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In an election season when accusations of ‘Faustian bargains’ are flying, CU Boulder scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers reflects on what that really means

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard noted that “every notable historical era will have its own Faust.”

The current election season seems to have an abundance of them, judging by the frequent cries of “Faustian bargain” made by media pundits, candidates in races across the country and members of the opinion class. With the term so commonly used as Election Day approaches—generally as an accusation of having made a deal with the devil or of selling one’s soul—it seems fair to ask: Is this what Goethe meant?

Is claiming that a candidate made a Faustian bargain if they aligned themselves with a certain politician, voted a particular way or made certain stump-speech promises true to what the German author envisioned two centuries ago?

Helmut Müller-Sievers, a CU Boulder professor of German, notes that “the Faustian bargain always has to do with the value of our conscience.”

“The Faustian bargain always has to do with the value of our conscience,” says Helmut Müller-Sievers, a professor of German in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literature. “You're basically saying, so long as I have created advantages for my family, created advantages for my political ideology, created advantages for my short-term goals in life, it will not bother me. I will be able to sleep.”

Müller-Sievers—whose academic focus includes the intersections of literature, science and engineering in the 18th and 19th centuries and the history of technology—teaches a course on Johann Goethe’s tragic play Faust, in which he also examines the motif of the Faustian bargain as it appears in literature.

A deal with the devil

According to Müller-Sievers, the mythical idea of the Faustian deal with the devil as we understand it today originated in Germany sometime around the beginning of the 16th century. Likely the first literary treatment is by Christopher Marlowe late in the 1500s.

“But already Marlowe situates the play in Germany,” Müller-Sievers explains. “There seems to be a sense that the Reformation might have emboldened people to make their own relationship with God and the devil, so there’s a little bit of polemics going on there.”

In Goethe’s rendition, Faust is a bitter academic who has been seeking truth and failing in his pursuit. “Nothing gives him satisfaction, and he falls into what we would today call a  depression. He is a cynic,” Müller-Sievers says.

Faust meets the devil, who is in the form of a dog that soon transforms into the demon Mephistopheles, and they begin a debate over the price for Faust’s soul. “It's the banter of super clever people who have no values and are too highly educated. That was already a common criticism at the time—intellectuals who want to show their brilliance but have no inner core.”

The two soon agree to a contest: Mephistopheles will win Faust's soul if he is able to entice Faust into wanting to hold on to some experience or aspect of the world that he finds desirable or fulfilling. Faust is convinced at first that he can resist, but soon succumbs.

The story of Faust has inspired artists for centuries, including the etching (left, ca. 1652) and a flying above the skyline (right) by Eugène Delacroix for an 1828 translation of Goethe's Faust.

“We use the term Faustian bargain, and we think there must have been some kind of decision, but it might well be a gradual sliding—small bargains you make along the way, and then can’t go back,” Müller-Sievers says.

“It is basically a question of whether we are able to push aside our moral qualms when we act. At a certain point, will they come and bite us, and make us change? Will our conscience ever rise up and force us to denounce compromises that we've made?”

Müller-Sievers cites the example of German actor Gustaf Gründgens, whose career is portrayed in the Oscar-winning 1981 film Mephisto by Hungarian director István Szabó. “It’s bizarre. He was one of the great actors of his time, and maybe the greatest actor ever to play Mephisto on the stage,” he says.

“But he made a deal with the Nazi regime so he could continue to work in theater.” Gründgens continued playing Mephisto in performance in Germany in the run up to and even during World War II.

Sometimes, as in Gründgens’ case, one makes a deal with a reigning power rather than an individual, Müller-Sievers notes, and sometimes a large percentage of a population makes a deal.

“In the former East Germany, the GDR, you had an oppressive regime, and many people thought, ‘Well, I have to cut a deal with this system to get a job or get ahead,’ and they started snooping on other people,” Müller-Sievers explains.

“There were conscientious objectors, but it was embarrassing that so many people consented to this, and it was embarrassing later when all the documents came out, and you could read all the terms of the bargains people had made.”

Top image: , artist unknown

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