It is a dazzling if ultimately unfulfilling excursion: “A great show! Yes, but only a show”. This system necessitates exploitation and colonisation, and Marlowe’s Faustus sounds like the giddy first capitalist:Īnd search all corners of the new-found worldįor pleasant fruits and princely delicates.įaustus embarks on a grand tour, meeting the Pope in Rome, the German Emperor Charles, and the spirits of Alexander the Great, Darius of Persia, and Helen of Troy (to whom he waxes lyrical: “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?”). Karl Marx identified the influx of gold from the New World as the dawn of capitalism, a system he compares to a sorcerer who is no “longer able to control the powers of the underworld he has called up”. The Faust legend gained traction at a time when the ‘closed’ medieval world was being cleaved open by a new mercantile culture. Faustus states that the only God he serves is his “own appetite”, and Goethe’s Mephistopheles offers him the opportunity to “sample every possible delight… grasp at what you want!” In David Luke’s lyrical translation: From credit cards to fast food, we opt for immediate pleasure even in the knowledge that it brings long-term pain. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on her deck” – an inspiration for the Rolling Stones’ song Sympathy for the Devil.ĭespite its theological underpinning, the Faust legend has thrived in secular consumer societies, particularly in a culture of instant gratification. His lawyer tries to argue that the buyer is a foreign imposter, but the devil proclaims he was present at America’s birth: “When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. The corrupting influence of money is also a theme of Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story The Devil and Daniel Webster (1936), written at the height of the Great Depression, in which a beleaguered farmer sells his soul for seven years of prosperity. The temptations of fascism dominate 20th-Century Faustian parables, most notably Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit (1956), in which townspeople are offered a bribe to murder one of their fellow citizens. In the dying embers of the Third Reich, the physiological, mental and spiritual degradation of Mann’s protagonist becomes a metaphor for Germany’s moral corruption. Based in part on the life story of Nietzsche, the novel explores how nihilism and primitivism usurp bourgeois culture. The protagonist is a composer who renounces love in exchange for heightened creative powers, which he acquires by infecting himself with syphilis: as Mann wrote in a précis, “The poison works as intoxication, stimulant, inspiration transports of exaltation allow him to create wonderful works of genius”. Mann’s father Thomas wrote the most notable post-war treatment of the legend, Doktor Faustus (1948), which the author described as “the novel of my epoch”.
With the exception of Frankenstein, published by Mary Shelley in 1818, it is difficult to think of a more enduring modern legend – both stories reflect unease about the dawning of a new world, full of possibility and anxiety. The project dominated his intellectual life: the first part of his dramatic poem, Faust, appeared in 1808 the second part was completed in 1831, the year before his death. The most influential interpretation of the Faust legend was written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). ‘The greatest film-maker who ever lived’ At approximately the same time, the legend of Pan Twardowski, a sorcerer who sold his soul to the devil, began to take root in Polish folklore. A chapbook speculating on his infamous exploits circulated in the late 16th Century, inspiring Christopher Marlowe’s play The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, first performed in London around 1592. The legend is loosely based on the life of Johann Georg Faust (c 1480–1540), an alchemist and practitioner of necromancy, a form of ‘black magic’.