Goethe’s Faust addresses themes of striking contemporary relevance: artificial intelligence, fluid identities, capitalism — and not least, the aporias of the modern relationship to nature. To this end, Goethe develops a language and imagery that draws on all forms of knowledge and expression available to him.
In the book and accompanying exhibition, the editors show which ideas, objects, and forms of knowledge inform Goethe’s confrontation with emerging modernity in Faust. Through a wealth of historical and contemporary images and pointed texts, they extend this engagement into the present and its globally escalating crises — a deciphering that reads Faust as a message in a bottle, sent from the dawn of modernity into the Capitalocene.
Petra Lutz is a historian and Germanist. She is the director of the Goethe National Museum in Weimar. Martin Naundorf is a curator and cultural worker. Martin Peschken is a scholar of literature and art. Nanny Schedler is a historian and coordinator at the Goethe National Museum.
