Václav Havel's Faust Drama Temptation (1985): Or, The Challenge of Influence

EHRHARD BAHR Vaclav Havel's Faust Drama Temptation (1985): Or, The Challenge of Influence The story of the chapbook of D. Faustus is a history of adaptations. E.M. Butler listed almost one hundred "Literary Fausts" between 1756 and 1947 in her book on the Fortunes of Faust (1952). ' She has shown that any writer had the same claim and title to the Faust myth as Goethe did around 1772. There are no exclusive rights to the Faust myth.2 Nevertheless, there is a tentatively historical explanation regarding the origins of Vaclav Havel's Faust drama of 1986. It is important to note that among the numerous early seventeenth-century translations was a Czech translation of 1611. The Czechs do claim the Faust legend as part of their national heritage, as shown by the now famous Faust House on Charles Square in Prague, which is shown with great pride to foreign tourists today.3 More important, however, than the Czech national roots of this Faust drama is the fact that it was authored by one of the masters of absurdist theater, a principle organizer of Charter 77, the Czechoslovak human rights organization of 1977, who was involved as a dissident in the "Velvet Revolution" in Central Europe that swept him into office as president of the Czech and Slovak Republic of 1990.4 Just as the protagonist of his Faust drama attempts to avoid political imprisonment, Havel tried to get out of prison in 1977. Vaclav Havel's biography and his moral authority make his treatment of the Faust legend especially fascinating as a statement of the intellectual and ethical problems of our time.5 Although Havel's Temptation was conceived and written during the worst years of his life under the Communist government, when he was jailed three times for a total of almost five years, and is perhaps the most pessimistic and most mimetic of his plays,6 the drama never- Goethe Yearbook 195 theless revolves around his most persistent theme: responsibility and the affirmation of individual identity in a time of dehumanizing pressures exerted by the totalitarian state and/or modern society. Although Havel's works were banned under the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia , he kept writing, having his essays published and his plays produced in Western Europe and the United States. Between 1969 and 1989 none of his plays were performed publicly in Czechoslovakia. Temptation was premiered in a German translation by the Akademietheater in Vienna in May 1986. This production was a failure. The play was misunderstood as a "Faust parody" by the director, as well as the audience and critics (Hahnl 24, Goetz-Stankiewicz 95), whose perspective was obviously determined by the "anxiety of influence" (Bloom).7 To a German-speaking audience it seemed clear that no playwright after Goethe could have succeeded with a dramatization of the Faust myth. This prejudice did not hold for productions in English, which included the British premiere at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1987, the American premiere at the Public Theatre in New York in the spring of 1989, and the West Coast premiere at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in July/August, 1989 (Goetz-Stankiewicz 95-6).8 As a literary text, Havel's Faust drama is influenced by its German precursors rather than by the Czech Faust tradition. Two minor clues indicate that Havel's play is based on Goethe's drama of 1808/1832 and Thomas Mann's novel of 1947. The first clue is the first name of the protagonist, Foustka: it is "Henry" (i.e., "Jindrich" in Czech, or "Heinrich" in the German translation), and not "John" ("Johann"), like the protagonist of the Faust legend before Goethe (it is a commonplace that Goethe purposely selected a different first name for his protagonist). It is interesting to note in this context that the name Foustka is a Czechified diminutive of Faust.9 That Havel has also a Margarete figure, named Marketa, a secretary who suffers almost the same fate as her namesake in Goethe's drama, is not as indicative as the name "Henry," because Havel could have gotten the Margarete plot from other sources than Goethe...