In Goethe’s Faust, the “merry companions” have barely tasted the wine Mephisto has conjured up in Auerbach’s Cellar, when they break into the otherwise unknown ditty “Uns ist ganz kannibalisch wohl, / Als wie fünfhundert Säuen!” (“We feel cannibalistically good, / Just like five-hundred sows!”)2 How does something having to do with cannibals find its way to Leipzig? Or: why does Faust bump into cannibals on his trip through the “small world” of Germany, even if only in the lyrics of a song that is immediately dismissed with his “Ich hätte Lust, nun abzufahren” (“I’d like to leave now,” 2296)? Cannibals are, after all, man-eaters found in exotic latitudes. Goethe could easily have learned about them from Zedler’s Universallexicon: “Cannibals or Caribs” are
ein Volck, welches die Antillischen Inseln, so von ihnen den Namen haben, […] bewohnte, anietzo aber nur einige von denenselben inne hat.
Sie hatten im Brauch, die Gefangenen, welche sie im Kriege bekommen, zu fressen, nachdem sie dieselbigen zuvor 3 Tage hungern lassen, wie sie
1 This essay was translated into English by J. M. van der Laan. It was published originally as “D. Johann Faust und die Kannibalen: Geographische Horizonte im sechzehnten Jahrhundert” in Guthke, Die Reise ans Ende der Welt: Erkundungen zur Kulturgeschichte der Literatur (Tübingen, 2011), 82–110.
2 Goethe, Faust, lines 2293–2294.
Original text © Karl S. Guthke, CC BY 4.0; Translation © James van der Laan, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0126.01
denn auch allenthalben die todten Cörper ihrer Feinde auf der Wahlstatt auffrassen.3
a people who inhabited the Antilles Islands from which they have their name […], now however live on only some of them. It was their custom to eat the prisoners they took in war after they let them go hungry for three days, just as they everywhere ate up the dead bodies of their enemies found on the battlefield.
The 1793 second edition of Adelung’s dictionary — the go-to reference work of its kind in the age of Goethe — added to Zedler’s information.
Adelung recognized that a cannibal was “figürlich gesprochen,” “ein wilder, grausamer Mensch” (“figuratively speaking,” “a wild, horrible human being”), but acknowledged as well the geographically exotic aspect in his primary definition: “ein Einwohner der Karibischen Inseln, welche [sic] ihre Feinde zu essen pflegen” (“an inhabitant of the Caribbean Islands, accustomed to eating their enemies.”)4 Already in the early sixteenth century, since Amerigo Vespucci gave a purported eyewitness report of the man-eaters in the New World, “cannibal” and
“Carib” were interchangeable terms.5 According to the knowledge of the day, they existed nowhere else. In this way, a sensational taboo came into circulation of which Columbus had only heard, but which was confirmed by almost all sixteenth-century travelers to Central and South America. Cannibalism became the best known of all topics concerning America, thanks not least to the hair-raising illustrations included in Vespucci’s sensational report Diß büchlein saget, wie die zwen […] herren […] funden […] ein nüwe welt […] (This Little Book Tells How the Two Gentlemen [the kings of Spain and Portugal] Found a New World) of 1509 and still found in the 1588 edition of Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia.6 This association of supposed anthropophagia and American exotica still
3 Johann Heinrich Zedler, Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste (Halle and Leipzig, 1732–1754), V (1733), col. 558, https://www.zedler-lexikon.de
4 Johann Christoph Adelung, Grammatisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1793), I, col. 1298.
5 David Beers Quinn, “New Geographical Horizons: Literature,” First Images of America, ed. Fredi Chiappelli (Los Angeles, CA, 1976), 638, 640, 643–644.
6 See the illustrations in Wolfgang Neuber, Fremde Welt im europäischen Horizont: Zur Topik der deutschen Amerika-Reiseberichte der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin, 1991), 208–209.
Subsequent references to this work appear parenthetically in the text abbreviated as N with page numbers. Many illustrations are also found in the facsimile edition of
asserted itself unabated among Goethe’s contemporaries. Adelung had an especially good ear for what the educated were saying. The word
“cannibal” in “Auerbach’s Cellar” would have given these people pause.
The historical Faust touched on the topic of cannibals only fleetingly, when he advised Philipp von Hutten in 1534 not to undertake an expedition to the notorious region of man-eaters, then the Welser Colony in present-day Venezuela. An “evil year,” he said, was in store for him.7 Hutten did not heed the warning and came to a sad end after a life full of adventure among man-eaters and no less barbaric Spaniards in the New World. The Venezuelan writer Francisco Herrera Luque stylized that life as an apparently Faustian one in his novel about Hutten entitled La luna de Fausto (Caracas: Pomaire, 1983).8 Faust’s prophecy for Hutten provides the beginning and is fulfilled at the end of Luque’s story. To be sure, this stylization is meaningful only in regard to the overseas trading enterprises and colonial projects of the aged Faust in the second part of Goethe’s tragedy. The historical Faust looks like a homebody of the “small world” in comparison to this territorially voracious Faust.
The same is true of Doctor Johann Faust of the 1587 Faustbuch. In spite of impressive travels arranged by the devil, he was never in America.
That is certainly surprising for a chapbook from the age of discoveries and conquests, when the horizon of awareness abruptly expanded into territories previously unimagined. With the newly “discovered” regions of the planet, strikingly foreign life-forms entered the Europeans’ field of vision, even if those Europeans were not seafarers.
Among those new life-forms, the American cannibals were prominent. They were fascinating, abhorrent, and frightening all at once, first causing uncertainty, finally however forcing critical self-examination, not excluding the recognition of one’s own barbarism (Montaigne and Lichtenberg come to mind). After all, already in 1537, only two generations after Columbus had landed among the foreigners across the Atlantic, the Pope had declared that they too were human beings. And yet, almost a century after the discovery of the putative
Hans Staden’s Warhaftige Historia: Zwei Reisen nach Brasilien (1548–1555), ed. Franz Obermeier (Kiel, 2007).
7 Hutten’s letter of 16 Jan. 1540 in Das Gold der Neuen Welt: Die Papiere des Welser-Konquistadors und Generalkapitäns von Venezuela Philipp von Hutten 1534–1541, eds.
Eberhard Schmitt and Friedrich Karl von Hutten (Hildburghausen, 1996), 134.
8 Also in German as Faustmond (Percha, 1986).
west coast of India during which time its cannibals were the subject of intense discourse, there is still not the slightest reference to them or to America in the Faustbuch, even though Faust wants to acquaint himself on his journeys with “die gantze Welt” (“the whole world”).
The foreword in the Wolfenbüttel “Faust” manuscript raises a finger in warning against just such a thirst for worldwide knowledge: “Was hilfft es dem Menschen / Wann Er gleich die ganntz Welt hette / vnnd nem schaden an seiner Seel” (“What good is it for a man / If he should gain the whole world / and suffer harm to his soul”).9 How can this surprising gap in Faust’s expressly stated will to know everything about the world be explained?
Even the contemporaries of the Faustbuch author might have noticed that something here was amiss. “P. F.” — who translated the German Faustbuch (with revisions) into English around 1590 and whose identity still remains uncertain — added to Faust’s travel destinations several more. Indeed, besides a few European and extra-European places, namely China and Guinea (which were covered in the German Faustbuch in a sense by the geographically indefinite terms “Asia” and
“Aphrica,” F 58), P. F. added Peru, “the Straights of Magellan,” and
“Nova Hispaniola.”10 The last of those was the region where the earliest explorations of America and the first encounters with man-eaters had occurred. A contemporary of Drake and Raleigh like P. F., Christopher Marlowe took his cue from the English Faustbuch in the early 1590s and extended the protagonist’s desire to travel to his eagerness to “search all corners of the new-found world.”11 In the Wagnerbuch (1593), a kind of sequel suggested at the end of the German Faustbuch, the author expanded the geographical horizon with three whole chapters about travel in America. So important was this topic to him that he announced the extension of Faust’s range of experience on the very title page as a particularly appealing feature of his undertaking, even though America
9 Historia von D. Johann Fausten, critical edition, eds. Stephan Füssel and Hans Joachim Kreutzer (Stuttgart, 1988), 58, 137 (Matth. 16: 26). Subsequent quotations and references to this volume appear parenthetically in the text abbreviated as F with page numbers.
10 The English Faust Book: A Critical Edition Based on the Text of 1592, ed. John Henry Jones (Cambridge, 1994), 128. The author had nothing more to say about these regions.
11 Doctor Faustus, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York, 1969), 27 (B-Text, line 81).
was by that time no longer so very “new.” In any case, with respect to geography, he wanted to best his predecessor who had had a blind spot for America, even though it would certainly have been high time to have spoken of it, especially if Faust’s travels were supposed to be through the “whole world.” Which prompts the question: what did the author of the Faustbuch actually mean by the whole world? A closer look at the geographical horizon of his work is in order, before trying to offer an explanation or even to find meaning in its historical deficiency.
What follows is an attempt to develop a few ideas about some thematic dimensions of the Faustbuch and geographical knowledge (or awareness) in the sixteenth century.