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  • Transformationen: Über Himmlisches und Teuflisches in Goethes Faust by Johannes Anderegg
  • Elisabeth Krimmer
Johannes Anderegg, Transformationen: Über Himmlisches und Teuflisches in Goethes Faust. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2011. 290 pp.

Johannes Anderegg’s informative and well-written study Transformationen: Über Himmlisches und Teuflisches in Goethe’s Faust investigates the representation of religion and evil in Goethe’s most famous drama while also paying great attention to matters of form. Anderegg emphasizes Faust’s anticlassical, anti-Aristotelian structure, which Goethe famously likened to a “Schwammfamilie.” The text mixes genres and is uninterested in psychological verisimilitude; different forms of reality coexist, and past, present, and future are intricately interwoven.

As Anderegg points out, Faust is a text that foregrounds its own theatricality. Transformationen identifies several features that are commonly associated with postmodern art, including citationality and intertextuality. Faust enters a dialogue with numerous other texts ranging from Ovid, Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare to the Bible and various traditions of religious writing. In addition, Anderegg traces numerous links to the visual arts, including works by Hieronymus [End Page 268] Bosch and Albrecht Dürer, and demonstrates in great detail that several important scenes in Faust II are inspired by famous paintings.

A good part of the book deals with the figure of Mephisto. Anderegg sees in Goethe’s devil a complex character composed of a multitude of different, often contradictory masks and roles, including comic and demonic aspects, harsh reality and make-belief, myth and modernity. Mephisto is the embodiment of sexual drive, but also a master of enlightened critique. Anderegg contrasts Mephisto’s role with that of Satan in the Book of Job, which Herder singled out as the epitome of poetry. In Job, Satan destroys the protagonist. In Goethe’s drama, he promotes his earthly well-being. Anderegg suggests that, although Mephisto fails on an individual level, that is, in his role as corruptor of souls, he triumphs on a grander scale as the spirit of modernity. Anderegg sees in this the reason why Goethe’s drama is a tragedy even though Faust is saved: the tragic nature of the text relates not to the fate of the protagonist but to the state of a world where might is right. After all, Faust owes his success, power, and wealth to the devil. Seen in this light, Faust is “eine Erfolgsgeschichte des Bösen” (133). Individuals thrive for the wrong reasons; however, history itself is not on a trajectory toward progress but rather unfolds as an arena of power and greed.

It is well known that, although Goethe knew the Bible intimately—he owned copies of the Luther Bible, the Vulgata, and the Hebraica—his notion of Christianity was rather unorthodox. Thus, it is hardly surprising that, even though Faust contains numerous references to religious traditions and motifs, the concepts it presents can hardly be confined within Christian categories. Instead, Anderegg proposes that we should look to the fine arts to make sense of the ending of Faust II. He reminds us that Goethe took a great interest in Heinrich Meyer’s Geschichte der Kunst and suggests that Faust integrates various citations from religious artworks discussed in Meyer’s opus magnum in the form of scenic montages. For example, Faust’s death is inspired by the motif of the Grablegung Christi, portrayed by numerous artists ranging from Raphael and Titian to Dürer and Caravaggio. Similarly, the scene in which angels and devils fight over the soul of the departed borrows from several representations of the same motif in the visual arts. Here, Anderegg is particularly interested in how the text replicates the simultaneous representation of successive events that characterizes these paintings. Like these paintings, Goethe’s work is polyfocal and operates on various levels of reality (Anderegg uses the term “Multirealität”).

Anderegg reads the final scenes of Faust II as an enactment of different beliefs about the afterlife inspired by visual representations such as Lasinio’s Il Giudizio universale e l’Inferno. In his interpretation of Faust’s ending, Anderegg again returns to the Book of Job. He points to a textual and visual tradition that does not focus exclusively on Job’s suffering but rather depicts Job as he...

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