Devil in the Deatils of the Age: Faust

What makes the period of the 1920s in the Weimar Republic such a large turning point is through the large events that changed Germany, mainly for the worst. Hyperinflation and rising unemployment during this decade especially during the early 1920s was a very rough time for many people. In the case of film, this is mainly seen through the idea of the "Faustian Man", which films, more important the 1926 film ironically called Faust, brings out this concept of the Faustian Man and what it generally was and how it applied in the mindset of Germans during this period of time.

Scene from the film between Mephisto and the alchemist, Faust
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Directed by F.W. Murnau, this film is basically based around an alchemist named Faust saving his village from a plague¹, thanks to the demon Mephisto, but then begins a downward spiral that puts him into such a despair that he needs to crawl his way back into the light. How this largely applies in context to the decade and to German Expressionism as a whole is that it shows the darker elements and desires that these films showed and represented. The Faustian Man concept can be seen as a man using evil as a way to fix problems that they are worried about in context, but at the same time costs them their humanity at the same time which at the time of the Weimar Republic can be applied to the more written ideas of German Expressionism that these films adopted. In the case of Faust and other films of the period, this is mainly from the works of books such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's poems of the same name as the film that it is loosely based on and its multiple parts² . In the case of the films such as Faust, and largely followed the concepts of it, sometime even being the embodiment of the Faustian ideas themselves³. In a way, Faust mainly shows this through the interactions between Faust and Mephisto, such as Mephisto following as his shadow⁴, which in terms of Weimar ideas, can be seen as Weimar Republic and the Treaty in a way, or even emerging parties like the Nazis, which later on the late 1920s into the 1930s began to cause dark times for the Republic and lead into doing dark deeds before falling completely.

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1 Paul Coates, The Gorgon's Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism, and the Image of Horror. Cambridge Studies in Film. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 32. ^↩

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2 Ibid., 30.^↩

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3 Ibid.^↩

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4 Ibid., 34.^↩