If I remember correctly, it was in the seventh grade at the polytechnic high school, i.e. elementary school, in a small town in Saxony. We were more than twenty students in the class and each one had to recite it, the Easter walk. Sometimes the text was mumbled, sometimes stressed jerkily, sometimes one got stuck. But in turn it was said stoically: “From the church’s venerable night / they have all been brought to light”. When it was finally my turn, the venerable slipped out as an venerable night – which was heard with horror and had an effect on the censors. Besides, Gretgen’s real name is Gretchen, isn’t it? No chance. Goethe had noted a “venerable night”, one does not take any liberties there; especially not when the artist’s word dem Faust comes from the noblest of our heritage. You looked closely at small blunders and deeply resented large ones. “Assault the heights of culture!” was the task for the GDR citizen. On a steep nature trail we went up. He lived up there Faust, there they planted the summit flag. But woe to him who strayed from the right path along the way.
The mountain guide of the masses and highest Walter of the cultural heritage in the 1950s, Ulbricht, warned – and his Goethe is so “great” for him that he thinks he has to say it three times: “We are fighting to maintain our great German cultural heritage , by not allowing one of the most important works of our great German poet Goethe to be formalistically defaced, by making the great idea in Goethe’s Faust into a caricature, because that happened in some works in the GDR, for example in the so-called Faustus by Eisler and in the production of Urfaust.” What in the name of hell had happened?
Here, in May 1953, Walter Ulbricht once again railed against Hanns Eisler’s opera libretto Johann Faustus, which had been published the previous year and immediately scathingly denounced. The composer of the GDR national anthem took the liberty of placing his Faust in the period of the Peasants’ War, as a failure. That was unacceptable. Only a few defended the text as a successful poem, his friend Bertolt Brecht for example. Opponents and opportunists outnumbered them. It was said that Eisler’s work struck “German national feeling in the face”. Its creator shows pleasure in digging in the dirt. Letters to the editor from “working people” appeared who were outraged by the “frivolous mockery of what is perhaps the most ingenious masterpiece that has become dear to the German people”. Finally the word fell: formalistic. No one could reliably know what it actually meant and when it applied. But once it was said, the work in question was dead and buried and, formerly in the Soviet Union, the creator often with it. Eisler fled the disaster and went to Vienna for a year. Later, when he was drunk, he cut up most of the music he had already composed for the opera with nail scissors. The libretto was first staged in the GDR in 1982 at the Berliner Ensemble.
Ulbricht’s other blow was aimed at a performance of this BE. There, at the beginning of 1952, enthusiastic young people from the team got together and, initially just for their own amusement, recorded scenes from the Urfaust rehearsed – Goethe’s sketch too Faust I. Egon Monk, 25 years old, later a successful television director in Germany, was the director. Käthe Reichel, 26, rehearsed Margarethe, Gretchen. Brecht, the artistic director of the shop, knew about the matter, and before the group was ready to play for him, he came, watched them and from then on got really involved.
Footage of the original Faust production preserved
the Urfaust namely fitted in with the master’s plans, and he liked the cheeky access of the boys to the old piece. Faust, here: not at all a stage hero struggling “Faustically” for the truth, but a less talented scientist who tries all sorts of hocus-pocus to come to recognize and feel. Mephisto: not demonic, not “lord of the underworld”, but a subaltern who, in order to get hold of Faust’s dear soul, must strive to get him what he desires. Margarethe: not a touchingly German girl, but a lower middle-class woman who asks very pointed questions when it comes to her lover’s belief in God. It is not a step on Faust’s path to higher things. The fact that he lets them down finds no excuse à la “where there is planing, there are shavings”.
In his work journal, Brecht noted: “URFAUST gets along merrily with the young people. a beautifully realistic poem! of course, done so naively, it may cause trouble. Our audience schoolmasters feel underestimated when they are allowed to enjoy themselves.” In the background, of course, was the horror of Gustaf Gründgen’s not at all naive Mephisto, which he had played so successfully, had been able to play when the fascinating evil was still there few years in Hitler’s Berlin. On the other hand, it was a pleasure to rediscover how sharp, witty, evil and beautiful Goethe’s verses and prose are, how lively his characters are.
The opportunity arose to show the production in Potsdam first. Brecht knew something like that from the USA: Before a production comes to New York’s Broadway, it runs in Cleveland or somewhere else, out of town tryouts they call it. And Brecht absolutely wanted the play for Berlin. In Potsdam he would see in advance how it works and how it is received. The premiere was in April 1952. Critics, particularly enthusiastic about Käthe Reichel, wrote: “If we can wholeheartedly recommend a performance to our readers, then it is the performance of Urfaust.” The SED basic organization at the Potsdam stage itself already saw things differently: “The task of the director does not consist in interesting experiments, but in the unadulterated rendition of our classics.” Where is the edifying? faithfulness! – So something was brewing.
Because of this, and also of their own free will, the team reviewed their work. The subject was seen in a more differentiated way: Faust less charlatan, Mephisto less plebeian. And rehearsed with a different cast, only Käthe Reichel continued to play Margarethe. Once a young man came from Rostock, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, later a film director. He brought his 8mm camera and filmed. So that, silent but moving, a document of the staging has been preserved: in the background stretches a cyclorama, painted with Hieronymus Bosch figures, falling to hell. Before that, the respective rooms are simply built. In it solid, concentrated game. The scenic arrangements very clear. The Berlin performance came out in mid-March 1953.
A radio voice was the first to report apostasy and arbitrariness. “…that fist! A Prometheus who wants to snatch fire from the gods? Not the slightest bit!” And demanded “that the Berliner Ensemble seriously examine his work”. On May 27, Ulbricht gave the speech mentioned at the beginning. The next day it struck New Germany to. Here, too, the production was added to Eisler’s opera libretto, which had already fallen victim to damnation: “This performance can only be understood as a rejection of the classical traditions of our national culture.”
Scarcely has it been shown in Berlin than Brecht, forced to do so, cancels the production. The GDR, once founded in the Goethe year 1949, believes that it has a timeless knowledge of how the poet’s work should be interpreted, and in particular the Faust stays a touchy-holy cow for a long time. It wasn’t until 1982 that this was explained New Germany officially that Goethe also “always allows new discoveries”. In 1984 a mysteriously enigmatic, fascinating one appears on the boards of the BE Urfaust, a game about superstition and science of the Middle Ages. The painter and stage designer Horst Sagert created this work of art. Dark Solitaire.