Works

In Scene Two of Goethe’s eponymous tragedy, the physician, philosopher, lawyer, and theologian Faust opines to Wagner, his companion: »Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast: one struggles to separate itself from the other.« Carl Gustav Carus shows Faust and Wagner returning home after an ›Osterspaziergang‹ (Easter Stroll) together with the black poodle that will later turn out to be Mephistopheles. Carus has his two protagonists pose outside the gates of a city, its Gothic skyline atmospherically swathed in mist. The German national costume they are wearing reflects a fashion that was on the rise in Germany around 1815, and that, as a badge of anti-French patriotism during the ›Wars of Liberation‹, was donned by people of all classes, men and women alike. It was also worn by democratically and nationalistically-minded progressives such as students and seminarians—at least until being banned by royal decree in 1820. Like both Goethe and Faust, Carus was an erudite man. As a physician and scientist, painter and writer, however, he was well able to reconcile the two souls dwelling within his chest, for as long as one was preoccupied with detail, the other was free to aspire to higher things.