Tragedy: Faust a Tragedy ( tragedy, tragic event, tragedy, buskin )

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust is a tragic play in verse. Although written as a closet drama, it is the play with the largest audience numbers on German-language stages.

Although today many of the classical and Central European themes may be hard for the modern reader to grasp, the work remains a resonant parable on scientific learning and religion, passion and seduction, independence and love, as well as other subjects. In poetic terms, Goethe places science and power in the context of a morally interested metaphysics. Faust is a scientific empiricist who is forced to confront questions of good and evil, God and the devil, sexuality and mortality.

Faust is Goethe's most famous work and considered by many to be one of the greatest works of German literature.