Introduction

Summary

IN JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE'S Prometheus, an early dramatic fragment (1773), Pandora rushes into the arms of her father, Prometheus, and breathlessly reports that she has witnessed what must have been sexual intercourse between her friend Mira and Mira's lover Arabar in an open meadow. Pandora is overwhelmed by what she has seen — Mira's initiation into womanhood — and by the nameless, vicarious passion ignited in herself. “Er küßte sie tausendmal,” she reports. “Und hing an ihrem Munde, / Um seinen Geist ihr einzuhauchen.” Alarmed by Pandora's outcry, Arabar had fled and left Mira to exhaust her still live desire in Pandora's embrace, who remains aflame with excitement. “Was ist das alles,” the girl asks her father, “was sie erschüttert / Und mich?” Prometheus answers with one of the oldest of conceits, “Da ist ein Augenblick, der alles erfüllt. / Alles, was wir gesehnt, geträumt, gehofft. / Gefürchtet meine Beste, — Das ist der Tod!” (FA 1,1:222, lines 334–36, 355–56, 389–91). In an undulating crescendo reminiscent of the Liebestod music of Tristan und Isolde, an extended protasis rises to an explosive, orgiastic “dann” in the apodosis: “Dann stirbt der Mensch” (line 404). Life is extinguished at the moment of greatest intensity. “O Vater, laß uns sterben!” cries Pandora (405). Thus does Goethe draw on the tradition of love and death, for the first time with this degree of explicitness.