This cultivar was selected as a seedling by Josef Hahnl grown from a batch of seed collected from the Old Ginkgo tree in Schönbrunn Castle in Vienna, Austria. This cultivar and  two of Hahnl´s other cultivars (Ginkgo biloba ‘Mephisto’ and Ginkgo biloba ‘Gretchen’) are named in honour of German writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832), who was a fan of Ginkgo and even write a poem on it in 1819. As the name “Goethe” was already in use, Josef Hahnl named them after the main characters of Goethe´s famous work, the Faust. This tragedy is inspired by the classic German legend of Erudite Faust, who made pact with the devil and exchanged his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures
 
Description - Ginkgo biloba ‘Dr. Faustus’. The leaves of this cultivar are a bit longer and narrower compared to the wild form, slightly resembling cv. Saratoga. Leaves mostly lack central incision and their margins are finely irregularly lobed/divided. Some tend to form a weak trumpet. The growth of mother plant is weak and slower than the species .The habit tends to be open and lax. The pruned mother plant cultivated in a container at Joseph Hahnl´s Ginkgo nursery is only about 50 cm high. The growth of grafted plants I entirely dependent on the vigour of the rootstock according to Josef Hahnl.