Goethe’s “Faust” is perhaps the most famous work in German literature. But at school he loses his special status and a theater expert even sees “an epochal Faust crisis”.
“It is a great delight to put oneself in the spirit of the times, to see how a wise man thought before us.” For generations of German schoolchildren, there was no getting around him: Goethe’s “Faust”.
Probably the most famous drama in German literary history is one of the best-known and most-cited works of all.
What the big question is (“How do you feel about religion?”), what “the core of the matter” was (Mephisto) and what the moment that should linger is all about, only knows who has at least a rough idea of what Johann Wolfgang von Goethe came up with with his “Faust I” more than 200 years ago.
The “Faust” loses importance in schools
But the cultural significance of the great work seems to be dwindling. The German Theater Association registers less interest in “Faust” – and the work is also becoming less important at school.
According to a survey by the German Press Agency, it is only required reading in a few federal states.
In Bavaria, it has to be read for the penultimate time in the new school year starting this September. From 2024/25 it will no longer be required reading after it has been for almost half a century – at least in the advanced German course.
In the 2020/21 season, according to the German Theater Association, “Faust I” was “for the first time in many years no longer in first place as the most staged drama”. According to the information, only two new productions of the great drama are planned on German stages in the coming season. “That’s remarkably little,” says a spokeswoman for the association.
Also on the stages there is less “Faust”
“In the 1980s or 90s, the play was often among the ten most performed dramas, so it wasn’t quite at the top,” says Detlev Baur, editor-in-chief of the magazine “Die Deutsche Bühne” published by the theater association.
However, this time he is not assuming a “cyclical “Faust” cooling phase”: “I rather suspect that it will no longer play such a big role on the stages in the future – if only because it is also losing importance in schools. Actually is “Faust” a reading drama – and who still reads plays today?”
The play with the most productions will be Georg Büchner’s “Woyzeck”, as Baur found out for the September edition. “Loser Goethe” is the title of his article, in which he writes of an “epochal “Faust” crisis”.
Faust and his much younger Gretchen are “perhaps not quite as explosive today as the social and psychological deformation of a penniless soldier like Woyzeck,” says Baur.
Georg Büchner’s social drama “Woyzeck” – together with Juli Zeh’s “Corpus Delicti” – is also set as reading material for the next three Abitur years by the Institute for Quality Development in Education (IQB) in Berlin, which should be assumed to be known.
“They must have deleted the wrong text,” says the Berlin Germanist Michael Jaeger, who wrote the book “Goethe’s Faust: The Drama of Modernity.”
“Man is wrong as long as he strives”
Jaeger cannot understand the recent Bavarian decision about the work: “Faust, of all things, is particularly well suited to transferring the themes from back then to the present day.” True to the motto: “It’s me, it’s Faust, I’m your kind.”
He calls it “particularly stupid to delete the possibly last text that was still somehow in most people’s heads”. He doubts whether interest in the material would also decrease “if you presented “Faust” to young people and gave them time to deal with it”.
“Everyone only learns what he can learn”
As the dpa survey of the state ministries of education showed, it is now the exception rather than the rule when “Faust” still has to be read at high school.
These exceptions include Hesse, Saarland, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Saxony, where the work is already included in the 10th grade, because “we consider the importance of the work as a cultural asset to be so high that high school students also read the work should know, not only the high school students”, as a spokesman for the Saxon Ministry of Education says.
In Lower Saxony, on the other hand, it hasn’t been compulsory for at least 40 years to have read the story about Doctor Faust, his devilish companion Mephisto and his Gretchen.
Germanist Jaeger sees a problem “not only related to Faust, but to our literary tradition”. He fears that cultural reference points, with which a large part of the population can relate, could disappear even further if there is no longer a literary canon. “It has all become completely arbitrary.” Today, many of the “Faust” quotes that he uses in lectures can no longer do anything.
“Everyone is finally looking for something themselves,” says “Faust”. It also says: “They are not used to the best, but they have read an awful lot.”