have to get back to Paula.

Q: David, what was Hitler’s view of Goethe?

A: 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.

Martin’s, I wanted to go as Faust while Goethe’s Faust was so popular to make music about wonderful performance by the London Philharmonic. Ah, at the Royal Festival Hall last Saturday. Oh, okay of year of the damnation of Faust, Mephistopheles. That’s wonderful, thank you Martin. It’s great. I think because it lends itself to opera. I think it, it’s so operatic in, it can be seen in our times anyway. It’s hard to put on theatre as a play, but it can be seen these operatic, you know, ideas almost like “Don Giovanni” and you know, we can imagine it, theatre times a thousand in a magnificent operatic way almost, you know, God, and the devil and Mephisto and waging and betting and having an argument and then there’s Faust and then all the humans and you know.

Q: Ivan, was it not Goethe who said you must love your life in order to live it and you must live your life in order to love it.

A: I have to check that, thanks Ivan.

Leslie, you may find it interesting to read “Magnificent” Rebels by Andrea Wolf. Fabulous book in which Goethe features prominently by the genuset who were the first to define romanticism. Goethe, Schiller, no, Humboldt, yes. Fantastic, thank you. I haven’t read that, I’d love to.

Andrea Wolf, “Magnificent Rebels.”, that’s great. Thanks so much, Leslie.

Lorna, I added some quotes, but only in English. The German original would’ve been interesting. My German is really pitiful. I do know a little bit of German and I read some of it, but I would be very hesitant to put the German original here and I would’ve, to put it actually not so much the German, but my accent would sound like, you know, every Monty Python sketch we’ve seen, okay. Or bad Hollywood movie.

Hannah is ah, but we were disappointed with the tenor, but rapturous music, this is amazing. So, can the two of you converse about the production you saw in London? This is what’s remarkable about lockdown.

Herbert visited Goethe’s house in Frankfurt, where he was born, the museum was destroyed during the war. Reconstructed, yeah, great, 15 to 20 large rooms, yeah, pretty big place, very prosperous family that he came from.

Q: Salt, please can you repeat Napoleon’s quotation about religion?

A: It’s a fight. I’m paraphrasing here, but it’s who has the fight over the better, who has a better imaginary friend? I think that’s the quote from Napoleon.

Maria, Beethoven looked ahead, society without kings, princes, nobleman. Yep, but he was very dependent on the nobility for as patrons. Absolutely, it’s the old Medici story, you know, the patron is the Medici’s, and then, you know, going back to the Ciceros of ancient Rome going all the way through the Renaissance period, Italy, Europe, England and elsewhere. Shakespeare, of course the financial support of the kings and the patrons. So, you have to be very careful of the game to play because who’s financing them. And in fact, there’s a letter by Goethe where he rails against Beethoven and the others for, yes, exactly what you’re saying, Maria, a society without kings and princes, but who pays for their bread, who pays for their wine, who pay, and so on. And Goethe writes a fantastic letter, which goes against it, you know, points out their contradiction.

Marion, I don’t understand how the third Reich adopted him. I don’t think he was seen as a Germanic hero by the third Reich, but I don’t think they could afford at all to demonise him like the composers, you know, whether they like them or not. I mean, the, that era of composers, the Beethoven’s and all the others, I don’t think they could risk it or if they even cared that much. Rita, thank you.

John and Barbara, many of his lines became German folklore, absolutely. And it’s so embedded in German culture and German folklore, you know, kids we’re studying it for so, so many and just know it.

“Faust” by Goethe, Rita, thank you. Okay, Avron, thanks.

Uta, the beginning is based on the Book of Job. Yes, absolutely. The big, the leading part of it is is God’s bet, God’s wager with Mephisto is heavily influenced by the Book of Job.

Nina, I was thinking of Geoethe’s American contemporary, Benjamin Franklin. That’s a fantastic connection. Thank you, never thought, yeah.

As enlightened, inventive, brilliant individual. Ah, that would make a great play by Tom Stoppard Benjamin Franklin and Goethe. Fascinating Judith, thank you. It’s also interesting that Mozart’s greatest operas based on Goethe’s Faust.

Yep, Patrick mentioned it. Yeah, I mean from Mozart to Beethoven to Mendelssohn to influencing Einstein’s thinking, to Nikolai Tesla to, I mean Salman Rushdie today. I mean, just so many everywhere that Faustian legend, and the reason I go back to Goethe is because he gets the essence of what he wants to write about and puts it in the most deceptively simple way with wit and charm and a dissent of dramatic power as well. And I think that, you know, so many have been inspired by this vision of human nature.

William, the seven seal, yep, exactly. Colette was Herzl influenced by Goethe when he quoted about Israel. If you dream it, it can be achieved. That’s a fascinating idea 'cause that is a Goethe kind of phrase. Very interesting.

Q: And is Israel a Faustian bargin?

A: Whoa, I’m not, that is a fascinating question that you’re asking. Is any country, is any religion? Is any culture, is any society a Faustian bargain? What I think Goethe would say is that any culture, simply human nature, is by definition, nature is Faustian bargain. It doesn’t mean it has to be horrifically cruel and evil versus all goody two shoes but you know that it’s always going to have its flip side. It’s always going to have, its shadow, its contradiction.

Martin, the tenor. Ah, okay, keep the debate going. Okay, about the production you saw. That’s great.

Q: Dagmar, any comparison between incarnations of the devil in Goethe’s “Faust I” and Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita”?

A: I don’t know that well enough. I’ll have to get back to you on that. I’m hesitant to say because I don’t know it that well.

Okay thank you, Maxine. “We cannot find a Napoleon quotation, nor does it even seem remotely credible”, said Peter Hicks of the Napoleon Foundation in an email. Napoleon does not even seem to made a remark concerning the French Wars of Religion, 1562. Okay, well I found this, I find this in Goethe’s writings and other historical writings.

Q: Okay, Abigail the Talmud asks whether it’s better to have been corn or not. Corn or do you mean born or corn?

A: Not sure.

Okay, Abigail, they claim, no, but now that we are here, we have to make the best of it. Okay, born, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Back to enjoy and endure within the flip of a switch and be prepared for both. Okay, so, thank you so much everybody. Hope you have a great rest of the weekend and thanks again Emily.