This is an article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung that came up when I searched for the German version of “everything solid melts into air.” I was trying to figure out whether Marx was actually quoting Goethe’s Faust, or just channeling parts of Faust (just channeling, it turns out).
The article is dense even in German, and therefore hilarious when run through a translation engine (this is Google Chrome’s automatic one). Here’s a paragraph from two-thirds of the way through. They’re translating “Faust” as “Fist,” which you can’t blame them for, being computers (that is what the word means):
Society of oblivion
To accelerate the coming orgy of forgetfulness: Fist liquidated memory as the condition of personal and collective identity by in Lethe’s dew in the spa bath of oblivion, the sliding track erase his crimes. Fist-exempt interest in the global flexibility and openness from the hassle of “ballast” memory-based phenomena such as ethics and morality. He follows this the ironic Goethe’s motto of a globalization-friendly progress ethics. “Will you Morali, freshest then take the” For Goethe knows: “So little to dampen now the steam cars, so little as this is also in the ethical possible.”