Lesarten von Goethes Faust (review)

Few Goethe and Faust scholars can match Ulrich Gaier's encyclopaedic knowledge of Germany's classic, nor his energy in making it broadly known through scholarly treatments of the Faust text and materials relevant thereto. To date he has published them for the most part with Reclam, Stuttgart in their familiar yellow or green Universal-Bibliothek and Erläuterungen series reserved for the texts of and critical notes to canonical German and other world literature. Given Gaier's own writings on this subject and the steady stream of others contributed by many scholars internationally, the central question for us now is: "What does this new Faust book add to Gaier's studies to date and the field in general?"

The hefty hardcover tome under review is graced on the front by Ludwig Nauwerk's graphic entitled "Erscheinung des Erdgeistes" (1816), depicting an overwhelmed Faust before the Earth Spirit, a scene more beautifully Hellenic than fear-inspiring, and an enticing entry into the volume. The table of contents (5-8) and a brief preface (9-14) are followed by three main parts. The first section offers a short "Geschichte des Faust-Stoffs" (15-40); the second one, on the "Entstehung und Konzeption des Faust," is about four times longer with five sub-sections dealing with the genesis of Goethe's treatments of the tragedy (41-129); the third, a full seven times longer than that, provides a detailed discussion of eight different interpretive approaches to the work (Lesarten), including the religious, naturphilosophisch, magical, historical, sociological, economic, anthropological, and poetical (130-802). These Lesarten constitute the core of the volume. There follow a lengthy bibliography of editions of Goethe's works and secondary studies (806-46), and a detailed index of names and thematic connections (847-56). All of this is an extraordinarily dense read, not just because of the book's length and smallish size (12x19 cm), tight margins, and diminutive type, but foremost because of its impressive erudition. Yet those familiar with Gaier's previous publications will soon ask themselves the question, haven't I seen this all before? The answer is, likely, yes.

In his brief preface, Gaier explains that his "dreibändige Kassette Faust-Dichtungen" (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1999), already contained a critical analysis of Goethe's Faust organized into "Lesarten" (9), which are indeed the same by subtitle as those in the current volume. These, he comments further, were also revised, expanded, and re-published in his two-volume "Studienausgabe" (Reclam 2011), the first focussing on Urfaust and Faust I, the second on Faust II. He adds that the new material in the current volume relates largely to the sections on religion, history, and the poetical (12). Gaier is thus forthright about the limited originality of this book, which is much to his credit. We might add though that this is only part of the publication story of this extraordinarily productive Faust scholar, for he critically edited at least a half dozen further Faust volumes between 1989 and 1999, all of which contain some elements of the volume under review, and all were published by Reclam. It would take much more time than any reviewer might be willing to devote to disentangle in detail all of those contributions from the current volume to distill exactly what is new in this one—and to what end, for its main strength is its comprehensiveness.

It is the metapoetical sophistication of Goethe's Faust that has made the tragedy such a worthwhile subject for readers and researchers, Gaier argues in his preface, a song he has sung many times before in previous volumes, and familiar to any Faust scholar: a somewhat rambling justification, beginning with a reference to Ernst Robert Curtius in 1948 and thereafter introducing a string of allusions suggested by the Faust text itself with its myriad sources and intertextual connections, all of which substantiate its metapoetical complexity. The anchoring of this preface in Curtius's Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (1948) and lack of further reference therein to any...