Faust has an engaging personality, so many today’s film characters are based on him. He is still relevant today. Berman achieved a great fictional analysis that is flowing, rational and comprehensive.
Berman describes how Goethe’s Faust presents a refined story that associated to social and political development of Germany within the historical context of a revolutionary western world. Goethe also provided what would seem to be a prophetic understanding of how the aspiration for development will invariably have consequences and result in human tragedy.
Berman splits the story of Faust into three metamorphoses: The Dreamer, The Lover and The Developer. In each section, both development and tragedy occur to some degree.
The Dreamer sees Faust, an insightful and well-educated man who accomplished what he could but now he feels trapped. He wants to change but he can’t, nothing cheers him up. He is having a mid-life crisis.
He is pulled back from the verge of suicide by the sound of Easter Sunday church bells, which sound he knows so well. The memory of his lower class childhood opened himself up to a whole lost dimension of his being that can renew him. He is ready to start a new life in the world, outside of his study in society where he can grow. But it will take "the powers of the underworld" to make such a synthesis work.
Mephisto provides him with "money as an extension of man, with speed to do great things in the world and also this will generate a sexual aura thus making capitalism a leading force of Faust's development.
The Lover begins in the Second Metamorphoses. Faust fall in love with Gretchen - with her innocence that draws him to her, representing something him can no longer have. But like in most love stories it ends with tragedy, loss of her life. She is betrayed by Faust.
To me this is where Faust begins to lose his humanity. He realizes to get to where he wants and to achieve his desires, there are going to be destruction and victims and that he cannot afford to 'feel' any remorse in his path - you would think it is the very notion of capitalism but it is also central in socializm as well.
Faust rises up again in The Developer metamorphosis and leaps entirely into the creation of his new development. "Faust's projects will require not only a great deal of capital but control over a vast extent of territory and a large number of people." His idea of the new modern world would leave no traces of the old world or anythings that comes in his path like the lighthouse and the old couple whom he asked of Mephisto to 'get rid' of.
"He will be a destroyer and creator, the dark and deeply ambiguous figure that our age has come to call "the developer".
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