Speech Coverage

Faust Works Donated to Kalamazoo College

German Scholar’s Library Donated to Kalamazoo College

Allison Luthy-Kaplan

KALAMAZOO, Mich.— Professor James M. van der Laan of Illinois State University delivered a lecture on Saturday, October 13 entitled “Faust Across the Ages and the Arts” to an audience of 50 people at Kalamazoo College. The speech was in honor of the newest addition to the A.M. Todd Rare Book Room being unveiled that day in Upjohn Library.

The collection of first editions was donated to Kalamazoo College after the recent death of the renowned German scholar, Victor Lange.

Born in Leipzig, Germany in 1908, Lange graduated from the University of Leipzig and went on to receive his doctorate in English literature. He moved to Canada at the beginning of World War II, eventually going to the US, where he became a main ambassador for German literature, which he collected. His son, an alumnus of Kalamazoo College, donated the collection after his father’s death.

The speaker, van der Laan, demonstrated the far-reaching influence of Faust with such materials as Edith Wharton’s “Age of Innocence” to Wishbone, a children’s television show about a dog that reads classic literature. With brief descriptions of their relevance, van der Laan played CDs, showed paintings, read aloud from books, and played DVDs.

The hour-long lecture got laughs from audience members at first, but lasted too long to hold their attention. Students who clearly had other things to do on homecoming day glanced repeatedly at the clock and stopped taking notes for their classes for much of the last half hour.

Van der Laan said of Faust, “The legend has such a grip on us—on his contemporaries and on us today.”

Clearly, Faust did not have as much of a grip on the students attending the lecture as van der Laan would have hoped.