Faust’s journeys into “the whole world” figure prominently in his quest for experience and knowledge. Where did they take him? First (in Chapter 25), he describes how he flew in a coach pulled by two winged dragons to an altitude of forty-seven miles and from there looked down upon the world, with the devil serving as his guide:
16 Dieter Wuttke, “Humanismus in den deutschsprachigen Ländern und Entdeckungsgeschichte 1493–1534,” Pirckheimer-Jahrbuch, VII (1992), 27; also 19, 40, 47. Concerning Brant, see Wolfgang Neuber, “Verdeckte Theologie: Sebastian Brant und die Südamerikaberichte der Frühzeit,” Der Umgang mit dem Fremden: Beiträge zur Literatur aus und über Lateinamerika, ed. Titus Heydenreich (München, 1986), 9–29. In the Narrenschiff (1494) which contains the first reference to America in the German language, Chapter 66 warns against exploring all lands (“erfarung aller land”), hence against traveling to faraway and unknown regions: “dann wem syn synn zu wandeln stot / Der mag nit gentzlich dienen got” (Das Narrenschiff, ed.
Manfred Lemmer, 2nd ed. (Tübingen, 1968), 169.
17 Concerning the analogy of Faust and the Biblical Fall, see Hoelzel, ch. 1.
Darnach sahe ich am Tag herab auff die Welt / da sahe ich viel Königreich / Fürstenthumb vnnd Wasser / also daß ich die gantze Welt / Asiam / Aphricam vnnd Europam / gnugsam sehen kondte. Vnnd in solcher Höhe sagt ich zu meinem Diener / So weise vnd zeige mir nu an / wie diß vnd das Land vnd Reich genennet werde. Das thät er / vnnd sprach: Sihe / diß auff der lincken Hand ist das Vngerlandt. Jtem / diß ist Preussen / dort schlimbs ist Sicilia / Polen / Dennmarck / Jtalia / Teutschland. Aber Morgen wirstu sehen Asiam / Aphricam / Jtem / Persiam vnd Tartarey / Jndiam / Arabiam. Vnd weil der Wind hinder sich schlägt / so sehen wir jetzund Pommern / Reussen vnd Preussen / deßgleichen Polen / Teutschland / Vngern vnd Osterreich. Am dritten Tag sahe ich in die grosse vnnd kleine Türckey / Persiam / Jndiam vnd Aphricam / Vor mir sahe ich Constantinopel[.] (F 58)
After that, I looked down during the day upon the world and I saw many kingdoms, principalities, and bodies of water. Thus, I could well enough see the whole world: Asia, Africa, and Europe. And at such altitude, I said to my servant: Now then, show and point out to me what this and that land and realm are called. He did that and said: Look, this on the left-hand side is the land of Hungary. Likewise, this is Prussia. Over there is Sicily, Poland, Denmark, Italy, Germany. But tomorrow you’ll see Asia, Africa, likewise, Persia and Tartary, India, Arabia. And because the wind shifts, we are now seeing Pomerania, Russia, and Prussia, likewise Poland, Germany, Hungary, and Austria. On the third day, I saw Greater and Lesser Turkey, Persia, India, and Africa. Before me, I saw Constantinople.
This passage amounts to no more than catalogue-style all-inclusive name-dropping from an extreme distance, hardly an “erfarung” (“experience”) of reality which mattered most for the empirically oriented natural historians of the early modern era.18 It is the same in Chapter 26, where the second journey is described. Now, Faust travels for twenty-five days through the heavens on a winged horse into which the devilish Mephistophiles has transformed himself. What appears there is another list of countries and provinces, this time only European, over which he passes without seeing much he would be interested in (“darinnen er nit viel sehen kondte / darzu er Lust hette,” F 60). Nor does he supply any information beyond the mere list of the names of places he has only seen from afar without ever having touched ground. Immediately after
18 See Müller (n. 14).
that, however, he sets out a third time and this time conscientiously enumerates the places he visits and inspects on his curiously zig-zag route: Trier, Paris, Mainz, Ulm, Naples, Venice, Rome, Florence, and other cities in Italy and France, especially many in the German-speaking territories, as well as Cracow, Crete, Constantinople, Cairo, Memphis, and the Caucasus. He apparently catches a bird’s or flying horse’s eye view of other European lands, too, as well as of India, Africa, and Persia, but these are just named without commentary. The places he actually visits, however, are briefly described in Baedeker fashion, with a view to points of interest: institutions of higher learning, cloisters, palaces,
“temples,” castles, towers, gates, and especially churches with the obligatory reference to reliquaries, monks, ecclesiastical dignitaries, and imperial insignias. Sometimes the references include brief histories, again reminiscent of the repertory of tourist guidebooks, not to mention the inclusion of noteworthy native products, above all alcoholic ones.
Only Rome and Constantinople receive more thorough treatment, not so much because of their cultural attractions, but because they offer Faust an opportunity to use his magic to play cheap tricks on the powerful people there, the Pope and the Sultan or “Türkischen Kaiser” (“Turkish Emperor”), and to decry the moral turpitude (“Hurerey” or harlotry) both here and there.
To be sure, in this way a culture in the far lands beyond the Christian occident comes into play, but apart from the mere mention of Asia, Africa, and India (words empty of any specific content) and the distant glimpse of Paradise located in the Middle East, the geographical and cultural horizon of Faust’s trips around the world remains essentially eurocentric and Christian. As a constant threat to the West, the Turks only constitute the frame of the picture, so to speak. Otherwise, Islam as a religion is not really taken seriously (for example, when Faust parodistically impersonates Mohammed at the Sultan’s palace). Is that supposed to be Faust’s “whole world?” One fails to find even the slightest reference to America. For the author of the Faustbuch, nothing exists to the west of the Pillars of Hercules. Yet, how is that possible at a time when the European range of vision had been extended to the fourth continent for almost a century — an extension that resulted in problems of self-image for the Europeans and their culture, as they confronted the unfamiliar life-forms in that antipodal New World, forms of life that
could not even exist according to the perspective of the Bible and the Church Fathers?
But is it really true that the sixteenth-century knowledge of the newly discovered islands and regions on the far side of the Atlantic played any meaningful role at all in the consciousness of a people living, unlike the Iberians, Italians, Dutch, and English, in territories which were not lands of seafarers, hence of explorers, conquerors, or colonizers?19 As is well known, competition was rampant among the seafaring powers with respect to discoveries in the Western hemisphere. In this context, knowledge was power and it was guarded with care. The Spanish crown, for instance, did everything possible in the sixteenth century to prevent news about the New World from becoming public (see note 21 below).
So one wonders: to what extent were the German territories — which were not involved in such competition — receptive to news about America and its man-eaters?
The Faustbuch author was not the only one in his century who had a blind spot with regard to Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, and the Caribbean Islands (“discovered” in the last years of the fifteenth century and the first three decades of the sixteenth). In the German-speaking lands geographical reference works and histories of the world appearing as late as in the latter half of the sixteenth century remained so indebted to Classical tradition that they did not deal with the New World.20 If it was treated at all, then only very briefly, as if it were irrelevant.
What appeared about America in German makes up “less than 1%
of all publications” until mid-century. “Signs of an imminent new age […], such as strange heavenly occurrences, bizarre monstrosities, miraculous stories [and] questions of faith arising in connection with the Reformation,” not to mention the threat of the Turks, received more attention. Even in France, which around mid-century had only halfheartedly begun to colonize and explore Latin America in conflict
19 In the standard work by J. H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance (Berkeley, CA, 1981), no German explorers are discussed. Boies Penrose mentions Germans only en passant in his Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance, 1420–1620 (Cambridge, MA, 1952).
20 N 47; see also Uta Lindgren, “Die Veränderung des europäischen Weltbilds durch die Entdeckung Amerikas,” Das Bild Lateinamerikas im deutschen Sprachraum, eds. Gustav Siebenmann and Hans-Joachim König (Tübingen, 1992), 27–29, and in the same volume Dietrich Briesemeister, “Das Amerikabild im deutschen Frühhumanismus,” 99–100.
with the Iberians, “twice as many books were published about Turkey than about North and South America between 1480 and 1609, and ten times as many brochures appeared concerning the then current Turkish question.” The situation was similar in Italy, Portugal, and Spain. To sum up: the discovery of America “does not seem to have interested the Europeans all that keenly.”21
Be that as it may, statistical evidence shows that printers in the German territories played a considerable, indeed, a leading role in the dissemination of news about the New World in the various publications of the day: broadsheets, collections of travel writing from the beginning to the end of the century (from Montalboddo and Simon Grynaeus/Johann Huttich to Theodor de Bry and Levinus Hulsius) as well as chapters in encyclopedic cosmographies like Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (first in 1544 with seven pages; expanded little by little after 1550 with additional Americana in many later editions, as in the Cosmographey of 1588, a work almost contemporaneous with the Faustbuch) and Sebastian Franck’s Weltbuch (1534; considerably amended with more Americana in 1567). To be sure, these genres feature translations almost exclusively, indeed several as in the case of the famous Columbus letter.
The same is true of Vespucci’s even more sensational reports in the first decade of the sixteenth century and of Cortés’s description of the conquest of Mexico (from 1520 on).22 Original German reports from the
21 Hans-Hagen Hildebrandt, “Die Aneignung des Fremden in europäischen Texten der Frühen Neuzeit,” Weltbildwandel: Selbstdeutung und Fremderfahrung im Epochenübergang vom Spätmittelalter zur Frühen Neuzeit, eds. Hans-Jürgen Bachorski and Werner Röcke (Trier, 1995), 107–108. See 108 for information about the New World as a Spanish state secret (far past the middle of the century). The statistic quoted is repeated in the afterword of Das Wagnerbuch von 1593, eds. Günther Mahal and Martin Ehrenfeuchter (Tübingen, 2005), II, 341; see also Die neuen Welten in alten Büchern: Entdeckung und Eroberung in frühen deutschen Schrift- und Bildzeugnissen, eds. Ulrich Knefelkamp and Hans-Joachim König (Bamberg, 1988), 24, 77; Lindgren, 22, and N 236: over against the total number of German broadsides, the portion of reports about America is “negligibly small”; “at least quantitatively the topic of the New World was not dominant there in the first decades after the discovery.”
22 Paul H. Baginsky, “Early German Interest in the New World (1494–1618),” The American-German Review, V:6 (1939), 8–13, 36. See also his German Works Relating to America, 1493–1800: A List Compiled from the Collection of the New York Public Library (New York, 1942); Philip Motley Palmer, German Works on America 1492–1800 (Berkeley, CA, 1952); Harold Jantz, “Images of America in the German Renaissance,”
First Images of America, 91–106; according to Jantz, the bibliographies by Baginsky and Palmer together contain “far less than half the pertinent early German material” (105); Rudolf Hirsch, “Printed Reports on the Early Discoveries and their
New World first appear in the 1550s in the wake of the activities of the Welsers in South America (more about that below). From then on, the cosmographical compendia recede into the background as sources of information (N 234), and the translations are outdone by the German eye witness reports, which address themselves emphatically to an audience back home with its own special interests, experiences, and expectations (N 254).
How likely is it then that news about the New World came to the attention of the Faustbuch author? Since nothing is known about his identity, except that he was a zealous Lutheran, one can only speculate on the basis of quantitative percentages for the sixteenth-century book market. On the one hand, and as noted, one can speak of a statistically slight level of German interest in America. On the other hand, the seminal reports by Columbus, Vespucci, Cortés, and those collected by Petrus Martyr Anghiera in the first half of the sixteenth century were European
“bestsellers.”23 In the second half of the century, Girolamo Benzoni’s Historia del mondo nuovo (1565) — which was used extensively by the Wagnerbuch author (1593) — belongs to that list as well. An “abundance of information” about America was thus easily available in Europe from the first quarter of the century onwards.24 In the time following, that is, in the second half of the century, that information continued to expand, deepen, and proliferate (even amid some controversy), thanks to more and more new travel descriptions and reports of explorations (as the relevant bibliographies attest). There is therefore little reason to assume that the author of the Faustbuch dispensed with even the slightest mention of America because, in contrast to his German-speaking contemporaries of at least some education, he did not have even a vague notion of it.
Why then this striking contraction of the horizon?
The almost medieval backwardness of the Faustbuch author is all the more surprising as most of the German source documents known to him were printed in the second half of the century (except for Latin texts,
Reception,” First Images, 537–562. Cp. N 223: “Bis zur Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts […] waren sowohl bei den Americana als auch im engeren bei den Brasiliana die relativ häufigsten Drucklegungen im deutschen Sprachraum zu verzeichnen.” See also N 238–240, 254: “ausschließlich Übersetzungen.” See also Die neuen Welten in alten Büchern, 77.
23 Frauke Gewecke, Wie die neue Welt in die alte kam (Stuttgart, 1986), 89.
24 Gewecke, 109.
he did not consult any foreign language sources). As I have already mentioned, German-language reports with a personal stamp and packed with experience about journeys and shocking adventures in the American lands of cannibals were available at the bookseller’s. Some of those accounts even enjoyed considerable popular success. The texts in question are those of Federmann, Staden, Schmidel, and Hutten (more about them below). The immediacy of experience recreated by such eye (and ear) witnesses — hair-raising, even wickedly unChristian exploits in disconcertingly foreign regions of the world where exotic savages25 considered roasted or smoked human flesh a delicacy — should have given the Faustbuch author an overabundant reservoir of thematic material for all kinds of adventures and sensational wonders. After all, the chapbook audience had open ears for such tales. Typically calling themselves Historia and touting the unadulterated nature of their documented “experience” in the title or in the foreword, such authentic, true-to-life reports should have been irresistible for the author of the Historia von D. Johann Fausten, dem weitbeschreyten Zauberer, “der noch bey Menschen Gedächtnuß gelebet” (“who was still present in living memory,” F 11), all the more so as he himself attached much importance to documentary truth.