The story of Faust and his bargain with the devil has become one of the foundational myths of Western epistemology and its dangers. However, while a large body of excellent scholarship exists on the early development of Faustian literature from its origins to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s epochal Faust of 1808, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the specific questions of knowledge at issue in the tradition inaugurated by the 1587 Historia von D. Johann Fausten or how those questions relate to the Faustian phenomenon’s surprising and enduring cross-cultural popularity in the centuries before Goethe. By taking a cultural-archaeological approach, in the sense of Michel Foucault, to the Early Modern corpus of Faustian literature, this project reconceptualizes that corpus as an archive in which the connections between the European intercultural phenomenon of Faust and contemporaneous shifts in epistemological discourse become legible. Moreover, this project reframes the question of knowledge within Early Modern Faust literature according to Ludwick Fleck’s theories about the socio-cultural contingency of scientific thinking within a given era, opening a new avenue for analyzing the place of Faust as a literary figure within the Scientific Revolution.

By comparing the first Faust book to similar contemporaneous works, it becomes clear that the Historia served as a unique form of narrative popular science literature addressing demonological and natural philosophical issues of interest throughout Europe at the turn of the seventeenth century, enabling the Historia to achieve exceptional success in translation and theatrical adaptation. This early Faustian literature both reflected and contributed to the dissemination of a skeptical movement within Early Modern European philosophy at the same time that the heterogenous ideologies written into the various early works of Faustian literature both reflected and contributed to an increasingly heterogenous epistemological landscape. The intimate entanglement of early Faustian literature with popular approaches to scientific thinking throughout the Early Modern period ultimately serves to explain its surprising popularity and longevity in as tumultuous an intellectual era as that of the Scientific Revolution and highlights the potential comparative literary analysis presents as a tool within intellectual history.

In 1934 Walter Benjamin gave a peculiar address in Paris that has been preserved for readers as “Der Autor als Produzent.” In this speech, Benjamin outlines the radical political responsibility of an author, particularly a German author, in that era to inculcate a revolutionary ethos in the public. Among the strategies he outlines for achieving this goal, Benjamin highlights the newspaper as the embodiment of that age’s conditions and a means of subverting bourgeois forms and consciousness. Benjamin fails to mention, however, that his friend Siegfried Kracauer had striven for years during his tenure as an editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung’s feuilleton section to effect precisely that end through his journalistic writing. Understanding the project Kracauer tried to achieve elucidates an often overlooked front in the struggle for the German conscience and consciousness that played out in the feuilleton sections of both leftist and centrist periodicals during the Weimar Republic. By exploring Kracaeur’s journalistic program in its historical context as well as in context of the work of other leftist Weimar feuilletonists, this essay hopes to elucidate how, despite ultimately failing to effect a revolution in the bourgeois worldview that might have prevented the fascists’ rise to power, the work of Kracauer and his contemporaries nevertheless expanded the possibilities for culture writing and redrew the boundaries of political discourse within German journalism.