Faust. Eine Tragödie. Zweyter Theil in fünf Acten. Stuttgart and Tübingen, J. G. Cotta, 1833.
Posthumous first separate edition; Hagen 480 records the D° state, a first separate printing from volume 41 of Cotta's Ausgabe letzter Hand, the sheet-norm altered to "Goethe's Faust. II. Th." Title-page and 344 pp. Small octavo (133 × 90 mm). It comes from the same ownership as the Faust I (No. 10).
Contemporary speckled boards, later spine label (well-preserved; internally very good and almost free of spotting).
Faust II is the close of Goethe's longest imaginative labour, a project begun in the 1770s. Finished in the summer of 1831, it was withheld and issued only after his death; Goethe told Zelter that the Second Part was "now complete in itself" and that he would "put a seal on it" [Goethe to Zelter, 4 September 1831], and never saw it as a separate printed book, which makes the 1833 Cotta edition the first separate appearance of his last dramatic act. Goethe himself drew the sharpest line between the parts. To Eckermann on 17 February 1831 he called Part I almost wholly subjective, born of a perplexed and passionate individual, and saw in Part II "a higher, broader, clearer, more passionless world" [Eckermann, 17 February 1831]. It is not a sequel in ordinary narrative terms but the transformation of Faust into world-drama, concerned now with history, culture, power and redemption.
Goethe finished Faust II against age and failing strength, sealing the manuscript for a posterity he knew he would not live to see [Eckermann]. The alchemy of his Frankfurt reading returns in the Laboratory, where Wagner brews the Homunculus [Gray, Goethe the Alchemist]; the fourth act sets the imperial constitution of the old Reich, conferring the arch-offices on the electors as the Goldene Bulle of 1356 ordained; the Classical Walpurgisnacht stages the Neptunist–Vulcanist contest of the geological writings; and the third act is the marriage of Helena and Faust, of Greek antiquity and the Romantic North, whose son Euphorion—Goethe's figure for Byron—soars, overreaches, and falls [Schöne, Faust. Kommentar]. The verse ranges across the whole tradition, from the Knittelvers of the old puppet play, through the Alexandrine that the Sturm und Drang had discarded as outworn and that Goethe now reclaimed for the imperial tent, to the Greek trimeter in which Helena enters and the free rhythms of the close [Schöne's commentary on Faust]. The argument is carried by symbol and allusion rather than by direct statement, the mode Jane Brown takes to govern the whole play [Brown, Goethe's Faust: The German Tragedy]; the closing Chorus mysticus states it plainly, that all which passes is but a likeness of the eternal (Faust II, lines 12104–11). The immortal part the angels bear aloft Goethe conceived as an Entelechie, an indestructible active monad that, because it never ceases to strive, may be redeemed [Eckermann].
The Second Part met contempt and ridicule when it appeared after Goethe's death, the salvation of Faust striking many as incongruous with his crimes; Wolfgang Menzel scorned the redemption as wholly unmerited, granted to a "vornehmer Lüstling," and mocked the closing heaven as a "Mädchenhimmel" [Menzel, Die deutsche Literatur (Stuttgart, 1836)]. The play was long thought impossible to stage, and was not performed complete until Peter Stein's twenty-one-hour staging of both parts at Hanover in 2000 [Fischer-Lichte, Theatre Journal 53 (2001)]. Oswald Spengler made "der faustische Mensch" the emblem of his account of Western culture [Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes]; Thomas Mann read Faust's rescue as a Pelagian "labour forwards towards grace" [Mann, "Goethe and Tolstoy," Essays of Three Decades]; Adorno found in the closing scene not merit rewarded but grace [Adorno, "Zur Schlußszene des Faust," Noten zur Literatur II]; and Ortega y Gasset confessed that the age had grown weary of the statue of Goethe and asked instead for the Goethe shipwrecked and lost in his own existence [Ortega y Gasset, "Um einen Goethe von innen bittend," Neue Rundschau 43 (1932)]. The copy is especially meaningful beside the 1808 Faust I from the same ownership. The two volumes hold both parts of Goethe's lifelong project, joined now by provenance as well as by text.
PROVENANCE
From the same ownership stream as the 1808 Faust I; associated with Friedrich Günther, Prince of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt.
The Heribert Tenschert Collection.
REFERENCES
Goedeke IV/3, 614; Hagen 480; Kippenberg I, 2397; Hirzel A 462; Brieger 672; Wilpert/Gühring 165.
Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 17 February 1831; Goethe to Carl Friedrich Zelter, 4 September 1831; Thomas Mann, "Goethe" (1932); Thomas Mann, "Goethe and Tolstoy," in Essays of Three Decades, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf, 1947); Albrecht Schöne, Faust. Kommentar (Frankfurter Ausgabe, 1994); Ronald D. Gray, Goethe the Alchemist(Cambridge, 1952); Jane K. Brown, Goethe's Faust: The German Tragedy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918–1922); Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, 1982); Theodor W. Adorno, "Zur Schlußszene des Faust," in Noten zur Literatur II(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961); Erika Fischer-Lichte, review of Faust I und II (dir. Peter Stein), Theatre Journal53, no. 3 (2001), pp. 488–489; Wolfgang Menzel, Die deutsche Literatur (Stuttgart, 1836); José Ortega y Gasset, "Um einen Goethe von innen bittend," Neue Rundschau 43 (1932); Osman Durrani, "Biblical Borrowings in Goethe's Faust," Modern Language Review.
