Goethe and Fallen Women

Faust and Gretchen

It has been too long since I have posted. Such are the pitfalls of writing a book. Next to my desk are several books (nothing to do with Goethe) that I have been longing to read. No such luck. But a recent news story has caused such a fever among the public that it offers a comparison to the fate of Gretchen in Goethe’s Faust. I speak of course of the current legal affair concerning Lindsay Clancy and the murder of her three children.

For those not familiar with Goethe’s work, Gretchen features in Part One, when Faust falls for her. Faust is a learned man, while she is an innocent girl and of course pure at the age of fourteen. Unhappy at her mother’s strictness, she is led to believe that Faust loves her. With the assistance of Mephistopheles, he seduces her. When she becomes pregnant, her brother challenges Faust to a duel and is killed. Gretchen then kills the Baby at its birth and is sentenced to execution. Faust tries to free her, but she will not leave her cell. To do so would be a sin. At the end of Part One, she is taken up into Heaven, as she never acted with evil intentions.

Gretchen as a character is based on a young Frankfurt woman, Susanna Margaretha Brandt, who was twenty-five and worked as a maid at an inn. She could not read or write, had no education at all, and her income seemed to derive solely from tips received from men lodging at the inn. This is apparently how she became pregnant by a Dutch man who was making a stop in the trade city of Frankfurt on his way to Russia. She was alone in the inn where she worked when she gave birth. She cut the birth cord and then killed the newborn. She was tried for infanticide, found guilty, and executed in 1772, the first woman in Frankfurt to be executed for infanticide since 1758.

 Of course, this bio is not that of “Goethe’s Gretchen,” but such is the title of a small book on “The Life and Death of the Child Murderer Susanna Margaretha Brandt” by Siegfried Birkner. It is due to Goethe’s writing of Faust, a major work of Western literature, that we know of Brandt at all. Birkner’s small book (Insel Publishers) of 30 chapters is 149 pages long. There is page after page of passages from the many legal procedures that led to Susanna’s beheading on January 14, 1772. It is fascinating to read the original German accounts describing where the birth took place (the laundry room of the inn where Susanna worked, where blood was found on the floor) and of the many interrogations that took place.

Margarete in church

What emerges is that Susanna seems not to have told anyone she was pregnant, not even her two sisters or her employer. All seemed to have noticed in the final months of her pregnancy that she wasn’t “herself,” but she denied being pregnant. This was a full-scale legal process, and Susanna even had a defense attorney. There were protocols for deciding whether she could be absolved. In the end, she went to the scaffold, one built for the occasion, with soldiers surrounding the area should there be protests. No relatives with her during her final days, only the religious authorities, who advised her to atone for her sins. After her death, she was carried to the cemetery by four boys who stopped now and then to open the coffin to allow people, for a small sum of money, to view the body.

In the first protocols Susanna denied knowing she was pregnant. It strikes me that such denial might have made it easier to kill the baby. She couldn’t accept that she was pregnant. That might be considered psychological grounds for a defense.

 Goethe himself may have witnessed the execution: he had finished his legal studies in Strassburg. His grandfather, an important city official, was witness to the legal proceedings. Eleven years later, Goethe at the court of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach attended discussions of whether the perpetrator of another infanticide should live or die. Some scholars have written that Goethe voted for execution, but a piece in the Times Literary Supplement by Jeremy Adler rejects this view. As Adler writes: “from the earliest version of his magnum opus, the Urfaust of 1772–5, to the perfection of Faust II, completed shortly before his death in 1832, Goethe unequivocally, humanely but also forcefully exonerates the child murderer, Gretchen. Even in our more enlightened times such a view would, I think, be usually regarded as progressive.”

Brandt tombstone

There are many German websites that cover exactly what I have written above, this one with great detail, in German and English. There is even a biking site that gives directions for traveling to view Susanna’s memorial stone. Click on image.

“Progressive” brings me back to Lindsay Clancy. It seems that most attention to the current trial focuses on her mental state and less on the brutal deaths of the children, thus undermining a case for first-degree murder, which would seem to call for the death penalty. Far from me to take a position, but I am surprised that Clancy opted for a trial with the intention of being absolved of of first-degree murder charge. Whatever her guilt, she will suffer the rest of her life from her actions.

How Goethe Became Goethe

Some of my readers may have been wondering about my long silence. I am sure I mentioned sometime back that I was starting to work on my own book on Goethe, which I have been doing for the past two years, but it was September 2025, the last date of a post, that I sat down in earnest to work. I have read and read and read and taken thousands of notes. I have reached the point where I am beginning to go through all those notes and categorize them and soon begin with the actual writing of the book, the subtitle of which is "How Goethe Became Goethe."

I am keeping the main title a secret for the moment, but it concerns an aspect of Goethe's early life that has contributed to Goethe "becoming" Goethe, if you get what I mean. Part of my book concerns the radical rethinking of what literature constituted in the 18th century, and the chapters of my book concern his writing from his earliest poetic attempts ca. 1764 until he left for Weimar in 1775. These years were what I characterize as his literary apprenticeship, which established the manner in which he would work going forward, all the way to the last works of his life, including the Faust drama. I will try to post more going forward, especially as I so often come across comparisons in art across the early modern period, before the 18th century, which seem to offer parallels to what was going on in literature.

Recently I got to thinking about this subject after viewing a wonderful small exhibit of Caravaggio’s 1595 painting Boy with a Basket of Fruit at the Morgan Library. 

The painting is on loan from the Galleria Borghese in Rome. (See image at bottom of post.) I can’t help thinking that many, many years ago, back in my youth, I visited that museum when I was an au pair with a German family living in Rome. Since I don’t recall the painting from those years, it was great to be acquainted with the work last week. A small booklet was available in the exhibition room, and a few days ago, with beautiful spring weather in the Sixties, I wandered out to Riverside Park, sat on a bench and read it. According to the booklet, Caravaggio devised an approach to painting that produced “a radical rethinking of what art might be.” The boy in the painting, for instance, was not a typical representation of figures in Italian art, whether religious or of noble people. The boy is not a god or a saint, and the peaches and pairs even have brown spots on them, while the figs disgorge their seeds. Another painting by Caravaggio (not on view at the Morgan), Boy Bitten by a Lizard, is even more “naturalistic,” drawing on figures from the “real” world.

 Here are a few pictures of Goethe in the "real world," a place we don't usually see him in his works. They were drawn when he was in Rome.
 

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I like the drawing of young Goethe staring out the window (actually he was 36 when he finally made it to Rome, but he still carries his youthfulness with him), as well as the one showing him making up his bed against the background of his own drawings. 

 From what I can tell, concepts like “naturalism” were not used in the 18th century when discussing changes going on in literature in Europe, but the life of real people was certainly on the minds of literati, especially in France. The philosophes wanted to “give power to the people,” so to speak, allow them to make their own decisions on matters of importance, instead of depending on the dictates of the Church or the Monarchy. The material changes taking place, including in the world in which Goethe grew up, were offering alternatives to ordinary people that would separate them from the world of their parents. Goethe’s father was a lawyer, but his grandfather had been a tailor who, in a second marriage, wed the wealthy widow of the owner of a successful wine establishment and  was thereby able to send Goethe’s father to law school. Literature, in turn, as in 16th and 17th century Italian paintings, was starting to incorporate “ordinary people.” Consider Tom Jones in Fielding’s novel. Who wanted to read the Odyssey or the Iliad, when you could read a story in which you could to an extent imagine yourself? Lessing dramatized the real-world conflicts that women faced in this new age when it came to marriage.

 

So, too, Goethe dramatized the conflict of individuals with the demands of the greater society. Goethe created in the character of Werther a person who readers identified with, who was felt to be “real.” Such was fiction, with Goethe as a predecessor of a writer like Jane Austen, whose fictional characters “live on” today in movies and TV series. Again, who wants to read Homer anymore? We live in a totally different world, the opportunities of which allow Goethe to become Goethe.