#faust wittenberg

[abnormalacademy]

April 2021

Harry toebeans!!!

August 2021

Flint (he/him), the neanderthal boy from the past, was taken away from his family by a time travel accident Chronys, the future girl, made. He is now living in a confusing future world, and he was given a name and the stereotypical leopard skin. Language is hard for him, he doesn't lack the intelligence, but his vocal cords just aren't built for the homo sapiens languages. He is very good at math, however. The only thing he has left from his world is his stick he used to play with, and he misses his family everyday.

Chronys Monolith (she/her) fucked up majorly, not only sending her and her brothers Polyver, Multimer, and Quantin to the past, but also sending her now fellow student Flint to the future. As time travel uses the same rules of mass conservation, when sending something one way, you have to also send something the other way. Chronys, eager to use time travel to do good, messed up the time travel device and as such accidentally took Flint from his timeline. Now they're all stuck in a world they don't understand, and she is destroyed by guilt.

Theo Andreas (he/him) is a son of Zeus, and terribly embarrassed by it. He has incredible strength, lightning powers, but he doesn't really have a dad. Zeus is very neglectful and as a cherry on top he is a bit... controversial. Theo knows a lot about Greek mythology, as his mother read him all the myths when he was little.

Malcolm’s father Faust Wittenberg (he/him) is a businessman to the core, and the only choices he has ever made that didn’t make him money were marrying Lucy and bringing his son into the world. When Lucy revealed that her lineage had magic in it, Faust was fascinated and the two enrolled Malcolm in Abnormal Academy to ensure the best education for his son. While Faust is a bit neglectful, he likes listening to Malcolm complain and truly he does love his son.

The dark wizard Sullivan Blackburn (they/them), mostly known as Erebos by the general public, is obsessed with draping the world in darkness. They possess the powers of possession, and creation of an ink black all consuming void. There is one light source they admire, which is Starplasm, their ever so shining rival in villainy, as their goals oppose one another.

After being exposed to dangerous levels of radiation in an experiment to create a miniature star for energy, Orion Arcturus' (he/him) atoms quickly disassembled into plasma. Now equipped with the ability to create stars, his perfectionism leads him to quickly destroy them in miniature supernovas. And thus Starplasm was born. Starplasm has a very homoerotic rivalry with Erebos, a fellow villain who sadly doesn't appreciate the light.

Jory Jeroban (he/him) is a billionaire with no regard for anyone but himself, which includes harmless (or less than harmless) children and the planet. He hires scientists to build robots from his design, as he enjoys designing "Jerobots" a great deal. And it's a great deal for evil scientists too, they can make as many evil robots as they want, if they just wear Jory's signature bowtie. Jeroban is after Robert, as he wants to improve his robots to conquer the world.

Phoebe Drake (she/her) is an RPG-loving nerd with the dangerous power of chance manipulation. Although she can't use it frequently, and it can only be applied in very direct situations, like dice rolls, it is still a talent that is not to be trifled with. After all, her dungeons in D&D are undefeated.

Adam Svoboda (he/him) is a genius inventor and the creator of the first sentient robot ever; though he prefers to call himself Robert's father. Adam is driven, and strives to always be the best, but he's a bit of a pushover. When other inventors ask something of him he usually does what he's told. Adam constantly monitors Robert as to study his behavior along other kids, to see how human he is. Adam is super protective of Robert, because he is the only family he has left. He doesn't have the best relationship to his brother, to speak lightly.

Čeněk Svoboda (he/him), brother of Adam, is an insect-obsessed evil scientist who insists that insects in the order Hymenoptera, including bees and ants, are the superior lifeform. As such, he wants to convert society into a big hive, which basically consists into making everyone into his worker drones, with him as the "queen" (and frankly, why can't he be in this day and age?).

November 2021

Chloe Floros (she/her) might be a florakinetic, but she doesn't particularly enjoy the sun. She is very relaxed and quite down to earth, also to be close with her plants. You don't want to get on her bad side, unless you enjoy being prickled by cacti or pierced by bamboo shoots.

[tuulikki]

Martin Luther and Dr. Faustus bickering. From “Wittenberg” by David Dalos.

[cannon-writes]

also read Wittenberg by David Davalos!

Faust and Martin Luther are both Hamlet’s professors at Wittenberg University, and he gets caught in the middle of their debates about religion vs reason. funny, witty, thought-provoking, and much less well-known than it should be, imo

all hamlet fans:

read r&g are dead if you havent (but i am assuming most people are aware of that one)

read fortinbras it’s not as good as ragad but it bangs

watch haider

[trisscar368]

Jonathan Harker is misquoting Hamlet.

“Up to now I never quite knew what Shakespeare meant when he made Hamlet say:—

"My tablets! quick, my tablets!

'Tis meet that I put it down," etc.,

for now, feeling as though my own brain were unhinged or as if the shock had come which must end in its undoing, I turn to my diary for repose. The habit of entering accurately must help to soothe me.”

The passage in question is from Act 1, scene 5 (line 107 to be precise).

Yea, from the table of my memory

I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,

All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,

That youth and observation copied there;

And thy commandment all alone shall live

Within the book and volume of my brain,

Unmix'd with baser matter: yes, by heaven!

O most pernicious woman!

O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!

My tables,--meet it is I set it down,

That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain

Hamlet here has just been confronted by the ghost of his father the King, and told that his mother the Queen helped his Uncle to kill his father. He’s had a very similar realization to dear Jonathan that something is deeply, unnaturally wrong. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark Transylvania, and the supernatural walks the earth.

Now prior to the play beginning, Hamlet was a student at Wittenberg, which is a university town in Germany (where Martin Luther and many reformers taught, and known as the home of one Doctor Johannes Faust). The tables he’s referencing are writing tables - a rather ingenious erasable notebook. The pages were covered in wax, and you could make notes with a metal stylus and then wipe the page clean with a wet sponge. When Hamlet was written there were no graphite pencils (pensils, which are mentioned prior to that era, were a type of paintbrush) and fountain pens wouldn’t be invented till the 1700s. If you were going to write something in ink you needed someplace to sit; a writing table was portable, like Jonathan’s journal. But they were expensive to make, and by the 1890s the technology was long forgotten. [x]

So dear Jonathan is misquoting a passage about memory and note taking, saying now he understands why taking writing things down is so important. But Jonathan doesn’t have the history to understand what those “tablets” actually were. That was lost when modern technology came about. And he doesn’t understand what Hamlet is doing.

It’s easy in context to understand that the reference is to school and note taking, but you must have the whole instead of just the one line to see the picture. Hamlet is replacing his prior life with this new knowledge and commandment (avenge me!), he is rewriting himself and starting down a dangerous path. He’s been exposed to a horror and it’s changed the genre of his life.

That is very accurate. Jonathan just doesn’t understand yet. Nor does he understand how applicable the passage is to the Count - one may smile, and smile, and still be a villain. All the politeness and courtesies Dracula extends hides something dangerous.

It’s very in theme with the novel - it’s not until Mina and Jonathan begin to gather all the letters and journals, putting together the context, that they understand what they’re dealing with. Something forgotten, something lost when the world modernized.

——

Now, there is a Doyleist reason that Jonathan is misquoting this passage - reportedly a friend of Stoker’s, Henry Irving, insisted on the line being said thus during his performances of Hamlet. Irving was rather well known for misquoting Shakespeare and his performances sound … colorful, to say the least. So there is at least one reference to a man who sounds very like a certain Count slapping on a mustache to pretend to be a carriage driver :D

[thetudorslovers]

"Helen of Troy,

Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!

Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.

Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,

And all is dross that is not Helena.

I will be Paris, and for love of thee,

Instead of Troy, shall Wittenberg be sack'd;

And I will combat with weak Menelaus,

And wear thy colours on my plumed crest;

Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel,

And then return to Helen for a kiss.

O, thou art fairer than the evening air

Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;

Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter

When he appear'd to hapless Semele;

More lovely than the monarch of the sky

In wanton Arethusa's azur'd arms;

And none but thou shalt be my paramour!"

-Christopher Marlowe, Faust

[yourbespokeartisanalapocalypse]

Eugene Delacroix, Mephistopheles Over Wittenberg (From Goethe's Faust), 1839.

[janeeyreofmanderley]

Just saying, since Horatio was studying in Wittenberg there is historically the chance of him returning from what can be known as worst semester abroad ever only to have to deal with Doctor Faustus.

( yep the “ historic Faust” , an doctor , healer, alchemist to whose quite eventful life many older legends were added actually lived in Wittenberg and locked horns with no other than Martin Luther, who thought the guy was a boozer and a looser)

[orangerosebush]

the story of the man behind Goethe and Marlowe's Faust is soooo funny to me, Renaissance occultist beef is genuinely the pettiest shit ever:

An itinerant magician named Georg Faust certainly existed, though his sketchy history has been obscured by confusion with other men bearing the same surname. He was a contemporary of Agrippa and Paracelsus who developed a reputation for diabolic magic in several German states in his own lifetime.

Complaints about him pop up here and there in the books and letters of humanists and occult philosophers of the period. The earliest reference to Faust is in a letter written by Trithemius in 1507, in which he is also identified as one Georgius Sabellicus, ‘who dares to call himself the prince of necromancers, is a vagrant, a charlatan, and a rascal’. In 1513 the humanist Konrad Muth wrote that he had heard one Georg Faustus bragging at an inn about his prowess as a fortune-teller. Martin Luther made a reference to him in 1537. After his death, around 1539–40, perhaps in Luther’s Wittenberg, Faust became a magnet for a variety of old legend motifs of magical escapades and diabolic pacts that transmitted orally and in print around central and northern Europe.

[rem-ir]

A ranked list? 👀👀

Off the top of my head, Alfred Schnittke’s Faust Cantata goes at the top, the Randy Newman album goes at the bottom (because it sucked), Marlowe outranks Goethe, Bedazzled (the Peter Cook one, I will not watch the new one) outranks Eric, Master and Margarita also outranks Goethe, and John Kendrick Bangs is tied with the Puppetplay. Dave Davalos’s Wittenberg play is on there and gets points for Hamlet cameos (Hameos) but loses points for gratuitous tennis.

[finita--la--commedia]

Has Faust actually existed ? — Yes. — born in Kundlingen in Würtemberg; studied magic in Cracow. Others make his birthplace somewhere in Weimar near Jena; others Soltwedel or Sandwedel in Anhalt.—That as a boy he went to live with his cousin in Wittemberg and took a doctorate in Ingolstadt — All this is much too bound up with myth, just as with the story of his dog, in which an evil spirit is supposed to have lurked. — He had also studied the classics.—Faust’s stay in Prague, Wittenberg ? in Erfurt he lectured on Homer, and at the students’ instigation conjured up the heroes, also the one-eyed Polyphemus. He was in Leipzig and there are 2 engravings in this connection. Faust is supposed also to have been a writer, though his work was published only after his death.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)  in: “Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 3: Notebook 2″ (1835),  Bruce H. Kirmmse (general editor) 

[thenightling]

If anyone puts you on a blacklist:

If you are a role player, if you are a fanfiction writer, if you are a shipper, if you are an fan artist, allow me to give you this reassurance.

There will always be some who does not like you, someone who thinks your ship is too “problematic” or your character illustration is “too thin” or someone is angry that you won’t role play in their style.  Know this: You disagreeing with them is not “bullying.”  Just because someone finds an apparently righteous reason to hate you that does not automatically mean you did anything wrong.  

In fact, if they put you on a blacklist of “People we advise you to put on block” THAT, children, is the bullying.  I have seen these sort of scare tactics before.   Do not fall for it.   Should you find out you are on such a list do not get upset.  Do not be embarrassed.   Here are some things to remember.

1.  Most people don’t actually heed Blacklists lists.  As we mature many of us learn to recognize personal bias and that “Warnings” about certain people are often nothing more than malicious spite.

2.   Acknowledging such lists and worrying about them gives the list creators power.  A big red flag is when they tell you that if you behave a certain way or conform to the behavior they want of you, they MIGHT remove you from said list.   It’s a power trip.  It’s a cruel power trip and allows them to feel like they have authority over you.  Don’t conform.  Don’t be anyone’s slave.   Do not let yourself live in the universe of Mean Girls.  This is allowing others to control you. You are submitting to the wills of others.  Never let anyone take your rights away.

3.  Never trust wording like “We only bully the bullies.”   This is an abusive and manipulative catchphrase.  It is very easy to twist and take out of context.   One minute they could be defending actual victims of bullying and the next they could deem someone a “bully” for writing long forum posts.  When the definition of bully becomes vague enough any enemy is a “bully.”  “Burn the Witch!”  “We’re only trying to protect you.”  “Big Brother is watching.”  Often the most evil are those who wear the mask of righteousness.  

 Think of it like when the US government wants you to go along with something dubious they’ll drop terms like “freedom” and “Patriot.”  Remember The Patriot act?   A few years ago some teens caught on that if they call someone a bully then others would be more accepting of whatever they might do to said “bully.”  And there are some still using this tactic.  So consider this another red flag.  

4.    These sort of blacklists are petty and immature and feel like something spiteful High schoolers might do.   To me they are akin to a kid saying “You can’t be friends with both of us.  It’s Us or Them.”  A lesson most of us learn in Kindergarten (or at least from Harry Potter) is that real friends don’t make you choose.   

Don’t let Cancel Culture evolve into a new form of domination.  

5.  There is no shame in being on someone else’s Blacklist.  Those that mind don’t matter and those that matter don’t mind.  

Remember: In the 1950s and 1960s Vincent Price was on the Hollywood blacklist for having friends that “Might” have had “communist ideas.”   This didn’t matter.  This didn’t stop him.   Roger Corman still hired him and he made some of his best films.   

Alice Cooper’s mother was shunned by her church congregation because of her son’s chosen career.  This inspired the hit song “No more Mister Nice Guy.” Vlad III of Wallachia (Vlad the Impaler) was excommunicated by the Eastern Orthodox Church for converting to Catholicism.  Today he’s still seen as a hero in Romania despite his brutal reputation.  And in pop culture he’s one of the most infamous and interesting of immortals.    Oscar Wilde was persona non grata after he was convicted of the “Crime” of homosexuality. Today none of his oppressors are remembered but he and his writing are immortalized.

Johann Georg Faustus  (the historic Faust) was banished from Ingolstadt over the accusation of practicing black magick and homosexuality.  Today two versions of his legend are considered classic literature. The Goethe version of the Faust story is Germany’s national play. And there is a statue of him (fictionalized though it may be) in Wittenberg.  

Leonardo Da Vinci was put on trial for the “Crime” of sodomy.  Today few even know about the accusation.  They just know his art and his intellect.  

John Lennon was stalked and considered a “potential subversive” by the FBI and on government lists of people to be watched.

James Baskett was not allowed to attend the premiere of the movie he starred in (Song of the South) because of his race.   

The FBI thought  Martin Luther King, Jr. was an enemy of the US and was “too influential.”  There are actual records of “concerns” about his behavior and his impassioned speeches.

My point is reasons for such blacklistings that seem reasonable right now might not be seen as reasonable in the future.   So don’t cower.   Don’t give in.   Just be yourself.   And don’t let anyone scare you.  Cancel culture is not new and lists like this and the misuse of the word “bully” are ironically just new ways to bully people.

Ignore them.   Those that mind don’t matter and those that matter don’t mind.

   Writing such blacklists is an ego trip.  It’s petty.  It’s immature.  And to worry about such things gives the list creators power.  Don’t let them do that to you.   Just be yourself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohELyD0EeDc

[zarayushas]

Eugene Delacroix - Mephistopheles Over Wittenberg (From Goethe’s Faust), 1839

[grandhotelabyss]

Last year, I read/reread The Divine Comedy, beginning at Halloween with the Inferno and continuing to the end of the year. Now I have decided, similarly, to read and/or reread the great literary treatments of the Faust legend, dwelling upon Marlowe’s and Goethe’s more literally demon-haunted treatments for my Halloween reading with a goal of moving on to Mann. (I’d previously read Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Goethe’s Faust, Part One, but not Goethe’s Part Two nor Mann’s novel.) Over at my site, on this most frightening day, you can read my pieces on Marlowe and Goethe. Links with samples follow.

Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus.

Given all the hints Shakespeare obviously took from Doctor Faustus for his own best tragedy—both plays concern tormented intellectuals from the university at Wittenberg—it is possibly too easy to read Hamlet back into Faustus. Shakespeare’s art is of a much higher order, though. Marlowe brings good and bad angels onstage to squabble over the soul of the hero, whereas Shakespeare invents an inner life—and a dense, mysterious, paronomasiac language—for his characters that locates metaphysical struggle in the psyche rather than in heaven and hell. Hamlet is constitutively ambiguous, Faustus merely frustrating.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust.

This is morally unacceptable, and meant to be. Not only has our hero as good as killed Gretchen and her whole family, his schemes of progress and modernization displace and murder as well. The translator Greenberg hears an anticipatory echo of Nazi atrocities...and W. Daniel Wilson’s introduction notes that German fascists and communists alike saw their doctrines of iron political will validated by Faust. But what if Goethe is not telling us the way things should be, merely the way things are? Let us not be so busy congratulating ourselves that we are not Nazis or Stalinists that we forget the Faustian bargains we have made for our technology and leisure, what costs we have asked others to bear for our own beautiful (and they are) artistic and spiritual aspirations.

As an All Hallows’ Eve bonus, you might also consider my review from earlier this month of Horace Walpole’s pioneering Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto:

It takes a Whig, not a Tory, to invent the Gothic genre. To recast the barbarous brutal past, Catholic and Oriental, as light, if shocking, relief, a nerve-titillating escape from the workaday world of the modern, you would have to belief in that past’s absolute supersession, or at least that it deserves such supersession. Once aestheticized in a pure literary style, the beauties and the terrors of the Old World, its aristocrats and monks and visionary maidens, become a theme park and a tourist trap, as well as an occasion for self-congratulation—an assertion of who is on the right side of history.

As the commercial jingle says in the very underrated Halloween III: Season of the Witch: “Happy, happy Halloween, Halloween, Halloween!”

[romanticism-art]

Mephistopheles Over Wittenberg (From Goethe's Faust), 1839, Eugene Delacroix

[noshitshakespeare]

Hi, I'm studying Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe and I'm really struggling to enjoy it, because it feels way more lacking in substance than any Shakespeare I've read (I'm also doing King Lear for my course) so I wondered if you had any advice?

Hello there @goingbacktohogwarts! I’m sorry to hear you’re not enjoying Doctor Faustus! Let me see if I can help you…

Marlowe is a very different kind of writer to Shakespeare, so my first suggestion is that you don’t compare the two too much. There’s a benefit to seeing differences and similarities (I did a post on that here, which you might find interesting), but if you expect to find a Shakespearean play in Marlowe, then you will be disappointed. It’s no different to comparing two modern authors and expecting them to have the same writing style.

I think that you can benefit a lot from situating Doctor Faustus historically. So, for instance, the idea of the good angel and the bad angel, or the Seven Deadly Sins as characters draws strongly on the allegorical tradition and the Medieval morality play. If you read something like Everyman or Mankind (or even The Castle of Perseverance) and then come back to Doctor Faustus, you’ll get an idea of what Marlowe is doing to that tradition.

The other thing the play does is engage with contemporary debates about religion. So if you study the Reformation, you’ll get a lot more from the religious factioning going on in the play, and why Faustus goes about wreaking havoc in the Vatican, given that he’s a scholar from Wittenberg. It can also help you to think about Faustus’ attitude to his soul (depending on whether or not he believes in predestination) and so on. Again, it’s a matter of expanding your knowledge of context to make you aware of the complexity of the play.

I think the most interesting question is the representation of Faustus: is he a hero for refusing to be bullied by the idea of hell? Does he make God look vengeful? Is he a proud fool who should know better? Is he admirable in his courage in spite of his pride? Traditionally, the Faust figure is obviously a bad example, not a sympathetic protagonist. So even if the ending is a conventional restatement of the status quo, I think Marlowe does something significant by making him essentially sympathetic, because it raises questions about individuality and human freedom.

The comic scenes are harder to get into, but it’s worth thinking about how they reflect the main plot or comment on the action.

My last and probably most important suggestion: read it out loud. Enjoy the language; it often works better dramatised. If nothing else, Marlowe has a knack for writing beautiful long monologues (and there are a fair few of those). Faustus’ final speech, for instance, is a work of intense beauty. Maybe get together a reading group. It’s hard work, but really worthwhile to try and voice it out loud: after all, it is a play.

Failing all that, if you really can’t get into it, I would say that the study of literature is an objective act, which is what differentiates it from reading for pleasure. That means that you don’t need to enjoy something to analyse it! In fact, it should remove any inhibitions you might have about tearing it to pieces… I hope that helps!