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