The Enlightening Supernatural: Ghost Stories in the Late Eighteenth-Century Germany

This dissertation explores the place of ghosts in late eighteenth-century German texts, where they appear with surprising frequency despite widespread disbelief in their ontological reality. These ghosts could simply be lingering remnants of superstition in an age where they no longer belong, but my project argues that they play a central role in the Enlightenment and its ideal of progress. The key texts analyzed in this context include three versions of the story of the Weiße Frau, as well as works by Immanuel Kant, Karl Philipp Moritz, Friedrich Schiller, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In various ways, these texts demonstrate how the presentation of a ghost creates new possibilities in philosophy and aesthetics, as well as opportunities for critique. For some, the ghostly encounter produces an “Enlightening” suspense, disrupting the normal conditions of one’s understanding and creating a demand for resolution that propels one towards the future. Some recognized a dangerous manipulative potential in such suspense, and they used ghost stories to critique Enlightenment thought or imagine alternative aesthetic models. In all of these works, the ghost does not function simply as a relic of the past that needs to be left behind; it features prominently as a means of considering the present and imagining the future.

The relationship between the Enlightenment and superstitious beliefs has either been oversimplified as a basic opposition, or complicated by the recognition that the commitment to reason works as a new form of superstition. Prior scholarship has recognized the German ghost story as a primarily nineteenth-century phenomenon. This dissertation uncovers the roots of the German ghost story in unlikely texts from the eighteenth century and suggests that the relationship between ghostly apparitions and the Enlightenment was more complementary than oppositional. Ghosts do not only represent the persistence of the past, they also disrupt the normal conditions of the present in a way that enables progress towards new possibilities in aesthetics and thought.

Redeeming Faustus: Tracing the pacts of Mariken and Faust from the 1500s to the present

This dissertation uncovers and analyzes the complicated history of the devil’s pact in literature from approximately 1330 to 2015, focusing primarily on texts written in German and Dutch. That the tale of the pact with the devil (the so-called Faustian bargain) is one of the most durable and pliable literary themes is undeniable. Yet for too long, the success of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust I (1808) decisively shaped scholarship on early devil’s pact tales, leading to a misreading of the texts with Goethe’s concerns being projected onto the earliest manifestations. But Goethe’s Faust really only borrows from the original Faust his name; the two characters could not be more different. Furthermore, Faustus was not the only early pact-maker character and his tale was neither limited to the German language nor to the Protestant faith. Among others, tales written in Dutch about a female, Catholic, latemedieval pact-maker, Mariken van Nieumeghen (1515), illustrate this. This dissertation seeks to redeem the early modern Faustus texts from its misreading and to broaden the scholarship on the literature of the devil’s pact by considering the Mariken and Faust traditions together.

The first chapter outlines the beginnings of pact literature as a Catholic phenomenon, considering the tales of Theophilus and Pope Joan alongside Mariken of Nijmegen. The second chapter turns to the original Faust tale, the Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587), best read as a Lutheran response to the Catholic pact literature in the wake of the Reformation. In the third chapter, this dissertation offers a new, united reading of the early modern Faust tradition. The fourth and fifth chapters trace the literary preoccupation with the pacts of both Mariken and Faustus from the late early modern to the present.

The dissertation traces the evolution of these two bodies of literature and provides an in-depth analysis and comparison of the two that has not been done before. It argues for a more global literary scholarship that considers texts across multiple languages and one that takes into consideration the rich body of material of the pact tradition.