Goethe Yearbook

Rarely does a collected volume live up to the promise of its title as emphatically as Lorna Fitzsimmons's Goethe's Faust and Cultural Memory. The "comparatist interfaces" invoked by the subtitle is a phrase that so often glides meaninglessly by, but not here. Fitzsimmons's theoretically rich introduction argues for Faust as an agent of "magian mnemotechny": "To conceive of Goethe's Faust as a form of cultural mnemotechny points to the drama's function as a means, both external and internal, by which memories are reconstructed and negotiated and new information processed" (2). With admirable succinctness, Fitzsimmons thereby situates Faust within a horizon of interpretation that reaches back to ancient mnemotechny (the art and practice of strengthening the memory) and to the ambivalent history of the mage, the bearer of supernatural abilities, finding traces of this tradition in Goethe's text, its afterlife, and its reception history.

The aim of the book is not to produce readings of Faust but rather to take as a point of departure the observation that Goethe's Faust continues to serve as a polysemic metonym from its location at the center of the German literary canon, as a kind of cultural memory tool in its own right. As Fitzsimmons points out, "[i]n recent years, the canonic status of Goethe's Faust has been reinforced, and elements of the Faustian archive activated, within the academic market for Faust studies, which has grown, at least in part, in response to budgetary considerations" (6). (This last point refers to the use of Faustian material to attract students.)

The nine essays can be divided into three sections. The first three look at the possibility of cultural memory within Faust; the middle three treat cultural memory about Faust; the final three concern the reimagination of Faust for the present and future.

To begin with the first third of the volume: in "The Faustian Contest with the Authority of the Word," Alan Corkhill examines how Faust stages the possibility of cultural memory in light of the rise of print culture, observing at one point that "Faust II, in particular, is all about the poetics of cultural memory through its charting of the iconography of mythical prehistory" as it is transformed into written history (18). J. M. van der Laan looks at the cultural forebears of Goethe's eternal-feminine. Robert E. Norton's "Herder as Faust" is the first piece that looks ahead to Faust reception, dealing with the history and implications of seeing in Herder a model for Faust. In particular, Norton examines "the early-twentieth-century context in which such a claim as 'Herder is Faust' could make sense" (52).

The middle third of the volume deals most explicitly with cultural memory. Jörg Esleben's "Faustian Tesserae in the Cultural Mosaic: Contemporary Canadian Interplay with Goethe's Faust" and Andrew Bush's "Remembering Faust in Argentina" both examine reinterpretations of Faust in specific national contexts. Bush's treatment is especially compelling, tracing guacho elements from Estanislao del Campo's Fausto up through Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo. In "Coleridge's Critique of Goethe's Faust," Frederick Burwick details how the English poet grappled with Goethe's text, showing that Coleridge's moral views affected his understanding of a work that he spent years trying to translate. Each of these chapters transplants Faust to a new national context, in each case with unexpected results. David G. John's chapter takes up Peter Stein's massive Faust production in conversation with ongoing anthroposophically inclined performances [End Page 283] at the Goetheanum in Dornach, showing that the engagement with Faust in German-speaking Europe remains both lively and fraught.

The final two essays are the highlights of the volume, for they most fully realize the promises of the title and subtitle, first in a profound engagement with cultural memory and second with a truly comparatist recontextualization of Faust. In "Goethe's Faust in Werner Fritsch's 'Theater of Now,'" Susanne Ledanff...