THE THREE BOOKS

(a) Historia, Von Doct. Johan Fausti... Jetzt aufs newe vbersehen, vnnd mit vielen Stücken gemehret. No place, no printer, 1589.) (⁸ A–P⁸, 228 pp., 5 [of 6] leaves (without final blank). Title in red and black, half-page title woodcut. Octavo (152 × 97 mm). Flexible eighteenth-century half-vellum, marbled boards, red edges (binding scuffed and bumped with losses; marginal tears; lightly browned and foxed).

(b) Ander Theil D. Joh. Fausti Historien... [the Wagner book]. By F. S. [Frankfurt am Main, Nikolaus Basse?], 1596. A–P⁸, 119 [of 120] leaves (without final blank). Title in red and black, title woodcut. Octavo (151 × 92 mm). Nineteenth-century half-vellum with a calligraphic spine-title and a fool device, marbled boards (rubbed; manuscript entries to endpapers).

(c) Historia Von Doct. Johan Fausti... Jetzt aufs new vbersehen, und mit vielen Stücken gemehret. [Frankfurt am Main, Nikolaus Basse], 1597. A–M⁸, 164 pp., 5 [of 6] leaves (without final blank). Title in red and black, half-page title woodcut. Octavo (147 × 93 mm). Late-nineteenth-century vellum, red gilt-stamped spine-label, marbled endpapers (boards a little sprung, light stain to front cover).

❦

The documentary record points not to the Johann Faust of Knittlingen of later tradition but to a real and traceable man, Georg Helmstetter of Helmstadt near Heidelberg, who matriculated at the university there in 1483 and took his bachelor's degree in 1484 and his master's in 1487 [Baron 2016, from Schottenloher's 1913 edition of Kilian Leib's weather-diary].

He soon left the lecture hall for the road and lived by astrology, physiognomy and palmistry. The earliest notice of him comes in a letter of 1507, in which the abbot Johannes Trithemius, writing to the Heidelberg astrologer Johannes Virdung von Haßfurt, dismisses him as a vagabond fraud and copies out the grandiose visiting card Faust was handing about, on which he had styled himself "Magister Georgius Sabellicus, Faustus iunior, fons necromanticorum, astrologus, magus secundus, chiromanticus." The same letter records that at Kreuznach, where Franz von Sickingen had found him a schoolmaster's place, he was accused of molesting the boys and fled.

In 1513 the humanist Conrad Mutianus Rufus heard him holding forth in an Erfurt tavern and called him "Georgius Faustus Helmitheus Hedelbergensis," which once more points to Heidelberg, and for all of Trithemius's contempt he found patrons among princes and prelates. In 1520 the Bamberg bishop Georg III. Schenk von Limpurg paid him for a horoscope, the fee duly entered in the episcopal accounts on 12 February of that year [Tille].

He is said to have died about 1541 at Staufen im Breisgau, though that last detail survives only in the Zimmerische Chronik, a source already coloured by legend [Baron, "Which Faustus Died in Staufen?"].

He was, in short, a thoroughly Renaissance figure, in whom the age's great confidence in human powers passed easily into overreaching, and in whom the desire for knowledge was inseparable from the conviction that such power had to be bought by pledging the soul to the Devil [Hecht 7–8; Neubert X].

The legend that gathered around this man was shaped to a remarkable degree within Luther's own circle at Wittenberg. Luther spoke of Faust at Table Talk (Tischreden) in 1537, Melanchthon repeated Faust stories in his lectures, and Melanchthon's pupil Johann Manlius fixed the magician's first name as Johann and his birthplace as Knittlingen, close to Melanchthon's native Bretten, which is why the later tradition has always wavered between Georg and Johann.

The decisive figure, however, was Augustin Lercheimer, pseudonym of Hermann Witekind, who had studied at Wittenberg from 1548 and stood high in Melanchthon's favour, and whose Christlich bedencken und erinnerung von Zauberey of 1585 furnished much of the conception that was incorporated in the anonymous Historia von D. Johann Fausten which Johann Spies printed at Frankfurt in 1587 [Baron, "The Faust Book's Indebtedness to Augustin Lercheimer and Wittenberg Sources"].

The Faust Book thus came into the world as a Lutheran production, its hero a Wittenberg theologian who binds himself to Mephistophilis for twenty-four years and is duly damned.

The Historia appeared in a Germany worn by plague, death and confessional dread, at the very height of the witch trials, and its Faust is no longer the daring intellectual of the humanist age [Middell 7] but, in Neubert's words, "a deliberately composed admonitory tract against sorcery and the Devil's pact" [Neubert XX], a single figure deliberately composed as an admonition against sorcery and the Devil's pact, into which the anxieties of the age could be gathered and then condemned.

The irony is a bitter one, for Lercheimer, whose book had fed the Historia, wrote chiefly against the persecution of witches [Baron], in the same decades that were sending great numbers of people, most of them women, to the stake and turning the same apparatus of fear upon heretics and upon Jews.

Even to print such matter was hazardous, since the magic in these books is increasingly shown rather than merely denounced, and that is why not one of the three names an author, a printer or a place. The silence, as Hecht remarked, betrays a publisher's genuine fear of the Inquisition and of the suspicion that he kept company with the Devil [Hecht 15; Münkler].

All three belong to the enlarged recension of the text, the one their title pages announce as "mit vielen Stücken gemehret," augmented with many pieces.

The edition of 1589 is the first to carry six chapters absent from the lean Spies text, five of them set in the university world of Erfurt, where Faust summons Homer's heroes and the giant Polyphemus before the students and turns away the friar Klinge, and one at Leipzig, the celebrated Faßritt, the ride out of Auerbach's cellar astride a wine barrel [Neubert XXII; Petsch 1911; Henning; Münkler].

The Wagner book of 1596 (first published in 1593) belongs to what Henning describes as a Faust trilogy, with the Faust-Buch of 1587 and the Fausts Gaukeltasche of 1607; it follows Faust's heir Christoph Wagner, who makes his own pact, for a mere five years, and reaches America and China before coming to his own wretched end, and it goes further than the Faust Book in actually displaying the magic it claims to withhold.

The survivals are as remarkable as the texts. Even the Spies editio princeps of 1587 is known in no more than about five copies, four of them imperfect [Heitz/Ritter], and across the some twenty recorded editions of the Historia, the Wagner book and their offshoots barely three dozen copies survive altogether, nearly all in public collections [Petsch 1911; Heitz/Ritter; USTC].

The 1589 is recorded in only two or three copies, one of them at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München [VD 16 F 647; USTC 663315]; the 1597 is a rarissimum surviving in this copy alone, known to VD 16 only from the description of this very book and listed by USTC among its lost editions [VD 16 F 653; USTC 663317]; and the 1596 Wagner book is, so far as record goes, likewise a unicum.

When Karl Engel compiled his Faust bibliography he could point to no library that owned the 1589, insisting only that its existence was "not to be doubted" [Engel 217], and he passed over the 1597 altogether, as did Ebert and Goedeke.

What in time turned this work of warning into the drama we know was a long reversal of its verdict. Faust remained a damned man through Widmann's recasting of 1599 and Pfitzer's of 1674, and it was only the Enlightenment that overturned the sentence.

In his unfinished Faust, Lessing treated the thirst for knowledge not as a sin but as the noblest of human impulses, and on the testimony of his friends Blanckenburg and Engel the play closed, for the first time, with Faust saved rather than destroyed [Wisconsin Workshop, "Our Faust?", 1987].

That rescue belonged to the same Enlightenment temper that was turning away from the stake and of which Lessing was himself a voice, the author of Nathan der Weise and the friend of Moses Mendelssohn.

Goethe brought the reversal to its conclusion, and in his hands Faust is redeemed by the very act of striving.

Goethe's Faust descends directly from the text these copies preserve. He came upon the story first as a child, in the puppet play that, in his own words, "echoed and reverberated within me in many tones" (Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book 10), and it was from that memory, rather than from any book, that his own Urfaust of about 1772 to 1775 and the Fragment of 1790 first grew, both of them written before he is known to have opened a printed Faust book.

Only in 1801, at work on Part One, did he borrow Pfitzer's Faustbuch from the Weimar library, having never known the Spies first edition [Pniower 1899, nos. 213, 217, 723], so that the chapbook was for him a quarry to return to rather than a point of departure.

Pfitzer had reworked Widmann, and Widmann had drawn on the Historia in its form enlarged by the Erfurt chapters, so that the matter Goethe took from the printed chapbook, and Auerbach's cellar before all, is precisely the matter this enlarged recension introduced and the first edition never held.

These three volumes are its earliest and rarest witnesses.

PROVENANCE

The jurist Heinrich Apel (1845–1889), who assembled an early-modern collection at his estate of Ermlitz near Leipzig and corresponded about the Faust copies with the bibliographer Friedrich Zarncke; with his ownership entries and the "Apel Library, Rittergut Ermlitz" stamp — Heinrich Apel's library mark, not the Theodor Apel stamp recorded by Lugt [Lugt II, 16a]. Confiscated after 1945, held at the Moritzburg, Halle, and restituted to the heir Gerd-Heinrich Apel under the 1994 law.

Hartung & Hartung, Munich, Auction 100, 15 May 2001, lots 101–103.

REFERENCES

All not in Adams or BM STC German.

All not in Adams, BM STC German, or the catalogue of the 1893 Faust exhibition at the Freies Deutsches Hochstift.

Goedeke II, 566 (III, 1) and 567 (IV, 6); Engel 217 and 301; Ebert 7372; Heitz/Ritter 140, 146, 708 (these copies); Henning 1021 and 1269 (these copies); VD 16 F 647 and F 653; USTC 663315 and USTC 663317.

Frank Baron, Georg Helmstetter (alias Faustus) als Alumnus der Universität Heidelberg (2016); Baron, "Which Faustus Died in Staufen? History and Legend in the Zimmerische Chronik"; Baron, "The Faust Book's Indebtedness to Augustin Lercheimer and Wittenberg Sources"; Hans Henning, Faust-Bibliographie / Faust-Variationen; Our Faust? Roots and Ramifications of a Modern German Myth (16th Wisconsin Workshop, 1987); Petsch, Das Volksbuch vom Doctor Faust(1911); A. Tille, Die Faustsplitter in der Literatur (1900); Münkler, Narrative Ambiguität (2011); Faust-Handbuch(2018); Pniower, Goethes Faust: Zeugnisse und Excurse (1899); Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit (Book 10).