abstract
Goethe tells us in Truth and Poetry that everything he wrote would be “fragments of a great confession.” Based on new discoveries in edition philology, this essay seeks to demonstrate that Goethe’s self-evaluation is applicable above all to his work on the Faust drama, which took his entire life to complete. From the first publication of the text in 1790 to its conclusion in 1831, this essay highlights ruptures in Goethe’s biography and in Goethe’s time. Given the background of Europe’s crises between 1789 and 1830, a disquieting and modern constellation is evident in Goethe’s complete works, namely, the irreconcilable conflict between Faust and the Traveler. In a scene full of significance, written at the end of the reworking and rewriting of the Faust manuscript, a process that extended over sixty years, Goethe inserts into the dramatic action the powerful maelstrom of the modern historic movement that begins with the Industrial Revolution. The consequent catastrophe of the Traveler will be understood as a tragic image with which Goethe bestows a symbolic expression to the realistic vision on anachronism itself.
keywords:
Faust (Goethe); The traveler; Philemon and Baucis; Metamorphoses (Ovid); “Fragments of a Great Confession”
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