Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

I want to thank David Bell again for his valuable article and his important response to my comment. I completely agree that one could consider the tragedy Faust of Goethe - as other works like The Sufferings of the Young Man Werther, Torquato Tasso and Wilhelm Meister - as interior journeys. He is also right that it is an oxymoron to make “evil itself a creative principle”.

But, as Goethe shows, ‘evil itself’ does not exist. Evil powers like Mephisto are thought to be also creative forces. As quoted in my comment, in Faust God strangely defines the Devil and Lucifer, who brings the light, as creative principles. Perhaps this is what the Rolling Stones enacted by Sympathy for the Devil inspired by Bulgakov's (not Nabokov's!) novel The Master and Margarita.

From the classical period to modern pop-culture, and in line with Freud's concept of the death drive, we seem to be confronted with the question of to what extent human striving acts out destructivity or creatively transforms destructivity.

Rainer Matthias Holm-Hadulla

Professor at Heidelberg University, Gartenstr 2, D-69115 Heidelberg, Germany

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