Faust. Nach ältester Aufzeichnung 1771–1775 (Urfaust). Bad Tölz, Bremer Presse, 1920.
One of 270 numbered copies on handmade paper, 110 pp., the seventh book of the Bremer Presse, a very early printing of the press. Chancery folio (270 × 167 mm).
Original vellum with gilt fillet borders to covers and spine, signed "Bremer Binderei F. Thiersch" (immaculately preserved; handmade-paper text in exceptional condition).
The Bremer Presse Urfaust closes the sequence by returning to the beginning. This is neither the completed Faust nor the 1790 Fragment, but the earliest stratum of the work, the pre-classical text that survives only because Luise von Göchhausen, a lady-in-waiting at the Weimar court, made a private copy of Goethe's early manuscript; the original was lost, and the Göchhausen copy was rediscovered in 1887. That history of loss and recovery makes the 1920 Bremer Presse edition conceptually exact. The press, founded by Willy Wiegand and Ludwig Wolde, was among the great German private presses of the century; Anna Simons contributed initials and ornament, and Frieda Thiersch gave its bindings their authority. To print the Urfaust at the Bremer Presse was to give Goethe's earliest Faust text a private-press monument, and the signed vellum binding, "Bremer Binderei F. Thiersch," completes the argument.
What that earliest text preserves is the Faust of the early 1770s, the Sturm und Drang draft Goethe brought from Frankfurt to Weimar in 1775 [Schmidt, Goethes Faust in ursprünglicher Gestalt]. There is no Prologue in Heaven here and no wager; Mephistopheles is the lesser figure and Faust stands more nearly alone, so that the whole weight falls on the seduction and destruction of Margarete. Much of it is still in prose, the form Goethe later lifted into verse everywhere but the one scene, "Trüber Tag. Feld," that he left unversed to the end. And it is harsher than what came after: the play breaks off with Gretchen given over to judgement, lacking the voice from above—the "Ist gerettet!" of the 1808 text—that Goethe would add only later to redeem her [Schmidt, ursprünglicher Gestalt; Schöne, Faust. Kommentar].
PROVENANCE
The Heribert Tenschert Collection.
REFERENCES
Curt Visel, Die Bremer Presse, Geschichte und Bibliographie (Munich, 1975); Julius Rodenberg, Deutsche Pressen(Zurich, 1925), describing the edition after the Göchhausen manuscript, edited by Max Hecker, with title and initial by Anna Simons, in 270 copies (Bad Tölz, 1920); W. H. Bruford, Theatre, Drama and Audience in Goethe's Germany(London, 1950); Klingspor Museum, Offenbach, Anna Simons archive; Erich Schmidt (ed.), Goethes Faust in ursprünglicher Gestalt nach der Göchhausenschen Handschrift (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1887); Albrecht Schöne, Faust. Kommentar (Frankfurter Ausgabe, 1994).
