Changing European Visions of Disaster and Development. Vanessa Pupavac
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[1795]), but under the Nazi regime, a cultured society and radical evil were aligned. The Jewish Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel observed how his incarceration in Buchenwald concentration camp was ‘not far from Goethe’s beloved Weimar’ (Wiesel 1999). As the literary critic Steiner wrote, ‘how was it that a commitment to Goethe, at every level of schooling and cultural activities, proved irrelevant in the face of political barbarism? What terrible truth lies behind the fact that Goethe’s Weimar abuts on the camp at Buchenwald?’ (Steiner 2000).
What could Goethe’s humanism offer against the experience of the death camps? ‘Goethe’s world is past’, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers proclaimed in his 1947 Goethe Prize speech (Jaspers 1952a [1947]: 40). Goethe avoided looking into the abyss of his own day and could not address the human catastrophes of the twentieth century (ibid.). The idea of good coming from evil looked ridiculously complacent in light of the Nazi crimes. Kant was right to recognise the existence of radical evil, and Goethe naive to reject it, Jaspers concluded. The philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno went further and indicted the whole of culture as sharing in collective guilt—‘the entirety of traditional culture’, according to him, was as ‘null and void’ (Adorno 1950 in Brockmann 2004: 132). Cultural complicity with radical evil was symbolised by the possibility Goethe’s famous oak could have been within concentration camp fences (Brockmann 2004: 125). Goethe’s work was appropriated by Nazism—Nazi pocket editions of Faust were distributed to German troops during the war (Piper 2010: 103).
In the wake of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, Faust myths became bleaker accounts of human evil and hubris. The 1947 novel Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann (1875–1955) allowed his Faust no redemption. His protagonist Adrian Leverkuhn specifically mocked Goethe’s portrayal of good coming out of evil (Mann 1968 [1947]: 229). He depicted German modern history as a Faustian pact in blood and condemned adherence to national loyalties as endorsing the ‘warrior type’ (Mann 1968 [1947]: 122, 490). Dr Faustus saw its cultural original sin in the Reformation. The poet W.H. Auden’s poem September 1, 1939 also traced back ‘the whole offence’ to Luther (Auden 1979: 86). Mann’s novel returned to the Faustbuch for his inspiration to present a deliberate recantation of Goethe’s Faust, and argued German history took a fatal wrong turn from the sixteenth century (Allen 1985; Ball 1986). Mann attacked Luther for undermining the Catholic Church as a bulwark and dam against evil, explicitly using language negating the symbols of Goethe’s Faust: ‘a citadel of order, an institution for objective disciplining, canalizing, banking-up of the religious life against the dangers of subjectivist demoralization, a chaos of divine and daemonic powers … an ocean of daemony’ (Mann 1968 [1947]: 117–8). Luther’s call for brutal suppression of peasants’ revolts and his anti-semitic views gave pernicious authority to political tyranny and the persecution of the Jews even as his attack on the church let in subjectivism (1974 [1520–1531]). Mann condemned an indulgent subjective outlook against the commitments of religion. Adrian’s syphilis was his damnation and symbolised the sickness of European culture. A false reaction to this subjectivism had endorsed an arbitrary secular order against individual freedom and conscience, symbolised in Adrian’s musical composition ‘where there would no longer be a free note’ (Mann 1968 [1947]: 186). German writers were not alone in taking up the theme of Faust. Other European writers invoked Faust to indict modernity’s barbaric direction. The French writer Paul Valéry’s incomplete 1940 play Mon Faust feared the individual soul drowning in mass society (Valéry 1946 [1940]). The British literary critic E. M. Butler and the philosopher Bertrand Russell saw dangers in Goethe’s Faust and Faust’s child, the Byronic romantic figure, glorifying demonic characters and deeds, and lending themselves to fascism (Butler 1956 [1949]; Russell 2002 [1945]: 620–2, 675–80). Across the Atlantic, Karl Shapiro’s poem The Progress of Faust depicted Faust at work on the American atomic bomb (Shapiro 1953 [1946]: 114–15; Watt 1996: 273). Leading atomic physicists were conscious of their cultural antecedent, having staged their own amateur Faust play back in 1932 parodying their discoveries (Smith 2008).
In the new millennium Faust is a key reference point in the burgeoning field of ecoliterature, or literary criticism inspired by ecologism. The story is being reinterpreted in light of chaos, complexity, and ecological systems thinking and is commonly invoked as a warning against human technological development and exploitation of nature (Hayles 1990, 1991; Laan 2007; Monbiot 2007; Rowland 2001; Vazsonyi 1996). Faust’s contract to sell his soul for knowledge has become an allegory of modern scientific hubris. The biographer Andrew Piper describes Faust’s dam project becoming his grave as ‘no surer critique of scientific progress’ (Piper 2010: 99). The environmentalist George Monbiot’s Heat: How We Can Stop the Planet Burning (2007) takes Marlowe’s Dr Faustus as his starting point for a passionate denunciation of global warming:
Faust is humankind, restless, curious, unsated. Mephistopheles … “a fiery man” … is fossil fuel. Faust’s miraculous abilities are the activities fossil permits … And the flames of hell—well, I think you’ve probably worked that out for yourself. (Monbiot 2007: 2)
Each chapter begins with a quote from Marlowe to reinforce how ‘Our use of fossil fuels is a Faustian pact’ (Monbiot 2007: 3). His text urges action against climate change and limits on human freedom, concluding ‘it is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but also against ourselves’ (Monbiot 2007: 215). His later book Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life (2013) discusses ecological movements seeking to recreate European wildernesses free from humans, and freeing nature to the governance of natural forces. Ironically, though, ecologism’s celebration of natural forces parallels neoliberalism’s celebration of market forces. Ecological ideas have helped legitimise abandoning industrial strategies and allowing the economic collapse and depopulation of some regions, especially in southern Europe. The birthplace of one of modernity’s leading Faustian dreamers and Lucifers lighting up the world is in a region being rewilded, as the book will explore.
Faust the Developer
Amid cultural pessimism, Faust continued to inspire progressive humanism during the twentieth century and push for material transformation. One of those inspired by Goethe’s Faust was the American Yugoslav inventor Nikola Tesla, who developed hydroelectric dams (Tesla 2011 [1918]: 39–40). Tesla emigrated from Europe to the United States. He was originally from a village at the foot of the Velebit Mountains in Croatia, which was then under the Habsburg military frontier regime (Carlson 2013: 12–13; Rothenberg 1966). The military frontier was originally created as a bulwark against the Ottoman empire, but when their military threat receded, a core function of the borderland was as a militarised cordon sanitaire against human or livestock disease. Even the son of a Serbian Orthodox priest might not escape military service in this peasant-soldier population of the military frontier. Soldiering, banditry, and subsistence farming were the main historical fate of its inhabitants. However, modern developments opened up new horizons for Tesla and his region of birth. The population could constitute themselves as a self-determining nation and resist being an undeveloped imperial borderland and abject puppets of empire.
The engineering resonances with Faust for Tesla’s home country are reinforced but have a more religiously secure sanction from the Renaissance humanist Faust Vrančić (or Fausto Veranzio) (circa 1551–1617), who was born in Šibenik, Croatia, then part of Venetian Dalmatia. Vrančić’s name is often coupled with Tesla in Croatia. Polymath, diplomat and bishop, at one time he worked at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, who also employed the astronomers Tycho Broche and Johannes Kepler. A historical precursor to Tesla, Vrančić was also interested in solar, wind and hydro-energy, and was author of Machinae Novae (1616) as well as a dictionary of five European languages and works on theology (Vrančić 1971). His designs included a wind turbine, a water mill using the power of the waves, a suspension bridge, and a Homo Volans, or parachute, as well as flood defence plans commissioned for Rome. Few of his designs were implemented in his life time. Innovation was moving away from Renaissance Italy. In the next century a tidal mill was constructed drawing on his work across the Atlantic in Brooklyn and a metal suspension bridge in the industrialising England. Fittingly one of the earliest hydroelectric plants in Europe was commissioned by the mayor of Šibenik on the Krka