Echo of Kotzebue’s Murder: The Baccalaureus in Goethe’s Tragedy “Faust, Part Two” as a Demonic Mask of the Age

Abstract

The article examines a seemingly marginal but conceptually significant scene with the Baccalaureus from the second act of Goethe’s tragedy “Faust. Part II,” in the context of the ideological and cultural transformations of post-Napoleonic Germany. The focus of the study is the figure of the Baccalaureus as a literary representation of the demonized intellectual youth of the Burschenschaft era. The research employs methods of historicalliterary and cultural-philosophical analysis, drawing on investigative records, contemporary correspondence, and Goethe’s own ref lections. The rhetoric of the Baccalaureus is analyzed as a fusion of Fichtean idealist subjectivism and the ecstatic, religious-prophetic language of revolutionary fanaticism. The study reveals parallels between the Baccalaureus’s monologues and the radical public discourse of student leaders in the 1810s. It is argued that the Baccalaureus represents not merely a satirical character but a poetic warning: Goethe demonstrates how the idea of subjective will, when carried to its extreme, replaces thought and dialogue with the rhetoric of destructive action, culminating in the murder of the playwright August von Kotzebue.