Changing European Visions of Disaster and Development. Vanessa Pupavac

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СКАЧАТЬ permits … And the flames of hell—well, I think you’ve probably worked that out for yourself. (Monbiot 2007: 2)

      Each chapter begins with a quote from Marlowe to reinforce how ‘Our use of fossil fuels is a Faustian pact’ (Monbiot 2007: 3). His text urges action against climate change and limits on human freedom, concluding ‘it is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but also against ourselves’ (Monbiot 2007: 215). His later book Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life (2013) discusses ecological movements seeking to recreate European wildernesses free from humans, and freeing nature to the governance of natural forces. Ironically, though, ecologism’s celebration of natural forces parallels neoliberalism’s celebration of market forces. Ecological ideas have helped legitimise abandoning industrial strategies and allowing the economic collapse and depopulation of some regions, especially in southern Europe. The birthplace of one of modernity’s leading Faustian dreamers and Lucifers lighting up the world is in a region being rewilded, as the book will explore.

      Faust the Developer

      Amid cultural pessimism, Faust continued to inspire progressive humanism during the twentieth century and push for material transformation. One of those inspired by Goethe’s Faust was the American Yugoslav inventor Nikola Tesla, who developed hydroelectric dams (Tesla 2011 [1918]: 39–40). Tesla emigrated from Europe to the United States. He was originally from a village at the foot of the Velebit Mountains in Croatia, which was then under the Habsburg military frontier regime (Carlson 2013: 12–13; Rothenberg 1966). The military frontier was originally created as a bulwark against the Ottoman empire, but when their military threat receded, a core function of the borderland was as a militarised cordon sanitaire against human or livestock disease. Even the son of a Serbian Orthodox priest might not escape military service in this peasant-soldier population of the military frontier. Soldiering, banditry, and subsistence farming were the main historical fate of its inhabitants. However, modern developments opened up new horizons for Tesla and his region of birth. The population could constitute themselves as a self-determining nation and resist being an undeveloped imperial borderland and abject puppets of empire.

      The engineering resonances with Faust for Tesla’s home country are reinforced but have a more religiously secure sanction from the Renaissance humanist Faust Vrančić (or Fausto Veranzio) (circa 1551–1617), who was born in Šibenik, Croatia, then part of Venetian Dalmatia. Vrančić’s name is often coupled with Tesla in Croatia. Polymath, diplomat and bishop, at one time he worked at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, who also employed the astronomers Tycho Broche and Johannes Kepler. A historical precursor to Tesla, Vrančić was also interested in solar, wind and hydro-energy, and was author of Machinae Novae (1616) as well as a dictionary of five European languages and works on theology (Vrančić 1971). His designs included a wind turbine, a water mill using the power of the waves, a suspension bridge, and a Homo Volans, or parachute, as well as flood defence plans commissioned for Rome. Few of his designs were implemented in his life time. Innovation was moving away from Renaissance Italy. In the next century a tidal mill was constructed drawing on his work across the Atlantic in Brooklyn and a metal suspension bridge in the industrialising England. Fittingly one of the earliest hydroelectric plants in Europe was commissioned by the mayor of Šibenik on the Krka River to provide electricity to the town and light its streets. The plant started operation on 28 August 1895, just two days after Tesla’s plant at the Niagara Falls, and claimed to be the second constructed in the world based on Tesla’s alternating current system.

      The association of Faust’s literary children and its related Miltonic tradition with claims for freedom and self-determination has persisted through the centuries. Writers engaged with the Faust tales to address foreign oppression, political censorship, and cultural taboos. Krleža was immersed in German literature, especially Goethe’s Faust (Šnajder 2019). His work addresses the themes of striving to be subjects, not just objects of modernity, and establishing a home in the world (Berman 1988 [1982]: 5). His 1938 novel The Banquet in Blitva parodied the Faust puppet play to depict the peoples of the Balkans as stunted puppets allowing themselves to be manipulated by invisible external powers (Krleža 2002 [1938]: 319–34). His puppet Dr Faust declared despairingly, ‘Fortunato Yorick is right! Our performances go on being repeated forever and our humanity as puppets on a string plays the same performance from the very beginning of its civic existence!’ (Krleža 2002 [1938]: 328). Krleža’s novel was a satire on the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia, set in a fictional Blitva (chard cabbage land) and its rival neighbour Blatvia (mud land), and its historic struggle for its independence against the Aragon empire. Krleža’s novel opens with ‘A Form of Prologue of Sentimental Variations on the Blitvinian Question through the Ages’, declaring how ‘Thirty European nations slaughtered one another for four years, and out of this bloodletting emerged Blitva, like a child’s tin rattle with the inscription Blithuania Restituta’ (Krleža 2002 [1938]: 3). The new state of Blitva was soon caught up in state coups, civilian killings and rival nationalist conflict with its neighbour Blatvia, bringing in Hunnia and other regional powers. Would the High Contracting Powers support the revival of Blitva and the humiliation of Blatvia, or the reverse? For centuries Blitvians and Blatvians had been warring with each other, or found themselves to be imperial cannon fodder in foreign wars, repeatedly menaced by invasion and irredentism, dictatorship and revolution, political corruption and social ignorance. Krleža’s novel addressed the problems of small nations establishing free peaceful societies, while squeezed between rival great powers. He set The Banquet in Blitva in the northern Baltic, making his fictional countries colder and bleaker than his southern homeland he was satirising (Krleža 2002 [1938]). Even after gaining formal national independence, they struggled to escape from being puppets of external forces or their own self-destructive tendencies and their political polarisation between intolerant nationalism and liberal internationalism with its own complicity in violence and intolerance (ibid.: 3–13). War remained the experience of most generations and his country fated to be in the third class carriage as Krleža’s fictional works The Banners and The Croatian God Mars also explored.

      Krleža has been described as a Faustian figure with two or more competing souls within him, aspiring, like Faust, to a ‘higher degree of harmony’ against an external and inner ‘world in conflict with itself’ (Goethe 1808 ‘Outside the City Gate’ in Wayne 1949: 67; Šnajder 2019: 118). As an atheist there was no God to redeem his soul from the diabolic, nor an interceding Greta to forgive his sins and overcome his conflicted nature. Earlier in his life, Krleža had addressed his inner Faustian demons by throwing himself into social political commitment. He believed in material transformation and recognised the need for collective action, but his individual freedom as a writer was paramount. Like his fictional protagonists he reacted against the echelons of society, and recoiled from political terror and social oppression. Krleža remained a conflicted self and, like Tesla, became an isolated recluse. Dead texts were more alive to him than his contemporaries (Šnajder 2019: 116–8). Yet the disillusioned modernist, in withdrawing from society, lost the comfort of community he craved.

      Earlier Fausts, in league with the devil, enjoyed supra-human powers and all the excesses of European civilisation before their damnation. Conversely Krleža’s puppet Dr Faust revealed people stunted and confined in a puppet play and manipulated by invisible fingers. The stage might be on ‘the so-called European level’, but his Fortunato Yorick was condemned to be ‘a thinking puppet who is aware of his puppet tragedy’ (Krleža 2002 [1938]: 320–6). Yorick was ‘in revolt against the establishment of puppet theaters as such’ and wanted them to cut the strings controlling them. His puppet-staged revolt, parodying Goethe’s Faust, did not get beyond the prologue (Krleža 2002 [1938]: 320–9). Even in their independence, the states of Blitva and Blatvia had to suffer external interference in their internal affairs from Western European statesmen, who dispensed advice from their plush theatre boxes, while having little comprehension of the local conditions: ‘You call yourself Europe and so we have to pay for everything at 143 percent interest, if not more, because you’re Europe’ (Krleža 2002 [1938]: 31). Krleža СКАЧАТЬ