Axel Goodbody

Nature, Technology and Cultural Change in Twentieth-Century German Literature

Introduction PART I: THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES Nature in German Culture PART II: CRITIQUES OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY Goethe as Ecophilosophical Inspiration and Literary Model From Modernist Catastrophe to Postmodern Survival PART III: NEGOTIATIONS BETWEEN NATURE AND CULTURE Heideggerian Ecopoetics and the Nature Poetry Tradition The Call of the Wild Greening the City PART IV: CONCLUSION Nature as a Cultural Project

Greening the City

Literary and artistic depictions and constructions of the ‘simple life’, a way of living combining individual self-realisation with harmonious social relations, within the context of a personally rewarding but simultaneously ethically grounded and empathetic interaction with animals and the natural environment, have been a central subject for ecocritical consideration. ‘Simple life’ texts participate in a pastoral tradition which extends back over two thousand years in Western culture and are rooted in biblical depictions of paradise on the one hand and Greek celebrations of a temporally distant Golden Age or a geographically remote Arcadia on the other. Pastoral is one of the principal ecocritical ‘tropes’ defined by Greg Garrard in terms of content as “pre-existing ways of imagining the place of humans in nature” and “key structuring metaphors”, and in formal terms as extended rhetorical and narrative strategies gathering together “permutations of creative imagination: metaphor, genre, narrative, image” (2004: 2, 7 and 14).

Postwar Dystopia and Rural Idyll: Arno Schmidt's early novels in the context of ecocriticism and cultural ecology

Abstract The article examines the representation of nature in five short novels written between 1945 and 1960 with reference to two literary theories recently formulated in Britain and Germany: Garrards account of the aims and methods of ecocriticism, and Finke and Zapfs understanding of literature as cultural ecology. Situated midway between the Inner Émigrés of the Third Reich and environmentally committed writers in the 1970s and 1980s, Schmidt dramatises the clash between conceptions of nature as order and chaos in pessimistic, autobiographically coloured narratives conveying a blistering critique of postwar conservatism and Cold War politics. His Warnutopien combine fantasies of withdrawal from society to a simple life in natural surroundings with apocalyptic warnings of nuclear destruction. Schmidts creative adaptation of the genres of apocalypse, idyll and utopia (identified by Garrard as central environmentalist tropes) is examined, and his distinctive contribution to nature discourse in the 1950s is discussed as an example of the ability of literature, a complex medium of symbolic representation, to serve as a sphere of experimentation and innovation, helping readers overcome the self-destructive dynamic of modern civilisation.

Telling the Story of Climate Change: The German Novel in the Anthropocene

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).

Ecocrítica alemã:Um panorama

O artigo apresenta o estado da arte da pesquisa ecocritica sobre a literatura alema. Apesar de esta ter se iniciado tardiamente em comparacao com os EUA, ja ha um numero de publicacoes que apontam para uma area em desenvolvimento.

Nature in German Culture: The Role of Writers in Environmental Debate

“Educated people make nature their friend”, reads a large sign on the picturesque remains of the old town wall in Marbach.1 The cobbled streets and crooked, half-timbered houses of Schiller’s birthplace nestle on the slopes above the Romantic river Neckar, and although the panorama from the Schiller Museum and National Literary Archive is dominated to the South by a power station, and the wooded slopes downriver towards Ludwigsburg and its Baroque palace are dotted by pylons and criss-crossed by power cables, upstream the scene remains one of vineyards, orchards and open countryside. The whine of traffic along the river valley can be heard day and night in this populous area on the edge of the Stuttgart urban industrial region. Yet it still gives the appearance of being a place where people live in harmony with the natural surroundings. To the visitor, the inhabitants seem to lead comfortable, orderly lives, observing local customs, growing regional varieties of fruit, drinking the area’s distinctive wine made from the Trollinger grape and cultivating their Swabian dialect. The environs of Marbach epitomise the idea of ‘Kulturlandschaft’, was first formulated by the midnineteenth-century folklorist and social theorist Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl. Taken up by the German Naturschutz and Heimatschutz (Nature Conservation and Homeland Protection) movements, this ideal of an anthropogenic terrain blending the natural, cultivated and built environments in an aesthetically harmonious whole continues to inform German land use planning today.

Heideggerian Ecopoetics and the Nature Poetry Tradition

“Dichterisch wohnet der Mensch”, Martin Heidegger cited Friedrich Holderlin in a public lecture in 1951, taking the line as a textual reference point for the explication of his own views on dwelling and poetry. In another lecture given in the same year, he asserted: “Die Sterblichen wohnen, insofern sie die Erde retten.” Poetically man lives, or dwells, and mortals dwell in that they save the Earth.1 Jonathan Bate has recently drawn together these two enigmatic statements, elucidating them with reference to other related passages from Heidegger’s work, in an ‘ecopoetic’ which is summed up at its simplest and boldest in the assertion: “Poetry is the place where we save the earth” (Bate 2000: 283). Heidegger is one of several politically conservative German thinkers whose responses to the development of technology and social modernisation in the first half of the twentieth century have been cautiously reexamined for their ecological potential — others include Ludwig Klages, Ernst Junger and his brother Friedrich Georg Junger2 — alongside those of their left-wing contemporaries Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno. But Heidegger, whose thinking turned decisively towards physis and the Earth in the mid 1930s, and who in his later work transferred to poetry the hopes he had once notoriously placed in the regeneration of society by National Socialism, has provided a particularly fruitful philosophical basis for ecocritical theorising and textual analysis, despite the political problems with which he confronts the critic.

Nature as a Cultural Project

Since the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s landmark study of the processes involved in scientific advance, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), it has become customary to question the assumption that science develops by the accumulation of individual discoveries and inventions, and to speak of ‘paradigm shifts’ periodically revolutionising our understanding of the world around us. This final chapter reviews three accounts of such epoch-making shifts in the conceptualising of the relationship of humankind with nature, and draws on texts by twentieth-century German authors which exemplify five principal conceptions of nature, between which Hartmut Bohme has distinguished: nature as cosmos, and as a hermeneutic, technological, ecological and cultural project. The chapter ends with a closer look at Christine Bruckner’s novel Die letzte Strophe (1989) as evidence of the ability of popular literature to reflect a conception of nature as a cultural project and a brief conclusion reviewing the findings of this study.

Goethe as Ecophilosophical Inspiration and Literary Model

If any single German writer comes close to the importance which Henry David Thoreau possesses in American culture as principal founder of the national ‘environmental imagination’ (Lawrence Buell), it is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Goethe’s standing as the greatest German writer in modern times is undisputed, and nature has been central to public interest in his work: “Nature is the concept which stood at the very centre of Goethe interpretation from the very beginning and still does today”, writes Karl Robert Mandelkow.1 On the basis of his poems, novels, plays and essays, he was already understood by his friend and collaborator Schiller, together with his Romantic contemporaries, as an advocate of nature and a poet of sensual perception. From the middle of the nineteenth century on, the conception of nature expounded in his voluminous scientific studies has also been a matter of constant debate and served repeatedly as a source of inspiration. Arguments based on Goethe have been at the heart of an ‘alternative’ German discourse on nature and environment over the past century and a half, and Goethe’s influence on the literature of nature in Germany is greater than that of any other writer.

From Modernist Catastrophe to Postmodern Survival

Few things grasp the public imagination like technological disasters. Events such as the dramatic collapse of the railway bridge over the Firth of Tay in 1879 (at the time the longest in the world and hailed as a triumph of modern engineering), the sinking of the luxury liner Titanic on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic in 1912, the spectacular launch failure of the space shuttle Challenger in Cape Canaveral and the reactor meltdown in Chernobyl in 1986 have exercised a powerful and lasting fascination. Shaking our faith in our ability to conquer nature with the aid of technology and reminding us of wider uncertainties inherent in modern civilisation of which we normally suppress awareness, they exemplify the continuing presence of risk and incursion of chance into a world which we had long since thought under our control.