7.43 Goethe — «Faust I» (the Gretchen tragedy) — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read the core of the Gretchen tragedy in Faust I : the first meeting in the street, Gretchen at her spinning wheel, the question about religion in Martha's garden, the prayer to the Mater dolorosa, and the prison scene that ends the play. Hear how Goethe changes verse with the speaker: Faust's long, free lines, Gretchen's short songs, the prose-like broken lines of the prison scene. Understand the famous phrases that have become part of the language: die Gretchenfrage , Name ist Schall und Rauch . Read the elided forms of verse: Ruh’ , hab’ ich , du hält’st . Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the German aloud; all of them come back below. German English So sind wir um Mitternacht geschieden. Then at midnight we part company. Name ist Schall und Rauch, A name is sound and smoke, Hier ist ein Fläschchen! Drey Tropfen nur Here is a little bottle! Only three drops Und ihr Verbrechen war ein guter Wahn! And her crime was a well-meant delusion! Meine Mutter hab’ ich umgebracht, I have killed my mother, Mir ist’s als müßt’ ich mich zu dir zwingen, I feel as if I had to force myself to come to you, Prerequisites : 7.42 — you need the study scenes of 7.28 Reading and the verse forms of 2.40 Grammar . About this text In 7.28 Reading you read how Faust, a scholar in despair, makes his pact with Mephistopheles. The second half of the first part of the play tells a different story: Faust, made young again by a witch's potion, sees a girl in the street, Margarete or Gretchen, a simple young woman from a pious family, and wants her. With Mephistopheles' help he gives her jewels, meets her in the garden of her neighbour Martha, and seduces her. The consequences destroy her. Her mother dies of the sleeping draught Faust gave Gretchen for her; her brother Valentin is killed by Faust in a duel; she drowns her newborn child, and is condemned to death. The passages here are five scenes, about 3,000 words, from the first edition of 1808 in the transcription of German Wikisource, with the omitted scenes marked […] . Goethe drew on a real case: in 1772 a young woman named Susanna Margaretha Brandt was executed in Frankfurt for killing her child, and Goethe followed the trial. The Gretchen tragedy turned that case into one of the most famous love stories in German. Grammar in the text The verse follows the speaker. Faust speaks in the irregular rhymed lines of the whole play. Gretchen at the spinning wheel sings in short lines of two stresses, with a refrain: Meine Ruh’ ist hin, / Mein Herz ist schwer . Her prayer in the Zwinger uses the form of a church hymn. In the prison scene the verse breaks apart into short, disordered lines, and the last lines of the play are almost speech. One line of the song is printed here as the first edition (1808) has it, Meiner armer Sinn ; modern editions print Mein armer Sinn , which is also the grammatical form today. Elision. Verse drops unstressed e and marks it with an apostrophe: Ruh’ for Ruhe , hab’ ich , sag’ , du hält’st . Read the forms as if the vowel were there and simply unsounded. Old spellings. The edition of 1808 writes Noth , Drey , Ueber and schreyen ; you met these forms in 2.39 Grammar and their history in 11.5 Background . The Gretchen question. Nun sag’, wie hast du’s mit der Religion? In everyday German die Gretchenfrage now means any direct question that goes to the heart of a matter and is hard to answer honestly, especially one about someone's convictions. Faust's evasive answer, Gefühl ist alles; / Name ist Schall und Rauch , is also a proverb. Reading it a second time, section by section Street (lines up to the first […] ). Faust offers to walk Margarete home; she refuses and walks away. He orders Mephistopheles to get her for him. Mephistopheles answers that she has just come from confession, and that over such an innocent girl he has no power; but he promises to arrange something, and Faust asks him for a present for her. Gretchen's room . Alone at her spinning wheel, Gretchen sings of the peace she has lost since she met him, of his walk, his smile and his kiss. Martha's garden . Gretchen makes Faust promise and asks him what he thinks of religion. He answers that no one can name or grasp God, that feeling is everything and a name only sound and smoke. She says she distrusts his companion. Before they part, Faust gives her a small bottle: three drops in her mother's drink will give her a deep sleep, so that the lovers can meet at night. Zwinger . Gretchen, pregnant and abandoned, puts fresh flowers before an image of the Mother of Sorrows and prays to be saved from shame and death. Prison . Faust comes at night with Mephistopheles' keys to free her. In her madness she takes him for the executioner, then knows him, and tells of her mother and the child she drowned. She will not flee. When Mephistopheles appears, she turns from both of them to God. Mephistopheles says Sie ist gerichtet! , she is judged; a voice from above answers Ist gerettet! , she is saved; and her voice calls after Faust as he disappears: Heinrich! Heinrich! Full translation An English translation of the whole text, made for this course and kept close to the original. The numbers are the paragraph numbers of the original text, so you can move between the two. Street. Faust. Margarete passing by. Faust. My pretty young lady, may I venture To offer you my arm and my escort? Margarete. I am neither a lady nor pretty, I can go home without an escort. She frees herself and goes off. Faust. By heaven, this child is beautiful! I have never seen anything like her. She is so well-behaved and virtuous, And yet a little pert at the same time. The red of her lips, the glow of her cheek, I shall not forget it all the days of my life! The way she casts her eyes down Has stamped itself deep into my heart; The way she was so curt with me, That is now simply delightful! Enter Mephistopheles. Faust. Listen, you must get me that girl! Mephistopheles. Well, w