Titan of German literature, author of Faust
The loftiest name in German literature, who all but single-handedly founded modern German letters. He spent nearly sixty years on the verse drama Faust: a knowledge-hungry old scholar signs a pact with the devil Mephistopheles, trading his soul for the chance to experience the world anew. Through this old legend Goethe asked a modern question — does the human appetite for knowledge and experience, endless and unappeasable, lead to salvation or to ruin? His early The Sorrows of Young Werther once swept a "Werther fever" across Europe.
In Faust, the pact with the devil has a famous condition: the moment Faust says to any instant "Stay a while, you are so fair," he loses his soul. Goethe wrote humanity’s never-satisfied, ever-striving nature as a wager with the devil — and the ending is unexpected: it is precisely this restless striving itself that in the end becomes the ground of Faust’s salvation.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.