Faust III

Description

The author of these pages is an anonymous, enigmatic man who claimed that his grandmother was the lover of the great poet Goethe and that he was Goethe’s grandson.

Gérard de Nerval, who translated Faust, was infatuated with his grandmother. One summer day in 1930, near Frankfurt, Nerval introduced this young Egyptian woman to Goethe. She began to dream fervently of having a child with this great man (Goethe).

After finishing Faust in the translation by her lover, Gérard de Nerval, and returning to Cairo—pregnant—she gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Marguerite and attributed to Goethe.

However, Gérard de Nerval forbade this. The daughter then married an employee of a French trading company in Cairo and bore him a son, convinced that he was the great Goethe’s grandson. Gaston Witte believed that this son was none other than Gérard de Nerval’s natural descendant. But the son continued to claim that his grandfather was the great poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The son did indeed bear the first name “Johann,” pronounced “Jean” in Egypt and “Hanna” by the Coptic Christians, the name by which he was known as a French teacher in a school in Upper Egypt.

Here, “Hanna” lived alone, without family or friends, until one day he vanished. He was found hanged in his room, leaving nothing behind except a suitcase containing various, disorganized items: old clothes, worn-out shoes, books, dictionaries, and scattered papers. Among these papers were chapters titled “Faust III, Son of Goethe.” No one was present at the scene of this solitary suicide in this Upper Egyptian town.