WHATEVER became of Faust? His pact with the Devil is well remembered, not to mention his unfortunate affair with Gretchen. Less familiar is the fact that he was rehabilitated, at least in Goethe's version. He ended up in charge of a kind of symbolic public-works program, draining swamps and reclaiming land from the sea, thus creating new territory where millions might live "not in security, but active and free." To Goethe, the serene humanist poet, it seemed like the perfect task for a character snatched back from the brink of damnation.
Technology has a way of re-enacting poetry. West Germany is currently considering a network of Autobahnen im Dunkeln, or highways in the dark: huge subterranean pipelines that will carry industrial waste and scrap to the coast, dump them into the ocean and form new land. "Under green fields, under our feet," writes an awed British journalist, "the thick current of Germany's yesterday will creep endlessly down to the sea." The scheme is symbolic of contemporary Germany; for 20 years, its people have sought to eliminate the rubbish of their past and build anew.
The Contradictions
In many ways, they have succeeded spectacularly well. But redemption through hard work, whether prescribed by Goethe or by Ludwig Erhard, has its limitations. Despite the visible and invisible Autobahnen, despite the gleaming cars and ambitious towers, despite the homburgs in Hamburg and the shoulder minks in Munich, despite all the scenes of prosperity, West Germany is deeply troubled.
Seelenkleister, or brooding about the state of one's soul, has always been a pastime of the Germans, but now they have more than usual cause to engage in it. For years, the economic miracle represented a kind of occupational therapy, a materialist escape; while it remains the dominant fact in Germany, more and more people no longer find it enough. Germans are uneasy about their place in the world, impatient with the obstacles that loom on all sides, resentful of the contradictions in which they are forced to live.
Two decades after the end of World War II. Germany is still divided, with 18 million people condemned to subsist in the prison camp that is the Russian-occupied Eastern zone. Less painful divisions elsewhere have started international tantrums, blood feuds, wars. Yet the Germans have been relatively patient and reasonable.
West Germany is the world's second largest trader after the U.S. Yet German political influence is not remotely equal to its economic power. In foreign affairs, Bonn is subservient not only to Washington, but often to London and Paris, and it moves uncertainly in the rest of the world; during the recent Middle Eastern imbroglio, West Germans felt that they were kicked around even by the Arabs.