Faust's Shadow
German Literature
Course 1 · Chapter 10 · Capstone: Faust's Long Shadow
This last chapter does two things. It looks at the German-language writing of the generation since reunification, and it follows one thread through the whole course: the ambitious bargain, a person who reaches for more than the world allows and pays for it. The thread runs from the Faust book of 1587 through Goethe to Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus, and it gives a way of reading the changes in German writing across four centuries. The chapter ends with a timeline, a table of myths, and a six-question method for testing claims about literature. Names and dates are from general knowledge and flagged "check".
Contemporary Voices
| Writer and work (check each) | Note |
|---|---|
| W. G. Sebald (1944 to 2001) | Born in Bavaria and lived in England. Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants, 1992) and Austerlitz (2001) blend memoir, fiction and photographs in long, wandering sentences about memory and the Holocaust. |
| Bernhard Schlink (born 1944) | Der Vorleser (The Reader, 1995) is about a young man's affair with an older woman who proves to have been a camp guard, and about the question of guilt across generations. |
| Herta Müller (born 1953) | A Romanian-German writer from the Banat region who emigrated to West Germany in 1987. Herztier (The Land of Green Plums) draws on life under the Ceaușescu dictatorship. Nobel Prize 2009 (check). |
| Daniel Kehlmann (born 1975) | Die Vermessung der Welt (Measuring the World, 2005), a comic novel about Gauss and Humboldt, was a huge international success. |
| Jenny Erpenbeck (born 1967) | Born in East Berlin. Gehen, ging, gegangen (Go, Went, Gone, 2015) is about refugees in Berlin, and her novel Kairos, set in the late GDR, won the International Booker Prize in 2024 (check). |
- Themes. Memory and the Holocaust, the legacy of the GDR, migration and the question of who counts as German.
- Translation. As in Hungary and elsewhere, reach abroad depends on translators and prizes (check the translators of each).
- Beyond Germany. Austrian, Swiss and migrant-background writers in German widen the picture (check); this course has kept to the German story.
The Thread: The Ambitious Bargain
1587: the warning
In the Faust book (Chapter 3), a learned man sells his soul for knowledge and power and is damned. The message is a Protestant warning against going beyond limits.
1808 and 1832: the wager
In Goethe's play (Chapter 5), Faust bets that no moment will satisfy him. He errs, destroys Gretchen, strives to the end and is saved. Striving is now both danger and value.
1947: the catastrophe
In Doktor Faustus, Thomas Mann tells the story of a composer who makes a pact for genius, as an allegory of Germany's path to Nazism, written in exile (check). The bargain is now a national tragedy.
A Timeline
| Period (check each) | Landmark |
|---|---|
| About 1200 | Nibelungenlied, Parzival, Walther (Chapter 2) |
| 1522 to 1587 | Luther's Bible and the Faust book (Chapter 3) |
| 1770s to 1805 | Sturm und Drang and Weimar (Chapters 4, 5) |
| 1808 to 1832 | Faust Parts One and Two (Chapter 5) |
| 1798 to 1850 | Romanticism and the Grimms (Chapter 6) |
| 1830s to 1890s | Büchner to Fontane and Nietzsche (Chapter 7) |
| 1900s to 1933 | Kafka, Rilke, Mann, Brecht (Chapter 8) |
| 1933 to 1989 | Exile, division and the postwar voice (Chapter 9) |
| 1990 onward | Sebald, Müller, Kehlmann, Erpenbeck (this chapter) |
Myths and Evidence
| Common claim | What to check |
|---|---|
| "Luther created modern German." | A written standard was forming already; Luther helped spread it (Chapter 3). |
| "Goethe is German literature." | Look at the range of his contemporaries and successors (Chapters 1 and 5). |
| "The Grimms just wrote down peasant tales." | Compare editions and sources (Chapter 6). |
| "Werther caused a wave of suicides." | Reports, bans and later legend differ (Chapter 4). |
| "Nietzsche was a Nazi philosopher." | Check editing, sources and his own statements (Chapter 7). |
| "German writers either supported the Nazis or left." | Look at each person's evidence (Chapter 9). |
A Six-Question Method
- Who says it? A critic, a translator, a publisher or a politician?
- What is the evidence? The text, a letter, a review of the time, or a later memory?
- When was it written? Near the events, or long afterwards?
- Which translation? Does the claim depend on one translator's choice?
- Who gains? Does it serve a nation, a school, a party or a sales campaign?
- What would change my mind? What evidence would show the claim to be false?
Exercises
Trace the ambitious-bargain thread through at least four chapters, and say where the thread does not fit.
Apply the six-question method to the claim "Luther created modern German", or another claim from the course, and give a verdict.
Compose a reading plan of five German-language works in English translation, justifying each choice and noting which translation to look for.
Quick Reference
- The thread: the ambitious bargain, 1587 to 1947
- Contemporary: Sebald, Schlink, Müller, Kehlmann, Erpenbeck (check)
- Method: who, evidence, when, translation, who gains, what would change my mind
- Habit: mark unproven claims as "claimed" or "interpretation"