Changing European Visions of Disaster and Development. Vanessa Pupavac
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I and deplored or apologised for Faust II. Such is Lewes’ evaluation of Faust I and II. Indeed Goethe was apprehensive about the reception of his completed Faust, which was not published until after his death, imagining his Faust shipwrecked and becoming covered in sand (Piper 2010: 101). In the twentieth century, Lukacs’ Age of Goethe (1968 [1947]) marked a major intellectual re-evaluation of Faust II, followed up in Berman’s later All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1988 [1982]).
We enjoyed reading and refer to various translations of Faust, including by David Constantine (2005, 2009), David Luke (1998), and Philip Wayne (1949, 1959). We gained different insights from their distinct interpretations, alongside commentaries grappling with this ‘incommensurable work’ such as John Williams’ Goethe’s Faust (1987). W. H. Bruford’s Germany in the Eighteenth Century: The Social Background of the Literary Revival (1965) does exactly what he proclaims in the title and socially contextualises Goethe’s work. Germany: Memories of a Nation (2012) of Neil Macgregor, former director of the British Museum, provides a fascinating cultural historical survey of Germany for a global audience and epitomises Jaspers’ ideals of the Humanism of a European Museum (Jaspers 1948: 510). Obviously the legend of Faust has fostered its own field of analysis. Among these, Ian Watt’s Myths of Modern Individualism (1996) gives a useful introduction to Faust as a modern mythical figure, while detailed surveys include Osman Durrani’s Faust: Icon of Modern Culture (2004), J. M. van der Laan’s Seeking Meaning for Goethe’s Faust (2007), and J. W. Smeed’s Faust in Literature (1975). Then there are analyses of other Faust creations. Marlowe’s Dr Faustus has been gaining literary appreciation among scholars of sixteenth-century literature (Marlowe 2005), as has Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita among scholars of twentieth-century literature. Mann’s Dr Faustus has its own vast commentary (Allen 1985; Ball 1986). The fascination with Faust, Dr Faustus, and his various guises continues, and continues to express our anxieties about our humanity since the rise of modernity.
The book traces the rise and fall of European humanist modernism, and modern development and disaster eradication through the following chapters:
Chapter 2, ‘The Disastrous Birth of Modernity in Europe’, discusses the changing European cultural understandings of disasters from acts of god to acts of nature and the seismic cultural importance of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake during Goethe’s lifetime. Historically belief in disasters as acts of God did not preclude belief in secondary causes and the need for official responses. Not least disasters were seen as portends of dynastic changes, and therefore important to rulers concerned to pacify their subjects. Early modern Europe pioneered scientific breakthroughs, but panics about witches and demonic spirits heightened during the devastating religious-political wars. The longer-term impact of these conflicts was to encourage the idea of religion being conventional and facilitated the reception of new scientific theories, notably Isaac Newton’s laws of physics in the late seventeenth century, whose great work of the 1680s coincided with the years settling the modern British constitution. Writing in Newton’s wake, the English writer Daniel Defoe encapsulated the transition period from pre-modern to modern understandings of disasters, where scientific explanations for natural disasters were gaining ground amid religious frameworks. He wrote pioneering accounts of disasters at the beginning of the eighteenth century and was scathing about accusations of witchcraft and the claims of quack medicine, while continuing to believe in disasters as acts of God and the importance of the devil and supernatural forces. The 1755 Lisbon earthquake precipitated a decisive shift towards secular scientific understandings of natural disasters, propelling Enlightenment hopes for the future of humanity and the eradication of disasters. Immanuel Kant’s scientific account of the Lisbon earthquake influenced his philosophical thinking on the realms of necessity and freedom and the scope of human agency in the world. The Lisbon earthquake took on a different political meaning for Goethe, writing six decades later. He saw the disaster as prefiguring the subsequent political revolutions and revolutionary armies overturning the old social order. Instead of political vulcanism, Goethe sought elite-led material development to found social stability and meet the needs of the population. However, Britain as the first industrialising country indicated that the Industrial Revolution was not conflict-free. Byron, as Faust’s rebellious child of Goethe’s poem, spoke up for the Luddites, the Nottinghamshire handloom weavers who smashed the new machinery in defence of their livelihoods. Yet neither he nor they were opposed to the new technological innovations per se. Their objections concerned political determination of economic developments.
Chapter 3, ‘Faustian Work and “The Hope of the Poor”’, considers the Dutch struggles against sea and empire, which so inspired Goethe and other Europeans. The dual struggles caught the imagination of Europeans politically and culturally, including Goethe, whose drama Egmont dramatised the Dutch revolt, and whose poem Faust celebrated hydro-engineering in Faust’s great reclamation project. The sixteenth-century Dutch engineer Andries Vierlingh described his building of sea defences and land reclamation as the ‘The Hope of the Poor’. Dutch hydro-engineering has inspired international thinking on dam building and flood prevention. The first part of the chapter discusses European cultural recognition of Dutch hydro-engineering and how pioneering Dutch engineering was matched by the Dutch political struggle against the Habsburg empire in the early modern period, and their pioneering philosophical and republican ideas. Goethe’s drama Egmont was written in the 1780s at a time when Dutch radicals were seeking national republican renewal against oligarchical rule and a sense of national decline. The second part of the chapter discusses the Zuyder Zee project completed in 1932, hailed as one of the wonders of the modern industrial work. The Zuyder Zee, and related post-war Delta works completed in the wake of the 1953 North Sea floods, represented the culmination of the Dutch Faustian struggle with the sea and modern hopes for disaster eradication, anticipated in Goethe’s ‘incommensurate’ Faust.
Chapter 4, on Faust the Developer, discusses the rise and fall of international development ideals through the iconic post-war development texts, Walt Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth and E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful. The Stages of Economic Growth proposed full industrial development would enhance people’s lives and freedom, while Small Is Beautiful argued large-scale industrial development was incompatible with an economics where people mattered (Schumacher 1974). The chapter then discusses the philosopher Marshall Berman’s exploration of Faust’s failings as the Developer, and the political theorist Hannah Arendt’s warnings against taking natural disasters or natural processes as the model for politics. Critically the suppression of political freedom distorted national development and led industrialisation to sacrifice many citizens as epitomised in the Soviet Union. Such historical experiences encouraged influential European intellectual strands to reject industrial modernity as creating a disastrous world. Humanity increasingly came to be seen as the cause of disasters, and reining in human activity was considered to be the solution. Abandoning industrialisation in European international development models had important international political implications for economically weaker states and regions. Adopting non-industrial sustainable development strategies implied perpetuating north-south and east-west inequalities between states and within states. The crises of international development, humanitarianism, and statebuilding are leading to migration replacing other strategies as people abandon hope of changing their country and international policy-making is redefining migration as a form of sustainable development.
Chapter 5, ‘Nikola Tesla’s Faustian Dream’, discusses the rise and fall of the industrial development of twentieth-century Yugoslavia and twenty-first-century Croatia, and how their development path parallels the rise and fall of dam building in European and international development. Its starting point is the American inventor Nikola Tesla, who was born in the military frontier of Habsburg empire in what is now Croatia. Goethe inspired Tesla’s engineering and design of one of the first hydroelectric power plants in the world. The industrial development of post-war federal socialist Yugoslavia linked national self-determination and industrial development, including ambitious hydroelectric engineering inspired by Tesla. Its workers’ self-management system managed to avoid some of the worst problems of industrialisation experienced in either the Western or the Soviet blocs, and Yugoslavia became the only European country in the Non-Aligned Movement. NAM ties encouraged Yugoslav