Wanderers Verstummen, Goethes Schweigen, Fausts Tragödie; oder, Die große Transformation der Welt by Michael Jaeger (review)

Michael Jaeger’s magisterial new book closes his trilogy begun in the equally expansive Fausts Kolonie and continued in Global Player Faust. In the first two books, Jaeger argued that Goethe intended Faust as an annihilating critique of political, economic, and scientific modernity, focusing most intently on acts 1, 4, and 5—especially the earthly scenes—of Faust II and marshaling Goethe’s autobiographical writings as support. Here he turns his attention to a complementary argument: during and following his Italian journey, Goethe reconceives the character of Faust, originally a brother of Werther and Prometheus from his Sturm und Drang period, as the negative of his own experience of beauty. Jaeger provides a detailed reading of the composition of Faust I between 1788 and 1806, as well as acts 2, 3, and 5—the final two scenes—of Faust II. As before, he makes ample use of Goethe’s autobiographical writings, Eckermann’s Gespräche, and letters to and from Goethe to bolster his case.

The broad sweep of Jaeger’s argument nonetheless begins with a simple interpretive question: how should we understand the figure of the wanderer who appears in act 5 of Faust II? Philemon and Baucis had taken him in previously after he was shipwrecked; he appears onstage on his way to see them again, and he “verstummt” (Jaeger’s verb, from Baucis’s question “Bleibst du stumm?”) upon seeing the change that Faust’s land reclamation project had wrought and is killed and burned on the pyre along with his erstwhile hosts. Jaeger decodes these scenes through the following equations and identities: wanderer = Goethe; shipwreck = Goethe’s life leading up to his Italian journey; Philemon and Baucis = Italy and the classical tradition it came to represent for Goethe; Faust = the modern subject that rejects the classical tradition; land reclamation project = the second creation of the world enabled by the Industrial Revolution; and pyre = the destruction of the classical tradition in order to make room for the second creation by the modern subject. When phrased this way, Jaeger’s thesis sounds rather reductionist, and it is, but this is also the book’s great merit, given its length: whatever the intricacies of interpreting particular lines and their relations to other texts, the argument always ties back to this schema. Jaeger reads the last parts of Faust as belonging to the “Bruchstücke einer großen Konfession” Goethe announced in Dichtung und Wahrheit, and the sheer mass of evidence he compiles produces the most compelling biographical reading possible.

The fifty-page “Ideengeschichtliche Exposition” that introduces the book sets up the binary of Goethe/Faust that Jaeger uses to structure his argument. Based on his reading of the Italienische Reise and Zweiter Römischer Aufenthalt, Jaeger associates Goethe with the figure of the wanderer who finally finds himself at home in the world and at peace with himself. Goethe’s aesthetic experiences in Italy, of both art and nature, depend on a self-forgetting in the visual contemplation of an object that creates a sense of joy in the object’s sheer being—“wie wahr, wie seiend!” as Goethe notes of some shellfish on the Lido—and a sense of the present’s fullness. Faust is incapable of forgetting himself and becoming absorbed in the beauty of the world, because the preexistence of creation is an affront to his heroic subjectivity, an attitude Jaeger labels “Ontophobie.” Hence, Faust, as a modern subject in the mold of Hegel’s philosophy of history and Saint-Simon’s utopia of work, empties out the present of meaning and places his hopes solely in a future that must be perpetually worked toward. In one of Jaeger’s many rephrasings of this basic opposition: “Der ‘neue Lebenslauf’ Fausts, der nach der Verfluchung der ‘schönen Welt’ anheben soll, ist, wie wir abermals unschwer erkennen, als programmatisch voluntaristischer Widerspruch der römischen Wiedergeburt des Italienwanderers konzipiert...