For more than a century, Faust was more than just an object of literary theory. In Germany, in the course of the overwhelming response Goethe's Faust tragedy spawned, both character and literary material developed into a national object of identification. The 'Faustian' became the sign of an age. For the self-reflection and self-description of Germany as a cultural nation in the 19th and in the first half of the 20th century, the Faust myth was of central importance. The singular meaning of the Faust story is also reflected in the fact that in the 19th and 20th centuries it became the subject of numerous at first predominantly private, and later also public, collecting activities, unlike any other literary subject matter. What stands out is the breadth and internationality of the collectors, both individual and institutional. The contributions collected in this volume discuss the origins, the composition, the objects and the forms of presentation of these collections - and what they reveal about the cultural memory (not just) of the Germans.
