Comic-Kolumne: Nele Heaslips “Faust”-Adaption | FAZ | EUROtoday

In Weimar, 2025 marks the tip of the “Faust” 12 months that the native classical music basis had proclaimed. Why was it referred to as that? Because in 1775, 250 years in the past, Goethe got here to Weimar – and he already had the concept for the play “Faust” with him, which might occupy him for the remainder of his life. However, there was no anniversary date in 2025 that was immediately linked to the two-part drama: the primary half appeared in 1808, the second shortly after Goethe’s dying in 1832, the so-called “Urfaust” (the early model rejected by the writer) after a manuscript discovery in 1887. But for the reason that “Faust” is the epitome of a masterpiece of German literature, the native counterpart to the “Divine Comedy”, “Don Quixote” or “Hamlet”, the work doesn’t want a date – it’s all the time present.

So we welcome the brand new 12 months once more with “Faust”. With a comic book of the fabric. God is aware of not the primary: Just keep in mind that the thesis (after which additionally the primary ebook publication) of the comedian all-rounder Flix within the nineties was an adaptation of “Faust” earlier than his replace of Goethe’s drama got here out in 2010; “Faust I” and “Faust II” by Flix, so to talk. The present try is getting into into distinguished comedian competitors.

It was drawn by an unknown particular person (however that was Flix on his debut). Her identify is Nele Heaslip. So in the event you’ve by no means heard of the lady from Rostock, who was born in 1997, that is comprehensible and, like me, you had been like me till final 12 months’s Frankfurt Book Fair. Then the Jaja writer Annette Köhn handed me the freshly printed copy of the work revealed by her formidable small Berlin writer. Such weighty presents – album format, hardcover, 280 pages – are usually not precisely my dream within the hustle and bustle of the ebook truthful, however a fast look confirmed that it could possibly be price studying. Since then I’ve spent fairly a little bit of time with Heaslip’s Faust.

This is important as a result of nearly all of the textual content may be discovered there and there’s a lot to learn (and verify). Not the textual content of all the Goethe “Faust”, as a result of in any other case 280 comedian pages can be inconceivable – you would not even be capable to get that quantity in regular printed variations of the basic editions. What we get right here as “Faust – The Tragedy First Part, Volume 1” is simply the primary half of “Faust I”, as much as the start of the “Witch’s Kitchen” scene, i.e. simply earlier than the primary girls seem within the piece. Before that, solely the title hero and Mephistopheles truly act, if one ignores the supporting function of Wagner or the batch-like appearances of the scholars in “Auerbach’s Cellar” (all males). Oh sure, and God after all (in Goethe solely “The Lord”, additionally a person) within the “Prologue in Heaven”.

With this, Nele Heaslip makes use of it, so there is no such thing as a “appropriation” and no “foreplay at the theater” along with her. In doing so, she shortly eliminates what doesn’t belong to the precise degree of motion. Otherwise, nevertheless, nearly all of the textual content is introduced, though there are definitely omissions. Let’s simply take the vigorous conversations on the road through the Easter stroll, that are vastly shortened right here, or the choirs of the ladies and the disciples within the suicide try scene. By the best way, this brings us to a hinge of the plot: Faust goes out for the primary time, and with Nele Heaslip this can be a doubly attention-grabbing second, as a result of the surroundings modifications on its black and white pages from the Middle Ages to fashionable occasions. Not in any fashionable period, however within the Nazi period.

The final choir of angels from the market sq. of a small city with picturesque half-timbered buildings turns into a neighborhood with a easily plastered facade and swastika flags hanging in entrance of it. These two views, introduced on the identical web page from the identical angle, are separated by a stylized barbed wire phase – a graphic image that Nele Heaslip has already included on the duvet of her comedian, the place 4 emblems are connected round the principle characters Faust and Mephistopheles, who’re reverse one another like halves of enjoying playing cards (the previous in colour, the latter in black and white): the cross and pentagram in Faust (which even have essential capabilities in Goethe) and in Mephistopheles is the barbed wire knot and a Star of David (which have essential capabilities in Heaslip).

Faust abruptly wears the Star of David on his coat as he goes out on the road for an Easter stroll. The directing theater thus strikes into Nele Heaslip’s comedian: visualization as a precept. She herself writes in her temporary foreword to the quantity: “The idea for depicting the plot emerged little by little – and as soon as I started drawing, I noticed with astonishment that the rest happened by itself. ‘Faust’ became independent and adapted to the new time levels as if it had been written specifically for them.” Our current figures as a 3rd time degree, which penetrates the plot powerfully proper from the beginning: within the type of industrial vegetation or a college lecture corridor during which Heinrich Faust stands on the lectern, lecturing however wordless – that is a fairly good thought, as a result of the self-doubt of his first look, which then seems in speech bubbles, turns into an internal monologue.

Such shifts of theatricality into literary type are what an adaptation has to realize: there should be an added worth on paper in comparison with the stage in the event you sacrifice the immediacy of the drama. Nele Heaslip has rather a lot to supply. One could name their relocation of elements of the plot to the Third Reich sought-after, however the corresponding implementation of the scene in “Auerbach’s Cellar” is definitely legitimate: It shouldn’t be college students, however Wehrmacht troopers who’re carousing there, and their mockery of the getting into Faust is that of a Jew. But it’s nonetheless too early on this undertaking to make a judgment, as a result of the third primary character, Gretchen, continues to be to be seen, and the way she matches into the Nazi surroundings – by way of character and life – shall be a litmus take a look at of the viability of the reinterpretation greater than the strikingly Jewish Doctor Faust.

I’ve little doubt that we are going to see this second a part of “Faust I” – and doubtless not too lengthy from now. Nele Heaslip has already created a big comedian adaptation undertaking, though again then it was excluded from a bigger public: 5 years in the past, as a part of a undertaking on the Regensburg University Library, a comic book got here out during which Heaslip put Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest” into photos. That was greater than 200 pages, and in accordance with her personal statements, it solely took the illustrator six months to do it. The “Faust” sequel can’t be lengthy in coming (if it isn’t already completed; after such a protracted break since “The Tempest” there would have been sufficient time).

But what fascinated Nele Heaslip about Goethe’s materials, which is in any other case thought of a male area within the theater – and never simply because the ladies in it begin so late? The daughter of an English father and a German mom (whose father in flip is a crucial museum man from Rostock, who then acted as a GDR spy in Denmark) says herself: “I have been drawing, writing and composing my whole life and I am also passionate about theater.” And she has a particular view of the stage in addition to a brave strategy to her aspect architectures, which generally fluctuate simply as a lot because the figures in Goethe’s textual content: Everything is in flux right here, even when Heaslip notes that in additional than 200 years of “Faust” neither we nor society have modified – exactly as a result of we’re as formidable and fickle because the title hero. She herself is undoubtedly the previous. The latter definitely can’t be stated of somebody who undertakes such a undertaking.