The Master's Apprentice, page 62
part #1 of Faust Series
Johann couldn’t help but grin. Karl was utterly useless as a juggler, but his talents clearly lay elsewhere. Johann was occasionally irritated by Karl’s glances—looks that were more than those of an admiring assistant. One time Johann had heard Karl mutter his name in his sleep: Faust, oh, my Faust. But Johann hadn’t said anything, because he didn’t want to embarrass the young man.
They had set up wooden benches using bricks and planks of spruce in front of the small stage, and about three dozen spectators had gathered. Full of anticipation, they watched Greta as she juggled five balls at once, attracting even more people to their show. Johann nodded appreciatively. Despite her young age, it was clear that Greta was a highly talented performer—she could even play the bagpipe. What they had to offer wasn’t the spectacular show Johann used to present with his laterna magica. It was smaller and less dramatic, but it made people happy.
And he was happy, too.
Karl was already crouching behind the booth, and now Greta caught her balls one by one, made them magically disappear in her dress, and joined him. Several young men in the audience made rude remarks and gestures, because Greta had developed a womanly figure. Sometimes she reminded him a little of Salome, the insatiable dancer who had bewitched him on their journey to Venice so long ago. Perhaps he would fall in love again someday, but for now his love for his daughter was enough for him.
“Watch how I, the widely traveled Doctor Faustus, once fought a lion in Africa and defeated it with the aid of white magic alone,” announced Johann, who had walked up to the theater. As always, he acted as the narrator while Karl and Greta worked the puppets.
In front of a desert backdrop, a lion with a golden mane appeared, roaring so loudly that the audience gasped with fright. A second puppet materialized—clearly the doctor with his star cloak and floppy hat.
“You terrible beast,” sounded Karl’s voice from behind the stage. “Here—drink my theriac!” The Faust puppet threw a miniature bottle at the lion, and the animal staggered from side to side as if drunk, eventually collapsing with a grunt. The audience laughed and applauded.
“I once met the beautiful Helen herself,” continued Johann. “I abducted her from Hades, where she had been sorrowfully waiting for her Paris since Troy.”
The backdrop was quickly changed to a canvas showing menacing flames. The puppet of a princess with blonde hair appeared on stage and cried heartrendingly.
“Oh, poor me,” wailed Greta’s voice. “The devil himself has dragged me down to hell—I may never see my beloved Paris again!”
Some spectators sighed while others giggled; the Faust puppet appeared from the right, this time with a book in its hands.
“I am going to free you, beautiful Helen,” announced Karl. “Not even the devil stands a chance against my book of magic spells.”
“Harr, harr! We shall see about that,” said Karl with a different, darker voice. At the same moment, a tinny thunderclap rang out and the devil emerged from the depths of the booth. He had goat’s horns and a long tail, and there was smoke, along with the stink of sulfur. The audience screamed with horror.
“Now both of you must remain in hell!” snarled the devil and tugged at Helen. “You are mine!” The puppets fought one another, and the crowd booed the devil.
“Ha! Now you will feel the force of magic,” shouted the Faust puppet at the devil. “This is my book of magic. Vade, Satanas!”
Doctor Faustus struck the devil on the nose with his book, and the hellish puppet disappeared with a wail. The audience hooted and clapped as the curtain fell, and Karl and Greta stepped in front of the booth and took a bow.
Johann stood next to them, smiling, pensively gazing at the devil puppet in Karl’s hand. It was a cheap wooden thing with horns made of tin, a red cloak made of rags, and a scruffy tail—the butt of jokes that people laughed at, now vanquished.
But at the bottom of his heart, Johann knew that the devil would one day return.
Faust and I
A Sort of Afterword
This book exists thanks to the German silent-film director F. W. Murnau, my former German teacher Kurt Weiß, and the German Train Drivers’ Union. Why? Well, I better start at the beginning . . .
I must have been about six years old when I saw Murnau’s interpretation of Goethe’s Faust on television—a masterpiece of expressionist film. I was home alone, flicking through the channels as children do. The eerie black-and-white images of a huge devil with a billowing cape, maimed plague victims, and a bearded old man wandering through foggy landscapes disturbed me more than any horror movie I watched later in life. (Take it as a warning to all parents who think they have to introduce their children to art at a young age—art can cause nightmares!)
At the start of the film, the word Faust—meaning “fist”—was written in old-fashioned letters, and for years I wondered what that meant. I always assumed it was about a fist punching someone’s face, but eventually I learned that it was the name of the bearded old man who is later turned into a handsome youth who falls in love with a girl named Gretchen. I was less interested in the love story back then—the devil was much more fascinating, and the fog, and the terrifying grimaces of the era of silent film. Those movies still hold an almost magical fascination for me.
Years later, in high school, I happened across Faust again. This time it came from my German teacher, Kurt Weiß—one of the few teachers who truly helped to shape me. (Every one of us knows one of those—they aren’t all bad, are they?) Herr Weiß was a movie buff, and he regularly showed old Lubitsch and Chaplin movies at his home. One day, he dragged us to a matinee showing of Faust—the well-known 1960 adaptation by Gustaf Gründgens. Bored seventeen-year-olds never say no to getting out of the classroom, even if that means having to watch a dusty old postwar film.
Much to my surprise, the movie captivated me at once, evoking old memories from Murnau’s Faust. I was moved by the story, but most of all I was fascinated by Goethe’s verses, which have stayed with me ever since. Not long after our field trip to the cinema, I bought the drama on a dozen cassette tapes and listened to it again and again. I realized just how many of Goethe’s lines had become part of everyday German language. To this day I love quoting from Faust, and this novel, too, is spiked with quotations. (During pub crawls, I never fail to impress by shouting “Uncertain shapes—again you haunt me” at my drinking buddies. And whenever we go hiking, I like to torture my family with excerpts from the Easter walk or the opening monologue, frowning broodingly and looking altogether Faustian.)
And I often do feel like Faust—never satisfied, forever searching for something. The beauty lies right before my eyes, but I don’t see it. That’s probably one of the reasons Faust is considered the most German of all mythical characters.
And this is where the German Train Drivers’ Union comes into play.
In 2015, I was on a book tour near Karlsruhe when the German train drivers decided to go on strike. As a result, I got stuck in a small town called Bretten and couldn’t get home. Any and all rental cars had been snatched up by wily businessmen who had smelled the rat before me. And there were no buses.
So I made the best of a bad situation, extended my hotel stay, rented a bicycle, and started to explore the beautiful Kraichgau region. That’s how I came upon a small place called Knittlingen. There was an old stone church, a tiny church square that didn’t really deserve to be called a “square,” and next to it, a house with a sign. The sign read:
BIRTHPLACE OF DR. JOHANNES FAUST, 1480 TO 1540.
Intrigued, I climbed off my bike and looked more closely. Until then I’d always thought Faust was nothing but a myth. Had he really existed?
A small museum stood next door to the house where Faust was born, and thankfully it was open. I went inside and met a quack, astrologer, clairvoyant, alchemist, charlatan, wise doctor, and cunning conjurer who had lived around the year 1500 and made an astonishing international career following his death. Almost forty years after my first encounter with Faust, the doctor entered my life as a real person, a historical figure!
From that moment I knew that I would write a novel about him.
At this point I’d like to extend my sincere gratitude to the German Train Drivers’ Union. Maybe sometimes the world needs to stand still for inspiration to sprout.
There are only a handful of sources about the historical Faust, but plenty of speculation. As a novelist I have the privilege of picking and choosing what I like from the existing literature on the subject without getting a rap on the knuckles from historians.
Knittlingen is considered the most likely birthplace for Faust. I decided on his date of birth because of a source that quotes Faust as having said to the prior of the Rebdorf Augustinian collegiate church that “when the sun and Jupiter stand in the same degree of a zodiac . . . prophets are born.” I put that together with Faust’s middle name, Georg—Saint George’s feast day is April 23, so I got April 23, 1478. The name Jörg Gerlach (Faust’s stepfather in my book) came from a farmer who lived in that very house in Knittlingen. A piece of paper with a magic spell was found in one of the thresholds, and a star-shaped alchemist’s cupboard also allegedly belonged to this property.
There isn’t much known about where Faust went from Knittlingen. It is possible that he studied at Heidelberg, because there is a corresponding name in the records. Then he probably roamed the empire, and the legends frequently mention a black dog and a companion by the name of Wagner. Faust cast a horoscope for the Bamberg prince-bishop Georg III; he spent time in Erfurt, at the Rebdorf monastery, in Nuremberg, and in Ingolstadt. The famous Sponheim abbot Johannes Trithemius (a type of magician himself) wrote nasty things about a charlatan and sodomite by the name of Faust in a letter. Sodomy was a term for homosexuality back then—a theme I pick up in my novel. A meeting between the historical Faust and polymath Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, as described in my novel, is possible but not proven.
Faust’s demise is a well-known legend. Allegedly, during an alchemy experiment in the town of Staufen in the Breisgau, he blew himself up in a rather gruesome manner: “Brains stuck to the wall . . . and his eyes and teeth were strewn about.” Unsurprising that people deduced the devil must have been at play, with such a theatrical exit. And thus the tale of Faust’s pact with Satan was born—a topic as old as mankind.
The large number of stories and legends that started to circulate following his death show just how well known the figure of Doctor Johann Georg Faustus was in the German empire. In the year 1587, the book printer Johann Spies published the Historia von D. Johann Fausten, which became the first German bestseller and even sold abroad.
And now the story really gets interesting.
Toward the end of the sixteenth century, a certain Christopher Marlowe in London happened across that book. His competitor, William Shakespeare, had published one hit play after the other, and Marlowe needed a good story. Faust’s suited him perfectly. The plot had everything a good play needed: action, blood, special effects, the dramatic downfall of the protagonist, and, of course, the devil. For theater owners back then, the devil was as valuable as comic-book superheroes are to the film industry today. You couldn’t go wrong with the devil.
The play, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, was a great success in England. But there were too many directors and actors on the island, and so some of them immigrated to other countries, including the German empire. They brought with them Marlowe’s play and performed it at fairs. But since barely any of the English actors spoke German, they introduced a comic figure who summarized the plot between acts. That was the birth of the Harlequin, also called Hanswurst or Kasper.
The play became very popular in the German empire, especially as a puppet show, and so about a hundred and fifty years later, a young boy named Johann Wolfgang—who would become famous under his last name, Goethe—was fascinated by the story. Just like me with Murnau’s disturbing film, Goethe couldn’t stop thinking about the material. From August 1771 until May 1772 he worked as a young lawyer in Frankfurt, where he witnessed the trial of a child murderess. In her desperation, a certain Susanna Margaretha Brandt had killed her newborn child. Goethe was deeply moved by the case, and by adding this sad story to the Faust theme, he created the Faust tragedy that is now considered the most German of all German tragedies—loved, venerated, canonized, and told and retold again and again.
An ancient story about the eternal battle between man and evil, about love and temptation, about a rise and a fall, and about a pact with the devil—the archetypal parable that was probably already known to the cavemen by their campfires.
Oh, yes, and finally my favorite joke on the matter:
The devil comes to the writer and says, “I promise you a bestseller in the millions! You will publish countless editions, enjoy fame, interviews, television appearances, and bathtubs full of money! All you have to do in return is this.” The devil raises one finger and grins nastily. “You must sell me your soul.”
The writer eyes the devil with suspicion for a long while. Then he says, “OK. And what’s the catch?”
There is a little Faust in every one of us—and in writers, a rather large one.
This novel cost me more sweat and effort than other books, and it exists only because a whole bunch of people helped me.
First up, I’d like to thank Gerd Schweizer and Berit Bräuer, who supplied me with great amounts of literature on the topic of Faust and contributed many important details. Berit Bräuer has written an excellent nonfiction book on Faust (Im Bann der Zeit), which I recommend highly.
Eva-Maria Springer led me through the Faust museum in Knittlingen and Faust’s birthplace; Brit Veith showed me through Knittlingen, and Barbara Gittinger was my expert for Maulbronn Monastery. Thank you also to Richard Dietz from the International Society for Faust (Internationale Faust-Gesellschaft e.V.), which manages Faust’s heritage and regularly invites the public to interesting talks.
Alexander Kipphahn from the Bretten city archive supplied me with the names of wealthy Bretten merchants; Horst Kaufmann from the Schembart Society (Schembart-Gesellschaft Nürnberg e.V.) told me everything I needed to know about the Nuremberg Schembartlauf, which served as my showdown. The Nuremberg city archive was a helpful partner on the topics of Loch waterways, Loch Prison, and the Hospital of the Holy Ghost. As they have so often, the Latin translations came from Dr. Manfred Heim; my rather poor Italian was corrected by Barbara Lambiase and Christian Platzer, and my French was checked by Alexandra Baisch. Helmut Hornung answered my questions on the subjects of comets, laterna magica, and telescopes. He pointed out to me that a telescope of the kind Tonio and later Faust own in my novel wasn’t in fact invented until 1608 in Holland. Well, I think the devil was ahead of his time—in my book, at least. As always, any mistakes are on my own muddleheadedness, not on my expert helpers.
Thank you also to my father, who—being a doctor—knows how fingers and eyes are amputated. Thank you to Gerd, Martina, and Sophia from the Gerd F. Rumler Agency; they support me in every which way, from coffee to emotional support. Thank you to the entire team at Ullstein Publishing—you do a great job—and to my favorite editor, Uta Rupprecht. My son, Niklas, helped me to remove anything childish and corny from the beginning of the novel. My daughter, Lily, a keen artist, gave her blessing for the beautiful cover of the book’s first edition.
A second and important editor in this project was my wife, Katrin, who was the first to notice that the final act wasn’t quite working yet. I’m sorry if I was being a drama queen at first. You were right, as always!
Faust for Beginners
Are you a Faust expert? Below are quotations I borrowed from Goethe’s famous tragedy Faust (translation by Charles T. Brooks). Did you find them in the book?
Name is but sound and smoke. (Verse 3456)
Quite a peculiar juice is blood. (Verse 1740)
The mass can only be impressed by masses. (Prelude in the Theatre)
Am called Magister, Doctor, indeed . . . (Verse 3600)
Remember then! Of one make ten, the two let be, make even three, there’s wealth for thee. (Verse 2540)
That I may know what the world contains in its innermost heart and finer veins, see all its energies and seeds, and deal no more in words but in deeds. (Verse 382)
Philosophy and medicine, and law, and ah! Theology, too. (Verse 354)
The spirit that denies . . . (Verse 1338)
Well, art is long! And life is short and fleeting. (Verse 558)
[Part of the part am I, which once was all,] the Gloom that brought forth Light [itself from out her mighty womb.] (Verse 1350)
In the beginning was the deed! (Verse 1237)
About the Author
Oliver Pötzsch worked for years as a journalist and scriptwriter for Bavarian television. He is the author of seven books in the international bestselling Hangman’s Daughter Tales historical series, the children’s novel Knight Kyle and the Magic Silver Lance, and the Black Musketeers series, including Book of the Night and Sword of Power. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Oliver lives in Munich with his family. For more information, visit www.oliver-poetzsch.de.
About the Translator
Lisa Reinhardt studied English and linguistics at University of Otago and lives with her family on the beautiful West Coast of New Zealand. Her most recent work includes The Council of Twelve, the seventh book in Oliver Pötzsch’s Hangman’s Daughter Tales series.
