Where the pact with the devil is made again and again
In the National Library you meet Faust and Mephisto
Frankfurt – On the first floor of the German National Library there is a “wormhole” in the form of a cupboard and virtual reality glasses, through which you can immerse yourself in a non-existent world – which looks so realistic. While library visitors pass by on their way to the reading room, a woman behind the VR glasses blindly feels for the here in the now, with her hands seemingly for nothing. But in her world she is holding in one hand the quill she took from a raven in flight to sign what she could not refuse: a pact with the devil. Mephisto bows in thanks.
How could the lady have guessed that the pretty poodle, who just wobbled towards her, would turn into Mephistopheles – well, if she had read Faust, then yes. But here she had had to stop herself from encouraging the poodle to come closer with encouraging slaps on her own thigh. Now she can’t get out of the “number”. The virtual journey has begun. She is excused for her actions – the ominous pact, the sipping of the magic potion that makes you irresistible, Gretchen’s ruin and the creation of destructive buildings. She’s not her, she’s looking through the eyes of scientist Dr. Heinrich Faust in an excerpt of the tragedy “Faust I and II” by Johann Wolfgang Goethe.
Truly, Mephisto is a charismatic, dazzling figure who, in the setting of a barren desert landscape, may foreshadow the coming disaster and yet seems ensnaring. He dwells on what Goethe wrote, and the lady as Faust responds in that style. She not only succumbs to the spirit, which always denies, but also to the three-dimensional impression of the virtual journey.
“Travellers” think they are in the middle of the scene, can look all around and discover surrealistic dream images far away from the scenery of the original work from 1790 in the seven scenes that build on one another. The abstract setting is not only intended to facilitate access to Goethe’s work, it is also intended to make it clear that Goethe’s thoughts were valid then as they are today and form a cross-reference to contemporary aspects. This includes sunrises in a matter of seconds for the speed and restlessness of modernity and the desert as a symbol of the exploitation of nature, composed in the great realization: “The more people want to own, the more they destroy.”
Goethe’s work should be something that can be experienced
Faust is the eternal restless in search of the perfect moment and life’s most important secrets. Taking your perspective as a “traveller” brings you close to your emotional world. One would most like to wander through and explore the VR landscape, one is served by leaves that are falling upwards, by the decay of objects, one lies moments of amazement, feels longing and shock, helplessness, loneliness like the hero of the book… “It’s about making Goethe’s Faust come alive,” summarizes Ute Schwens, Director of the German National Library in Frankfurt.
For this purpose, ZDF Digital, the German Museum of Books and Writing of the German National Library, the Goethe-Institut and the Goethe-Museum, supported by the federal computer game funding, worked together, wrote the screenplay, created worlds, let actors play the basis for the programming and the VR Experience realized in a similarly complex methodology of the film adaptation of “Lord of the Rings”.
The interactive journey in the footsteps of Faust lasts 20 minutes, during which there are always things to do. Then the short credits run. Library employee Elisabeth Fründt – until then hidden behind the artificial world – becomes visible again at the end of the experience, as if by magic. She was there the whole time, accompanies the journey gently and imperceptibly as a helping hand, makes sure that you don’t get tangled in cables, that everything runs smoothly and that you don’t fall out of the (game) framework. The “traveller” moves in a field almost three by three meters in size and, thanks to virtual reality, puts his feet on a whole planet of impressions, impulses and worlds of thought. You’re a bit disappointed that it’s already over because it was so beautiful. One would like to start all over again – or read Goethe’s “Faust” right now with the pictures of an extraordinary encounter and the empathetic aftershock for the title hero.
Michelle Spillner