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.Citing Faust s dream of opening up land for an entire people todevelop in freedom ( Such teeming would I see upon this land,/ Onacres free among free people stand (ll.11579 11580)) Schott claims thatthis link to the people is the final triumph of the  Faustian man :  Thisis the Faustian man who has arrived at the pinnacle of life: his breastfilled with a thousand plans and ideals, sweeping across the farthestdistances, boldness extending to impudence, craving the impossible,self-forgetful, elevating the people s welfare to the highest law. 18 Thisfinal connection between the ideal of development and the good of thepeople becomes the element that indicates how the Nazis embodiedthese Faustian ideals.Though Belgum, Kirst-Gundersen and Levesque read Schott as oneof many second-rate writers who engaged in mere  propaganda , theypoint out that  in sheer numbers, they far outweighed that group ofGermanists from the 1930s whose names are still remembered.19 Butmore than that, Schott essentially captures the ethical structure of sac-rifice embedded in Goethe s Faust and which was confirmed by theleading Goethe scholars in the entire period from 1870 to 1940.Schott himself relies on earlier scholarship by Kuno Fischer, whoseoriginal 1877 Faust lectures were compiled into  the most illustrious andconsequential work on Faust of the decade and went through six edi-tions by 1901.20 His interpretation already sets up the basic argumentsThe Structure of Aesthetic Pleasure 95that both Schott and Korff later develop.He celebrates the ideal of striv-ing that forms the key to understanding Faust s redemption as both  thelaw of his own development and the merging of his goals with those ofthe people, in which Faust s  pleasure is the fruit of his labour and thegaze upon the great and blessed sphere of influence that he has created:the land he has wrested from the elements, cultivated, and transformedinto a human world and an arena for striving generations in his image.21Individual striving, culminating in a collective striving, forms the ethi-cal core of this Faust interpretation that is at once positivist in its claimto objectivity and nationalist in its ideological presuppositions.But as historians of the secondary literature on Faust all agree,Fischer was also just one voice out of many.22 The Nazi interpretationof Faust was not an anomaly, nor did it represent a break with earlierFaust readings.Rather, the basic outlines of the Nazi reception of Fausthad already been established in the period from 1871 to 1933 in read-ings by some of the most prominent and established Goethe scholarsof their times.Writers such as Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Gustav vonLoeper, Hermann Grimm, Heinrich von Trietschke, Karl Goedeke, FranzDingelstedt, Wilhelm Scherer and Erich Schmidt prepared the way foran anti-religious, pro-nationalist ideology of individual developmentthat was at the same time consonant with most academic scholarship.23The unity of the critical scholarship and the canonical status of Faustincreased in the late nineteenth century to the point that the textattained the status of a  world Bible ,24 that is, an uncriticizable sourceof absolute truth.25 Scholz emphasizes the overwhelming enthusiasmof the late nineteenth-century reception for such an ideological inter-pretation of the drama:  Whoever reads through the Faust literatureencounters such interpretations at every turn, not just with the lesserspirits, but also in works that make a claim to academic rigor.The scaleof ardent and lofty ideological interpretation is so incredible as to bedifficult to properly communicate to the reader of a research report. 26The exceptions to this rule demonstrate the linking of Goethe s textto the ideology that grew out of it.For, the most prominent critics ofthe  perfectibilistic interpretation that idealizes the figure of Faustwere also critics of Goethe s project in general.These critics, includ-ing Protestant and Catholic critics, such as Joseph Görres, Joseph vonEichendorfff, Ludwig Wachler, Carl Daub and Karl Ernst Schubarth inthe early nineteenth century, Wilhelm Molitor, Wilhelm Gwinner andAlexander Baumgarten by the end of the century, and Karl Barthes andFriedrich Gogarthen in the early twentieth century, attacked Goethe santi-religious tendencies and saw in Faust an attempt to overturn10.1057/9780230306905 - Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany, Edited by Pamela E.Swett, Corey Ross and Fabrice d AlmeidaCopyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to University of British Columbia Library - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-3096 David Panreligion in favour of a this-worldly, secular ethic.27 Their need to resortto an outright rejection of the text in order to come to a proper critiqueof the developmental ethic of the Faust figure indicates that the amoralstructure inheres in the text of Goethe s Faust itself.Compared to these religious condemners of Faust, the aestheticizinginterpretation developed in the Nazi period by critics such as WilhelmBöhm, Max Kommerell, Dorothea Lohmeyer and Wilhelm Emrich fit-ted within the bounds of the drama and did not seek to attack thetext itself.28 While Böhm condemns the ideological development ofthe Faust myth, these critics avoid discussing the ideological compo-nent of Goethe s text by confining themselves to positivist studies ofsources and biographical connections as well as purely formal analyses.Significantly, these critics concentrate their arguments on the exten-sive play of form and symbolism in Faust II, confirming the diversion-ary character of these episodes as compared with the tragic aspects ofthe drama.Kommerell s reading, though focusing for the most part oninterpreting the formal structures of Faust II, nevertheless affirms thatthe hero of Faust is  not one person, but the person, the person as a self-constructing principle of human existence that organizes the materialphysically and morally, thereby subjugating lesser centres of life; thehighest forming power at nature s disposal; the person as achievementwithin her household [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]