Framing Faust: Twentieth-Century Cultural Struggles (review)

For more than four centuries the Faust figure has inspired artists, philosophers and cultural critics. Since its inception in the sixteenth century, with the printing of the Historia von D. Johan Fausten (1587), Faust and the Faustian have served as vehicles for Western societies to come to terms with cultural and social changes, negotiate political struggle, and trigger revolutionary spirits on both ends of the political spectrum. The twentieth century is especially rich in "Faustian variations": Faust is the subject of a plethora of films (more than eighty), operas, dramas, essays, novels, art works, cartoons and computer games, he figures prominently in political and philosophical treatises, and has instigated a wealth of scholarly work on the history and significance of the Faustian in Western culture. Following the traces of Faust in the twentieth century can thus offer insights into some of the major cultural struggles of this eventful and violent century. For Inez Hedges, who is a professor of French, German, and cinema studies at Northeastern University, this "proliferation of Faustian motifs . . . means that we have somehow consented to see ourselves in Faustian terms. . . . It is almost as though the 'Faustian bargain' has become part of our commonsense understanding of how success, power, and celebrity function" (8–9).

Framing Faust aims at an English-speaking audience, introducing some of the major twentieth-century German, French (and Soviet) instances of the Faustian myth to scholars who do not read German or French (or Russian) and who might not have ready access to those works. Given the ubiquitousness of the Faustian in European cultural and intellectual history—Hedges describes the Faust myth "as one of the great gifts of Germanic culture to the world" (xiii)—it is indeed remarkable that today a considerable number of those works have virtually disappeared. Some of the films, especially the early ones, are seldom screened, not available on DVD, and are only accessible in film archives. Many of the literary works are either out of print or not available in English translations. The author thus provides detailed summaries hoping the works "will be resuscitated and that they will find new audiences" (xiv).

The historical and geographical scope of Framing Faust is broad: it reaches from early silent French cinema to Stan Brakhage's experimental Faust films; from Europe at the turn of the century to post-war America; from German fascism and Nazi propaganda to East German socialism and Russian Stalinism. Readily available, canonized works such as Klaus Mann's Mephisto and Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus, G. W. Pabst's, F. Murnau's and Istvan Szabo's films (Der Student von Prag, Faust, Mephisto) are related to by now forgotten or often marginalized instances of the Faustian, such as George Melies's early Faust films, German Nazi ideologue Georg Schott's Faust in heutiger Schau, Else Lasker-Schüler's play Ichundich and Hélène Cixous's Revolutions pour plus d'un Faust. The Faust figure, Hedges argues, re-surfaces "in moments of historical crisis and transformation," every reworking of the motif can be seen as an attempt to make sense of these crises: "it can be used to legitimate the hegemonic claim of a particular group to impose its worldview or to express dissent and present an alternative clothed in a familiar, and therefore more acceptable, form" (188).

Hedges creates six different "frames" for the Faust figure: early cinema, German national socialism, socialism, feminism, literary and artistic avant-gardes, and the cold war era in the United States and the USSR. Each frame constitutes one chapter which typically brings together works from different historical, discursive, and geographical contexts. While this approach indeed shows the remarkable versatility of the Faust figure, capable of lending itself to very different, often seemingly contradictory political and aesthetic agendas, it cloaks the more subtle, at times nationalistic effects of each individual instance of the Faustian.

To give just one example: As Hedges notes, the land-reclamation project, one of Faust's main "achievements...