Page 33 - GALIET BEAUTY´S LURE: WAR Helen of Troy and Margareta of Germany IV

heroine, Margareta, and in Heine's57 golden-haired Lorelei.58 Margareta, like Faust, symbolizes the tensions and strivings, or storm-and-stress of the Romantic Spirit. On one hand, she emblemizes the ideals of beauty of spirit, of piety, of duty, of loveliness, of purity and industriousness59 (Classicism), and on the other, she emblemizes madness and demise (Romanticism). Demonically lured and abandoned by Faust, she bears a child; her mother and brother perish; and ostracized by all, she goes mad. Having drowned her child, awaiting trial, and rejecting Faust’s demonic impetus to save her, she repents and is saved by God. Faust’s famous last couplet in his Chorus Mysticus sings how “the Eternal Feminine/draws us on high” 3⁄4 das Ewig-Weibliche/zieht uns hinan.60 Yet this “Eternal Feminine” is related to das Ewig-Leere, or Mephistopheles’ “Eternal Emptiness.”61 Goethe’s Faust suggests the eternal feminine draws humans on high (i.e., Paris, Priam, Menelaus and Hitler), but it can also hurl mortals down a precipice: the Eternal-Empty, thus becoming a creative and destructive force as emblemized by Golden-haired Margareta.
57 Heine, Like Celan, is a German-speaking Jewish Poet exiled in Paris whose feelings towards the fatherland are ambivalent. Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, 1995. 38.
58 Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, 1995. 36.
59 Goethe. Faust. Trans. Walter Arndt. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Lines 2610- 2615. 71.
60 Goethe. Faust. Trans. Walter Arndt. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Lines 12110-12111. 344.
61 See line 11603 of Scene 5. The Eternal-Feminine needs to be linked with the sole, legitimate counter term that appears in Faust. It is a neologism that shares the same German grammatical adjective form “Ewig.” It appears when Mephistopheles closes Faust’s death scene as das Ewig-Leere (11603), signifying “Eternal Emptiness.” Goethe. Faust. Trans. Walter Arndt. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. 491.
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