The other is the ‘unitarian’ insistence that the work must be assumed to be an integrated dramatic whole, sprung from a single and unvarying conception, and that any apparent contradictions may be resolved by sufficiently ingenious argument, or shown to be unimportant matters of detail. The controversy has a certain similarity to the disputes that have arisen in the last century or two from the application of historical scholarship to the Bible. At its most extreme, geneticism tears Faust to pieces and leaves the reader wondering why this is accounted a masterpiece of world dramatic literature at all; at its worst, the unitarian special pleading becomes an exercise in perverse piety and blindness to textual and biographical fact. A balanced approach will wish to credit the poem with at least a profound human and personal unity and to see its creation as a kind of organic growth: at each stage of revision and expansion, we must assume, Goethe respected what he had already written and indeed for the most part already published, but sought to develop and enlarge his earlier conception and so far as possible to integrate the old with the new. The analogy of a work of architecture built progressively at different periods is only partly appropriate; in Faust, the architect is always Goethe.

Whatever eventual critical synthesis we may try to achieve, however, the fact that Part One took him some thirty years to write is inescapable and demands to be taken into account. If as readers we are content with mere impressions, we may ignore this genetic process; otherwise we are under an obligation to be aware of it, in outline at least. Most of its main details are in fact well enough known. We should above all note, and distinguish from the rest of the poem, those parts of it which are based on its original core: this was the long unpublished, mysteriously fragmentary version of the early 1770s (written probably between 1772 and 1775, though certain scenes may go further back) which in Goethe studies is now always referred to as the ‘original Faust’ or Urfaust. Goethe later destroyed this manuscript, but by a sensational chance an unknown contemporary copy of it was discovered sixty-five years after his death and almost exactly a century ago (1887). This ‘Göchhausen transcript’, so called after the lady of the Weimar court circle who made it at some time in the late 1770s, is thought to be a substantially accurate copy of Goethe’s lost text, though we cannot of course know this for certain, and it is also possible that he had other Faust plans at that time of which the transcript contains no indication. Those parts of the final 1808 version which clearly correspond to this known pre-1775 nucleus, and most of which represent only slight revisions of the youthful material, comprise Faust’s opening soliloquy and conjuration of the Earth Spirit (lines 354–517), two episodic scenes of antiacademic satire (518–605, 1868–2050), the episodic tavern scene (2073–336), and above all the sequence (beginning with 2605 and ending with 4614, between which the 1808 text contains some later insertions) of comic, touching, and tragic scenes telling the story of Faust’s seduction and abandonment of Margareta (Gretchen) which so powerfully dominates the second half of Part One. Most of this Urfaust material has always more strongly appealed to both German and non-German readers than most of Goethe’s complex and sophisticated later additions; indeed, the Gretchen story especially, which was entirely the young Goethe’s invention and had no precedent in any earlier version of the Faust story, has exercised such imaginative fascination, and in particular so dominated theatrical productions and adaptations of the play throughout the nineteenth century, that the general public tends to associate Faust with the Gretchen affair almost to the exclusion of anything else.

The youthful Urfaust reflected the preoccupations not only of the youthful Goethe but of his generation. It has been said that if he had decided to publish it at the time, even in its fragmentary form, it might well have eclipsed the success and notoriety of his tragic first novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and possibly changed the whole course of German literary history. At the time of writing the Urfaust and Werther and his most famous early poems, the young Goethe, born in 1749 and still living in his native city of Frankfurt, was a restless, rebellious, highly individualistic genius, the son of a well-to-do middle-class family and therefore in practice free (unlike any other German writer of his day) to devote himself chiefly to literature. He had taken a degree in law and briefly practised it, but never bound himself to the legal profession, nor had he yet settled into any permanent position or become beholden to a patron. His emergence as a miraculously original and almost at once internationally famous writer coincided with that upsurge or breakthrough in German literature which by a quirk of historical terminology came to be known as the ‘Storm and Stress’ period, but which in a wider world perspective may be seen as a precursory and provocative German form of European Romanticism. The young Goethe, indeed, may be said to have virtually invented this avant-garde movement single-handed. True, there had been pioneer theorists and essayists, notably the highly influential cultural historian and philosopher Herder (1744–1803) whose encounter with Goethe in 1770 was one of the turning-points in the latter’s development. There were about half-a-dozen minor writers, mostly dramatists, clustering round Goethe and treating him as a cult figure, but it was Goethe alone whose creative ‘genius’ (the word first became fashionable at this time) was not merely soi-disant—he alone who raised the values of eighteenth-century sentimentalism and early romanticism to a European level of literary expression. What is more, the Storm and Stress movement of the 1770s was Goethe’s own ‘Storm and Stress’ phase, just as the ‘Weimar Classicism’ of the 1790s corresponded to a maturer and so to speak ‘classical’ period in his life. German literary history lends itself to personalization, and so centrally pre-eminent in it is Goethe that in his time its stages were not so much reflected in and by his personal evolution, as rather vice versa: they reflected him, he virtually constituted them. In Goethe, German literature underwent a peculiar evolution from Storm and Stress to a new classicism or romantic-classical synthesis; and nowhere is this more succinctly documented than in the development, as we may trace it in the genesis of Part One, of his modern, highly personal yet historically momentous conception of the old Faust story. In this sense, too, Faust is a ‘central’ work, and for the same reason the genetic or ‘diachronic’ examination of it (as distinct from merely reading through the final text synchronically in the normal way) gains added interest, at least as a supplementary or introductory exercise.

The sixteenth century was an age of forbidden exploration: old dogmas and certainties were being challenged, a new humanism was developing, the sciences were emancipating themselves from their magical antecedents, and all this could in the popular imagination easily be invested with an aura of dread and a savour of blasphemy. The legend of the daring magus who sells himself to the Devil for new knowledge and new powers was one that flourished in this atmosphere. A shadowy historical figure existed to give it a name: from a few scattered sources we hear of a certain Georg Faust who lived between about 1480 and 1540, a disreputable wandering academic charlatan who laid claim to out-of-the-way knowledge and healing gifts and was said to have come to a violent end. After his death legend credited him with academic titles, he became ‘Dr Johannes Faustus’ (the name in its Latinized form meaning favoured or fortunate), he had been a professor at Wittenberg, the Devil had kept him company in the shape of a black dog, he had conjured up characters from Homer in front of his students, played tricks on the Pope and Emperor and other princes, and on the expiry of his agreed term of twenty-four years had duly been torn to pieces by demons and carried off to hell. In the course of the century crude folk-narratives came into circulation in Germany, retailing the magician’s sensational adventures and moralizing piously about his dreadful example. These Faust chapbooks, of which the first known example was printed in Frankturt in 1587, continued to be published until the early eighteenth century in successive variants. From the outset translations quickly appeared in other countries, and an early English version inspired the first dramatic treatment of the theme: Christopher Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, written probably in 1592 and published posthumously in 1604. It was common in Elizabethan times for English actors to travel with their repertoires to foreign courts, and thus it was not long before debased versions of Marlowe’s tragedy became well known in the German-speaking territories, entering also the repertoire of the popular puppet theatres (in which they still survive today).