Sabine Wilke

Introduction: "Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene"

In this cluster of essays, a group of scholars from different disciplines—History, Comparative Literature, American Studies, and Literature and Media Studies—offers reflections upon a broadly construed question: what does it mean for the humanities to address the concept of the Anthropocene? We have, quite intentionally, included essays that vary with regard to materials and approaches. What they share is a concern with the challenges of representing a concept at once wholly abstract and alarmingly material in aesthetically, rhetorically, and ultimately politically efficacious ways. They share as well a conviction that the humanities, in their attention to the creation and critique of aesthetic objects, can play a significant role in heightening public environmental awareness. The problem they collectively address is a curious, but pervasive one in environmentalism: why does it seem that widely accepted science and widely shared framing paradigms have such limited effect on the various public audiences that they attempt and need to reach? How, too, might that be changed? The claim that we have entered a new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene was first made by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000 (and elaborated upon by Crutzen in an article published in Nature in 2002). Originally defined as the age in which humanity came to have an impact upon long-term geological processes, it now stresses that our species has become a crucially significant factor in potentially cataclysmic climatological and biogeographical changes. Especially since the Industrial Revolution, humanity has exerted an increasingly powerful influence over the Earth’s ecosystems, changing not only the planet’s surface appearance, but also its chemistry and geology. Indeed, Will Steffen, Paul Crutzen and 1 P. J. Crutzen and E. F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’” Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18; P. J. Crutzen “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415, no. 6867 (2002): 23.

Performing Hunger: Fasting in Franz Kafka’s Hunger Artist as Poetic Practice

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.

Wilde Moderne. Der Bildhauer Fritz Behn (1878–1970) von Joachim Zeller (review)

among the true achievements of novel-writing, Kramer identifies them as what we sometimes call mirror fictions. They present fictional lives in which the contemporary readers enjoy seeing themselves reflected and feel an affirmation in finding their mode of expression reproduced. Like the representations on the feuilleton page, Kracauer’s first novel invites those readers to find their way into their sense of themselves by reliving an identity from within the figure of Ginster. Kracauer does not create a literary language that endures because he cannot find the resources to establish the stylistic means to sustain a perspective from outside these identities. We would find that effect exemplified in the way Thomas Mann portrays figures from Ginster’s generation. The phrase “guilty pleasure” of course brings only a vague redolence of how Kracauer draws on any material to mediate between himself and his reader. The most cogent formulations drawing attention to Kracauer’s enraptured self-enclosure occur in Theodor Adorno’s comments, both in their private correspondence and in Adorno’s published essays. Adorno figures as a counterpart to Kracauer in thirteen of the essays collected here. In their introduction, moreover, the editors cite Adorno’s incisive observation that “es mangele ihm, bei aller Aufgeschlossenheit und gerade um deren Hartnäckigkeit willen, an Freiheit zum Objekt. In dem Blick, der an die Sache sich festsaugt, ist bei Kracauer, anstelle von Theorie, immer schon er selber da” (10). It does not impress Adorno that in principle this predetermined identity has a humane or left-leaning character. It remains myth-bound in its fascinated reproduction of its own self-enclosure. Absent the sympathy earned by a progressive political desire, the remark quoted above would fit Ernst Jünger just as precisely. Apparently it does not impress the editors of this volume that Adorno and Horkheimer are so well able to recognize that theory itself does not easily evade the egotistical sublime of metaphysics. The editors’ introductory remarks look for support of Kracauer in the face of Adorno’s critique by calling it an “Ironie” (10) that those theoretical limitations also afflict Adorno and Horkheimer themselves as though they were not aware of it. The difficulties that arise between including critical reflections on Kracauer as powerful as Adorno’s, and then diminishing or evading their implication, continue to bedevil the defensive positions taken up in the entire volume. Those are the same difficulties that determine the broader challenge presented by the intellectual triangle Benjamin–Adorno–Kracauer. Several of the contributions refer to Miriam Bratu Hansen’s approach to this triad with her book Cinema and Experience, published posthumously in 2012. Precisely because of their looser array, however, the efforts brought together in this volume, though not decisive, certainly advance our insights well beyond her attempt at a fixed perspective in that endeavor.

Visionen von Natur vor uns. Alfred Ehrhardt fotografiert und filmt Urformen der Natur

What did nature look like before it was destroyed by modern civilization? That is a question that was at the center of modernist art photography. It also resonates today in the context of environmental debates. On the example of the art work of Bauhaus photographer and cinematographer Alfred Ehrhardt, the artistic project of portraying nature “before us” is analyzed as an aesthetic project that positions itself before and next to the Anthropocene, i.e., the geological concept that foregrounds a radical interconnectivity between humans and nonhuman nature in our post-industrial era of mankind.

„Die Katastrophe ist ein schwarzes Blatt“: Katastrophenmanagement und Umweltethik in Georg Kaisers Schauspiel Gas (1918)

Kaiser’s play presents the catastrophic explosion of a plant that produces the world’s supply of gas in the context of weighing strategies of risk management and certain positions in environmental ethics. An ecocritical reading of this expressionist play and its thematic focus on industrial automation, alienation, and the problems of modern mass society that lead to a vicious cycle of war and violence underscores the limitations of the aesthetic solutions that the play offers for these ethical concepts. While the hyperbolic staging of the explosion at the end of Act One and the debate of the various ethical positions that are offered for rebuilding society over the course of the remaining four acts raises awareness of some of the environmental issues that are related to that project, it nevertheless falls short of sketching a dimension that leads beyond the anthropocentrism, lack of a global perspective, and genuine interest in finding a sustainable solution that still informs these positions. (SW; in German)

Zwanzig Jahre Germanistik postkolonial

(Lubrich, Oliver, Das Schwinden der Differenz. Postkoloniale Poetiken. Alexander von Humboldt – Bram Stoker – Ernst Jünger – Jean Genet.—Hermes, Stefan, ”Fahrten nach Südwest.” Die Kolonialkriege gegen die Herero und Nama in der deutschen Literatur (1904–2004).—Albrecht, Monika, “Europa ist nicht die Welt.” (Post)Kolonialismus in Literatur und Geschichte der westdeutschen Nachkriegszeit.—Lillge, Claudia und Anne-Rose Meyer, Hrsg., Interkulturelle Mahlzeiten. Kulinarische Begegnungen und Kommunikation in der Literatur.—Schmitz, Helmut, Hrsg., Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur. Transkulturelle deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur im Zeitalter globaler Migration.—Struck, Wolfgang, Die Eroberung der Phantasie. Kolonialismus, Literatur und Film zwischen deutschem Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik.)