Cagliostro als Menetekel des Verführers in Goethes Lustspiel Der Groß-Cophta (1791)

摘要

Goethe’s comedy Groß-Cophta (1791) was a literary reaction to the French Revolution. He dramatized the ill-famed affair of the necklace in Paris (1785/1786), in which the charlatan, head of a freemason lodge, magician and hypnotist Cagliostro was involved. Literary criticism took it for a documentary drama, aesthetically deficient, neither comic nor coherent, only worrying and oppressive. But the protagonist and the plot of the drama cannot be taken only for historical fact, because Goethe points via Cagliostro prognostically at a type of a modern seducer in a political sense. Goethe’s protagonist is the first one of this type in German literary history, which reaches to Thomas Mann’s Cipolla.