Chapter 30 - America

Summary

Chapter 30 examines Goethe’s relationship with America. The country was for him an imagined space full of possibility, a historical frontier which opened onto modernity. The chapter considers the transatlantic network which, in the post-Napoleonic period, linked Harvard, Göttingen and Weimar, and would prove particularly important for Goethe’s geological studies. It also describes the – at times ambivalent – perspectives on American democracy that reached Goethe from Prince Bernhard, the son of Carl August, during his American travels, before moving to an analysis of American influences on and representations of America in Goethe’s literary work.