The Year’s Work in Modern Language Studies, Vol. 78, 2018, S. 382
"Klaus Weißinger, Goethes Faust: Ökonom—Landesplaner—Unternehmer, Frankfurt, Lang, 131 pp., challenges conventional interpretations of Part 2 by arguing that Faust is a successful and largely positive figure. He scours Act 5 for the incidental details of Faust’s engineering project which might imply a geographical location (shown in diagram maps), doing so in order to show that Faust is a successful entrepreneur with substantial achievements. w.’s critics will no doubt feel that he at times trivialises Faust’s entanglement in guilt and glosses over the harm that he does and thus also the ambivalence of his ‘success’. A close reading of a relatively short text—Act 5 of Part 2—runs the risk of not contextualizing it with sufficient precision, but, as here, it can produce useful insights into details of formulation."