My Problem With Faust

Faust is originally a German folktale about a guy who makes a deal with the devil. There’s loads of those and Faust used to be only one of them until Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) happened to it. It’s Goethe’s plays which I do have a problem with, not the original folktale, which has Faust strike a deal with the devil about the devil serving him for a specific number of years (time span varies from version to version) and then getting his soul as a payment. Faust is not originally a character who escapes from a deal with the devil (although there are plenty of others in German folklore).

Goethe is one of the most prolific and one of the most revered German authors, playwrights, and poets. Despite holding a day job, too, he wrote a large number of plays, poems, and prose. And among all those, Faust is Goethe’s Opus Magnum. He worked on it, on and off, for sixty years and left three different plays behind in the end: Urfaust, Faust I, and Faust II. The Urfaust was an early version of Goethe’s play, Faust I is a rather regular play, while Faust II is highly complicated to understand and demands a good grasp on several mythologies and, perhaps, a membership of the Freemasons. Faust I is staged regularly in Germany, the same goes for the Urfaust, but Faust II is seldom put on stage. Reception for the ‘easier’ parts of Faust was very good from the beginning and several lines of the text have found their way into regular German, such as ‘des Pudels Kern’ (the core of the poodle, referring to the first meeting between Faust and Mephisto, the devil in the piece). So much about the plays as a such and their reception.

Let me give you a short rundown on those parts of the two plays (Faust I and II) which are important for my problem with the story.

Faust I starts with a wager between God and Mephisto, in which they bet that Mephisto will not be able to dissuade Faust from his thirst for knowledge and make him content with where he is and what he’s doing (to long-time Freemason Goethe, striving for knowledge was more important than piety, obviously).

Mephisto takes the bet and goes to earth to meet with Faust, who is seriously frustrated, because he wants to understand the secrets of the universe - something his human mind simply can’t comprehend. They make a deal that Mephisto will serve Faust and show him whatever he wants and will only get Faust’s soul once Faust is content and satisfied. There’s a very nice, rhyming passage about it, but I’m not citing it here, for I would have to translate it, which would then destroy the rhymes.

First of all, Mephisto takes the old man Faust to a witch who gives him a youth elixir - since a lot of the fun things Mephisto will show Faust are not fun for an old man. Then, to put it in a more modern way, they go partying like no tomorrow. After a lot of carousing, fighting, and other things which Faust probably didn’t even do in his own youth, Faust happens to see a young woman - Gretchen. It’s lust on first sight (surely not love) and Faust insists he has to have her. Since Mephisto is bound to serve him, he does his thing, enlisting the help of Gretchen’s aunt and giving a lot of expensive gifts, too. In the end, Faust gets what he wants: he gets inside of Gretchen’s bedroom and it’s everyone’s guess what he and Gretchen are doing there.

Unfortunately, when leaving said bedroom again, Faust is faced with Gretchen’s brother, a soldier who has come home on leave and isn’t happy to see a stranger come out of his little  sister’s bedroom. As wasn’t even uncommon in Goethe’s time, he demands satisfaction, challenging Faust to a duel - which Faust only wins with Mephisto’s help. The brother dies, Gretchen’s mother comes outside, sees her dead son, and dies of shock and a broken heart. Faust has to escape, of course, leaving Gretchen behind and continuing his fun-having and partying.

Gretchen, erstwhile, hasn’t just lost her whole family (Gretchen’s father isn’t mentioned at all, so presumably dead), she’s also pregnant. Given how little interest she had in Faust at the beginning and her overall behaviour, it’s safe to presume that she’s pregnant with his child. All alone in the world (her aunt clearly isn’t much help), she finally does the only thing she thinks she can do: she gives birth to the child in secret and drowns it right afterwards. She’s caught, though, and sentenced to death as a child murderess.

Faust is only reminded of the woman he used to obsess over when he sees a woman who resembles her at a witches’ gathering and learns about her fate: she’s to be executed the very next day. He orders Mephisto to take him to Gretchen’s cell and the devil does as ordered. There, Faust offers to take her away to safety, but Gretchen, seeing through him and Mephisto, rather entrusts her fate to God and, while executed for her crime, goes to heaven. End of Faust I.

Faust II is mostly made up of Faust travelling wherever his fancy takes him and ending up as some sort of Emperor of Earth with the most beautiful woman of all times, Helen of Troy (Goethe was an author of the German Classicism, after all), by his side. This is where he, finally, is too content and decides he wants for things to stay the way they are - deal done, one soul for hell, right? Wrong. Because, as Mephisto drags Faust’s soul to hell, Gretchen’s soul turns up and takes Faust to heaven. End of Faust II with one cheated devil and one lucky Faust.

It is the end which simply doesn’t make sense to me. Gretchen is, when all’s said and done, collateral to Faust’s new experiences with fun and not having his nose in a book at all times. Her fate is tragic, but resolved at the end of Faust I with God taking mercy on her soul and her entering heaven, her sins forgiven. There is no reason why Gretchen should have had any interest whatsoever in saving Faust. There was no love between them to begin with, not in any emotional sense, and she sees right through him before her end, turning her back on him and any possibility of being saved, trusting God more than Faust - and rightfully so, too.

In all likelihood, Goethe had written himself into a corner with his Faust. The whole ‘you can go on as long as you’re not satisfied’ deal, when coupled with human nature (which is rarely really satisfied), could have made Faust wander earth eternally, looking for new stimulation, - or Mephisto just rage-quit the wager, admitting that God had won. The Deus Ex Machina of Gretchen’s intervention at the end is just slightly less annoying than God taking a hand in it himself would be. Clearly, Goethe wasn’t going to let Faust end up in hell, even though that’s what all folktales about Faust do (and most modern interpretations of the tale as well). And as Faust I was already out and staged at the time he finished Faust II, he couldn’t go back and change the relationship of the two from the beginning, giving his end more sense.

Let this be a lesson to you. If a prolific and highly successful author can write himself into a corner and come up with something rather stupid to resolve his problem, you don’t have to be ashamed of the same thing happening to you. Try to avoid the Deus Ex Machina solution, though, rather go back and make changes or accept that you won’t get the ending you were aiming for.