sions, Zeus at one point sends Pandora, the first woman, to bring unhappiness to
humans by releasingall the evils of the world from her“box”(except,ofcourse,
for hope); in laterversions, he eventuallyallows Herculesto unchain Prome-
theus.¹⁵
The meanings attributedto themyth are just as varied and contradictory.As
manyinterpreters have pointed out,the long-fought struggle of human beingsfor
alife of self-determination in the GoldenAgesimultaneouslycondemnedthem
to alife oftoil in the IronAge. During the nineteenth century,Prometheus was
claimed for the competingnarratives of bourgeois emancipation, modern capi-
talism, as well as proletarian revolution.WritersJohannWolfgangvon Goethe,
LordByron, andPercyBysshe Shelley,composers LudwigvanBeethoven,
Franz Liszt,and Alexander Scriabin, and paintersGustave Moreau, ArnoldBöck-
lin,andMaxKlingerallturnedtothefamousTitanastheembodimentofthe
modernindividual, his heroic struggles, failures, and triumphs. Socialistappro-
priations translated the underlying cult of bourgeois individualism into collecti-
vistterms, but retained the original equation of individual agency with mascu-
linity.
Evoking Prometheus in the German context,ofcourse,meantcitingJohann
Wolfgangvon Goethe–that is, the drama fragment written duringthe 1770s
under the influenceofthe French Revolution. Goethe’sPrometheus famously
rails against the ancientgods and,inthe name of bourgeois emancipation
and humanistic thought,asserts his free will.“Ishould honoryou? Forwhat?/
Have yousoftened the sufferings,/ ever,ofthe burdened?/ Have youstilled the
tears,/ ever,ofthe anguished?,”he asks defiantly,incensed about the existence
of sufferinginthe world. Significantly, it is men’sability to feel stronglyand
deeply,“to suffer,toweep, to enjoy and to delight themselves, andto mock
you–as Ido!”,that createthe conditions for their resistancetoauthority.¹⁶Mod-
eling an emotional praxisofdissent,the drama fragmentwasrepeatedlyreprint-
ed in socialist publications and contributed toaveritable cult of Goethe and
Schiller in socialist circles.¹⁷Goethe’sPrometheusfragmentwasincluded in
Foranintroductionto the history of themythological figure, see Carol Dougherty,Prome-
theus(London: Routledge,2006).With aspecial focus on the nineteenth century,see Caroline
Corbeau-Parsons,Prometheus in the Nineteenth Century: From Myth to Symbol(London:Legen-
da,2013).Foraphilosophical reading of Prometheus in the Goethean tradition, also see Hans
Blumenberg,Work on Myth,trans. Robert M.Wallace(Cambridge,MA: MITPress, 1985).
JohannWolfgangvonGoethe,“Prometheus,”inJohannWolfgangvon Goethe: Selected Poet-
ry,trans. DavidLuke (London: Penguin,2005), 11.
Atypical example can be found inArbeiter-Jugend.Monatsschriftder sozialistischen Arbeiter-
Jugend Deutschlands1.4(1909): 48.
110 Chapter5