In the death of tragedy we read that George Steiner considered Goethe’s composition of Urfaust to be the moment when German literature nearly embraced the full force of the tragic but then stepped back from its implications. This essay will follow Steiner’s insight and ask why the tragic was not, circa 1772, fully embraced. Steiner had already argued that the coming together of creative genius and a historical setting propitious for tragedy is an altogether rare occurrence. Others, like Erich Heller, have seen the problem in a complete lack of any tradition that would have allowed Goethe to look more insistently at the problem of evil. Some critics, such as Nicholas Boyle, see in Goethe’s pulling back a psychological necessity: the great poet needed to develop other aspects of his creative genius. And many scholars have suggested that the truly tragic was incompatible with Goethe’s optimistic, universal character. No doubt there is considerable truth in each of these interpretations. Yet they emphasize Goethe’s personality traits at the cost of concentration on the vast social and historical changes surrounding the years 1772 to 1775, when Urfaust was written, and focus on genre considerations to the exclusion of an analysis of the tenuous connection between intellectuals and ordinary people.

Roughly two millennia after Aristotle’s assertion that “a tragedy is an imitation of personages better than the ordinary man,” the question of who can be represented as tragic remained open. Precisely this openness allows us to see in Urfaust a rich, contradictory initial embrace of what Steiner calls the “low tragic”—one that, contrary to Aristotle, and to the Ständeklausel (estates clause) of Johann Christoph Gottsched, involved ordinary people as the subject of genuine tragedy. But the embrace was reluctant. Urfaust, it will be argued, also represented the failure to see, hear, and empathize fully with the “people” whose voice the intellectuals of Sturm und Drang hoped to recapture but in fact sentimentalized. To heighten contrast, the essay then takes up the moment when, according to Steiner, German drama drew closer to low tragedy: Büchner’s Woyzeck. What separates the possibilities of the tragic is neither genius nor genre, I contend, but a more immediate and political engagement with the people.