Skip to main content
Disciplines
Automotive Business IT + Informatics Construction + Real Estate Electrical Engineering + Electronics Energy + Sustainability Insurance + Risk Finance + Banking Management + Leadership Marketing + Sales Mechanical Engineering + Materials
Events
DE
EN
Books
Journals
Topic Page
Marketing
Start single access now
Access for companies
EXTENDED SEARCH
Log in
Top

2017 | Book

Preface: The Anthropocene and the Challenge of Cultural Difference Read chapter Read first chapter

German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene

Editors: Caroline Schaumann, Heather I. Sullivan

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US

Book Series : Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" , Springer Professional "Technik"

Login to get access
insite
SEARCH

About this book

This book offers essays on both canonical and non-canonical German-language texts and films, advancing ecocritical models for German Studies, and introducing environmental issues in German literature and film to a broader audience. This volume contextualizes the broad-ranging topics and authors in terms of the Anthropocene, beginning with Goethe and the Romantics and extending into twenty-first-century literature and film. Addressing the growing need for environmental awareness in an international humanities curriculum, this book complements ecocritical analyses emerging from North American and British studies with a specifically German Studies perspective, opening the door to a transnational understanding of how the environment plays an integral role in cultural, political, and economic issues.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Preface: The Anthropocene and the Challenge of Cultural Difference
Abstract
Over the last decade, the concept of the Anthropocene has imposed itself as a new framework for thinking and writing about environmental issues. The idea that humans have so pervasively reshaped global ecological systems that their impact will be visible in the geological strata to future observers, and that this transformation has ushered in a new geological epoch, has influenced environmental debates about ecological science, policies, and environmental narratives and cultures. Regardless of whether geologists will end up accepting or rejecting the term, the Anthropocene has turned humankind at large into the protagonist of a new deep-time narrative, generated heated debates over the merits of such a species narrative as opposed to an emphasis on economic and geopolitical inequality, and given rise to controversies over what kind of nature environmentalism should aim to conserve in this new framework.
Ursula K. Heise
Introduction
Abstract
The introduction to German Ecocriticism defines and contextualizes the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and the Anthropocene in terms of German-speaking literature and film from the early nineteenth century through today. The volume, however, goes beyond national boundaries by addressing the implications of and the need for transnational, cosmopolitan, and “planetary” perspectives for textual explorations of the physical environment. We briefly outline the book’s chapters that are organized thematically in four parts: “Interactions with Place and Ecological Systems: Local and Global,” “Vibrant Matter: Rocks, Minerals, and Food,” “Representing Catastrophe, Crisis, and Ecological Devastation,” and “Genres in the Anthropocene.” By offering a critical investigation into cultural performances of nature in manifold forms, this volume provides specifically German-focused studies of global environmental issues.
Caroline Schaumann, Heather I. Sullivan

Ecological Systems and Place in the Anthropocene

Frontmatter
The Dark Pastoral: A Trope for the Anthropocene
Abstract
This chapter addresses the challenges of portraying radically altered ecological systems as a human story in an era of global anthropogenic impact, exploring how to combine traditional literary tropes like the pastoral with more recent forms such as climate fiction. The dark pastoral trope builds on the pastoral’s long and rich, albeit problematic, literary tradition featuring human beings in highly aestheticized landscapes and re-contextualizes it within the Anthropocene’s dark drama of floods, earthquakes, storms, nuclear explosions, and climate change. Texts such as Goethe’s Werther, Kleist’s Earthquake in Chili, Storm’s The Dykemaster, Pausewang’s The Cloud, and Trojanow’s The Lamentations of Zeno posit various pastoral moments only to rupture and re-shape them with disasters that nevertheless highlight the human enmeshment with the non-human.
Heather I. Sullivan
Goethe’s Faust and the Ecolinguistics of
Abstract
Scholarship now understands that Goethe’s Faust is not a celebration of modernity, but rather its critique. Faust’s striving comes at a cost measured in human lives, shattered economies, failing empires, territorial wars, and environmental degradation. What was understood as the vision of a free republic of the Faustian spirit is now seen as Goethe’s critique of capitalism, colonialism, and technology. If Goethe does not champion Faust as the modern individual, does he offer an alternative? This chapter argues that we can discern in Faust an ecolinguistic conception of an ego that diminishes in response to an awareness of nature, history, and geological time. Karl Bühler’s model of the “here-now-I system of subjective orientation” provides a new way of thinking about place that is already instantiated in Goethe’s Faust.
Simon Richter
Adalbert Stifter’s Alternative Anthropocene: Reimagining Social Nature in Brigitta and Abdias
Abstract
This chapter investigates the production of nature in two novellas from Adalbert Stifter’s Studien: Brigitta and Abdias. I argue that both texts imagine an alternative Anthropocene reality that is presented as a more ethical parallel to nineteenth-century environmental degradation. The pastoralist vision in Brigitta expresses Stifter’s vision of an alternative Anthropocene most directly, whereas Abdias provides a more negative contrast. This chapter thus situates the moral and ethical reflections in Stifter’s narratives within the realities of the social production of nature that the texts portray, and demonstrates how social nature serves a key role in casting the texts’ didactic agendas in an ironic and critical light.
Alexander Phillips
The Senses of Slovenia: Peter Handke, Stanley Cavell, and the Environmental Ethics of Repetition
Abstract
This analysis of the art of memory in Peter Handke’s Die Wiederholung argues that his notion of memory is rooted in Kierkegaard’s (future-oriented) concept of repetition rather than the Greek (past-oriented) concept of recollection. Drawing on Stanley Cavell’s reading of Thoreau, this chapter explores the environmental ramifications of such a dramaturgy of memory. It investigates the anthropological dialectics of primary and secondary nature, the relation between spatial mapping and language development, and the paradox of gaining identity through accepting otherness. Close readings of narrative strategies offer new insights into the ways in which Handke combines his language philosophy with an ethics of space, movement, and createdness. His poetics of world-forming anticipates concerns that are discussed in the Anthropocene debate today in powerful ways.
Bernhard Malkmus

Vibrant Matter: Rocks, Mines, Air, and Food

Frontmatter
“Mines aren’t really like that”: German Romantic Undergrounds Revisited
Abstract
Drawing on contemporary reconceptualizations of materiality as a site of more-than-human mindfulness, meaning, and moral salience, this chapter brings a material ecocritical perspective to bear on the celebration of caverns, mines, and mining in Novalis’s unfinished novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen. While the German Romantic romance with mining has sometimes been seen as complicit with the emergent extractive economy of industrial modernity, I argue that it is also possible to exhume from Novalis’ literary underground an ecophilosophical ethos of human responsibility for more-than-human flourishing that answers to the socio-ecological exigencies of the present, in which “letting be” is no longer adequate.
Kate Rigby
(Bad) Air and (Faulty) Inspiration: Elemental and Environmental Influences on Fontane
Abstract
Theodor Fontane’s obsession with air documented in his writings takes two very different forms. In his fiction, he assesses air quality in gendered terms so that men’s comments on factory smoke and smells metaphorically reveal their social and political positions, whereas women’s insatiable hunger for fresh air is symptomatic for their suffering in their marriages. In Fontane’s letters and diaries, on the other hand, references to air relate to his specific “meteopathia,” that is, his belief that his writing depended on “good air.” This chapter contextualizes Fontane’s works within the Anthropocene discourses, studying his reflections on the weather, “air cures,” and the aerial transmission of bacteria in terms of contemporary discourses on miasma, traditional concepts of “inspiration,” Buell’s “toxic discourse,” and Alaimo’s “trans-corporeality.”
Evi Zemanek
Performing Hunger: Fasting in Franz Kafka’s Hunger Artist as Poetic Practice
Abstract
This chapter builds on material ecocriticism to include poetic issues that frame the entanglement of food and consumption as an ensemble of critical practices in literature. We interpret the economic and semiotic system of capitalism as a cultural phenomenon. On the example of Franz Kafka’s short story “A Hunger Artist” (1924), we show how poetic texts explore themes, places, cultures, and identities through a variety of techniques that are tied to figurative language. With its roots in modernist poetics, Kafka’s text reflects the cultural practice of fasting as an artistic performance on the thematic level and, at the same time, enacts the disruption of consumptive patterns through fasting on the level of poetic meaning.
Sabine Wilke, Cora L. Wilke-Gray
Speaking Stones: Material Agency and Interaction in Christian Enzensberger’s Geschichte der Natur
Abstract
This chapter investigates the agentic dimensions of pebbles in Christian Enzensberger’s Nicht Eins und Doch: Geschichte der Natur. While stone is a material usually scorned for its inanimateness and has been infamously denounced as “worldless” by Martin Heidegger, Enzensberger lends stone a voice, thus defying a longstanding hierarchy that since the Middle Ages has placed lithic matter at the very bottom of worldly existence. Yet Enzensberger’s novel can be read as a continuation and expansion of Heidegger’s essay “Der Feldweg.” In an experimental, multilingual, and imaginative narrative about sensual encounters with the nonhuman world, Enzensberger’s text elucidates a greater range of human experience that emerges when humans give up their claim to exclusive agency to explore, in reversed manner, their entanglement with the earth.
Caroline Schaumann

Catastrophe, Crisis, and Cultural Exploitation

Frontmatter
When Nature Strikes Back: The Inconvenient Apocalypse in Franz Hohler’s Der Neue Berg
Abstract
With grotesque humor, the Swiss author Hans Hohler showcases in his debut novel Der neue Berg (1989) the inability of officials and bureaucrats to come to terms with the fact that on a hill in the midst of Zurich’s sprawling agglomeration, a volcano is about to erupt. Instead of afflicting a remote region, a mysterious force has brought Earth’s fire to an urban center where the planet is abused on a daily basis. Contrary to doomsday scenarios in popular culture that seek to entertain and thrill the audience, the chain of events in the novel reveals a sublime mythic power whose utter incomprehensibility shatters preconceived notions of risk—an alienating effect that awakens the readers’ own awareness of their dependence on the “goodwill” of nature.
Christoph Weber
National Invective and Environmental Exploitation in Thomas Bernhard’s Frost
Abstract
Frost belongs to the distinctively Austrian genre of the anti-Heimat novel and as such critiques the state of affairs in the Second Republic. Bernhard specifically condemns his homeland’s hypocritical stance toward its National Socialist past and its postwar attempt to reinvent itself by fetishizing its unspoiled Alpine scenery and wholesome rustic citizenry. His national invective is rooted in environmental as much as political history. In the course of the novel, forests are harvested by the cellulose industry and an entire river drainage is dammed for the construction of a major power plant, which is modeled on the Glockner-Kaprun hydroelectric facility, one of many modernization projects carried out under the mantle of a New Austria but whose origins extend back to the era of German-Austro fascism.
Sean Ireton
German Film Ventures into the Amazon: Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo as Prelude to Michał Marczak’s Eco-documentary
Abstract
Where the German director Werner Herzog films ecosystems, his works recapitulate colonialism’s contradictions. This chapter begins by examining one of Herzog’s short films, Ten Thousand Years Older (2001), in which the director and his crew encounter a South American tribe that developed entirely apart from Western society, and it explores the differences between the documentarian’s standpoint and that of his various subjects. It then compares Herzog’s film with Michał Marczak’s Polish-German eco-documentary Fuck for Forest (2012). Marczak’s camera also witnesses things that the activists who are his film’s subjects do not, capturing what eludes his protagonists’ Western gazes. Both of these films are cinematic spaces in which rainforest people can be seen and heard, irrespective of their filmmakers’ colonial fantasies.
Brad Prager
Assessing How We Assess Environmental Risk: Kathrin Röggla’s Documentary Film The Mobile Future
Abstract
Kathrin Röggla’s 2012 made-for-TV documentary The Mobile Future examines the rhetorical strategies at work in articulating threats to the environment, the linguistic and visual imagery we conjure up in the process, as well as the realities of those who make a living in the field of risk management. Born in Salzburg in 1971 and now residing in Berlin, Röggla has made a name for herself as a writer and an essayist on contemporary topics. Drawing attention to the importance of rhetoric and communication for effective ecocriticism, her self-reflective film emphasizes the complexities contained in the assessment of environmental danger and the challenges involved in the delivery of nuanced messages to the public.
Katharina Gerstenberger

Genres in the Anthropocene

Frontmatter
Writing After Nature: A Sebaldian Ecopoetics
Abstract
Although the melancholic disposition of Sebald’s narrators can threaten to engulf the narrative in a temporal stasis, texts ranging from the long poem After Nature to the travelog The Rings of Saturn are open to a futurity that should be of interest to critical ecological thought. This chapter reads sites of disturbance in Sebald’s writing as novel environments rather than merely the ongoing devastation of a traumatic past. The reduced ecologies of weeds and ruderals that comprise Sebald’s environmental imagination subtly celebrate the regenerative capacities of anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic ecological disturbances (storms, volcanoes, fires, and floods), they nourish a more-than-human future beyond the legacy of anthropogenic destruction, and they also yield an ecopoetics not predicated on an unpolluted atmosphere or unalienated life.
Jason Groves
Telling the Story of Climate Change: The German Novel in the Anthropocene
Abstract
This chapter begins by discussing the implications of the Anthropocene for literature and literary criticism, and the part which ecocritics can play in critically analyzing cultural representations of our relationship with nature and defining the contribution of imagination, art, and writing to the development of a posthuman identity. Reviewing studies of climate fiction in English and German to date, it traces the emergence of climate fiction as a twenty-first-century genre and presents a brief overview of 25 German novels published since 1993. Finally, it compares the solutions to problems of form and narrative strategy arrived at by Ilija Trojanow in his lament over our destructive impact on nature in Eistau (2011) with those in Cornelia Franz’s young adult novel, Ins Nordlicht blicken (2012).
Axel Goodbody
The Anthropocene in Contemporary German Ecothrillers
Abstract
Ecothrillers deal with the mostly invisible and intangible problems of climate change by searching for better ways of imagining its relations to nature and humanity. Ecothrillers present a global environmental crisis with variegated local effects that threaten all humankind but can still be prevented at the very last minute. The environmental crisis is mostly depicted as a result of anthropocentric dominion over nature, as a rationalistic ideology of progression and technological-economical exploitation of natural resources. The chapter (1) presents the impact of the Anthropocene for the humanities, (2) summarizes the characteristics of ecothrillers, and (3) analyzes prominent German-speaking examples by Frank Schätzing and Bernd C. Fleck while scrutinizing their different narrative patterns (precautionary, apocalyptic, dystopian, utopian) to contribute to a reflection on species agency.
Gabriele Dürbeck
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene
Editors
Caroline Schaumann
Heather I. Sullivan
Copyright Year
2017
Electronic ISBN
978-1-137-54222-9
Print ISBN
978-1-137-55985-2
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54222-9