The Ingenious Art of Mephistopheles Faust’s Forgetting and Peter Schlemihl’s Life without a Shadow Collective Memory

Abstract

The paper strives to provide a hermeneutical analysis of the motive of obliv- ion in Goethe’s Faust and Adelbert von Chamisso’s short storyPeter Schlemihl’s Miraculous Story. In both works the Devil appears as an agent of forgetting, which is his ingenious art. Both texts share the age-old bargain with the Devil sealed in blood, whose consequences are tragically far-reach- ing - loss of one’s soul (Faust) and loss of one’s shadow (Peter Schlemihl). The pact with the Devil entails a life doomed to eternal oblivion. Mephis- topheles forces Faust to move through a series of insane events, from one act of oblivion to the next, resulting in Faust’s forgetting himself, even his love for a girl named Margaret, although he swore in good faith: “I can’t lose her or forget her.” Chamisso’s hero Schlemihl offers his shadow to the Grey Man (the archetypal figure of the Devil) in exchange for gold (Fortunatus’s for- tune-bag). As a result, Schlemihl loses his shadow which will be interpreted as collective memory in the paper.