Professor Anna Bohnenkamp (University of Frankfurt am Main, Goethe Museum), a specialist in Goethe’s life and works, reveals in the culture of 1820s a sense of constant acceleration in the field of communications and economic relations. She explores how this feeling is presented in Goethe’s late works and evaluates the importance of this factor for the radical change that took place in the second part of Goethe’s Faust as compared to the first, as well as its impact on the nature of “the highest moment” in the context of the deal between Faust and Mephistopheles.
German literature of the nineteenth century; Goethe’s Faust; Goethe’s worldview; the «velociferic» century; Time in literature; Money in literature.