his teens to his seventies, he either fell passionately in love with
women who attracted him physically or worshipped women with whom he
felt a platonic (spiritual) affinity. When he finally married, in
1806, he was fifty-seven.
The young maidservant whose life was ruined became Gretchen in Part
I of Faust. You can understand why he began writing it in the early
1770s, about the same time as his Sturm und Drang works. Faust was a
rebel against authority who strove constantly to know and experience
everything. He had immense courage, which the Sturm and Drang
followers admired, and he was a figure straight out of German
history. Another noted German dramatist, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
(1729-1781), had called for a play on the Faust theme and had even
composed a scene himself. The addition of the Gretchen story brought
to the work an element of folk simplicity.
But Goethe's Faust is no simple updating of the legend. His hero
does not sell his soul to the Devil--he makes a bet with him, and
the Devil, Mephistopheles, loses. Faust does not disobey God's
commands, as he does in the legend. Goethe's God has complete
confidence in Faust's good sense and gives His permission for
Mephistopheles to tempt Faust in order to keep him on his toes.
Goethe wrote a Faust that is definitely not a Christian cautionary
tale. What, then, is it? You'll want to keep the question in mind as
you read the work.
In 1775, Goethe's life was swept in another direction and he didn't
return to Faust for many years. He was invited to live at the court
of the young duke of Weimar, who wanted Goethe as a central
attraction for the intellectual and artistic life of Weimar. Goethe
was to spend most of the rest of his life there, writing, becoming
involved with the theater, pursuing private scientific studies, and,
as a favor to his patron, serving as an administrator for the tiny
duchy. Goethe's friend Herder (who may have been a model for
Mephistopheles) settled in Weimar, along with other writers and
thinkers, who, with Goethe, made Weimar an intellectual center for
the next half-century or so.
In 1786, Goethe did something surprising. He left the Weimar court
abruptly and journeyed to Italy. He spent much of the next two years
in Rome, where he studied the art of the Classical period,
completing more than one thousand drawings of Classical statues and
buildings. During his journey, about which he later wrote, Goethe
immersed himself in the Classical style, but he did not turn away
completely from Romanticism. Some of his works display a tension, an
uneasy balance between the two styles. A drama such as Iphigenie in
Tauris (1787) is unmistakably Classical, in theme as well as in form
and style, but what about Faust? In Faust, Part II, a work of his
later years, Goethe attempts a union of the Classical and Romantic
in the marriage of Faust and Helen of Troy.
