Nature, Technology and Cultural Change in Twentieth-Century German Literature: The Challenge of Ecocriticism (New Perspectives in German Studies)

Nature, Technology and Cultural Change in Twentieth-Century German Literature The Challenge of Ecocriticism

Axel Goodbody

New Perspectives in German Studies General Editors: Michael Butler is Emeritus Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Birmingham and Professor William E. Paterson OBE is Professor of European and German Politics at the University of Birmingham and Chairman of the German British Forum. Over the last twenty years the concept of German studies has undergone major transformation. The traditional mixture of language and literary studies, related very closely to the discipline as practised in German universities, has expanded to embrace history, politics, economics and cultural studies. The conventional boundaries between all these disciplines have become increasingly blurred, a process which has been accelerated markedly since German unification in 1989/90. New Perspectives in German Studies, developed in conjunction with the Institute for German Studies and the Department of German Studies at the University of Birmingham, has been designed to respond precisely to this trend of the interdisciplinary approach to the study of German and to cater for the growing interest in Germany in the context of European integration. The books in this series will focus on the modern period, from 1750 to the present day. Titles include: Mathew M.C. Allen THE VARIETIES OF CAPITALISM PARADIGM Explaining Germany’s Comparative Advantage? Peter Bleses and Martin Seeleib-Kaiser THE DUAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE GERMAN WELFARE STATE Michael Butler and Robert Evans (editors) THE CHALLENGE OF GERMAN CULTURE Essays Presented to Wilfried van der Will Michael Butler, Malcolm Pender and Joy Charnley (editors) THE MAKING OF MODERN SWITZERLAND 1848–1998 Paul Cooke and Andrew Plowman (editors) GERMAN WRITERS AND THE POLITICS OF CULTURE Dealing with the Stasi Beverly Crawford POWER AND GERMAN FOREIGN POLICY Embedded Hegemony in Europe Wolf-Dieter Eberwein and Karl Kaiser (editors) GERMANY’S NEW FOREIGN POLICY Decision-Making in an Interdependent World Karl Christian Führer and Corey Ross (editors) MASS MEDIA, CULTURE AND SOCIETY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY GERMANY Axel Goodbody NATURE, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURAL CHANGE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY GERMAN LITERATURE The Challenge of Ecocriticism

Jonathan Grix THE ROLE OF THE MASSES IN THE COLLAPSE OF THE GDR Gunther Hellmann (editor) GERMANY’S EU POLICY IN ASYLUM AND DEFENCE De-Europeanization by Default? Dan Hough, Michael Koß and Jonathan Olsen THE LEFT PARTY IN CONTEMPORARY GERMAN POLITICS Margarete Kohlenbach WALTER BENJAMIN Self-Reference and Religiosity Charles Lees PARTY POLITICS IN GERMANY A Comparative Politics Approach Hanns W, Maull GERMANY’S UNCERTAIN POWER Foreign Policy of the Berlin Republic Alister Miskimmon GERMANY AND THE COMMON FOREIGN AND SECURITY POLICY OF THE EUROPEAN UNION Between Europeanization and National Adaptation Christian Schweiger BRITAIN, GERMANY AND THE FUTURE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION James Sloam THE EUROPEAN POLICY OF THE GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRATS Interpreting a Changing World Ronald Speirs and John Breuilly (editors) GERMANY’S TWO UNIFICATIONS Anticipations, Experiences, Responses Henning Tewes GERMANY, CIVILIAN POWER AND THE NEW EUROPE Enlarging Nato and the European Union Maiken Umbach GERMAN FEDERALISM Past, Present, Future Roger Woods GERMANY’S NEW RIGHT AS CULTURE AND POLITICS New Perspectives in German Studies Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–92430–4 hardcover Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–92434–7 paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England.

Nature, Technology and Cultural Change in Twentieth-Century German Literature The Challenge of Ecocriticism

Axel Goodbody Reader in German University of Bath, UK

© Axel Goodbody 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–53545–9 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–53545–3 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction

viii I Theoretical Perspectives

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

3

II Critiques of Science and Technology 2 Goethe as Ecophilosophical Inspiration and Literary Model

45

3 From Modernist Catastrophe to Postmodern Survival: Technological Disaster in Georg Kaiser’s ‘Gas’ Trilogy and Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Untergang der Titanic

87

III Negotiations between Nature and Culture 4 Heideggerian Ecopoetics and the Nature Poetry Tradition: Naming and Dwelling in Loerke and Bobrowski

129

5 The Call of the Wild: Hunting and Ecology in the Stories of Otto Alscher and Horst Stern

168

6 Greening the City: From Allotment Colony to Ecology Park in the Novels of Paul Gurk and Günter Seuren

209

IV Conclusion 7 Nature as a Cultural Project

255

Notes

280

Bibliography

297

Index

323

v

Acknowledgements The idea for this book goes back nearly ten years, but it would not have seen the light of day without periods of study leave funded by my Department at the University of Bath and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Collaboration with Colin Riordan (University of Newcastle) on the three-year project ‘Nature and Environment in Modern German Literature’, which enabled me to make several study visits to the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach, also broadened my knowledge of the subject greatly and sharpened my perception of key issues. Earlier versions of most parts of the book were first delivered as conference papers; in some cases, these have been published as journal articles or chapters in essay volumes. I am grateful to the editors and publishers for permission to draw on material from the following publications: parts of Chapter 2 appeared in an essay in Nachdenklicher Leichtsinn: Essays on Goethe and Goethe Reception, edited by Heike Bartel and Brian Keith-Smith; Chapter 3 summarises findings in my contribution to Georg Kaiser and Modernity, edited by Frank Krause, and in an article on Hans Magnus Enzensberger in the AUMLA Special Issue ‘Nature and the Environment’. The analysis of Otto Alscher’s hunting stories in Chapter 5 first appeared in Fractured Biographies, edited by Ian Wallace, and parts of the discussion of the cultural history of hunting are taken from a contribution in Culture, Creativity and Environment: New Environmentalist Criticism edited by Fiona Beckett and Terry Gifford. The section on Günter Seuren in Chapter 6 is adapted from a chapter in Cityscapes and Countryside in Contemporary German Literature, edited by Julian Preece and Osman Durrani; the argument and some of the comments on individual texts in Chapter 7 have appeared in Science, Technology and the German Cultural Imagination edited by Christian Emden and David Midgley. Full details of these publications are given in the bibliography at the end of the volume. I thank my colleagues at Bath, especially Dennis Tate and Ian Wallace, for their support and encouragement over the years. I learned much about theoretical approaches to cultural representations of nature from friendly ecocritics in the UK branch of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), especially Richard Kerridge, Terry Gifford and Greg Garrard. I have also profited from inspirational vi

Acknowledgements vii

conversations with Jürgen Barkhoff at the German Department of Trinity College, Dublin, my colleague at Bath, Ingolfur Blühdorn, and Aleida Assmann at the University of Konstanz, where I spent a productive month using the university’s open-shelf multi-disciplinary library in 2004. In March of the previous year, Hannes Bergthaller convened a steering group meeting in Bonn out of which the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment emerged. Working with fellow researchers in the EASLCE (especially Sylvia Mayer, Christa Grewe-Volpp and Berbeli Wanning) on conferences and publications has been an enjoyable and rewarding experience. I thank Michael Butler for his energetic support with publication and for reading the final manuscript so carefully. Before this, Michael Niedermeier of the Goethe-Wörterbuchstelle in Berlin and Frank Krause (Goldsmiths, London) kindly commented on drafts of the sections of this book on Goethe and Kaiser respectively, and others sowed the seeds of further chapters: Reinhard Tgahrt, whose hospitality and stimulating conversation I enjoyed during stays at the archive in Marbach, Marcel Atze, who recommended I read Paul Gurk’s novel, Helga Korodi, who introduced me to Otto Alscher’s animal stories and supplied me with copies of otherwise inaccessible publications, and Lia Pirskawetz, who welcomed me into the Berlin-Brandenburg Arbeitskreis Literatur um Welt and first drew my attention to Seuren’s novel. Last but not least, I thank my children for their cheerful impatience with my distraction when writing, and most of all, my wife Maggie, for all her advice, help and support throughout.

Introduction ‘Mensch – Natur – Technik’ was the catchword chosen by the organisers of Expo 2000, the international exhibition held in Hanover from June to October 2000.1 This was to be no ordinary trade fair, but an event marking the new millennium, by presenting to the world Germany’s vision of a future providing conceptual and technological solutions to the global problems of hunger, poverty and destruction of the environment. That this particular theme should have been chosen was no accident. The high level of environmental awareness among German citizens is a legitimate source of national pride, and German governments of differing political persuasions have taken a lead in international initiatives to clean up the oceans, reduce industrial pollution, make nuclear energy safer and combat global warming. A continuity of concern for nature and the environment in German culture would seem traceable back to the Romantics and is possibly rooted in earlier national self-understanding as a nature-loving people, whose relative poverty and political disunity could be taken as manifestations of a virtuous simplicity, elevating them above the arid intellectualism of French civilisation and rapacious British mercantilism. However, this image of Germany as a model in facing the ecological challenges of the future is a mere half-truth, which ignores crucial aspects of the country’s twentieth-century history. Although Germany’s path towards modernity is not necessarily universally representative, the Third Reich constitutes an extreme example of that logic of mastery over nature which has underpinned the Enlightenment project. Germany’s history exemplifies as no other the dilemmas of industrialised modernity – the fact that in dominating external nature, humankind has also subjugated internal nature, leaving us alienated from ourselves, and worse, and that the self-determination of a privileged elite has involved the ruthless exploitation of so many subordinates. The Nazis demonstrated with murderous consistency the pathologies and seismic fractures of the modern civilising process. For all their cult of nature, their synthesis of modernity with barbarism was fundamentally technocratic; in appropriating Nietzsche’s idealisation of nature in the face of the seeming degradation of civilisation and adopting a hierarchical variant of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, they sought to impose a rigid order on nature, excluding and purging rather than fostering viii

Introduction

ix

natural diversity and flux (see Blackbourn 2006 and Narraway 2007). It is this paradox which renders Germany’s broken cultural tradition worthy of study and makes it particularly instructive to consider the changes that have taken place in Germans’ attitudes towards nature over the course of the twentieth century. While nature and technology constitute the thematic focus of this volume, my special concern is with the literal and symbolic representations of our relationship with the natural environment, under the impact of modernity, in literature. How, I ask, have literary works explored the assumptions underlying contemporaries’ behaviour, reflected on their strategies for action and envisioned alternatives? The broad thrust of the argument in the following pages approximates to a practice of ‘ecocriticism’, that relatively recent addition to the portfolio of critical approaches which focuses on the analysis of the cultural (as opposed to the scientific) dimension of discursive understandings and representations of nature and naturalness. Its principal impulse is a sense of the need to reenvision our relationship with the natural environment, if human beings are to live with dignity and survive as a species in the longer term. Ecocriticism is open to reductive misunderstanding as a narrowly focused, crudely instrumentalising approach, and some early work has rightly been described as naively undertheorised. This conception of ecocriticism ignores, however, many more recent insights into the complexities of cultural production and the subtleties of creative writing, and the development of ecocritical theory in studies published since the mid-1990s. Though ecocriticism thus provides a convenient label for the general perspective from which the works discussed here are read, it should be noted that space is also devoted to two subjects that only occupy a peripheral position in Anglo-American debate: conceptions of technology and the ‘ecological’ role of creative writing in environmental discourse. The growing interest in and acceptance of ecocriticism in the United States and Britain over the past decade has not been matched in Germany, where it tends to be dismissed by Literaturwissenschaftler, or literary scholars, as mere ‘Motivforschung’ (research into literary themes and motifs). The ‘eco-’ prefix suggests a fashionable trend embarked on for extra-literary reasons, or at best an attitude, a kind of ‘applied’ literary study, to however laudable an end. There are, of course, overlaps between Anglo-American ecocriticism and the rhetorical, formal and ideological analysis of texts practised by German academic critics, debates on literary representations of Heimat, regional and national identity, literary landscapes and Technikkritik, and studies of nature in

x

Introduction

individual authors from Goethe to Hermann Löns. Interdisciplinary lecture series, conferences and research projects on conceptions of nature have brought individual German literary critics together with environmental philosophers, historians and psychologists. However, the shadow of the Nazi past, in which the ‘myth’ of nature played such a problematic part, means that preoccupation with nature has until very recently been viewed with suspicion in the humanities and arts faculties of German, Austrian and Swiss universities. Taking as their starting point questions about the part played by creative writing and the arts in environmental discourse raised not only by British and American ecocritics, but also by German thinkers including Theodor W. Adorno, Gernot and Hartmut Böhme, Peter Finke and Hubert Zapf, the following chapters investigate the reflection of key issues with a direct bearing on the environment – attitudes towards modernity, progress, science and technology; place, dwelling and caring for the natural environment; the treatment of animals; greening the city – in representative twentieth-century German texts. In terms of genre, narrative prose (where these issues tend to find their most extended and complex representation) predominates. Poetry forms the subject of one chapter and features in others; examples of essayistic prose and drama are also examined. I have avoided familiar works by major authors, such as Bertolt Brecht’s poem ‘An die Nachgeborenen’ (written 1934–8), Günter Grass’s novel Die Rättin (1986), and Christa Wolf’s fictional diary Störfall (1987), since these have already been widely discussed in the context of environmental concerns. (See for instance Mecklenburg 1977 and Haupt 1982 on Brecht; Hunt 1992, Siemon and Goodbody in Riordan 1997, Barkhoff 2000, and Bullivant 2002 on Grass; Hope 1992, Rechtien 1992–3, Jambon 1999, Delisle 2001, and Heise 2006 on Wolf.) With the exception of Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Volker Braun, the focus is here on predecessors of environmentalism (Goethe in particular, in the second chapter, but also writers from the first half of the twentieth century such as Georg Kaiser, Oskar Loerke, Otto Alscher and Paul Gurk) and on works by less well-known contemporary authors such as Hanns Cibulka, Carl Amery, Jurij Koch, Horst Stern, Christine Brückner, Wulf Kirsten, Günter Seuren and Klaus Modick. The relevance of the former for environmental debate is oblique rather than direct but it has not been unrewarding to explore the part which they have played in responding to and helping shape public perceptions of nature, science and technology, and anthropogenic change of the environment. Comparison with later writers in whose motivation overt

Introduction

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environmental concern and commitment play a part, without rendering their work one-dimensional, has also yielded new insights. As in any study seeking to account for so broad a subject over so lengthy a period, there is inevitably an element of personal taste and chance in the selection of the writers examined here and the works chosen as case studies. My attention was drawn to them, in some instances, by references in the existing secondary literature and in others, by colleagues. However, while I make no claim that they constitute a canon of German environmental literature in the twentieth century, I believe they do reflect the development of thinking on key issues in modern environmental debate, and illustrate the contribution of the more important genres of creative writing. Contrary to popular views based on C.P. Snow’s famous ‘Two Cultures’ thesis, writers are by no means always forces of conservatism, anxiously registering the effects of modernisation and serving as (temporary) escape from, or compensation for the distress suffered by those who have lost out from or are threatened by change. Their wildest fantasies of destruction and most idealised Arcadian scenes can harbour a critical potential, reminding readers of alternative forms of modernity to set against the environmental consumption and self-destructive urges in contemporary society. Germany has been, as a nation, an agent of modernisation second only to America in the twentieth century, in terms of technological development, urbanisation and use of the mass media. However, it has also been home to a powerful tradition of cultural pessimism and, as I have indicated above, disastrous atavistic tendencies in politics. The writers discussed here engage with the discourses of both Fortschrittsoptimismus (optimistic belief in progress) and Zivilisationskritik (predominantly pessimistic and conservative critique of most forms of modernisation) and participate, however modestly, in the negotiation of appropriate responses to social and cultural change. Ability to avoid the one-sidedness of ready-made solutions to complex problems, to see the world with fresh eyes and find memorable forms of expression encapsulating this vision serves here as the primary touchstone in assessing their work, although their shortcomings and failures are also instructive. Within the broad context of social, political and technological modernisation, the aspirations and anxieties of ordinary people in the twentieth century and the shifting understandings of nature and science, this book aims to understand and critically evaluate the conceptions of nature of a representative range of authors. It seeks to examine their achievement, in light of the current environmental situation, in representing our relationship with the natural environment through image,

xii Introduction

narrative and other means. The first chapter introduces ecocriticism as an approach to the study of contemporary culture and provides an overview of the different strands within the movement. After drawing parallels with existing German work in the field, it argues that the critic must, using Kate Soper’s terminology, strike a balance between ‘natureendorsing’ and ‘nature-sceptical’ approaches, that is, both consider literary writing on nature as a statement on something that exists objectively, and analyse it as a linguistic construction of ‘nature’. Finally, it compares the view of the potential of art and literature to foster environmental awareness associated with Gernot and Hartmut Böhme’s conception of ‘ecological aesthetics’ with Peter Finke’s and Hubert Zapf’s theory of ‘cultural ecology’ and the crucial function of literature therein. The second chapter, the first of two devoted to critiques of science and technology, is concerned with Goethe as the thinker and writer who has probably exercised the single greatest influence over the Germans’ perception of nature since the ‘ecological turn’ in the1970s. It not only examines the proto-ecological aspects of his conception of natural science and passages from his poetry and prose which led to his adoption by environmentalists as a ‘Green’ but also stresses the tensions between competing understandings of nature and human nature in his writing in general and in the end of Faust Part II (1832) in particular. Texts by Adolf Muschg, Hanns Cibulka, Klaus Modick and Volker Braun are discussed as examples of the ecological interpretation and creative adaptation of Goethean ideas and narratives. The third chapter contrasts modernist and postmodern takes on progress and technology, juxtaposing the depiction of catastrophe in Georg Kaiser’s apocalyptic ‘Gas’ plays, written in the aftermath of the First World War, with the perspective of pragmatic human endeavour and survival in Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s epic poem Der Untergang der Titanic (1978). Kaiser’s plays, which perceptively diagnose the dangers of the twentieth-century technological-industrial “system”, based on the objectification and rationalisation of nature, exemplify cultural Modernism’s response to modernity. Here traditional visions of the end of the world are dramatised and adapted to represent the self-destructive processes inherent in technological and economic modernisation. The Titanic disaster, variously depicted as an apocalyptic (grand) narrative illustrating technological hubris and the rottenness of class-ridden society, and hence readily capable of cooption as a vehicle for environmentalist arguments in the 1970s, becomes in Enzensberger’s multi-layered

Introduction

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account a lesson of faith in the ability of humankind to learn, adapt and survive. The chapters which follow are concerned with aspects of the negotiation between nature and human culture. In the fourth chapter, Heidegger’s concepts of ‘naming’ and ‘dwelling’ serve as a basis for assessment of the contribution of two of the early and mid-twentieth century’s most important nature poets, Oskar Loerke and Johannes Bobrowski, to what Jonathan Bate has described as the ultimate task of poetry: “making the earth our home”. The next two chapters return to aspects of the shift in the understanding of our relationship with nature between the first half of the century and later thinking informed by or responding critically to the environmental movement. The works discussed here are primarily chosen for their illustration of changing attitudes towards nature, but public debates also provide the context for an assessment of the authors’ individual self-expression. The texts are examined critically as aesthetic phenomena against the background of literary and cultural tradition. Chapter 5 begins by reflecting on the ethics of hunting and how they have changed since the eighteenth century and examines the conception of nature and the wild underlying the animal stories written by the Romanian German Otto Alscher in the 1920s and 1930s. Identification with wild animals leads Alscher to environmental concern over the erosion of their habitat. This is, however, accompanied by an ideologically problematic admiration for predators as models for human behaviour in a return to ‘nature’ which is conceived as capable of healing the diseases of modern civilisation. In the final part of the chapter, the West German environmental journalist and novelist Horst Stern’s ‘Hunting Novella’, written half a century later, reveals the greatly increased urgency of environmental problems in the intervening years and pleads for a new, ecological hunting ethic. Images of the city are discussed in Chapter 6. The focus is on green enclaves, which serve multiple functions as refuges for the socially marginalised, recreational spheres and utopian alternatives in an age of alienation from nature. Paul Gurk’s novel Laubenkolonie Schwanensee (1987) [1949], which is set in a Berlin allotment colony in the1930s, laments the disappearance of vestiges of a ‘natural’ way of life, while Günter Seuren’s Die Krötenküsser (2000) provides a satirical commentary on the mistakes and missed opportunities of a group of environmental activists. The postmodern perspective on technology, progress and the course of human history encountered in Chapter 3 is paralleled by a

xiv Introduction

post-environmentalist thrust in Seuren’s depiction of contemporary urban life. The final chapter draws tentative conclusions on the role creative imagining has played in the twentieth century as a counter-discourse to the hegemonic, scientific–rationalist conception of nature and our relationship with it. Taking Hartmut Böhme’s classification of the principal conceptions of nature in Western history as cosmos, and as a hermeneutic, technological, ecological and cultural project, it detaches these conceptions from their historical context and explores their reflection in the work of a range of twentieth-century authors. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of a popular novel, taking up the issues of the environmental movement and configuring them for the author’s mature female readership. It asks to what extent Christine Brückner’s Die letzte Strophe (1989) may be seen as a variant of what Hartmut Böhme describes as the understanding of nature as a ‘cultural project’. Here, as throughout the book, I am concerned with the extent to which individual works, and literature as a whole, comes towards meeting the challenge of ecocriticism, that is, to participate, however modestly, in the resolution of ecological crisis, be it by exposing technocratic, instrumental modernity’s facilitation of social injustice and environmental devastation, by interpreting its underlying causes, or by articulating counter-visions in which hierarchy and subordination are replaced by mutuality among humans and between humans and the non-human.

I Theoretical Perspectives

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1 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. The image which such localities present to the outside world of a nature-loving people is borne out by Germany’s history: among the founding fathers of ecological thinking have been Germans such as the distinguished Prussian geographer Alexander von Humboldt and Ernst Haeckel, the nineteenth-century marine biologist and vociferous 3

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supporter of evolutionary theory, who is remembered, despite the discrediting of his more fanciful speculations by subsequent scientists, and reminders of his imperialist and racist politics, for having given the new discipline its name in the 1860s.2 Above all, it was Goethe who acted, as much through his scientific writings as in his poems, plays and novels, as an important mediator of respect for nature, not least through his formative influence on the writing and practical activities of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy. Steiner introduced holist principles to disciplines ranging from educational theory to medicine, which have found application in the internationally successful Waldorf Schools, biodynamic farming and the Demeter health food chain. Germany’s recent national record in institutional commitment to the environment is perhaps a more significant indicator of contemporaries’ attitudes and values. The country has, after all, taken a lead in drafting European Union legislation on clean production and recycling, and in international conferences and agreements since Rio on sustainable development and global warming. Between 1998 and 2005, Germany was governed by a national coalition including its Green Party. The strength and duration of popular environmental concern today is explained not least by a cultural tradition exemplified by a literature celebrating intimacy with nature extending from Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus, via Goethe’s Werther, the poetry of Hölderlin and the Romantics, the nineteenth-century Poetic Realists Stifter, Keller, Fontane and Storm, to the twentieth-century novels and short stories of Hermann Hesse and Hermann Löns, Max Frisch and Uwe Johnson, Günter Grass, Christa Wolf and Peter Handke, and the poetry of Bertolt Brecht and Johannes Bobrowski, Günter Kunert and Sarah Kirsch. This tradition is paralleled in German art from the sixteenth-century German landscape painter Albrecht Altdorfer and the Romantic Caspar David Friedrich’s Chasseur im Walde (1814) to Emil Nolde and Anselm Kiefer’s Varus (1976) and in German film from Arnold Fanck’s Der heilige Berg (1926) to Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2006). In his De Germania, the second-century Roman historian Tacitus idealised the barbarian Germanic tribes (contrasting them with his degenerate Roman countrymen) as a fierce freedom-loving people who derived their vigour from their forest home (see Schama 1995: 75–81). The link he forged between the Germanic people and untamed nature was echoed in the eighteenth century by Johann Gottfried Herder, who extolled nature as a divine presence and a source of Germanic character, in the nineteenth century in Riehl’s monumental Naturgeschichte des Volkes als Grundlage einer deutschen Social-Politik (1851–4) and in the first

Nature in German Culture 5

half of the twentieth century in völkisch (i.e. conservative nationalist) writing. America may regard itself as ‘nature’s nation’ (Nash 1967), but nature also unmistakably possesses central importance in the formulation of German self-understanding and national identity (see Weyergraf 1987, Apel 1998: 15–27, Lekan and Zeller 2005: 1–14, 17–32). Germany’s comparatively late and rapid industrialisation and urbanisation gave rise to highly contradictory perceptions and transformations of a landscape which had already been saturated with symbolic meanings by the Romantics. Given that nature has been a site of such fierce ideological debate and social contestation (see Lekan and Zeller 2005: 4–6), it is not surprising that representations of it in twentieth-century German culture constitute a richly rewarding field of study. Their understanding may inform debates about the future and be of more than merely national significance. Paradoxically, though, as we shall see, the term ‘ecocriticism’ has no direct German equivalent, and the approach it denotes has yet to develop beyond the status of a marginal phenomenon in German literary and cultural studies.

1.1 The ecocritical approach If the looming threat of our eventual exhaustion of the accessible reserves of natural resources, and particularly of primary energy sources such as fossil fuels, arouses less public anxiety today than 30 years ago, climate change and economic growth in developing countries are nevertheless slowly beginning to change perceptions of the conditions of human and non-human life on the planet. The environmental consequences of global warming may be unevenly distributed, but they seem set to pose one of the most serious challenges to governments, societies and individuals across the world in the twenty-first century. Environmental issues are, however, as Lawrence Buell notes in The Future of Environmental Criticism, not merely the property of the biological and environmental scientists, engineers and public policy experts around whose disciplines university programmes in Environmental Studies are generally built; they are also cultural concerns. Environmental crisis is at bottom an epistemological problem, a consequence of false premises and inappropriate thought patterns. The disentangling of such thought patterns might be considered to be, in the first instance, the subject of philosophy. But the humanities – history, cultural studies in the wider sense, literature, film, the history of art, education and media studies, sociology and cultural geography, religion and psychology – all have a part to play in meeting the challenge (Buell 2005: vi).

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Conceptualisation and discursive argument are in practice inseparable from vision, imagination and cultural tradition. Technological breakthroughs and legislative reforms are generated by and take effect on the back of transformations of environmental values, perception and will – and story, image and artistic performance are crucial factors in this process of transformation (ibid.). The description, critical analysis and evaluation of literature and the visual arts, drawing on the resources of aesthetics, ethics and cultural theory, is the domain of environmental criticism.3 In America, ‘ecocriticism’ has become a widely accepted umbrella term for the environmentally oriented study of literature and the arts, and for the theories that underlie such critical practice. However, the environmental ‘turn’ in cultural studies has been no unitary event, and ecocriticism neither constitutes a single coherent theory of literature or culture nor possesses a special methodology. Employing the normal tools of the trade and augmenting them with others eclectically derived from a range of disciplines, it has nevertheless arrived at significant new insights: ecocriticism has foregrounded neglected subgenres from nature writing to ecological science fiction, explored environmental subtexts in canonical works and identified or reinterpreted significant thematic configurations such as pastoral and eco-apocalypticism. The ecocritical approach is not necessarily rooted in a perception of crisis in the sense of impending global environmental collapse but it is driven by concern about the unviability of our current treatment of the natural environment in the longer term and by conviction of the need for an ongoing re-examination of our underlying attitudes towards nature. Above all, it participates in the forces of resistance to the prevailing dualism of nature and culture. In the early modern period, Francis Bacon and René Descartes severed the human from the non-human and determined their relationship as one of possession and mastery, thus laying the groundwork for attitudes responsible for environmental damage and reckless resource consumption today. As a post-Marxist issue-driven approach, ecocriticism parallels feminism, gay studies and postcolonialism. Its special preoccupation with nature and environment complements and vies for precedence with their concern with the cultural transmission of inequalities of gender, sexuality and race. It differs from them, of course, in that while literature can speak for nature, as it can on behalf of silenced or disempowered social groups, writers cannot speak as nature or non-human animals. They can, however, in Buell’s words, speak “in cognisance of human being as ecologically or environmentally embedded” (ibid. 8). Ecocritics then typically share a common ethical commitment (whether

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or not this is accompanied by political engagement), tend to subscribe to a holist approach and are united in their special concern with how artistic representation envisages human and non-human webs of interrelation. The ecocritical readers edited by Cheryl Glotfelty and Laurence Coupe (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996, Coupe 2000) were landmark publications establishing the genealogy of the new research field. Garrard’s recent introduction in the Routledge ‘Critical Idiom’ series (2004) and Buell’s Blackwell volume on the ‘Future of Environmental Criticism’ (2005) suggest that a phase of consolidation has now been reached, which is further marked by the inclusion of chapters on ecocriticism in a number of introductions to literary and cultural theory (Barry 2002, Rigby 2002). The emergence of ecocritism has been traced in a number of recent publications which not only review its first decade of achievements (Buell 1999, Estok 2001) but also offer a critique of its shortcomings (Cohen 2004). As early as the 1930s the American critic Kenneth Burke had begun exploring the significance of ecology for literary criticism. The roots of ecocriticism are, however, usually located in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the environmental movement in the United States was at its height. Major historical surveys of literary representations of the nature–culture relationship such as Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964), Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind (1967) and Clarence Glacken’s Traces on the Rhodian Shore (1967) provided the basis on which later work was built, such as Annette Kolodny’s exposure of the ideological significance of gendering in (male) nature representation in The Lay of the Land (1975). Meanwhile, Joseph Meeker pursued a different line of approach, examining comedy as a genre uniquely suited to serve the contemporary need for an environmental aesthetic, in The Comedy of Survival (1974). In the late 1980s, Cheryll Glotfelty, a PhD student whose work on American women writers had led her to focus her attention on research into literature about the relationship between humankind and the natural environment, began a networking exercise which meant that, for the first time, scholars researching local writers in Western America and the tradition of non-fictional nature writing became aware of their common interests with literary historians re-examining canonical writers such as the Transcendentalists, Thoreau and nineteenth- and twentieth-century nature poetry from an ecological perspective. Her Ecocriticism Reader (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996) was to reprint articles reflecting on the mutual relevance of literature and ecology which had

8

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appeared in journals since the 1960s, together with a range of recent studies of American nature writing and an annotated bibliography. Meanwhile, the foundation of ASLE (the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) at a meeting of the Western Literature Association in 1992 marked the start of a new phase of ecocritical activity. ASLE’s mission is “to promote the exchange of ideas and information about literature and other cultural representations that consider human relationships with the natural world”. It seeks not only to facilitate traditional and innovative approaches to all cultural representations of nature, including collaboration with “environmental historians, economists, journalists, philosophers, psychologists, art historians and scientists” but also to encourage new nature writing by fostering contact between scholars and environmentally engaged writers, photographers, painters, musicians and film makers. Last but not least, it aims to promote the incorporation of environmental concerns and awareness into pedagogical theory and practice.4 The Association, which has over a thousand members, organises biennial conferences that are attended by a broad cross-section of people interested professionally or personally in literary and cultural representations of nature and publishes the six-monthly journal ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment). In the United States, nature writing has played a central role in literary tradition, and national identity has been decisively shaped by the combination of two distinct, almost diametrically opposed, outlooks on nature: the heroic narrative of conquest and civilisation of the continent’s west, and idealisation of the New World’s pristine landscapes as the sublime site of moral purity, contrasting with European corruption. Ecocriticism in Britain has a lower profile. However, the Marxist critic Raymond Williams’ book The Country and the City (1973) was a significant source of inspiration for environmentally oriented study of the English literary tradition. Jonathan Bate’s Romantic Ecology. Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991) was the first full-length study to adopt an explicitly ecocritical approach. Announcing a move from red to green, Bate challenged the assumption among critics since the 1960s that the Romantics’ preoccupation with nature could be dismissed as political escapism and argued that Wordsworth’s supreme achievement lay in his insight into the human condition as being at once a part of nature and set apart from it. He drew attention to the poet’s envisionings of a rural community living in harmony with the natural environment and to those parts of his work which reflect an intimate knowledge of the topography and people of the Lake District. Finally, he

Nature in German Culture 9

indicated Wordsworth’s significance as a precursor of modern environmental thinkers by demonstrating the influence of his ideas on Ruskin, William Morris and the founding fathers of the National Trust and the nation’s national parks. Bate’s book marked a turning point, since when ecophilosophy and ecological aesthetics have prompted a reinterpretation of Romantic conceptions of nature and a reevaluation of its resistance to Enlightenment dualism, rationalism and secularisation of the more-than-human world. English Romanticism and Victorian ecology have been key fields for enquiry alongside accounts of contemporary writing informed by explicit environmental concern (see Gifford 1995, 1999, Kerridge and Sammells 1998, Parham 2002). The most significant British ecocritical study, Bate’s Song of the Earth (2000), which asks what capacity English writers from Jane Austen to Philip Larkin have to reunite us with the Earth, is discussed further in Chapter 4. Differences in approach characterised ecocriticism from the start; Buell has described the movement as a “concourse of interlocking but semi-autonomous projects” (1999: 706). However, a pattern can be recognised in its development. Early work was mainly concerned with countering the marginalisation of environmental issues in literary criticism prevailing in the1980s. The first ecocritics sought to reconnect critical practice with environmental experience and to fuse it with practical commitment. Lawrence Buell’s monumental study The Environmental Imagination. Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture went beyond such writing in sophistication, range and lucidity. Focused on a nature writer whose position in American cultural tradition is undisputedly pivotal and whose influence has been international, it opened up a range of new thematic perspectives, while exploring intertextual and genre dimensions of his and other work. Buell wrote of a ‘dual accountability’ of environmental writing to matter (biology, zoology, geology) as well as discursive mentation. He suggested that if environmental writing shows itself ignorant of the known facts of nature, it does so at its peril. It may not be the poet’s or essayist’s highest calling to teach ornithology, for instance. But it is a legitimate aim of the environmental text to reanimate and redirect the reader’s interaction with nature. The mimetic function of literature is as important, according to Buell, as its intra- and intertextual dimensions, and he defends a symbiosis of object-responsiveness and imaginative shaping against the charges of epistemological naivety (ibid. 91–103). Buell’s checklist of the ingredients comprising ‘environmentally oriented’ texts (1995: 7f.) provided a pragmatic basis for subsequent discussion of

10 Nature, Technology and Cultural Change

the reflection of environmental consciousness in literary texts. The first desideratum he identifies is a presentation of the non-human environment “not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history” (my emphasis). The novels of Thomas Hardy and many travel books conform to this criterion. Secondly, human interest should not be “understood to be the only legitimate interest”. The empathy with nature in Walt Whitman’s long poem ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’ (1860) contrasts favourably with the comparative self-absorption of much Romantic poetry on this account. Whitman is concerned with the composition of a specific place, and he endows a symbolic bird with a habitat, a history and a story of its own. The third aspect identified by Buell is human accountability to the environment as part of the text’s ethical orientation. In Wordsworth’s poem ‘Nutting’ (1800), for instance, reminiscence prompts the poet to retell a self-incriminating tale of youthful violation of a hazel grove. Finally, a sense of the environment as a process rather than a constant must be implicit. James Fenimore Cooper’s Pioneers (1823) is more of an environmentally orientated text than his other, later, Leatherstocking Tales, inasmuch as it records the shifts in the relationship of the people with nature associated with the development of the community from small settlement to large town. Only in the rarest cases are all four main ingredients likely to be present unequivocally and consistently, he cautions, and the works in which they are most explicitly incorporated are actually more likely to be non-fictional than fictional ones. These criteria, which reflect an alignment of the author, if not with biocentrism then at least with a weak form of anthropocentrism, and identify the environment as an ethical issue, but avoid simplistic notions of the necessity to preserve nature as a static status quo against all forms of change, have been useful guidelines in my consideration of German literature. Jonathan Bate’s essay ‘Living with the Weather’ (1996) similarly exemplifies what can be described as a ‘literalist’, but non-reductive approach to texts. Bate reinterprets Byron’s poem ‘Darkness’ and Keats’s ode ‘To Autumn’ in the context of the volcanic eruption on the Pacific island of Tambora in 1816 and its consequences for the European climate. ‘Darkness’, hitherto interpreted as an apocalyptic political vision, reveals a surprisingly literal dimension of meaning in the knowledge of the miserable summers of 1816 and 1817, which were blighted by volcanic ash in the atmosphere. Keats’s vision of the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”, written in 1819, can equally plausibly be read as an expression of joy and physical well-being by the asthmatic poet at the first

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good harvest and the first clear autumn weather in years. Bate showed that Romantic poetry reflects on the climatic co-determinants of the human condition. Though scope for such rereadings of canonical literature is probably limited, he was manifestly justified in taking issue with both formalist critics, who had regarded Romantic descriptions of nature as apolitical escapism, and the New Historicists, who read them either as ‘displacements’ of unconscious political motives or as a disguise for covert ideological polemics. Karl Kroeber’s Ecological Literary Criticism. Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (1994) concurred with Bate’s reassessment of Romantic poetry as an anticipation of ecological thinking, finding a ‘biological materialism’ of relevance to us today in the Romantics’ (in particular Shelley’s) visions of a harmonious interanimation of the cultural and the natural. Bate’s argument that the best Romantic writing on nature is the expression of an intense, original and enduring exploration of humanity’s place in the natural world has recently been further developed by Rigby, whose account of European Romanticism draws comparisons between the English Romantics and their German contemporaries, Goethe, Schelling, Novalis, Tieck and Eichendorff (Rigby 2004). While some ‘first wave’ ecocriticism in the first half of the 1990s was characterised by avoidance of rather than engagement with cultural theory, Buell, Bate and Kroeber thus demonstrated that ecocritical literalism could provide new insights without going back on theory’s recognition that even the most intentionally ‘realistic’ of texts are heavily mediated refractions of the palpable world. The new “Global Warming criticism”, disclosing the inextricability of culture and nature by the agency of the weather, which Bate called for in place of the old Cold War criticism (a term coined by Kroeber for the concerns which dominated critical discourse from the 1960s to the 1980s), which had been primarily concerned with human language, agency and social relations, did not necessarily mean ignoring structuralism, post-structuralism and other developments in theory since the 1960s. By the middle of the 1990s, the hagiographical tendency of certain American critics discussing texts and genres that seemed to provide dense, accurate representations of actual, natural environments was being subjected to criticism by Patrick Murphy and others seeking not only to theorise but also to politicise the movement. Murphy’s ecofeminist essays published under the title Literature, Nature and Other (1995) introduced three important new dimensions to ecocriticism. On the one hand, they marked the beginning of a more thorough exploration of the relevance of post-structuralism and other developments in critical theory since the 1970s for an ecological

12 Nature, Technology and Cultural Change

critique. On the other, his development of the link between ecologism and feminism and the attention he paid to Native American writers liberated ecocriticism from what had begun to attract criticism as a ghetto of predominantly masculinist, elitist and tendentially xenophobic sentimentality. In deconstructing the gendering of nature in texts and in using Bakhtin’s dialogics as a theoretical framework embracing feminism and ecology, Murphy took a decisive step towards overcoming the “defensiveness towards theory” identified by Simon Estok in ecocritical writing and towards avoiding the trap of indulging in a nostalgic pastoralist evasion of the complexities of twentieth-century life (Estok 2001: 224).5 White middle-class male ecocriticism now faced a dual challenge from ecofeminists and environmental justice activists. Ecofeminism is based on the premise of a correlation between the history of institutionalised patriarchy and human domination of the non-human. Its principal literary aim has been to resist androcentric traditions of literary interpretation (see Kolodny 1975 and Westling 1996); it has drawn on revisions of the history of science (Carolyn Merchant, Donna Haraway), feminist ecotheology (Mary Daly) and environmental philosophy (Val Plumwood and Karen Warren). Two broad camps of ecofeminists are divided by their different attitudes towards the association of women with nature (i.e. the concept of ‘natural’ femininity as well as that of a ‘feminine’ nature). On the one hand, the social ecofeminists, who stress the cultural construction of gender, have argued that the symbolic coding of nature as female which pervades Western culture has reinforced the domination of both women and nature. On the other, cultural ecofeminists, who are less wary of essentialism, have proposed that there is an inherent, not merely historically contingent, caring relationship between women and nature. The recuperation of maternal images of a pagan Earth deity, they suggest, may be of positive strategic value. While cultural ecofeminism played an important role in the feminist and environmental movements in the United States, social ecofeminists have contributed more to ecocritical theory. At the same time as patriarchal assumptions were being challenged, the middle-class bias of first-wave ecocriticism was increasingly being replaced by a more class- and race-conscious social ecocriticism. Estok in particular has taken issue with his colleagues’ blindness to environmental racism. The result has been a shift of focus from wilderness to metropolitan and toxified landscapes, with attention being directed towards constructed as well as natural environments. The inclusion of urban, ethnic and national perspectives has given a new impetus to the examination

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of historical and ideological (mis-)appropriations of nature as a justification for systems of cultural and social oppression. Concern for displaced peoples and environmental racism has infused place studies with new life. This brief outline inevitably oversimplifies the development of ecocriticism. Further directions taken have included the exploration of contingencies between environmentalism and French post-structuralist theory (Cronon 1995, Conley 1997, Phillips 2003) and the phenomenological strand of theory engaging with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty (Abram 1997, Westling 1996, Scigaj 1999, Bate 2000, Rigby 2004). There have also been efforts to ground literary criticism in neurophysiology (Kroeber 1994), evolutionary biology (Glen Love and John Elder) and scientific ecology. The call to model ecocriticism on ecology is, it should be noted, not unproblematic when used to justify pleas for cultural diversity. The early twentieth-century idea of the ‘climax community’ seemed to provide a model for visions of unity, balance and moral integrity. This steady state, in which everything was supposedly cooperatively and interdependently linked, constituted a sort of idyllic status ante quem, threatened by human intervention. Today’s ecologists are more likely to stress the pervasive presence of change, probability and interspecies competition (see Potthast 2004 and Grewe-Volpp 2006). The attempt to bridge the gap between cultural theory and the natural sciences has so far been only a relatively minor field of enquiry in American ecocriticism. Ecocritics, even more than environmental historians and historians of ideas, have been more interested in analysing normative claims than scientific issues (i.e. ideas how things should be rather than how they are), and have consequently tended to focus on the rhetorical strategy and mode of articulation rather than the validity of arguments in terms of scientific proof. Theories applying the ecological principle of interconnectedness to the question of the role of literature and the arts in human society (Meeker 1974, Bateson 1979, Rueckert in Glotfelty and Fromm 1996) have, however, been more fruitful; Peter Finke’s and Hubert Zapf’s conception of ‘cultural ecology’ is discussed further at the end of this chapter. The diversification of critical method in ecocriticism has been accompanied by a broadening of focus from the original concentration on non-fictional nature writing, nature poetry and wilderness fiction, towards other genres (science fiction, the thriller), media (film and art) and landscapes and constructed environments (parks, zoos and shopping malls) (see Cosgrove and Daniels 1988, Wilson 1992, Hochman 1998). Studies of the ecology of language itself (Haugen 1972, Halliday

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1990, Fill 1993, Harré et al. 1999, Fill and Mühlhäusler 2001) have been accompanied by explorations of the rhetoric, narratology and iconography of environmental discourse (Bennett and Chaloupka 1993, Herndl and Brown 1996, Kerridge 1999). Greg Garrard has recently defined the task of ecocriticism as one of the analysis of tropes, that is extended rhetorical and narrative strategies adapting existing genres, narratives, metaphors and images. Garrard identifies ‘pollution’, ‘pastoral’, ‘wilderness’, ‘apocalypse’, ‘dwelling’, ‘animals’, and ‘the earth’ as thematic structures constituting “pre-existing ways of imagining the place of humans in nature”, around which conventions shaping environmental discourse have crystallised (2004: 10). He sketches out an exciting perspective of the critical analysis of the ways in which writers and artists transform and negotiate between nature and culture, real and imagined nature, by elaborating and inflecting such tropes. The development of ecocriticism on the international stage is a relatively recent phenomenon. Since the publication of Patrick Murphy’s international handbook on The Literature of Nature (1998), American ecocritics have shown a cautious interest in comparative and general literary studies. Organisations affiliated with the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment have sprung up in Japan, Korea, the United Kingdom, Australia/New Zealand, Europe, India and Canada, bringing researchers and teachers of American Studies together with scholars keen to explore this aspect of their own national literary and cultural traditions. In the case of the German-speaking world, this development is exemplified by the essay volumes Natur – Kultur – Text. Beiträge zu Ökologie und Literaturwissenschaft (Gersdorf and Mayer 2005a) and Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies. Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism (Gersdorf and Mayer 2006).

1.2 Environmental concern and cultural pessimism: Ecologically oriented literary and cultural studies in Germany Environmental concerns may feature less prominently in private and public life in Germany today than prior to reunification, but, as I have noted above, environmental awareness and green politics had a strong presence in twentieth-century Germany and a long and rich history. Germany’s political culture is the product of a tradition in which not only idealisations of nature but also critiques of modernity and the technocratic society have played a major part. The Green (Environmental and Alternative) Movement in the 1970s has been described by political

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sociologists as a third wave of cultural criticism following in the footsteps of Bourgeois Romanticism and Utopian Socialism in the early nineteenth century, and Agrarian Romanticism and the Lifestyle Reform Movement/Youth Movement at the end of the nineteenth and the turn of the twentieth century (Rucht 1989: 63f.). Revolting against the constraints of modern urban, industrial civilisation, many of the more extreme proponents of these movements interpreted alienation from the natural environment and loss of community in the mass society as forces inevitably leading to decay and decline. Environmental arguments in modern Germany are rooted in a discourse which was dominated by cultural pessimism from the late nineteenth century up to the middle of the twentieth century and in which Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Klages and Oswald Spengler were central figures. This is the darker side to German intellectuals’ special relationship with nature. Herder and the Romantics had valorised their national difference from, on the one hand, French rationalism and enlightenment, and on the other, British materialism and mercantilism through a national affinity with the organic. The essays by Joachim Radkau and Michael Imort in Lekan and Zeller 2005 are salutary correctives to the myth that Germans are racially or even culturally closer to nature than other nations, or have a special inborn affinity with the non-human. Radkau and Imort identify the decentralised decision-making on natural resources which resulted from the premodern pattern of petty states and free cities, the lack of German colonies (except for a brief period at the end of the nineteenth century), which benefited sustainable resource management, and the construction of ‘forest’ as a symbol of Germandom, uniting the nation against Napoleonic occupation, as principal factors determining the German traditions of environmental consciousness and empathy with animals. In the late nineteenth century, this association of the German nation and people with nature was used to excuse relative backwardness in terms of economic development and to condone the absence of political emancipation. In the Heimatschutz (Homeland Protection) movement, nature conservation, the preservation of historical monuments and the fostering of traditional art, architecture, customs, costumes and festivals were closely allied with conservative, nationalist and, in the case of some proponents, racist political agendas. Though the Reformbewegung (Lifestyle Reform Movement) embraced a number of socialist organisations, and many of the initiatives it was composed of in housing reform, communal living, education, youth hostelling, vegetarianism, abstinence from alcohol, natural healing, nudism and so on were driven by emancipatory and egalitarian principles, the conservative

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critique of social, economic and technological modernisation dominated public debate at the turn of the century. Developments after the First World War and the polarisation of German politics in the 1920s resulted in the appropriation of the idealism of many of the idealistic groups in the Wandervogelbewegung (the German Youth Movement founded in 1901) seeking to return to nature and their incorporation in the fascist movement (see Dominick 1992 and Lekan 2004). The myth of a simple, natural way of life became a tool for militarist expansion in the ideology of Blood and Soil. The Nazis’ understanding of nature was, in keeping with their practice of ‘reactionary modernism’ (Jeffrey Herf), a schizophrenic one of sentimental idealisation on the one hand and ruthless exploitation on the other. Since the eighteenth century, traditional conceptions of nature as static harmony had been increasingly replaced by dynamic understandings of change through organic processes. Historical events and social formations were now seen in analogy with the lives of natural organisms. In the world view of Social Darwinism, social forces were described as powers of nature and wars interpreted as natural phenomena. The Nazis’ poisonous ideological loading of ‘Naturgefühl’, the aesthetic relationship with nature championed by the Romantics, played its part, as Jörg Zimmermann has commented, in the holocaust: “Höhepunkt mystifizierender Verkehrung von Gesellschaft in Natur war sicherlich die Blut-und-Boden-Ideologie des Faschismus, die ein angeblich urdeutsches Naturgefühl schließlich sogar mit der Forderung nach Ausrottung ‘minderwertiger’ und das meinte auch: ‘unschöner’ Rassen vereinbaren konnte” (1982: 144). Efforts to protect forests and promote organic farming, and seemingly exemplary legislation on vivisection, nature conservation and hunting existed in practice within an ideological framework oriented towards thoroughgoing mastery of the natural world, necessitating warfare, eugenics and elimination or enslavement of undesirable races.6 Though defeat in 1945 led to the comprehensive disqualification of the Nazis’ ‘ideology of nature’, critiques of modernity did not cease: F.G. Jünger published a sophisticated critique of technology, Die Perfektion der Technik in 1946. A decade later, Karl Jaspers spoke out against the atom bomb (Jaspers 1957) and Günther Anders wrote an influential analysis of the unrecognised implications of the nuclear age, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (1956). New causes for environmental concern were emerging in the1950s, with international nuclear testing and, at home, with sweeping change to the countryside resulting from the introduction of industrialised farming methods. Individual writers such as Günter Eich,

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Arno Schmidt and Hans Magnus Enzensberger blended elements of technological scepticism with traces of Romantic idealisation of nature in apocalyptic scenarios and satirical works that were sharply critical of the materialism and restorational politics of the Adenauer era. However, these were outsiders in a society generally characterised by economic optimism and enthusiasm for technology. When the environmental movement took shape in Germany in the early 1970s, it was in response to international developments rather than as a revival of the native tradition of empathy with and concern for nature. The model environmental legislation of the Brandt-Scheel Social Democrat/Liberal coalition between 1969 and 1973 was crucially concerned with ‘environment’ rather than ‘nature’, and focused on concrete issues of pollution, resource depletion and public health. (This development was initially matched in the GDR, whose environmental laws in the early 1970s were hardly less progressive. However, their non-implementation, out of economic necessity and bureaucratic neglect, led to the sharp deterioration of environmental conditions in East Germany which finally became apparent at reunification.) The wave of popular environmental protest in West Germany organised in Bürgerinitiativen (grass-roots Citizens’ Initiatives) from 1972 onwards initially embraced liberal and conservative forces and even individuals from the far right but these last were excluded when the Green Party was founded in 1980. Environmentalism was effectively fused, for the first time, with traditional left-wing concerns in a programme of participative democratic activism. Carl Amery’s Das Ende der Vorsehung (1972) and Natur als Politik (1976), Herbert Gruhl’s bestselling study Ein Planet wird geplündert (1975), Robert Jungk’s Der Atomstaat (1977), Rudolf Bahro’s Die Alternative (1977), Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich’s Frieden mit der Natur (1979), Eugen Drewermann’s Der tödliche Fortschritt (1981), Hoimar von Ditfurth’s So laßt uns denn ein Apfelbäumchen pflanzen (1985) and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker’s Bewußtseinswandel (1988) are among the many influential non-fiction publications which drew attention to the environment and played a part in forming public opinion, alongside TV progammes and articles in the press. The discovery of Waldsterben (forest dieback) in 1982 and the nuclear accident in Chernobyl in 1986 sustained a continuing high level of interest up to reunification and beyond. The German branch of Greenpeace, the organisation founded in Canada in 1971 to fight French nuclear testing in the Pacific, rapidly advanced after its founding in 1980 to become the wealthiest and possibly the most influential environmental organisation in the world.

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Yet environment-oriented studies in Germany have remained largely a matter for the natural sciences and have been slow to establish themselves in the humanities. Academic interest has been strongest among philosophers working in environmental ethics and nature aesthetics (Jonas 1979, Birnbacher 1980, Gernot Böhme 1989, 1992, Meyer-Abich 1990, Seel 1991, Ott 1993, Schäfer 1993, Vietta 1995, Krebs 1997, 1999), and among historians (Wey 1982, Sieferle 1984, 1988 and 1997, Kluge 1985, Linse 1986, Brüggemeier and Rommelspacher 1987, Groh and Groh 1991, 1996, Hermand 1993, Rohkrämer 1999, Sieferle and Breuninger 1999, Radkau 2000, Radkau and Uekötter 2003).7 Collections of essays edited by Rapp (1981), Weber (1989) and Wilke (1993) have re-examined conceptions of nature in the light of the environmental movement. Further work on the archaeology of ecological thinking and the pathology of deleterious conceptions of nature in the history of ideas and cultural studies includes Zimmermann 1982, Großklaus and Oldemeyer 1983, Riedel 1988, Mayer-Tasch 1991, Hermand 1991a, Heiland 1992 and Böhme et al. 2000. Following the pattern of developments in the United States (since Nash 1967, Glacken 1967, Worster 1977, Bramwell 1989 and Evernden 1992), literary texts were discussed alongside discursive writing in historical accounts of shifts in the understanding of nature and the emergence of environmental awareness in Germany before literature became a common focus of major studies in its own right (see Barthelmeß 1972, 1988, Großklaus and Oldemeyer 1983 and Sieferle 1984).8 At the same time, ground-breaking literary research into the cultural meanings vested in nature was being carried out in fields ranging from Baroque emblems to eighteenth-century physico-theology and landscape aesthetics, and tensions between Romantic pantheism and nihilism in the nineteenth century. Literary studies from the 1960s and 1970s such as Friedrich Sengle’s seminal article on ‘Wunschbild Land und Schreckbild Stadt’ in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prose writing (1963), Joachim Ritter’s landmark analysis of the function of landscape (1963), Renate Böschenstein’s work on the genre of the idyll (BöschensteinSchäfer 1967), Ernst Ulrich Grosse’s historical review of ‘Sympathie der Natur’ (1968), Alexander von Bormann’s revelation of the complexity of the Romantic Eichendorff’s nature imagery, Natura Loquitur (1968), Rolf Christian Zimmermann’s reconstruction of Goethe’s studies of alchemy and nature mysticism and his analysis of their significance for his conception of nature in Das Weltbild des jungen Goethe (1969), Klaus Garber’s explication of Baroque nature imagery, Der locus amoenus und der locus terribilis (1974) and Uwe Ketelsen’s account of the nature poetry of the

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early Enlightenment (1974) all opened up new perspectives on literary representations of nature. It was not, however, until the late 1970s that research into cultural representations of nature began to be guided by environmental concern. Contemporary research in German studies is indebted above all to two pioneers: the Wisconsin research professor Jost Hermand and Hartmut Böhme, Professor for Cultural Theory at the Humboldt University, Berlin. Hermand has written two ground-breaking volumes providing overviews of green thinking and environmental literature in the German-speaking world (1991a, b), initiated a series of collaborative projects and published edited volumes on associated themes (Grimm and Hermand 1981, 1989, Hermand and Müller 1989, Hermand 1993, Hermand and Steakley 1996) and encouraged a generation of younger scholars to work in the field. In Germany, Hartmut Böhme has meanwhile been the most significant contributor: his volume of essays Natur und Subjekt (1988) complemented Hermand’s leftist environmental commitment and concern with the history of ideas by focusing on the adaptation of traditional nature metaphors and the reconfiguring of narratives and by engaging in more sophisticated theorisation. (Böhme’s ecological aesthetics are discussed below, and Chapter 7 builds on his conception of nature as a cultural project.) Both Hermand and Böhme have called repeatedly for the vigorous pursuit of ecologically oriented literary and cultural studies in Germany (see Hermand and Müller 1989, Böhme 1994, Hermand 1997 and Böhme et al. 2000). Further significant German practitioners of environment-oriented criticism have been Norbert Mecklenburg, Ursula Heukenkamp, Harro Segeberg and Gerhard Kaiser. The strong tradition of German nature poetry meant that this genre provided the initial focus for publications (see especially Mecklenburg 1977, Ertl 1982, Haupt 1982, Heukenkamp 1982, also the anthologies edited by Mayer-Tasch (1981) and von Bormann (1984) and more recent publications such as Fietz et al. 1992 and Heukenkamp 1999). A second area of activity has been the work of Goethe and the Goethezeit from 1770 to 1830 (see Kreutzer 1978, Niedermeier 1988–9, 1992, Kaiser 1991a, 1994, Matussek 1992, Barkhoff 1996, 1997b and Wyder 1998). Research into nineteenth-century prose writing has included Denkler 1980, Obermaier 1985, Seeber and Klussmann 1986, Frühwald 1989, Cella 1990, Großklaus 1990, Kaiser 1991a, Stahlova 1991, Detering 1992, the contributions by Christian Begemann and Arthur Brande in Duhamel 1994 and Wanning 2005. The twentieth-century novel has naturally attracted attention (Herles 1982, Gsteiger 1989, Hunt 1992, Jucker 1995a, Schumacher 1998, Jambon 1999,

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Barkhoff 2000, 2003) as also GDR writing, with its strong socio-political orientation (Knabe 1985, Mallinckrodt 1987, Emmerich 1990, 2000, Schlenstedt 1993, Grauert 1995, 2004, Jucker 1995b, Schenkel 1994). Popular themes have been critiques of technology (Ott 1987, Segeberg 1987a, 1987b and 1997, Schütz 1988, Großklaus and Lämmert 1989, Hädecke 1993, Platen 1997, Korber 1998, Midgley 2000, Wege 2000), apocalyptic scenarios reflecting cultural pessimism (Schatz 1985, Grimm et al. 1986, Vondung 1988, Kaiser 1991, Lilienthal 1996, Bullivant 2002), landscape (Lobsien 1981, Theile 1992, Raymond 1993, Wunderlich 1995, Riedel 1996, Apel 1998) and Heimat (Pott 1986, Mecklenburg 1987, Seliger 1987, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung 1990, Blickle 1992, Hermand and Steakley 1996, Ecker 1997, Haberl and Strohmeier 1999, Boa and Palfreyman 2000). Lindenpütz (1999) is perhaps the most significant contribution to research into children’s literature and the teenage novel, which genres are of special importance to educators. Nature-oriented studies of individual authors such as Karl Philipp Moritz (Grams 1992), Schiller (Riedel 1989), Hermann Löns (Dupke 1993), Elfriede Jelinek (Doll 1994) and Christoph Ransmayr (e.g. Mosebach 2003) have been accompanied by collections of essays (Riordan 1997, Goodbody 1998, Morris-Keitel 2000, Gersdorf and Mayer 2005a, 2006) and special numbers of journals such as Der Deutschunterricht (‘Naturerfahrung in der Literatur’
38, no. 1 (1986) and ‘Technik in Sprache und Literatur’
41, no. 5 (1989); Diskussion Deutsch (‘Deutschunterricht und Ökologie’
135 (1994)) and Literatur für Leser (‘Literatur und Technik’
21, no. 2 (1998)).9 However, it is no accident that Auslandsgermanisten working in the English-speaking countries have played a significant part in the initial exploration of this aspect of German writing.10 Although the wider concerns with place and identity which have accompanied ecocriticism over the past decade and a half in Britain and America have their equivalents in German literary and cultural studies, the core ecocritical project of reassessing the cultural heritage in the light of contemporary environmental crisis and the values we need to promote today has yet to become a part of mainstream academic discourse in Germany. The principal reason for this state of affairs is doubtless the reluctance of German academics to engage in a subject tainted by association with racist nationalism, eugenics and the holocaust. Ernst Haeckel, whose influence on intellectual life in late nineteenth-century Germany was considerable, was a social Darwinist who subscribed to the orthogenic view that evolution was progressive, held that there were superior and inferior species, and supported imperialist expansion with pseudoscientific

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arguments. The historian Daniel Gasman has described Haeckelianism as a necessary, if not in itself sufficient, precondition for the development of Nazi ideology and the rise of fascism (1998: 3–9). “The story of the protection of the natural environment in Germany can never be told as a success story as it is in the United States”, notes Christoph Mauch. “The extermination of native plants in Eastern Europe by Nazi conservationists who wished to ‘germanise’ the landscape was carried out simultaneously with the extermination of millions of lives. The term ‘German space’ therefore has sinister connotations” (2004: 4). The link between critical environmental consciousness and patriotism which exists in America is not there in Germany today and there persists a distrust of green arguments as fundamentally irrational and intrinsically undemocratic among many German intellectuals.11 Ruth and Dieter Groh’s dismissal of the ecological nature aesthetic developed from Adorno and Hermann Schmitz by the philosopher Gernot Böhme and his brother, the cultural historian Hartmut Böhme, illustrates the accusations of political naivety which tend to be levelled at green perspectives in literary and cultural studies: “Die projektierte Naturästhetik will [ … ] Argumente durch Gefühle ersetzen. In diesem Anspruch bekundet sich eine eklatante Vernunftfeindschaft, eine Absage an rationale Diskurse, ein antizivilisatorischer Affekt, dem prinzipiell zu mißtrauen uns historische Erfahrungen lehren” (Groh and Groh 1996: 126). The charge of cultural pessimism reflects an intensity of feeling and a readiness to associate opponents with right-wing extremism which betray sensitivities still characteristic of the nature discourse in Germany today. Secondly, there is widespread scepticism among German literary scholars regarding an approach understood as naively mimetic and primarily concerned with one-dimensional, polemic texts of little aesthetic value. The well-meaning Gesinnungsästhetik, or prioritising of content over form, and of political message over aesthetic considerations, which underlies most descriptions of polluted and damaged landscapes instrumentalises literature and constitutes an ‘ecological realism’ which smacks of Russian or East German Socialist Realism between the 1930s and the 1950s. The 1980s saw a swing of public taste away from the ethos of political responsibility which had characterised so much postwar literature and of which ‘environmental’ writing has been seen as the last manifestation, towards postmodern detachment and aesthetic play. The ugly term ‘Ökolyrik’ reinforced the view that green literature was necessarily didactic and crudely simplistic, that it sacrificed art to propaganda or politically correct rhetoric. In the 1990s, when ecological

22 Nature, Technology and Cultural Change

politics were belatedly gaining recognition in Britain, and ecocriticism was establishing itself in the United States, ecological issues were in any case displaced from their position near the top of the German political agenda by other political and economic concerns in the wake of reunification. The absence in Germany of the tradition of Nature Writing, which was of central importance for first wave ecocritics in the United States, is a further reason. Defined by Scott Slovic as “literary nonfiction that offers scientific scrutiny of the world (as in the older tradition of literary natural history), explores the private experience of the individual human observer of the world, or reflects upon the political and philosophical implications of the relationships among human beings and the larger planet”,12 this includes essayistic and autobiographical accounts of (largely wilderness) landscapes by Henry David Thoreau, Mary Austin, Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Rick Bass and Barry Lopez.13 Anthologies of German landscape writing (Schneider 1981, Sieferle 1991, Schäfer and Storch 1993) contain some comparable texts, and there is an (as yet largely unexplored) body of German travel writing concerned with environmental issues. Nevertheless, German publications in the nature writing genre such as Wilhelm Lehmann’s Bukolisches Tagebuch (1948) are marginal phenomena which only underline the difference from the centrality of nature writing in American cultural tradition. For these and doubtless also other reasons, events, institutions and publication outlets acting as identifiable fora for ecocritical discussion have only begun to emerge in Germany.14 Over the past two decades, however, German environmental historians and historians of technology have, like their colleagues in Britain and the United States, reached a new understanding of science, technology and the environment as a continuum conditioned by cultural and social negotiation. This has led to a reassessment of the German tradition of nature protection. Whereas Fritz Stern (1961), George Mosse (1964), Klaus Bergmann (1970) and even Rolf Peter Sieferle (1984) portrayed Romantic landscape ideals and the discourse of Heimat as harbingers of anti-Enlightenment, pro-fascist tendencies, Ulrich Linse (1986), Celia Applegate (1990), Alon Confino (1997) and William Rollins (1997) have shown that Heimat appreciation and regionalism can be agents of cultural and political modernisation rather than mere atavistic nostalgia. Thomas Rohkrämer has demonstrated that key thinkers between the 1880s and the 1930s were less anti-modern in their approach than seekers of an alternative form of modernity. In Eine andere Moderne? Zivilisationskritik, Natur und Technik in Deutschland 1880–1933 (1999), he

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reassesses the principal solutions offered by Germans to the problems arising from their rapid industrialisation. ‘Civilisation criticism’ was a precursor of the analyses of the modern predicament and tentative visions of reconciliation between man and nature, technology and the environment formulated by Adorno/Horkheimer, Bloch, Anders and Marcuse since the Second World War. The anxieties about industrial development in the late nineteenth century, their radicalisation through the trauma of the First World War and the phase of renewed modernisation which followed in the mid-to-late twenties led to three distinct strategies, which sought to overcome the negative aspects of modernity by means of ethics, nature and technology. ‘Technology in the service of traditional cultural values’ sums up Walther Rathenau’s optimistic conception of containment of the ‘mechanisation’ of modern society within an ethical framework. It was superseded by the pessimism of the philosopher of ‘life’ and radical opponent of modernisation, Ludwig Klages. Klages drew attention to environmental degradation and the physical and emotional consequences of technological and social change in fundamentally flawed but fascinating prophetic works. Despite his esoteric mysticism, the implausibilities and contradictions inherent in his philosophy and his lack of provision for practical counter-measures, Klages’s vision of ‘technology in the service of a “natural” way of life’ is worthy of serious attention, Rohkrämer argues. His championing of emotional and aesthetic experience of nature as an alternative to a purely instrumental relationship is conducive to sensitivity towards environmental damage and is capable of motivating resistance to it. Ernst Jünger, Rohkrämer’s third main subject, came from an outspoken critique of technology in the aftermath of the First World War to seek salvation in perfecting it. The society in which man was fused with technology in a ‘heroic construction’ in Jünger’s Der Arbeiter (1932) reflected a technocratic standpoint attempting to “solve the problems of modernity through technology”. This variant of civilisation criticism, which sacrificed the freedom of the individual to organisation and efficiency, creating an organic community by force, came close to subsequent political policy and practice in the Third Reich. Civilisation criticism as a whole was nevertheless a creative response to the deepening class divisions, the decline of traditional forms of culture, the mechanisation of human life and the environmental damage which characterised the period. Rohkrämer’s suggestion that lessons may be learned from analysing the merits and shortcomings of the various diagnoses of society’s ills

24 Nature, Technology and Cultural Change

which he examines, and the political implications of the different proposals for action corresponds to my own perspective in the following chapters where I examine the green visions of writers with sympathy but also with critical detachment from elements of Romantic escapism, fatalism and leanings towards the political far right in their work. German ecocriticism has the potential to form a distinctive twofold project. One the one hand, it has the works of Goethe and the Romantics, and nineteenth and early twentieth-century prose fiction, poetry, drama and essay to explore, in an archaeology of contemporary green literary and cultural thinking and feeling. On the other hand, it has the task of critically reviewing reflections on our relationship with the non-human and expressions of technological scepticism since the 1970s. The following pages are concerned with the theoretical position from which texts are examined in the subsequent chapters. First I discuss an issue with important implications for textual analysis: the dispute over whether nature is ‘out there’ (i.e. that which is given and not the product of human hands, that which comes into being and changes its form independently of us) or rather a product of human mentation, a linguistic construct. The final section of the chapter takes a closer look at two of the most significant German contributions to ecotheory to date: Gernot and Hartmut Böhme’s ecological aesthetics and Peter Finke and Hubert Zapf’s concept of cultural ecology.

1.3 The challenge of post-structuralism Within the broad framework of ecocritical enquiry in the United States, Lawrence Buell noted in 1999 that adherents of the Deep Ecology model, perceiving the bond between nature and the human self in terms of a shared spiritual identity, were clashing with the proponents of poststructuralist theory, who are inherently sceptical of myths of naturalness and authenticity, and focus on the social and cultural construction of conceptions of nature. This fundamental debate has been pursued not least through investigations of landscapes and animals in literary texts, conceiving these in turn as natural entities and as imagined descriptive and symbolic structures (1999: 706). Kate Soper writes similarly in her admirably lucid book What is Nature? of the underlying tension “between those who would invoke a mystical or ‘theological’ version of nature as a caution against Prometheanism [for instance Heidegger], and those who would expose the reactionary function of all forms of nature ‘idolatry’ in perpetuating social divisions and hierarchies [e.g. Foucault]” (1995: 98). Her central argument is that both currently influential perspectives have a part to

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play in the debate on nature. The first, which may be described as the ecological perspective, is a response to the environmental crisis. It is critical of plunder and destruction, and seeks to correct abuse. The second, the perspective of theory and cultural criticism, focuses on the semiotics of ‘nature’ as a concept, and its role in mediating access to reality. Its justification lies in the necessity to halt the oppressive use of the idea of ‘nature’ to legitimate social and sexual hierarchies and discriminatory cultural norms. While the two perspectives can roughly be equated with the ‘green’ and the ‘postmodern’, they are, in Soper’s view, more accurately characterised as ‘nature-endorsing’ and ‘naturesceptical’ (p. 4).15 Soper writes of “abrasion” between the valorisation of nature at the heart of ecological politics and the nature-sceptical critiques of a progressive gender politics. She insists, nevertheless, on the possibility of achieving a reconciliation of the two perspectives, whereby each becomes conscious of what their respective discourse on nature is ignoring or politically repressing: “It would be no more appropriate for those whose primary interest is in sexuality to pit their ‘nature’ deconstructions against the ecological cause, than for ecologists to ignore the slidings of a signifier so central to their concerns” (p. 120). Soper’s aim, “to admit – and hold in productive tension – the wisdom both of those who insist on the ‘culturality’ or ‘constructed’ nature of ‘nature’, and of those who would insist on the independent existence and specific determinations of that which is referred to through the concept of ‘nature’” (p. 249), provides a model for an approach in literary criticism cognisant of the validity of the claims of both ecologists and postmodern cultural theorists. The nature-endorsing and the naturesceptical share, after all, broad affinities in their critique of current models of ‘progress’ and their exposure of oppressive dimensions of faith in scientific rationality. As forms of resistance to aspects of Western modernity, they complement each other. The nature-endorsing approach adopted, for instance, in Hermand 1991a and 1991b takes as its point of departure ecologically oriented critiques of modern society and of the consequences of the dialectic of enlightenment and visions of alternative relationships with the natural environment. Though these are formulated explicitly in non-fictional texts and more often conveyed through symbolic representation in literature, Hermand does not in practice distinguish greatly between the two. His approach is mindful of the fact that literature has served traditionally as an advocate of nature and championed the suppressed, non-rational aspects of the subject against utilitarian rationalism. Essentially nature-sceptical studies such as Thomas Dupke’s account of the ‘myth’ of Hermann Löns (Dupke 1993),

26 Nature, Technology and Cultural Change

which examines ‘Heimat’, ‘Volk’ and ‘nature’ in his writing, are, on the other hand, grounded in the premise that ‘nature’ is a social, cultural, linguistic and literary construction. They subject concepts, metaphors, myths and representations of nature to ideological critique and psychoanalytical deconstruction. Peter Matussek’s Naturbild und Diskursgeschichte (1992), which takes Goethe’s Faust as a paradigm for the contribution of imaginative writing to the nature discourse, is also principally concerned with constructions of nature rather than its mimetic representation. After the accident in the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in 1986, a German theatre director was asked by a journalist whether it was still possible to stage Goethe’s great poetic celebration of restless human striving. Faust is, Matussek argues, a work of great complexity and sophistication which continues to elicit new responses and interpretations in changing circumstances. Its images and formal structures encapsulate insights for which discursive concepts had yet to be found in the early nineteenth century and which justify its reading and performance today. Recasting Adorno’s nature aesthetics in a postmodern linguistic turn, Matussek applies the terms and concepts he has arrived at in an account of Goethe’s changing construction of nature over the half century in which Faust was written. He distinguishes between four principal ‘Naturbilder’ or nature conceptions (these are discussed further in Chapter 2 later) and traces their reception and interpretation by critics, academics and other readers from Goethe’s death up to the present. Matussek’s perspective is that of an aesthetic theorist and literary historian rather than an ecologist. He maintains critical distance from Green interpretations of Goethe’s Faust (for instance by the ethical philosopher Hans Jonas, the zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz and the author and critic Adolf Muschg), arguing that these represent a one-sided understanding of the play.16 However, his study is nevertheless motivated by conviction that aesthetic engagement with nature has an emancipatory role to play in anticipating liberation from the (essentially repressive) discursive practices through which, according to Michel Foucault, the mental set or ideology enclosing the thinking of all members of a given society is conveyed (p. 13). Gerhard Kaiser’s Mutter Natur und die Dampfmaschine (1991a), a study of shifting conceptions of nature in nineteenth-century German literature, again combines elements of the ‘nature-endorsing’ and ‘nature-sceptical’ approaches but this time leans more towards the former, inasmuch as it is more mindful of ecological concerns. Kaiser analyses themes, forms and genre conventions, and discusses the complex relationship between

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ecological consciousness, the history of taste and aesthetic reflection in the nineteenth century. His central texts, Goethe’s idyll Der Wanderer, his Märchen and Faust II, Keller’s Grüner Heinrich and Raabe’s Pfisters Mühle have in common an interweaving of contemporary realia with biblical and classical references. Kaiser’s central argument is that in the late eighteenth century ‘nature’ became a literary construct standing as the opposite pole to a depraved and threatening present. Images of the supposedly lost paradise, in reality projections of utopian yearning into a mythical past, fulfilled a collective psychic need. The invasion of a childhood world by cold paternal rationalism precipitated a longing for security in the embrace of ‘mother nature’. However, the substitution of ‘mother nature’ for the biblical creator, a characteristic of creative writing in the period, was no mere naive wish-fulfilment, since literature simultaneously served as a vehicle of critical reflection on the metaphysical conception. Thanks to this element of self-reflexivity, its real achievement was ultimately to facilitate coming to terms with the experience of loss.17 Heinrich Detering has similarly balanced empathy with the author’s ecological concern against critical awareness of literary and textual structures in a brief overview of Wilhelm Raabe’s novels, deconstructing elisions, breaks and ambivalences as tell-tale signs of underlying uncertainties (1992). Despite the superficially ‘happy’ ending of Pfisters Mühle, siding with the forces of industry, Raabe’s narrative is an indictment of the seemingly inexorable march of ‘progress’ in the name of what is lost and destroyed in its wake: culture, conviviality and the rural life. Raabe emerges as a thoroughly ‘modern’ German author, on account of both the anguish with which he registers the impact of industrialisation and his ultimate inability to find answers to the questions posed by modernisation. Such studies suggest how an ecocriticism attentive to the concerns of both the ‘nature-endorsing’ and the ‘nature-sceptical’ can throw light on cultural artefacts and the role they have played in filtering the vision of readers and users. It can and should engage in a range of practices – on the one hand, exploring themes in writing about nature, investigating questions of history and philosophy, and highlighting alternative imaginings of the relationship between humankind and nature through empathetic close reading and explication. On the other, it must draw attention to ideological subtexts, psychological displacements and unconscious dimensions, expose the layers of mediation by literary conventions in genres and individual texts, and elucidate the use of intertextual reference to ‘supercharge’ landscapes with cultural values.

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While resisting the totalising implications of the linguistic turn, which can decouple literary discourse from the material world and reduce it to linguistic play or ideological formation, ecologically oriented criticism then must and can incorporate the critical insights of post-structuralist theory. Ecocriticism shares a common cause with postmodern and post-structuralist theory in challenging androcentrism, anthropocentrism and logocentrism and in deprivileging the human subject. Like them, it dismisses technocracy, and insists on the situatedness and subjectivity of perception. It is the business of literature and other forms of culture to register, image and conceptualise the tensions between sustainability, social justice and the quest of individuals for a rewarding life. And it is the task of criticism to examine their role in reflecting and shaping our attitudes and in informing our decisions, including those governing interventions in nature. Such examination must, however, be mindful of the relativity and ethnocentric quality of conceptions of nature and its configuration as ‘other’ in narratives of human self-projection. The potential of literature and other cultural media to contribute to the formation of a new understanding of nature and our relationship with it, one appropriate to the conditions of human existence in the twenty-first century, is the subject of the final section of this chapter.

1.4 Nature and ecology in German cultural theory While ecocritical theory was emerging in the United States and Britain, a parallel but quite separate debate on the social-ecological function of literature has been pursued in Germany. This focused initially on ecological aesthetics. In his account of the emergence of an aesthetic relationship with nature in the eighteenth century, Joachim Ritter identified the function of art and literature as presenting nature in its relationship to the feeling subject at a time when contemporaries were exploiting it as an object with unprecedented logic and success. Aesthetic representations of nature fulfilled a compensatory function, restoring the alienated urban public’s lost closeness with it. Odo Marquard developed this Compensation Theory in the 1970s and 1980s. It was the task of the humanities, he argued, to compensate for the deficits of our scientific and technological age by mediating traditional cultural values, to make good the reified and fragmented experience of reality by invoking holistic visions of the landscape. Ruth and Dieter Groh have summarised Marquard’s views as follows: “Sie [the humanities] kompensieren ‘Entgeschichtlichungen’, die durch beschleunigten

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Fortschritt im wissenschaftlich-technisch-industriellen Sektor hervorgerufen werden, indem sie Geschichten von gestern erzählen: Sensibilisierungs-, Bewahrungs- und Orientierungsgeschichten, die unaushaltbare lebensweltliche Verluste ausgleichen und den Menschen helfen, ‘in einer farbigen, vertrauten und sinnvollen Welt’ zu leben.”18 Marquard denies that the humanities possess the ability to give us genuine new insights, or exert any actual influence over the technological–industrial sector, but he assigns them a function of social stabilisation. Ruth and Dieter Groh argue, however, that the relationship between the humanities and the sciences is more accurately described as one of complementarity rather than compensation. To what extent, then, we are prompted to ask, can aesthetic appreciation of nature be freed from the various (often conservative and reactionary) functions it has served in the past and reconfigured in the service of ecology? Can literary and artistic representations of natural beauty, by mobilising feelings for nature, actually overcome the ‘split consciousness’ which has led us to distinguish between aspects of nature to which we are sentimentally attached and others which we ruthlessly exploit? To what extent can writing, film, art and life practices further a caring, consistently sustainable relationship with the natural environment as a whole? Jörg Zimmermann was one of the first to write about the potential contribution of aesthetic phenomena and media to contemporary ecological debate, in Das Naturbild des Menschen (1982). Under the heading ‘Zur Geschichte des ästhetischen Naturbegriffs’ (pp. 118–54), he called for the adoption of a modification of eighteenth-century theories of art in response to contemporary environmental problems. The task of the artist must be defined in such a way as to make clear his or her responsibility towards nature as an end in itself (“als Zweck in sich selbst”). This involved returning to the mimetic representation of nature which had been abandoned in the Modernist era, but in a non-trivial, critically reflected form. The late eighteenth-century conception of the artistically shaped landscape (the English Garden) as a sphere of naturalness, in which nature was given the freedom to express itself to the full and exemplified diversity and individuality, provided a model for the utopian visions of mediation between nature and human society required of the new nature aesthetic today: Die wahrhaft utopische Perspektive einer neuen Ästhetik der Natur aber ist die reale Vermittlung von Kunst und Natur in Gestalt einer Poiesis, die verallgemeinert, was in der Ästhetik des Landschaftsgartens gegen

30 Nature, Technology and Cultural Change

Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts projektiert worden ist: “künstlerische Gestaltung der Landschaft, ein Kunstwerk, dessen Kunstmittel seine natürlichen Gebilde in ihren natürlichen Formen wären”. Kriterien der Realisierung wären Mannigfaltigkeit, Individualität, physignomische Expressivität, – Gegenbilder zu jener Armut und Uniformität, die aus einer bloß technologisch motivierten Bearbeitung von Natur resultieren. Das Leben der Natur zu vervielfältigen, hatte Hölderlin emphatisch als eigentliche Bestimmung des Menschen deklariert. (p. 147)19 Zimmermann’s ideas were taken up by Gernot and Hartmut Böhme, whose ground-breaking study Das Andere der Vernunft (1983) had reexamined the implications of Kant’s epistemological revolution in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft for our conception of nature. The Enlightenment had brought about the end of the Aristotelian conception of nature as an active subject, replacing it by the modern conception of a mechanism governed by immutable laws, an object to be understood and exploited to the end of liberating the rational subject. No longer an organism, familiar to us, but regarded with fear and respect, it was now separate from us and our only link with it was by means of feelings. Gernot Böhme’s Für eine ökologische Naturästhetik (1989) and Hartmut Böhme’s Natur und Subjekt (1988) discuss at length those pre-modern nature conceptions which were discredited in the Enlightenment, but revived and adapted to the spheres of literature and art by Goethe and the Romantics. These, they argue, are relevant again today as harbingers of an alternative relationship with nature. The Böhmes are particularly concerned with the understanding of nature as a communicating subject and with the ‘language of nature’. This last idea, which has traditionally exercised a powerful fascination over German thinkers (see von Bormann 1968, Rothacker 1979, Blumenberg 1981 and Goodbody 1984: 9–47), arose out of a view of natural phenomena as manifestations of the life force. Paracelsus’ programme of natural science and medicine was based on it in the sixteenth century and it played a central role in the theosophy of the seventeenthcentury mystic Jacob Böhme. By the late eighteenth century, the language of nature ceased to be regarded as a scientific or metaphysical reality, but it is retained in Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft as an aesthetic order constituting a model for human morality. It performs a comparable function in Goethe’s scientific writings. Goethe’s insistence on an attitude of respect, even reverence, as a prerequisite for scientific research constitutes in the Böhmes’ eyes more than a mere rearguard action

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against the advance of an avowedly utilitarian science. His philosophy of science is interpreted as recognising our unique human position; we may stand outside nature by virtue of our reasoning faculty but are equally a part of it as embodied beings. Novalis’s and Eichendorff’s conception of poetry as a translation of the ‘dumb’ speech of nature into a language intelligible to humans similarly derives from their Romantic understanding of nature as, in Kate Rigby’s words, “dynamic, self-generative, and animate unity-in-diversity, of which humans too are integrally a part” (2004: 12). Whereas the language of nature for Paracelsus and Jacob Böhme had been a static series of correspondences encoding a divine symbolism, it now became the voice of an individual landscape, whose physiognomy speaks to us psychosomatically (ibid. 77f.). Aesthetics, defined by the Böhmes as the general theory of sensual cognition, provides in their view the key to changing people’s attitudes towards the environment, and combating the alienation and destruction of modern society. They are able to enlist a powerful ally free of suspicion of right-wing cultural pessimism in the person of the Frankfurt School sociologist and philosopher, Theodor W. Adorno. They also cite passages in support of their argument from the writings of Bloch, Marcuse and Benjamin. Bloch’s confident vision of an ‘alliance technology’, one working together with rather than against nature, is, however, of limited use, because of his blindness to the full extent and nature of the destructive forces immanent in nuclear and other modern technology. Adorno, whose hopes are tenuous by comparison, and whose formulations are characteristically couched in the hypothetical, provides a more fruitful point of reference. The fascinatingly suggestive section on ‘Das Naturschöne’ in his Ästhetische Theorie (1970: 97–121) reinstates the primacy of natural beauty over works of art, a position which had been weakened by Kant and undermined by Schiller and Hegel. Adorno reminds us that the freedom, autonomy and dignity of the subject established in Kant’s philosophy were achieved at the expense of nature, animals and women. His understanding of natural beauty is complex: it is described as the appearance of immediacy and freedom (“the trace of non-identity in things in the ban of universal identity”, p. 114) and associated with truth and harmonious coexistence (p. 115). While rejecting the ‘vulgar antithesis’ of nature and society and the concomitant idea that it is possible to ‘go back to’ nature, Adorno sees the work of art as concerned with ‘reconciliation’ with nature. He is therefore less interested in untouched landscapes which may have survived into the present than in the European ‘culturescape’, or cultivated

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landscape, a product of the humanisation of nature. Direct representation of the reconciliation of nature and human culture is admittedly so problematic as to be impossible. Contemporary art, he argues, must reflect the traces of the ‘wounds’ of nature in the landscape, of the damage inflicted on it, otherwise it becomes a ‘deceiving phantasm’ and an alibi for further reification. The cultural landscape provides an important model for contemporary art, in that, while bearing the marks of exploitation and denaturalisation, it nevertheless harbours a utopian potential. This ideal potential in art outweighs the dangers inherent in its deceptions and reactionary tendencies. In Hartmut Böhme’s paraphrase of Adorno, landscape adapted to human dwelling can be the “experience of a past which never existed, but which nature, if it could wish, would bear in itself as a promise for the future”.20 Art, which is conceived of as a ‘translation’ of the ‘nonconceptual language’ of nature,21 is witness to the possibility of a harmonious relationship with the natural environment: Wohl [ … ] führt das Eingedenken der Natur in der Kunst zu Bestimmungen, die diese aus dem Bannkreis des Produktionsfetischismus lösen. So etwa, wenn die nicht gemachte, sondern gewordene Kulturlandschaft gerechtfertigt wird als Erfahrung eines Vergangenen, das nie war, was aber Natur, wenn sie hätte wollen können, als Versprechen trug. Natur als Schönes ist kein ‘Aktionsobjekt’; sie steht jenseits der Zwecke der Selbsterhaltung; sie weckt im Bild scheinbarer Unmittelbarkeit das Bild des gänzlich mit sich selbst Vermittelten; sie spricht nach dem “Modell einer nicht begrifflichen, nicht dingfest signifikativen Sprache”; sie enthält Chiffren eines Geschichtlichen und verweist auf die Möglichkeit einer Technik, die “unter veränderten Produktionsverhältnissen [ … ] fähig [wäre], ihr [der Natur] beizustehen und auf der armen Erde ihr zu dem zu helfen, wohin sie vielleicht möchte”.22 The attitude of ‘Schonung’, or sparing of nature, which the Böhmes regard as crucial today (see Hartmut Böhme 1988: 33, 115), can, they suggest, be encouraged by the fostering of a sensual culture, developing people’s awareness of the physical impact of landscapes on them. This is a task in which art, literature and literary criticism all have a part to play. Ecotheorists must build on the idea of nature as communication, Gernot Böhme argues. It is their purpose to investigate and systematise knowledge of our physical responses to environments with the aim of reintegrating corporeality into our consciousness and sensitising the public to

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the consequences of industrialisation and modern social organisation for us as well as nature: “Die Entfaltung des Sinnenbewußtseins des Menschen, zu dem die Kunst beitragen kann, ist zugleich die notwendige Wiedereingliederung seiner Natürlichkeit in sein Selbstverständnis, wie sie das Umweltproblem dem Menschen heute abverlangt” (Gernot Böhme 1989: 15). Goethe’s work, Hartmut Böhme argues, provided his contemporaries with a non-manipulative counter-model to the economic appropriation of nature, in a discourse of preserving by actively recalling (“bewahrende Erinnerung”), taking leave in sorrow (“trauernde Verabschiedung”) and holding open the possibility of better alternatives (“utopisches Offenhalten”) (Hartmut Böhme 1988: 147). Modern art, if it is to avoid stabilising the status quo through its alibi function, or even actively encouraging reactionary tendencies, must avoid idyllic scenes of reconciliation, but it can keep alive through images of grief and negativity the idea nature speaks to us and thus contribute, alongside moral education and political legislation, to the shifts in consciousness and behaviour which are imperative for our future: “In Bildern der Trauer oder Negativität hält die Kunst in Erinnerung, was aus der Wissenschaft verdrängt und im heruntergekommenen Freizeit-Naturgenuß als Konsumgut wieder aufbereitet wurde [ … .] Diese unverzichtbare Erinnerungsarbeit der Kunst [ … ] [ist] Wahrung eines Zusammenhangs mit einer Ästhetik der Natur, die es allerdings normativ und politisch zu vertreten gilt” (ibid. 44). Gernot Böhme’s prime concern in Für eine ökologische Naturästhetik is with establishing a theoretical basis in aesthetics and nature philosophy for a nature aesthetic in the service of environmental awareness. His arguments are further developed in Atmosphäre (1995), where he explores the ecological potential of Hermann Schmitz’s phenomenological philosophy of corporeality (Leiblichkeit). ‘Atmosphere’ is constituted in the self-unfolding of things in time and space. As embodied beings, we too, he argues, are affected by the atmosphere created by the things around us. Specific landscapes actively call forth feelings and ideas. The affective impact of landscape and climate on inhabitants helps generate a sense of place and ecological empathy. Hartmut Böhme has applied these ideas in ecocritical practice in Natur und Subjekt, examining attitudes towards nature and technology in the early modern period from the point of view of a cultural historian and discussing individual authors and works since the eighteenth century. The passages and chapters on Novalis, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Goethe, on the Russian film director Tarkovsky’s melancholy allegories of modern

34 Nature, Technology and Cultural Change

civilisation and on contemporary apocalyptic narratives combine textual analysis with psychoanalytical insights in a suggestive account of the artistic reservoirs of alternative images of our relationship with nature, illustrating the practical potential of the Böhmes’ approach for ecocritical analysis. The Böhmes insist repeatedly on the impossibility of any return to a position preceding Kant’s location of epistemology in the rational subject. They stress the non-literal, metaphorical status of the ‘language of nature’ and the general need to subject proto-ecological, pre-modern conceptions of nature to the same radical critical reflection as Enlightenment rationalism. (See Gernot Böhme 1992, in particular, where the author expands on the “aporias of our relationship with nature”, pp.9–25.) Their efforts to develop an ecologically oriented aesthetic of nature have nonetheless, as indicated above, not been universally welcomed. In particular, they have been dismissed as illusory by Ruth and Dieter Groh. In the first volume of their ‘Cultural History of Nature’ (1991) the Grohs argue that twentieth-century confidence in historical progression towards liberation from the constraints of nature, and in an optimal use of resources for the general benefit of humankind, owed more than met the eye to traditional metaphysical assumptions. Like the Böhmes, they express belief in the ability of the humanities to provide “outlines of ways of repairing and preventing damage” (p. 10), and write of the importance of preserving awareness of the values and cultural achievements of the past, in order to counter the abstraction and ahistoricism of modern society. They stress the humanities should not confine themselves to a merely compensatory function, but must challenge the status quo, through “rational analysis, tenacious enlightenment and active resistance” (p. 168). However, in their second volume (1996), the Grohs’ examination of the ways in which cultural predispositions and conscious and unconscious options for particular conceptions of nature have determined our perception and experience of the natural environment takes a direction sharply critical of mainstream ecological thinking and the Böhmes’ aesthetic project. They adopt a position opposed to ‘physiocentrism’ and the related ‘teleological’ understanding of nature which they discern in ecophilosophers of the 1970s and 1980s such as Hans Jonas, Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich and the Böhmes. The clearest formulation of their argument is found in the extended essay ‘Natur als Maßstab – eine Kopfgeburt’ (Nature as a yardstick: A mental fiction), which draws on Norbert Elias’s reflections on the metaphorical origins and functions of conceptions of nature (Elias 1986). Since Darwin, Elias observes, the only appropriate conception of

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nature is one of the open process of evolution and the expanding universe. Critically reviewing the historical development of the conceptualisation of nature in the light of this, he distinguishes between a ‘distancing’ function of nature metaphors on the one hand and an ‘engaging’ function on the other. The former facilitates description and scientific detachment, while the latter reflects longings and fantasies, in particular the longing to be directed towards health and prosperity by a benevolent parental figure. In projecting a rational order into nature, in envisaging it as a meaningful whole or an acting subject, the engaging function tends to idealise nature as a model and to play down both “the horrors of the food chain” and the violence and destruction inherent in human nature. Historically, the two functions have frequently overlapped in thinkers’ and literary writers’ conceptions of nature, leading them to arrive at false conclusions. The Greeks conceived of nature as a woman, on the basis of the analogy between its gift of life and the ability to give birth. They envisaged it as a sphere of order, harmony and peace in analogy with their conceptions of the ideal organisation of society. And they pictured it as a craftsman, producing objects as potters and smiths did. These ideas subsequently took hold in the imagination and assumed a life of their own. A reversal then took place, by means of which nature ceased to be a reflection of society, becoming instead a paradigm for social organisation and human culture. It is this confusion which the Grohs accuse ecotheorists of (p. 93). They fail to recognise that the roots of their teleological concept of nature (calling for respect of the purposes and projects of nature, especially of all life which seeks to survive and reproduce, but also in a more general way of the Earth’s striving towards complexity, biodiversity, harmony and beauty, and for humanity to find its place in nature) lie in the symbols of the classical philosophers, and in the very metaphors with which men sought to understand nature by forming analogies with human life. ‘Nature’, the Grohs correctly observe, is epistemologically a chameleon, adopting the colour, that is the predispositions and ideology, of the viewer (p. 96). Historically speaking, they point out, the aesthetic experience of nature has followed shifting patterns of interpretation (p. 108). Over the centuries, it has been dictated by conceptual vocabulary and influenced by the designs of individual creative writers and painters. The epoch-making achievement of Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft was his separation of aesthetics from religion and his founding of the criteria of natural beauty in the faculties of the perceiving subject, rather than in nature itself (p. 119). The Romantics’ speculative revival of holism was a retrograde step inasmuch as it sought to restore the broken link between

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aesthetic judgement and a teleological conception of nature. Their faith in the ability of “heile Natur” (unspoiled nature), experienced aesthetically, to redeem the individual and human history, can only be regarded with suspicion. The Romantics’ endowment of nature with the attributes of harmony, purpose, reason, organic unity and intactness, and their denial of the existence in it of purposelessness, waste, destruction, compulsive repetition, amorality or indifference to individual fate, were in fact a throwback to early Enlightenment optimism, which had seen nature as the quintessence of harmonious self-regulation (p. 121). If ‘epistemic anthropocentrism’ (i.e. acknowledgement that our access to the world is necessarily mediated by human concepts, perceptions and methodology) has been recognised as inescapable since Kant, and nature can no longer seriously be conceived of as a unified whole or an intrinsic good, it follows that it cannot serve as an ethical norm or aesthetic paradigm. Natural beauty cannot logically, the Grohs claim, provide the foundation for an ethic of protection of nature which the Böhmes seek in it: this must rather be found in a progressive extension of modern ethics based on the autonomy of the subject, by means of which moral responsibility embraces not only the self and other human actors, but also non-human nature.23 They dismiss as ‘sentimental self-deception’ Gernot Böhme’s argument that the recognition of our relatedness with nature which results from aesthetic experience will automatically lead to an attitude of sparing (p. 128). Physiocentric thinkers, the Grohs observe critically, tend to see the solution to environmental problems less in conscious, ethically motivated action than in a shift in behaviour resulting automatically from a feeling of corporeal union with the ‘whole of nature’. What is needed is, however, rather an enlightened, self-reflecting anthropocentrism and a critical analysis of the reasons for our blindness to the destruction of the environment through technology. Even moderate physiocentrists like the Böhmes reduce humans to sentient and passive natural beings, ignoring the active interpretation of our feelings by reason and culture. In depriving them of autonomy, they also deprive them ultimately of responsibility for their actions (pp. 138f.). The Romantic attempt to compensate for the loss of the holistic unity of knowledge which resulted from the freedom and autonomy gained by the subject in the Enlightenment and its revival by ecocentric thinkers are thus no more than a nostalgic quest for lost authenticity and wholeness in nature through subjective aesthetic experience. The response of most modern art since Baudelaire and Valéry, namely to turn away from nature, has been more appropriate. It is simply anachronistic

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to conceive of nature as an acting subject (p. 133). The Böhmes’ ecoaesthetic is nothing more than “poor poesy” and “a lyrical concoction of metaphysical concepts” (p. 129). The Grohs are of course right to challenge the notion of nature as stable and harmonious unity; the true nature of nature is change, as Thomas Potthast puts it in his critique of the conception of ecological balance and its use as a moral norm (2004). However, the Grohs’ account of the Böhmes’ arguments is revealed as a polemic misrepresentation, if examined with the help of Angelika Krebs’ systematic breakdown and evaluation of the arguments and standpoints in environmental ethics (1997). Their black and white dichotomy of anthropocentrism and physiocentrism ignores crucial distinctions between variants of each. Physiocentrism includes the subsets of pathocentrism (which accords sentient beings moral status) and biocentrism (which extends the sphere of moral concern to all living beings, but not beyond the organic). Most physiocentrists also draw distinctions of degree between the moral claims of humans and those of other forms of life and natural objects. In fact, under the general heading of physiocentrism, the Grohs lump dubious naturam sequi and holistic arguments together with problematic but challenging teleological ones and incontrovertible pathocentric concerns. Gernot Böhme cannot, it follows, be meaningfully categorised as a physiocentrist. Krebs in fact argues that his ‘Aisthesis’ proposition extends the (anthropocentric!) basic needs argument, by presenting the aesthetic fulfilment we derive from contact with natural beauty as a significant (though not essential) component of the good life. “In our own interest and out of moral consideration for the good life of others, nature should be preserved and cultivated in such a way as to continue to afford the possibility of aesthetic fulfilment”, she sums up his position (1997: 368). Krebs draws attention to a range of significant aesthetic arguments rooted in intuitive feelings that nature is more than just a resource, which are situated between the extremes of wholly uncontroversial basic needs anthropocentrism and the popular but flawed arguments of many Deep Ecologists, Ecofeminists and New Age thinkers: “Zwischen diesen beiden unattraktiven Extremen, dem instrumentell verkürzten Anthropozentrismus auf der einen Seite und dem zum Absoluten aufgeblähten Physiozentrismus auf der anderen Seite, liegt das wirklich interessante Terrain des unverkürzten, eudämonistisch reichen Anthropozentrismus und des epistemisch-anthropozentrischen Physiozentrismus” (p. 378). Far from being invalidated by the Grohs’ critique, the Böhmes’ position lies comfortably within this terrain. It must also be asked whether

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the Grohs’ strategy of rational enlightenment is sufficient to change deep-rooted public attitudes and behaviour without the backing of the Böhmes’ enlistment of feelings and the physical impact of landscapes. As Krebs points out, quantitative, factual information (for instance, statistics on the health risks and dangers of radioactivity) is not enough to motivate us to take the steps necessary to avoid them. We also need a qualitative knowledge, one which enables us to imagine the danger, and we need to be reminded of our dependence on nature as a species (p. 365). Krebs’ suggestion that this is the remit of journalism, art and literature (pp. 367f.) is compatible not only with the Böhmes’ ecological aesthetic, but also with the conception of literature as cultural ecology to which I now turn. Neither the special quality of literature’s contribution to culture in general nor its significance for the nature discourse in particular were questions of great importance in the theory of cultural ecology as originally formulated by the American psychologist Gregory Bateson in the 1970s or even in Peter Finke’s ‘evolutionary cultural ecology’, which followed in the 1990s. They have, however, become a central concern in Hubert Zapf’s recent theoretical reflections. As Gersdorf and Mayer note in their introduction to the essay volume Natur – Kultur – Text (2005a), Finke and Zapf have been central figures in introducing Bateson’s ideas in Germany. Peter Finke, who leads a research group at the University of Bielefeld, has drawn on the early twentieth-century German-Scandinavian biologist and theorist of Umwelten and Innenwelt, Jakob von Uexküll, and a series of anthropologists as well as Bateson, in his efforts to recast cultural anthropology in terms of ecological concepts. What, Bateson had asked, is the function of cultural artefacts in facilitating the survival of the human species? Finke’s answer is couched in terms of systems theory (2003). Taking up John Tyler Bonner’s definition of culture as the transfer of information by behaviour and communication (in analogy with nature, which transfers information genetically) and Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes as cultural replicators, he suggests that human cultures may be regarded as non-material ecosystems. These are grounded in nature and influence it in turn. All concretisations of the mental information conveyed in cultural ecosystems (including art and literature) are, like organisms in biological ecosystems, subject to cycles of production, consumption and reduction. They are, however, only loosely determined by rules and conventions, in contrast with the laws of nature. In our daily lives we engage with a multiplicity of distinct but overlapping cultural ecosystems. Although governed by customs, conventions and bureaucracies, these

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are constantly in a state of flux. Every social act can trigger a process of intellectual or cultural evolution by producing new concepts, circumstances or values. Linguistic and imaginative creativity is equivalent to the flow of energy in a natural ecosystem, and cultures can and must be assessed on the basis of their sustainability. Finke’s criteria for evaluating contemporary culture (including the spheres of ethics, knowledge, language, literature, art, the economy, technology and the understanding of nature) are creative potential, openness towards neighbouring systems, tolerance of error and diversity. The inclusion of conceptions of nature may seem surprising, but is central: “Letztlich geht es um nichts anderes als um einen umfassenden, rational gesteuerten kulturellen Wandel hin zu neuen, zukunftsfähigen Lebensstilen, um Veränderungen in den Köpfen und im Alltagshandeln. Damit wird Naturschutz zum Teil eine Aufgabe der Angewandten Kulturwissenschaft” (2003: 276; emphasis in original). Though literature plays only a minor role in Finke’s thinking, he sees it as a promising field for analysis, because, as “a sphere in which possible cultural forms may be tried out” (p. 272), it offers space for cultural imagination and trains the creative potential of language. In a phrase reminiscent of Adorno and Böhme, he accords literature and art the ability to serve as a “sanatorium of our general cultural existence and its self-inflicted damage” (p. 273). The position of literature in this general cultural theory is further expanded on by Hubert Zapf in the first, theoretical part of his study of the American novel, Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie (2002: 3–68), and summed up concisely in his introduction to a recent collection of ecocritical essays (2006a). In addition to Finke, Zapf also draws on Wolfgang Iser’s literary anthropology and incorporates ideas from Joseph Meeker, William Rueckert and Hartmut Böhme. Literature, art and other forms of cultural activity are necessary “to continually restore the richness, diversity, and complexity of those inner landscapes of the mind, the imagination, the psyche, and of interpersonal communication which make up the cultural ecosystems of modern humans, but are threatened with impoverishment by an increasingly overeconomised, standardised, and depersonalised contemporary culture” (ibid. 3). Literature is the classical medium of cultural ecology in that it has staged and explored, in ever new scenarios, the consequences of prevailing and alternative value systems and conceptions of human and non-human ‘nature’. However, the cultural–ecological function of literature goes beyond this immediate thematic concern with the environment. It also embraces the special structures and functions of literary textuality, as it has developed in

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relation to other forms of textuality in the course of cultural evolution. For “imaginative literature transforms conceptual, logocentric processes into energetic processes, and thus acts like an ecological force within the larger system of cultural discourses” (ibid.). Since its divergence from linear, progress-oriented technological and scientific discourse in the eighteenth century, literature, with its holistic world models, has then taken on two important ecological functions. Firstly, in terms of content, it has become “a sensorium and imaginative sounding board for hidden problems, deficits and imbalances of the larger culture, as a form of textuality which critically reflects and symbolically articulates what is marginalised, neglected, repressed or excluded by dominant civilisatory power structures, but is nevertheless of vital importance for an adequately complex account of humanity’s existence within the fundamental culture–nature relationship” (ibid. 4). And secondly, in terms of form, “by breaking up closed world views and exclusionary truth claims in favour of plural perspectives, multiple meanings, and dynamic interrelationships”, literature has become the site of “a constant creative renewal of language, perception, communication and imagination”. The arts in general and literature in particular thus perform a crucial function in the totality of cultural discourse and are indispensable for ensuring “the richness, diversity, and continuing evolutionary potential of the culture as a whole” (ibid.). Possessing its own dynamic as a uniquely complex medium of reflection, representation and communication of cultural processes, literature brings together elements dispersed in our society between politics, economic activity, the legal system, ethics, ideology and science. Its ambiguity, irony and metaphorical language free concepts and ideas from their discursive simplification and instrumentalisation, destabilise ideologies and subvert one-dimensional identities. The aestheticisation inherent in linguistic engagement with the world liberates readers from conventional patterns of thought and the fictionalisation and symbolic representation of experience helps them imagine in concrete form what they already know in the abstract. Literature thus goes beyond mere compensation for the negative effects of industrialisation, urbanisation, technological development, commercialisation, acceleration and mediatisation, to change society, by critically reviewing the consequences of modernity and reminding us of historically marginalised opportunities through a reservoir of imagined alternatives. In the chapters which follow, my general aim has been to identify the conceptions of science and technology, nature and the wild, which are explicit or implicit in texts, set them in the context of earlier literary and

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non-literary (philosophical and political) discourse and weigh up their usefulness as responses to environmental crisis in terms of descriptive plausibility and conceptual coherence. Texts are examined which articulate critiques of the Enlightenment’s legacy of instrumental rationalisation, scientism, technology and modernisation; propose a conception of dwelling as an alternative to the crude harnessing of natural forces and exploitation of its resources; reflect on the loss of wilderness and animality as a result of population growth, economic development and the taming of the wild; and communicate visions of an alternative to the alienation of modern urban life. These studies are framed by an initial chapter on Goethe’s conception of nature (holism, embeddedness, ‘delicate empiricism’ and the attitude of respect and wonder summed up in the term Weltfrömmigkeit) and its reclamation by modern authors and a final chapter centred on Hartmut Böhme’s conception of nature as a cultural project.

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II Critiques of Science and Technology

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2 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. Commentators on Goethe’s role as a forerunner of environmentalism have noted the influence of his holism, for example, on the writings of the geographer Alexander von Humboldt, whose descriptions of landscapes anticipated the principle of the ecosystem by stressing the interdependence of geology, climate, flora and fauna. In England, Goethe was hailed as a precursor by Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley. In the decades that followed, Ernst Haeckel, founder of the science of ecology, fused the Goethean conception of nature with the theory of evolution in his writings and popularised them in the Monist movement, while Rudolf Steiner, the father of Anthroposophy, who edited Goethe’s scientific 45

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writings, promoted practical applications in the spheres of education, farming, medicine, architecture and the theatre. More recently, the parallels between Goethe’s thinking on nature and developments in twentieth-century science have been discussed by the physicists Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker and his significance for environmental ethics has been underlined by the philosopher Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich.2 However, Goethe wrote in an age too different from ours for him to be plausibly claimed as an early environmentalist. His thinking on nature, science and technology was also too complex for such a reductive classification. Indeed, two diametrically opposed camps may be made out in the reception of his thinking on nature since his death. In the second half of the nineteenth century, most mainstream commentators and cultural functionaries celebrated Goethe as the champion of Faustian striving, and his works were cited in support of the belief that individual self-realisation could go hand in hand with economic capitalism and faith in scientific and technological progress. Marxist critics such as Georg Lukács adapted this perspective, interpreting Faust as a representation of man’s struggle for freedom, social justice and the self-realisation of the individual through control over nature, and this understanding of Goethe became quasi-official cultural policy after the Second World War in the GDR. Among those who focused instead on the ecocentric dimension of his writings, what Mandelkow has described as the omnipresent political distortion and ideological appropriation of Goethe’s ideas has been equally apparent. Time and again, he has been enlisted in problematic anti-modernist critiques of calculating business practice and exploitative science or adapted to fit into a world view characterised by polarities between ‘Kultur’ and ‘Zivilisation’, community and society, instinct and reason, loyalty and dissident critical intellect.3 Nietzsche, for instance, saw in Goethe’s ‘return to nature’ a superior (conservative and anti-revolutionary) alternative to Rousseau’s ideas, and the anti-Semitic political philosopher and cultural critic Houston Stewart Chamberlain championed his holism in the early years of the twentieth century as an alternative to contemporary ‘atomistic’ scientific practice. The Goethean terms ‘Gestalt’, ‘metamorphosis’ and ‘morphology’ were extrapolated into an aesthetic of organic totality, symbolic beauty and the transfiguration of nature by Ernst Cassirer and Eduard Spranger, and found wide currency among conservative thinkers in the1920s and 1930s, who ignored the historical, social and political conditions under which Goethe wrote.4 For decades after the Second World War, the concept of

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organic development was central to the understanding of Goethe in West Germany. Despite challenges by individual critics such as Klaus Ziegler, the view prevailed that Goethe’s conception of nature was one of cosmic laws, harmonious order, organic development, reason and health. The environmentally oriented interest in Goethe that emerged in the 1970s was on the one hand a rebuttal of the sharply critical assessment of Goethe as a political thinker which had become customary in the previous decade. It marked a shift from the politics of class to those of ecology, or from red to green. More importantly, however, it was also a leftist response to this longstanding conservative appropriation of Goethe’s conception of nature. To what extent, I ask first of all in this chapter, were the ecological arguments which emerged in the late twentieth century genuinely prefigured in Goethe’s thinking on nature? And secondly, what part have reference to Goethe as an authority and critical dialogue with him played in reflection on our relationship with nature and the formulation of environmentally informed standpoints in the works of writers in the1970s and 1980s? Jost Hermand strikes a wise note of caution in the chapter on Goethe in his book on the ecological aesthetic in German literature, Im Wettlauf mit der Zeit:5 “ ‘Goethe als Kritiker der Technik’, ‘Goethe als holistisch denkender Naturphilosoph’, ‘Goethe als Vordenker unserer Weltlage’: all das sind goldene Worte, die sicher mehr versprechen, als sie halten können” (1991b: 36). Nonetheless, Hermand goes on to argue that Goethe can justifiably be regarded as a proto-ecological thinker. He finds in both Goethe’s scientific writings and his literary works images of utopian reconciliation with nature, alongside warnings of the dangers of a suicidal alienation from nature. The fragmentary epic poem ‘Die Geheimnisse’ (Goethe 1998: II 271–81)6 and the novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, which is described as concerned with the “devastating consequences of the capitalist implementation of technology [ … ], in which Goethe saw a great danger for nature in the future” (pp. 43f.), are, for instance, seen to anticipate the land communes of the Alternative Movement in the 1970s in their presentation of (part-masonic, part-ecological) fraternities leading a way of life striking a balance between self-realisation and social responsibility. Hermand writes of the ‘gentle empiricism’ with which Goethe approaches the study and use of nature, tempering Enlightenment liberation of humankind from the bonds of necessity with a respect and reverence for nature rooted in pantheism. He outlines Goethe’s holistic

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view of the universe, which recognised humanity as an integral part of nature and anticipated ecological principles by stressing the interdependence of the mineral, vegetable, animal and human spheres. The Enlightenment metaphor for the universe as a machine is, Hermand writes, replaced in Goethe’s work by a conception of nature as an organic whole, unified by “a certain law of analogies” (p. 38, quoted from a letter to Karl Ludwig von Knebel in 1788) and a common principle of evolution from simple forms to more complex ones. Above all, in Hermand’s eyes Goethe subscribes to the principle of a meaningful integration of human beings in the natural order: Goethe war [ … ] in dieser Zeit einer der wenigen, der [ … ] ein Weltbild entwarf, dem das Prinzip der sinnvollen Integration des Menschen in die Natur zugrunde lag. [ … ] Sein Ideal war daher ein humanus naturalis, der sowohl Sinnen- als auch Vernunftwesen ist, der sich der Natur bedient und sich zugleich in sie einordnet, der sich als selbständiges Wesen fühlt und doch die Grenzen seiner Möglichkeiten im Auge behält. (p. 41) This is a persuasive assessment of the lasting significance of Goethe’s conception of nature. However, it glosses over aspects of his thinking which do not fit into Hermand’s understanding of the poet as ‘green’. Goethe may register and express anxiety about the industrial transformation of Germany which began in his lifetime, but, for obvious historical reasons, no sense of the fragility of the biosphere is to be found in his thinking. He is also, as Kate Rigby has put it, “the inheritor of a tradition from which he never entirely freed himself, whereby the appropriation and domination of the earth by humanity was in some sense preordained” (2004: 211). It is thus only logical that, as Margrit Wyder has shown, the scala naturae (i.e. the ladder of creation, a hierarchical variant of the notion of the chain of being) was his central metaphor for nature (however significant his dynamic reinterpretation of this age-old static image) rather than the ecological metaphors of the ‘web’ or ‘network’ of life, which avoid implications of hierarchy (1999: 1–4). Further, Goethe’s critique of the instrumental relationship with nature exemplified in the Enlightenment is, like that of the Romantics, not primarily rooted in environmental concerns, but focused on implications for the human individual. As Rigby notes, his principal preoccupation is with the dual impoverishment of humanity resulting from the demand that we close off our imaginations, emotions and capacity for empathy and

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from the relegation of the corporeal aspect of the self to mechanical nature (2004: 22f.). The ‘grüne Weltfrömmigkeit’ in which Hermand finds the principal legacy of Goethe’s thinking on nature is also a problematic reduction. The term ‘Weltfrömmigkeit’, which appears in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (VIII 243), where it is introduced in contrast with ‘Hausfrömmigkeit’ (i.e. conventional domestic piety), resonates with Romantic pantheism (which saw nature as the physical embodiment of a divine creative force). It thus corresponds to the eco-spiritualism which flowered in Germany and elsewhere in the early 1980s. In a more general way, it also reflects the respect, modesty and sense of obligation towards the world at the heart of Goethe’s approach to nature and the natural sciences. There is a genuine correspondence between this principle and Deep Ecologists’ efforts to extend our sense of self to the environment, so as to foster an ethos of caring. However, elevating ‘green piety’ to the key to Goethe’s thinking on nature ignores the presence of other approaches and arguments in his writing, and the development of his views over time. It obliterates the tensions between Promethean domination and wondering ‘letting be’ which run right through his work and disregards the complexity of his poetic statements. Goethe played a key role in synthesising and reformulating several distinct strands of philosophical tradition which have fed into modern German ecologism. Both the pantheistic religiosity of his earlier writing and the mature conception of scientific study as ‘observation of nature’ exemplified in the Farbenlehre (i.e. patient observance, accompanied by openness to the physiological, aesthetic and emotional impact of perceptions on the observer)7 have been enormously influential. However, contemporary writers have also found in him a uniquely rich source of images and narratives, and a sophisticated model in the use of strategies and techniques for the formulation of experience. In this respect too, Goethe has then had much to offer for authors seeking to promote the ecological consciousness indispensable for the longer-term survival of humankind in our age of population growth, resource depletion and pollution. In the following, I begin by tracing the re-examination of Goethe’s conception of science by environmentally committed thinkers in the1970s and 1980s, with reference to commentaries by the literary historian Leo Kreutzer, the philosopher Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich, the physicist Fritjof Capra and the writer, essayist and critic Adolf Muschg. There follows a brief account of the principal understandings of nature

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reflected in Goethe’s poetry, prose fiction, essays and scientific writings. Their adaptation and mediation through narrative structures and imagery is then discussed with reference to Faust – a work written over forty years, which reveals the shifts in his thinking and arguably encapsulates his most profound insights into modernity and the relationship of humanity with the natural environment. The final part of the chapter examines representative instances of creative literary dialogue with Goethe in the writing of Hanns Cibulka, Klaus Modick and Volker Braun.

2.1 The revival of interest in Goethe’s conception of science Goethe’s scientific writings rather then his poetry, plays or novels provided the principal focus of attention in the environmental turn in his reception. ‘Porträt eines Verlierers, daher aus erstaunlicher Nähe’ was the subtitle of an article on Goethe’s thinking on nature published by Leo Kreutzer in 1978. Goethe as a loser: the allusion was above all to his unsuccessful challenge to Newtonian physics in the Farbenlehre, which constituted an affinity with the Greens as seemingly powerless opponents of the government’s nuclear energy programme and heirs to a tradition of marginalised thinking on our relationship with nature. Kreutzer quotes from the inaugural lecture of the eminent physiologist Emil Du BoisReymond, Rektor of the University of Berlin in 1882, in which Goethe the scientist was referred to as an ‘auto-didactic dilettante’. He notes, however, that since the age of scientific positivism, Goethe’s science has been the subject of more sympathetic commentaries by the physicists Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker and the Swiss zoologist Adolf Portman. Kreutzer’s approach to Goethe is explicitly linked with the antinuclear movement: Ich bin betroffen durch eine naturwissenschaftlich ermöglichte Beherrschung der Natur, die gegenwärtig einen Grad erreicht hat, der, in Zerstörung umschlagend, auch den Gleichmütigsten nicht mehr unberührt läßt; diese Betroffenheit [ … ] teile ich mit vielen. [ … ] Aufschauend von den Büchern, mußten wir irgendwann gewahr werden, daß die technologischen Weiterungen naturwissenschaftlichen Vorankommens dabei sind, unsere Welt rabiat zu verändern. Die Konflikte um die sogennante friedliche Nutzung der Atomenergie haben uns dann hellwach gemacht. [ … ] Was ist wirklich von ihm zu halten, von diesem immer beängstigender werdenden, den Menschen

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und seine Umwelt immer mehr überfordernden Siegeszug der Naturwissenschaft und Technik? Ich bin, wie viele andere dies fragend, auf den Naturwissenschaftler Goethe gestoßen. (1978: 382f.) Living in an age when science was already primarily concerned with controlling nature, Goethe insisted on what could be experienced directly through the senses and rejected experiments depending on complicated apparatus.8 In areas of dispute such as the geological debate between the Neptunists and the Volcanists, he based his support (generally for the former) as much on taste as on scientific evidence and insisted on the ethical dimension of scientific research. His warnings of the limitations of abstract mathematical analysis, his conviction of the importance of the observing subject and of intuition as a path to knowledge and finally his indulgence in the metaphorical truth of a ‘language of nature’ made him an outsider in natural science. “Going ‘back to Goethe’ is neither possible nor desirable”, Kreutzer concedes. But the poet deserves consideration in the context of questions urgently requiring answers today, in particular “the question whether scientific research should be set limits, whether it should be governed by ethical principles”. He concludes with the passionate but carefully chosen words: Uns verbindet mit Goethe die Einsicht in die Notwendigkeit, naturwissenschaftlicher Forschung und ihren technologischen Weiterungen Maßstäbe zu setzen: sie zu verpflichten, die Natur sich selbst und den Menschen nicht immer weiter zu entfremden; nicht immer das Machbare zu machen, ohne zu fragen, wem dann da die Kräfte der Natur dienstbar gemacht werden. (p. 390) Goethe’s scientific writings were the subject of a conference convened in Trieste by Horst Albert Glaser a few years later, which brought together the Hölderlin scholar, Pierre Bertaux, the nature philosopher, Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich and the biochemist, Friedrich Cramer. In the conference papers, published under the title Goethe und die Natur, the universalist poet was again seen as a model in the struggle against specialisation and alienation. These were the years of forest dieback and the intensified threat of nuclear war following the NATO dual track decision to upgrade the nuclear weapons stationed in Germany. Science and technology appeared increasingly as agents of destruction and instruments of domination and control. Goethe’s Gnostic holism, and his alternative conception of scientific practice as ‘gentle empiricism’9 had acquired a new relevance.

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In one of the more substantial contributions, Klaus Meyer-Abich asks what we can learn from Goethean science. Though he distrusted machines, Goethe was not opposed to technology in principle. His general aim, “to learn the way nature works by listening attentively” (MeyerAbich 1986: 48), was almost identical with that of his Enlightenment contemporaries. Meyer-Abich finds the particular qualities of Goethe’s holistic, life-orientated conception of scientific research formulated most clearly in the preface to Zur Morphologie, his Morphological Studies written in 1807. After initially seeking to impose his will on nature, the scientist, according to Goethe, will learn to recognise its powers and venerate them (XIII 53). Meyer-Abich notes that Goethe goes on to forge a direct link between recognition of the mutual influence of mankind and nature on each other, and self-development, or self-perfection on the part of the observer. Nature provides a model for all spheres of human activity: Goethe writes elsewhere “that we make ourselves worthy of spiritual participation in nature’s productions by observation of its constant creation” (XIII 30f.). In his alternative, ‘symbolic’ practice, science thus converges with education and art. Several contributors to Goethe und die Natur noted that Goethe’s studies of the forms of natural objects, of symmetry and variation anticipated developments in modern physics. This argument was put more forcefully by the physicist and New Age thinker Fritjof Capra. In his influential book The Turning Point (1982), Capra identified the challenge to traditional (Newtonian) physics represented by modern (alternative) science as a paradigm shift from the mechanistic world view to a holistic, ecological one. Deforestation, desertification, the hole in the ozone layer, the greenhouse effect, the extinction of species, population growth and growing social inequality are for him all facets of a general crisis of modernity to which the New Social Movements and the theories of outsiders in modern science constitute responses. Capra combined psychotherapy, a spiritualism derived from the Tao and the book of I Ching, and a plea for ‘modern’ science and system theory in a heady mix, impressing on his readers the need for a dynamic balance of Yin and Yang, that is self-realisation and integration, rational and intuitive thinking, analysis and synthesis, growth and preservation. Capra, who has worked in the United States and Britain since the 1960s, but is Austrian by birth, toured Germany in the early 1980s and wrote a new introduction for the second edition of the German translation of his book, entitled ‘Das ganzheitlich-ökologische Denken in der deutschen Geistesgeschichte’, in which he explored the tradition of holistic and ecological thinking in Germany (1991: 1–11). Goethe, he

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observed, is the central figure in the development of ecological holism in German thought (p. 5), bringing together ideas from Hermetic tradition and the Kabbalah, the early modern nature mysticism of Paracelsus and Böhme, and the philosophies of Bruno and Spinoza, and anticipating modern systems theory (p. 3). In Goethe, whom he described as a “synthetic writer, convinced of the rights of nature and thinking in networks”, Capra found striking parallels with Gregory Bateson’s arguments in Mind and Nature (1979). Goethe’s statements on the ethics of scientific research corresponded to Bateson’s concerns and his concept of a ‘bewegliche Ordnung’ (I 203), or flexible order in nature, coincided with the systems-theory biologist’s conception of cyclical processes and the polarity of opposites. Perhaps the most eloquent and informed call for recognition of the ‘Green wisdom’ in Goethe’s writing, literary as well as scientific, came from the Swiss novelist, dramatist, essayist and literary scholar Adolf Muschg. Two short essays written in 1979 and 1981, and published in the volume Empörung durch Landschaften (1985), reveal deep concern over the environmental impact of modernisation, industrialisation and the consumer society, both abroad (in China) and at home in Switzerland. ‘Ansichtssachen’ and ‘Empörung durch Landschaften’ (‘Points of view’ and ‘Indignation over landscapes’) reflect his shock on realising the loss of nature, the impending disappearance of landscapes and cultural heritage, and the threat to a way of life associated with his childhood – but equally an acute awareness of his own privileged position and the proximity of such nostalgic feeling to blindness to the rights and needs of others. Mindful of the imperative to link ecology with social justice, he nevertheless insists on the importance of a modification of Romantic civilisation criticism such as to practise resistance to “the universal theft of the present” (p. 20). When Muschg’s book Goethe als Emigrant. Auf der Suche nach dem Grünen bei einem alten Dichter appeared in 1986, he had taught Goethe for over thirty years, edited the West-östlicher Divan and the Wanderjahre, and adapted a narrative fragment of Goethe’s for the stage (Muschg 1971). The essays collected here reveal the gradual emergence of his appreciation of Goethe as a Green thinker. Posing the iconoclastic question ‘Is Goethe Fun?’ in the earliest essay, which was written in 1968, he comments: “The defiance with which he stood by the evidence accumulated through his love [of nature], facing the tribunal of the new natural sciences, is moving” (ibid. 186). Alluding to the condescending remarks of later scientists on Goethe’s opposition to the fragmentation of knowledge into individual disciplines, he writes: “We are in a better

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position to appreciate the wise instinct present in his apparently quixotic stance” (ibid. 187). By the 1980s, Muschg had sharpened the focus of his solidarity with Goethe as an opponent of Enlightenment rationalism. Of the poem ‘Erlkönig’ he notes: “At the time, the poem was concerned with the threatening of nature; today we hear in it the voice of nature threatened”, and he suggests ‘Der Zauberlehrling’ might be read as a commentary on the build-up of nuclear weapons in Europe (ibid. 30). The elegy ‘Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen’ which he describes as “a model of relationships and adequate forms for our dealings with nature and our fellow humans”, exemplifies “a Goethe of contemporary relevance” (ibid.). But it is to Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and the Farbenlehre that Muschg turns especially, as major works deserving attention as pointers to an alternative relationship towards nature. The Wanderjahre can and should be read today as “the study of a project in communal survival [ … ] under the conditions of the industrial age” (ibid. 13). The Farbenlehre is described as a compendium of appropriate ways of relating with nature. Goethe had rejected Newtonian spectral analysis as a threat to the intactness of nature, resulting, since the observer is himself a part of nature, in “reduction, even possible destruction of the self” (ibid. 39). His own consciously amateur approach, involving empathy and identification, constitutes a “nature wisdom” from which we can learn today: Sein wissenschaftlicher Takt sagte Goethe, daß Gefühl in der Hand sein muß, die nach der Natur greift, und daß nicht jeder Griff erlaubt ist; daß ein ausbeutendes Verhältnis zum Objekt sich rächt in der Verarmung des Subjekts; daß es zwischen beiden Korrespondenzverhältnisse zu entdecken, zu pflegen, ja zu retten gibt. [ … ] Die nachbarlich-dilettantische Gefühls- und Naturweisheit, die wir nötig haben, ist bei Goethe vorgebildet. (ibid. 40) “To call Goethe ‘green’”, he argues, is therefore “not just an eye-catching allusion to contemporary politics” (ibid. 18). Goethe may not have been a model democrat, but his approach to nature, vindicated by developments in modern science such as game theory, relativity and the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics, demands the observed phenomenon be allowed to retain its dignity, and is guided by an ethic of social viability: [Er] wäre schwerlich ein Eideshelfer basisdemokratischer Verfahren. [ … ] Wohl aber hat der Glaube, daß der Mensch in jedem Baum sich

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selber ehrt, in jedem Tier seinesgleichen begegnet, in Goethe einen bis auf den Zwischenkieferknochen erprobten Zeugen. Daß die Natur nicht für den Entreißdiebstahl geschaffen ist, daß sie ihren Segen an einen schonenden, einen ‘zarten’ Umgang bindet, brauchte ihm nicht erst angesichts der gefährdeten Natur aufzugehen. Die Symmetrie, das Gleichgewicht zwischen Subjekt und Objekt verstand sich für ihn aus dem Bewußtsein der Verwandtschaft, der analogen Bildung, der Bedingtheit durcheinander. Die Anerkennung dieser Symmetrie, die Herstellung dieses Gleichgewichts war für ihn eine Frage der natürlichen Würde und des moralischen Ranges. (ibid.) Like Kreutzer, Meyer-Abich and Capra, Muschg sees in Goethe’s holism a blueprint for the shift away from anthropocentrism to the more ecocentric world view on which our survival will depend, one which accords rights to nature. Goethe’s scientific writings provide a unique basis for the formulation of a contractually enforceable environmental ethic: Damit die Tagesordnung unserer Zivilisation nicht ungebremst auf den Jüngsten Tag zulaufe, bedürfen wir nicht mehr bloß der Wahrung der Menschenrechte [ … ] Wir brauchen auch ein Habeas Corpus für unsere Materien; die tätige Einsicht, daß sie ‘Mutterstoff’, eigensinnig, schutzbedürftig, kurzum: daß sie unseresgleichen sind, für Ausbeutung ebenso zu gut und zu teuer wie wir. [ … ] Wir brauchen einen Code – eine Konvention – erlaubter Umgangsformen mit der hochempfindlich gewordenen Natur, eine Stilkunde der Schonung. Einem solchen Vertragswerk ist in deutscher Sprache nirgends weiter vorgearbeitet als bei ihrem größten Schriftsteller in seinen naturwissenschaftlichen Schriften. (pp. 69–70) In a recent, rather more cautious commentary on Goethe’s conception of science, Daniel Steuer has located his principal achievement as lying in his critical identification of the Enlightenment world view as constituting the context for the scientific activity of his contemporaries and the attention he drew to the mediatedness of all scientific knowledge: Science is no longer seen to approximate a true representation of nature, but to construct its own objects through its conceptual and technological procedures. Competing theories are seen to be evaluated for their fit not with nature but with theoretical fashions and the policies of funding bodies. The anthropology of knowledge which

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has thus emerged, and which very much resembles Goethe’s contextualisation of scientific activity, does not amount to a complete relativism. But the empirical content of scientific knowledge is perceived to be highly mediated. (2004: 176) Beyond this, there are unmistakable resonances between the cosmological vision implicit in the literature and science of Goethe and the Romantics, and the new physics of quantum dynamics and unified field theory. As Kate Rigby notes with reference to a recent study of English Romanticism by Mark Lussier, these not only have a common point of departure in the perceived inadequacy of dualistic and mechanistic procedures, they also share the principles of complementarity, uncertainty and the participation of the observer (2004: 5). In an essay written in 1792 outlining his theory of scientific practice, ‘Der Versuch als Vermittler zwischen Objekt und Subjekt’ (XIII 10–20), Goethe deplored the effacement of the role of the observer, and the substitution of mathematical formulae for sensual experience. What Max Weber has more recently called the ‘disenchantment’ of nature (i.e. the suppression of animism and the replacement of the medieval organicist world view of the Earth as nurturing, in some instances threatening, mother by Baconian scientific method, Cartesian rationalism and Newtonian physics) has had the effect of depriving the non-human of moral considerability and thus paved the way for a purely instrumental attitude towards nature. Goethe’s identification of ‘polarity’ and ‘intensification’ as expansive and inhibiting forces common to all organic and inorganic matter directed attention towards the active, self-organising dimension of the universe. His redefinition of the unity of nature as based not on a primal oneness, but a ‘Wechselwirkung’, or interconnectedness and interdependence of organisms with one another and their inorganic environment, was an important step in the emergence of modern ecological consciousness (Rigby 2004: 32f.).10

2.2 Conceptions of nature in Goethe’s literary and scientific writing In 1991, the environmental historian Rolf Peter Sieferle published a paperback reader entitled Natur. Ein Lesebuch. His aim was to provide the basis for public reassessment of dominant Western conceptions of nature and alternatives to them: “The texts presented here [ … ] have been selected so as to illustrate the history of the experience of nature, explain the origin of the current environmental crisis and perhaps

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indicate ways of saving nature” (1991: 2). Each section of the book includes a text by or about Goethe. The first, entitled ‘Creation, Cosmos, Myth’, includes the fragment ‘Die Natur’, which was written by the Swiss theologian Georg Christoph Tobler but accepted by Goethe as a reflection of his own views in the early 1780s. Sieferle’s judgement of the importance of this text, a locus classicus of the imaging of nature as bountiful mother, is underlined by the reproduction of an excerpt on the back cover of the book. Mother Nature here assumes a darker guise. The perils accompanying the treatment of nature as mere raw material for our use convey an implicit environmental message: “Natur! Wir sind von ihr umgeben und umschlungen – unvermögend aus ihr herauszutreten, und unvermögend tiefer in sie hineinzukommen. Ungebeten und ungewarnt nimmt sie uns in den Kreislauf ihres Tanzes auf und treibt sich mit uns fort, bis wir ermüdet sind und ihrem Arme entfallen” (XIII 45). An extract from Albrecht Schöne’s study of the Farbenlehre (Schöne 1987: 94–103) is reproduced in the second section of Sieferle’s anthology on scientific approaches to nature. A passage from the Wahlverwandtschaften (VI 269–76) features in the third, under the heading ‘The Nature of Man’, and the poem ‘Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen’ (I 199–201) may be found in the fourth, which is concerned with plants and animals. The fifth section, which comprises literary landscapes, contains a letter written to Frau von Stein in 1799 conveying Goethe’s experience of the sublime in crossing the Alps (Goethe 1988, I 274–6). Sieferle presents a final Goethe text in the last section of the book, which is devoted to the explicitly environmental topic, ‘The Destruction of Nature’. This is the letter of 15 September 1771 from Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, which laments the felling of the nut trees in the vicarage garden in whose shade Werther had spent pleasant hours with Lotte the previous July: Man möchte rasend werden, Wilhelm, daß es Menschen geben soll ohne Sinn und Gefühl an dem wenigen, was auf Erden noch einen Wert hat. Du kennst die Nußbäume, unter denen ich bei dem ehrlichen Pfarrer zu St.. mit Lotten gesessen, die herrlichen Nußbäume, die mich, Gott weiß, immer mit dem größten Seelenvergnügen füllten! Wie vertraulich sie den Pfarrhof machten, wie kühl! und wie herrlich die Äste waren! [ … ] Ich sage dir, dem Schulmeister standen die Tränen in den Augen, da wir gestern davon redeten, daß sie abgehauen worden – abgehauen! Ich möchte toll werden, ich könnte den Hund ermorden, der den ersten Hieb dran

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tat. Ich, der ich mich vertrauern könnte, wenn so ein paar Bäume in meinem Hofe stünden und einer davon stürbe vor Alter ab, ich muß zusehen. Lieber Schatz, eins ist doch dabei: Was Menschengefühl ist! Das ganze Dorf murrt, und ich hoffe, die Frau Pfarrerin soll es an Butter und Eiern und übrigem Zutrauen spüren, was für eine Wunde sie ihrem Orte gegeben hat. (VI 80f.) The isolation of extracts from their textual and extra-textual context can be problematic. Readers unaware of the fate to which Werther’s exaggerated indulgence in feeling for nature leads, and unfamiliar with Goethe’s critical detachment from his protagonist, could overlook the tell-tale traces of emotional excess present in the passage (“möchte rasend werden”, “möchte toll werden”, “könnte den Hund ermorden”, “mich vertrauern könnte”) and his comically impotent spite in the final lines, and conclude that Goethe was himself an environmental activist. Sieferle’s anthology is, nevertheless, not only useful as a reminder of historical positions which anticipated aspects of our own concerns and sensibilities but also of the range of conceptions of nature in cultural tradition and of the diversity of Goethe’s work.11 In the early 1990s, Peter Matussek wrote of the “boundless number of studies of Goethe’s conception of nature” (Matussek 1992: 10), and publications over the last 15 years such as Peters 1993, Kaiser 1994, Matussek 1998, Wyder 1998, Richards 2002, von Engelhardt 2003, Jäger 2004 and Rigby 2004 have further added to the secondary literature on aspects of nature in Goethe’s work. Alfred Schmidt’s twenty-page entry ‘Natur’ in the recent Goethe-Handbuch (Witte et al. 1998: IV Part 2, 755–76) is, however, typical in drawing a caesura around 1780 between two broad phases in Goethe’s thinking on nature. The first of these, in which a religious conception of nature is fused with dynamic youthful emotional identification, stood under the influence of thinkers as diverse as Ossian, Herder, Bruno, Spinoza, Shaftesbury and Rousseau. It is succeeded by objective study and contemplation in Goethe’s mature work. Four main currents of thinking on nature may be distinguished which converged in Goethe’s writing. The first of these is the pantheist belief in nature as manifestation of the divine and its ‘Romantic’ reinterpretation as an active subject and living organism, focusing on the causality, free creativity and boundless productivity underlying the universe, rendering it a being with which the individual can communicate intuitively. Characteristic of Goethe’s Sturm-und-Drang phase, this finds expression in early poems such as ‘Maifest’ (I 30f.) and ‘Ganymed’ (I 46f.). Its problematic dimension is already explored in Werther. Werther’s letter

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of 10 May 1771 is a supremely eloquent formulation of the experience of union with nature and wondering appreciation of its calm beauty and multiplicity: Ich bin [ … ] so ganz in dem Gefühle von ruhigem Dasein versunken, [ … ]. Wenn das liebe Tal um mich dampft, und die hohe Sonne an der Oberfläche der undurchdringlichen Finsternis meines Waldes ruht, und nur einzelne Strahlen sich in das innere Heiligtum stehlen, ich dann im hohen Grase am fallenden Bache liege, und näher an der Erde tausend mannigfaltige Gräschen mir merkwürdig werden; wenn ich das Wimmeln der kleinen Welt zwischen Halmen, die unzähligen, unergründlichen Gestalten der Würmchen, der Mücken näher an meinem Herzen fühle, und fühle die Gegenwart des Allmächtigen, der uns nach seinem Bilde schuf, das Wehen des Alliebenden, der uns in ewiger Wonne schwebend trägt und erhält; mein Freund! wenn’s dann um meine Augen dämmert, und die Welt um mich her und der Himmel ganz in meiner Seele ruhn wie die Gestalt einer Geliebten – dann sehne ich mich oft und denke: Ach könntest du das wieder ausdrücken, könntest du dem Papiere das einhauchen, was so voll, so warm in dir lebt [ … ] Aber ich gehe darüber zugrunde, ich erliege unter der Gewalt der Herrlichkeit dieser Erscheinungen. (VI 9) Aesthetic pleasure, mystery and wonder lead here to a sense of the presence of the Almighty, but Werther’s feelings of infinite well-being and security produce a characteristic gender shift. Gerhard Kaiser has shown how the idea of ‘mother nature’, which was familiar to Goethe from a variety of classical sources, Christianity and Eastern philosophy and religion, came to replace the traditional figure of the father creator, in works from Goethe’s early verse epic ‘Der Wanderer’ (I 41) to the end of Faust Part II (‘das Ewig-Weibliche’). Goethe, Kaiser argues, played a significant part in the construction of ‘mother nature’ as a literary figure (Kaiser 1991a).12 His images of matriarchal security in a world of patriarchal reason anticipate the celebration of Gaia and feminine, nurturing qualities by ecofeminists in the 1980s. At the same time, as indicated above, Werther reveals unmistakable traces of the author’s detachment from his protagonist’s raptures. The gendering of nature present in the image of the world and the heavens as Werther’s beloved is a male fantasy betraying traces of desire for possession and domination. (The phrase “mein Wald” already introduces a jarring note of possessiveness above.) The worms and midges next to his heart and his closing confession of inability to express his overwhelming sentiments hint at the

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danger of indulgence in emotional outpourings while ignoring physical realities and social needs. While idealising nature as the harmonious opposite of exploitative technology and dissonant society, Goethe then simultaneously hints at the shortcomings of this approach to nature. Other passages in Werther foreground modern man’s estrangement from nature. In the letter of 18 August, the landscape, hitherto a manifestation of the divine and an invigorating source of joyful feelings of harmonious integration, becomes a cause of misery for Werther. At the very height of summer, its appearance changes to that of an ‘eternally devouring and regurgitating monster’ against which humans must struggle to assert their freedom, in inherently destructive activity: Es hat sich vor meiner Seele wie ein Vorhang weggezogen, und der Schauplatz des unendlichen Lebens verwandelt sich vor mir in den Abgrund des ewig offenen Grabes. Kannst du sagen: Das ist! Da alles vorübergeht? Da alles mit der Wetterschnelle vorüberrollt, so selten die ganze Kraft seines Daseins ausdauert, ach, in den Strom fortgerissen, untergetaucht und an Felsen zerschmettert wird? Da ist kein Augenblick, der nicht dich verzehrte, und die Deinigen um dich her, kein Augenblick, da du nicht ein Zerstörer bist, sein mußt; der harmloseste Spaziergang kostet tausend armen Würmchen das Leben, es zerrüttet ein Fußtritt die mühseligen Gebäude der Ameisen und stampft eine kleine Welt in ein schmähliches Grab. Ha! Nicht die große, seltne Not der Welt, diese Fluten, die eure Dörfer wegspülen, diese Erdbeben, die eure Städte verschlingen, rühren mich; mir untergräbt das Herz die verzehrende Kraft, die in dem All der Natur verborgen liegt; die nichts gebildet hat, das nicht seinen Nachbar, nicht sich selbst zerstörte. Und so taumle ich beängstigt. Himmel und Erde und ihre webenden Kräfte um mich her: ich sehe nichts als ein ewig verschlingendes, ewig wiederkäuendes Ungeheuer. (VI 52f.) Goethe here anticipates the bleak nihilism of a strand of nineteenthcentury literature exemplified by Jean Paul’s ‘Rede des toten Christus vom Weltgebäude herab, daß kein Gott sei’ and Büchner’s Woyzeck, and of certain subsequent philosophers (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche). This current of thinking constituted the implicit other of Romantic efforts to reconcile modern man with a nature from which he has become alienated, by means of philosophical, theological and poetic holism (see Frühwald 1989). In Goethe’s early work, the pastoral conception of the ‘natural’ as inherently virtuous which underlay the literary celebration of simplicity

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and self-limitation, the idealisation of country life and critique of urban, courtly luxury in seventeenth and eighteenth-century ‘Landlebenliteratur’ is more important. In Werther, it is evident in the letters of 12, 15 and 26 May 1771, which depict Arcadian scenes suggesting an ethic of frugality, modesty and self-restraint conducive to the harmonious integration of the individual in the natural environment. The most striking passages are perhaps to be found in the letter of 21 June, where Werther describes the “features of patriarchal living” in Wahlheim: Wie wohl ist mir’s, daß mein Herz die simple, harmlose Wonne des Menschen fühlen kann, der ein Krauthaupt auf seinen Tisch bringt, das er selbst gezogen, und nun nicht den Kohl allein, sondern all die guten Tage, den schönen Morgen, da er ihn pflanzte, die lieblichen Abende, da er ihn begoß, und da er an dem fortschreitenden Wachstum seine Freude hatte, alle in einem Augenblicke wieder mitgenießt. (VI 29f.) There is no gender dimension to this critique of civilisation as a suppression of original human innocence, goodness and communitarianism, spontaneity, health and happiness. However, it is accompanied, as in Rousseau’s writings, by a striving for political emancipation which finds clearest expression in the letters of 15 May 1771 and 15 March 1772 (VI 10f. and 68). The holist understanding of nature, whether conceived of in medieval terms as the ‘great chain of being’, a notion rooted in the perfection and completeness of divine creation, or inspired by the Neoplatonists’ systems of correspondences between different spheres of existence, constitutes a further distinct strand in Goethe’s thinking. It is present in his early pantheistic effusions, but comes into its own in the essay ‘Über den Granit’ (XIII 253–8), where Goethe subordinates nature religion to scientific observation and suggests creative writing can contribute intuitively to knowledge by divining symbolic relationships between natural phenomena and the human sphere. Goethe’s holism finds its bestknown symbolic expression in the poem ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’, which links the spheres of the inorganic (the mountain tops) with organic plant life (the forest), the animal world (the birds) and finally the human, thus admitting the subject to a harmonious cosmic order. It is also conceptualised in ‘Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen’ (I 199–201) and ‘Metamorphose der Tiere’ (I 201–3). A final significant aspect of Goethe’s understanding of nature is associated with his critique of contemporary industrialisation. Traces of this

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are already to be found in the Reise in der Schweiz 1797 and in Goethe’s letters and conversations, but it only comes to the fore in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. In the novel’s ‘Pedagogical Province’, the negative aspects of modernisation are countered by a four-fold ‘respect’ for what is above, beside, below and in us. A strikingly bleak vision of the future in ‘Lenardo’s Diary’ expresses the author’s anxiety in the face of the coming age of large-scale mechanised factory production, which he anticipates will destroy handcraft and small-scale manufacturing and have a baneful influence on culture and society, bringing unemployment, division of labour and alienation: Das überhandnehmende Maschinenwesen quält und ängstigt mich, es wälzt sich heran wie ein Gewitter, langsam, langsam; aber es hat seine Richtung genommen, es wird kommen und treffen. [ … ] Man denkt daran, man spricht davon, und weder Denken noch Reden kann Hülfe bringen. [ … ] Noch schwebt Ihnen das hübsche, frohe Leben vor, das Sie diese Tage her dort gesehen, wovon Ihnen die geputzte Menge allseits andringend gestern das erfreulichste Zeugnis gab; denken Sie, wie das nach und nach zusammensinken, absterben, die Öde, durch Jahrhunderte belebt und bevölkert, wieder in ihre uralte Einsamkeit zurückfallen werde. (VIII 429f.) Underlying this development is a new attitude towards nature, bent on its instrumental exploitation. In ‘From Makarien’s Archive’ Goethe writes of the destructive impact of those contemporaries who seek: [ … ] von jeder neuen Entdeckung nur so geschwind als möglich für sich einigen Vorteil zu ziehen, indem sie einen eitlen Ruhm, bald in Fortpflanzung, bald in Vermehrung, bald in Verbesserung, geschwinder Besitznahme, vielleicht gar durch Präokkupation, zu erwerben [ … ] und durch solche Unreifheiten die wahre Wissenschaft unsicher machen und verwirren, ja ihre schönste Folge, die praktische Blüte derselben, offenbar verkümmern. (VIII 472) Goethe should not be misunderstood here as expressing a blanket rejection of all forms of modernisation and industrial development. His views on industrialisation must rather, as Michael Niedermeier points out, be seen in the context of contemporary developments in the Swiss economy; it was no accident that Goethe developed the theme of the ruin of craftsmanship and small-scale manufacturing by ‘mechanisation’ as a paradigmatic feature of the age in the Wanderjahre after learning

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from Johann Heinrich Meyer about the crises in the Swiss textile industry (2000: 123). Niedermeier concludes cautiously that Goethe’s views on the rise of the machine can only be understood in the context of the time and of his personal experiences, whether or not one shares his doubts about the approaching modern age (ibid. 125). All these conceptions of nature are present in Faust, which represents Goethe’s most sustained reflection on the challenge of modernity to traditional conceptions of the place of humanity in the natural context. Peter Matussek’s book Naturbild und Diskursgeschichte and his essay in the edited volume Goethe und die Verzeitlichung der Natur are among the most significant recent studies of nature in Goethe’s work as a whole and in Faust in particular.13 Matussek follows Foucault and Lepenies in seeing the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century as marked by the shift away from the conception of history as a natural phenomenon to one of nature as a historical one which culminated in Darwin’s theory of evolution. Within this context, he traces Goethe’s shifting conceptions of nature through their reflection in different Faust passages written over a period of sixty years. In the process, he illustrates not merely the complexity of Goethe’s understanding of nature but also its significance for his aesthetic theory and poetic practice. Matussek’s starting point is the proposition that a broad chronological development from anthropocentrism to physiocentrism may be assumed in Goethe’s writing, beginning with the active agency of the subject and ending with that of nature. However, he argues that in Goethe’s later work the poet actually abandons his conviction that the meaning of things may be read from them (this underlies the early Classical phase of his writing), and returns to a position where the writer invests the object with meaning. This reversal, which suggests the poet’s recognition that true physiocentrism was ultimately untenable, is accompanied by the adoption of an aesthetic strategy of allegory rather than organic symbolism. Reviewing four phases in the poet’s work, each of which is in itself complex and contains contradictory elements, Matussek distinguishes between the following attitudes towards nature, reflected in Faust: ●

●

enthusiastic knowing, commanding and imposing one’s will. This ‘expressive’ conception of nature is found in passages written up to 1775, for instance in the scene where Faust conjures up the ‘Erdgeist’ (354–513), and in the Urfaust (III 376–420); empathy, intuitive knowledge and harmonious integration of the subject. This ‘sympathetic’ conception of nature is illustrated by the

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●

●

opening monologue in the scene ‘Wald und Höhle’ (3217–50), first published in Faust, ein Fragment in 1790; investing with meaning and deducing abstract principles from concrete examples. This procedure is reflected in the ‘harmonising’ conception of nature expressed in the ‘Osterspaziergang’ section of the scene ‘Vor dem Tor’ (903–48), published in 1808; visionary construction of nature. Goethe’s ‘constructivist’ conception of nature is, according to Matussek, exemplified in the final monologue of Faust Part II (11559–80).

In the first of these passages, Faust is frustrated by the thought that knowledge of nature can only be gained by accumulating facts and the rational explanation of hidden mechanisms. He turns to mystical contemplation, which yields a vision of the chain of being. Not satisfied with the role of non-participant observer, he then resorts to an alchemist experiment. Through this he succeeds in conjuring up the spirit, but not in understanding it. For “the emphatic sense of union proves to be an illusion [ … ]. Instead of further penetrating the secrets of nature, Faust is repulsed by his own projection, the Earth Spirit, and forced to return to the abstract world of the scholar” (Matussek 1998: 210). Matussek reads in this scene both a formulation of the ‘expressive’ relationship with nature fundamental to the Sturm und Drang movement and a critique of it. It is as if the second, ‘Wald und Höhle’ monologue, written a decade later, attempts to show how this failure to communicate with nature can be made good, through subjective experience of loving oneness with the living force in all things. Faust’s empathy, which is rooted in conviction of the possibility of the individual recognising intuitively the true nature of things but that also embraces scientific knowledge, is also reflected in ‘Über den Granit’. However, both the passage from the play and the essay, Matussek notes, end not in calm contemplation, but in restless enquiry, again suggesting dissatisfaction and uncertainty on the part of the author. In the third, ‘Osterspaziergang’ passage, Faust and Wagner observe the rejoicing population on Easter Sunday. Human nature is described in analogy to the natural environment in a series of carefully constructed parallels. Both are brought to new life by the light of the sun. Unlike the associative symbolism of the previously discussed monologue, physical objects serve here as representations of abstract ideas. Faust “invests the objects of nature with higher value by means of his idealising eye; it is he who provides the symbolic content, by speaking of ‘joyful hope’,

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‘shaping and striving’, ‘rising again’, and ‘becoming human’” (ibid. 221). This passage (and poems from the same period such as ‘Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen’) reflects the theoretical basis which Goethe’s scientific studies had acquired through his reading of Kant and the exchange of ideas with Schiller in the 1790s. In its implication of a pre-established harmony between natural and historical processes it corresponds to Schelling’s nature philosophy. Faust directs Wagner’s attention to the analogies between nature and society, “making visible the originary phenomena, which can only be perceived in the here and now of momentary experience, as concrete manifestations” (ibid. 225). Here again, Matussek finds tell-tale traces in the text which call the conceptual framework into question.14 The constellation whereby Goethe presents an approach to nature, only to undermine it through language and form, is repeated in Matussek’s eyes in the final, constructivist monologue: “This is the language of military planning teams, exclusively focused on outcomes” (ibid. 231). Although the thrust of Matussek’s book leads away from the question of Goethe’s contribution to our understanding of nature today and possible alternatives, his argument has been traced at some length here because he shows how Faust constitutes an ongoing negotiation with the conceptions of nature of his time: Goethe’s achievement lies in “his poetic dramatisation of each stage in his critical engagement with the shifting emphases and radical turnarounds in the natural history of his time” (ibid. 202). The poet’s representations of nature exemplify the potential of aesthetic configuration to break with conventional thought patterns and use new images to explore the complexities of our relationship with the natural environment. This is particularly true of the final Act of Faust Part II, which calls for closer examination, because it has been the focus of more explicitly ecologically oriented readings of the work.

2.3

Faust Part II, Act V: The ambivalence of modernity

One of the most influential books on the politics of environmentalism to appear in Germany in the 1970s was the Conservative politician Herbert Gruhl’s bestseller, Ein Planet wird geplündert (Gruhl 1975).15 In the introduction, the author, at the time CDU spokesman on environmental issues, later one of the founders of the German Green Party, described an episode towards the end of Goethe’s Faust Part II as anticipating the central problem of our age. Philemon and Baucis, an aged couple who lead a simple life in harmony with nature, here fall victim

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to the blind ambition of Faust, who is seen by Gruhl as embodying the destructive forces of technology: Einer der wenigen, die tief in das Wesen der lebendigen Natur und des Menschen eingedrungen sind, ist Johann Wolfgang Goethe gewesen. Solche Tiefe ist seither nie wieder erreicht worden. Die geringe Beachtung Goethes heute spricht Bände über den Geist der Zeit. In den grandiosen Bildern seines Faust II hat Goethe auch unsere Epoche vorausgesehen: die Liquidation der beiden Alten, Philemon und Baucis, stellt die Ausmerzung der letzten Reste einfachen Lebens dar, die in die moderne Zeit hineinragen. Und wie sinnträchtig, daß Faust erblindet, als er die technischen Projekte voranzutreiben wähnt, während in Wirklichkeit bereits sein Grab bereitet wird. (p. 18) This interpretation of Faust reflected an international trend. In his classic study of modernity, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Marshall Berman has described how Faust, the archetypal “intellectual nonconformist, a marginal and suspicious character”, who “‘loses control’ of the energies of the mind, which then proceed to take on a dynamic and highly explosive life of their own”, became a villain in popular American culture in the 1970s.16 Partly in response to gargantuan Communist projects to dam and divert rivers in Siberia, regardless of their ecological consequences or their cost in terms of human life, the figure of Faust came to personify the scientific technocrat’s desire to control and dominate. Cited in influential critiques of the ‘restlessness’ of modern man, which allegedly drove modernisation in general and the development of weapons of mass destruction in particular, and associated with nuclear disasters, biological warfare and genetic engineering, Faust became synonymous with scientific irresponsibility and indifference to human life and liberty. Berman traces the emergence in the United States in the 1960 and 1970s, in books by Norman O. Brown, Gunther Stent and Bernard James, of the belief that to live the good life, or indeed just to survive, “‘Faustian Man’ must go”: “As debate intensified through the seventies on the desirability and limits of economic growth, and on the best ways to produce and conserve energy, ecologists and anti-growth writers typecast Faust as the primal ‘Growthman’, who would tear the whole world apart for the sake of insatiable expansion, without asking or caring what unlimited growth would do to nature or to man” (p. 83). Gruhl reads Goethe’s play as a straightforward condemnation of Faust’s actions. He praises the author’s foresight, which is reflected in various allusions in the play to the dangers of self-centred subjectivity,

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and above all represented symbolically through Faust’s blindness. However, he fails to recognise the implications of the formal and thematic complexity of the work. Such one-sided understandings of the Faust story flatten, as Berman has put it, tragedy into melodrama. Faust’s motivation, when his grand project to regain new land from the sea by building dykes is first mooted in Act IV, is a titanic wish to conquer the elements and control the power of the sea: Zwecklose Kraft unbändiger Elemente! Da wagt mein Geist, sich selbst zu überfliegen; Hier möcht’ ich kämpfen, dies möcht’ ich besiegen. (10219–21) The scenes ‘Offene Gegend’, ‘Palast’ and ‘Tiefe Nacht’ with which Act V of Faust Part II opens underline the negative aspect of Faust’s insatiable striving. Yet the colonisation project in which he then engages is represented in an essentially positive light. Faust’s last monologue reveals a shift away from amoral obsession with self-assertion to social commitment. His plans to secure fertile farmland by draining a pestilent swamp and building dykes are formulated in the much-quoted utopian vision of future generations of free men living in plenty, together maintaining the dykes which keep the waves at bay: Ein Sumpf zieht am Gebirge hin, Verpestet alles schon Errungene; Den faulen Pfuhl sich abzuziehn, Das Letzte wär’ das Höchsterrungene. Eröffn’ ich Räume vielen Millionen, Nicht sicher zwar, doch tätig-frei zu wohnen. Grün das Gefilde, fruchtbar; Mensch und Herde Sogleich behaglich auf der neusten Erde, Gleich angesiedelt an des Hügels Kraft, Den aufgewälzt kühn-emsige Völkerschaft. Im Innern hier ein paradiesisch Land, Da rase draußen Flut bis auf zum Rand, Und wie sie nascht, gewaltsam einzuschießen, Gemeindrang eilt, die Lücke zu verschließen. Und so verbringt, umrungen von Gefahr, Hier Kindheit, Mann und Greis sein tüchtig Jahr. […] Solch ein Gewimmel möcht’ ich sehn, Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn. (11559–80)

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It has often been pointed out that these lines are linked with positive concepts in Goethe’s philosophy through the adjectives ‘frei’, ‘tätig’ and ‘tüchtig’. There are, nevertheless, limits to the extent to which Faust can be seen here as the mouthpiece of the author; both diction and context suggest that empathy and admiration are tempered by critical detachment. Goethe exaggerates the scale and longevity of Faust’s land reclamation scheme (e.g. in “vielen Millionen”), and his protagonist is, as Gruhl pointed out, by this time blind. The sounds which he believes derive from teams of workers completing his great project are in reality those of Lemures (spirits of the dead which the Romans believed had to be driven from houses in order to make them habitable again) digging his grave. Hence Berman’s characterisation of the play as the ‘tragedy of development’ (Berman 1983: 40) for Goethe, legitimate pride in man’s achievement and faith in his potential are tragically intertwined in human nature with hubris and self-deception. That Faust has erred in his greed, his disregard for others and his recourse to violence is nowhere clearer than in his treatment of Philemon and Baucis. The original tale of the pious couple, which parallels the biblical stories of the Flood and Sodom and Gomorrha (Genesis, Chapters 6–8 and 18–19), was familiar to Goethe from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.17 The gods Zeus and Hermes decided to put the people of Phrygia to the test. Disguised as wayfarers, they were hospitably received by Philemon and Baucis in their mountainside hut, after being turned away by their richer neighbours in the valley below. As a reward, the two were saved from a flood that submerged the rest of the country and drowned the people. The lives of Goethe’s elderly couple have been characterised by modesty, piety and service to the community. (As a lighthouse keeper Philemon has saved travellers from shipwreck.) Their acceptance of a divine order contrasts with Faust’s exclusive reliance on human reason and the work of human hands. Faust wishes to be able to survey the landscape from the sand dune their hut stands on, but they refuse his offer of property on reclaimed land in exchange and become a thorn in his side. When he orders Mephistopheles to transfer them to their new home forcibly, they are burned to death in their hut. Philemon and Baucis exemplify Faust’s culpability and ensure his failure: the implication distantly present in their names, that his dykes will be breached and the land flooded again, is supported by Mephistopheles’ prediction: [ … ] du bereitest schon Neptunen, Dem Wasserteufel, großen Schmaus. In jeder Art seid ihr verloren; -

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Die Elemente sind mit uns verschworen, Und auf Vernichtung läuft’s hinaus. (11546–50) To the modern ear, this is reminiscent of narratives of ‘nature’s revenge’ for man’s technological arrogance and the attempt to exercise absolute control over nature. Nonetheless, the idealism inherent in Faust’s incessant striving and its characterisation as an essential human characteristic ultimately qualify Faust to become the object of divine mercy rather than justice: “Gerettet ist das edle Glied / Der Geisterwelt vom Bösen, / Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, / Den können wir erlösen” (11934–7). His striving to burst the bonds of human limitations may be fundamentally flawed, but Goethe clearly finds it simultaneously heroic. Explicitly environmentalist interpretations of Faust, however sophisticated, therefore tend to oversimplify a complex and at times ambiguous work.18 In his reading of the play in Im Wettlauf mit der Zeit, Jost Hermand identifies Green utopias in which humankind and nature are “still homeostatically enmeshed” in the scenes ‘Klassische Walpurgisnacht’ and ‘Bergschluchten’ (1991b: 46) but goes on to reduce Faust to a pattern of “confrontations between nature and human egoism” (ibid. 48). It is, he argues, above all a tale of warning against progress, technology and capitalism: “Faust’s existence inevitably becomes the Exemplum terribilis of a way of life and a system of production threatening the whole of nature” (p. 46). Gerhard Kaiser approaches the play from a standpoint similarly critical of contemporary science and technology. Though it contains images of the relationship with nature we ought to practise (Kaiser describes the scene ‘Anmutige Gegend’ as “outline model of the relationship between humans and the natural world”, (1994) pp. 87–92), Faust is for Kaiser a predominantly pessimistic commentary on the crucial political, economic, scientific and technological changes which took place around 1800. Goethe reinterprets the Faust legend and ancient mythical narratives of the process of human civilisation (Prometheus and the story of Adam and Eve) as a “restless and ceaseless striding out, an unlimited consumption of the world, an ungovernable striving for domination of the world and the self, a progress leading to catastrophe” (p. 18). The ‘Laboratorium’ scene where Faust’s colleague Wagner brings the Homunculus into existence, a critique of the delusion of ability to create human life reminiscent of popular understandings of genetic engineering in our day, is in Kaiser’s view paralleled in Faust’s final vision of a thriving colony on land reclaimed from the sea and his description of it as his ‘new[est] creation’.

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Comments such as Hermand’s that: “Faust’s final monologue [ … ] can only be read as a manifesto of false consciousness” (p. 48) ignore the extent to which the poet identifies with his protagonist. For the vision of the future in Faust’s last great speech is not merely one of the triumphalist subjugation of nature: it incorporates images of a harmonious reconciliation of nature and culture. Philemon himself describes the land already reclaimed by Faust as a garden, a paradise and the work of intelligent minds and stout hands (lines 11085–94). Faust’s downfall is precipitated by his impatience with what he can achieve by natural means and his recourse to magic. However, this magic cannot simply be equated with modern technology; it would seem rather to stand for achievement at the expense of human dignity, violating natural laws. Neither Goethe’s drama in general, nor this episode in particular, would seem to be an outright condemnation of modernisation. Goethe does not reject the rational use of nature for human ends. (Nor, of course, does he warn against pollution or the squandering of resources.) His narrative rather seems to indicate the consequences of amoral, self-centred craving for power, in short, of overreach. At this point in the play Faust unifies in his person the absolutist ruler and capitalist entrepreneur. The very language of his monologue betrays the problematic nature of his actions; ellipses and unjustified superlatives suggest indecent haste and undermine the dignity of his vision. Faust is culpable, but less because he embodies the technological ethos as such than because of his egoism, the boundlessness of his striving and his indifference to the cost in terms of human life.19 Goethe’s drama prompts us to ask whether the large-scale subjection of nature necessarily involves a corresponding domination of our fellow men and raises the question to what extent structural violence is inherent in the pursuit of utopian visions. Marshall Berman has emphasised the necessity of reading Faust in the historical context. Its real significance, he argues, lay in Goethe’s expression and dramatisation of the process by which, at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth century, a distinctively modern world-system came into being (1983: 39). Faust’s heroic deed is the liberation of repressed human energies, “not only in himself but in all those he touches, and eventually in the whole society around him”. But the development he initiates – intellectual, moral, economic and social – turns out to exact great human cost (p. 40). For the Faustian enterprise demands abandoning traditional concepts of good and evil, and working with and through the new creative–destructive powers inherent in capitalism and socialism alike. The creative and destructive potentialities of modernity are thus, according to Berman, worked through in exemplary fashion in

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the deeply ambiguous figure of Faust the Developer (p. 63).20 Berman cites as Faustian in the truest sense of the word the actions of concerned scientists in and after the Manhattan project, who, driven by guilt and anguished social concern, sought to place nuclear technology under the control of the civilian authorities and limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Goethe’s Faust, he suggests, remains a unique challenge to contemporaries to imagine and create new modes of modernity. Harro Segeberg argues similarly that what Goethe shows in Faust is how the essentially laudable ideal of directing, managing and utilising nature’s laws for human benefit, here symbolised by Faust’s plans for a prosperous, peaceful colony of people living in social harmony and in harmony with the environment, becomes corrupted into a ‘war’ against nature in the pursuit of power, a ‘rape’ of its riches.21 Throughout Act V of the play, control over nature is synonymous with its destruction. Faust speaks of nature as a resource to be freely exploited: he cannot tolerate it when it is not subject to calculation and practical utilisation. Hence his perception of the way of life exemplified by Philemon and Baucis, leaving nature as far as possible to itself, as a provocation undermining his authority. (Their ‘Düne’ and ‘offene Gegend’ constitute the antithesis of his ‘Ziergarten’ and ‘gradgeführter Kanal’.) Noting the premodern technology involved (Faust’s dykes are built with spades and shovels), Segeberg suggests that Goethe, writing on the threshold of the age of the machine, can only envisage a realisation of such grand engineering plans (in which he showed enthusiastic interest) through the efforts of exceptional individuals, combining technological vision with political control over a large workforce. Faust’s dyke-building project stands for efforts to liberate humanity from subservience to nature, that is from the drudgery of everyday life and exposure to natural catastrophes. However, in Goethe’s eyes this can only be realised through violent domination of nature: it requires quasimilitary self-discipline on the part of the individual and ruthless regimentation and exploitation of the workers. With satirical sleight of hand, Goethe exposes the absurdity of Faust’s belief that the (ultimately religious) idea of a utopian reconciliation of nature with itself and with all its creatures, including humankind, can be achieved by slave labour. It is not just in order to rhyme with ‘versöhnen’ (‘to reconcile’) that ‘frönen’ (‘to indulge a person’s vanity’) is substituted for ‘fronen’ (‘to labour for one’s feudal lord’) in the words of the blind Faust: Wie das Geklirr der Spaten mich ergetzt! Es ist die Menge, die mir frönet, Die Erde mit sich selbst versöhnet (11540–2)

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The lasting achievement of Act 5 of Faust Part II is, Segeberg argues persuasively, that Goethe raises the question how far engineers should rightly go in their control and utilisation of nature. Faust’s technological project is in part a response of the poet to the great storm flood of 1825, when many lives were lost on the west coast of Schleswig-Holstein and to similarly disastrous floods in St Petersburg. It also reflects Goethe’s recorded interest in hydrostatic engineering projects for the Suez and Panama Canals. To this extent, Faust thus anticipates heroic engineering figures such as Bernhard Kellermann’s MacAllan in the bestselling novel Der Tunnel (1915). But his words simultaneously reveal the problematic of such engineering visions. Goethe presents us with an exaggerated caricature of a work model which is unfit for the future (p. 30), and exposes the frequently (either naively or cynically) accepted consequences of a particular conception of technology. Goethe’s scenario of failure, Segeberg concludes, outlines the consequences of, and presents for discussion, a model of human behaviour which was already controversial at the time of writing.22 Goethe pardons Faust at the end of the play because he is convinced of the need to manage nature in order to provide the basis for a peaceful human culture, and this, in the absence of an alternative social model, is dependent on the achievement of such heroic, visionary individuals (p. 54). Despite his failings, Faust is a figure who seeks, as Goethe formulates under the heading ‘Harnessing and Liberating the Elements’ in his Versuch einer Witterungslehre (1825), to create “life with a form” (XIII 309) in the face of the formlessness and arbitrary dangers of nature. Rigby goes beyond this explanation of the tragedy and redemption of Faust through historical contextualisation by Berman and Segeberg. She points to two aspects of the play which constitute significant failings from a contemporary ecocritical position. The first is the (unsurprising, nevertheless noteworthy) absence of a twenty-first-century awareness of the need for a ‘gentle technology’ to accompany Goethe’s ‘gentle empiricism’. The second is the shortcomings of the poet’s gender assumptions. Gerhard Kaiser has noted Philemon’s “idyllic description, playing down its problems” of what he describes as Faust’s “irrevocably doomed industrialised agricultural landscape, devoid of field boundaries, cleared of all natural features, and traversed by canals” (1994: 46–9, here p. 46) and argued that the old man has become blinded by Faust’s project, leaving his wife Baucis as the latter’s only true opponent. The fate of Faust, the representative of modern man (“representative through his excess in pursuit of the very practices of modernity”, p. 69), reflects modern society’s need to acknowledge the importance of values

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associated by Goethe with the female principle: “The end of Faust asserts the individual’s and humankind’s need for and possibility of redemption, but it also indicates the point of no return is no longer far off” (p. 83). Rigby is more critical of the poet: “Faust is in death wrested away from the Mephistophelian mire into the mountainous region of spiritual illumination, where his soul is drawn ever onward and upward by ‘eternal Womanhood’: a virtual form of the feminine, symbolising the impossible goal of his ceaseless striving, which seemingly redeems Faust from the wrong that he has inflicted on a variety of actual others, feminine and otherwise” (2004: 212f.). The patriarchal assumptions underlying the gendering of this transcendental turn are as problematic as its ecophilosophical implications. Despite his generally dismissive attitude towards the appropriation of Goethe from an environmentalist standpoint in Naturbild und Diskursgeschichte, Peter Matussek shows a certain interest in comments on Faust by ecophilosophers, writers and essayists. Referring briefly to Hans Jonas, Konrad Lorenz, Adolf Muschg, Christa Wolf (Lesen und Schreiben, 1980) and Erwin Chargaff (Das Feuer des Heraklit, 1984), he distinguishes between the following: ●

●

●

Green fundamentalists, who have read in Faust’s conjuring up of the ‘Erdgeist’ a rejection of instrumental reason in favour of intuitive knowledge of nature (1992: 217f.); the generation of Alternatives or Dropouts after the decline of the Student Movement, who have found a model for their withdrawal from political engagement to poetry and observation of nature in the ‘Wald und Höhle’ monologue and other works of the early Classical period (pp. 277f.); Green realists, who have revived the conception of nature based on analogies between the human sphere and the natural environment in Goethe’s mature work.

The Nobel Prize-winning researcher into animal behaviour Konrad Lorenz exemplifies the first of these approaches. In his book Der Abbau des Menschlichen (1983) Lorenz enlists the ‘Erdgeistbeschwörung’ scene in defence of suppressed instincts in an age under increasing pressure from scientism and technology. Matussek is particularly critical of Lorenz’s transfer of Goethe’s championing of feelings as the principal basis of knowledge into an anti-Enlightenment context, since this negates the emancipatory dimension of the original passage. He also discerns traces of Green fundamentalism in Muschg’s essays: these are,

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however, free of problematic political implications. Muschg is, in Matussek’s view, above all a representative of the second, ‘unpolitical’ category of Green interpreters, because of his presentation of the poet as ‘Fluchthelfer’ and ‘Emigrant’ (i.e. instigator to escapism and withdrawal). Matussek does, however, cite Muschg a final time, as a supporter of Goethe’s mature, ‘harmonical’ nature conception, where, in the last passage from Goethe als Emigrant quoted above, he calls for a code or convention of permissible forms of behaviour in our interaction with nature. This is as far as Matussek is prepared to go in acknowledging the attempts of contemporaries to enlist Goethe’s nature conception as an alternative to the dominant scientific approach (p. 22). Seeking to forestall crude over-simplification and the instrumentalisation of the poet’s writings, he argues that Goethe’s real legacy lies not in myth, alchemy, the theory of signatures or nature religiosity but in his transformation of these into art (pp. 22f.). Art alone and aesthetic experience are for Goethe, in the words of Hartmut Böhme, “the possible places where the non-ideological idea of a redeemed nature can be glimpsed, if only negatively” (1988: 178). Bearing these points and reservations in mind, the final section of this chapter is concerned with the use made not only of Goethean ideas, but also of narrative material, motifs and images by three contemporary writers in works reflecting on the relationship between nature and culture, and the impact of modernisation and technology on the environment.

2.4 Writers’ affinities: enlistment by literary dissidents in the GDR, New Age rediscovery of Goethean science and creative adaptation of Faustian ambivalences Paul Gurk’s novel Tuzub 37 (1935), Max Frisch’s Homo Faber (1957), Günther Schwab’s Der Tanz mit dem Teufel (1958), Jurij Brezan’s Krabat oder die Verwandlung der Welt (1976), Jurij Koch’s Der Kirschbaum (1984), Carl Amery’s Das Geheimnis der Krypta (1990), Gert Heidenreich’s Belial oder Die Stille (1990) and Friedrich Cramer’s Amazonas (1991) are among the many twentieth-century reworkings of the theme of Faust as developer and technocrat. Christa Wolf alludes to Faust in Störfall (1987), her diary of events in the days after the nuclear accident in Chernobyl, and Faustian themes may be found in films ranging from Metropolis (1927, dir. Fritz Lang) to Fitzcarraldo (1981, dir. Werner Herzog). But few writers have entered into such an extended intertextual dialogue with Goethe

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as the critical socialist Volker Braun, for whom the Faust figure has provided a key crystallisation point in a searching process of reflection on Marxist ideology, historical developments in the GDR and the future of humanity. Before looking at Braun’s writing, however, I turn first to Goethe’s presence in the diaries of Hanns Cibulka and Klaus Modick’s novella Moos, in order to give a broader picture of how contemporaries have drawn on Goethe’s conception of nature in texts addressing environmental issues. Both Karl Robert Mandelkow and Peter Matussek have noted that the environmental turn in the reception of Goethe’s work extended to the GDR as well as West Germany. This applies not only to the discursive commentaries they are principally concerned with, but also to the more personal essayistic responses and thematic reworkings of creative writers. Ulrich Plenzdorf’s Neue Leiden des jungen W. (1973) is probably the best-known example of the striking use East German writers made of the literary heritage as a point of reference in the formulation of their critical social and political concerns in the 1970s and 1980s. Plenzdorf’s Neue Leiden, like the (relatively minor) Werther boom in the 1970s in West Germany, reflected the rise of New Subjectivity as well as the environmental movement, which was itself at this point closely associated with the affirmation of individuality, spontaneity and self-realisation (see Wapnewski 1975). His protagonist, the dropout Edgar Wibeau, identifies not least with Werther’s ideal of rural simplicity, quoting the lines cited above from his letter of 21 June 1771: “Wie wohl ist mir’s, daß mein Herz die simple harmlose Wonne des Menschen fühlen kann, der ein Krauthaupt auf seinen Tisch bringt, das er selbst gezogen” (Plenzdorf 1973: 51). Writing at the same time as Plenzdorf, Hanns Cibulka drew on Goethe as an authority, albeit in a more conventional way, and not in support of an alternative youth culture, but to provide his critique of modernity and socialist modernisation, and his environmental concerns, with a solid philosophical foundation. Cibulka had published volumes of poetry from the 1950s on, but he is primarily remembered for the literary diaries he wrote in the 1970s and 1980s. These found a wide readership in the GDR at the time and the better known ones have been reprinted since the Wende. Sanddornzeit,23 an account of a summer spent on the Baltic island of Hiddensee, the Dornburger Blätter (Cibulka 1992), letters and literary notes describing a retreat in the castle at Dornburg where Goethe stayed in 1828, and above all Swantow,24 the story of six months spent by a middle-aged couple recuperating from a road accident on the island of Rügen, all infuse evocative landscape descriptions with

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reflections on the environment and pessimistic visions of the future. Exemplifying the ‘substitute function’ of literature in the GDR, where politically sensitive issues were subject to censorship in the media, Cibulka’s books played a significant role in stimulating public debate on the hitherto largely unacknowledged costs of technological progress (see Mallinckrodt 1987). Cibulka is highly critical of the materialism, aggression and hectic tempo of modern life, of which he regards pollution and nuclear contamination as tangible products. He calls for a fundamental turnaround, as much in the lives of individuals as in the policies of the state. As in the writing of representatives of Inner Emigration in the Third Reich like Ernst Wiechert and Wilhelm Lehmann, the implicit alternative is a return to a ‘natural’ order of modesty and simplicity. Cibulka’s diaries, passages from which echo Monism, Anthroposophy and New Age philosophy, trace his “slow but sustained turn to Goethe” as a spiritual guide. Individual entries are prefaced by quotations and interspersed with references to the author’s reading of Goethe’s work. “Goethe’s scientific studies are among the most precious items in German prose literature”, he writes in Sanddornzeit: In Goethes ‘Morphologischen Schriften’ fand ich die entscheidende Ergänzung zu dem naturwissenschaftlichen Denken unserer Zeit. Jeder Stein, jede Pflanze, jedes Tier wird bei ihm mit den Sinnen erfahren, mit dem Gefühl erlebt, mit den Augen des Geistes angeschaut. [ … ] Was mich beim Lesen seiner naturwissenschaftlichen Schriften immer wieder neu beglückt, ist die große, freie und beruhigende Aussicht, nach der ich jahrelang gesucht. Alles, was uns auf dieser Welt umgibt, wird bei ihm unter dem Aspekt einer höheren Einheit gesehen und erlebt. [ … ] In der Art und Weise, wie wir heute die Natur erkennen, fällen wir den Richtspruch über uns selbst, über unsere Existenz, unser Schicksal. Was wir heute durch die moderne Wissenschaft nach außen hin gewinnen, darf nach innen nicht verlorengehen. Die Beantwortung einer solchen Frage berührt schlechthin unsere gesamte Kultur. (1991: 61–3) In the Dornburger Blätter he reads passages from the Italienische Reise, the Materialien zur Geschichte der Farbenlehre, the Metamorphose der Pflanzen, the letters to Zelter and the ‘Dornburger Trilogie’ poems, and quotes repeatedly from Eckermann’s Gespräche mit Goethe. The Dornburg landscape is experienced as a harmonious interaction of mankind and nature, a realisation of Goethean “friendship with the Earth”. The author temporarily reverts to a slower pace of life and rediscovers

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“Anschauen”, that is an ability to observe calmly and with empathy, which is contrasted with the noise and change of construction and industry in Jena and the destruction of nearby stone quarrying. Written 10 years later, Swantow is more openly environmentalist. Politically controversial because of its outspoken attack on nuclear power (which Cibulka demonises in several passages), it also tackled the issues of pollution, the extinction of species and the alienation of our lives through bureaucratisation and technology.25 Cibulka called for a sea-change in our consciousness, starting in the individual, for: “Nature no longer has the strength to recreate what we are destroying every day, within our selves and in our environment. Humanity is murdering itself, though it is a gradual process” (p. 128). Cibulka’s call for a renunciation of material goods, of egoism and the lust for power, and for the adoption of an ethic of pacifism, modesty, self-restraint, respect for human dignity and appreciation of our impact on the environment, posed a fundamental challenge to his contemporaries, but was, not least through his enlistment of Goethe in support of his Green message, at the same time reassuringly traditional. The revival of interest in holist conceptions of nature which ran parallel in West Germany in the late 1970s and early 1980s is clearly reflected in the journal Scheidewege, in which several articles appeared on Goethe’s alternative form of science (see Strolz 1978 and Meyer-Abich 1983–4). The influence of Goethe’s thinking is evident in the Philosophie der Grünen published by Manon Maren-Grisebach in 1982 and Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich’s Wege zum Frieden mit der Natur (1984). Klaus Modick’s novella Moos, which also first appeared in 1984,26 is a thoughtful and stylistically polished literary product of the popular attention to Goethe as the source of an alternative to modern civilisation. Moos contains only one direct reference to the poet: “Follow Goethe!” is the advice of the narrator’s revered Professor Mandelbaum at his graduation (p.120).27 However, the whole text is permeated with allusions to the Goethean way of science. In an introductory framing narrative, we are told that the main part of the text is a manuscript which was found on the death of the retired botanist Lukas Ohlburg. Ohlburg had a distinguished career as the author of standard works on subtropical and tropical flora but became increasingly disillusioned with the direction taken by his discipline and published controversial essays calling for a revision of botanical terminology. The phrase “tender science” (‘zärtliche Wissenschaft’, p. 119), which he uses to describe an alternative, echoes Goethe’s “sensitive empiricism” (‘zarte Empirie’), just as Goethe’s “observing judgement” (‘anschauende Urteilskraft’) reverberates in the

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contemplative observation of nature (‘Naturanschauung’, p. 120) which Ohlburg now practises. Like Goethe, he rejects the abstract, conceptual and analytical approach which has contributed to our alienation from nature. He criticises “modern science’s self-imposed anaesthesis of the sphere of perception” (p. 28), insisting plants cannot be properly understood unless their sensual impact on the observer, their look, feel, smell and taste, are observed and described. Modick’s protagonist also follows Goethe in suggesting that true knowledge of nature demands a synthesis of science and art. Ohlburg has retired to an isolated cottage in the Ammerland, a boggy part of Lower Saxony midway between Bremen and the Dutch border, where his family spent their holidays when he was a child. His father is depicted as a man who spent his life fighting “greenery” and “wild growth” (‘Grünzeug’ and ‘Wildwuchs’, p. 36), getting his sons to scrub the moss from the cracks in the paving around the house at the beginning of each holiday season. He exemplifies a generation whose motto was ‘ratio delectat’ (p. 38): fearing the formlessness of nature, he is driven by “manic paranoia” (pp. 62f.) to impose order on it. As a botanist, Ohlburg has followed in his father’s footsteps, classifying and naming things as a way of attempting to control them (pp. 38 and 40). However, following a heart attack, he has come to seek a different relationship with nature, recognising that “one await nature’s approach with composure, afford it a certain symbiosis in our lives and living environments, and only fight it when it really threatens us” (p. 30). His initial intention is to bring together his critical essays in an academic study entitled ‘Kritik der botanischen Terminologie und Nomenklatur’ (p. 5). Several passages of the book (e.g. pp. 16 and 38–41) are indeed concerned with the stultifying and discriminatory aspects of Linnean classification, which impede rather than facilitate real knowledge of plants. However, Ohlburg soon abandons the Kantian analysis implied in his title, and the manuscript instead becomes a diary reflecting on his own life and our relationship with nature. The shift in approach and textual form is signified by his change of the title to ‘Moos’. Art and story-telling, he notes, address the questions science cannot answer, the how and why, as opposed to the what (pp. 16, 85f.). The language he now emulates is one which “defines by expressing the indefinable”, which “does justice to the individual and exceptional, and trusts what can be seen more than fixed concepts” (p. 19), affords insight into the aesthetic and sensual reality of things (p. 41) and “does not explain, but wonders” (p. 53). It is also a language which allows things to speak for themselves and express their nature. In ‘Über die

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Farbenlehre’, Goethe had written of the task of the scientist as one of listening to the language of nature: … vom leisesten Hauch bis zum wildesten Geräusch, vom einfachsten Klang bis zur höchsten Zusammenstimmung, von dem heftigsten leidenschaftlichen Schrei bis zum sanftesten Worte der Vernunft ist es nur die Natur, die spricht, ihr Dasein, ihre Kraft, ihr Leben und ihre Verhältnisse offenbart. [ … ] So spricht die Natur hinabwärts zu andern Sinnen, so spricht sie mit sich selbst und zu uns durch tausend Erscheinungen. Dem Aufmerksamen ist sie nirgends tot noch stumm. (XIII: 315) Modick echoes this conception of nature as a subject, expressing and revealing itself willingly to the patient and attentive researcher, speaking to all the human senses, including our intuition (pp. 18, 34, 53). Ohlburg’s short lyrical descriptions of the seasons and the landscape involve Goethean anthropomorphisation: Wo Mooskissen den Boden bedecken, hält der Winter dem Märzwind viel länger stand. Das Schmelzen durchtrieft seit Tagen den Wald, der Klammheit zeigt, nackt wird. Ein Schmatzen lockert die lange Starre. Träges Getropfe vom Dach. Oder vom Überall. Sonnenstrahlen lecken an Schneeresten. Wind treibt schwadigen Dunst vom Boden auf. Die Erde gähnt und dreht sich. (p. 113) His spiritual journey towards harmonious union with nature (p. 70), ending in the acceptance of death as a relinquishment of individuality and release into the great oneness of being, reads like an extrapolation from ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’. He comes to regard his impending death as a metamorphosis rather than an abrupt ending of existence. In the introduction, we are told of the curious circumstances of the old man’s death. Since he lives alone, his body is found by neighbours. It is on the floor, near a desk on which his unfinished papers lie. He appears calm and serene (p. 7), like a man who has become one with the whole of being. The secret of his serenity is revealed bit by bit in the course of the narrative, which tells of Ohlburg’s doings and thoughts over the winter months he spends in the house. A picture painted by his young niece, when she visited him with her parents at Christmas, is an intuitive anticipation of his death: it depicts him lying at the edge of the forest, with his beard growing among the roots of trees: “The child knows what nature is and what is in it. She can still grasp it as a whole, with mountains

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we no longer see. She can speak of death, the price of life, and show it, for instance by painting me in a bed of moss” (p. 100). Modick hints at the existence of ‘correspondences’ between different spheres of reality (pp. 33, 53, 77), and cites a series of myths, folk beliefs and literary works describing metamorphoses as intuitive expressions of the link between humans and trees or plants (pp. 79f.). A dream in which the circulation of blood in Ohlburg’s body is associated with the ecological cycle suggests analogies between the universe and the human body.28 Moss, the central symbol of the novella, is the cushion in the woods on which the poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff had lain in the poem ‘Im Moose’, which is cited by Ohlburg on the title page of his manuscript (p. 11), passing review over her life and imagining her death as an absorption, like smoke, into the pores of the Earth. But, since plant life is the equivalent of not only being dead, but also of being as yet unborn, metamorphosis into moss is also a return to primal union with Mother Nature, predating individual identity (p. 118). Modick describes a “Vermoosung” or “enmossing” of the dead Ohlburg’s beard and parts of his body (p. 8), which he had anticipated in the comment: “The individual encroaches on the whole. The whole begins to enmoss the individual” (p. 108). Archaic in that it developed out of the earliest plants to colonise the land, and reverted to reproducing in water, moss above all exemplifies a process of seeming return to a simpler life form, but on a higher plane of existence. This is one of many pseudo-cyclical patterns in nature, which are a model for humans: “In the sweep of its compass, human life traces a seeming regression similar to that of the mosses” (p. 108). Ohlburg sees old age as a natural return to the proximity with nature enjoyed in childhood: “There must be an urge to go back over the course of one’s life. Not in a process of ageing, senile regression, but productively, as a preparedness to revisit the experiences of childhood” (p. 21). Moss is also an emblem of the gentle power of nature; as a creature of Gaia, it seems to be seeking to repair the damage resulting from human activity and to preserve life on the planet. Ohlburg comments on the ability of certain mosses to act as chemical and radioactive sinks as “a desperate attempt, in view of the annihilation of the Earth and the disappearance of humanity, to stem this destruction with its own frail means” (p. 106). Modick’s challenge to the “ignorant arrogance of rationalism” (p. 15) is a slight, somewhat implausible tale. Though the book is described in a review from Szene Hamburg quoted on the flyleaf of the second edition as an “ecological cult book”, it was not actually a bestseller when it came out, selling fewer than 2000 copies (see Modick 2005). However, a steady

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trickle of requests led to its republication in 1996, with a simpler title and attractive illustrations. (This edition is now also out of print.) Modick’s suggestive language, which skilfully avoids banality, and the web of explicit and tacit allusions to Goethe, Droste-Hülshoff, Justinus Kerner and other writers make it an aesthetically satisfying piece of writing. Distancing mechanisms also allow the reader to suspend critical disbelief in the poetic ‘reality’ of the suggested correspondences between man and nature and in nature as an active subject. Romantic Green irrationalism and Green politicians’ ignorance of the realities of country life are chided gently by Ohlburg’s younger brother Franz and a neighbouring farmer. Franz, a professional psychologist, describes Ohlburg’s manuscript at the outset as a product of incipient senility, preempting the objections of critical readers, and Ohlburg himself describes his attraction to moss, and his sense that it is approaching him of its own accord in terms of the hypothetical, almost disbelievingly. In contrast with such sympathetic alignment with Goethe’s thinking on nature, the East German Volker Braun’s reworkings of Goethe’s plays (Faust in 1968 and 1973, Iphigenie in 1992) constitute radical adaptations in which the originals seem to serve primarily as starting points for counter-statements.29 Braun has treated motifs and phrases from Goethe and a handful of other poets (principally Klopstock, Hölderlin, Schiller, Rimbaud and Brecht) with equal freedom in his poetry. Where the conservative cultural critic Cibulka, once described as ‘the first Alternative, the first Green in the GDR’ (cited in Heise 1999: 6), and the West German Green sympathiser Modick look to the Weimar poet as a precursor with a proto-ecological world view, the radical socialist Braun once described his own practice in an interview as one of ‘Umstülpen’, or turning on its head (see Walther 1973: 390). However, this does not do justice to the complexity or importance of his “intellectual elective affinities” (Bothe 2004: 27) with Goethe. ‘Von Gagarins Flug’ (I 71f.),30 an early poem of Braun’s, reveals his initial conformity with the GDR establishment view of science and technology. A hymn to the Soviet Union’s technological progress, celebrating the Faustian vision of humanity casting off the fetters of superstition and material deprivation, it echoes the ‘Osterspaziergang’ (Faust, lines 923–8) in its anaphoric repetition of clauses beginning with the preposition ‘aus’. Braun’s relationship with Goethe was, however, soon coloured by ironic detachment.31 ‘Prometheus’ (II 94, written in 1967) is a socialist ‘updating’ of Goethe’s poem (Goethe 1998: I, 44–6), replacing individual rebellion by the work of the collective. Prometheus’s impatience with the gods in Goethe’s poem reappears in the guise of Braun’s irritation

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with his contemporaries’ placid faith in the state’s progress towards socialism. By the 1970s, Braun’s relationship with Goethe was becoming increasingly complex. In an entry in his Notate entitled ‘Die Goethepächter’ (Goethe’s Leaseholders), he comments scathingly on the official guardians of the cultural heritage: “They have turned Goethe’s works into a workhouse for the education of the recalcitrant nation. Here they bustle around like schoolmarms, while we [i.e. writers] have our fun with him outside on the meadows of public life” (II 248). The sharpness of his tone reflects the difficulties Braun experienced in staging Hans Faust in Weimar in 1968. The play was a critical response to the politically motivated interpretation of Faust in the early decades of the GDR as an Adolf Hennecke-like activist, working tirelessly to build the socialist nation.32 The action33 is set in the GDR in the early 1950s. Hans Hinze (alias Faust), a worker who is dissatisfied with the pace of reconstruction in the GDR, but too disillusioned to do anything about it, is taunted by the party official Kurt Kunze (alias Mephisto), in words echoing Faust’s last monologue: “Nein, du gaffst zu, und schlingst / Kartoffelschalen! Auf dem freien Grund / Bedeckt von Trümmern, wimmelt / Das freie Volk in seinem Dreck. / Du willst was ändern? Im Geiste. Du / Begreifst nur dich, und dich noch falsch” (II 167). ‘Enttrümmerung’, or clearing rubble from the bombed cities, is the first step in reconstruction, and Hinze, who recognises he cannot achieve anything on his own, enters into a Faustian pact with the Communist authorities in order to work for a better future: “Solang ich nicht / Zufrieden bin, gehören wir / Zusammen, und der vorher aufhört / Den soll man einsperren” (II 171). His plans for the industrial transformation of the country are, however, expressed in a vision which, like Faust’s, goes beyond necessity and prudence to reveal not only Promethean hubris, but also a cult of vitalism, involving erotically charged violence towards the Earth: “Die Sonne. Eh, schau dir das an. Das / Lassen wir vorerst wie es ist. / Hau ran Alte. Erst mal diesen Planeten. / [ … ] Schön und vollkommen, die alte Vettel / Leg sie um! Siehst du das Korn, gelb? / Die Fabrik, dröhnt schon in den Ohren. / [ … ] Da kommt eine Stadt hin!” (II 172). ‘Das mitteldeutsche Loch’, a vast open-cast coal mine and industrial building site (an allusion to the industrialisation of the Lausitz in Schwarze Pumpe, Hoyerswerda and Burghammer in which Braun himself participated as a young worker between 1958 and 1960), becomes the equivalent of Faust’s dyke-building enterprise. After a lengthy struggle, Hinze achieves fulfilment, and is united with the workers in transforming the environment

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and modernising the country: Jetzt merk ich erst, daß ich lebe. Die Hände fühlen die Luft und die Füße den Boden. […] Brauchbarer Planet, Gestrüpp Aus Stahl und Kabeln. Mit zwei Griffen Löse ich Flüsse aus und setz ich Hügel in Gang. Schöne Natur, selbstfabriziert. […] Ich möchte mich Ausbreiten über die Landschaft Und sie bedecken mit Beton. Eine Arbeit reißt hundert zu mir Ich bin verknüpft Mit vielen, die mich halten Auf dieser Höhe. (II 201) Nature is provocatively presented as a raw material to be used, shaped and beautified by individual and communal human (especially male) activity – in a process which approximates more to rape than consensual embrace. As the satirical pointing of the language suggests, his euphoria is as ill-founded as Faust’s. The project he is working on is dropped by the authorities for reasons of economic necessity, and Hinze, Kunze and Marlies (alias Gretchen) are confronted with new problems. Working as a miner, Hinze succeeds in over-fulfilling his production target, but he alienates the workers by boasting of his personal achievements. The unity of individual and social development falls apart, and Hinze despairs, faced with the prospect of a joyless life and never-ending work: “Ja, das hab ich gemacht, Jahre, Jahre. Eine Maßnahme schlägt die andre weg, eine Landschaft deckt die andre zu. Steht die Zeit still? Und jeder redet sich ein: das, das ist was! und hält sich dran fest, jahrelang, und macht sich etwas vor, und merkt nicht: er selbst, selbst kommt zu nichts” (II 221)! However, the play ends with Hinze allowing himself to be persuaded to continue in a project which is both that of socialism and the future of humanity. Sensitive to the ambivalences of the original, Braun thus recasts the Faustian narrative, as an expression of his struggle to retain faith in the socialist vision, accentuating its problematic individualistic and environmentally exploitative dimensions, but not ceasing to subscribe to the project of modernity.

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Wolfgang Emmerich and others have shown how, in the course of the 1970s, this precarious balance between vitalist subjugation of nature and depiction of the damage and loss entailed by capitalism and the Marxist programme (a dramatisation of the consequences of its reduction to a lifeless object by Enlightenment rationalism) come under increasing strain in Braun’s work (see Emmerich 1990, Jucker 1995b, Bothe 2004). The poem ‘Durchgearbeitete Landschaft’ (1971) ends with a characteristically ambivalent image, reflecting, in Katrin Bothe’s words, an “almost desperate attempt” to reconcile ideal with reality: Die Doppeldeutigkeit der Wendung “der Erde / Aufgeschlagenes Auge” als einer Landschaft, der Gewalt angetan und die zu neuem Leben erweckt wurde, ist sicherlich der authentische Volker Braun dieser Zeit: Beinahe verzweifelt sucht er noch, eine Harmonie zu stiften, setzt er hier auf die Rekultivierung ‘verbrauchter’ BraunkohleLandschaften – auch dies eine trügerische Hoffnung angesichte der zerstörten Industrielandschaften, die die DDR hinterließ. (2004: 6) ‘Material V: Burghammer’ (VIII 66–8), written a decade later, in the winter of 1982–3, draws on both ‘Durchgearbeitete Landschaft’ and Braun’s early play Kipper Paul Bauch (1963–5). It alternates between critical detachment, expressed through bitter sarcastic commentary and stubborn determination not to abandon his ideals and leave the country. Goethe’s poem ‘Ilmenau’ (HA I 107–12), a lyrical self-reflection triggered by the encounter with a once familiar landscape, serves Braun as a formal model. But it also provides a point of contrast which emphasises the loss: “Wo es bei Goethe “grünet”, vom “immergrünen Hain” die Rede ist, [ … ], da ist bei Braun die Landschaft “graslos”, voller “Baumleichen” und “Aschewasser”, der “Himmel wie Kalk”. Der regenerierende, belebende Gang in die Natur ist nicht mehr möglich” (Bothe 2004: 10). Ideological disillusionment is paralleled by formal change in Braun’s poems. The ‘Material’ poems, of which this is one, no longer integrate or adapt quotations to provide a historical contextualisation of Braun’s thought, but consist rather of a montage of disparate material embedded in a stream of consciousness, linking past and present. Their fragmentation suggests unfinished issues needing further thinking through, and reflects Braun’s loss of confidence in linear progression in history.34 Though Braun continued to propound the socialist ethos of humanity’s Faustian/Promethean self-realisation, its unwelcome social and environmental consequences featured increasingly prominently in his

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plays, poems and prose, in references to the destructive impact of brown-coal extraction, industrial pollution and the dangers associated with nuclear technology. A later version of the poem ‘Prometheus’ published in 1979 reflects a diminution of the poet’s confidence in man’s ability to determine his own future. The fire which Prometheus stole from the gods and gave to man becomes an image for nuclear technology, which the poet regards with increasing unease. By the 1980s, Braun, who had become a personal friend of Rudolf Bahro, was writing environmentalist polemics such as ‘Material VI: Die Mummelfälle’ (VIII 67f.) and ‘Verschönt den Wald’ (VIII 283–6). His work is in general, however, less concerned with the physical landscapes of devastation left behind by mining than with their symbolic meaning: the ‘waste land’ of modern society becomes an elaborate political allegory and disillusionment with technological and political modernisation finds expression in increasingly apocalyptic scenarios. In the prose piece ‘Verfahren Prometheus’, written in 1982, Prometheus appears as man the inventor, engineer and manager, the driving force behind development and modernity. Intoxicated with his own success, but inflicting toil and suffering on millions in the course of his achievements, he is plagued by gnawing pains akin to those of the demi-god, bound to the rocks, whose liver is picked at night by a punishing eagle: Bei der Berechnung der Transportsysteme für die Quader der Pyra-mi-den spürte er zum erstenmal den Schmerz in der Leber, unge-ach-tet er gerade in dieser Epoche seines Lebens von einem Hochgefühl getragen war. Aber irgend etwas, auf seinen Spaziergängen die schweißigen Rücken der Völker in den endlosen Schnellstraßen Unter-ägyp-tens vor Augen, nagte an ihm. [ … ] Es war ein Rausch. (VIII 263) Prometheus’s final incarnation is Albert Einstein, who is unjustly remembered here as the father of nuclear physics and facilitator of the atom bomb, ignoring his opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb after the war and his wider significance for twentieth-century physics. Writing at a time in the early 1980s when tensions between the superpowers made nuclear war seem a real possibility, Braun could only see invention and technology as identical with the urge to destroy and oppress fellow men: “Er hätte fortfahren können mit der Übung, aber unversehns gelang die Entdeckung, die seinem alten Namen Ehre machte d.h. ihn auslöschte, das Feuer der Feuer, dessen ungeheurer Schein die

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Morgenröte eines sagenhaften Zeitalters bedeuten konnte. Der Jubel- / der Entsetzensschrei des Planeten meldete, daß er nun unsterblich war” (VIII 265). Goethe’s significance for Braun may be described as that of a rubbingpost or as a sparring partner in his protracted wrestling with the tendency of socialism’s emancipatory impetus to degenerate into repression and the destructive forces seemingly inherent in human civilisation. These themes are further explored in the narrative dialogue Der Wendehals oder Trotzdestonichts (1995) and the essay ‘Dem Geyer gleich: Goethe und Kafka in der Natur’ (1999). In the latter, Braun refers to Faust as a “nature poem of bourgeois society”, offering insight into the self-destructive mechanisms of modern industrialisation. Globalisation, the latest manifestation of Faust’s blindness, “is threatening to sever the link with our own bodies, the connection with nature, the very basis of our lives” (Braun 1999: 165). Faust is one of a number of images and motifs which undergo continuous development in Braun’s work, through constant rereading and reworking of his own texts and those of other writers. Poems such as ‘Harzreise im Winter’, ‘Ilmenau’ and ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’ are, in Kathrin Bothe’s words, “quite literally yardsticks, ‘measuring instruments’ which Braun uses to ground himself over the years, and which recall earlier phases of his life, in order to determine the degree of continuity and variation” (Bothe 2004: 27). These examples illustrate how, as Robert Mandelkow has written, Goethe served as a model for writers in the 1970s and 1980s in both his theoretical advocacy and his literary representation of nature: “Goethe als dichterischer Gestalter und theoretischer Anwalt der Natur: Dieses Auslegungsmuster ist gerade in der jüngsten Phase seiner Rezeptionsgeschichte – nach einer Zeit der politischen Goethekritik und Goetheentfremdung – zu einem Thema von hoher Aktualität geworden” (1998: 233). Mandelkow warned, quite rightly, that the resurgence of interest in Goethe’s ‘way of science’ must not blind contemporaries to the dangers of fetishising nature again, by taking its alleged laws as a blueprint for human actions, and reviving the old ideology of nature in a new, environmental guise (p. 258). Yet there can be no doubt that as a mediator and synthesiser of proto-ecological traditions, Goethe has played a key role as a stimulus and point of reference for the crystallisation of unease with late twentieth-century society and the formulation of concerns regarding the integration of humankind in the continuum of nature.

3 From Modernist Catastrophe to Postmodern Survival Technological Disaster in Georg Kaiser’s ‘Gas’ Trilogy and Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Untergang der Titanic

3.1 Apocalypse, cultural pessimism and the literary debate on technology in Germany 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. In recent years, the boundaries between such man-made disasters and other natural catastrophes have become increasingly blurred, with growing acceptance that we are involved in exacerbating certain meteorological phenomena. We have also come to recognise that circumstances under our control contribute significantly to the disastrous impact of natural events: the deaths and suffering resulting from earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis and hurricanes are often a consequence of warnings which have been ignored and inadequate preparation. Both kinds 87

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of disaster are commonly related to risks which were at least partially known previously. They result not only from chance and human error but also from strategic economic decisions. Unsurprisingly, this explanation is customarily ignored in initial responses; too strong is the desire, in the face of shock and grief over the loss of life, to seek scapegoats (who absolve us of our own complicity as members of a society whose aspirations and value systems provided the context for their actions). However, there is also a powerful tendency to invest events which are in reality part of the programmed logic of technological progress with greater meaning. With major disasters, a process of myth construction sets in, adapting the facts to correspond to familiar narratives. The very word ‘disaster’ was originally an attempt to offer a metaphysical explanation for the event, signifying as it did a disadvantageous positioning of the stars. Where the hand of God is not invoked, technological disasters are typically interpreted as the result of hubris or excessive human self-confidence. “Tand, Tand, / Ist das Gebilde von Menschenhand”, the witches from Macbeth cry in Theodor Fontane’s ballad ‘Die Brück’ am Tay’, which, written in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, became a canonical text for generations of German school children.1 Fontane’s personification of technology in the Edinburgh train which plunged from the bridge in a December storm, with the loss of life of all 75 passengers and crew, and in the person of the passenger Johnie, who cries with confidence in the ability of his age to subject nature to human will: “Die Brücke noch! / Aber was tut es, wir zwingen es doch. / Ein fester Kessel, ein doppelter Dampf, / Die bleiben Sieger in solchem Kampf, / Und wie’s auch rast und ringt und rennt, / Wir kriegen es unter: das Element”, reinforced the popular understanding of the disaster as a “Mene Tekel of human presumption” (Schneider et al. 1987: 324, 328). Alternatively, the pressure to transform the disaster into a triumph is often irresistible. Journalistic and literary accounts of disasters frequently focus on the noble composure of the victims and the heroism of those who rescued the survivors. The accident is presented as an Act of God, awesome, inexplicable and incapable of prediction. Hence the popular myth that, as the Titanic sank, the band bravely played on, calming the anxieties of the drowning passengers, and closing (by this time, rather implausibly, on a steeply sloping deck) with the hymn ‘Nearer my God, to Thee’ (see Howells 1999: 120–35). The need to make sense of major disasters is reflected in the two terms commonly used to describe them: ‘catastrophe’ and ‘apocalypse’. The Greek word ‘catastrophe’ meant a ‘sudden (downward) turn’ or ‘overturning’. A technical

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term in classical drama for the denouement, that is, the change which produced the (usually unhappy) final event, it has come to mean any sudden and violent physical change leading to a subversion of the order or system of things. Describing an event as a catastrophe thus implies that it invalidates received understandings and patterns of behaviour, and forces us to rethink our value systems. Technological catastrophes trigger critical reflection on scientific and technological progress, and inaugurate a paradigm shift with wider implications for the materialism and instrumental rationalism underlying Western modernity (see Delisle 2001: 13f. and Teusch 2005: 205). The implications of the word ‘apocalypse’ are more far-reaching, complex and problematic. The term originally signified a ‘revelation’ or ‘un-concealing’; apocalyptic texts were visions of divine punishment at the end of time, involving violent destruction. The primary function of the Old Testament and early Christian apocalypses was to provide consolation and hope to the oppressed, for terrifying destruction was to be followed by a rewarding of the righteous and their triumphant entry into the New Jerusalem. In the nineteenth century, these religious apocalyptic narratives were co-opted into secular philosophies of history. First appropriated by the Romantics in a trajectory of aesthetic redemption, they were later adopted by Marxists in the context of political revolution. The apocalyptic structure of thinking is problematic for several reasons: its adherents are typically less concerned to seek to ameliorate their situation than to suffer it passively in a spirit of resignation or even actively further its deterioration, in order to hasten the longed-for reversal of fortune. It also totalises what may be a valid explanation of local and temporal circumstances, and presumes the inevitability of large-scale, often total destruction. Further, apocalypse is associated with a psychology of paranoia and violence, and a perspective of extreme moral dualism. While the emotionally charged scenarios of apocalyptic writers, which reduce long-term issues to monocausal crises involving conflict between recognisably opposed groups, are capable of galvanising activists and converting sceptics, they do so at the price of leaving others despairing and disempowered. Finally, there is the problem that apocalyptic rhetoric is often not so much a response to existing crisis as an agent in its production.2 The depiction of apocalyptic events in literature commonly reflects a desire to warn readers; extrapolating the negative trends and developments in modern society in fictional scenarios is intended as a dramatic appeal for change before it is too late. However, such shock therapy can have the opposite effect, desensitising readers through depictions of

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violence and accustoming them to the prospect of global annihilation. It can thus actually serve to bring the disastrous end nearer. The motives driving modern apocalyptic authors are likely to be complex; their texts frequently betray an ambivalent fascination with global destruction. Derrida and other recent theorists have deconstructed apocalyptic thinking as a mechanism for the alleviation of guilt, detecting in visions of apocalyptic disaster ‘phantasms’ or imaginary scenarios signifying an unconscious wish on the part of the author to be reborn, cleansed of guilt (Derrida 1983). These considerations are all pertinent to the understanding and critical assessment of public perceptions of technology in twentieth-century Germany and of the depiction of technological disaster by German writers and artists. Georg Kaiser’s play Gas, and his apocalyptic Gas – Zweiter Teil are key texts in a German tradition critiquing technology, which has been traced back to the late eighteenth century. Jean Paul and E.T.A. Hoffmann were among the first to ask, in their reflections on automata, that is, the novelty machines of the age which imitated human movements and activities, what challenges scientific and industrial development would present, and more specifically, what impact it would have on traditional assumptions about the difference between humans and machines (see Schneider et al. 1987: 13–45). Goethe and Immermann were further precursors of the critique of technology and industrialisation which began in earnest with commentaries by Justinus Kerner and other conservative writers on the railway, machines and manufacturing in the 1840s. The theme preoccupied many later nineteenth-century writers and found radical expression at the beginning of the twentieth century in the poems of Johannes R. Becher, Karl Otten and others published in Kurt Pinthus’s classic Expressionist anthology Menschheitsdämmerung (1919). It is reflected in Alfred Döblin’s great dystopian novel Berge, Meere und Giganten (1924) and mid and late twentieth-century works such as Bertolt Brecht’s play Leben des Galilei (in the passage criticising contemporary scientists which he added after the first atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – Werke V, pp. 180 and 283f.), Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Die Physiker (1962), prose writing from Max Frisch’s Homo Faber (1957) to Christa Wolf’s Störfall (1987), and the poetry of Günter Kunert and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Klaus Vondung and others have noted that technological disasters in German writing have commonly featured within a framework of cultural pessimism relishing downfall and destruction, and that this pessimism is understandable as a response to specific social developments and political events. Catastrophic/apocalyptic writing is concentrated in two

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main phases in the twentieth century: the first, around the end of the First World War, and the second, in the 1980s. Expressionist apocalypticism was the most spectacular of the responses to the current of disillusionment with reason, progress, civilisation and technology which featured prominently in public debate at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, forming a counter-current to the popular technological euphoria of the age. In the years leading up to the First World War, it is already to be found in the poetic visions of Georg Heym, Jakob van Hoddis and Georg Trakl, and the paintings of Ludwig Meidner. The machine appears as a juggernaut, and the city as an Old Testament Moloch crushing the individual – well-known examples of the latter include Georg Heym’s poems ‘Die Dämonen der Städte’ and ‘Der Gott der Stadt’ (Heym 1977: 186f. and 192). As David Midgley notes (2000: 307f.), expressions of hostility to the world of the factory intensified as Expressionist poetry entered its agitatory phase during 1916–18. The plays of Kaiser, Ernst Toller and others also reflected the shock of realisation of the terrible consequences for the individual soldier of technological advance and the organisational perfection of the military machine and later the experience of military defeat, the collapse of the State and the dashing of hopes for revolutionary renewal. Cultural pessimism experienced a revival in a parallel but less pronounced period after the Second World War, when Arno Schmidt’s novels and Günter Eich’s poems and radio plays were among many works containing apocalyptic scenarios of the future. A second major phase of apocalypticism came, however, in the second half of the1970s and 1980s, with works by Thomas Brasch and Tankred Dorst, Günter Grass and Günter Kunert, Heiner Müller and Christa Wolf. Political factors such as fears that West German democracy was being undermined by the hunt for terrorists and the heated public debate on the upgrading of American nuclear weapons on German soil converged here with ecological ones; the seeming impotence of the anti-nuclear movement and the discovery of acid rain and Waldsterben precipitated a general crisis of faith in modernity and progress which lasted for over a decade. Since the middle of the 1970s, a quite extensive body of writing on the history of literary images of technology in Germany has examined the formulation of shifting attitudes in fictional narratives, variations of myths, dramatisations and poetic images, and charted the reservoir of ideas contained in texts problematising and presenting alternatives to contemporary reality.3 Relatively few studies of representations of technology, of the practical application of science in industry and commerce and of the impact of scientific and technological advances on the

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individual, society and the environment have, however, considered the link with authors’ explicitly formulated conceptions of nature or have explored their implicit understanding of our relationship with the natural environment.4 In Germany, as in the English-speaking world, C.P. Snow’s famous lecture known as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959) provided a focus for discussion of the potential contribution of creative writing to public debate on technology. Snow painted a picture of enthusiastic espousal of progress by the scientific establishment and its pessimistic rejection by the cultural elite. Arguing that with only a minority of writers being prepared to respond creatively to industrial reality, most have preferred to withdraw to rural idylls or dream worlds, that technology had all too often been demonised and even that aesthetic protest had led via anti-social sentiments to fascist politics, he denied the competence of writers to describe and interpret the processes of technological advancement and diagnosed a schizophrenic dysfunction in modern Western societies. However, Snow’s picture of a world in which scientists had the future in their blood, while intellectual and literary figures were Luddites and opponents of democracy, is a drastic over-simplification. More recent commentators such as Odo Marquard have suggested that the social function of the arts is one of compensation and that writers seek to cushion the impact of the pressures of rationalisation rather than actually stem the tide of modernisation.5 This too ignores the fact that writers tend, by virtue of their position of relative independence from power elites, to be sceptical of contemporary society, and to serve, as SaintJohn Perse put it in his acceptance speech of the Nobel Prize in 1960, as “the guilty conscience of their age” (quoted in Schneider et al. 1987: 994). It fails to acknowledge that critics of the destructive tendencies of civilisation and progress typically constitute a minority voice responding to a dominant culture, whose relatively untroubled view of the future may overlook genuine dangers. Provided fears of disaster are subject to the necessary self-reflection, literary encodings of popular environmental anxieties may then perform a useful social function, by subverting consensus based on a false sense of security. In denying writers any insight into the processes of technological and industrial development, and effectively precluding the possibility of constructive literary engagement with contemporary society, Snow and Marquard ignore those writers who have supported technological advance and modernisation. In Germany these ranged from liberalprogressive mid-century figures such as Heinrich Heine, Gottfried Keller and Ferdinand Freiligrath to later authors like Arno Holz and Kurd

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Laßwitz, the father of German Science Fiction. In the years preceding the First World War, Marinetti’s Futurism found only a limited following in Germany, but the work of Josef Winckler, Ernst Stadler, Marie Holzer, the ‘Werkleute auf Haus Nyland’ and Brecht express enthusiasm for technology and exhilaration at the possibilities it afforded for personal fulfilment. The thrill of speed offered by planes and cars was experienced as a means of intensifying experience and participating in the life force, permitting escape from the oppressive monotony of everyday existence and affording respite from the painful “dissociation of the self” which characterised modern urban life (Vietta and Kemper 1975: 18f., 21f.). At the same time, socialist poets such as Ivan Goll and Johannes R. Becher celebrated grand technological projects leading to the brotherhood of man. Raymond Williams is one of a number of theorists who have sought to meet the need for a different model, accommodating the fact that, historically seen, literature has accentuated political and technological scenarios through symbolic configuration in ways which have sometimes cemented the status quo but at others led to change. Williams describes novelists as participating in the processes of social and cultural change by giving expression to residual, dominant or emergent “structures of feeling”. By articulating emergent structures of feeling at the very edge of semantic availability, writers can, he argues, anticipate shifts in social practice (1977: 121–35). From an ecocritical standpoint, the most significant writers are likely to be those who have been most successful in redirecting the processes of modernisation by informing, warning and mobilising their readers. However, critical analysis of other literary representations of technology and nature may also be instructive where these articulate collective thought patterns and embody popular attitudes. As a sphere of simulation, literature facilitates imaginary experiences, which can (however indirectly and unquantifiably in everyday life) influence public attitudes and views. An understanding of the visions of the future consequences of new technologies in past fictional narratives, Harro Segeberg has therefore argued, can contribute usefully to contemporary debates, by helping us understand and engage with popular assumptions (1987a: 1–11). In approaching the question what part individual writers have played in the discourse on technology, a convenient starting point is to attempt to classify their positions along a continuum between the extremes of anthropocentrism and biocentrism. Close to the first are those who trace the emancipation of humankind from drudgery (or, through the railway, the car, flight or space travel, from the limitations imposed by

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the laws of nature and our physical attributes) and celebrate the achievement of engineers in a heroic struggle against nature. Writers stressing the alienation from nature which has accompanied modernisation and progress, lamenting the loss of organic structures and ‘poetry’ and demonstrating the dangers of relying solely on instrumental reason without regard for the intrinsic value of all living beings by dramatising the destructive potential of technology are situated towards the biocentric end of the scale. The standpoints of individual nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers are in practice seldom as clearcut as this implies. While Goethe shared his contemporaries’ anxieties about “das überhandnehmende Maschinenwesen”, or mechanisation getting out of control, in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (VIII 429), we have seen that he ultimately endorsed the process of modernisation and expressed enthusiasm for engineering projects including the Panama Canal. Ambivalence characterised the response of many writers to technological developments in the 1840s and 1850s, when the railways were built in Germany (see Schneider et al. 1987: 46–94 and Hädecke 1993: 188–207). By the Gründerjahre, it was generally acknowledged that the changes now sweeping across the country, bringing new wealth and improved living standards, could not simply be halted, despite the losses incurred by certain groups of contemporaries. Wilhelm Raabe and Max Kretzer drew attention to the cultural and social as well as ecological consequences of rapid late nineteenth-century industrialisation in their novels, noting with concern the disruption of traditional ways of working and forms of community living, and the erosion of values which followed, together with pollution of the environment from the concentration of production in large factories. A powerful sense of loss of the good old days is eloquently expressed in Pfisters Mühle (1884) and Meister Timpe (1888), but within the context of recognition of the need to move with the times. The First World War was a decisive factor in radicalising critiques of technology, enhancing as it did awareness how society as a whole was being organised in order to meet the demands of industrial processes. The cultural scene at the end of the war and after the failed revolution of 1918–19 was dominated by fears of the future and longings for a tabula rasa as a prerequisite for a new beginning. This supremely pessimistic moment, to which Georg Kaiser’s ‘Gas’ plays belong, lasted until about 1923. From then on, however, the Weimar Republic was characterised by a more balanced debate, in which technology was a territory disputed by adherents of the belief that it either enslaved or emancipated the

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individual. In the early 1930s, the perspective that a heroic social elite was necessary to prevent technological progress from imposing terribly on future generations was taken up with enthusiasm by right-wing thinkers such as Ernst Jünger (see Midgley 2000: 305, 339–43), and the hitherto essentially open process of questioning was subordinated to ideological and political ends in the Third Reich (Wege 2000: 25). Carl Wege has disentangled the arguments encountered in Weimar writing and formulated a set of dichotomies which goes beyond the crude anthropocentric/biocentric distinction outlined above: ●

●

●

●

●

●

man controls machines, just as he has subjugated nature (an anthropocentric standpoint),versus man is dependent on machines (a technocentric standpoint); man can assert his authority in the face of the new order and retain control (voluntarism) versus man must accept his technological fate (determinism); man and machine belong to different spheres, the spiritual/ intellectual and the mechanical/material, versus these complement each other harmoniously, entering into alliances, symbioses or organic constructions; technology releases new, aggressive, chaotic forces in Western society versus it provides a new, structured order of work technology deprives the human soul of substance and leaves it empty versus it opens up new dimensions of being; quantity triumphs over quality, the masses over the individual, versus civilisation and progress abolish outdated educational privileges and contribute to a homogenous popular national culture. (Wege 2000: 13ff.)

Ideological persuasion, it seems, had only an indirect bearing on the positions adopted and those taking up a defensive stance on one count could prove surprisingly confident and optimistic on another. It is, however, well to bear in mind that cultural representations of technology cannot always be taken at face value and are frequently additionally or even primarily a symbolic reflection of social situations. Fears that we are being, or are about to become, dominated by machines often derive from an experience of social structures which leaves no space for individual autonomy, and from a resultant loss of confidence in our ability to control our lives. The machine, be it in plays such as ˇ apek’s RUR (1920, in which the word ‘robot’ Kaiser’s Gas (1918), Karel C was coined), Ernst Toller’s Masse Mensch (1921) and Die Maschinenstürmer

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(1922), in films like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) or in Nicolas Born’s essays on Die Welt der Maschine (1980), is typically a symbol for the disempowering process of social standardisation and regimentation associated with modernity. With this caveat in mind, and the general context of public attitudes to and cultural representations of technology in the twentieth century which I have attempted to outline, I now examine a key work from each of the two periods in which, as mentioned above, apocalyptic scenarios flourished in twentieth-century Germany. Bearing in mind the distinctions and insights arrived at by Wege and others, I ask what contribution Kaiser’s plays and Enzensberger’s long poem have made to enlightened debate on technology and our relationship with nature. Georg Kaiser’s ‘Gas’ plays are centred on an escalating series of explosions in a vast industrial complex which supplies the energy for the national economy. Their end in a great battle leading to the global annihilation of humanity reflects the widespread disillusionment of the time with the political and socio-economic structures that had brought forth the industrialised slaughter of the First World War. Typifying Expressionist polarisation, demonisation of technology and idealisation of nature, they might appear initially to merely reinforce clichés and have no more to offer today’s reader or theatre audience than a dramatic expression of irrational fears. Kaiser’s conception of nature and naturalness as an alternative to technological modernity,6 which draws on Rousseau and Schopenhauer and seeks to reconcile them with Nietzsche, is also, as we shall see, fundamentally problematic and fraught with contradictions. However, this is not to wholly deny his achievement as a dramatist. For in his ‘Denk-Spiele’, fictional experiments with conflict solution models, he created a unique dramatic form with which to address philosophical, political and social problems. Abstract but highly suggestive allegories, his plays use a theatrical “aesthetic of terror” (Segeberg 1987a: 227) to trigger change and renewal by bringing audiences to reflect on the dangers inherent in the process of modernisation. The disaster which befell the RMS Titanic on 14 April 1912 has served literally dozens of writers and film directors as an event on which to hang morals of the hubris present in faith in technology, of the corrupting influence of affluence and of the iniquity of the class society. For Enzensberger, the ship serves as an allegory of progress and political and technical modernity. As previous commentators have shown, the fate of this largest and most luxurious transatlantic liner of its time stands not only for that of capitalist society, but also of the Marxist project: it reflects

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the poet’s disillusionment with left-wing politics after the collapse of the student movement and the evaporation of the revolutionary fervour of 1968. However, the poem is at the same time quite literally concerned with our relationship with nature; as the inexplicable other of human reason, civilisation and progress, the iceberg is as important a symbol as the Titanic itself. Kaiser is already ambivalent in his faith in the ability of socialism to create a better world. Enzensberger, however, breaks not only with socialist utopianism but also with the ‘negative utopia’ of apocalypticism, by including counter-narratives of survival in his account of the disaster. Modernist pessimism is replaced by a philosophy of postmodern pragmatism. Despite his fascination with disaster, ironic detachment is more to the fore than tragedy. My focus in the following is on the meanings with which Kaiser and Enzensberger invest their respective disasters and the conceptions of nature and naturalness which underpin their critique of technology and modern civilisation. In terms of aesthetic form, I ask how they complement the abstraction of logical argument by evoking experiences, constructing dramatic narratives and crystallising issues in symbols, thus moving the audience or reader and facilitating a change of attitude. Finally, I examine the role of self-reflexivity and humour as distancing mechanisms from the dangerous naivety of the core apocalyptic tradition, which enable a more powerful symbolic representation of the complexity of the issues concerned.

3.2 Kaiser’s critique of technology in the ‘Gas’ trilogy Coming after the end of the first phase of Fordist optimism,7 Kaiser’s three ‘Gas’ plays, Die Koralle, Gas and Gas – Zweiter Teil, articulate age-old anxieties about human hubris (overstepping boundaries set by the gods or nature), which are archetypically configured in the myths of Icarus and Prometheus. They resonate, by means of biblical allusions, with the sense of loss of innocent, harmonious union with nature incurred by individuals in the psychological process of individuation and by communities in the development of human civilisation, which is encapsulated in the biblical story of the Fall and expulsion from the Garden of Eden. But above all, they voice the critique of modern civilisation first expounded by Rousseau and recast by Nietzsche, Klages and Spengler. Kaiser’s disillusionment with machines, technology and complex social organisation was motivated at least in part, as noted above, by the experience of the First World War. The beginning of Gas – Zweiter Teil, written in the period 1918–19, directly reflects the situation in Germany during

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the last year of the war, when the entire economy was geared towards a war effort with which fewer and fewer of the population genuinely agreed. Do these doom-laden scenarios of the future have any insights into technological development to offer? Kaiser’s critique of technology was a central concern of research into his work in the 1970s and 1980s, and I shall be drawing on the final chapter of Harro Segeberg’s Literarische Technik-Bilder (1987a: 224–62), which remains the most perceptive account of this aspect of Gas and Gas – Zweiter Teil, though Kaiser has been revisited by Vietta (1992) and Midgley (in the chapter ‘Technology versus Humanity’, in Midgley 2000). However, none of the three authors, Segeberg, Vietta and Midgley, discusses the playwright’s conception of technology in the context of his understanding of nature. I shall therefore also be examining the contemporaneous, thematically related plays Die Koralle and Hölle Weg Erde and the later play Rosamunde Floris.8 The industrial complex around which the three ‘Gas’ plays revolve produces gas, which was replacing water and coal at the time as a relatively new energy source. Kaiser anticipates gas providing the basis for a new era of unprecedented productivity in the national, indeed the global economy. It serves as a symbol for both the achievements and the dangers of technology. On the one hand, it is a force driving industrialisation, capital accumulation and power centralisation: “Unser Gas speist die Technik der Welt!”, the clerk announces proudly at the beginning of Gas (II 12).9 On the other, as a product of frenetic activity (“Hetzjagd”, II 23) and unnatural exertion (“Raserei der Arbeit”, II 36), it intensifies the negative aspects of modernisation. The relentless drive towards greater productivity leads to ever-increasing regimentation and exploitation of the individual. This is a direct reflection of early Fordism, with its monotonous assembly-line production and the increase in work tempo brought about by the introduction of piecework pay and productivity bonuses. Gas is a power to destroy as well as to create. Die Koralle and Gas are punctuated by industrial accidents causing loss of life and destruction of property. The reason for the devastating gas explosion in Act 1 of Gas, in which thousands of workers lose their lives, remains a mystery: it stands symbolically for problems inherent in capitalist production, industrial society and modernity in general. (The real historical phenomenon it corresponded to most closely was in fact the catastrophic loss of life in trench warfare, where the military ‘machine’ seemed out of control, devouring men.) Kaiser attacks the coldly rational, materialistic world

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view behind the economic calculation of the cost of such accidents by engineers, industrialists and politicians. The captains of industry have no qualms in continuing production with the formula which led to the explosion, for technology and industry “cannot stand still” (II 35). In Gas – Zweiter Teil the industrial sphere becomes indistinguishable from the military. The production of gas is superseded by the invention of poison gas – a reflection of actual developments in the First World War, and an anticipation of the atomic bombs which were dropped on Japan 25 years later, in order to hasten the end of the Second World War. Kaiser’s plays then show technological advance as driven by capitalist profit-making and competition, and as leading not only to the ruthless exploitation of labour and the calculated risk of human life but also to endangerment of the future of humanity through the development of weapons of mass destruction. Whatever the limitations of his pessimism, he grapples with issues of political power, social justice and the ethics of science, which are no less important a century after they were written. The protagonists of Kaiser’s three ‘Gas’ plays, which were written between 1916 and 1919, form four generations of one family. Die Koralle introduces us to the Billionaire, a first-generation capitalist, the founder of a great industrial empire; Gas to his son, a socialist reformer; and Gas – Zweiter Teil to his great-grandson, the so-called ‘Billionaire Worker’, an idealist who looks beyond material conditions to a world of the spirit. In Die Koralle, the machine is the epitome of laissez-faire capitalism, crushing the workers. In Gas too, the unremittingly bleak industrial world is presented as one of spiritual deprivation and the brutal reduction of the individual to a unit in the work force. Young men are maimed, reduced to a hand on a lever, a foot on a brake or an eye on a pressure gauge. The explosion at the beginning of the play is only the logical culmination of processes crippling the workers, who are represented as performing the same task all their lives. The process is taken to its logical conclusion in Gas – Zweiter Teil, where they are reduced to robotic slaves. At certain points, for instance in Acts 2 and 3 of Die Koralle, the thrust of Kaiser’s critique is unmistakeably directed at the capitalist exploitation of the working class. However, he also anticipates the co-opting of technology by the military–industrial complex which was to characterise communism as well as twentieth-century capitalism. At the end of Act 5 of Gas, the government compels the Billionaire’s Son to allow his works to be rebuilt, because the gas he produces has become indispensable to the national defence. The interruption of production jeopardises military strength when they are on the point of going to war. The socialist

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form of production he has introduced is openly discredited, alongside capitalism, through this association with armed aggression and the lust for power. The conflation of industry with militarism heralded in Gas is complete at the beginning of Gas – Zweiter Teil. The armed conflict in the offing at the end of the previous play has been in full swing for years and the war against nature has logically developed into one against a human enemy. The creeping rationalisation of society and disempowerment of the individual reflected in Gas and Gas – Zweiter Teil are not, then, associated with any particular ideological orientation. Kaiser reveals a shrewd understanding of contemporary socialists’ enthusiastic embrace of technology, which was to take the exploitation of human and material resources to new limits. The juxtaposition of such perceptive reflection of contemporary developments with elements of seemingly irrational phobia and apocalyptic pessimism in Kaiser’s plays is a feature which demands explanation. Technology is repeatedly demonised. The factory machine in Gas, a thing of flesh and blood (the engineer describes the gas as “bleeding” in the inspection glass), is represented as a savage beast with a destructive will. After the explosion, a traumatised worker expresses a horror vision of a great cat which sets buildings alight with its eyes and bursts them apart by arching its back: “Weiße Katze gesprungen – rote Augen gerissen – gelbes Maul gesperrt – buckelt knisternden Rücken – wächst rund – knickt Träger weg – hebt das Dach auf – und platzt in Funken!!” (II 17). The demonic image exemplifies the dynamisation, animation and personification of inert objects which have been identified by Vietta and Kemper as the corollary of the reification of the subject in Expressionist writing. Kaiser’s sinister animation of the machine expresses the widespread feeling of being at the mercy of a social structure beyond our control. Industrialism is conceived as a social experiment incapable of respecting the integrity of the human individual (II 37). In pursuit of total control of nature, by means of reason and abstract mathematical formulae, we have suppressed those aspects of ourselves associated with the unconscious. These are now projected onto the machine, which ‘takes revenge’. Kaiser’s explosions reflect the diffuse destructive forces, latent brutality and aggression in modern urban industrial civilisation. The question of the benefits and dangers of scientific and technological progress is raised in a dramatic debate between the Engineer and the Billionaire’s Son in Act 4 of Gas. The former is the proponent of technology, while the latter advocates a de-industrialised society as an alternative. Work in the power plant has come to a standstill after the

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explosion. First, the workers, who have rediscovered themselves as human beings and individuals now they are no longer subjected to the rhythms of the regular working day, evoke the mental and physical consequences of factory work in a stylised indictment of its alienating effects. Then, the Billionaire’s Son speaks, outlining his plans for a new ‘colony’ in resonant phrases. When the Engineer is finally heard, he speaks with surprising eloquence. Technology is the crowning achievement of humankind, it transforms beings weaker than many an animal into global victors. Tower blocks, telephone and power cables, cars and planes are witness to the greatness of human endeavour. Technology is a heroic undertaking in which man takes charge of his destiny and rules the world. The Billionaire’s Son presents his plans for the future as offering space to people who had lived their whole lives in the narrow confines of industrial production. But the Engineer describes them scornfully as exchanging world power for an existence huddled together like animals in a pen, timorously eking out a living through subsistence farming, in short, becoming “peasants” (II 49). Not surprisingly, it is his arguments which win over the workers, rather than those of the social reformer. In Gas – Zweiter Teil, Kaiser again highlights the tedium of monotonously repeated actions in industrial production and the destructive potential of invention as problematic aspects of modernity. However, the discussion of technology undergoes a decisive shift in perspective. Act 3, another set-piece debate, this time between the Billionaire Worker and the Chief Engineer (Großingenieur), an ice-cold Übermensch described as “the petrefaction of fanatic working energy” (II 63), echoes the dialectic structure and themes of Act 4 of Gas. But the focus has altered; invention is now presented as essentially destructive and aggressive and Kaiser appears to have lost faith in the existence of any alternative other than renunciation. Paradoxically, the Engineer and the Billionaire Worker adopt positions diametrically opposed to those of their predecessors in the previous play. The Chief Engineer calls on the workers to follow him on strike. He has invented a new, all-powerful weapon: poison gas. This, he believes, will cow the enemy into surrender. Born of hatred and shame, it epitomises, in the eyes of the Billionaire worker, the “powers of destruction”, and is a logical consequence of the distortion of the forces of progress in contemporary society. The workers are presented with an impossible choice: if they are not to be masters (“Rächer”, “Kämpfer”, “Sieger”, II 84) through the use of this gas, they are to be slaves. The perspective offered by the Billionaire Worker is one of saintly acceptance of their lot and withdrawal into an

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inner, spiritual realm. Their options are summed up in the couplet: “Gründet das Reich – Zündet das Giftgas!” (II 87). By demonising technology, Kaiser mystifies it and naturalises the situation in 1918 as an ahistorical one. His perception of the future as one in which individuals will become a faceless ‘workforce’ and be reduced to a collective apathy, out of which even charismatic leaders will fail to shake them, leaves him with a deeply pessimistic view of history. The strain of cultural pessimism in his plays reflects a weakness which is characteristic of the whole Expressionist generation’s critique of technology. Kaiser’s conception of our relationship with nature is equally representative of his time in its stark dichotomy of mastery and self-immolation.

3.3 Nature and naturalness as alternatives to industrial civilisation The alternatives to industrial civilisation which Kaiser hints at in his plays have usually been dismissed as mere clichés (see Willeke 1995: 53, 89). An interest in contemporary experiments in social reform is evident at the beginning of Die Koralle, where he alludes briefly to “Landkolonien” (I 657) – the agricultural cooperatives which sprang up in various parts of Germany at the end of the nineteenth century as social and cultural experiments (see Linse 1983). A related idea is aired at greater length in Acts 2 and 4 of Gas, where the Billionaire’s Son unfolds his vision of a new society in which the workers are to become “über grünem Grund Siedler” (II 26). His sketches for a new town on the site of the destroyed factory recall the Garden City idea, which was popularised by Ebenezer Howard in To-Morrow. A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898) and enthusiastically promoted in Germany by the GartenstadtGesellschaft founded in Berlin in 1903. Here and elsewhere, Kaiser is indebted to his friend Gustav Landauer, who was one of the principal theorists of the Land Commune Movement and a founding member of the Gartenstadt-Gesellschaft. In the preface to the 1919 edition of Aufruf zum Sozialismus, Landauer called for a return to rurality or “Ländlichkeit” (1919: xvi), an idea which he developed in the essay ‘Die Siedlung’: Das sozialistische Dorf mit Werkstätten und Dorffabriken, mit Wiesen und Äckern und Gärten, mit Großvieh und Kleinvieh und Federvieh – ihr Großstadtproletarier, gewöhnt euch an den Gedanken, so fremd und seltsam er auch im Anfang noch anmuten mag, daß das der einzige Anfang eines Wirklichkeitssozialismus ist,

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der übriggeblieben ist. Der Sozialismus ist die Rückkehr zur natürlichen Arbeit, zur natürlichen, abwechslungsvollen Verbindung aller Tätigkeiten, zur Gemeinschaft von geistiger und körperlicher, von handwerklicher und landwirtschaftlicher Arbeit, zur Vereinigung auch von Unterricht und Arbeit, von Spiel und Arbeit. (1924: 71) This picture of the future socialist society as one consisting of village communities in which people found time for leisure and education, while alternating freely and ‘naturally’ between different kinds of work in handcraft, agriculture and small-scale manufacturing, is reminiscent of William Morris’s utopian vision of the London of the future in News From Nowhere (1890). However, the Billionaire’s Son’s words in Kaiser’s play amount to nothing more than poetic pathos and rhetorical phrases: “Raum ist euer – und Allheit im Raum, der euch beherbergt! [ … ] In euch braust der Himmel und flutet die Fläche mit Farbe der Gräser!” “Menschen in Einheit und Fülle seid ihr morgen! Triften von Breite in Grüne sind neuer Bezirk!” (II 47). Kaiser’s green ideals seem naïve and regressive: whereas Landauer calls for a partial de-industrialisation through detachment from the capitalist world market and the embedding of industry in the context of a revival of the crafts and agriculture, Kaiser seems to exclude industry from his vision of the future. He ignores Landauer’s careful distinction between genuinely emancipatory technologies and merely competitive ones (Segeberg 1987a: 241f.). In Act 2 of Gas – Zweiter Teil the theme of an alternative form of existence is taken up again in poetic speeches evoking the dawn of a new existence. A life of harmonious self-fulfilment and love is conjured up in images of light, colour and flowing water. In words reminiscent of both Christianity and Taoism, the Billionaire Worker calls on the factory workers not merely to avoid (destructive) technology and to renounce material wealth for non-material aims but to embrace an existence of patient suffering. His vision of the future is one of other-worldly inwardness: “Baut das Reich, das ihr seid in euch mit letzter Befestigung” (II 86). Echoing the words of Christ to Pilate when asked whether he was King of the Jews, he exclaims: “Nicht von dieser Welt ist das Reich!!!!” This renunciation of all earthly things is hard to reconcile with Kaiser’s previous allusions to the Garden City and Landauer’s communitarian socialism, and we are left asking ourselves whether any of the figures expressing such ideas can seriously be taken for a mouthpiece of the author. The play Hölle Weg Erde, which was written at the same time as Gas – Zweiter Teil, provides a curious contrast. Hölle Weg Erde’s optimistic narrative of the New Man succeeding in persuading the masses to embark

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on a new life is diametrically opposed to the dystopian perspective of technology leading to disaster in Kaiser’s other plays written between 1916 and 1919. The three acts of the play represent respectively the hell of contemporary capitalism and modern alienated society, the journey towards change and finally the beginnings of a new life, one which is natural, simple, healthy and moral. At the beginning of the third Act, ‘Erde’, dawn breaks over a barren plain. Spazierer, the semi-autobiographical artist – protagonist, appears, leading a multitude, who, like the People of Israel, have left the fleshpots of the city in search of a better existence. Echoing the words of the Billionaire Worker in Gas – Zweiter Teil, he calls on them to build a “new creation” on the land and realise their true human potential (II 142). Here humankind will enter into a mystical union with the Earth: “Euer Blut braust – denn ihr seid die Erde!!” (II 143). The new Jerusalem that is envisaged here, a gleaming citadel with white towers and splendid gabled houses, confirms Kaiser’s reliance on poetic vision to evoke alternatives to contemporary society and raises the question how this stance of desperate hope can be reconciled with the Taoist passivity, Schopenhauerian pessimism and Nietzschean selfrealisation encountered elsewhere in his work. At the end of Gas – Zweiter Teil, the Billionaire Worker pleads, as we have seen above, not for a life in harmony with nature but for a renunciation amounting to voluntary slavery. His message of passivity reflects the heart of the cult of Far Eastern philosophy and spirituality in Germany around the turn of the century, which was an integral part of his contemporaries’ critique of civilisation. Hesse and Zweig, Klabund and Döblin, Brecht, Loerke and Eich were among those who sought in Chinese culture a source of spiritual renewal for Europe (see Chu 2002: 127–40 and Bergner 1998: 106–8). Taoism, the Rousseauistic ideal of return to a life of simplicity, purity and health, and Schopenhauer’s renunciation all appeared as alternatives to Western materialism. Die Koralle is dominated by Schopenhauer’s conception of human life as suffering and by a wish to reverse the process of evolution, which has resulted in a one-sided development of and reliance on intellect and reason, suppressing the instincts and the unconscious, and to regress to a simpler form of existence. At the end of the play, the Billionaire rejects the Christian promise of an afterlife in favour of a return to the bliss of origin: “Am Ende findet man es [das Himmelreich] nicht – im Anfang steht es da: das Paradies!” “Ich habe das Paradies, das hinter uns liegt, wieder erreicht”, he enthuses: “Ich [ … ] stehe mitten auf holdestem Wiesengrün. Oben strömt Himmelsblau” (I 710).

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Somewhat confusingly for today’s readers, Kaiser grafts his fascination with Taoism’s ‘inaction’ and Schopenhauer’s renunciation onto the ideas of Nietzsche and contemporary Lebensphilosophie. He was, however, by no means alone in doing so: Alfred Döblin’s conception of nature was, for instance, similarly syncretist.10 Nietzsche’s conception of ‘Leben’ as a dynamic process of growth and development which modern man contravened at his peril was of central importance for the Expressionist generation in their efforts to go beyond mechanistic causality on the one hand and mystical longing and metaphysical speculation on the other, in explaining the laws of nature (see Martens 1974).11 Nature and an active life overcoming all obstacles had been idealised by Nietzsche as yardsticks for human behaviour. In Also sprach Zarathustra, the prophet calls (unlike the historical Zoroaster, who sought the meaning of life in an afterlife) for a return to the Earth: “Ich beschwöre euch, meine Brüder, bleibt der Erde treu und glaubt Denen nicht, welche euch von überirdischen Hoffnungen reden!” (1980, IV: 15). His cult of the body and the instincts, as a substitute for Christian otherworldliness and the enforced sublimations of modern civilisation, involves demanding of his followers a mix of ascetic self-sacrifice, individual subordination to the good of the species and ruthless hedonism. They are to blend passive contemplation with instinctive action, selfeffacement with aggressive self-assertion at the expense of others. The artistic genius is placed above conventional morality: “Was gut und böse ist, das weiss noch Niemand – es sei denn der Schaffende! – Das aber ist Der, welcher des Menschen Ziel schafft und der Erde ihren Sinn giebt und ihre Zukunft” (ibid. 247). Nietzsche envisages natural human existence as a ruthless struggle for survival, in which the moral norms traditionally deemed necessary for social existence must be overturned: “Alles, was den Guten böse heisst, muss zusammenkommen, dass Eine Wahrheit geboren werde [ … ] Das verwegene Wagen, das lange Misstrauen, das grausame Nein, der Überdruss, das Schneiden in’s Lebendige – wie selten kommt das zusammen! Aus solchem Samen aber wird – Wahrheit gezeugt!” (ibid. 251). Nietzsche’s conception of nature and his perspective on the future have been compared to those of today’s Deep Ecologists. In ‘Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne’, he writes of human existence in the universe as a fleeting, peripheral and insignificant phenomenon. Human intelligence and reason are pitiful, shadowy, meaningless and arbitrary (1980, I: 875–7). His approach is nevertheless ultimately less biocentric than anthropocentric, for though he implies that that which enables and affirms life and freedom is good and calls

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for a new German culture which works towards the “completion” of nature, he privileges the human race above other species. The “meaning of the earth” is the Superman, a supreme predatory animal. Only the Superman is capable of the Dionysian embrace of existence preached by Zarathustra and described in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft as “amor fati” (i.e. loving one’s life, with all its flaws, just for what it is). The unresolved tension between the passivity of Laotse and Nietzschean assertion of the individual will, as precepts for human behaviour, which runs through Kaiser’s work is clearly encapsulated in his late play Rosamunde Floris (written 1936–7). The eponymous protagonist is a New Woman, who is associated with the Earth, plant life, growth, vitality and reproduction. Breaking out of stifling social restrictions, she reasserts nature over culture. The passion and purity of her quasi-religious love for her partner William are presented as a force capable of warming and regenerating the cold urban surroundings and uniting the atomised individuals in society. Rosamunde also exemplifies a new partner relationship with nature. Her empathy with animal life is extreme: she dreams that birds fleeing from monsters seek refuge in her and she is chosen to protect them (III 392). The play is prefaced by a motto from Laotse: “Perfect purity is true simplicity” (III 363). However, Rosamunde’s actions are less acts of simplicity, purity and relinquishment than of ruthless self-assertion. She takes to a new extreme the ambivalence of the Billionaire in Die Koralle, who practises philanthropy, and seeks peace of mind in union with nature, but is at the same time a ‘tiger’ of a self-made man. Rosamunde shows callous disregard for others, murdering an innocent man, a woman and finally her own child. Kaiser’s evident admiration of her savage immorality can be understood as appreciation for the behaviour of a trapped animal, single-mindedly following its instinct for survival. Once she has succeeded in clearing suspicion and is no longer in danger, the claims of society get the better of her; she confesses her guilt and is executed.12 Kaiser had already expressed his regard for inner independence, rejection of accepted norms and morals, and orientation towards the future in Die Koralle. Rosamunde takes the consequences of Nietzschean self-assertion to the extreme, exemplifying the vital force of nature in a play characterised by images of rigidity and irksome restriction. The playwright’s intentions seem summed up in the words of the Police Commissioner: “Die Macht, die wir nicht kontrollieren, hat gewaltet – das Schicksal. In seiner Unerbittlichkeit erhaben – es ist Tragödie und aus ihr kommt Trost” (III 420). Kaiser has Rosamunde redeemed by the

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moonlight streaming into her prison cell, in a quasi-religious apotheosis (III 429), before paying final homage to the all-powerful life force in the closing lines: the natives’ drums in the jungle where her lover, William, works sound “eigentümlich und beständig wie der unbesiegliche Herzschlag alles unvergänglichen Lebens” (III 431). Humanity is, it appears, caught tragically between the primeval urge for self-realisation and the imperative of civilisation, with its sublimations and accommodations to communal living.

3.4 Kaiser’s contribution to the debate on technology The ultimate aim of contributors to the Expressionist debate on technology such as Kaiser was, Harro Segeberg observes, to return technology to its role of serving man, rather than driving him (1987a: 212). The essay ‘Das Drama Platons’ (written 1917) is the first indication of the conception of the drama as a vehicle for developing arguments which was to be Kaiser’s distinctive achievement. Kaiser conceived his plays as ‘DenkSpiele’, or literary experiments dramatising philosophical debates: “Ins Denk-Spiel sind wir eingezogen und bereits erzogen aus karger SchauLust zu glückvoller Denk-Lust”. The abstract nature of the action, his rejection of realism and neglect of scenic decor are consequences of his focus on the dialectic of point and counterpoint (IV 544). Segeberg gave a new turn to Kaiser research by pointing out that the technique of abstraction in Kaiser’s ‘Gas’ plays mimicked the logic of contemporary science and technology. Kaiser’s dramatic scenarios present hypotheses concerning future social developments at which he has arrived by isolating and generalising from empirically observed patterns of behaviour. These are then recombined in new artificial realities, in a fictional thought experiment (1987a: 226). His conception of the drama as a vehicle of intellectual emancipation, not necessarily providing answers but stimulating independent thought, was a precursor of Brecht’s epic theatre. The ‘Gas’ plays investigate the consequences of pursuit of progress regardless of the risks involved (ibid. 242). Judged as open-ended experiments to fathom the future of industrial civilisation, they have, as we have seen, undoubted weaknesses. It is not merely that Kaiser leans towards what Carl Wege describes in the passage from Buchstabe und Maschine summarised above as the poles of technocracy, determinism, dualism, aggressive technology, spiritual emptiness and cultural pessimism. The thought patterns through which he induces us to see technology, in particular his many biblical images and resonances which imply that shifts in value must follow a model of

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quasi-religious awakening or conversion, are not conducive to envisaging practical alternatives to the path taken by modern society. Aggression and destruction are also presented as anthropological constants. Kaiser undercuts the perspectives of change championed by New Men and Women in the ‘Gas’ plays, Hölle Weg Erde and Rosamunde Floris and their alternatives to technology, industry and the regimentation of human life with a world view of radical pessimism in which human existence is presented as incarceration, guilt and suffering. Kaiser’s catastrophes are warnings, reminders of our vulnerability. His aim is, as Ulrich Teusch has put it, to shock spectators into preventing the things which happen on stage from happening in real life (Teusch 2005: 220). However, if the overwhelmingly negative outcome of all the plays examined here (with the exception of Hölle Weg Erde) is intended as a provocative challenge to the audience, there is a real danger that it may demotivate viewers rather than empower or inspire them to resistance. Kaiser’s apocalypticism thus runs the risk of conjuring up the very developments he sought to warn against. The conception of the stage expounded in Kaiser’s essays is, however, not that of a pulpit, but of a battleground of ideas (IV 545). The ‘Gas’ plays are less concerned with expounding a philosophy of unremitting pessimism than with asking, as Midgley puts it, “what would happen if all social development were to be subordinated to the goal of unleashing an ever increasing technological potential” (2000: 310). As Willeke has observed (1995: 116), Kaiser responds to an existential crisis by evoking a series of positive ideals as bulwarks against the threat of nothingness and meaninglessness: natural sensuality, community, the mystical union of lovers and artistic creativity. He is not, however, satisfied with any of these for long: most of his plays end by demonstrating their failure. Kaiser’s plays have kept their place in theatre programmes not least because of their unique linguistic reduction and stylisation. Arranged in contradictory configurations, his protagonists sling arguments at each other like verbal ordinance, igniting each other with powerful telegrammatic detonators (Segeberg 1987a: 233). Explosion is in fact central to the playwright’s theatrical shock strategy, which seeks to spark insight in the audience, to shake them into recognition of the necessity of change, rather than to inform, explain or provide conceptual solutions. The abstraction of Kaiser’s plays has also meant that, as parables, they have been able to take on a new significance for each generation. Segeberg notes that the most effective productions since the Second World War have not sought to be realistic or to foreground relevance to a contemporary issue but to preserve the plays’ suggestiveness (pp. 249–58). As early

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as 1947, theatre critics were already suggesting that the message of Gas and Gas – Zweiter Teil could be updated by substituting ‘atom’ for ‘gas’. In 1958, a year after the apogee of the debate on the atom bomb and the founding of the Bundeswehr, the legendary Weimar experimental producer Erwin Piscator put on a monumental production in Bochum, telescoping both ‘Gas’ plays into one. When public concern shifted from the atom bomb to nuclear power, another revival followed in the late 1970s. While a production in Essen, which alluded explicitly to the anti-nuclear movement, was dismissed by the critics as “a pamphlet supporting the protestors in Gorleben” (see Segeberg 1987a: 250), Peter Schlapp’s production in Marburg avoided the temptation to cast the action in the present. A third production in Hamburg also maintained the element of dramatic stylisation and abstraction, merely alluding in passing to the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Kaiser’s distinctive mix of pathos and cool stylisation, passionate commitment and ironic scepticism is still capable of arousing resonances in audiences today. We shall see how Enzensberger, while avoiding some of the more problematic aspects of the ‘Gas’ plays through critical awareness of the apocalyptic mindset, similarly juxtaposes emotional identification with detachment in Der Untergang der Titanic.

3.5 Titanic myths “Why are the activities aboard the Titanic so fascinating to us that we give no heed to the water through which we pass, or to that iceberg on the horizon?”, the American ecocritic Glen Love asked in a conference address in 1990 (Love 1996: 229). Pleading for an ecologically oriented literary criticism seeking “to redirect human consciousness to a full consideration of its place in a threatened natural world” (p. 237), he proposed reading the Titanic disaster, which has been invested with such diverse political and social meanings in the past, as a cautionary tale illustrating our blindness to the environmental situation. Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s epic poem Der Untergang der Titanic (1978a)13 is a work which is, for all the attention it devotes to activities aboard the ship, centrally preoccupied with the ‘water’ and the ‘iceberg’, and the need to rethink our conceptions of technology and progress. This complex metaphorical text was initially either dismissed as a disaster scenario in keeping with the pessimistic cultural trend which pervaded the late 1970s in Germany or attacked as a cynical postmodern work overburdened with cultural allusions, playing nihilistically with

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catastrophe (see Dietschreit 1986: 115–17 and McGowan 1990: 12). More attentive readings have since explored the dimension of critical self-reflection in the poem, which reviewers either failed to recognise, or misunderstood, and focused on the poet’s philosophical reflections on truth and representation (Koch 1997 and Delisle 2001). The Titanic is examined in this chapter as an image of modern industrial society and the narrative of its sinking as a vehicle for reflection on self-destructive tendencies present in modernity. Starting with a brief contextualisation through reference to some of the many myths and cultural representations of the Titanic and an indication of the political and metaphysical dimensions of meaning in Enzensberger’s poem, I trace continuities with concerns with technology and ecology expressed in his earlier work and discuss key passages from the poem that give metaphorical expression to anxieties concerning nuclear holocaust. Arguing that the philosophy of pragmatism which runs through the poem as a counter-current to apocalyptic pessimism remains, a quarter of a century on, a useful position in environmental debate, I then reflect on the extent to which the poem may be called a postmodern work and how it differs from Kaiser’s plays as examples of Modernism. The imagination and representation of the scenes as the Titanic disappeared beneath calm but freezing waters off the coast of Newfoundland on the evening of 14 April 1912 with nearly 1500 persons still on board have mobilised timeless anxieties and fantasies many of which had already been encapsulated in images and accounts of previous sea voyages and catastrophes. The first sets of slides and newsreels relating to the disaster were released within days, and within a month a short feature film had been made (see Mills 1995). Documentary accounts of the disaster remain popular reading today, Titanic enthusiasts’ societies flourish14 and the events of that fateful night continue to be treated in novels15 and films. James Cameron’s Titanic film starring Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslett was no less than the ninth feature film on the subject (see the filmography in Mills 1995: 126–30). “The thrill of the affair has been great enough to sustain two revivals (1950s-60s, 1980s-90s) and innumerable novels (mostly middlebrow romances) as well as plays, films, paintings, dance, opera, musicals”, notes John Wilson Foster, editor of one of several recent anthologies of Titanica (Foster 1999: xiv). Over the decades, the story has revealed an elasticity which has permitted an astonishing range of strands to be taken up – narratives of heroism, rites of passage, inner development, failure and redemption, of romance and the triumph of American masculinity over British effeminacy. In his instructive account, Richard Howells shows how stories

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about the disaster can be understood, like the myths of primitive societies, as cultural devices by which abstract values have been encoded in concrete form and random, arbitrary events made meaningful. From the beginning, he points out that attempts to derive uplifting lessons from the disaster were accompanied by perceptions of a punishing hand of fate. Through the (retrospective) dubbing of the ship as ‘unsinkable’, its lot became a tragic example of the consequences of hubris. After the Second World War, the sinking of the Titanic, which had already signalled to conservative contemporaries the precipitous decline of Western civilisation and the traditional moral values that had kept it afloat, came in Walter Lord’s bestselling account, A Night to Remember (1956), to symbolise the end of a golden era, the beginning of the end of the British Empire. Steven Biel has read Lord’s book as a narrative of nostalgia for an age of security (see Foster 1999: 296–301). In a world in transition to the atomic age, the Titanic was both like and unlike the bomb, a far cry from its threat of instantaneous destruction, yet its ancestor in terms of misplaced assurance. The appeal of Lord’s story, which was several times reprinted, adapted for television and filmed, lay in its correspondence with the anxious counter-current to the belief in progress and nuclear technology which swept the 1950s, and more broadly, with feelings of ambivalence about the achievements of the ‘affluent society’ and social security. Cameron’s film of 1997 continues, despite its primary focus on the nature of love and the meaning of sacrifice, to prompt questions about society’s divide between rich and poor, and modernity’s faith in, and obsession with, technological prowess and mastery over nature.16 For Germans, the Titanic story has also possessed a certain appeal, perhaps because of its echoes of their own experience of political and economic disasters in the twentieth century. German literary versions of the story could be said to have preceded the event: Atlantis, a novel on maritime disaster by Gerhart Hauptmann, was being serialised in the press when the accident happened. The artist Max Beckmann painted a huge canvas, ‘The Sinking of the Titanic’, within months of the disaster, and a feature film was released called In Nacht und Eis. The Marbach exhibition catalogue Literatur im Industriezeitalter (Schneider et al. 1987) presents further responses, including Karl Krauss’s satirical montage of text fragments celebrating the ship and exposing the materialism, conventional piety and blind faith in technology of its builders, and novels by Bernhard Kellermann (1938) and Josef Pelz von Felinau (1939). In 1929, Atlantic, the first talking film on the Titanic, was directed by a German, and during the Second World War, a spectacular propaganda

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film Titanic, based on a Robert Prechtl’s novel Titanensturz (1937), sought to persuade viewers of the imminent demise of the decadent Anglo-Saxon world. Enzensberger was probably initially attracted to the Titanic story as one encapsulating his own misgivings about developments in contemporary society. His poem, begun in the late 1960s, but only completed in 1977, predated the second worldwide revival of interest sparked off by the discovery of the wreck of the Titanic in the 1980s. It reflects extensive research into a wide range of historical sources and works of popular culture, including films. The 1953 Hollywood melodrama Titanic, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb, is mentioned more than once, and several scenes are described in cinematic terms.

3.6 Dimensions of meaning in Enzensberger’s Untergang der Titanic Der Untergang der Titanic, which unites elements of epic, lyric, drama and philosophical fragment, must be one of the most complex and ambitiously imaginative accounts of the disaster. The dimension of political allegory, which provided the initial focus for critical analysis of the poem, is in itself complex: Enzensberger describes it as his initial intention to depict the ship as a microcosm of capitalist society, foundering on the iceberg of revolution. However, the events of 1968–9 led him to invert their polarity. Cuba, the island of socialist experiment and the repository of his hopes for the future at the time of the Student Movement, becomes the Titanic, a vessel swaying under the poet’s feet and destined to go under. The iceberg undergoes a similar semantic transformation, ending up as the symbol of a historical reality indifferent to the Marxist perspective of social and political progress. The poem is thus a reflection of the author’s disillusionment with socialism and utopian anarchism, though traces of remaining political commitment are present in references to the fate of the steerage passengers, to blacks, stokers, the unemployed and emigrants, and in Enzensberger’s vision of the Bedouins from the wall painting in the lounge coming alive and swarming over the ship (pp. 5, 54f., 59, 66f., 80). The Titanic represents the whole of Western civilisation, culture and philosophy, and Dante, Engels and Bakunin are among the passengers in the poet’s “forty-six thousand gross register ton head” (p. 80), but it also stands for capitalist society in particular, with the wealthy and powerful living at the expense of “Wogs, Jews, camel drivers and Polacks” (p. 63), “Chicanos, Eskimos and Palestinians” (p. 78).

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Enzensberger’s principal target is a society living in relative affluence and a false sense of security, blind to its injustices and self-destructive forces. Within the context of a broad critique of modernity, individual passages in the poem link the Titanic with scientism and technological hubris, luxury and capitalism, class conflict and the exploitation of the Third World. The central themes of sinking and drowning, and the motif of water creeping, trickling and rushing in link the text with earlier poems of Enzensberger’s such as ‘Schaum’ and ‘An alle Fernsprechteilnehmer’, which provide extended metaphors for the situation of the individual in the affluent society, subjected to the repressive, life-threatening effects of nuclear and other technologies. This is not to deny that the poem possesses a metaphysical dimension of meaning. The iceberg embodies the unknown, the incalculable, the ‘other’ of civilisation; it reminds us of the limitations of human reason, the residual risk in a modern world under technological control and the ultimate dependence of humanity on the laws of nature. Slicing open the ship’s side like the blade of a hidden knife, it is a mysterious elemental force. Cruel and at the same time awesomely beautiful, the iceberg and the sea recall the “delightful horror” of the eighteenthcentury sublime and the darker side of Romantic pantheism. In its radiant perfection, it echoes the whiteness of the “spirits of the north” in the Norwegian landscape of his earlier poem ‘lachesis lapponica’ (Enzensberger 1964a: 76–9) and evokes the void, the non-linear course of history and the cyclical principle of nature, denying existence of meaning. In this context, however, the political and metaphysical dimensions of meaning are less important than the narrative of contemporary technological and environmental self-annihilation: “Is it just a matter of a few dozen passengers”, the poet / narrator asks, “or do I watch the whole human race over there, haphazardly / hanging on to some run-down cruise liner, fit for the scrapyard / and headed for self-destruction?” (p. 97). Suffocating, drowning in water, being buried in snow and standing on the brink of disaster, soaked to the skin in the downpour (pp. 35f., 40f., 60, 97f.) are metaphors for the modern predicament behind which lurk above all fears of nuclear holocaust. Nuclear apocalypse has been identified by Arrigo Subiotto as one of a number of long-term environmental concerns in Enzensberger’s work, alongside the extinction of species, pollution and the population explosion (Subiotto 1998). He traces Enzensberger’s development from the “unfocussed repudiation of modernity” evident in “incipient unease

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with the potential damage a developing post-war industrial society was likely to inflict on the world” and “romantic nostalgia for an unspoilt primitive life” in his first poetry volume Die Verteidigung der Wölfe (1957) to elegies on the potential extinction of the natural world through man’s destructive activities in Landessprache (1960). In the wake of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when the world stood on the brink of nuclear warfare, Enzensberger’s admonitions of the danger of catastrophe, fundamental doubts about progress and mistrust of man’s ability to control and survive his own technological inventions appeared to culminate in Blindenschrift (1964), in which references to radioactivity served as a symbol for nature unleashed by man against himself, totalitarian capitalism and botched enlightenment. Subsequently, Enzensberger’s attention shifted from bourgeois consumerism and the nuclear threat to denunciation of monopoly capitalism and industrial imperialism. However, he returned to the environment in 1973, with the essay ‘Zur Kritik der politischen Ökologie’. While acknowledging ecological imperatives, this engaged in an ideological critique of Green politics. Enzensberger rejected the false consciousness of pretending we are all in the same boat, denying, as he put it in an indirect allusion to the Titanic, the difference between first class and steerage, between the bridge and the engine room (1973: 18). The confidence with which he argued that socialism is a precondition for survival was, however, already waning. His next major poetic work, Mausoleum, which was ironically subtitled ‘Thirty-seven Ballads on the Future of Progress’, portrayed protagonists and opponents of Enlightenment rationalism from the fourteenth century up to the present. Inventions, discoveries and innovations were shown to have been won at the price of repeated errors, accidents and losses. There is a direct link between these poems, in which scientific and technological advance is celebrated as dogged human endeavour, but stripped of any perspective of teleological fulfilment and Enzensberger’s interrogation of progress and technology in Der Untergang der Titanic. In the Eighth Canto, an engineer on board the Titanic first holds it is “quite out of the question” the ship is about to go down, only to muse that “at the root of all innovation there is catastrophe”. He ends by accepting the possibility of his own demise and envisaging humanity’s self-destruction (pp. 26f.). The “incredible calm” of Enzensberger’s passengers in the face of disaster (p. 37) and their silent inability to understand the exhortations of agitators (p. 17) reflect not only the ebbing of political activism, but also a public protest seemingly too weak to have any impact on the German

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government’s energy policies, in respect of both nuclear power (“For years we have been playing around / with the afflictions / that were in store. / Residual risk, we used to say, / leak, we called it, fail-safe threshold” – p. 87) and global warming: “the glaciologists / have brought their microcomputers along for the worldwide / symposium on climate research, printing out on-line / iceberg simulations for the next hundred and fifty years” (p. 77).17 Der Untergang der Titanic coincided with other German works envisioning approaching disaster in the form of freezing to death or an Ice Age in the late 1970s (see Grimm 1980). Snow and ice, flooding and darkness were poetic images not only for the political disillusionment of the mid-to-late 1970s in Germany but also for environmental disaster in general and nuclear winter in particular. The protest of the German citizens’ action groups against the building of a new generation of nuclear power stations in the 1970s was motivated by a conflation of legitimate concerns for safety and individual freedom with an abhorrence of nuclear weapons which was rooted in part in the wartime experience of destruction and suffering. Enzensberger participated in this national trauma but distanced himself from it at the same time. His biographer Jörg Lau has argued that the preoccupation with nuclear holocaust which is evident in Enzensberger’s poems and essays since the late 1950s, when the ‘Kampf dem Atomtod’ movement was at its height, and which resurfaced in the long poem ‘Die Frösche von Bikini’ (Enzensberger 1980: 37–52) goes back to his childhood experience of the Allied bombing raids on Nuremberg (Lau 1999: 19). Continuity does not, however, preclude development, and Der Untergang der Titanic marks a shift towards a position of more relaxed detachment.

3.7 Enzensberger’s postmodern adaptation of the ‘mentality of catastrophe’ Interwoven in the narrative of the Titanic being holed by the iceberg and its passengers drowning in the sub-zero sea are references to other catastrophes and natural forces threatening humankind – the darkness at noon at Christ’s crucifixion, the conflagrations, lightning, earthquakes and shipwrecks in paintings of the Apocalypse, the extinction of the dinosaurs, the volcanic eruption in the poem ‘The Reprieve’, the Flood in ‘Keeping Cool’ and the city of Berlin becoming submerged in a snowstorm in the Twenty-second and Thirty-first Cantos. Such images are the stock in trade of cultural pessimism. The very title Der Untergang der Titanic echoes Oswald Spengler’s influential work on the cyclical rise

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and fall of human cultures, prophesying the end of Western civilisation, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Spengler 1918/1922). Yet Enzensberger’s poem cannot simply be located within the German tradition of apocalyptic thinking touched on in Chapters 1 and 3. Moray McGowan has commented that images of existential and cultural negativity, even despair, coexist in Enzensberger’s work from the start with an aggressive political stance. Negation and pessimism are, he argues, abiding elements in his work, but they are practised and celebrated as signs of an active human intelligence. There is a dialectical relationship between cultural pessimism and an anarchistic impulse driven by a positive ideal of a free humanity. If Der Untergang der Titanic invites the reader to jump to certain conclusions, it does so only to subvert them. It “belongs to a certain contemporary German cultural climate but also resists it” (McGowan 1990: 11). Warnings of doom are already placed within a context of intellectual detachment from the apocalyptic mindset in the essay ‘Zur Kritik der politischen Ökologie’. In the ecological movement, he proposes, scientific arguments have entered into a confused alliance with diverse political motivations and interests, some manifest but others concealed. Among the latter are dubious “socio-psychological needs” such as hopes of conversion and redemption, delight in the collapse of things, feelings of guilt and resignation, escapism and hostility to civilisation (Enzensberger 1973: 8). The “conversion rhetoric” of the environmentalists has the effect of reducing visions of catastrophe to a “pleasurable frisson” (p. 33). The essay ‘Zwei Randbemerkungen zum Weltuntergang’ (Enzensberger 1978b), published in the same year as Der Untergang der Titanic, at first continues in this vein, dismissing the “mentality of catastrophe” so widespread among contemporaries, only to paradoxically reassert the political “reality” in their irrational pessimistic visions of the future. Enzensberger opens by noting that the apocalypse, which is omnipresent in contemporary culture, is no longer conceived of as an act of vengeance of the divine, beyond human understanding. The police state, paranoia, bureaucracy, terrorism, economic crisis, the arms race and environmental destruction – that is the “methodically calculated products” of modern civilisation – are today’s seven-headed monster. Apocalypse is no longer a unitary event; it has lost its finality and its universality. Once conceived of as sudden and unexpected; it is now widely predicted. It has become a creeping phenomenon, affecting some countries, classes and parts of the world, while others look on in comfort. His second “gloss on the end of the world” (p. 1) is addressed

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to a former comrade in arms, who is struggling to reformulate a political vision of utopian socialism. However well-meaning this may be, he must, Enzensberger argues, accept that the age has lost its faith in the future (p. 7). What is needed is a new Leftist theory, getting away from crude cold war ideological analysis and recognising the utopian elements present in popular visions of apocalypse. Back in the 1920s, Marxists had interpreted the fascination exercised by Spengler’s Decline of the West as an indication of the impending collapse of capitalism. The progressive erosion since the 1960s of the socialist utopia of a new world order has been accompanied by a parallel loss of validity of the “negative utopia” of apocalypse. However problematic today’s expressions of apocalyptic pessimism may be, we must understand that such imaginings are to the future what scientific analysis is to the past and present: theory must be accompanied by acknowledgement of collective wishes and fears (p. 6). Like utopian longings, popular apocalyptic fears are fluctuating energies capable of undermining the existing social order. Images and narratives of destruction, despair, panic and fear harbour the impulse for revenge and the quest for justice, the traces of relief and hope. Herein lies the “realism” of literary and filmic visions of atomic disaster, floods and epidemics (p. 8). The position formulated here, which takes equal account of Enzensberger’s disdainful scepticism and the pessimistic proclivities we have noted above throughout his work, is reflected in the ‘postapocalyptic’ perspective of Der Untergang der Titanic.18 The apocalyptic narrative is repeatedly interrupted by observations by the poet/narrator that the disaster in 1912 was not, in fact, a catastrophe heralding radical change and that “the dinner is going on”. “What were we talking about?”, he asks in the Twenty-ninth Canto: “Ah yes, the end! / There was a time when we still believed in it” (p. 81). “Let us stop counting on the end!” he calls (p. 83), for “in actual fact”, as he had noted earlier in the poem, “the rich have remained rich, and the Commandantes / Commandantes” (p. 77). “People are rather too eager for Doom to come, / like suicides looking for an alibi” (p. 26), an engineer comments in the Eighth Canto. Der Untergang der Titanic is a work of personal reorientation; abandoning the comfortable ideological positions of Leftist politics, Enzensberger adopts a stance of detachment, cultivation of aesthetic pleasure as a lifeenhancing activity and paradoxical optimism. The catastrophe in the main narrative is subverted by counter-narratives of seemingly quixotic action by individuals in the face of technological and natural disasters, celebrating self-preservation against all the odds. The Japanese Titanic

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survivor who lashes himself to a door like Christ on the cross in the Nineteenth Canto and the five Chinese stowaways who emerge from a bundle of rags in one of the lifeboats the morning after the disaster (pp. 72f.) are models of a courageous pragmatism. The poem ‘The Reprieve’ (p. 34) is the most striking illustration of this new vision of the way forward for humankind. Enzensberger’s “elderly man in braces”, calmly turning from his vegetables to point his garden hose at the molten lava which is threatening to engulf his home, may be fiction, but the success of the people of Heimaey in averting this natural disaster and saving their town was reality. “The 1973 eruption on the island of Heimaey was a classic example of the struggle between man and volcanoes”, we read on a website describing the event, which took place fifteen miles south of Iceland: With a heroic effort the people of Iceland saved the town of Vestmannaeyjar and the country’s most important fishing port. This eruption is famous because the Icelanders sprayed sea water on the lava to slow and stop its movement. It was the largest effort ever exerted to control volcanic activity. More than 19 miles (30 km) of pipe and 43 pumps were used to deliver sea water [ … ] Not only did the tremendous efforts save the port, they actually improved it. The residents returned to rebuild their town and even used the heat from the cooling lava to construct a district heating system.19 This parable of flexibility, stubborn ingenuity and prudent use of technology exemplifies a pragmatic stance mindful of the precariousness of civilisation and thankful for its provisional survival.20 It prompts the questions to what extent Enzensberger’s post-apocalyptic position equates to Postmodernism, to whose substitution of media images for reality ‘The Reprieve’ seems to allude, in representing the poet as watching the event from the comfort of his sitting room, and how Enzensberger’s position relates to Georg Kaiser’s as a representative of literary Modernism. Though a consensus has yet to be reached over the precise definition of Postmodernism, that multi-faceted movement in cultural theory and the arts reflecting and critically engaging with post-industrial society and social postmodernity, it is clear that there are important parallels (and differences) between Der Untergang der Titanic and Postmodernism, in terms of the accounts of the movement in standard works,21 which can clarify what separates Enzensberger from Kaiser. A first point to note is that, as Manfred Koch, Manon Delisle and others have pointed out

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(Koch 1997: 289–94, Delisle 2001: 234–40), Enzensberger was not significantly influenced by postmodern theory.22 Der Untergang der Titanic and ‘Zwei Randbemerkungen’ appeared prior to or simultaneously with what are commonly regarded as the key texts of postmodern theory (e.g. Lyotard 1979, Baudrillard 1981, Jameson 1984). Enzensberger has never written of the ‘postmodern age’. In the essays collected in the volumes Politische Brosamen (1982) and Mittelmaß und Wahn (1988), he rather describes the new German society emerging in the 1970s as one of ‘normality’ and ‘mediocrity’. Whereas Lyotard and other proponents of Postmodernism regard postmodern society predominantly as a liberation from the constrictions of modernist ideology and identity formation, Enzensberger’s perspective on the change is thus more critical. They also differ in that while Lyotard rejects the idea of a social function for utopian or critical visions in art, Enzensberger shares Adorno’s belief in the moral and political impetus of culture (see Kang 2002: 170–82, especially p. 173). There are nevertheless significant similarities between Enzensberger and Lyotard, which are grounded in their critiques of modernity. Both build on Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of the dialectic of Enlightenment and their conviction that an originally emancipatory development had become a repressive force. The shift in Enzensberger’s thinking around 1975–80, in works from Mausoleum on, which focus on the critique of progress and modernity, paralleled central arguments in Lyotard’s study of the ‘Postmodern Condition’ such as the loss of legitimation for the “grand narratives” or total explanations of reality which had, since the decline of Christianity, been the driving force behind modernity – above all Marxism and the “myth” of the progressive liberation of humanity through science. The poems ‘Model toward a Theory of Cognition’ and ‘Department of Philosophy’ in Der Untergang der Titanic reflect the same perception of a crisis in the legitimation of science. Going beyond this, the work as a whole is a recognisably postmodern response to the twin modernist narratives of progress and catastrophe. At this point, Silvio Vietta’s conception of “literarische Moderne”, a term which places Modernism (the movement traditionally seen as at its peak between 1880 and 1925, with a second phase in the 1950s and 1960s) at the centre of a much broader current of modern literature and culture, will be helpful in refining our understanding of the characteristic conceptions of technology and nature associated with Modernism and in explaining the links between Kaiser’s plays and the Romantics’ opposition to Enlightenment rationalism. “Literarische Moderne” extends back

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not only to Baudelaire, in whom the roots of Modernism are often located, but to the Romantics, and forward almost up to the present; he regards many of the works of the 1970s and 1980s as participating in the logical development of key modernist themes and forms. According to Vietta, the “Moderne” begins in the late eighteenth century, with Hölderlin and the Romantics, as a response to historical developments; 1793 saw the first expressions of disillusionment by German writers with the French Revolution (Vietta 1992: 10). This political dimension is accompanied by a fundamental critique of early modern rationalism and of scientific, technological and economic modernity. In the arts in general and literature in particular, which now begins to constitute an autonomous sphere free of theological, moral and political functions, a counter-discourse emerges, opposing modern man’s claim to power over nature and one-sided anthropocentrism. From now on, literature and art present utopias of their own and simultaneously explore the factors preventing their realisation in contemporary society. They develop new languages and forms, formulating visions of reconciliation with our fellow men and with nature, but at the same time retaining an awareness of the status of these as wish projections. The “Moderne” combines the critique of rationalist modernity and progress with the quest for an alternative form of progress. What distinguishes it from pre-modernist critiques of instrumental rationalism (for instance in Herder) is its use of utopias to move on to another perspective on the future: empathy with nature takes the place of domination over it, reconciliation replaces exploitation, a holist perspective that of egocentrism (p. 28). Modernist writing in Vietta’s sense formulates an alternative relationship between humankind and nature, a utopia of community based on love for others and appreciation of natural beauty (p. 52). But the great literary utopias of Modernism (works such as Hölderlin’s Hyperion) simultaneously record the failure of the attempt – which distinguishes them from the many merely idyllic works of the last 200 years. At the same time, the more powerful and complex statements are not depictions of industrialisation and pollution, but critical reflections on the philosophical foundations of modernity, in particular its groundedness in the subject and its anthropocentrism. These issues are already explored in depth in what Vietta calls Early “Moderne” (Hölderlin and Novalis), present in many of the major nineteenth-century writers, and continue to be articulated in the twentieth century in the works of the Expressionists and post-war authors such as Ingeborg Bachmann, who fuses a critique of modernity with that of fascism and patriarchy. By the late twentieth century, the

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focus has shifted to a critique of industrialisation and the consumer society as promoting self-destruction and destruction of the environment, in warning utopias. At the core of modernist writing in Vietta’s understanding of it are a capacity for critical self-reflection and an alternative consciousness (p. 15). From the start, images of apocalyptic destruction, of the abyss, coldness and darkness have characterised Modernism. These reflect the experience of the loneliness and alienation of the subject which results from modern man’s self-understanding as separate from nature, having gained knowledge about it in order to exercise control over it, in ways which lead to material benefit, but also to destruction. Vietta includes depictions of technological disaster in this field of images and narratives linked with the ‘end of the world’, suggesting that the end of the nineteenth century witnessed a shift from individual disasters to the fate of collectives and a narrowing of the focus towards technological disasters. Kaiser’s plays, with their perceptive diagnosis of the dangers of the technological-industrial “system”, based on the objectification and rationalisation of nature, thus constitute a key modernist response to modernity. On the one hand, they adapt and dramatise earlier images of the end of the world and make use of traditional metaphors to represent (ultimately self-destructive) exploitation and consumption of the natural environment. On the other, they anticipate, with their insight into industrialisation as the anonymous subject of history, the Risk Society as described by Ulrich Beck: Kaisers Dramen zeigen erstmalig die innere Problematik einer Gesellschaft, die ihren Habenszuwachs durch Risiken und immer höhere Risiken ihrer eigenen Produktivität erkaufen muß. [ … ] Daß Kaiser die Gattung des Dramas mit dieser spezifischen Dialektik der durch die moderne Industriegesellschaft selbst erzeugten Katastrophengefahren konfrontiert hat, ist – bei allen dramaturgischen Schwächen seiner Dramen – das große Verdienst dieses Autors. (p. 254) In a brief concluding chapter, Vietta locates the difference between Modernism and Postmodernism in the shift from elegiac lament, despair and a tragic world view (as reflected for instance in Dürrenmatt and Bernhard) to indifference, deconstruction and a comic world view. (By ‘deconstruction’ he means the overt rejection of patterns of thought but their underlying retention as principles structuring the discourse, as

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for instance in parody, satire and irony.) The utopia of a non-exploitative interaction with nature which is central to literary Modernism is, according to Vietta, missing in Postmodernism (p. 323). This understanding of Postmodernism and its conception of nature and technology is, however, an oversimplification in need of differentiation and correction. Wolfgang Welsch has argued convincingly that plurality is the key to understanding what distinguishes Postmodernism from Modernism (2002: xvii, 4f., 30f., 34). Characteristics of the former such as the end of metanarratives and the decentring of the subject can be seen as aspects of plurality, introduced where Modernism imposed unity and uniformity. However, plurality is by no means the same thing as indifference or an ‘anything goes’ attitude. In fact, Postmodernism, as a theory defending and explaining the radical plurality of our age, is crucially concerned with democracy, morality and the emancipation of minorities. Similarly, while Postmodernism is predisposed against technology, because of the latter’s regimentation of the individual, it is not so much anti-technological as rather critical of scientific rationalism’s exclusive claims to validity, of its tyrannical monopoly in society. Postmodernism calls for an end to the hegemony of scientism but foresees a continuation of scientific–technological rationality (p. 222). Postmodernism actually extends the critique of modernity and technology in Modernism which has been described above by Vietta – but no longer in a nostalgic lament for lost unity; euphoria and relief have taken the place of melancholy over the loss of totality. Modernist counter-discourses to Enlightenment rationalism have remained characterised by a pursuit of innovation and totality, radicality and universality. The crucial break comes, according to Welsch, in the early twentieth century, when plurality and particularity, discontinuity and antagonism appear in scientific theory, with Einstein and Heisenberg. Postmodern literature and philosophy follow much later in the wake of this countercurrent from within. Welsch’s distinction between modernist totality and postmodern plurality goes some way towards explaining what distinguishes Kaiser’s Gas plays from Enzensberger’s Titanic poem. The difference between the two is bound up with the modernist and postmodern conceptions of catastrophe and apocalypse they exemplify. Kaiser is typically modernist in his response to the crisis of bourgeois society and culture, in that he reflects the experience of shock and disorientation and breaks with the artistic conventions associated with Realism and Naturalism. His plays reflect a fundamental ambivalence of modernist apocalypses, which herald widespread destruction, even (in the case of Gas – Zweiter Teil)

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global annihilation, but are at the same time capable of bringing release from the stifling restrictions of bourgeois society. Offering liberation from the domination of instrumental reason, they symbolised for many of the Expressionists (not least Georg Heym) a dangerous but exciting and vital way of life as opposed to the stifling normality of everyday bourgeois existence (see Huyssen and Scherpe 1986: 272). We have seen that Kaiser’s visions of technological disaster were the subject of new interest in the 1970s and 1980s, when the anti-nuclear movement was at its height. New productions alluded directly to contemporary fears of the consequences of both nuclear warfare and accidents in power stations and echoed the apocalyptic environmental scenarios of Rachel Carson and Paul Ehrlich, who envisaged humanity’s self-destruction through the misuse of science and population growth. This operative type of disaster narrative, seeking to shake readers out of their indifference to social developments (see Lilienthal 1996 and Bullivant 2002), was in essence a continuation of the modernist position, inasmuch as it perpetuated the notion of a definitive end or turning point in human existence. The postmodern apocalypse similarly shows two faces, reflecting on the one hand a pessimistic world view and the loss of confidence in a better world and on the other a euphoric liberation. However, there has been a shift to playful self-referentiality and aesthetic fascination with disintegration. Apocalypse is no longer an event which gives meaning to life: it has become a spectacle of images, narratives and explanations taken eclectically from biblical, literary and psychoanalytical sources. Writers such as Ulrich Horstmann and Peter Sloterdijk have been accused of cynical celebration of nuclear destruction as the prelude to a perfect posthuman world. However, critics such as Stadelmaier (1986) and Uecker (1997) have stressed the value of irony, ambiguity and above all the suspension of the finality of apocalypse in postmodern apocalyptic works such as Tankred Dorst’s Merlin (1980) and Günter Grass’s Die Rättin (1986). Enzensberger’s poem is in any case neither an expression of resignation nor a cynical aestheticisation of catastrophe. For all his scepticism regarding technology and modernisation, he is, as we have seen, wary of the spurious “socio-psychological needs” driving much civilisation criticism and he skilfully integrates critical reflections on the ambivalence of indulging in artistic depiction of disaster. Der Untergang der Titanic can be described as a non-trivial postmodern work in terms of content and form. First, it closely parallels Postmodernism’s understanding of meaning as fundamentally unstable, its blurring of fact and fiction (the loss of the ‘original’ poem and his

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querying whether it ever existed imply there is no actual truth, only memories, fragments and palimpsests) and its questioning of identity and authenticity (for instance in the Twenty-Third Canto and ‘Identity Check’). Linked with this is Enzensberger’s narrational self-reflexivity, which is present in the many passages commenting on the process of writing. The unreliability of artists and writers and the deception and untruth necessarily present in all representation and reconstruction of the past are recurrent themes. However, Enzensberger’s negation of epistemological certainty does not reduce the poem to the ‘flatness’, ‘depthlessness’ and ‘superficiality’ described by Fredric Jameson (1984) as typifying Postmodernism – or to the triumph of hedonist individualism, abandonment of political commitment, treatment of images as more important than reality and debasement of art through commercialisation and plagiarism that critics of Postmodernism on both the left and the right have seen as constituting its essence. In terms of literary form, central aspects of Der Untergang der Titanic also correspond to Postmodernism. We find in it the breaking down of the barriers between elite, high culture, with its cultural pessimism, and the more entertaining and affirmative mass culture, which observers such as Susan Sontag and Leslie Fiedler initially identified in American literature in the late 1950s and theorised as postmodern. Enzensberger also makes extensive use of intertextuality, Dante and Edgar Allan Poe being among his most prominent literary points of reference.23 Finally and most importantly, the ending of Der Untergang der Titanic, with its tales of survivors and its implication that life will go on despite such disasters, breaks with the modernist tradition of apocalypse as a decisive turning point and corresponds to the postmodern acceptance of the fragmentation and uncertainty of the age as a joyful liberation, rather than the expression of anguish, which typified classic works of Modernism such as Eliot’s Waste Land or the poetry of Ezra Pound. Environmental disaster and Spenglerian decline of Western Civilisation can, it seems, be indefinitely postponed. One by one, we read in ‘Keeping Cool’, the prophets of Doom, who “know exactly the moment / When”, are having to leave their posts and return reluctantly to everyday life. Their gloomy prognostications are exposed as “a tranquillizer of sorts, / a sweet consolation for dull prospects, loss of hair, and wet feet” (pp. 57f.). At the height of the environmental movement in the Unites States, Joseph Meeker had published a book, The Comedy of Survival. Studies in Literary Ecology, in which he called for a “careful and honest examination”

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of literature, in order: to discover its influence on human behaviour and the natural environment – to determine what role, if any, it plays in the welfare and survival of mankind and what insight it offers into human relationships with other species and with the world around us. Is it an activity which adapts us better to the world or one which estranges us from it? From the unforgiving perspective of evolution and natural selection, does literature contribute more to our survival than it does to our extinction?24 It can be no accident that Der Untergang der Titanic, with its focus on survival rather then extinction, bears the subtitle ‘A Comedy’. Enzensberger’s choice of genre attribution is usually explained as an echo of Dante’s Divine Comedy, but may also have been prompted by Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s description of comedy as the one mode of writing relevant to our age. Already in 1954, Friedrich Dürrenmatt had argued that comedy and the grotesque were the sole genres appropriate in an age of totalitarian power structures, under the shadow of atomic destruction: Die Tragödie setzt Schuld, Not, Maß, Übersicht, Verantwortung voraus. In der Wurstelei unseres Jahrhunderts, in diesem Kehraus der weißen Rasse, gibt es keine Schuldigen und auch keine Verantwortlichen mehr. [ … ] Wir sind zu kollektiv schuldig, zu kollektiv gebettet in die Sünden unserer Väter und Vorväter. Wir sind nur noch Kindeskinder. Das ist unser Pech, nicht unsere Schuld: Schuld gibt es nur noch als persönliche Leistung, als religiöse Tat. Uns kommt nur noch die Komödie bei.25 (My emphasis) Enzensberger’s choice of the comic genre also corresponds to Meeker’s conception of comedy as a mode that values traits that humans share with non-humans – species survival, adaptation to circumstances, community, veniality and play – as opposed to tragedy’s anthropocentric haughtiness towards the natural order. Der Untergang der Titanic is an example of what Greg Garrard has described (drawing on the rhetorician Stephen O’Leary) as the comic ‘frame of acceptance’ in apocalypse (2004: 86–8). Whereas tragedy conceives of evil in terms of guilt, involving sacrifice and leading to redemption, comedy reflects an understanding of it as error, which can be followed by recognition and the exposure of fallibility. While tragic time is predetermined, careering towards a

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catastrophic conclusion, comic time is open-ended and episodic. Tragic actors choose a side in the conflict of good and evil, but have little impact on outcomes, but comic actors have a real agency, though it is typically flawed and morally ambiguous. The comic frame of acceptance hence avoids the radical dualism of tragic apocalypse, its determinism, and its typical issue in suicidal, homicidal or even genocidal frenzies (p. 88). Its narratives, in Garrard’s words, “emphasise the provisionality of knowledge, free will, ongoing struggle and a plurality of social groups with differing responsibilities” (p. 107). Enzensberger’s pragmatic philosophy and comic form are diametrically opposed to the apocalyptic polarisation of responses to the crisis in our relationship to the environment expressed with such clarity by Kaiser. Sooner or later, he implies, humanity will disappear. It is up to us in the meantime to make the most of the ‘reprieve’ offered. Kaiser had confronted his audience with the challenge of recognising the crisis and taking radical action. Disillusioned with such revolutionary thought patterns, Enzensberger is more concerned with his readers taking responsibility for the present and with the quest for a managed solution that might reconcile techno-economic advancement with human environmental welfare in awareness of the limits of Earth’s resources. His playful, ironic approach encourages detachment from and critical reflection on the discourse of catastrophe. Der Untergang der Titanic combines, in the words of Manon Delisle (2001: 239f.), modernist enlightenment with elements of Postmodernism.

III Negotiations between Nature and Culture

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4 Heideggerian Ecopoetics and the Nature Poetry Tradition Naming and Dwelling in Loerke and Bobrowski

4.1 Heidegger’s conception of dwelling and poetry in ecocritical perspective “Dichterisch wohnet der Mensch”, Martin Heidegger cited Friedrich Hölderlin 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 Jünger and his brother Friedrich Georg Jünger2 – 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. 129

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In the final chapter of The Song of the Earth, Jonathan Bate explores the usefulness of Heidegger’s ideas in defining the potential of creative writing, and particularly poetry, to further the ecological project. The distinctive contribution of poetic writing, he argues, lies less in a crude attempt to promote ecological arguments than in “a poiesis (Greek ‘making’) of the oikos (Greek ‘home’ or ‘dwelling-place’)” (ibid. 245). Bate uses the term ‘ecopoetics’ for both poetic and critical practices, defining the latter in Heideggerian terms as seeking “not to enframe literary texts, but to meditate upon them, to thank them, to listen to them, albeit to ask questions of them” (ibid. 268). Informed by her reading of post-Heideggerian studies by Yves Bonnefoy, Michel Haar and Michael Zimmermann, Kate Rigby has since confirmed the philosopher’s importance for ecocritical analysis, but voiced a number of reservations and introduced modifications, which I discuss below.3 Though he is concerned with the arts in general, Bate assigns to poetry a privileged place, because of its special ability to provide glimpses of utopia – without deceiving us into accepting them as reality. In poiesis, he writes, the poet imagines himself at one with nature again, as in childhood. But the introduction of language to convey the experience simultaneously opens up a gap between the subject and nature. The attempt to reanimate the moment of union linguistically is a seeking after lost nature (ibid. 75). Poetic language is “a special kind of expression which may effect an imaginative reunification of mind and nature, though it also has a melancholy awareness of the illusoriness of its own utopian vision” (ibid. 245). Writing, he paraphrases Heidegger, is the archetypal place of severance and alienation from Earth, but poetry is “a special kind of writing [ … ] which has the peculiar power to speak ‘earth’. Poetry is the song of the earth” (ibid. 251). Though Bate draws quite extensively on other cultural theorists in the course of his book, it is Heidegger who he finds most congenial. Heidegger’s alignment with the Nazis between 1933 and 1936, his disregard for democracy and his anti-Semitism, from all of which he never subsequently distanced himself satisfactorily,4 are troubling factors which necessitate a reformulation of his concept of dwelling so as to avoid its elitist and racist implications. This is, however, only one instance of the awkward historical links between environmental fundamentalism and totalitarian political ideologies (see Biehl and Staudenmaier 1995). Bate refers to Anna Bramwell’s account of the political history of ecological thinking in the twentieth century (Bramwell 1989), which is focused (rather one-sidedly) on the connections between Deep Ecology and fascism, cites Luc Ferry’s denunciation of ecologism as inherently

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fascist in The New Ecological Order (Ferry 1995) and alludes to the Social Darwinism and racism of Ernst Haeckel, concluding: Nature is so various that no consistent political principles can be derived from it. [ … ] When ecopolitics is developed into political system, its case [ … ] is hopeless. It may become fascism (Darré), or romantic neofeudalism (Ruskin), or utopian socialism (William Morris, Murray Bookchin), or philosophical anarchism (William Godwin, Peter Kropotkin). Whatever it becomes, it ceases to be ecopoetics. (pp. 267f.) His solution is to draw a line between ecocriticism (as a form of criticism comparable to feminism and postcolonialism, setting out to change society) and ecopoetics. The latter, with which he claims to be exclusively concerned, has less to do with “assumptions or proposals about particular environmental issues” than with “reflecting upon what it might mean to dwell with the earth”. Further, “works of art can themselves be an imaginary state of nature, imaginary ideal ecosystems, and by reading them, by inhabiting them, we can start to imagine what it might be like to live differently upon the earth” (pp. 250f.). Bate’s personal preference is most clearly expressed where he writes: “Ecopoetics must concern itself with consciousness. When it comes to practice, we have to speak in other discourses” (p. 266). He nevertheless acknowledges the “dilemma of Green reading”: “that it must, yet it cannot, separate ecopoetics from ecopolitics”. In practice, as we shall see below, Bate goes beyond “pre-political” ecopoetics (ibid.) to a form of criticism which is very much mindful of the political intention and impact of a given work. A second distinctive feature of Bate’s conception of the function of poetry as facilitating dwelling, and resisting the self-destructive forces in modern civilisation, is that it embraces Heidegger’s metaphysics. In the German philosopher’s conception of poetic creation as ‘Entbergen’ (a translation of the Greek alétheia, meaning ‘revelation’, ‘unconcealment’ or ‘letting be’), he finds confirmation of his own conviction that poetry performs a religious function, giving us access to reality in a way ordinary language cannot: For Heidegger, poetry can, quite literally, save the earth. [ … ] For Heidegger, language is the house of being; it is through language that unconcealment takes place for human beings. By disclosing the being of entities in language, the poet lets them be. That is the special, the sacred role of the poet. (p. 258. My emphasis)

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To secular readers and critics this sacralisation of poetry will seem a throwback to the poetics of Romantic pantheism. (It is therefore more to Rigby’s taste than to Garrard’s.) Whereas religious feeling has been a powerful force behind environmentalist commitment, and nature spirituality played its part in the green movement in Germany in the 1980s, it cannot be relied on as the sole basis for the ethics of our relationship with the natural environment. Nor would Bate’s ecopoetic give insight into the work of some of the foremost twentieth-century German poets writing on nature such as Bertolt Brecht. However, we shall see that it provides a congenial framework for discussion of the central tradition of German twentieth-century nature poetry – a genre rooted in Monism. Bate stands on less controversial ground in his explication of Heidegger’s critique of technology, an understanding of which is necessary to appreciate the role of poetry in “saving the earth”. Heidegger was acutely conscious of the tendency of the modern age to exploit nature with ruthless rationality, and of the danger of this stifling other possible ways of interacting with nature. Modern technology is characterised by a “challenging-forth” (“Herausfordern”) and “setting-upon” (“Stellen”) things, which reduce not only the things themselves, but also humankind, to raw material or “Bestand” (“standing reserve”), and restrict human living to mere production and consumption.5 Heidegger regards technological creation as a legitimate activity, indeed a quintessential human one. But we need, rather than continuing the contemporary scientific “enframing” and “harnessing” of nature, to develop that earlier, alternative form of téchne he calls poíesis. The poíesis of the fine arts is a form of téchne which originally indicated a bringing forth of the true into the beautiful (Heidegger 2000: 35). The acts of poets and artists are ones of reception as much as production, responding to the call of “unconcealment”. Poetry is thus a “presencing”, not a mere representation. Technology too has the potential to be a “Her-vor-bringen”, an “ins Erscheinen bringen”, an “in den Vorschein bringen” (i.e. a mode of bringing forth, presencing and revealing). Poetry is for Heidegger both a model for human production and the prime medium through which we explore our connection with and dislocation from the Earth. Its supremely important function is enabling us to dwell on the Earth. Taking the phrase “poetically man dwells” from Hölderlin’s late poetic fragment ‘In lieblicher Bläue’, he asserts that poetry is “what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling” (English translation 1975: 218; German original 2000: 196). The poet’s task is not least to recall the

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wholeness of being in the face of the ravages of industrial development; indeed, Heidegger appears to be saying in ‘Wozu Dichter?’: “To look out for the integral entirety of beings is to take a hint from the phenomena of advancing technology, a hint in the direction of those regions from where, perhaps, an originary, constructive overcoming of the technical could come” (English translation 2002: 217; German original 1977: 290).6 The poet must then be capable of discerning the danger that is assailing man in his very being (p. 294). In ‘Bauen, Wohnen, Denken’, one of his more intuitive and poetic essays, “wohnen” is associated not only with feeling at home in and being content with a place, and belonging, but also with cultivating it and safeguarding it against thoughtless exploitation. Living on the Earth in this fuller sense is a specifically human form of being. It implies awareness of our participation in nature and our own mortality, and a will to engage in “building” activities that cultivate and organically construct. Through a series of etymological connections (2000: 150f.), Heidegger links dwelling and building with being at peace, sparing and preserving, concluding: Die Sterblichen wohnen, insofern sie die Erde retten [ … ]. Die Rettung entreißt nicht nur einer Gefahr, retten bedeutet eigentlich: etwas in sein eigenes Wesen freilassen. Die Erde retten ist mehr, als sie ausnützen oder gar abmühen. Das Retten der Erde meistert die Erde nicht und macht sich die Erde nicht untertan, von wo nur ein Schritt ist zur schrankenlosen Ausbeutung. (p. 152) Mortals “dwell” in that they save the Earth but less in the sense of snatching things away from danger than of setting them free into their own essence. “Saving” is then the opposite of the modern urge to master the Earth, subjugate and despoil it. In obscure but poetically suggestive lines, Heidegger writes of a primal oneness of the “fourfold” of Earth and sky, divinities and mortals: Aus einer ursprünglichen Einheit gehören die Vier: Erde und Himmel, die Göttlichen und die Sterblichen in eins. Die Erde ist die dienend Tragende, die blühend Fruchtende, hingebreitet in Gestein und Gewässer, aufgehend zu Gewächs und Getier. [ … ] Der Himmel ist der wölbende Sonnengang, der gestaltwechselnde Mondlauf, der wandernde Glanz der Gestirne, [ … ]. Die Göttlichen sind die winkenden Boten der Gottheit. Aus dem heiligen Walten dieser erscheint der Gott in seine Gegenwart oder er entzieht sich in seine Verhüllung. [ … ] Die

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Sterblichen sind die Menschen. Sie heißen die Sterblichen, weil sie sterben können. Sterben heißt, den Tod als Tod vermögen. [ … ] Diese ihre Einfalt nennen wir das Geviert. (2000: 151, 152)7 Rigby’s interpretative paraphrase is helpful: the “fourfold” comprises the Earth, understood as the land itself, waterways and the biotic community; the sky with night and day, the seasons and the weather; the traces of an absent God; and fellow humans, who live in the knowledge they will die.8 Dwelling is tantamount to living in this fourfold, which involves sparing the Earth, and restoring it to its true being: “Die Sterblichen sind im Geviert, indem sie wohnen. Der Grundzug des Wohnens aber ist das Schonen. Die Sterblichen wohnen in der Weise, daß sie das Geviert in sein Wesen schonen” (p. 152). Saving the Earth, receiving the sky, awaiting the divinities and learning to accept death are the four ways in which we spare the fourfold and initiate ourselves into our own essential being (p. 153). To dwell, Rigby interprets, is to create and caringly maintain a place of habitation in the fourfold, and it behoves us in particular to preserve things and places which themselves disclose the interweaving or “gathering” of these four elements. This involves attuning ourselves in what we think and say, do and make, to the natural environment (the land, plants, animals and the climate), and leaving open a space for the possibility of the divine, while assenting to our mortality and the ties that bind us to our fellow mortals (2001b: 10). Dwelling, in this sense, possesses a clear ecological dimension, but it does not imply nature conservation to the exclusion of inhabitation and sensitive construction: our relationship with the things among which we live must be guided by the need to “bring the fourfold into the things”. We must learn not only to nurse and nurture the things that grow, but also to specially construct things that do not grow, that is to build: Dwelling preserves the fourfold by bringing the essence of the fourfold into things. But things themselves secure the fourfold only when they themselves as things are let be in their essence. How does this happen? In this way, that mortals nurse and nurture the things that grow, and specially construct things that do not grow. Cultivating and construction are building in the narrower sense. (1993: 353; original German 2000: 153) In view of the racist dimension of Heidegger’s conception of dwelling, Bate undertakes a threefold modification. First, he stresses the need to

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shift the association of dwelling with the ethnically or politically defined Volk or nation to one with the inhabitants of a locality, province or region. Secondly, he draws attention to the leanings of Heidegger’s ecopoetic to Burkean conservatism and the defence of class interests, and stresses the need to distinguish between ownership and belonging: “To inhabit is not to possess. Dwelling is not owning.” Indeed, poets who find their home in a specific environment often have “an imaginative, not a proprietorial, interest in belonging”. Finally, it follows that the ecopoetic vision must be “inclusive, not exclusionary”, that is open to outsiders and newcomers (p. 280). Bate demonstrates the possibility of such an ecopoetic with reference to poems written before and during the First World War by the quintessentially English, unmilitaristic Edward Thomas, but his argument hinges above all on discussion of the poem ‘Todtnauberg’ by Paul Celan, probably the foremost German (Jewish) poet of the Holocaust. (This enigmatic poem, which was written after a visit to Heidegger’s Black Forest home in 1967, appears to record how Celan sought in vain a healing word from the philosopher concerning the past but nevertheless ended by confirming his sharing of his host’s poetics of dwelling.) Drawing on Michel Haar, Kate Rigby reconfigures Bate’s interpretation of Heideggerian “dwelling” in two subtle but important ways. Heidegger’s sense of dwelling was, she argues, certainly by the 1950s, and possibly already in the mid-1930s, not dependent on place of birth, let alone ancestral belonging. It is rather “an achievement, something which we have to learn again and again, something which involves conscious commitment, not something that is in any sense ‘in the blood’” (2001: 11). Secondly, she detects a recognition, in ‘ … dichterisch wohnet der Mensch … ’, that some form of loss or exile is intrinsic to dwelling. Heidegger can be read as saying that encounter the absence or strangeness of a place before we can begin to attune ourselves to it in dwelling. Poets admit us to dwelling precisely to the extent that they allow even the most familiar things to appear in all their strangeness, as if encountered for the first time (pp. 11f.). This finds support in Heidegger’s conception of the poetic language which “has the peculiar power to speak ‘earth’” (Bate) as being characterised by a particular type of image, which allows the familiar to appear in all its strangeness. The poetic image seeks to reveal the essence of things without subjugating them to the structures of abstract, rational and instrumental human thought. Poetic images are “not mere fantasies and illusions but imaginings that are visible inclusions of the alien in the sight of the familiar” (English translation 1975: 226; German original 2000: 204f.).

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The role of poetry in fostering dwelling is further explored by Heidegger in the essay ‘Wozu Dichter?’ and revisited at the end of ‘Die Frage nach der Technik’. There is a parallel between Heidegger’s faith in the ability of poetry to preserve the humanness of man and the thingness of things in the age of capitalism and the nuclear arms race (1977: 292), and Adorno’s conception of the potential of art to gesture toward utopian solutions by reproducing the beauty of nature, with its promise of freedom, peace and belonging. According to Heidegger, our very “unshieldedness” (“Schutzlossein”), the inevitability of our own death and the patent possibility of the self-extinction of humankind through nuclear war afford a glimmer of hope. They may bring us to cease to repress knowledge of our mortality and recognise in death the supreme law, one which sets us on our “way to the other side of life, and so into the whole of the pure draft”: “Er [der Tod] ist es, der die Sterblichen in ihrem Wesen anrührt und sie so auf dem Weg zur anderen Seite des Lebens und so in das Ganze des reinen Bezugs setzt” (p. 304). Poetic language does not seek to describe, but to evoke the wholeness of being, which manifests itself precisely in its concealment, by means of images (2000: 205). “The poetic saying of images gathers the brightness and sound of the heavenly appearances into one with the darkness and silence of what is alien” (English translation 1975: 226; German original 2000: 205). The idea implicit in the terms ‘sound’ and ‘silence’ that nature constitutes a ‘silent’ language, whose sounds convey the essence of things, and that these may be interpreted intuitively by the poet and articulated in human language, is familiar from Herder’s writings on the origin of language and played a central role in Romantic poetics. Its presence in Heidegger’s thinking is surprising, given that its ‘logical’ explanation lies in the premodern and pre-Kantian conception of a unity of mind and matter, and intrinsic correspondences between the spheres of natural phenomena and the intellect. It confirms the Neoplatonic metaphysical basis of this aspect of his philosophy, which is also hinted at in his systematic use of metaphors of light for the appearance of the divine.

4.2 Poetry as an articulation of nature’s sounds and as a translation of its signs: Naming, saying and singing For those who listen attentively, the language of nature is, according to Heidegger, a quality latent in all human language. Poets’ special ability is to recognise it and allow it to speak out in their work. “Strictly, it is

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language that then speaks”, he writes: Man first speaks when, and only when, he responds to language by listening to its appeal. [ … ] Language beckons us, at first and then again at the end, towards a thing’s nature. [ … ] But the responding in which man authentically listens to the appeal of language is that which speaks in the element of poetry. The more poetic a poet is [ … ] the greater is the purity with which he submits what he says to an ever more painstaking listening. (1975: 216; German original 2000: 194) Poetry “corresponds” to authentic language, which directs us towards the true being of things. It is a “response” to the latter’s “appeal” in which the intensity of poetic concentration is determined by the purity with which the poet grounds his words in a painstaking process of listening. There is a paradoxical freedom to be gained from such speaking, which involves becoming “one who listens, though not one who simply obeys” (English translation 1993: 330; German original 2000: 26). Bate expands on this simultaneous listening and speaking of poetry, which is carried out through naming, saying and singing. Naming, he notes, gives form to as yet formless perception. Delineating and “revealing” the perceived object, it effectively brings it into existence as an entity in its own right. (This is the basis of pre-scientific belief in the “magic” power of language to create, which is reflected in the biblical account of the creation by the word of God.) However, naming is an act which in normal circumstances today epitomises the human domination of nature, in that it subjugates things to categories designed around human perception and the satisfaction of human needs. Bate’s ecopoetics implicitly involves a different, poetic kind of naming, in which “to name a place is to allow that place its being” (p. 175), and poets let being truly be by naming and saying it.9 For Heidegger, poetry is also distinguished by being singing. Echoing Joseph von Eichendorff’s quintessentially Romantic poem ‘Wünschelrute’ (“Schläft ein Lied in allen Dingen, / Die da träumen fort und fort, / Und die Welt hebt an zu singen, / Triffst Du nur das Zauberwort”), in which the poet imagines himself freeing the Earth from an enchanted sleep, and redeeming it by divining its secret, he describes it as a “re-singing” of the poem of the Earth (2000: 204). In ‘Wozu Dichter?’, Heidegger asserts similarly that to be a poet means “singing, to attend to the track of the fugitive gods” (2002: 202). Singing is saying “in a greater degree”, “turned away from all purposeful self-assertion” (English translation 2002: 237; German original 1977: 316).

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Besides revealing things, naming, saying and singing can be acts of recalling, which preserve what is vanishing (including ways of life or endangered plant species). Heidegger quotes from a letter of Rainer Maria Rilke’s: Our task is this, to imprint this provisional, frail earth so deeply, sufferingly and passionately that its essence rises up again within us “invisibly”. We are the bees of the invisible. We gather constantly the honey of the visible, in order to preserve it in the great golden hive of the Invisible.” (English translation 2002: 231; German original 1977: 308. Emphasis in original) Bate concludes that “a refuge for nature, for the letting-be of Being, must be found in poetry” (p. 264). The “saying” of poets, Heidegger comments, more complicatedly but also more suggestively, again with reference to Rilke, “concerns the remembering (making inward) reversal of consciousness which turns our defencelessness into the invisibility of world inner space” (English translation 2002: 233f.; German original 1977: 312). Poets turn the unwholeness of human defencelessness into the wholeness of worldly existence (p. 316). It is no accident that this sense of the ability of poetry to serve as a spiritual–intellectual refuge, not merely compensating for sufferings in the real world of unemployment, political oppression and war, but also in some way healing the wounds inflicted by these, was formulated in the political, economic and social turmoil of the immediate post-war years. Similar ideas played an important role in the writing of poets of Inner Emigration such as Oskar Loerke and Wilhelm Lehmann. Yet they have a potentially problematic dimension. This became apparent after the Second World War, where nature poetry ignored human suffering and continued to focus on seeking to let beings unfold in the language of the poem. Heidegger not only draws on the poets Hölderlin and Rilke, he also illustrates his conceptions of dwelling and poetry with reference to Goethe and Schiller, Trakl and Celan. However, the relevance of Heideggerian ecopoetics to the work of some of the twentieth-century German poets most explicitly concerned with nature and our relationship with it, namely the ‘Naturlyrik’ of Loerke and Lehmann, Kramer and Eich, Huchel and Bobrowski, Krolow, Becker and Kirsten, remains curiously unexplored. In the following, I ask to what extent the issues it addresses and the questions it raises may be applicable to two of them – Oskar Loerke, whose writing spans the period from the turn of the century up to the 1940s and the East German Johannes Bobrowski who

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wrote most of his poems in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Neither of these, it should be noted, appears to have been directly informed by Heidegger. Loerke was exceptionally widely read and absorbed many influences but perhaps owed most to Schopenhauer and the Monism of Gustav Fechner. Bobrowski was primarily indebted to Hölderlin and the counter-Enlightenment thinker Johann Georg Hamann. That they should, nevertheless, possess affinities with Heidegger is unsurprising: in their responses to the disorientation resulting from twentieth-century modernisation and the experience of war and dictatorship, the poets, like the philosopher, drew on Hölderlin’s world view of a modern world abandoned by the gods, in which the poet must seek out the traces of the divine. Loerke and Bobrowski also shared Heidegger’s understanding of a mystic link between word and thing in the authentic language of nature to which poetry constantly aspires. Responding to the epistemological and linguistic crisis of modernity, they sought to develop an alternative way of speaking of nature to the language of instrumental reason, articulating a relationship different from the anthropocentrism of the technologically enhanced but phenomenologically impoverished scientific gaze. The traditional notion of a “language of nature” served to counter what David Ehrenfeld has called the “arrogance of humanism” (Ehrenfeld 1978), which is otherwise present in Heidegger’s conception of human language as the “house of being”. Taking issue with the implication that signification is an exclusively human prerogative, which Bate makes explicit in his formulation: “Things need us so they can be named” (2000: 265), Kate Rigby asks how the naming which is central to language can avoid being an inherently “enframing” activity, ignoring the qualities of the things themselves, and overriding the pattern of interrelationship prevailing between them. If poetic naming is to differ from ordinary language, the poet must devise practical ways of making it so (2001b: 12f.). Rigby suggests three practical ways in which poets can decentre the subject, and join their voice to that of the land. The first is by foregrounding the materiality of language: that is sounds and rhythms, metrical and phonetic patterns. A second is by weaving a web of meanings within the poem and between it and its intertexts so as to mimic the complex interrelationships in natural systems. Finally and most importantly, the poet can and must celebrate the world beyond the text: the sounds, motions, colours and forms of the sustaining Earth (ibid. 13). We shall see how Loerke and Bobrowski develop corresponding strategies.

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A second, related caveat of Rigby’s with regard to Bate’s ecopoetics10 is her insistence on recognition that there could be a mode of being going beyond what it is possible to express in human language. Acknowledgement of our inadequacy in this respect is necessary, she argues, to avoid the ethically troubling hierarchy present in some of Heidegger’s statements, long after his shift away from the strong anthropocentrism of Sein und Zeit. Drawing on Michel Haar, she calls for a “negative ecopoetics”, one more Rilkean than Heideggerian, in which “poetry sings the sayable world, but so as to let it be beyond every name” (p. 15). The poetic work, she suggests, can save the Earth by disclosing it as only partially and imperfectly sayable: by drawing attention, for instance, to its own status as text and as a mode of enframing or by foregrounding the non-equation of word and thing. Poetic strategies include disavowals of sayability, moments of semantic incoherence and accentuation of the formal qualities of texts which declare them to be human artefacts rather than self-disclosures of nature.11 German nature poetry in the mid-twentieth century possesses an old-fashioned confidence in the power of the poetic word to express reality, and its conception of nature as dependent on human articulation in order to come into the fullness of being would seem at first glance diametrically opposed to such ecological humility. However, we shall see that it embraces other aspects of the ecopoetics of negativity.

4.3 Oskar Loerke Loerke’s poetry is concerned with dwelling, in the broader sense of making us at home on the earth, by attuning us to the natural environment and making us conscious of our own mortality and aware of the presence of the divine. However, the term ‘wohnen’ does not feature significantly in his poems, and he does not seek to foster identification with or promote the cultivation of specific places, let alone safeguard them against exploitation. Indeed, Loerke might seem a subject unlikely to reward ecopoetic examination, given the uncertainty of readers about the reality of the natural objects in his poems, which is reflected in the recurring debate in the secondary literature as to whether he should be classified as a ‘nature poet’ at all. Loerke’s landscapes defy conventional distinction between mimetic description and extensions of the self or projections of the poetic subject. He himself repeatedly asserted that his poems originated in personally experienced situations and places. He responded indignantly, for example, to a review of his volume Der längste Tag, which interpreted his poems in terms of images, that he gave the

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world as it was, “imageless and large with things” (“Ich gab die bilderlose, dingegrosse Welt” – Loerke 1996: 17). However, his poetic landscapes are curiously generalised. Actual places, for instance in the mountains of the Mittelgebirge or the woods of the island of Rügen, are internalised in a ‘Binnenraum’ of the intellect or spirit. “Der Abendflieger schwebt am Fensterkreuze. / Sein Klang schraubt ihn zum Binnenraum herein, / Wo Aldebaran schon und Beteigeuze / Und fremder Lichter andre längst sich reihn”, he writes in the poem ‘Namen’ (Loerke 1983: 369).12 “Gebirge wächst, wo sonst nur Angst gedeiht, / In mir”, the poem ‘Gebirge wächst’ opens, and continues: “Sich selber weiß – ich frage nicht – / Das Reich der Tiere in mir und der Pflanzen” (pp. 331–3). Loerke, who is generally regarded as one of the most important, but least accessible German poets in the first half of the twentieth century, is a thinking, dialectical writer rather than one expressing moods, feelings or impressions, and his empathy with nature is based on the abstract principle of its underlying rhythms and musicality rather than the beauty of plants, animals or landscapes. Though his childhood and teenage years were spent on the family’s farm in West Prussia, he was a city dweller for most of his adult life, whose experience of nature was restricted to travels in his twenties, and, in his later years, holidays and the garden of his house in the leafy Berlin suburb of Frohnau. Urban settings are as common as rural ones in his poems, and the city is no counterpoint to the country, but equally a site of potential experience of the divine. Loerke is a complex writer – for all the inwardness of his verse, he grapples consistently with socio-political issues – who studied philosophy, history, languages and music. He read widely (Herder, Goethe, Jean Paul, Novalis and Stifter were among the authors he found most congenial) and absorbed themes and poetic techniques from world literature. (Essays and poems reflect, for instance, his admiration for Pelo-thien, the Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty, whose work he first made acquaintance with in an anthology of translations of Chinese poetry published in 1905.) References to literature, music and art are as much in evidence as the natural environment, and Loerke’s poems are constructed as much from intertexts (the Bible and the speeches of Buddha, Greek myth and folk tales, and German literature from Walther von der Vogelweide to Hölderlin and Goethe) as from the physical world around him. They thus combine historical and geographical specificity with the timelessness and universality of metaphor, traditional mimesis with textuality.13 Loerke’s diaries show the foundations of his poetics were laid down in the first decade of the century, and belong in the context of

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Neoromanticism.14 He was influenced by Maeterlinck and George, and shared the cosmic world view of contemporaries such as Julius Hart, Arno Holz, Theodor Däubler and Alfred Mombert. He was probably already acquainted with the writings of Gustav Theodor Fechner and the Monist thinking of Ernst Haeckel before he met the influential literary editor Moritz Heimann, with whom he was to work together in the S. Fischer publishing house from 1917 on and shared his interests with the members of the literary ‘Donnerstagsrunde’ assembled by Heimann during the First World War.15 By 1910 he had found his own voice, developing distinctive poetic themes and techniques, and he experienced a breakthrough in 1913, when he was awarded the Kleist prize. During the First World War he came into his own as an outsider, and was for a time at the forefront of literary developments through his links with the Expressionist movement. In the 1920s, Loerke’s prose writing, essays and poetry were, however, virtually ignored by all but a small circle of friends. The poems he is best remembered for today are probably those written during the Third Reich, when nature poetry became one of the principal vehicles for articulation of the stance of opposition to the Nazis ranging from non-cooperative refractoriness and recalcitrance to passive resistance and (still outwardly unpolitical) literary dissidence known as Inner Emigration. In Loerke’s poems the landscape is experienced as a manifestation of the divine. “Ein Gott, im Anschaun seiner selbst versteint, / Dünkt das Gebirg. Kleid Gottes ist die Schicht / Von Erde, die sein Leben hüllt”, he writes in ‘Göttertragik’ (p. 67). The poet’s task is to record his intuitive recognition of the eternal being or order behind the chaotic world of surface appearance: “Denn fremd ist nichts, was ewig, / Nur fremd manchmal sein Kleid. / Und uns soll nicht verwirren / Die formverwirrte Ewigkeit” (‘Ein Traum’, pp. 38–40). The timeless constellations in the heavens above, which are echoed in the ever repeated cycles of birth and death in the natural world below, provide consolation for our human inadequacy, fragmentation and mortality through the promise of participation in their perfection and permanence. The poem ‘Mystische Sicht’ depicts a natural world animated by the spirit of the earth, in which the branches of a tree swaying in the wind gesture to the stars, their “brothers”: So steigt die dumpfe Erde in den Baum, Der aus ihr wächst, Und wiegt die starren Glieder in den schwanken Gliedern. Und er sieht, der schwarze Stern,

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Aus grüner Seele brausend, Nach hellen hinüber Und streichelt brüderlich und scheu nach ihnen hin, Als wären sie ganz nahe. So wohnt die Erde denn im Wipfel ihrer Bäume? – Sie sinnt sich aus in allen Wesen, Wird nie zu Ende kommen. (pp. 334f.) The influence of the mid-nineteenth-century Monist Fechner is evident here, and in entries in Loerke’s diaries ascribing a soul to elements in the landscape, comparable to the human soul, as an explanation of its emotional impact on and communication with the subject. The turn of the century witnessed, according to Eric Jacobsen (2005: 89), a “veritable Fechner-revival”. In the years leading up to the founding of the Monist League in 1906, his two most poetically speculative works, Nana, oder über das Seelenleben der Pflanzen (1848) and Zend-Avesta oder über die Dinge des Himmels und des Jenseits: vom Standpunkt der Naturbetrachtung (1851) were reprinted and read avidly alongside such popular scientific works as Ernst Haeckel’s Welträtsel: Gemeinverständliche Studien über monistische Philosophie (1899), which expressed exuberant admiration for all living things, and Wilhelm Bölsche’s Das Liebesleben in der Natur (1898–1903), which argued that all things had a common purpose, namely to love and to evolve in their capacity to love. In the 1850s, Fechner had been one of the foremost defenders of the panentheist world view against the empiricist scepticism of his contemporaries Rudolf Virchow and Emil Dubois-Reymond, and the materialist reductionism of Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Vogt and Ludwig Büchner. Building on the Romantic physicist Lorenz Oken’s conception of correspondences between the human organs of perception and the creatures in the plant and animal worlds (in Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie, 1811–12), he developed a theory of psycho-physical parallels between the human, animal and plant kingdoms, the planetary system and the cosmos. Behind this stood the German tradition of dual-aspect Monism. Initiated by Herder and Goethe, who drew on Spinoza’s theory of mind and matter being equal attributes of the infinite being; this philosophy had received its classical exposition in Schelling’s Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797). Fechner’s ascription of souls to all living beings, and also the moon, the sun and the stars, which he saw as ultimately united in a ‘world soul’, placed humanity in a position mid-way in terms of complexity between the smallest entities and the divine whole. Fanciful as these speculations were, they had and have, as

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Jacobsen notes, like the Lovelock/Margulis Gaia-theory of the 1970s, the advantage of endowing nature with subjectivity and intrinsic value (Jacobsen 2005: 84f.). The embeddedness of humans in nature, they implied, provided an alternative to Cartesian dualism and presupposed that creation was not there purely for humans’ benefit. Fechner’s writings thus implied an ecological value system more strongly than any Monist cosmology had done before and anticipated today’s pathocentric eco-humanism (ibid. 325). An aspect of Monist thinking which particularly attracted poets at the turn of the twentieth century, when the despiritualisation of nature was progressing apace, was the idea that aesthetic appreciation of nature provided presentiments of the world soul. Heinrich and Julius Hart, Wilhelm Bölsche and Bruno Wille, members of the Friedrichshagener Kreis, had stressed the religious value of the aesthetic experience of nature in their writings since the early 1890s. However, the great populariser of this idea was Ernst Haeckel, whose Kunstformen der Natur (1899–1904) presented natural beauty as a pathway to the spiritual, arguing that even the simplest forms of life were ‘ensouled’ and possessed artistic creativity. In ‘Maienmeditation’, Loerke sees the all-pervading spirit of the universe in the flowers of chestnut trees lit up by evening sunshine: “Es ist der Geist, der in den Stämmen fährt, // Der dunkel auffährt, immer auf und auf, / Aus ewiger Mitte ein Getrief, Getrauf”. Man is estranged from Mother Nature, but can experience the great unity of being in an aesthetic shock which transcends time: Du Geist, – ich Geist, wir kennen uns nicht mehr, Und fahren aus demselben Grunde her. Zerwrungen ist die lange Nabelschnur Zur selben Muttergottes der Natur. Wir Menschen sind ihr nur in Schauern treu: Der Zeiten Schichten wirbeln dann wie Spreu, Wir sehn Äonen eng im Augenblick (pp. 71f.) The motif of kinship between humans and animals and plants is found in many poems. In ‘Die beiden unsichtbaren Heere’, the poet guides a moth gently away from his desk lamp, because he recognises “Du lebst und also bist du meinesgleichen” and that “Die Kräfte bleiben nicht in Grenzen / Gezirkt, und Tier und Mensch und Pflanze tauschen” (p. 82).16 In a late poem, ‘Ende’, which imagines the feelings of a tree

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which has just been felled, death is described as a transition to another, superior form of being: Ein Schwindel faßt es, Und es geht unter. Doch im Erlöschen, Mit neuen Organen, Ahnt es läuten seinen Wandel, Der ihm stumm war achtzig Jahre [ … ] (p. 452) There is a parallel here, as in the earlier poem ‘Die Wurzeln’ (in which the poet dreams he is a giant oak, spreading its roots all over the world), not only with Fechner and Haeckel, but also with the cosmological musings in Bruno Wille’s widely read novel Offenbarungen des Wachholderbaums (1901). Wille’s protagonist learns from a juniper tree, the voice of the cosmic spirit of the universe, that all material is linked with spirit. The human soul is composed of smaller souls and is itself part of larger souls. The death of a tree or of an individual is a trivial change in the life of the oceanic Allseele, a mere exchange of partners in the eternal dance of the tiniest atomic souls. The human soul thus continues to exist after death as a psycho-physical presence in the cosmos (Jacobsen 2005: 267f.). The spirit of life unites all living things within a single organism, and the self extends beyond the body to the environment as a sphere surrounding it, which he calls “Umleib” (p. 269). Loerke’s importance lies less in the poetic transmission of this Monist cosmology and nature religiosity, which now seems quaintly antiquated, than in his inflection of it in confrontation with modernity.17 His poems express the alienation of modern man from nature and the post-Nietzschean generation’s break with the established church. The Expressionist anguish of ‘Die Einzelpappel’ (pp. 26f.), ‘Meeressturm im Samland’ (p. 41), ‘Die Ebene’ (p. 115) and ‘Wiederkehr’ (pp. 119f.) reflects a personal crisis of faith in which Loerke broke with the Christian piety he had been brought up in but also the experience of his contemporaries. The syncretist religiosity he subsequently articulates is characterised by sombreness of tone and a stress on the stern and distant side of nature. In the afterword to the volume Der Silberdistelwald, which is addressed to Wilhelm Lehmann, he wrote in 1934: Ich lernte bei Dir das immer geschehende Jüngste Gericht gewahren. Ich lernte bei Dir: Im Dasein des Grünen Gottes (kühler und weniger bestimmt gesagt: der Natur) – in seinem bloßen Dasein als dem

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währenden Vollzug seiner Gesetze liegt dieses Gericht: das mildeste und härteste, das denkbar ist. Im Niederfall eines Borkestücks von der hundertjährigen Platane ergeht sein Spruch, im unsichtbaren Altern aller Blätter und aller Adern in den Blättern, im Flug und Schritt der vieltausenderlei Zeiten auf Erden: durch unser Trauern und Freuen scheint das Endgültige. (1958, I: 681f.) Loerke is separated from Fechner by a distinctly modern sense of subjection to laws of nature which are coldly indifferent to the fate of the individual. Transience, suffering and death, and a mixture of resignation and stoic fortitude in the face of these, are the central themes in his poetry. For all his apparent confidence in the divinity and purpose of nature and human life, and in the power of the poetic word, Loerke responds to the dual crisis of modernity: alienation from the natural world and language scepticism. The loss of belief in a direct relationship between word and thing, theorised by Ferdinand de Saussure in his writings on the arbitrariness of the relationship between signifier and signified, and described so memorably in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s fictional letter of Lord Chandos (1902) as a “disintegration of words in the mouth like mouldy mushrooms” (Hofmannsthal 1976: 14), leads him, as we shall see below, to argue, like Heidegger, that there are other, poetic ways of speaking of things capable of truly representing their essence. Loerke’s reaction to the despiritualising of nature through contemporary science was complex: on the one hand, as we have seen, he compensated for the disorientation and loss of meaning in modernity by positing an underlying unity of being (“The world knows its grounding thought, otherwise it would not exist” – 1958, I: 652). However, important elements in his poems run counter to the holist-mystical paradigm: they tend to foreground the difficulties experienced by the subject in recognising this unity and are no mere reconciliatory affirmation of life but reflect a view of human existence as suffering and indeed celebrate suffering as a path to redemption.18 ‘Nachtwanderung zu Tal’ (pp. 44f.), which speaks of a mysterious music drawing the poet on, conveying “the meaning of the earth, painful and invisible”, reflects a melancholy awareness of the illusoriness of the poet’s glimpses of utopia. However, the darker side of Loerke’s writing is perhaps best illustrated by ‘Sonnwendlied der Vögel’, where the birds are compared to seers and prophets. Their magical song sings of the foundations of all Being, which are governed by the daily and annual course of the sun. But its golden wheel rolls inexorably onwards,

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oblivious to the suffering and death of the individual birds: Da oben geht ein goldnes Rad, Das Erden zu Aposteln hat Und alles auf den Erden. Wir tragen all einen Mühlenstein, Der Ast ist zu dünn, wir sind zu klein, Wir werden müde werden. (pp. 19f.) Loerke is often referred to as a poet of Magic Realism. In the section of his study of the author entitled ‘Dichtung als Dasein: Magische Verse’, Walter Gebhard distinguishes between two respects in which Loerke’s writing may be described as ‘magic’. On the one hand, objects in the natural world constitute magic “figures”, and on the other, linguistic metaphors convey these in the poem. In the first sense of the word, configurations of things become transparent, revealing a historical or mythical event or cosmic correspondence in an epiphanic moment of mystical insight. This blossoming of normally insignificant things into representative significance is experienced as if they were speaking to the poet: the unexpected coincidence of different spheres of reality seems magical in its transcendence of time and place. In the second sense, ‘magic’ alludes to the layering of different spheres of reality in the poetic word (for instance through synaesthesia or metaphor). The simplicity of the ‘right’ word, which has been arrived at intuitively and represents a perfect match of art, language and reality, is experienced as ‘given’. The definition of the term ‘Magic Realism’ by Michael Scheffel in his study of the phenomenon (Scheffel 1990) captures a further important aspect of Loerke’s poetry. Scheffel proposes that Magic Realism be regarded as a generic stylistic concept (originating in art criticism, it has been used variously for the literature of Inner Emigration, early post-war writing and the Latin American novel), which possesses a distinct historical focus in German literature between the 1920s and the 1950s. Magic Realism is a post-Expressionist movement distinct from the superficial realism of New Sobriety. It combines precision with atmosphere and realistic detail with dream imagery and reveals a hidden meaning between the lines of the visible phenomena of the landscape through meticulous reproduction of the world of visible objects. By dint of ‘hyperrealist’ magnification, familiar objects become mysterious cyphers of a reality which is experienced as strange and riddlesome. Magic Realism lives from tensions between the material and the imagined, the near and the far, the idyllic and the sinister. Typically, peaceful scenes

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bathed in a harmonious afterglow are framed against the background of a dark, threatening world. The Neoromantic cosmic experience of coincidence of macrocosm and microcosm, of union, participation and plenitude, remains central to Magic Realism, but it is now predominantly situated in an eerie, morbid, enervating atmosphere of “lethargic presentiment” (“träge Erwartung”, p. 98) and accompanied by a feeling of loneliness and helplessness. The quest for a “long lost knowledge of the whole”, as Martin Raschke puts it in a programmatic essay, is prompted by cultural pessimism and political foreboding. “The uncanny”, he writes, “is caught in the noose of the familiar and trusted” (see Scheffel 1990: 95). Though Loerke was a generation older than the Magic Realists at the centre of Scheffel’s study (which is principally concerned with the prose writing of Kasack, Kreuder, Lampe, Lange, Langgässer, Raschke and Saalfeld), and is not discussed there, he has been identified by Burkhard Schäfer (2001) as an important precursor of the movement. His poems certainly express, like their stories, novels and essays, a longing for harmony, while acknowledging alienation and fear, and reflect the fundamental ambivalence of the order of nature summed up by Scheffel in the term “sinister idyll” (p. 99). Like the work of these “visionaries craving order but perceiving decomposition”, they articulate the paradoxical fusion of “fragmentation of the world of things on the one hand, and its harmonisation in an ultimate, invisible order on the other” (p. 112). Schäfer, who builds on Scheffel’s study of Magic Realism, but is led by his particular focus on the motif of waste land and post-industrial wilderness (Ruderalfläche) and its use as a figure of poetological reflection to examine different authors, is prompted by Scheffel’s preoccupation with the “Zwischengeneration” or interstitial generation of German writers in the 1930s and 1940s to reflect on the nature poets as a “Zwischenmoderne” (p. 76). Located between High Modernism (1890–1925) and the second phase of Modernism in the 1960s, both of which emphasised textuality and the autonomy and materiality of the signifier as opposed to traditional mimetics, he describes the Magic Realist nature poets as offering a response to the crisis of (nature) aesthetics in modernity which was essentially conservative, but less anachronistic than a “hybrid coincidence of modernity and traditionalism”. Outsiders on the literary scene in the 1920s, they established a language of peripheralness which acquired acute political significance after 1933. Even during the period of High Modernism, by no means had

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all writers belonged to the avant-garde, which denied the possibility of authentic, non-clichéd articulation of natural beauty in art. This literary project of German nature poetry, which fell out of favour during the post-war phase of economic, industrial and technological development, began to attract interest again in the 1980s. Jörg Zimmermann ended his overview of the history of nature aesthetics in 1982 with a call for redefinition of the artist’s task in such a way as to make clear the responsibility towards nature as “a purpose in itself”: “This includes the possibility of relating art to nature again, mimetically, but in a non-trivial, self-reflexive form” (1982: 147). To what extent, then, does Loerke’s poetry possess an ecopoetic dimension, and seek to further dwelling through naming and singing? Gebhard describes Loerke’s poetry as an attempt to “house” the reader in nature, by granting him or her participation in a reality which is timeless and transcends suffering (Gebhard 1968: 134). In the poem ‘Gebirge wächst’, a hut high up in the Dolomite mountains, threatened by avalanches but surrounded by timeless forests, wild animals and stern, snowcapped mountains is envisaged; it becomes an image for the poem, as a “Haus für Menschengäste / Im Labsal und im Wehsal Ewigkeit” (p. 331). And in one of his essays on Chinese literature, Loerke compares the work of the poet with that of the architect, as a creation out of nothing, giving form to the formless, so there is “something there which can be entered into and lived in by living things”: Der Pinsel tuscht Verse, an allen Wegbiegungen treten sie auf, emsige Baumeister, um eine Architektur aus dem Nichts zu errichten, damit etwas da sei, was von den Lebewesen betreten und bewohnt werden könne. [ … ] Aber auch die Menschen müssen aus dem Schlaf der ungeschichtlichen Gestaltlosigkeit erlöst werden, damit sie in das Diesseits der Anschaulichkeit erwachen. (1958, II: 634). The poems in which Loerke writes of our participation in the transience and suffering which accompanies all life and stresses our link through the spirit with other aspects of nature, great and small, can be seen as seeking to make us at home on the Earth. He touches on the idea of an equality of all being at one point, in ‘Das unsichtbare Reich Sebastian Bachs’, where he says of the invisible realm of music and the spirit: “Dort sind alle Wesen gleich: / Nicht an Stimme und Gesicht, / Doch an Ehre, Recht und Licht” (p. 495). More generally, his poems are a response to the erosion of reality in modernity comparable with the Rilkean

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conception of poets imprinting the “provisional, frail earth so deeply, sufferingly and passionately” on themselves “that its essence rises up again” within them, and thus preserving the memory of disappearing things, like bees gathering the honey of their essence in an invisible hive. What Loerke admires in Pe-lo-thien, for instance, is above all the Chinese poet’s ability to “transform the world by observing it, to destroy and reconstruct it, discovering it in the distance of what is close and the closeness of what is distant” (1958, II: 609). In a world of fragmentation, alienation and suffering, the poem performs a quasi-sacred function, storing away the traces of utopian wholeness.19 The consolation provided by nature’s permanence and harmonious order in a world of transience and vicissitude took on a new dimension during the Third Reich, when Loerke was dismissed from his position as Secretary of the Literature Section of the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts and all but excluded from the literary world. He now envisages nature as an unassailable invisible realm, providing refuge for a community of the spirit, the outcast and persecuted, in which the poet finds peace and companionship with other representatives of culture throughout the ages (see ‘Die Verbannten’, pp. 396f., ‘Der Wald der Welt’, p. 466 and ‘Das unsichtbare Reich Sebastian Bachs’, pp. 495–8). In the poems of the volumes Der Silberdistelwald (1934) and Der Wald der Welt (1936) it is a matrix of values of lasting validity, transcending contemporary reality, a metaphor for humanist cultural tradition and the cultural being of humanity. However, as Gerhard Schulz has commented in his article on ‘Zeitgedicht und innere Emigration’ in Der Silberdistelwald (Schulz 1984), Loerke’s conception of nature remains characterised by ambivalences and contradictions. To a certain extent these may be attributed to mood swings between optimistic defiance and melancholy pessimism. Though nature is timeless, it is also defenceless. In the poem ‘Gebirge wächst’ (pp. 331–3), which has already been shown to exemplify the poet’s mediation between the outer and inner worlds, and to present poetry as a safe house for Loerke’s companions in spirit in the shape of a climber’s hut high in the mountains, the forest is described as surviving natural disasters such as avalanches and regenerating. However, the poem ends darkly, with the mountains saying their primeval power has been sapped by the ‘un-power’ of humans: their brows are faded and their voices have echoed into silence (p. 333). ‘Die Laubwolke’ (p. 449), in which a deciduous tree provides one of the iconic images of Inner Emigration, contrasts with this in imputing to nature, despite its fragility, a fundamental strength and ability to last. The Chinese poet Lao Tse’s motto “Constant is what is easily injured”

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serves as a model for survival in adversity. One of Loerke’s best-known poems because of its political significance as an expression of faith in the ability of the human spirit and cultural tradition to endure oppression, expressed in lines echoing Goethe and Hölderlin, combining the concrete with the abstract, the hymnic with the didactic, and the timeless with immediate political relevance, ‘Die Laubwolke’ presents nature’s annual cycle of renewal as impervious to the saws and axes of gardeners and loggers, whatever the fate of the individual tree. The poem expresses an ultimately subversive conviction that the ordered universe will survive its human violation. The laws of nature, experienced elsewhere as crushing the individual, are here a source of reassurance to the suffering, and though Loerke’s conception of nature is on the whole one of a dynamic process, there is a tendency in the poems written during the Third Reich to represent it as static, as for instance in the poem ‘Tannen’: Ihre Schatten schlugen viel Zirkel im Grase, Der Fingerhut dorrt in der Apothekervase, Die Tannen ragen reglos noch immer Mit grünen Bärten, mit moosigem Schurze, Es endigt das Menschenleben, das kurze – Die riesigen Tannen ragen noch immer: Die Sonne, vom Berge schräg zerschnitten, Ist heute abend nach hundert Jahren nicht tiefer geglitten, Die grünen Türme ragen wie damals, wie eben. (p. 399) Even nature’s indifferent otherness becomes paradoxically comforting, because it signifies a sphere free of short-sighted human desires (“Kurzstrebigkeit” and “Vormundsucht” – 1958, I: 688). Though nature never becomes identical with human principles and concerns, its embrace is experienced on the whole profoundly positively. “Mein Haus, es steht nun mitten / Im Silberdistelwald”, Loerke writes in the mysteriously beautiful poem of the same name (p. 402). “Forest of the world” and “Silver thistle forest” are images for a harmoniously structured world of morality and enlightenment. However, the relationship between humankind and nature is one of mutual dependence. In Pan’s shadow, worldly strife is at peace. But his sleep can be disturbed: “Wenn wir Pans Schlaf verscharren, / Nimmt niemand ihn in Schutz”. A falling star becomes a token of communion between heaven and Earth, and a symbol of the reciprocally caring father–son relationship between

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nature and the poet: Vielleicht, daß eine Blüte Zu tiefer Kommunion Ihm nachfiel und verglühte: Mein Vater du, ich hüte, Ich hüte dich, mein Sohn (ibid.) Loerke’s dwelling is, unlike Heidegger’s, inclusive and open to “Zeitgenossen aus vielen Zeiten”, that is all of good intention. Rather than being associated with possession, ancestral or racial belonging, it is something earned by the individual through engagement in the world of the spirit, the intellect, culture and moral values. For all the anthropocentric bias of his conception of language, we shall see in the following that Loerke also acknowledges a certain linguistic autonomy of nature, which goes some way towards meeting the requirements of an ecologically sound poetic. In various places, Loerke wrote of nature’s dependence on human transformation in order to attain completion and form. An entry in his Gedanken und Bemerkungen zu Literatur und Leben written in 1927 asserts that naming grants phenomena permanence by developing and unfolding the experience of them: “Erst wenn die Sprache bis dahin noch nicht erfaßte Dinge erfaßt, sind sie in der Welt. Sonst aber gehen sie vorüber, auch für den, der ihr Urerlebnis hatte, weil er diesem Urerlebnis nicht genügend weit nachgegangen ist, weil er es nicht entfaltete” (1996: 22). The poetic word extracts the spiritual essence from transient materiality, he notes in a commentary on Till Eulenspiegel: “Das magische Wort hat den Geist der Verweslichkeit abgejagt” (1958, II: 639). Indeed, it is capable of preserving and redeeming reality, as he writes in an essay on Chinese literature. Poetry, unlike the everyday language of contemporaries, possesses a holy and demonic power, it has the ability to invest non-being with new existence: “Das magische Wort ist der letzte Heiland, wenn alles zerbricht: das ganze, klare, treffende, erkennende, tragende, trächtige, – nicht das zergliedernde, knechtisch mitteilende, nur einkaufende und ausgebende, herumirrende, schönrednerische” (1958, II: 633). Poems concerning naming include ‘Die Vogelstraßen’, in which nature is described as “waiting anxiously” for the poet to give it meaning (p. 256), and ‘Der Dichter’, in which Loerke writes, echoing the Platonic and Gnostic understanding of creation through divine light,

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that mortal things are dependent on us to bring them to life: Dein Urlicht treibt die Berge herrenlos, Und es bewegt die Länder ernst und groß Wie Meer! – Doch Sterbliches, darauf entsprungen, Erwartet starr das Licht von unsren Zungen. (p. 238) The image appears again in ‘Namen’ (“Du nährst das mitgenommne Erdenlicht” – p. 369). By addressing things, we bring them into existence, and by giving nameless things our names, we overcome transience. However, if the dumb things rely on our naming them, it is an action through which we also learn about ourselves: Sprichst du sie an, die fern ist viele Leben, So schwebt die Kugel unter deinen Schuh. Den namenlosen unsre Namen geben, Uns Kindern spielt es die Äonen zu. Auch unter dir die nahen Dinge kamen, Die stummen wie vor deinen Mund Und bitten dich um neue Namen, In ihnen machen sie dir selbst dich kund. (pp. 369f.) Loerke’s conception of naming also corresponds to Bate’s ecopoetics in that it reflects a belief, like that of Heidegger, that poetic language constitutes a particular way of naming things, one which lets them be, and brings them into a fuller being. If poetic language gives existence to unarticulated experience, it is neither through pure subjectivity nor by dint of mere technical skill. The poet responds rather to beings, which seek entry into the poem, Loerke writes in the afterword to Der Silberdistelwald: Ich hatte mein Erleben heimzuleiten in die Form seiner Existenz durch Sprache. In ihr wird keine begnadungslüsterne Beichte angenommen, ebensowenig wie in den musikalischen Formen. Und auch keine Technik schafft Existenz. [ … ] Ich stand vielmehr in einem Zustrom der einfachen Dinge und Wesenheiten, die keine Bedingungen für ihren Eintritt in das Gedicht mitbrachten, außer daß sie darauf drangen, ihre volle Wirklichkeit zu behalten. (1958, I: 683f.) In later poems such as ‘Die Rast’ (pp. 350f.), this voicing of nature takes on a distinctly political dimension. On a stormy autumnal walk through

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the mountains, the trees lashed by the wind seem to reflect the helplessness of the individual. However, descending into a sheltered valley for a rest, the poet sees the buds on the trees in their protective casing, safe from the rigours of winter and awaiting the next spring. Friends, as he describes them, who have never broken silence, open themselves, and their languages are silent in the poet’s words: “In mir übt seine Sprache verfrüht / Der Wipfel: er enthüllt sich, er blüht.” Loerke’s stance during the Third Reich ranged between political non-conformity and passive resistance, but the liberation of nature is unmistakably linked with human liberty and justice in his poetic project. In the poem ‘Katakombe’, he exhorts his companions, thinkers and artists who are, like the Early Christians, forced to live in catacombs, to search for the magic word which provides protection from the night: Sucht Katakombenbrüder für das Wort. Es pflanzt den Hall aus Gott im Hohlen, Und Nachhall klärt sich auf zum Urbefehl: Da kreist, zum Schweben herbefohlen, Das All, verheimlicht erst, dann ohne Hehl. Resede schaukelt und Limone. Es sammelt den versprengten goldnen Hort Die Nacht nicht ein; sie weiß, er wohne Befreit, verbürgt im Katakombenwort. (pp. 481f.) Loerke’s diction is here old-fashioned, his poetic form conventional and his belief in the power of the human word seemingly untroubled by modern linguistic scepticism. Yet he was from his earliest writings conscious of the barrier between self and ‘speechless’ life, and his poems express sensitivity towards the violation of reality in human language. The poet’s words and images are not imposed on nature arbitrarily but arrived at through communication with it. The speaker opens himself up to the mineral, vegetable and animal world by looking and listening; his speaking Earth is a submission to its need for self-reflection which demands of the subject forgetting of the self and imaginative empathy. Commenting on the poem ‘Gebirge wächst’, Loerke uses the mystical expression “hollow” (“Höhlung”) for the sphere in which nature is experienced as communicating with him. [Das Irdische] zeugt durch Schwere, Gestalt, Wachstum, Entwicklung wie mit lauter schweigenden Stimmen für sich selbst. Wenn ich im

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Sehen und Hören nicht mit mir selbst zu sprechen anfing, sprach doch das Geschaute und Erhorchte in jener Höhlung, in der es mit mir allein war, zu mir. [ … ] Heute kann ich mich fragen, ob es damals von mir nicht vermessen war, das nicht metaphorisch, sondern geradezu mitzuteilen, so geradezu, daß die Berge selbst redeten. Aber: ist es eine auf den Stein übertragene Menschenrede? (1958, I: 654). The initial focus of attention on the physical appearance of things becomes a feeling of them from within. The poetic symbol, which unites rational thought, feeling and imagination, fuses the dual aspects of being, the physical and the spiritual. “Das benennende Wort ist glücklich mit sich selbst”, Loerke writes, “weil es nicht ziert und nicht lügt, was es immer benenne” (1958, II: 638). Poetry is for Loerke, as for Heidegger, a re-singing of the song of the Earth, bringing it to shine and sound, and disclosing being in a magic incantation: “Meine Verse”, he writes in the essay ‘Meine sieben Gedichtbücher’, “erzählen [ … ] mehr, als daß sie singen, und wenn sie im Gesang erklingen, so ist das mehr der Gesang der Dinge als meine Stimme” (1958, I: 653). The poem ‘Wechselgesang’ suggests the whole of creation has sprung from a primeval melody (echoing Eichendorff), and that the poet enters into an antiphonal chant with nature, in which each intensifies the other: Ich töne wie die Blätter tönen, Sie spielen lauter, was ich meine, Ich bin schon kühner, was ich scheine, Woran sie tönend mich gewöhnen. […] So schließt Musik den Weg zum Kreise, Umkreist sich selbst mit ihrem Wege. Sie hat sich selber fern im stillen, Vielleicht auch Mensch und Baum ersonnen: Wir sind beschlossen wie begonnen Sibyllenmund nach ihrem Willen. (p. 217) The rhythm and the sounds of the words are here as important as their meaning. In the chapter on Loerke’s poetology in his Theorie des modernen Naturgedichts, Christian Kohlroß has written of Loerke’s view of rhythm as the poietic principle in nature, the natura naturans which it is the business of the poet to mimic (2000: 101–47). The quasi-divine creative force can appear as flowing water, as a tree, in the forms of the

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spiral and the wedge, and take on human form as Pan or a nymph. However, as Loerke writes in a much-quoted passage from his poetological essays, these are only superficial manifestations of the fundamental rhythm which is universally present in creation: Noch im wortlosen Vorstellen, noch im Schlaf, noch im Unterbewußtsein zählen und schlagen die schweigenden Laute ihren einstigen und künftigen Takt. Dem Narren mag das Narretei heißen, die Dichter erkannten das Schicksalhafte darin an. Die Sprache, aufgehoben in Schrift und Gesang, strebt diesem physisch-metaphysischen Symbolum zu. (1958, I: 703) Rhyme and assonance weave a magic web of sound in the poem, echoing and alternating with, amplifying and clarifying the underlying harmony of nature. Rhyme in particular is a form of synthesis, bringing together in words what belongs together in reality. Loerke writes of “der Urdrang des Reimes, zu gesellten Dingen lebendige Geister zu gesellen, damit sich der Bestand der Schöpfung selbst begreife und durch Begreifen seiner Beziehzungen vermehre” (p. 716). “Der Reim macht heimisch in der Welt, er trifft überall brüderliche Geschlechter an”, he later notes (p. 726). Poetry is thus a synthesising activity, in which the world is made conscious of its structure (Kohlroß 2000: 107f.). The abstraction and distortion of discursive human language (and philosophy) normally prevent us from speaking meaningfully about metaphysical things, but poetic language, with its verses, rhymes, rhythms and symbols, finds a way of doing so, and of expressing the Earth. Not the least of Loerke’s ecopoetic achievements lies in his distinctly modern stress on the strangeness of nature, his respect for its otherness, his acknowledgement of the limited nature of our understanding of its language and his recognition of the imperfection of our speaking of it in the poem. “From the start”, writes Gebhard, Loerke “keeps at a pious distance from the sphere of beings”, despite his readiness in the early work to engage in pantheist empathy and ecstatic union with nature (p. 17). Nature admits man, but simultaneously excludes him. The trees, which spring from the Earth, grow and express their essence, and the birds, which defy gravity by hovering and flying, are privy to universal knowledge, but man, rendered impure through his consciousness, is denied more than occasional, fleeting access to “never awakened slumber in the life of the universe” (‘Abendstimmen der Einsamkeit’, p. 107). A simultaneous concealing and revealing is present in nature’s visual communication with humans, through mysterious feathers and signs.

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In ‘Nächtliche Kiefernwipfel’ (pp. 411f.), for instance, the poet tries in vain to read the ideogrammes sketched by the pine branches against the moonlit sky, which seem to be “imparting the inner meaning which they see to the passing wind”. The inadequacy of human language is illustrated by ‘Gebirge wächst’: the rocks speak to the poet, and the “sphere of the minerals” within him answers. “Du hörst uns Berge, hörst uns ohne List, / Ach, sag es nicht den Leuten. / Sie fassen schwer, was einfach ist / Und doppelt nicht zu deuten” (p. 332). Nature’s haughty detachment from humankind is perhaps clearest in ‘Das Unentrinnbare’ (p. 309) and the cycles ‘Die ehrwürdigen Bäume’ (pp. 460–5) and ‘Der Steinpfad’ (pp. 529–43), which is set in Loerke’s garden. The peach trees reject the poet’s advances when he believes he hears them speak: “Ich frage: sprichst du? – “Deine Rede!” / Die Pfirsichkugeln glühn Urfehde” (p. 529). His clumsy approaches and longing for companionship are met by supreme indifference: Fühlst du dich fremd auf deinem Pfade, So flehe nicht um Fremdlings Gnade, Denn Fremde sind wir, die da grünen, Die niemals sich zu dir erkühnen Wie du zu uns. Alldonner schallen – Verlassen bist du von uns allen. (p. 533) Loerke thus credits language with the ability to gain access to and preserve reality, and to articulate the sensation that other life awakes within him, but he frequently speaks of the barriers, distance and detachment encountered, and posits the linguistic “conquering” of poetry as a contemplative taking possession, free of physical violence. For this reason Tgahrt describes Loerke’s conception of language as “a complicated marriage between language mysticism and common sense” (Loerke 1996: 88). Essential prerequisite for the harmonious union with nature which remains present in later poems of Loerke’s such as ‘Besuch der Berge bei mir’ (p. 555) is an attitude without ulterior motivation, or “ohne List” on the part of the subject. This presupposes rejection of an instrumental relationship with nature. In the poem ‘Gestaltung’, the trees, which are “displeasingly distant yet joined to us” (“befremdend fern und doch gesellt”), insist that no one has ever been possessed of them without setting aside their power over them, in a quasiSchopenhauerian relinquishment of the will: “Kein Mensch war je von uns besessen, / bevor er seine Macht vergessen. / Vergiß: schon prägt sich unsere Spur. / Gedenk: sie lischt. Versuche nur!” (pp. 461f.).

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As we have seen above, there are traces of a sense of the need to protect nature in Loerke’s poems. ‘Gebetsfrage’ is not, perhaps, one of Loerke’s best works, and he did not publish it in his lifetime, but its unusually open criticism of the abuse of our custodianship of plant and animal life deserves mention. Loerke asks God the father why he has endowed us with an intellect which is so destructive and the source of such suffering, why he stands silently by as we fell trees and slaughter calves: Um Kälber hab ich oft geweint, Die wir dir stahlen, Vater. Ihr Fuß hüpft heute aus der Hütte, Ihr Blut hüpft morgen in die Bütte. Du strafst uns nicht. Ist denn dein Herz versteint? (p. 585) The decentring of the subject which is implicit in Loerke’s poetic aim to let things speak and be through his verse, in his definition of the special task of poetry as “Gesicht der Welt festzuhalten” (1996: 43), and in his acknowledgement of our imperfect understanding of nature, is occasionally explicit, as for instance in the “God of thunder’s” admonition: “Ich schuf die Welt nicht um der Menschen Willen” (p. 498). Another aspect of the ecopoetics of negativity may be found in Loerke’s attempt to convey the meaning of the world, which is expressed obliquely, through negation and fragmentary juxtaposition of the visible and the invisible worlds. The obscurity of certain of his poems, his love of paradox and riddle, and his preference for suggestive questions, his heaping of negation, layering of metaphors and absence of clarity as to who is speaking are all poetic strategies which reflect the ultimate unsayability of the religious mystery of communion with nature which he openly acknowledges, for instance, in ‘Mit Sankt Francisci Geist’: Doch blieb das liebe Wunder wahr Nur eine winzige Sekunde. Es fiel mit meinem Wort vom Munde, – Und das kann ich nie wieder sagen. (p. 96) Loerke’s poems are characterised by deceptively simple diction, a laconic layering of themes and shifting approaches. Their blend of pessimism and optimism, melancholy and celebration, renunciation and the aspiration to transform society, and the quest for compensation for the disorientation of modernity in the comforting harmony of nature with dogged determination to challenge those in power is unique. However,

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their inflection of traditional themes and poetics to the end of correcting the anthropocentrism of the age, seeking to counter the distortion of our lives through instrumental objectivisation, is paralleled in the nature poetry of Johannes Bobrowski.

4.4 Johannes Bobrowski Born in 1917, Johannes Bobrowski was a generation younger than Loerke. His poems were influenced by Magic Realism, but sound quite different from Loerke’s, with their laconic suggestiveness and mysteriously obscure images. Formally, too, they have little in common, being written (like the poems of Rudolf Alexander Schröder, Josef Weinheber and Friedrich Georg Jünger in the 1920s and 1930s), in free rhythms. Bobrowski’s model was the eighteenth-century adaptation of the Pindaric ode by Klopstock and Hölderlin, in which irregular cadences, recurring phrases and patterns of images replaced rhyme and metre as structuring principles and facilitated the expression of emotion, spontaneity, imagination and freedom from restraint.20 Like Loerke, whose poetry he admired as a young man, and later remembered with affection,21 Bobrowski spent most of his adult life living in Berlin, but drew on childhood memories of the countryside in the extreme Eastern part of Prussia. Born in Tilsit, he moved, following postings of his father’s in the state railway company, first to Königsberg, where he attended secondary school, and then to the Friedrichshagen suburb of Berlin in 1937. However, the lost home he subsequently dreamed and wrote about was the farming country in the Lithuanian hinterland of the border town of Tilsit, among whose villages, woods and lakes he spent many holidays with relatives of his mother’s. Bobrowski’s grandparents had been Baptists; he grew up as an active member of the Lutheran church and joined the Bekennende Kirche, which adopted an oppositional stance towards the Nazi authorities in the Third Reich. By the time the two-year compulsory military training he had begun in 1937 had come to an end, war had broken out. He served in Poland, France and, after the invasion of Russia, again on the Eastern front. In June 1941 he witnessed a pogrom instigated by the invading forces in Kaunas, in which nearly 4000 Jews met their death (see Tgahrt 1993: 467). He was only to return to East Berlin in 1949, after four years as a prisoner of war in Russian labour camps. Living after the war, and in the GDR, Bobrowski wrote in a very different political context from that of Inner Émigrés such as Loerke and Lehmann. The theme of loss of the homeland in the East, which was

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treated in West Germany by writers from Günter Grass to Horst Bienek, was still too closely associated with revanchist nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s for it to be acceptable in the GDR. The state was dependent on good relations with its communist neighbours (especially the Soviet Union and Poland, from which so many Germans had been expelled when territories were ceded to these countries). The approach to writing prescribed by Socialist Realism also implied unwavering support for scientific and technological modernisation, to which we have seen twentieth-century nature poetry on the whole constitutes a critical response. Bobrowski’s prolonged struggle to come to terms with the past, mourning loss and confronting guilt, involved simultaneously acknowledging and distancing himself from his poetic affinities with an essentially conservative lyric tradition lamenting the lost Heimat and childhood oneness with nature. His particular transformation of the poetic legacy of nature poetry was achieved by pursuing a quasi-didactic mission to remind his fellow Germans of their historical subjugation, exploitation and extermination of their Eastern neighbours and by finding a new poetic language as a legitimate form in which to express it.22 The difficulties he faced in the process may be seen in the evolution of his plans for a “Sarmatian Divan” (echoing Goethe’s West-östlicher Diwan) recalling and preserving the lost East in the memory, lamenting it but at the same time naming the guilt pertaining to his countrymen.23 Initial ambitions to present the landscape, people, mentality, history and culture of the Russian, Polish, Baltic and Jewish ethnic mix, and to expiate the historical guilt of the Germans, are gradually refined and purged of elements of folklore and touches of the noble savage in the description of the native Prussians. In Bobrowski’s evocation, which interweaves recent history and childhood memories with the prehistory and history of the area, and mythical elements, personal loss is subsumed in collective experience, and the very word ‘Heimat’ is avoided (see Tgahrt 1993: 314, 319–45). Bobrowski’s first volume of poetry, Sarmatische Zeit (1961), is focused on the landscape inhabited by generations of his family in the border country between East Prussia and Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Poland and western Russia. The name he gives it, ‘Sarmatia’, was that used in the ancient world to designate a geographically remote and little-known area bounded by the Polish river Vistula in the West and the Russian Volga in the East, the Baltic in the North and the Caspian and Black Seas in the South. Its wide plains, traversed by major rivers and dotted by lakes, forests, meadows and swamplands, were inhabited by nomadic cattle-raising tribes.

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Bobrowski’s Sarmatia is then a historical concept avoiding the implications of terms from more recent political geography, stretching back through the centuries into prehistoric times. Frontiers and political allegiances had shifted repeatedly here; the German presence goes back to the twelfth century, when the Knights of the Teutonic Order, invited to subject and convert the heathen Borussians (the original Prussians) who inhabited the coastal area between the Vistula and the Memel, Germanised the region, brutally slaughtering many of the original Balto-Slavic population. Bobrowski stresses the polyglot, multi-ethnic and multi-religious background. Sarmatia is, however, also a mythical entity: Rankl has pointed out the phonetic parallel of the name with Arcadia and the qualities of the classical locus amoenus it possesses as a sphere in which man lives in harmony with nature (see Rankl 2002: 116–18). Many of Bobrowski’s poems – ‘Die Spur im Sand’ (Bobrowski 1987: 28),24 ‘Kaunas 1941’ (pp. 60f.), ‘Gedenkblatt’(p. 97), ‘Else Lasker-Schüler’ (pp. 117f.), ‘Ikone’ (p. 122), and ‘Bericht’ (p. 133) are among the more obvious – bear relatively direct witnesss to the recent past, hinting at German guilt (Bobrowski’s poems are not least an expiation of the sense of personal guilt stemming from his own involvement in the invasion of the East), and preparing the way for what he refers to as an age of neighbourliness, “without fear” (see ‘Absage’, p. 73). The final section of ‘Die Spur im Sand’, a poem concerned with the persecution of the Jews, reads: Weil deiner Väter Gott uns noch die Jahre wird heller färben, Aaron, liegt die Spur im Staub der Straßen, find ich dich. Und gehe. Und deine Ferne trag ich, dein Erwarten auf meiner Schulter. (p. 28) The somewhat surprising affinity with the Jews which Bobrowski expresses here goes beyond recognition of a shared Old Testament God (he remained a practising Christian); in their historic plight he found a parallel with his own loss of childhood Heimat, and in them, possible models for coming to terms with this and reinhabiting the Earth.

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In ‘Holunderblüte’ the flower of the elder becomes a correlative for the traumatic experience of the Kaunas pogrom, which must not be forgotten: “Leute, es möcht der Holunder / sterben / an eurer Vergeßlichkeit” (p. 94). The guilt incurred by the SS and by the regular German army is subsumed in other poems under centuries of German aggression towards their Eastern neighbours. ‘Pruzzische Elegie’ (pp. 33–5) is a song “bright with angry love”, but “dark, bitter with grieving”, recording the Borussians’ “never sung fall”, that is their defeat in 1283, and the ultimate extinction of their culture and language (which was Slavic, but with Nordic influences) in the seventeenth century. ‘Gestorbene Sprache’ integrates words of the Borussian language. Associated with the call of the birds and animals, the sounds of wind and water in the landscape, in much the way that Lehmann had as a young man idealised the Irish language as one uncorrupted by the abstraction and rationalisation of modern life, Borussian becomes a lamenting and avenging force: Der mit den Flügeln schlägt draußen, der an die Tür streift, das ist dein Bruder, du hörst ihn. Laurio, sagt er, Wasser, ein Bogen, farbenlos, tief. Der kam herab mit dem Fluß, um Muschel und Schnecke treibend, ein Fächergewächs, im Sand und war grün. Warne, sagt er und wittan, die Krähe hat keinen Baum, ich habe Macht, dich zu küssen, ich wohne in deinem Ohr. Sag ihm, du willst ihn nicht hören – er kommt, ein Otter, er kommt hornisssenschwärmig, er schreit, eine Grille, er wächst mit dem Moor unter dein Haus, in den Quellen flüstert er, smordis vernimmst du, dein Faulbaum wird welken, morgen stirbt er am Zaun. (p. 26)

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Implicit in the brotherhood of crow, otter and cricket, despite their threats, is the vision of a way of life in harmony with nature akin to Heideggerian dwelling. However, Bobrowski differs from Loerke and Lehmann in presenting this as inseparable from social justice and from openness to ethnic and cultural diversity. The river poems ‘Die Daubas’ and ‘Die Düna’ contain lines which evoke the concept of dwelling: “Wo denn / wollen wir bleiben? / Immer ist es die Erde, / der Grund, da wir liegen werden” (pp. 69f.). “Ich will vom Atem der Ströme / leben, vom Sprind / trinken, das Irdische trinken, / die Nacht, vom Geheimnis der Tiefe / unter dem Gras” (p. 58). Over and again, particularly in the later poems, Bobrowski calls for a receptivity to the voices of nature which borders on acceptance of an animistic world view. In the ‘Pruzzische Elegie’, he conjures up a timeless, mythical past in which people lived a simple, rural, often nomadic way of life, in a pleasant, wooded land, washed by foaming seas. Their woodland groves are marked by the smoke of sacrificial pyres, for the Borussians had no temples, but, like the Celts, worshipped in the forests, cremating and burying their dead there. The poem gathers the traces of their existence, which remain in the names of mountains, rivers and roads, in songs and sagas, and are present in the rustling of the lizard and the gurgling of waters on the bog: Namen reden von dir, zertretenes Volk, Berghänge, Flüsse, glanzlos noch oft, Steine und Wege – Lieder abends und Sagen, das Rascheln der Eidechsen nennt dich und, wie Wasser im Moor, heut ein Gesang, vor Klage arm (p. 35) The poem opening the volume Sarmatische Zeit, ‘Anruf’, invokes intimate childhood memories of landscape and culture and laments the loss of this home, which has been “fortgeschenkt”, or “given away for nothing”. Oblique allusions to German aggression over the centuries and his own wartime experiences in occupied West Russia (wolves, a hunter, a yellow rock) end in what seems a hint at promise of reconciliation (in the Christian symbol of the fish), and reference to a time when he, a

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stranger, will be welcomed: Wilna, Eiche du – meine Birke, Nowgorod – einst in Wäldern aufflog meiner Frühlinge Schrei, meiner Tage Schritt erscholl überm Fluß. […] Heiliges schwimmt, ein Fisch, durch die alten Täler, die waldigen Täler noch, der Väter Rede tönt noch herauf: Heiß willkommen die Fremden. Du wirst ein Fremder sein. Bald. (p. 3) Here as elsewhere, the fragmentation of the opening lines, the archaic ring to the vocabulary, which underscores his conjuring up of the past, the syntactic contraction and dislocated word order, the line divisions and free rhythms, which slow readers, making them weigh up the semantic possibilities of each word, can all be regarded as techniques through which Bobrowski draws attention to the textual status of the poem, and by implication to the unsayability, in normal, rational human language, of certain aspects of the being of things, thus approximating to the negative ecopoetics of which Rigby writes. From the early 1960s onwards Bobrowski wrote fewer poems about the subject of historical guilt and more on nature and the poet’s relationship with it. He commented repeatedly on the necessity to listen to, and speak, the sounds and the signs of nature: “Rede: Die Wälder tönen, / den eratmenden Strom / durchfliegen die Fische, der Himmel / zittert von Feuern.” (‘Der Wanderer’, p. 88) In ‘Wetterzeichen’, the poet converses “laut mit dem Sommerlicht // und den Vögeln / gegen den Abend, im Dunkel / den Fledermäusen”, he listens to the flowing of the river and recalls perceiving signs in nature: “ich halt einen Baum, ich red noch: / Wir sahen kommen die Zeichen / und schwinden, her durch die Stille / zwei Federn fielen herab” (pp. 98f.).25 ‘Immer zu benennen’ formulates a poetic imperative reminiscent of Rilke’s ninth Duino Elegy, an act of naming essential to the integration

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of the human in the natural sphere: Immer zu benennen: den Baum, den Vogel im Flug, den rötlichen Fels, wo der Strom zieht, grün, und den Fisch im weißen Rauch, wenn es dunkelt über die Walder hinab. Zeichen, Farben, es ist ein Spiel, ich bin bedenklich, es möchte nicht enden gerecht. Und wer lehrt mich, was ich vergaß: der Steine Schlaf, den Schlaf der Vögel im Flug, der Bäume Schlaf, im Dunkel geht ihre Rede – ? (p. 143) The influence of Bobrowski’s eighteenth-century Königsberg compatriot Johann Georg Hamann, for whom poetry was a medium of revelation, an imitation and reflection of divine creation, building on the system of cyphers revealing God’s presence in nature, is visible in the opening lines. And the final section implies a conception of the task of the poet not so different from Loerke’s, as a diviner, who must awaken the slumbering speech of nature by saying or singing the Earth.26 As Anders Strand has pointed out, Bobrowski’s poems belong to the Orphic tradition of Hölderlin and Rilke (and to a lesser extent also Loerke and Lehmann), in which the poet revisits the (mythical) past in an effort to restore lost wholeness and harmony, just as the singer from Thrace descended into the realm of the dead, seeking to reawaken Euridice through the power of his love and his song. Strand writes of the traditional belief in the ability of the Orphic gaze to transcend the coordinates of time and space and read the deeper structure of being through the signs of things (Strand 1999: 153f.). But the central section of the poem reminds us that recalling forgotten, intuitive childhood knowledge is a tricky business, ever on the verge of anthropocentric arrogance. Dwelling and speaking appear equally problematic in ‘Herberge’, which laments the absence of communication between the poet and nature. Nature provides a shelter or

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house in which the poetic persona can remain, but the shades of the past permit him no rest. The voices he hears are foreign, and he hears them with an uncomprehending ear: Komm und geh und kehr wieder, komm und bleib, ein Haus, Nebelhaus, steht vor dem Wald, Dächer aus Rauch, Türme aus Vogelrufen, Birkenzweige abends verschließen die Tür. Ruhlos liegen wir dort, Schattentuch auf der Schulter, um die Fischerfeuer gehn mit den rötlichen Flossen die Lüfte, du sprichst, fremde Stimme, ich hör dich mit fremdem Ohr. (p. 168) In ‘Schattenland’, Bobrowski appears to reach a subtly different conclusion: in an age of shadows, to be able to live, to dwell, one must learn to speak with the voice of nature: “wer hier lebt, / spricht mit des Vogels Stimme” (p. 160). This is consonant with the conception of the poet’s task as bringing the landscape back to life, as he urges in ‘Wiedererweckung’: “Zähl / die Gräser / und zähl / Fäden aus Regenwasser, / und Licht, die Blättchen / zähl, und zeichne ein / deine Schritte, Wildspuren, / und Stimmen, beleb / mit Worten / das Blut in den Bäumen und / den Lungen” (p. 203). The poem ‘Ebene’ may serve as a final example of the poet’s selfexhortation to listen to the voice of nature, dwell and speak the Earth: [ … ] Mit dem Wind kam ich herauf den Berg. Hier werd ich leben. Ein Jäger war ich, einfing mich aber das Gras. Lehr mich reden, Gras, lehr mich tot sein und hören, lange, und reden, Stein, lehr du mich bleiben, Wasser, frag mir, und Wind, nicht nach. (p. 80)

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The lyrical subject, formerly a hunter (a term which possesses aggressive military connotations in Bobrowski’s writing), desires to live here and to live peacefully. Embraced by the grass, he wishes to learn its speech and mode of being, to learn constancy from the stone, to learn from the water to stay, and to live unquestioned by the wind. Everything in the landscape reveals traces and voices of the past, everything witnesses to past guilt and suffering as well as love and happiness. This poem, on one level a personal lament for Bobrowski’s lost homeland, perhaps best exemplifies the inclusive ecopoetic open to outsiders called for by Jonathan Bate. Reflecting “an imaginative, not a proprietorial, interest in belonging” (Bate 2000: 280), it recalls the sense of dwelling identified by Rigby as originating in loss and exile and constituting a reinhabitation, in a process involving conscious commitment and sustained effort (Rigby 2001: 11f.).27 But the sense of dwelling present in the work of both poets examined here suggests that each contributes in his own way to the relational understanding of selfhood based on active identification with wider circles of being which is at the heart of Deep Ecology’s corrective to utilitarian assumptions about our interaction with the natural environment.

5 The Call of the Wild Hunting and Ecology in the Stories of Otto Alscher and Horst Stern

5.1 Hunting as a cultural phenomenon and as a moral and environmental problem Hunting is a prime subject for exploring our relationship with the wild and shifting conceptions of the nature/culture divide, for the hunter is a liminal figure, with one foot in the camp of humanity, pursuing his prey, but with the other paradoxically situated in the world of the animal, who he knows more intimately than other men, and with whom he is linked by empathy and identification. Matt Cartmill writes of the hunter as a fundamentally ambiguous figure, “who can be seen either as a fight against wildness or as a half-animal participant in it” (1996: 31).1 Historically, nature lovers have more often than not been hunters, who have regarded themselves as friends of the animal kinds, and by extension friends of the wild, non-human realm that the animals inhabit, while hounding and shooting individual animals. Hunting is the traditional vehicle of our closest encounter with the wild animal, a site of immersion in nature and rediscovery of what is felt to be our true human nature. The hunt has played a significant part in many cultures and served varying social functions throughout the course of history. Its significance as a source of food in primitive societies is, however, often exaggerated. While it is true that, from what we know of Palaeolithic man, the earliest European hunter–gatherer peoples (Neanderthal Man) lived on a diet in which large wild animals played a major part, by the later Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods our more immediate ancestors (Cro-Magnon Man) were more gatherers than hunters and big game was 168

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of limited importance in comparison with the smaller animals hunted and eaten in everyday life. Hunting was now as much a matter of skill, strategy, communication and adaptability as of sheer strength and the living out of individuals’ aggressive instincts. A second myth about hunting is that it has always served as a natural vehicle for genetically programmed, aggressive and destructive human instincts. From the 1920s on, a school of anthropologists led by Raymond Dart claimed that the origins of humankind lay in a shift from the foodgathering practices of forest dwellers to hunting in the open savannah. Their argument that it was walking upright and using weapons which distinguished homo sapiens from the apes was taken up by the journalist Robert Ardrey in the 1960s. Humans were, he wrote, a “killer ape” species. Central propositions of the ‘hunting hypothesis’ which Ardrey popularised were that hunting and its selection pressures had made men and women out of our ape-like ancestors, instilled a taste for violence in them, estranged them from the animal kingdom and excluded them from the order of nature (see Cartmill 1996: 14). The picture of humans as mentally unbalanced predators threatening an otherwise harmonious natural realm has been disseminated in countless works of popular science, novels and poems, not to mention films such as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Though the view that hunting and shooting today are remnants of aggressive behaviour rooted in evolutionary psychology, and hence reflect innate human qualities, still finds supporters (see Kühnle 1994, 1997), it has long since been challenged by experts (see chapters 1, 2 and 10 in Cartmill 1996 and chapter 8, ‘Anthropology’, in Fromm 1977). In the hunter–gatherer peoples of Europe, hunting appears to have acted as a periodic supplement filling gaps in protein supply, at times of year when other food was not available (see Cartmill 1996: 17). Archaeological finds have in any case revealed that hunting accounted for only a tiny percentage of the meat eaten in the earliest urban centres of the agrarian societies which began to emerge in the Mediterranean area around 10,000 BC (see Spehr 1994: 59f.). By this time, the primary function of hunting was to protect crops and livestock, and to ensure the safety of human settlements from predatory animals. The link between hunting and aggression is in any case questionable: in today’s primitive societies, for instance, animals are commonly asked for forgiveness when being killed. Among the aspects of hunting which have been of long-term cultural significance are its association with male identity and with social elites. Throughout most of Western history, hunting has been a stereotypically

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male activity. Today, many men like to go hunting because it gets them away from their families and into the (almost) exclusively male company of old friends: it fulfils a need for male bonding. Many men believe that hunting affirms their identity as men and, as Cartmill notes, feel that taking a boy hunting cements his bonds to other males and helps make a man out of him (p. 233). Some hunters think their sport affirms their virility as well as their masculine identity. However, hunting was not, it seems, originally an exclusively male domain. Lesser game was frequently hunted by women, who were responsible for the everyday provision of food, though hunting larger animals, which involved going further afield and could last over days or weeks, was probably the business of men. The ancient historian J.J. Bachofen interpreted Greek myths of male Olympian sky-Gods slaying chthonian female monsters as reflecting the eclipsing of a peaceful, egalitarian and environmentally sensitive matriarchy by a warlike, hierarchical and polytheistic patriarchal society at the end of the Minoan and the beginning of the Mycenaean culture. Bachofen’s views are now considered speculative and unreliable. However, Greek mythology does seem to contain evidence of the eclipsing of a female mythology of nature and hunting (represented by Earth Goddesses, Artemis the huntress, and the Amazons) by male equivalents (Zeus, Perseus, Hercules, Achilles). “The motives of hunters are vague and visceral”, Cartmill notes (p. 228). The stereotype of the violent, psychopathic male who simply takes pleasure in inflicting pain and death is, however, no more plausible for most persons involved than the suggestion that hunters in today’s industrialised countries are pursuing an economic rationale. Different people hunt for different reasons. In certain societies and at certain times, hunting has been a marker of the ruling class and social climbers have joined the chase to gain status. Hunting was already an attribute of royalty and a marker of social privilege in ancient Greece (and to a lesser extent also in Rome), and this aspect became central in the Middle Ages. From the time of Charlemagne, hunting rights were separated from land ownership and made a royal prerogative, which was then divided up and awarded by territorial rulers to nobles and other loyal subjects. Deer and boar hunting served to bond the nobility with the monarch and provided a training ground for military activities. Although hunting lesser game continued to be open to ordinary people, the period witnessed the emergence of new practices of hunting aiming no longer at a quick and certain kill, either for the procurement of food or for protection, but rather at hunting as a display of cultural sophistication and status in the feudal social hierarchy. Many of the elaborate conventions

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which now emerged in Germany under the term Waidwerk (the art of hunting) were imported from France, where the noble art of hunting, which now focused on falconry and the mounted pursuit of stags, in which no missile weapons were used, and the quarry essentially run to death (the “Parforce” hunt), served as a model of and training ground for chivalry. Conversely, however, hunting can be a seasonal ritual of working-class solidarity or an event bringing together people of different social classes. (Landry writes that William Cobbett, one of the most outspoken radical writers in early nineteenth century Britain, championed hunting and other rural sports as recreations that encouraged social and cultural interaction between elite and non-elite – 2001: 44.) In the early modern period, two different relationships with the natural environment existed side by side, together with traditional (often ecologically beneficial) limitations on its use. They both deprived nature of subjectivity and moral value. On the one hand, the development towards increasingly rational economic exploitation of natural resources sought to render agricultural production more efficient. This was paralleled by the refinement of methods of hunting as a ‘harvesting’ of game, and the extermination of predators such as bear, wolf and lynx in most parts of Europe. On the other hand, elaborate hunting parties at Renaissance and Baroque courts involved the slaughter of vast numbers of animals. Such cruel and wasteful practices were grounded in a conception of nature as negative other which corresponded to the medieval view of nature’s inferiority and sinfulness, leaving the way open for the unimpeded exercise of domination and representation of power. (The same values and arguments enabled the Naturvölker, or primitive peoples encountered by the first colonists, to be ruthlessly robbed, murdered and enslaved, and patriarchal control over women’s alternative knowledge and use of plants, animals and the human body to be tightened in the witch hunts.) Christian tradition, which underlies most Western attitudes, in fact embraces two conflicting strands of thought about how animals should be treated. Both of these are founded on Bible passages. The first, ‘dominionist’ strand, which was formulated in the fourth century by Saint Augustine and restated by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, and remains influential today, emphasises humanity’s separateness from the rest of creation, and our legitimate right to make almost any use of animals for our own interests. In Genesis 1, 28, God blesses the newly created man and woman, and says to them: “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven and all the living creatures that move on earth” (New Jerusalem

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Bible). In Genesis 9, 1–4, Noah and his sons are even incited to be “the terror and the dread of all the animals on land and all the birds of heaven, of everything that moves on land and all the fish of the sea” (my emphasis). Every living thing is ours to eat.2 A second, contradictory strand of Christian thought holds that human exploitation of nature (and predation in general) entered history with the Fall and will disappear when God comes again to reign on Earth. It is inspired by the ideal state of non-predation, in which all God’s creatures coexist in peaceful vegetarianism, envisaged in the prophecy of Isaiah: “The wolf will live with the lamb, the panther lie down with the kid, calf, lion and fat-stock beast together, with a little boy to lead them” (Isaiah 22, 6–9). This counter-current in Western thought, which is present in the teaching of Saint Francis and the writings of Albert Schweitzer, has come to the fore in the second half of the twentieth century. Challenging humanity’s exploitation of the animal world, it conceives of our relationship with animals as somewhere between stewardship and brotherhood. Many of the arguments around hunting today draw ultimately on one or other of these approaches. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed a major shift in attitudes towards nature and animals which began to alter the status and cultural significance of hunting. With the separation from nature of the growing number of people living in urban environments and working in industry, the professions and administrative jobs, the rural landscape acquired new value as a sphere of semi-autonomy for the individual, affording freedom for self-realisation, aesthetic pleasure and metaphysical experience. The first Naturdenkmäler, or “natural monuments” (the term was coined by Alexander von Humboldt in 1819), the precursors of national parks and conservation areas, were designated and protected from a sense of the need to preserve pockets of wilderness (and the wild animals living in them) capable of injecting, albeit temporarily, ‘romantic’ feelings into the visitor as an antidote to the ‘artificial’ life of civilisation (Spehr 1994: 130). This development was accompanied by a new understanding of our relationship with animals, one more emotional than rational, based on imaginative identification on the one hand, and recognition of their difference and autonomy on the other. The behavioural and evolutionary links between humans and animals were now stressed rather than their previously alleged lack of reason, will and soul. Rousseau pleaded in the preface to his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754) for the participation of animals in natural law, on the basis of their sentience, and wrote of human duties towards them

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(see Dinzelbacher 2000: 347). Herder described animals as the “older brothers” of man in Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–91). He continued to subscribe to the notion that man was “the highest form of being attainable by an Earth-organisation”, and, through reason, “the first freedman of creation” but noted the actual superiority of certain animals over human beings in terms of instincts and skills in his Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772) (see ibid. 352, 356, 369 and 371). Since the Renaissance, Humanists such as Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) had repeatedly opposed cruelty to animals. Thomas More reviled hunting in his Utopia (1516) and argued that killing animals was a matter for butchers. George Turbervile’s Noble Art of Venerie or Hunting (1576) introduced a series of original poems into the material drawn from French sources, in which hart, hare, fox and otter plead for mercy, speak of their suffering, and demand humility of the hunter, who should not gloat at his conquest, but seek pardon of his prey (see Landry 2001: 35–42). The more sweeping change in public attitudes which began in the second half of the eighteenth century is signalled clearly in Matthias Claudius’s short but moving Schreiben eines parforcegejagten Hirschen an den Fürsten, der ihn parforcegejagt hatte (1775). Writing in the pages of his widely read journal, the Wandsbecker Bote, the popular poet and essayist Claudius gave satirical expression to the suffering of an innocent, peaceful, herbivorous animal, for the satisfaction of sadistic human pleasure: Durchlauchtiger Fürst, Gnädigster Fürst und Herr! Ich habe heute die Gnade gehabt, von Ew. Hochfürstlichen Durchlaucht parforcegejagt zu werden; bitte aber untertänigst, mich künftig damit zu verschonen. Ew. Hochfürstl. Durchl. sollten nur einmal parforcegejagt sein, so würden Sie meine Bitte nicht unbillig finden. Ich liege hier und mag meinen Kopf nicht aufheben, und das Blut läuft mir aus Maul und Nüstern. Wie können Ihr Durchlaucht es doch übers Herz bringen, ein armes unschuldiges Tier, das sich von Gras und Kräutern nährt, zu Tode zu jagen? Lassen Sie mich lieber totschießen, so bin ich kurz und gut davon. (Claudius 1980: 156f.) In the 1840s and 1850s, Arthur Schopenhauer systematically developed an ethic based on sympathy with all forms of life, which invested animals with intrinsic value as active subjects and moral entities. The breakthrough of the theory of evolution with Darwin’s work drew new attention to the continuum between animals and humans. Though it

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was interpreted by many as confirming humans’ superiority over other life forms, it prompted interest in previously neglected ‘animal’ aspects of humanity such as the unconscious. In a famous passage from the opening of Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben (1874), Nietzsche contrasted animals’ blissful security in their instincts, their innocent freedom from self-questioning and moral scruples, with the discontent arising from man’s memory and the burden of awareness of history. Animals are: kurz angebunden mit ihrer Lust und Unlust, nämlich an den Pflock des Augenblickes und deshalb weder schwermüthig noch überdrüssig. Dies zu sehen geht dem Menschen hart ein, weil er seines Menschenthums sich vor dem Thiere brüstet und doch nach seinem Glücke eifersüchtig hinblickt – denn das will er allein, gleich dem Thiere weder überdrüssig noch unter Schmerzen leben, und will es doch vergebens, weil er es nicht will wie das Thier. (Nietzsche 1980, I: 248) The human instincts, which had been denigrated in the early modern period as lower, animal aspects of humanity, acquired a quasi-heroic significance in the context of Nietzsche’s cultural criticism. Though he does not write that return to carefree childhood or immersion in the spiritual world of the animal, who he supposed to be free of awareness of death, hold out the promise of lasting redemption from individuation or escape from the alienation of modern civilisation, he expresses envy of animals as creatures enjoying a supposedly spontaneous, uncomplicated relationship with the natural world, in an originary form of being based on immediacy of instinct. This core element of the vitalist philosophy which exercised such influence at the turn of the twentieth century was to lead to a politically disastrous subordination of reason, ethics and the cognitive to instinct and existential self-interest in Nazi ideology (see Dinzelbacher 2000: 527–9). By the end of the nineteenth century, societies to prevent cruelty to domestic animals and to protect endangered species had been founded all over Europe. Paradoxically, however, hunting also flourished. It now served, alongside nature conservation and tourism, as a means of compensating for the emotional deficits of industrial society. Hunting satisfied a growing need for contact with a ‘wild’ sphere of unregimented existence, combining the encounter with ‘unspoiled’ wilderness and the wild animal with a supposedly ‘authentic’ way of life. Hunting and conservation exemplified two sides of the same coin of experiencing nature corresponding to Erich Fromm’s distinction between ‘Haben’ and ‘Sein’,

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that is between passive possession/consumption of material things, aggression and greed on the one hand and an active, productive relationship with nature based on love and shared experience on the other (see Bode and Emmert 2000: 47f.). As indicated above, the relationship between hunting and love of nature is curiously complex: not only early scientific naturalists, but also poets and other writers celebrating nature were commonly hunters. Conservationists such as John James Audubon and Johann Matthäus Bechstein, politicians who promoted conservation like Franklin D. Roosevelt and even the originator of the Land Ethic, Aldo Leopold, were keen hunters and advocates of hunting. By the turn of the twentieth century, the emotions projected onto animals were highly contradictory: on the one hand, they reflected indifference and a hostility rooted in pride in modernity and confidence in the superiority of human civilisation, and on the other, a sense of kinship fed by discontent with modernity. The widespread practice of mounting and displaying antlers like military trophies, as fetish objects conveying a reassuring sense of control and power, has been interpreted as suggesting that hunting responded to collective insecurities about (gender and class) identity in the face of female emancipation and of the threat of revolution. The extended ritual of killing the quarry, involving observing a moment of silence, placing a twig in the animal’s mouth, and compulsory blooding of the shirtsleeves while field dressing and dividing up the carcass, turned the act into a miniature drama in which the hunter cathartically triumphed over his fears. Personal and collective insecurities had already been present in Romantic representations of the hunter as precarious and endangered, a position symbolised by Actaeon, the hunter who became the hunted, torn to bits by his hounds in punishment by Diana for having spied on her naked in her bath (see Rigby 2004: 225f.). The motif of the hunter’s ambivalence about taking the life of an animal, which is present in many accounts of hunting, is no mere accretion of modern civilisation, but reflects, according to Cartmill and Landry, a fundamental ambivalence in hunting discourse throughout the centuries, which they see as characterised by its shifting identifications between the humans and animals. This aspect of hunting is reflected in the story of Saint Hubert. According to legend, Hubert, a French nobleman who lived in the early eighth century and became Bishop of Liège, became obsessed with hunting after the tragic death of his young wife. A vision of a shining cross in the antlers of a deer he was pursuing led him to devote his life to evangelisation. The shared suffering and death of the crucified Christ and the hunted stag are underlined

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by the similarity of the deer’s antlers with the crown of thorns. (In one version of the tale, the event takes place on Good Friday and Hubert’s wife tries in vain to dissuade him from going out hunting.) The hunter’s remorse over his bloody actions at the sight of his reproachful victim is transformed through a projection of powerful unconscious wishes into divine forgiveness and redemption through the animal’s vicarious suffering.3 A transitional phase between the 1890s and 1930s saw a gradual decline in the significance of hunting as a marker of the social elite (though big game hunting in the colonies provided a substitute) and growing pressures on game. Royal hunts continued, however, and indeed reached new heights under the German Kaisers. After 1871, shooting parties on their estates in East Prussia (Rominten) and Brandenburg (Schorfheide) met the greatly increased representational needs of the newly founded German Empire. Wilhelm II, who was famous for his lavish shooting parties, is reported to have shot 75,000 animals personally over a period of 30 years – seven a day on average (Bode and Emmert 2000: 128). These hunting activities reflect the vain, impulsive and domineering personality of a man who exacerbated international political tensions in the run up to the First World War and have been interpreted as a form of compensation for feelings of inferiority stemming from physical disability (his left arm was shorter than his right). However, Wilhelm II’s personal obsession coincided with the practice of hunting as a form of representation of power by German rulers going back to the court of the Emperor Maximilian I in the early seventeenth century. Meanwhile, the sophistication of late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury weaponry, the opening up of hunting to ever larger sections of the population and the gradual exposure of previously remote parts of the country to hunters as a result of increased mobility all took their toll on game. This pressure, which was felt in all the developed countries, led to a phase of more comprehensive legislation concerning the management of wildlife in the 1930s and 1940s. German hunters have tended to speak with pride of the exemplary hunting law passed in 1934, banning the unnecessary suffering of animals, regulating which and how many could be shot, and making hunters legally responsible, for the first time in any country, for the care of game and the maintenance of stock. However, the Reichsjagdgesetz, like the Nature Conservation Act (Reichsnaturschutzgesetz) which succeeded it, illustrate the combination of ruthless control, exploitation and modern development (involving the draining of wetlands and the large-scale improvement of agricultural

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land, and the building of dams and motorways) with idealisation of nature, the soil and the German landscape, which characterised Nazi ideology. Hitler, who was a dog-lover and a vegetarian, was, like most of the German population, uninterested in hunting. Indeed, his personal distaste (despite his romantic heroisation of existential struggle, critique of the degeneracy of modern civilisation, and fixation on racial health) is recorded in a conversation with Albert Speer in his mountain retreat on the Obersalzberg: Wie kann ein Mensch sich nur für so etwas begeistern. Tiere zu töten, wenn es sein muß, ist ein Geschäft des Metzgers. Aber dafür noch viel Geld ausgeben … Ich verstehe ja, daß es Berufsjäger geben muß, um das kranke Wild abzuschießen. Wenn wenigstens noch eine Gefahr damit verbunden wäre, wie in den Zeiten, als man mit dem Speer gegen das Wild anging. Aber heute, wo jeder mit einem dicken Bauch aus der Entfernung sicher das Tier abschießen kann … Jagd und Pferderennen sind letzte Überreste einer abgestorbenen, feudalen Welt. (Speer 1969: 110f.) The “fat belly” is a reference to the second in command in the Third Reich, Hermann Göring, who was a keen hunter and adopted the title Reichsjägermeister. Historically, there have been many links between the control and exploitation of animals and of fellow humans. However, the less than innocent political dimension to hunting has nowhere been more evident than in the Third Reich, when totalitarian control went hand in hand with a problematic understanding of nature as a sphere of purity and authenticity. Göring, who took over the imperial estates in 1936, notoriously exemplified the link between hunting and the exclusion and extermination of beings not considered organic or ‘natural’. Hunting was in practice restricted to a tiny elite in the Third Reich, but the number of animals killed and the quality of the trophies rose dramatically, not least due to scientific perfectioning of the practices of breeding, overstocking and winter feeding which had begun under the Kaisers. In the post-war decades the traditions of intensive care for game and the representational hunt were resumed in West Germany, and, a decade and a half later, in the GDR. Up to the1970s, West (and East) German heads of state, senior politicians and top civil servants were members of the shooting fraternity, alongside members of the nobility, bankers and the captains of industry. Shooting continued to be a privilege of the relatively wealthy but its growing role in corporate hospitality shifted it

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in practice further and further away from the intimate knowledge of and interaction with the wild animal which it traditionally involved. Tensions between the interests of hunters and conservationists also came increasingly to the fore. Native fauna were largely ignored by German conservationists and popular concern over the loss of species concentrated on charismatic foreign megafauna. The attention of the members of the environmental movement was meanwhile directed towards the issues of pollution, nuclear power and global warming and later also to forest dieback and the hole in the ozone layer. However, the animal-loving environmental journalist Horst Stern took up the cause of foresters, whose complaints about the damage to State forests resulting from overstocking with deer had been ignored by the authorities thanks to a powerful hunting lobby. Stern brought the issue to the attention of the public in a TV documentary on Red Deer, which was provocatively broadcast on Christmas Eve, 1971. “It was a devastating blow to German forest romanticism, Bambi-type sentimentality and, last but not least, the smooth talking of the hunting fraternity”, noted Ernst Johann in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (see Fischer 1997: 115). Stern repeated and developed his arguments in an open letter to the President, Walter Scheel (Stern 1975), which led to the end of State hunts as diversions for visiting Heads of State and diplomats, and forced the German Hunting Association to acknowledge the need for reform. Hunters no longer possess the political clout they once had, and there is, as in the United Kingdom, a vociferous German anti-hunting lobby.4 Wilhelm Bode and Elisabeth Emmert have described the 1970s and 1980s as a turning point for hunting (p. 12), a time of sweeping change, when the need for a new democratic and ecological legitimation of the practice became apparent. It was now recognised that hunting must be integrated with conservation and forestry and undergo a transition “from noble hobby to ecological craft”. They write of the necessity for a reduction of the stocks of game to a level which will prevent irreparable damage to Germany’s mixed forests,5 a switch from trophy hunting to planned culling of the weaker animals, including does and fawns, and a reduction of winter feeding and medical intervention, which effectively turn deer and boar into domestic animals. German hunters see themselves today as “applied conservationists”, benefiting the environment by preserving otherwise endangered species through the protection of their habitats.6 However, as long as hunting focuses on the preservation of the currently favoured species at the expense of others, its real environmental benefit and contribution to biodiversity is limited. So long as the current population of deer is maintained by feeding, hunters cannot

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either claim to be performing an ecologically valuable task by standing in for extinct natural predators such as wolf, lynx and bear.7 For some hunters at least, a part of the attraction of their sport lies in an erotically charged, aggressive pleasure taken in killing animals. (This troubling motivation is discussed by Cartmill, pp. 238–40.) Here hunting is associated with a violent and irrational aspect of the human psyche: certain men (fortunately relatively few) practise a Dionysian form of hunting which makes them feel “wild and wicked and crazy”. Tradition sanctions here what would otherwise be regarded as a pathological inclination akin to rape. However, there are many more supporters of hunting who seek to justify it in terms of its ‘naturalness’. Hunting today is, they claim, a disalienating activity. The hunter gains a knowledge of and develops a respect for his prey which is missing in ordinary life relations with animals as a result of the industrialisation of modern food production and its invisibility to the consumer. By giving expression to the ‘animal’ or ‘predator’ within us, tracking, stalking and shooting are also ‘original’ ways of being human, in which normally suppressed instincts are reunited with reason. This savage element at the heart of hunting is explored in one of the most significant philosophical defences of hunting in modern time, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Hunting, first published in 1942. Ortega describes hunting as a “deep and permanent yearning in the human condition” (Ortega y Gasset 1986: 29). It involves hardship, risk, physical effort and concentration, and presupposes a scarcity of game. One of the difficulties with Ortega’s argument is that he takes the predatory animal as a model, but in practice nine out of ten chases by predators in the wild are unsuccessful – an unattractive prospect for sporting hunters. It also ignores the fact that humans differ in important ways from other animals. A second difficulty is that the commercialisation of hunting as a recreational activity has stripped it of the schooling of the intellect and the disciplining of the instincts which led Ortega to describe the code of ethics observed by hunters as comparable to those in monastic orders and the military (p. 31). The sophistication of modern weapons has necessitated the elaboration of a set of rules which seek to prevent hunting from becoming too easy. (Hare, pheasant, grouse and duck may not, for instance, be shot while sitting or swimming.) Ortega recognises the artificiality with which hunting has been turned into a ‘sport’, involving ‘fair chase’ and chivalry. As weapons become more effective, man has “imposed more and more limitations on himself as the animal’s rival in order to leave it free to practise its wily defences, in order to avoid making the prey and the hunter excessively unequal” (p. 45).

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If hunting is a sport which benefits society by bringing people closer to nature and permitting them to escape at least temporarily from their alienation from their true human nature prevalent today, it is difficult to understand why it should be necessary to kill the animal: the compensatory proximity with nature is equally possible for walkers and photographers. For Ortega, it cannot however simply be replaced by other competitive sports or the photo safari. Though the purpose of the hunt lies in the chase rather than in the kill, the death of the animal remains crucial. “Every good hunter is uneasy in the depths of his conscience when faced with the death he is about to inflict on the enchanting animal”, but without “the harsh confrontation with the animal’s fierceness, the struggle with its energetic defence, the point of orgiastic intoxication aroused by the sight of blood, and even the hint of criminal suspicion which claws the hunter’s conscience” (my emphasis), hunting, in Ortega’s view, lacks authenticity. “The spirit of the hunt disappears” (p. 95). Ortega notes the ‘extras’ conveyed by hunting: “the immersion in the countryside, the healthfulness of the exercise, the distraction from [one’s] job, and so on and so forth” (p. 97). However, hunting is much more than these. As he rightly notes, it is a spiritual act, a religious rite – and, for him, an experience restoring us to authentic being. Because hunting relies on intense observation of the animal and a sort of imitation, or anticipation of its moves, Ortega writes of a “mystical union with the beast” (p. 124). The ‘equal’ encounter with the wild is “a conscious and almost religious humbling of man which limits his superiority and lowers him toward the animal” (pp. 97f.). In the “subtle rite” of hunting we divest ourselves of civilisation and return to nature (pp. 123 and 116). Deprived by civilisation of our “ancestral proximity to animals, vegetables and minerals – in sum, to Nature”, we take pleasure in the “artificial return to it” (p. 111). Hunting is a “vacation from the human condition through an authentic ‘immersion in Nature’” (p. 121). The argument that hunting gives (temporary) relief from the pain of individuation is returned to by Erich Fromm in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, but without Ortega’s mysticism. Fromm distinguishes “elite hunting”, which “satisfies the wish for power and control, including a certain amount of sadism, characteristic of power elites”, from the actions of the primitive professional and the modern passionate hunter. The last of these is led by two principal motivations. The first is to return to the “natural state”, become one with the animal, and be “freed from the burden of the existential split: to be part of nature and to transcend it by virtue of his consciousness”. However, of at least equal importance is the hunter’s enjoyment of his skill (1977: 185). It is worth noting that

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neither the experience of “oneness with nature” nor the pleasure taken in the combination of skills and “wide knowledge beyond that of handling a weapon” (ibid.) required by hunting would seem to necessitate or justify killing wild animals today, though Fromm does not comment directly on this. Val Plumwood’s recent reflections on the “relational” or “respectful” hunt go further towards accommodating the shift in thinking about nature from strong to weak anthropocentrism and sensitivities to animal rights and gender equality. Plumwood limits her justification of hunting to forms based on need and practised in a context which involves some elements of respect and sacredness. The animal must be treated “responsibly and seriously to fulfil an important need in a way that recognises the ‘more’ that it is and respects both its individuality and its normal species life, in a reciprocal chain of mutual use which must ultimately include both hunter and hunted” (2000: 299ff). In other words, to conform to the principles of sacred eating in a good human life, we must gain our food in such a way as to acknowledge our kinship with those whom we make our food, and the “more than food” that every one of us is (p. 303). The “sensitive hunter” relies not only on his or her communicative skills and knowledge but also on understanding of and rapport with the animals that are being hunted. The hunter will often be effective by adopting an ‘intentional’ stance, that is conceiving the hunted animal as another mindful, communicative and intentional being, and combining this rapport with the imperative of hunting food needed for the survival of self and loved ones. Neither Ortega nor Plumwood satisfies the imperative of humanely managing Germany’s (or Britain’s) game populations today. And we are left with the paradox that hunters are among those who care most about, know most intimately and practise the most effective stewardship of our wild animals but are motivated by the desire to kill – for pleasure rather than for food. Public attitudes towards hunting seem broadly negative, but there is a vociferous minority determined to continue and it is hard to imagine how game could be managed without some form of shooting. The reflection in literary texts of attitudes towards animals and hunting has aroused little academic interest in Germany so far.8 Yet literature, as a medium of non-trivial reflection on personal experience and received cultural values can give unique insight into the complexity of our relationship with wild animals. In the following text, I examine the hunting and wild animal stories of the Romanian German Otto Alscher (1880–1944) in the context of the ideological construction of nature and

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hunting in the early twentieth century. Alscher, a hunter who yet showed profound respect for wild animals and expressed concern at the erosion of their habitat, exemplifies the tensions in the attitude towards animals of his generation and beyond. His writing also illustrates the problematic political implications of the quest for authentic human experience, taking predatory animals as models for human behaviour, while at the same time speaking of the wild animal’s essential otherness and calling for a ‘partnership’ with wild animals, a reconciliation of nature and culture, civilisation and the wild. The action in Horst Stern’s novella, which was written half a century after Alscher’s stories, takes place in the same part of the world (the forests of the Carpathian Mountains). Motivated by an explicit aim to expose the hypocrisy of hunting practices in the1970s and 1980s, the domestication of the wild and the degeneration of a noble sport through political instrumentalisation and commercialisation, it illustrates the changed environmental situation and the shift in attitudes towards animals, and serves as an example of both the strengths and the weaknesses associated with the writing of direct environmental commitment.

5.2 Idyll and aggression in the stories of Otto Alscher Though forests, mountains and wild animals have exercised a powerful fascination over the German cultural imagination,9 there is little more wilderness left in modern Germany than in Britain. The densely populated central European landscape has been cleared, cultivated and shaped by its inhabitants for more than a thousand years, and the last native German wolves were shot in the mid-nineteenth century. It is not therefore surprising that Otto Alscher, one of the few twentieth-century German authors to know and write about life and animals in the wild, should have lived on the extreme Eastern edge of the German-speaking world, in a corner of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, where the Danube traverses the Southern Carpathian Mountains. Hunting and wild animal stories occupy a marginal status in twentieth-century German literature, and Alscher’s reputation today is no more than that of a minor provincial writer, remembered at best in the context of the literature of the Banat region, today divided between Romania, Serbia and Hungary, which was colonised by Germans in the early eighteenth century, and where at one time over a million German speakers lived. Yet he published four novels and six volumes of stories during his lifetime. In the years leading up to the First World War, Alscher enjoyed considerable success with literary and journalistic works

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which drew his wider home to the attention of German readers as one remote from the major European capitals, an exotic landscape of forests, farms and small towns, inhabited by Gypsy woodcutters, Romanian peasants and Hungarian landlords. The novel Gogan und das Tier (1912) and the two volumes of short prose Die Kluft: Rufe von Menschen und Tieren (1917) and Tier und Mensch (1928) were published respectively by a leading German publisher based in Berlin (S. Fischer), and, in the case of the stories, by a reputable Munich firm (Albert Langen). However, his later work failed to match this success. The novel Zwei Mörder in der Wildnis (1934) only appeared in abridged form, serialised in a popular journal, and his last collection of stories, Die Bärin (1943), which contains some of his best writing, was published locally in a small print run by a friend of the author’s. Alscher, whose father ran a photographic studio in the town of Ors¸ ova, began his writing career after a brief period studying photography and graphic design in Vienna in 1900. He moved to Budapest to work as a journalist in 1911, and at the end of the First World War he supported the short-lived Hungarian Socialist Republic. After this had been crushed, he returned to the Banat, where his home had meanwhile become a part of the Kingdom of Romania. For a period of time Alscher continued to work as a journalist and played an active part in the sociopolitical life of the German minority during the brief period of cultural revival which ensued. However, political disillusionment, professional disappointments and the break-up of his first marriage led him to withdraw to a house in the woods he had built and lived in sporadically in the pre-war years. His efforts to live the simple life here, hunting, working a smallholding and writing, earned him the nickname of the “hermit” and “Mahatma Gandhi” of Ors¸ova. Grinding poverty and failure to find a publisher for his novels and stories left him open to the lure of fascism in the 1930s, whose glorification of the instincts he shared. When Germany lost control of Romania in the final months of the Second World War, Alscher was interned and died in a camp.10 Alscher was a keen hunter in his youth, and his early stories celebrate hunting as an expression of deep-rooted human instincts. But as he got older, he seems gradually to have lost pleasure in shooting, and become more interested in observing and describing the bears, wolves, lynxes, polecats, martens, eagles and smaller creatures of the Carpathian forests. From the start, his writing reflects a fundamental ambivalence regarding the shooting of wild animals, and in the 1920s, their focus shifts away from the excitement of tracking animals down, towards respectful observation, appreciation of their grace and vitality, wonder at their

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autonomy and acknowledgement of their right to life. First signs of this may be found in the stories ‘Der Marder’ and ‘Der Fremde’, which he wrote during the First World War. In the former, the author sets out with his dogs and his best rifle on a winter hunting expedition. It is the first good day after a depressing spell of bad weather, and the landscape is magically transformed by snowfall. He writes of the will to power and describes the exertion of hunting in terms reminiscent of Nietzsche, as a stripping away of the layers of effete civilisation, and, like Ortega, as a regaining of our lost animality: Gibt es etwas Herrlicheres als den Willen zur Kraft? Den Willen zur Gewalt, zur Überwältigung, zur Grausamkeit, wenn es sein muß, wenn wir sie nur üben, weil wir sie auch zu ertragen wissen und sie eine Probe unsrer Kraft an anderen ist. [ … ] Der Körper dampft und verlangt Nacktheit. Die Muskeln, denen alles zu eng ist, wenn sie jauchzen, wenn sie ihren Gesang singen, ihren gleichtönig wuchtigen, unbeirrt fließenden Gesang. Leben ist der Gesang des Körpers. Hartes, willensuchendes, einfaches Leben, dessen Scham das Verhüllte, Verdeckte und nicht das Nackte ist. (Alscher 1917: 20–22) Coming on the tracks of a pair of wolves, he muses: Ich möchte doch wieder einen Wolf sehen, wie er kommt, lang, geräuschlos, stark und grau durch den Wald gleitend, furchtlos auf den Schützen zu, der ihn mit klopfendem Herzen erwartet. Und wie sich dann alle Wildheit jäh und flammend in seinen Blicken entzündet, bevor sie hart verlöschend einem starken Leben nachgleiten, das von dannen schwindet, sich irgendeiner fernen Urkraft wieder zu einigen. (p. 24) Alscher laments the dilution of the life force in the process of civilisation, our recourse to increasingly sophisticated weapons and the gradual displacement of strength by cunning, of the body by intellect. And yet this is no untroubled celebration of the Dionysian, for he also writes of modern man’s unease at taking animal life. He experiences feelings of shock and horror at his own actions when faced with the death throes of a hare. There is a disturbing contradiction in man’s dual nature, he muses, as both a creature of instincts and a reasoning subject guided by moral principles, capable of empathising with animals (p. 22). Brushing this feeling aside, however, he proceeds to shoot a wildcat which his

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dogs have flushed out of a badger’s den. Reinvigorated, he strides out in search of further adventure and observes at the sight of the blood dripping from the animal strung from his rucksack: Vielleicht ist der Gang der Menschen darum so stark, so stolz, weil Blut ihren Weg bezeichnet. Weil jeder Schritt der Menschen Vernichtung ist, Vernichtung von Zeit, Raum und Unmöglichkeit. Und daß diese unsere Tritte des Verderbens doch immer wieder zu neuem Leben führen, ist dies nicht das Erhabenste unseres Seins? Das Starke siegt. Wenn nicht darauf die Entwicklung von Mensch und Tier aufgebaut wäre, was wären wir heute? Aber das Recht der Kraft wird immer seine Geltung haben, auch für die Zukunft der Menschheit. Denn wehe, wenn es einmal nicht mehr so sein sollte. Wir dürfen immer nur durch Macht zur Milde gelangen, denn nur der Adel der Kraft ist der wahrhaftige. (pp. 27f.) These commonplaces of Social Darwinism, in which Darwin’s principle of the survival of the fittest (i.e. those most able to adapt to environmental change) is reformulated in a doctrine of the right of the strongest to dominate other species and dubiously transferred to the human sphere, lead to reflection on the unlimited power of modern man over animals and fantasies of his own prowess as a hunter: “Ich will heute meine Überlegeneheit ausnützen. Ich will sehen, ob etwas meinem Siegeswillen gewachsen ist, ob das Spiel vom Leben und Tod in meiner Hand durch etwas eine Störung erleiden kann” (pp. 28f.). However, this moment of supreme hubris is a turning point. A marten, seemingly trapped in an isolated thicket, manages to escape his dogs and bullets to safety. He starts the homeward journey disappointed and perplexed that his shots could have missed their target. Gradually, these feelings pass, and his lasting memory is the sight of the marten’s “wonderfully easy dashing”, its “supple, agile gliding” across the snow, and the wonderment that prevented him from pressing the trigger until it was too late: “Es ist kein Springen, kein Laufen, es scheint den Schnee nicht zu berühren, nur um über die weiche Masse hinwegzugleiten, ohne eine Spur zu hinterlassen. Ich sehe deutlich das ganze Tier, aber ich erkenne keine Bewegung, schlank und schmal und wie aus Erz gegossen fliegt es hin” (p. 31). We humans will never be able to emulate such suppleness and lightness, the powerful yet invisible play of muscles, whose action is of unfathomable origin. The strength of animals lies in such seeming effortlessness, which contrasts with the struggle and sweat attaching to

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all our achievements. Indeed, it is shame over that sweat which drives us to seek artificial aid in weapons, to feign feverishly a strength which we do not possess, but with which the animal is born. Echoing Nietzsche’s Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben, he reflects that humans have sought to outstrip animals out of sheer jealousy. Our admiration for them is the purest thing of which we are capable (p. 33). In ‘Der Fremde’, a similar lesson is learned by a Romanian shepherd’s boy, who is visiting his father in their summer grazing in the mountains. “What use are wolves?” he asks. “They’re no good for anything, there’s not even room for them in the forest any more – they should be exterminated!” (p. 44). He is puzzled by his father’s equanimity when one of their dogs is killed by the leader of the wolf pack. The man accepts the presence of the wolves in the forest and argues for coexistence with them: Was soll man machen! Der Wolf leidet es eben nicht, daß wir in seinem Walde tun, als wären wir die Herren. Vordem waren die Hirten hier heroben, die Wölfe machten zuviel Schaden, auch die Adler schlugen Lämmer, nun aber sind wir doch gekommen, und wenn sie sich da zur Wehr setzen, müssen wir es ruhig dulden! [ … ] Wald ist Wald und der Wolf gehört zum Walde. (pp. 48f.) Towards the end of the story, the boy finds the leader of the wolf pack trapped in the shepherds’ hut. Having entered to steal a new-born lamb the shepherds are looking after, the animal has been caught by the wind blowing the door shut. Alone and without a weapon, the indignant boy can do no more than shout abuse at the animal through the window. It turns to look at him: “Wie groß doch der Wolf war. Wie mächtig sein Schädel, die gedrungene Brust, der langbehaarte Rücken. Die Augen glühten, sie stachen auf ihn, und doch war es, als ruhe dieser fremde, wilde Blick nicht auf ihm, durchdringe ihn vielmehr und schaute weit hinaus” (p. 57). Overcome with the feeling that it is impossible for anyone to capture or defeat such “immense, indomitable wildness” (p. 58), that it would merely be inherited by some other creature in the forest if this wolf should suffer harm, and with the sensation that he himself will “collapse and fade away” if he does not remove the barrier which separates him from the animal, the boy eventually throws open the door and releases the wolf. As it passes him, it is as if his existence “shakes from the steps of a great, strange life” (p. 60). If Alscher’s description of the marten in ‘Der Marder’ recalls the symbolisation of the life force by

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animals in the paintings of Henri Rousseau or Franz Marc, it is the wolf which exercises a particular fascination in both stories and becomes an identification figure, standing, as in the American animal stories of Ernest Thompson Seton, for an uninhibited way of life, lonely but free of ties and, where necessary, cruel and devoid of guilt. Stories narrated from the perspective of the hunter predominate in Alscher’s early work, but are later balanced by a growing number of tales and passages in the novels told from the animal’s perspective. At the very heart of his mature writing is the encounter with the wild, which is crystallised in the experience of being fixed in the animal’s gaze. By returning our human gaze, animals make us aware they are active subjects and not merely passive objects. They reassert an autonomy which momentarily decentres our anthropocentric world view. In an autobiographical note entitled ‘Von mir über mich’, written in 1934 to accompany the serialisation of his novel Zwei Mörder in der Wildnis in the magazine Daheim, Alscher describes a dramatic experience in his childhood: Mein Leben verlief wie das vieler Kinder deutscher Auswanderer bis zu meinem dreizehnten Jahre mehr farbig als eintönig, ohne daß ich jedoch etwas Außergewöhnliches darin gefunden hätte. Bis dann ein aus den Verhältnissen nicht gerade herausspringendes Geschehnis mein Wesen bestimmend beeinflußte. [ … ] An einem Oktobertage kehrte ich mit anderen Kameraden von einem Ausflug über die Berge heim. Ich ging voran, es dämmerte bereits stark. [ … ] Da schiebt sich plötzlich ein großes, graues Tier über die Waldblöße. [ … ] Ich sehe den starken Schädel, die breiten Wangenhaare, die spitzen, kurzen Ohren und den stämmigen Brustbau. Sogleich weiß ich: es ist ein Wolf! Doch nur mit einem ungeheuren Erstaunen starre ich ihn an. In mir ist gar keine Furcht, nur ein freudiger Schreck, der fragen möchte, nichts als fragen. [ … ] Mir ist, als hätte ich eine große Freundschaft werden sehen, die aber doch nur Verheißung blieb. Zweifel und Bewunderung für das freie, wilde Tier erfüllten mich und Fragen, viele Fragen, die sich der Knabe nicht beantworten konnte. (Daheim 70, no. 15: 4) The encounter, which corresponds to several passages in Alscher’s fiction, is perhaps as much imagined as experienced. He describes himself as a child of “German émigrés”: his parents were both from Silesia, and the family only moved to Ors¸ ova when he was eleven. Hence the young Otto was an outsider, who sought solace in nature (and companionship with other social outsiders). The absence of fear shows the boy has

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entered manhood: the incident resembles an initiation into the great community of nature. The encounter with the wolf is presented as a solitary one, and the animal holds out a “great friendship” as a tantalising possibility. Alscher is careful not to seek to go beyond this and claim such friendship existed in reality, for that would domesticate the animal and sentimentalise the experience. Its freedom and wildness at the same time serve as a model for his own non-integration in society. Coming eye to eye with a wild animal, or hearing its call nearby, is described repeatedly in Alscher’s stories as a mystical moment giving meaning to life. “Es ist seltsam”, he concludes the autobiographical sketch, daß die langen Jahre des Großstadtlebens, das Wirken an einer Zeitung vor dem Kriege [ … ], der Krieg selbst, [ … ] dann die reichen Jahre politischer und völkischer Tätigkeit – daß dies alles mir nur wie ein Zwischenspiel erscheint zur Festigung jener Augenblicke, da ich bei föhnigem Wind unter mir im Walde des Nachwinters den rauhen Plärrschrei des Luchses hörte. [ … ] Ja, ganz kurz sind die Augenblicke des wahren Lebensgefühles beim Menschen, und doch sind sie allein Träger eines ganzen Daseins. (ibid.) Alscher here takes understanding of and respect for the wild animal a step further than previous German writers such as Karl May, Ludwig Ganghofer and Hermann Löns. Löns, who is remembered as the ‘poet of the Lüneburg Heath’ and ‘father of the German wild animal story’, was one of the first Germans to write extensively about animals from their perspective. His early stories, written from the mid-1890s on, feature real creatures rather than the allegorical figures of animal fables and avoid crude anthropomorphisation. But they continue to present animals as individuals with personalities and conscious motives for their actions, humanising them as quaint rustic figures. His mature writing is more factual and naturalistic, combining precise personal observation with scientific knowledge. Alscher’s depiction of animals is from the start less cosily anthropomorphic than that of Löns, who was 14 years his senior. While continuing to ascribe a degree of intentionality to the animals, he is more sensitive towards the reality of their lives and more faithful to their perceptual worlds. The similarities between Löns and Alscher are nevertheless considerable and worth noting: outsiders by birth in the regions to which they gave literary voice, they can be said to have constructed their identities by idealising the local landscape as wilderness and stylising themselves as hunter–writers. For both, nature serves a dual function (see Dupke

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1993: 107ff). On the one hand, it is a harmonious, often idyllic refuge from society, a source of pleasure which compensates for the alienation, disorientation and fragmentation of city life and modern industrial society, and for problems in the authors’ private lives (see especially chapters 4 and 8 of Dupke 1993). On the other, it is a site of Darwinian struggle. The rule of the strongest is presented as a quasi-divine order, a stern but ultimately reassuring life principle. The influence of Nietzsche’s critique of civilisation is evident in both Löns’s and Alscher’s celebration of the law of nature as one contrasting with the ‘artificial’, ‘degenerate’ laws of modern society and standing as a model for social regeneration and the future State.11 It is no accident that, although they displayed left-wing sympathies in their youth, both authors turned to völkisch (i.e. racist–nationalist) conservatism and ended up in compromising proximity with the Nazis.12 This dual function of nature is directly expressed in Alscher’s first novel, Ich bin ein Flüchtling (1909). The forest provides a haven for the two Gypsy protagonists, who have been wrongly accused of theft and attempted murder by local farmers. Its majestic calm impresses itself on them: “Here they were at home, here, where they had spent the night hundreds of times, and often stayed months as woodcutters, always surrounded by peace, and at peace in themselves” (p. 13). Such passages on the comforting safety the virgin forest affords by day alternate with others where the giant trees tower over the two tiny figures by night, the gathering darkness in their branches suggesting the insignificance and powerlessness of human beings against nature. The forest, the mountains and the starry skies above them are visible tokens of das Gesetz, the law of nature. Its constant self-renewal of the species in the great cycle of birth and death, which is aloof and cruelly indifferent to the fate of individuals, is echoed in the human laws which ensure that the Gypsies remain disadvantaged outsiders (pp. 17f. and 52). In the following passage, where one of the Gypsies lies awake at night in the forest, Alscher, like Löns, alternates between ultimately contradictory faces of nature: its unfathomable, hostile power over life and death, and the comforting security of its seeming peace and harmony: Sein Blick war in die Nacht gerichtet, als sähe er Unfaßbares in ihr kreisen, etwas, das mit wütender Macht auf ihn eindrang und dessen er sich nicht zu erwehren vermochte. Nach ein paar Stunden Schlaf aber, als er zufällig erwachte, das Feuer ruhig blaken sah, die tiefe Stille der Urwaldnacht fühlte, stieg eine wohlige Sicherheit in ihm auf, ein wonniges Heimgefühl, so tief und sicher, daß er es nie zu verlieren glaubte. (p. 19)

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Alscher’s Gypsies are a “Naturvolk” (1909: 217), exhibiting the innate guilelessness of Rousseau’s noble savage but capable of outbursts of savage violence. Idyll and aggression were complementary aspects of international cultural criticism at the turn of the twentieth century. Present, for instance, in the wilderness writing of Rudyard Kipling and Jack London, they are exemplified as opposite poles in the pre-war German literature of nature by the Monist spirituality of Waldemar Bonsels’s much-loved children’s story Die Biene Maja (1912), and Löns’s Bloodand-Soil historical novel Der Wehrwolf (1910). Löns and Alscher blend them together in their animal stories, constructing nature as an expression of the longings and hopes of their contemporaries but also of their fears and fantasies of violence. The ‘myth’ of nature, which comprises their response to the pressures of modernisation and the scientific world view of the age, embraces both harmony and a destructive tendency. The latter is evident in the problematic fascination with the survival instinct and ruthless self-assertion of predators which we noted above in Alscher’s writing. In the novel Zwei Mörder in der Wildnis, which was written in the 1930s, it is a lynx which personifies the wild. The protagonist Hugo Frahm recognises in the animal, which appears to him at various points in the forest, a kindred spirit, and a model for his future actions: Wie, wenn das Erscheinen des Luchses vor ihm irgendeine Bedeutung hatte? Vielleicht die, daß zwischen ihm und diesem gewaltigsten Vertreter der Wildnis eine geheime Bindung zustandekommen würde, die sein Leben dem dieses kühnen Räubers annähern würde? Eine Tat der Gewalt hatte ihn in den Urwald geführt, hierher, wo nur die unverhüllte Kraft ihr Recht fand. Also mußte auch er ein Mensch werden, der nur durch seine Stärke sich Geltung verschaffte. Das wollte ihn der Luchs wohl lehren. (Daheim 70, no. 17: 7) As Helga Korodi has pointed out, the animal effectively becomes his totem (Korodi 2003: 138). The ‘Wehrwolf’ in Löns’s novel, a neologism combining self-defence with the attributes of the werewolf and real wolves, performs a similar function (see Dupke 1993: 165–7). The celebration of hunting, which Alscher shared with Löns as a variant of the vitalist philosophy so widespread around 1900, is curiously ambivalent. On the one hand, they represent the hunt as an innocent opportunity to enjoy nature and regain naturalness by watching, listening and putting physical strength, endurance and skill to the test. On the other, it enables them to live out latent violent tendencies. Observing

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animals is a source of pleasure in itself for Löns but always leads to the destructive act. Dupke shows through close reading of selected passages how hunting is erotically charged in Löns’s work: suppressed libido is transformed into aggression and the kill is described in terms of sexual possession (Dupke 1993: 78–85, 117ff). In some of Alscher’s early stories and in places in Zwei Mörder in der Wildnis nature is also eroticised. However, libidinous overtones are relatively insignificant in Alscher’s work as a whole. A further difference between Alscher and the North German Löns is the relative absence of racism in his work. Coming from a multiethnic stopping point for river traffic on the Danube, where a sprinkling of Austrians and Hungarians lived alongside ‘Swabian’ Germans, Romanians, Gypsies and Jews, Alscher constructs on the whole evenhanded cultural images rather than discriminatory racial stereotypes. His representation of Gypsies is far from Löns’s “vermin” (“Ungeziefer”, in Der Wehrwolf: see Dupke 1993: 139): he idealises their way of life as one reintegrating dimensions of our being suppressed in modern civilisation, and identifies, like his urban Expressionist contemporaries, with the under-privileged and socially disadvantaged (in his case not factory workers or prostitutes, but tramps, casual workers and shepherds). His political views may have been fickle and sadly misguided – in the early years of the First World War he penned chauvinistic propaganda, and during the Second World War he wrote politically compromising articles in return for a small regular income – yet his individualism, tolerance and support for a multi-cultural society were sufficiently distinct from Nazi ideology to ensure he remained an outsider in the Third Reich. Löns’s espousal of the conservationist cause (he supported efforts to found the first German national park in the Lüneburg Heath, opposed building in intact landscapes, spoke out against the clearing of trees and hedges by ‘improving’ estate owners, campaigned for the protection of birds and pleaded for consideration of animal suffering) led environmentalists in the 1970s and 1980s to describe him as a pioneering ecologist and an early Green (Dupke 1993: 20). However, Dupke reminds us that the considerations he was motivated by were aesthetic and political rather than genuinely ecological (p. 277). The same is of course true for Alscher: his lament at the creeping destruction of the habitat of wild animals is rooted in a defensive critique of modernisation and its seeming threat to individual freedom by depriving us of the ability to lead simple, natural lives. In the story ‘Über den Menschen’, which was written during the First World War, a modern city is described from the perspective

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of a bear, as a suppurating wound or cancerous growth on the face of the Earth: Der Bär umkreiste auf den Höhen oben die Stadt. Er sah das Tal durchsetzt mit eckigen Erhöhungen, die ihm wie Wucherungen waren, gleich den krankhaften Auswüchsen am Stamme alter Bäume, wie Schorf einer Wunde, die nie heilte, wie sie ineinanderliefen, sich gegenseitig zu verdrängen schienen. Und aus diesen Wucherungen heraus und hinein krochen Menschen gleich Maden am schon zerfallenen Kadaver eines Tieres. Die Höhen rings um die Stadt waren kahl, zerwaschen, zerfressen. Das Gehölz verkrüppelt, die Berge wie verstümmelt, gleich dem Grase, dem Boden rings um das Aas eines Tieres. (1917: 90f.) Expressionist pathos is replaced by more sober description, however, in the later stories. In the volume Tier und Mensch (1928), ‘Zerstörung’ tells how the virgin forest of the Carpathians, which has afforded a bear “undisturbed peace” and “a safe yet limitless home”, is disturbed and changed forever by hunters. The bear survives despite being wounded, but its habitat, which is described in terms reminiscent of Stifter’s timeless, majestic Bohemian forests, will never be the same again: Einsam und unberührt war die Wildnis wie vordem, trotzdem aber klaffte ein Riß durch die Stille. Etwas in ihr war zerstört, hatte sich schreckhaft geändert, und so tief die Ruhe des Urwaldes auch war, so friedlich ihr Weben, ein Schrillen durchzitterte sie, schnitt in sie hinein, so daß sie der Bär schmerzhaft wie eine Wunde empfand. (1928: 26) ‘Verfolger’ is a similar narrative, but this time from the perspective of a wolf. Again, the forest has been “violated” and “made strange” by intruding hunters and hounds pursuing wolves which had taken their sheep. ‘Der Furchtbare’, a gripping story concerning the impact of the opening of a manganese mine in the forest on a colony of eagles, alternates between the perspective of the birds and that of an engineer who works in the mines. Alscher writes of the impact of population displacement in the First World War, population growth and industrial development on the habitat of the Carpathian bears, wolves and lynxes, from a sense of the necessity of striking a balance between the material needs and desires of humans and the value of the non-human, including wildlife.

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In his late work, the gap separating humans from animals is further bridged through presenting animals as models for humanity in caring and loyalty. This is particularly true of the last volume of stories, Die Bärin (1943), whose subtitle, “Contemplative Stories”, signals the author’s relinquishment of vitalist activism. In the title story he writes of a boy who has stolen an infant bear cub from its den and is bringing it back to show proudly to his teacher. Events lead to recognition that the mother bear is anything but a “dumb animal”, and the cub’s life and happiness are worthy of his respect and care. In ‘Mein Freund Walter, der Uhu’, subtitled “Strange Links between Man and Animal”, Alscher writes of his relationship with an eagle-owl which he had been given as an owlet and has raised to maturity. The bird continues to visit him after its release into the wild. Close knowledge of animals can only lead us to recognise them as friends, he argues, though they will always retain their autonomy. Even predators are not enemies, but competitors, and potential partners of man: Bindungen bestehen zwischen Tier und Mensch, die wir noch lange nicht alle geklärt haben. Was wissen wir überhaupt von den wahren Empfindungen der Tiere, wir ahnen noch immer nicht die Grenze, wo bei ihnen Erfahrungen und Triebe in Überlegung, vielleicht sogar zusammenhängendes Denken übergehen. Eines aber ist mir gewiß: daß das starke, freie Tier, das Raubtier, dem Menschen nicht unbedingt als Feind, sondern als Partner, als Wettbewerber gegenübersteht, wenn es in ihm die gleiche Stärke und Freiheit spürt. (1943: 22) The need to coexist with animals and respect the natural environment is also the prime message of the novel Der Löwentöter, which was written in the 1920s, but only published posthumously in 1972. Alscher’s most thoughtful treatment of our relationship with animals and with our own animality is, however, to be found in the early novel Gogan und das Tier (1912), which explores the possibility of reconciliation between civilisation with the wild, reason and instinct. His most successful longer work in terms of structural cohesion and symbolic richness, this book tells the story of the illegitimate offspring of a Hungarian countess and a travelling Gypsy. Through Gogan’s search for his true parents and his quest for an identity involving integration of his – at times – violent impulsiveness (described as the “unredeemed wildness” and “simplest, most violent instincts” within him – Alscher 1970: 118) Alscher undermines ethnic and social barriers. Gogan is bent on tracking down his

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father, in order to avenge his mother’s rape and rid himself of the “curse of animality” he has inherited (p. 112). However, the novel ends with him resolving to accept what he owes to his father, and “grasp and transfigure” the “animality” within him (p. 113). When two college friends ask him to join them in a business project to exploit the forests on the estate, he thus rejects the proposed, strictly rational usage of natural resources, saying this would compromise his personal freedom: Wenn ich dies Gut übernehme, tu ich es nicht, um es als Forst- und Ackerland zu betrachten, sondern als ein Stück Erde, das einzig meinem Fuß gehört [ … ] Denn ich will diese Erde nicht als ein Tier betrachten, das für mich arbeiten muß, ich will auch nicht der Untertan sein, der für diese Erde lebt und blutet. Ich will nicht besitzen, will nicht besessen sein, sondern will mich dieser Erde als Teil der Natur, als Landschaftsteil anfügen. Und möge dabei ihr Acker zu Brachland, ihr Wald zur Wildnis werden, sie wird doch jene Landschaft bleiben, mit der mein Atemzug der gleiche ist. (p. 116) This identification with the land is closer to Erich Fromm’s ‘Sein’ then ‘Haben’ or Löns’s völkisch belonging. It becomes Gogan’s aim in life to “convert the animality in us into conscious life practice” (p. 118) and avoid the pathology of an age in which human libido is suppressed. His newfound purpose finds confirmation in the trusting obedience of a pointer he has just purchased, “a large, powerful dog [ … ] with the muzzle of a badger, but the eyes of a wolf” (p. 115). Its hunting urges are half the result of training and half inborn hunting instinct. As “the product of man, yet animal enough [ … ] to testify to its belonging to the great unity of life with every breath” (p. 119), it stands as a model for the reconciliation of the tensions within him between longing for the freedom to follow his impulses and recognition of the necessity for reason and its disciplined application. Alscher emphasises the otherness and autonomy of the wild animal as a source of enrichment in our lives. Wildness, he suggests, is important to us as something we are in danger of losing ourselves. Paradoxically, this can be a justification for hunting, as in Gogan’s explanation of an unannounced absence from the estate: “Seht, mir geht es wie meinem neuen Hunde da, der soll auch manchmal ganz unvermutet verschwinden und einige Tage ausbleiben. Vielleicht um einmal frei von aller Dressur einen Fuchs zu hetzen oder seine überschüssige Kraft auszutoben, um durch die Erschöpfung um so mächtigeren Ersatz zu gewinnen … So geht es mir!” (p. 115)

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The book ends with Gogan taking the dog out hunting. Alscher was of his time as a hunter, who yet appreciated nature and sought to preserve it. The same tension is observable in contemporaries such as the novelist William Faulkner, whose great hunting tale The Bear (written, like Alscher’s last collection of stories, in the 1940s), is the story of the initiation of a young man into adulthood and simultaneously a paean to the wild and a lament at its passing. It is not surprising that Alscher’s novels, which are flawed by structural weaknesses, implausible plots, clichéd characters and intrusive religious–philosophical commentary, are forgotten today. But he was a master of shorter prose, excelling in brief, atmospheric pieces which evoke, like wildlife photographs, the encounter with the wild and the experience of nature. Typically, he conjures up the scene as a synaesthesia of closely observed elements: birdsong, the noises of animals in the forest, the panoramic backdrop of dusk and dawn in the mountains, the taste and touch and smell of things. ‘Die Waldnacht’ in Die Bärin opens with the sounds, shapes and smells of the forest at night. Dangers lurk for the unwary amongst the animals going about their business: Langer, rinnender Grillenlaut. Er zieht die Nacht mit, immer tiefer in die kühle Finsternis hinein. Eine Bergwand mit schwarz geballten Bäumen schließt das Tal ab. Sie wacht reglos über der Nacht in dem Garten alter Obstbäume, der zu ihren Füßen hingelagert ist. Ganz ins Dunkel geduckt kauert eine Blockhütte mit leeren Fensterhöhlen, die den feuchten Geruch der Verlassenheit ausströmen. Im finsteren Ball eines Nußbaumes faucht schläfrig eine Waldkauz. Es ist, als spräche er mit sich, müde und zwecklos. Unter ihm, bei einem Astloch, schabt eine Haselmaus an einer Nuß, doch der Kauz beachtet sie nicht. Die Nacht ist voller kalter, stickiger Ruhe. Sie atmet den Geruch von Fallaub, Staub und faulen Äpfeln aus. Ein Igel, der sich schnuppernd unter den Bäumen hinschiebt, zerstört manchmal die Stille mit einem lauten Geraschel, dann wieder verharrt er lange und unhörbar auf einer Stelle. In den Bäumen oben wispert und schüttert es. Bilche, Siebenschläfer, sind dort an der Arbeit, die Spätlinge eines Birnbaumes zu verzehren. Manchmal lassen sie eine angefressene Frucht fallen, die klatscht dumpf auf, raschelt kurz nach, worauf dann ein lauerndes, stummes Lauschen der Nacht folgt. (1943: 32) The landscape is ensouled, but this is no bland, harmonious Romantic pantheism: as in Wilhelm Lehmann’s poems and Bukolische Tagebücher

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(written 1927–32, published 1948), it is alive with the actions of real birds and animals. These appear as if in response to the intensity and persistence of the author’s waiting and listening. The touches of anthropomorphisation invest the scene with a dynamic of expectancy. Onomatopoeic verbs and unfamiliar bird names lend freshness: Alscher enriches our lives by opening our eyes to a world we have neglected and ignored. His deftly and economically structured animal stories, which combine such vivid landscape descriptions with authentic knowledge of the animals, deserve to find readers again. Unsurpassed in evoking the atmosphere of the forest, they remind us of the presence of the wild and the need for wildness in our lives.13 “In the last two centuries, animals have gradually disappeared. Today we live without them”, writes John Berger in his essay ‘Why Look at Animals?’ (Berger 2003: 264). Most of us know only our pets, which have been transformed into human puppets, and our only contact with wild animals is in zoos, or on television. These are “always the observed”. The fact they can observe us has lost all significance: they are the “objects of our ever-extending knowledge” (p. 267). This reduction of the animal to an object is “part of the same process as that by which men have been reduced to isolated productive and consuming units” (p. 265). Historically, animals have been “subjected and worshipped, bred and sacrificed”: Today the vestiges of this dualism remain among those who live intimately with, and depend upon, animals. A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements in that sentence are connected by an and and not by a but. (p. 261) Simultaneously like and unlike us, animals lead parallel lives. They offer humans “a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species” (p. 261). “The eyes of an animal when they consider a man are attentive and wary”, Berger comments. “Man becomes aware of himself returning the look” (p. 260). For Alscher, hunting was a unique possibility of experiencing the animal’s gaze.

5.3 Cultural criticism and ecological commitment in Horst Stern’s Jagdnovelle Born in Stettin on the Baltic coast in 1922, Stern fought in the Second World War, was captured in North Africa and spent two years as a

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prisoner of war in Kentucky. Having learned enough English there to enable him to get a job as a legal interpreter for the US forces near Stuttgart on his release, he became a legal reporter for the daily newspaper Stuttgarter Nachrichten and subsequently reporter for local news. Meanwhile he developed a fascination with animals, their living environment and behaviour and our relationship with them. Stern acquired and looked after a series of birds and small animals, including a falcon and a pair of ravens, which he prepared for release into the wild, and began writing pieces about them for the weekend supplement of his paper.14 When his friend Wolfgang Bechtle became chief editor of the scientific magazine Kosmos, Stern was commissioned to write longer and more serious articles, including one which involved a trip to the Antarctic. His work as a journalist covered a wide range of topics, and trained him in the ability to gain a quick grasp of a subject, identify key issues and formulate arguments clearly, entertainingly and persuasively. His career took a decisive turn in 1970, when he was invited to make a series of TV programmes on animals for the Stuttgart-based Süddeutscher Rundfunk. The first, entitled Bemerkungen zum Pferd, caused a furore among the horse-riding community by exposing the pain and fear involved in training horses for racing and show-jumping. Some 25 often sharply critical and politically sensitive TV programmes about animals, the conditions they lived in and our disturbed relationship with them in modern urban society followed over the next nine years. Under the general heading ‘Sterns Stunde’, they set out to counter the dissociation of our relations with animals which has resulted from the division between those subjected to unfeeling scientific knowledge and economic use on the one hand and others whose lives are often grotesquely deformed through their treatment as pets. Stern was no animal rights radical, and not even a vegetarian, but he saw it as his task to inform, educate and enlighten the public, and to reintegrate our estranged knowledge of and feelings about animals. This central aim is summed up in a commentary he gave when two of his programmes were broadcast again at the end of the 1980s: Homo carnivoris, der fleischfressende Mensch, besudelt sich ja nicht, indem er seinem natürlichen Proteinhunger folgt. Er gerät nur dann ins Zwielicht, wenn er das Kainsmal des Tiertöters rosig überschminkt, indem er das Nutztier total aus seinem Bewußtsein verdrängt und sein schlechtes Gewissen darüber oft genug in eine fanatische Afterliebe zu Hund und Katze und zum Kanarienvogel Hansi umfunktioniert. (cited in Fischer 1997: 153)

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Using cameramen trained in the ‘Stuttgarter Schule’ tradition of quality television documentaries, Stern reinvented the genre of the Tiersendung or animal-centred programme, no longer permitting viewers to escape from everyday reality to exotic foreign landscapes, but rather critically examining Germany’s native animals and their treatment. With hardhitting pictures and terse, often sarcastic and bitter commentaries, he presented challenging facts and arguments about battery poultry farms, pig and cattle rearing, tourism and industrial development in the Alps, and hunting. Controversial programmes alternated with more conciliatory and visually attractive ones: in a two-part film, for instance, Stern sought to combat fear of spiders by informing the public about them and presenting beautiful images. Stern had become a household name and was a leading opinion former on animals’ rights when he broadcast three in-depth programmes on the use of animals for experiments in pharmaceutical research between 1977 and 1979. His scrupulously balanced presentation of this emotive subject refused to condemn the scientists as “sadists in white coats” (see Fischer 1997: 70) and pointed out the benefits for the treatment of spastic children gained from distressing experimental operations on the brains of cats. Inevitably, Stern was attacked in the tabloid press as a traitor to the cause. As much in response to the change in the political climate in Germany from the late 1970s on, when the media were gradually opened up to commercial stations and entertainment began to replace more serious programming, as to personal disappointments, Stern withdrew, first from TV and later from journalism, and moved to the west coast of Ireland. Since his semi-retirement in 1984, Stern has continued to write sporadically on environmental issues, but more importantly, he has published three works of fiction. In 1986 he surprised the reading public with the historical novel Mann aus Apulien, a portrait of the thirteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Though Stern had published a poem and a short story in the immediate post-war years and written a radio play and cabaret texts, he had soon given up literary ambitions for journalism. Many of his articles, essays and speeches, however, display literary qualities, combining pithy phrases and vivid imagery with stylistic elegance. The longer essays and travelogues include narrative passages, make use of cultural allusions and quotations, and employ irony and structuring metaphors (see Fischer 1997: 194). Mann aus Apulien, the literary debut of a man in his mid-sixties, was thus only in appearance an abrupt change for Stern. The subject had also occupied him for more than two decades, ever since efforts to train

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a falcon in the early 1960s had led him to read Frederick’s classic work on falconry, De arte venandi cum avibus. Though the more cruel practices are disregarded, the medieval emperor’s careful description of his observations, written at a time when his contemporaries were content to quote Aristotle, is still of interest to falconers today. De arte venandi cum avibus prompted Stern to speculate what sort of man the author was. He explores the last five years of Frederick’s life through interior monologue, making extensive use of dreams and fantasies, and reflecting sceptically on his youthful plans, ageing body, and the looming collapse of the empire. In all of this, the art of falconry provides a unifying pattern of metaphors (see Fischer 1997: 198–200). The autobiographical element already present in Mann aus Apulien gains central importance in his other novel, Klint (1993), in which Stern gives free reign to his darkest thoughts about the environment and his most pessimistic visions of the future. Again, his approach is oblique, imaginative and concerned with subjective states rather than objective facts. The life and death of the protagonist Klint, a journalist whose degeneration into mental illness parallels and is fed by the progress of ecological degradation, are reconstructed by a second journalist. This narrator’s attempt to separate fact from fiction in the documents at his disposal is progressively undermined. Lengthy parts of the narrative consist of Klint’s feverish fantasies. Here, as in Mann aus Apulien, metaphors play a structuring role: Stern gives a new twist to the Classical motif of Arcadia, and sodomy provides a striking image for the perversion of our relationship with nature and animals. Ludwig Fischer comments that the novel, which was not a success with the public, nevertheless made a highly original contribution to the literature of environmental apocalypse in the 1980s: “Stern’s union of literary and aesthetic quality with political and moral ‘sensitivity’ makes the book a major work of contemporary German literature” (see Fischer 1997: 202–5 and 257–66, also the chapter on Klint in Jambon 1999). Jadgnovelle, a shorter work which was written between the two novels, and published in 1989, is closer to normal expectations of ökologische Warnliteratur, or the literature of environmental commitment. It is, however, more than just a fictionalisation of the issues which Stern had addressed eighteen years previously in his TV programme Bemerkungen über den Rothirsch and the open letter to Walter Scheel. In setting and theme, Jagdnovelle (which has been published in English under the title The Last Hunt) invites comparison with Alscher’s stories and novels. The action takes place in the 1970s in an unspecified South-East European dictatorship which we can deduce from geographical references to be

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Yugoslavia. The inspiration for the story came to Stern on a visit to that country in the company of a delegation of Munich forestry officials to inspect traditional methods of forest management. As he relates in the opening pages (Stern 1991: 7f.), he came across an enormous bearskin displayed in a provincial hunting museum, with a plaque bearing the name of a German hunter who had shot it. The skin, he was told, had been retained in the country because of its exceptional size (close to the world record). Within moments, Stern has commented in an interview, the outline of the story how the bear came to be shot formed in his mind (Stern 1997: 71). Thematically, there are parallels with Otto Alscher’s stories ‘Über den Menschen’ and ‘Die Alten’ (1917: 81–96, 2000: 67–73). The first of these, set during the First World War, told how a bear was displaced from its hitherto secluded forest habitat by the advancing military and began to follow waves of refugees in their trek down to the sea. Though it returned to its original home, it lost the natural instinct to avoid humans and before long fell victim to hunters. In the second story, an old man has cleared a smallholding in the forest, built a house there and planted fruit trees and maize. He is determined to catch the animal which keeps plundering his plums and beehives. When he discovers it is a bear, he is puzzled by its approach to a human settlement, at a time of year when food is in plenty, with young animals, domestic and wild, available at a safer distance. On eventually encountering it in the forest, he finds it is so old as to be forced to live from fruits and berries. Blind in one eye, it is pitifully thin. Recognising a fellow traveller in old age, he has not the heart to kill it and leaves it in peace. Stern’s novella, which is also concerned with wildness and domestication, and focuses similarly on ageing as an experience common to both animals and humankind, describes, at greater length, the displacement of a brown bear from its Balkan habitat due to human encroachment, its wanderings and struggle to survive. It succumbs to dependence on feeding by a gamekeeper, and eventually dies at the hand of a hunter. The bear is a counterpart to the hunter’s lonely, ageing and alienated self, in a world increasingly driven by political, economic and technological imperatives. Though this bear is unusually large, experiences in its youth have made it especially shy of human contact. It refuses to accept the bait laid by hunters and does not attack farm animals. Driven from the area in which it was born by less inhibited, hence physically stronger rivals, it has found refuge for some years in a remote Alpine valley. However, it is disturbed again by the construction of a dam and hydroelectric power station, and returns to the Balkans. Driven by hunger, it

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finally accepts the food left for it by a gamekeeper, who guides it day by day closer to the hide from which it is eventually shot. Stern alternates between narration from the animal’s perspective and that of the hunter and gamekeeper. Of the three narrative strands, one is concerned with the West German financier Joop, who is in charge of foreign business at the headquarters of a major bank in the Rhineland. The second follows the bear’s journey and the third tells of Duschan, the Yugoslavian gamekeeper in whose territory it settles. The three narratives converge in an ending which is not without dramatic twists (e.g. pp. 87–93, where the bear encounters a charcoal burner), despite our foreknowledge of the outcome. Joop, the hunter, discovers that his fate has been unknowingly intertwined with that of the bear for years (pp. 158f.). He first hears of the animal on a visit to Yugoslavia as a representative of the World Bank, to approve funding for projects including a motorway to facilitate the development of forestry and tourism in the hunting grounds to which it has returned. When he learns where the bear has come from, he realises he is also part-responsible for its displacement from the Alps, through his earlier involvement in the approval of the above-mentioned dam (pp. 159f.). Before he has even pulled the trigger, he is then doubly complicit in the processes which have led to the bear’s death. Joop is, however, no mere stereotype of the philistine German financier, but cultivated, sensitive to verbal nuance and intellectually curious. Capable of introspection, he is aware of the tensions between conflicting scales of value beneath the seemingly calm surface of his life. Like many a contemporary, he alternates between pragmatic rationalism and actions which compensate for the emptiness of his life (pp. 43f.). At certain moments he is capable of sidestepping the economic rationale. For instance, he requires of the Yugoslavian authorities that environmental impact experts be present at his inspection of the terrain for the proposed development projects to be funded by the World Bank (p. 74). These conservationists become his ‘Erinyen’ (p. 133), that is the avenging spirits of his guilty conscience. His economic realism is constantly challenged by conflicting inclinations: a lust for hunting bordering on enslavement on the one hand, and a growing sense of guilt rooted in ecological awareness on the other: Es schüttelte ihn das inwendige Ringen zwischen einem fast als Ekel empfundenen neuen Trophäenüberdruß [ … ] und der alten Bockgeilheit, die sich von jeher im Töten und Trauern zu läutern suchte [ … ]. Ekel und Geilheit, beide waren in Joop, der Ekel auch

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eine Folge seiner langsam gewachsenen Erkenntnis, daß der neue ökologische Mantel, in dessen Schutz vor öffentlicher Unbill die Jagd sich in die Zukunft zu schleichen sucht, nur mühsam die alten Zeichen der Lust an ihrem Leib verdeckt. (p. 141) The misgivings which Joop increasingly entertains about the moral justification of hunting are deepened by what the Yugoslavian ecologists reveal of its environmental consequences and he undergoes a ‘Pauline Conversion’ (p. 132). Torn between the hunter’s lust for the kill (“Bockgeilheit”) and mounting dissatisfaction with the false pretensions symbolised by hunting trophies (“Trophäenüberdruß”), he finds himself physically incapable of shooting the prize stag reserved for him by the Head of State as a sweetener. Although he regrets this moment of weakness and subsequently accepts the bear when it is offered him as a substitute, he gets no pleasure from shooting it. In the final pages of the story he renounces hunting symbolically, removing an oil painting of Diana the huntress from his office and having the prized rifles he keeps in his flat encased in “museum glass” (p. 173). Joop is initially convinced of the possibility of reconciling hunting with nature conservation and believes the countries of Eastern Europe may have something to teach the West here (p. 76). But he learns that the giant antlers he sees displayed are not the innocent fruits of assiduous gamekeeping (“Erntefrüchte einer bewundernswert konsequenten Wildhege”), but “a luxuriation of bone growth wholly unsuited to forest life”, and “biological nonsense” (pp. 78f.). The quest for ever larger stags with finer antlers necessitates the maintenance of a vast deer population, since each stag is at the peak of a biological pyramid. The damage caused by the deer eating the new shoots and scraping the bark off young trees is such that nothing survives to replace the mature trees, and the forest is gradually becoming open grassland. Hunting is in any case losing its real meaning: permitting the deer to multiply means that the foreign visitor paying for shooting rights no longer has to search for game. It is there, waiting tamely. The animals have been conditioned by “Kirrung”, that is being fed in a particular place at a particular time, and can easily be picked off by hunters sitting in wait. The deer are to all extents and purposes being farmed. This critique comes to a head in a passage arranged in verse form (pp. 135–7). Lulled into a soporific trance by the heat of the afternoon, Joop hears the voices of the Yugoslavian ecologists merge in a powerful indictment of the overstocking of the forests. Building on the traditional association of hunting and shooting with the sexual act, the forest is described as

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having become a “stag brothel” (“Hirschbordell”), designed to maximise the foreign currency income from Western hunters and bolster the dictator’s ego. Otto Ascher had written of laying out food for wild animals, especially wolves, in the winter months, in the Luderplatz (literally ‘carrion place’) near his house in the woods, in order to lure them into an open space where they could be readily shot. Such hunting by way of making the wild animal compliant is inherently problematic for Stern, who sees today’s shooting for sport as characterised by deception and shame (p. 141). Instead of finding, pursuing and outwitting a wild animal fighting to the death for survival, its living conditions are undermined, it is deprived of its normal source of food and then offered a substitute, through feeding, which draws it ever more closely into the sphere of our control. There is no element of struggle left in the hunt. The animal is duped and “executed” (pp. 169, 171), rendering the hunter effectively emasculated. A second recurrent metaphor reflecting Stern’s disgust with this domestication of the wild in modern society is the “piggishness” it engenders in both the animal and the hunter.15 Joop recalls a TV programme from the 1960s showing how grizzly bears in the US national parks had taken to eating kitchen refuse, conveniently providing motifs for camera-bearing tourists while rummaging in yoghurt pots (pp. 62f.). The author’s moral indignation is a touch too evident as he describes the bear in our story, which starts out wild and shy of humans (“He lacked gluttony. He lacked piggishness”, p. 22), finally taking the gamekeeper’s bait: Er fraß von ihr mit einer viehischen Gier, die ihn im Innersten seines Wesens zu verderben begann. Schon ertrug er auch den für seine feine Nase um die Bäume schier wabernden Geruch von Menschen und ihrem Gerät und sogar den Lärm der noch fernen Sägen auf der Lichtung. Gurgelnd und schmatzend, das Maul vor Speichel triefend, die Augen vor Lust verdreht, wühlte er die Zähne in die allzu bequeme Beute. Sie hatten es geschafft. Sie hatten ihn schweinish gemacht. Er wußte es nicht, aber er war es nun geworden und würde es bleiben. Tanzbärhaft hing er am Nasenstrick ihrer Listen, wie die anderen Bären der Gegend auch, sein Fell ein Sack voll Geld. (p. 112) The Yugoslavian bears have become “boarding pupils” of the Head of State’s gamekeepers (“Zöglinge der Jagdfunktionäre des großen Mannes in seinem Palast in der Hauptstadt”, p. 130). This undermining of the essence of the wild animal is troubling not only because it compromises

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humans’ moral integrity but also because of the limitation of the scope for human self-realisation which accompanies it. The citizens of Eastern Europe have been deprived by dictatorship and the command economy of freedom and the ability to make decisions about their lives, while in the West the name given by the bank employees to the pretentious desk in Joop’s office, the “bay of pigs” (p. 11), suggests a corresponding degeneration into servility under capitalism. Money and commercialisation are in fact presented as universal evils responsible for the corruption of modern society. Stern’s starting point in the tale is the grotesque mismatch between the enormous “shamanic” bearskin, inspiring fear in visitors to the museum even when deprived of head and claws, and the insignificance of the hunter, whose name indicates bourgeois ordinariness. Money, he muses, can be the only conceivable link between this puny hunter and his primeval quarry. When Joop travels to New York for a World Bank meeting, the slogan he is met with by protestors, “Dollars and pounds are the rich man’s hounds!” (p. 44) suggests a link between the human injustice furthered by globalisation (Third World debt) and our exploitation of animals in hunting (p. 46). The corruption of wild animals, Joop observes elsewhere, exemplifies the material and spiritual pollution of civilisation modern (p. 63). In a drunken conversation with a fellow hunter, he extends the second law of entropy to the feelings and to language as the medium of their expression. Our way of life is debasing everything of value, in a “meltdown of mediocrity” (p. 31). There is a continuity here with passages examined above in Alscher’s writing expressing cultural pessimism. Stern’s pessimistic generalisations about a world in which the things of nature have begun to shed their skins like vipers (pp. 26f.), devoid of passion (p. 31), dominated by money and shallow, transient relationships, suggest he subscribes to a mindset lamenting the “end of nature”. He is, however, wise enough to recognise that we cannot escape from guilt in our relationship with animals: it is better to know the fish we eat, hence we should all become anglers, he once said to the Zeit journalist, Reiner Luyken in an interview (1993). Ariane Heimbach states in her essay ‘Kein sogenannter Tierfreund’ (Fischer 1997: 149–66): “For Stern, reducing the violence we do to animals is all we can realistically aim to achieve, given his fatalistic conception of the relationship between humans and animals, his view that human well-being is only attainable at the cost of animal suffering” (ibid. 162). It is perhaps truer to say that Stern alternates between a quite challenging standpoint based on rational ecological

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considerations and utilitarian, anthropocentric arguments against the infliction of unnecessary suffering on animals on the one hand and more conventionally nature-loving passages implicitly embracing a holistic, biocentric standpoint on the other. This ambivalence is evident in his position on hunting. He does not altogether discredit it: what Stern misses in hunters today is above all their failure to know and respect the wild animal (see p. 37). He sketches an alternative to Joop in the figure of Mari Czerky, the man’s divorced second wife. The last in line of a noble Austro-Hungarian family, and the only woman Joop has really loved, Mari is an incarnation of the goddess Diana, fearless and chaste. She gives the animals a ‘fair’ chance by not using a support when shooting, gladly bearing the bruises from the recoil of her rifle. She takes only enough cartridges for one shot at each animal, and does the animals the honour of standing to shoot them, whereas others sit in hides: game deserves decency/standing (“Anstand”, p. 118), she observes. Joop’s relationship with Mari during the latter part of their marriage and after their divorce is reflected in the painting of Diana hanging in his office. He identifies not only with the shadowy figure of the hunter in the background, who is offering up the hare he has caught to the goddess, but also, involuntarily, with the bleeding hare itself. His inadequacy in the face of his second wife’s social and sporting superiority is explained by the domination of his innermost being by concepts from the sphere of management and finance, such as “ablegen”, “Rendite” and “Wiedervorlage”, which render him unable to feel or think authentically (p. 124). Diana embodies, as Cartmill writes, “all the ambiguities inherent in the figure of the hunter. Though she persecutes the wild animals with her ‘arrows of anguish’, she is also their friend and protector. She killed (or connived in the death of) the great hunter Orion because he boasted in her hearing that he would kill every wild beast alive” (1996: 33). Her aura of holy virginity spills over into her environment, rendering the deer and the forest sacred. Stern seems to be mourning the passing of this sanctity of the wild, which he links with Ortega’s conception of hunting as a rite restoring us to authentic being. Heimbach puts her finger on the unresolved tension running through Stern’s work when she criticises his “hunting sentimentality” (Fischer 1997: 156), and the emotion-led relationship with animals which surfaces periodically in his writing and media work, and runs counter to his general strategy of critical enlightenment (ibid. 159). Stern does not actually problematise the validity of the concept of ‘wildness’ in

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contemporary society any more than Alscher does or explore the wider consequences of reconceiving nature as something inevitably shaped by man.16 Jagdnovelle is a plea for ‘ecological’ hunting based on the principle of rational management of game but the emotional force driving it is one of identification with the individual animal, which would logically find expression in a total rejection of killing animals. The narrative records this confusion of purpose, which seems characteristic of our time: at the end, Joop has the painting of Diana taken down from the wall of his office and returned to Mari. It is not clear whether he does so in admission that he is not cut out to be a hunter or whether the gesture is tantamount to a rejection of hunting per se. These uncertainties in conception are matched by weaknesses in the execution of Jagdnovelle. The story sold well enough to be brought out in paperback two years after the first edition but came in for criticism from reviewers. Klaus Modick, for instance, described it as preachy, saying Stern’s weaker passages were “on the level of radio programmes for schools: adult education in narrative form” (Modick 1989). As a work of literature, it is neatly, if conventionally constructed, but marred by the author’s transparent didacticism. Stern’s disgust with modern hunting finds expression in a graphic anatomical description of the bullets entering the bear’s body, tearing through its blood vessels, nerves and muscle tissue (pp. 168f.). The first shot, which misses its heart, passes through its body, mangling its shoulder before exiting under the first rib and proceeding to rip open the stomach of the dead horse the bear is feeding on, “so that the green broth from the one mixed with the red blood from the other. It oozed and dripped and spurted a little in the rhythm of the animal’s heartbeat” (p. 168). Too often we are told what to think: italics are used to hammer home points (pp. 22, 112, 160, 171) and key passages are spoiled by laboriously explained metaphors and pretentious cultural allusions (for instance the passages from Trakl’s poems read by Mari Czerky, pp. 121f.). Stern avoids sentimentalising the bear, indeed, he pulls no punches in describing the uglier side of its nature, reminding us repeatedly, for instance, of its unaesthetic salivation and smell (pp. 16, 24f., 41f., 66). When it wakes from its hibernation, fear takes hold of the creatures of the forest (p. 87). It remains other, outside human values, in that it acts with casual brutality, devouring first a defenceless newborn fawn and then a cuddly baby owl (pp. 24, 69). Given the chance, it is even capable of cannibalism (p. 71). However, Jagdnovelle lacks the subtlety and integrity of Alscher’s stories. Though the movements and actions of the

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bear are described on the whole from the perspective of an attentive observer and merely paralleled with acts of human volition through similes and subjunctive constructions (p. 29), Stern occasionally slips into allowing it to think and act like a human. At one point, he writes: “The bear did not spare a thought for the fact that, by following the meat day by day, he was getting steadily closer to the clearing.” He swiftly corrects the anthropomorphic implication: “But bears probably don’t think anyway” (p. 145). Towards the end of the story, he similarly comments defensively: “The bear sighs – whatever people may think who say that bears don’t sigh” (pp. 166f.). The animal stories of Alscher and Stern are far from providing definitive answers in our search for appropriate positions and ethical principles for our dealings with animals, but they illustrate and draw attention to the tensions, contradictions and shifts in public attitudes towards them and the growing anxieties of our age concerning the legitimacy of our exploitation of the natural environment. Alscher had an intimate knowledge of nature, and there is already a conservationist thrust to the stories in which he writes of the displacement of wild animals as a result of the erosion of their habitat. He was an increasingly reluctant hunter, more interested in observing wild animals than in killing them. Emphasising their otherness and autonomy as a source of enrichment in our lives, he pleads for respect for them and asserts their brotherhood with us. Writing half a century later, Stern is committed to the prevention of cruelty to animals and to their right to live in as natural a way as possible. Jagdnovelle is an outcry against contemporary hunting practices, but, while pleading for ecologically sound management of wildlife, it reveals a sneaking admiration for hunting as it might be: a human immersion in the natural world and in animal being. Before we condemn Stern’s inability to resolve the conundrum of preserving the wild in a relentlessly civilised world, perhaps we should remember that it is humbug to oppose the (relatively swift, pain-free and dignified) killing of animals by responsible hunters, so long as we continue to ignore and condone the suffering of the millions of cattle, pigs, sheep, hens and ducks kept in conditions unsuited to their nature and their annual slaughter in our battery farms and abattoirs. Our schizophrenic treatment of animals, unthinkingly consuming the many and lavishly cherishing the few (the ‘Bambi syndrome’), degrades us and deprives our lives of a dimension of meaning. Stern, who was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart in 1974 for his part in “gradually guiding private and public attitudes towards animals away

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from sentimentality towards the facts” (quoted from Fischer 1997: 151) is rightly described by Ludwig Fischer as a significant “precursor of all those striving for a less violent, less sentimental and schizophrenic relationship between human beings and the fellow creatures on whom they ultimately rely” (Fischer 1997: 7).

6 Greening the City From Allotment Colony to Ecology Park in the Novels of Paul Gurk and Günter Seuren

6.1 Green utopias, urban ecology and visions of the simple life in 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). Where they are not mentioned explicitly, the trials and tribulations of the author or his contemporaries are always implicitly present as a background in envisionings of the simple life. The pastoral idyll is a powerful wish-construction: it is often nostalgically projected backwards in time, into the author’s childhood or a more remote past, and almost inevitably located in idealised rural surroundings which contrast sharply with contemporary urban life. However, the more complex pastoral texts have 209

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always gone beyond mere escapism: Leo Marx and Raymond Williams locate the prime achievement of pastoral in its negotiation between the Arcadian ideals of a life of healthy simplicity and innocent sensual pleasure and the realities of political and social life in Western society under the impact of modernisation and industrialisation (see Marx 1964, Williams 1973 and Gifford 1999). Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) was one of the first books to extend and revitalise the traditional pastoral narrative of retreat from the corrupt and frenetic city to the calm and innocence of the countryside by giving it a proto-ecological dimension. Thoreau’s critique of the machine age and anthropocentrism is echoed in a number of late nineteenth-century utopian novels. For example, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) satirised Victorian faith in the ability of science and technology to produce a more egalitarian society and a better world and broke with the technological optimism of previous utopias such as Étienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie (1842). News from Nowhere (1890), written by the pioneer ecosocialist William Morris in response to Edward Bellamy’s optimistic American bestseller Looking Backward 2000 – 1887 was, however, the first major ecologically inspired work to focus on an alternative vision of the city. Writing at a time when the growth of London and the living conditions of the urban poor were of increasing concern, Morris sought to provide a model for the solution of contemporary social problems that went beyond purely rural versions of the good or simple life. His protagonist wakes up in the year 2102 in the regenerated capital of a now deindustrialised nation. Following the overthrow of capitalism and the implementation of a programme known as “The Clearing of Misery”, the old slums have been replaced by comfortable houses with ample gardens and surrounding green space. The influence of Morris’s ideas may be traced not only in the writings of proponents of the Garden City idea, but also those of town planners such as Lewis Mumford. Many of those engaged in the ecological redesigning of cities in the late twentieth century have shared his hopes and visions. Despite the classic status of Morris’s book, in which Kensington is re-wooded, blackbirds sing again in Picadilly, and salmon abound in the Thames, the greening of the city was, however, to remain a marginal literary theme. Between 1950 and 1990, the proportion of the population in the industrialised countries living in urban areas rose from 50 to 80 per cent, the geographer, ecologist and former Head of Environment for the Greater London Authority, David Goode has noted (Gordon 1990: 2). It is estimated that by 2025 a quarter of the world population will live in

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cities of over one million. While cities have been the cradle of civilisation, epitomise modernity and in many respects represent the pinnacle of human creative achievement, life in them is not merely crowded and anonymous, but also often squalid, unhealthy and dangerous. In the nineteenth and twentieth century, the city has become a site of unprecedented alienation between humankind and the natural world. “It seems”, Goode writes, … that urbanites are fast becoming an egocentric species thriving on human culture alone. People are not only unaware of their natural roots but are becoming divorced from all aspects of the natural world upon which they ultimately depend. And, for those who are aware, it may seem impossible for individuals to do anything about it, caught as they are in the intricate web of the modern city. (ibid. 2–3) The consequences of this alienation of the population of cities from nature, and ways of retaining contact with the natural basis of life, acknowledging our own embodiment and living sensually and aesthetically rich lives in a constructed environment, should be of central importance for ecocritics today. However, the cultural dimension of urban ecology has until recently been a neglected subject, as Michael Bennett and David Teague comment in the introduction to their book The Nature of Cities (1999: 3–14). In America in the 1960s and 1970s, there was little contact between mainstream environmentalists, whose priorities lay in the preservation of wilderness and wildlife, water quality control and land use planning and social justice activists, for whom the environmental issues that affected urban residents (sanitation, pest control, noise pollution and malnutrition) were of greater importance, not to mention the conditions underpinning these hazards, such as cuts in public services and inequities in public housing policy.1 Despite the publication of ground-breaking sociological and philosophical studies of urban ecology, ecologically oriented literary critics have tended to perpetuate the negative view of the city as sick, ecocidal and life-denying which underlay Lewis Mumford’s books The Culture of Cities (1938) and The City in History (1961). The eighties saw a shift in public attitudes towards the city throughout the Western world, a rediscovery of the benefits of city-centre urbanism (sociability, walkability, cosmopolitanism, spontaneity and diversity) and an identification of the placeless sprawl of the suburbs (by the intelligensia, if not the public in general) as a cultural wasteland and the true enemy of environmentally friendly living. Yet the ecocritical movement, because of its initial focus on

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nature writing and pastoralism, has only gradually begun to survey the terrain of urban environments and to adopt and adapt an environmental perspective to the analysis of urban life.2 This pattern in American literary scholarship is replicated in studies of German literature. Literary representations of the city, and of Berlin in particular, whose rapid industrialisation, relative lack of civic identity and reputation for provisionality pioneered the experiences of economic modernisation, social differentiation and organisational rationalisation in the German-speaking world, have attracted considerable attention (see Klotz 1969, Kähler 1986, Rölleke 1988, Scherpe 1988, Siebenhaar 1992, Enklaar-Lagendijk and Ester 2000). However, ecological considerations have rarely been addressed explicitly. Silvio Vietta writes for instance of the dual face of the city as representative site of modernity and of misery, homelessness, fear and metaphysical despair in his book Die literarische Moderne (1992: 273–318, especially pp. 280f.) but does not discuss ecological issues as such. Conversely, studies focused on nature and environment have tended to ignore the city. Jost Hermand’s Grüne Utopien in Deutschland (1991a) is the principal exception. In this ground-breaking overview of visions of the simple life in the German-speaking world, Hermand drew attention to a neglected tradition of utopian thought, expressed principally in the treatises, pamphlets and speeches of politicians, philosophers and scientists but also reflected in literary essays and novels. His principal concern was with “ernstzunehmende Sozialutopien”, that is visions of community which reconciled an aspiration to emancipation and selfrealisation with consideration for nature and recognition of the need to integrate in its rhythms (p. 19). Such visions involve voluntary selflimitation and collective responsibility alongside varying degrees of imposed restriction of individual freedom and limits to material consumption, in order to husband natural resources and reintegrate humankind into the oikos or ‘home’ of the natural environment. The point at which urban ecology features most significantly in Hermand’s book is in his account of the practical initiatives in urban reform at the turn of the twentieth century, though he also touches on proto-ecological visions of the urban environment at the time of the French Revolution and the laying out of parks in German cities from the 1820s on. Grüne Utopien also contains a brief discussion of ‘Netzwerk’, a scheme associated with the ‘LETS’ (Local Exchange Trading Systems) concept of barter and cash-free exchange of services, and the ‘Projekt kooperativer Lebensgemeinschaften’ of a student group in West Berlin in the second half of the 1970s.3 Ebenezer Howard’s influential book on

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garden cities, To-Morrow. A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898), prompted Bernhard and Paul Kampffmeyer, Heinrich and Julius Hart, Wilhelm Bölsche, Gustav Landauer and others to found the Deutsche Gartenstadt-Gesellschaft in 1902 and provided the impetus for housing projects in Dresden (Hellerau) and Essen. Heinrich Hart, first President of the Association, saw the country as retrograde, conservative and divorced from cultural and technological progress, while the city was conflict-ridden and feverish, its cultural and technological advantage too dearly paid for by the suffering of generations. Neither was, however, dispensable, and a fusion of their respective positive attributes was essential: Die Städte sind notwendig wegen der kulturellen Aufgaben der Menschheit, die nur dort, wo ein reges geistiges wie wirtschaftliches Miteinanderleben und -streben möglich ist, gelöst werden können. Andererseits bedarf der Mensch der dauernden Berührung mit dem Mutterboden, mit der Natur, eines Lebens in reiner Luft und hellem Licht, wenn er nicht verkümmern und hinsiechen soll. Die Vorteile von Großstadt und Land müssen verbunden sein, um jedem einzelnen ein natur- und vernunftgemäßes Leben, der Gesamtheit aber eine Kultur von innerer Kraft und möglichst schrankenloser Dauer zu sichern.4 Garden City initiatives, which were based on private ownership and remained a largely middle-class phenomenon, were complemented by the founding of a series of colonies, most of which were rural, but some urban. Among the best known were the Obstbaumkolonie Eden and the Neue Gemeinschaft, both on the outskirts of Berlin, and the artists’ colony Monte Verità, located in warmer climes on the shores of Lago Maggiore. Ulrich Linse has collected key documents from this Siedlungsbewegung, which represented a revolt of the intelligentsia against urbanisation and the mass society, in the volume Zurück, o Mensch, zur Mutter Erde (1983). The urban and rural colonies founded between 1890 and 1933 harboured in the eyes of their proponents the potential for social and political regeneration and shared, at least in the initial stages, ownership of the land and the means of production. However, few lasted more than a matter of years, and as a social experiment, they reflected an illusory search for simple solutions to the painfully experienced complexity of economic circumstances.5 Hermand’s discussion of the city is significant for its reversal of the polarities of previous academic discourse that had been highly criticial

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of the longstanding cultural tradition in Germany vilifying the city and idealising the country. Klaus Bergmann’s landmark study of Agrarian Romanticism and Anti-Urbanism in the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century (Bergmann 1970), for instance, presented an overwhelmingly negative account of the perspective on the city by cultural critics of the period. Following in the footsteps of Fritz Stern and George Mosse, Bergmann identified the praise of country life and the denigration of the metropolis as distortions of reality whose baneful influence played a part in the rise of National Socialism. Describing his book as “a contribution to modern research into prejudice” (see pp. 361–6), he interpreted anxious opposition to the city, a response to the wave of urbanisation unleashed by the industrial expansion of the Gründerjahre, as a key dimension of cultural pessimism and anti-modernism in late nineteenth-century Germany. Notwithstanding his careful distinctions and balanced presentation of politically ambivalent figures such as Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, Friedrich Lienhard, Heinrich Sohnrey and the young Paul SchultzeNaumburg, Bergmann’s overall narrative is one of nineteenth-century Agrarian Romanticism leading directly to Blood and Soil ideology. Ideas first formulated by Riehl and members of the Heimatkunst- and Heimatschutzbewegung were taken up by Langbehn and Spengler and found their logical conclusion in works such as the NS-ideologue Hans Günther’s Verstädterung – Ihre Gefahren für Volk und Staat vom Standpunkte der Lebensforschung und der Gesellschaftswissenschaft (1934). Bergmann acknowledged the presence of ideas on architecture, design and landscape conservation “which may be described as truly modern” (p. 133) and elements of “a new conception of art and environment” (p. 134) in the Heimatschutz and Life Reform Movements. He recognised that the Garden City Movement, the principal theoretical and practical initiative in turn-of-the-century Germany, was driven by sober observation of the human and social impact of the loss of the familiar environment, way of life, traditions and values of the tens of thousands migrating from the countryside to the city (pp. 141–3). However, his main concern remained with what he saw as the unfortunate misconception of the city as “unnatural” and “overcivilised”, as a morally pernicious place of exploitative labour, social misery and juvenile vice, sapping the physical and intellectual energies of the people. Not only Hermand, but also subsequent social and cultural historians such as Linse, Dominick and Rollins have traced a more sympathetic picture of turn-of-the-century conservative critiques of modernisation, arguing that some of the ideas and activities of the rural and urban colonies, and

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some of the activities of the Bund Heimatschutz, anticipated the aims of the environmental movement (Linse 1983, 1986, Dominick 1992, Rollins 1997). Friedrich Sengle had already published a brief but admirably balanced article in 1963 on the symbiosis between the idealisation of country life and the vilification of the city in German literature. ‘Wunschbild Land und Schreckbild Stadt’ focused on the ‘myth’ at the heart of the literary treatment of the city/country divide in Germany. Sketching its historical development from Baroque poetry and drama through eighteenthcentury idylls and early nineteenth-century village stories to the novels of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, Sengle identified aspects of the cultural representation of city and country which were and are of continuing relevance. Even ‘realistic’ writing on the countryside (Bauerndichtung) has seldom been a medium of self-expression for people who lived in the country, he noted. Largely the product of authors themselves situated at a remove from country life, the literature of the urban-rural divide introduced its urban middle-class readership to a form of country life whose exoticism was emphasised through folkloristic detail. From Baroque to Blood and Soil, writers’ distance from their rural subject matter facilitated a falsifying idealisation of the natural, the original and elementary man, and a stylisation of country life as a conscious choice of simplicity. Piety, marital fidelity, innocence and health in the country were contrasted with artificial courtly ceremonial and profligate urban decadence. Though not all of this writing is backward-looking, and an emancipatory potential is visible in the praise of the ‘natural’ in the Enlightenment, where Arcadian dreams and a fascination with the naïve (the Naturvolk) were associated with conceptions of natural justice, natural religion and natural morality, the thrust of most of the nineteenth-century village tales and novels (for instance those of Jeremias Gotthelf) was reactionary. Visions of a rural counter-offensive against the sprawling, satanic city were taken up again in the late nineteenth-century Heimatroman, where the metropolis was portrayed as a sewer, suppurating boil or monster. It is the (anarchically classless) site of seduction and doom, the other of the heroic (and usually authoritarian) rural idyll. Sober, realistic depictions of the metropolis began late in German literature, according to Sengle, with Heine’s and Börne’s writing on Paris. Throughout the nineteenth century the negative image of urban modernity predominated, in a configuration already present in Goethe, Tieck, Eichendorff and von Arnim, who used the natural beauty and

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individual autonomy in country estates as a foil for the alienation, social misery and political tensions accompanying urbanisation and industrialisation. The depiction of the city in the writing of the Naturalists was deeply ambivalent: they drew attention to urban misery, but at the same time celebrated cities as second nature and cosmic phenomena, imaging them as seas of stone or great beasts. The Expressionists inherited some of this enthusiasm for the city, and used Modernist techniques of poetic montage to convey the intoxication of the individual through the intensity of the experience of life in the metropolis. However, the general profile of the city was overwhelmingly negative. It featured as a sinful Babel, Sodom or Nineveh, or, for instance in Georg Heym’s apocalyptic poem ‘Der Gott der Stadt’, as Baal, a pagan deity representing the atavistic, self-destructive element in modern civilisation. Kafka, who wrote on the fringe of Expressionism, provided an image of the soulless bureaucracy and alienation of modern urban society in Das Schloß (1926), whose influence is traceable in many later city novels. After the Second World War, Sengle argues, Romantic anti-urbanism and distrust in modern civilisation continued but were countered by the snobbish anti-provincialism of a group of city novelists. We need to go beyond such polarisation and myth-making, which has been a barrier to a rational and moral approach to life, towards representations of social reality in which the interaction between city and country is foregrounded and their interdependence reflected. The quest for literary examples of such “extended urbanity” leads Sengle to Stifter’s Nachsommer (1857), Keller’s Grüner Heinrich (1854) and Martin Salander (1886) and the poetry of Hölderlin and Arno Holz but above all to Fontane’s Der Stechlin (1898) and more recent works such as Heimito von Doderer’s Strudlhofstiege (1951) and Die Dämonen (1956). The idealisation of the country and the demonisation of the city which Sengle identifies as a constant in German prose fiction have, he argues, played a not insignificant part in the crisis of cultural modernity and the political catastrophes which visited Germany in the first half of the twentieth century: “Much more dangerous than obnoxious realities are false, defeatist conceptions of reality, and literature’s responsibility for these should not be underestimated” (Sengle 1963: 631). In the 1960s, he writes optimistically, prosperity, broadcasting and increased mobility are eroding the divide between city and country. What modern Germany must and can hope for is a literature avoiding the extremes of provincial traditionalism and experimental urban literature, and facing up to its responsibility for shaping public attitudes. I will attempt to show in this chapter that despite this unhelpful tradition of polarisation between city and country (which, as we know from Raymond Williams, is equally

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prominent in English literature) and the generalisation, abstraction and simplification of complex issues which characterised turn-of-the-century German literature in particular, modern German writers have been capable of engaging constructively with the problems of urban ecology in their reflections on the city and visions of the simple life.6 Friedrich Wolf’s play Der Unbedingte (Wolf 1960, I: 115–64), one of many forgotten examples of proto-Green thinking discussed briefly by Jost Hermand, exemplifies both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Expressionists’ perspective on nature in its vision of radical transformation of the modern city. Written, like Kaiser’s Gas plays, at the end of the First World War, it resembles them in its stark symbolic expression of both despair and hope, its sweeping critique of modern civilisation and its scepticism regarding contemporary social reform initiatives. Wolf’s protagonist, a young poet living in a Berlin garret, is driven by a vision of return to a primeval form of existence, in which humanity “re-engages umbilically with the Earth” (p. 120). All personal possessions are to be renounced, and all buildings demolished, returning the population to a life as cave-dwellers: “Wir müssen der Erde näher kommen! Leise. Wenn ich hier lag … durch vierfach Mauerwerk von ihr getrennt … von Möbeln, Kleidern, Steinen bewacht … erdrosselt; und doch … kitzelnder Fingerspitzen Ziehen … fließende Strähne … Quelle unter dir – schlägt die Mauer – Götze! Wild. Hinab!” (p. 122). In his efforts to rid humanity of the “dismembering machine” of modern civilisation (p. 132), he attempts to lead the exploited urban proletarians back to the “naked earth” (p. 123), where they can become “more healthy, purer, more absolute” (p. 130). Just as childhood memories of meadows and countryside cannot be suppressed for long in the individual mind, green fields and grazing cattle will one day reappear where the streets and houses of Berlin now stand: Seht, die Erde ist das einzige Gut, das man nicht fälschen noch knechten kann. Ihr könnt Berlin asphaltieren, daß kein Grashalm mehr wächst … doch über dem Potsdamer Platz – was sind tausend Jahre – werden wieder Stiere äsen! Ihr könnt den Zeitgenossen in Glashallen und auf Stahlplatten züchten … doch plötzlich erwacht die Erinnerung an Land … Wiese … Kindheit … (p. 133) His quixotic struggle against avaricious land speculators and heartless engineers ends in failure, not least because of the objective material needs of the people. The final act of the play is set in an “Earth Spa”: the poet, whose missionary zeal to reform society has fallen on deaf ears, attends to a group of clients immersed in soil up to their necks as a

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health treatment. Throwing off his disguise, he launches into a tirade against the modern world, in which the Earth has been “tested by experts”, “cleaned up” and “sterilised”, and turns one last time to the proletariat for support: “Ihr aber, Brüder, ihr spürt’s, wie diese Erde ein Ganzes ist, ein Lebewesen, keine Mineraliensammlung, kein Retortenprodukt, ein Lebewesen, das stirbt, wenn man auch nur einen Teil in ihm zerstört!” (p. 156). Burying himself in a mine shaft, he triumphs in death. For the play ends with his martyred body, displayed, like the Kassierer in Kaiser’s Von morgens bis mitternachts (written 1912, published 1916), as a Christ-like figure on the cross. This triggers a transformation of public consciousness and galvanises the people into revolt. Despite the poet’s naivety and grotesque excesses, he is thus vindicated. As the title of Der Unbedingte indicates, it is a play consciously taking dissatisfaction with the artificiality of modernity to the extreme and coupling the longing for return to a simpler, organic way of life with a tragic world view. On a more practical plane, if the rift between mankind and nature is to be healed, “new initiatives are required in the way we plan, design, and manage cities”, in the words of David Goode. “We need to consider ways in which people can relate more closely to nature in cities either by protecting the surviving vestiges of the natural world, or by creating completely new opportunities for nature to exist within the urban setting” (Gordon 1990: 3). The first of the two texts looked at in detail in this chapter, Paul Gurk’s novel Laubenkolonie Schwanensee (1949), corresponds to the first of these options, inasmuch as it depicts the impact on the people living in an allotment colony on the northern edge of Berlin when their homes are demolished to make way for new urban development. The second, Günter Seuren’s Die Krötenküsser (2000), which describes the conflicts which arise when a group of volunteers create an ecology park on a wasteland site in the north-east of Munich, relates to Goode’s second option. First, however, it may be helpful to reflect more generally on the function of green spaces in the city, and on the cultural significance of allotment gardens in particular, and to give a brief indication of their literary representation in the works of Raabe, Fallada and Plenzdorf.

6.2 Allotments and other green spaces in the city and their literary representation Green urban spaces are recognised as fulfilling environmental purposes ranging from providing wildlife habitats to impounding storm water.

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Vegetation (particularly trees) reduces climatic extremes by moderating wind turbulence and temperatures, countering aridity, filtering and metabolising pollutants, reducing noise and oxygenating the atmosphere. A second category of benefits relates to food production: allotments played an important role in providing fresh vegetables in many European cities during the Second World War and they continue to serve this function in some parts of the world today. The first function of green urban spaces in European countries which is likely to come to mind is, however, as places for recreational activities for individuals and the local community. The resurgence of interest which has led to the greening of numerous tracts of urban wasteland since the1970s, Goode writes, has been linked with “a very strong need for green” in our lives: It may be a very deep emotion: the need for something green and wild or a place to go for sanctuary or solitude – a place to experience wilderness in the city. The need for such places is at the heart of the concept of a green city whether in the form of ecology parks, city farms, allotment gardens, or just neighbourhood wildspace. (Gordon 1990: 7) Regeneration of social cohesion and the reinstatement of a sense of local pride have been important by-products of the many local initiatives greening European cities since the 1960s which are described in Gordon’s book (see also Nicholson-Lord 1987). Urban green spaces feature in literature as sites of otherness and wildness, as symbolic configurations of resistance to modernity and alternative cultural values. An early example may be found in Raabe’s short novel Pfisters Mühle. Written 1883–4, this story is an eloquent expression of the author’s discomfort in the face of the wave of industrialisation, urban growth and social change in the first decade after the founding of the Reich. It is typical of its time in its largely negative depiction of the city and its romantic dream of the rural idyll but unusual in the sophistication of the framing and self-awareness of the narrative. The text alternates and negotiates between Eberhard Pfister’s nostalgic visions of the countryside as a fast-disappearing, harmonious, social, cultural and biological sphere associated with the enchanted land of poetry on the one hand and his consciousness of the inevitable onward march of modernity on the other symbolised by industrialisation and the seemingly unstoppable expansion of the metropolis of Berlin. Associated with progress and the future, the city exercises a powerful fascination. Eberhard describes its challenging presence in the

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landscape of his childhood: Wiesen und Kornfelder bis in die weiteste Ferne, hier und da zwischen Obstbäumen ein Kirchturm, einzelne Dörfer überall verstreut, eine vielfach sich windende Landstraße mit Pappelbäumen eingefaßt, Feld- und Fahrwege nach allen Richtungen und dann und wann auch ein qualmender Fabrikschornstein. Aber die Hauptsache in dem Bilde waren doch, und dieses besonders für mich, die Dunstwolke und die Türme im Nordosten von unserm Dörfchen. Mit der Natur steht die Landjugend auf viel zu gutem Fuße, um sich viel aus ihr zu machen und sie als etwas anderes denn als ein Selbstverständliches zu nehmen; aber die Stadt – ja die Stadt, das ist etwas! Das ist ein Entgegenstehendes, welches auf die eine oder andere Weise überwunden werden muß und nie von seiner Geltung für das junge Gemüt etwas aufgibt. (Raabe 1980: 9) Gone are the days of a happy give-and-take of city and country, when city-dwellers cherished the country not only as a source of food but also as a place which met its need for conviviality. The mill in the country where Eberhard grew up (now primarily an inn, although flour is still milled there), which has now been sold, and will be demolished to make way for a factory, finds an urban equivalent in a Berlin cemetery. The scene of his courtship with his pretty young fiancée Jenny, this island of green in a former suburb of the great city which is rapidly being developed is described as “a green space, full of bushes and trees, in a rectangle surrounded by new houses built in the most modern style, and criss-crossed by streets as yet imaginary, but in the intentions of the city planners no less real for that” (p. 33). Jenny’s father has purchased a grave plot and is determined to exercise his right to be interred here, alongside his own mother and deceased wife. He takes grim pleasure in the idea of his body preventing the “Fortschrittler”, or agents of progress, from developing the land for 30 years to come.7 Raabe’s story ends with a seeming reconciliation of city and country, work and recreation, materialism and things of the spirit. Adam Asche, Eberhard’s friend and adoptive brother, an industrial chemist and enterprising businessman who has already warned us he is “a man [ … ] with the fixed intention of himself polluting some bubbling spring, crystal stream or majestic river, in short: one or other of the many waterways in the idyllic German Empire as soon and as despicably as possible” (p. 69) and who believes “the best man will always be he who manages with the basest of materials to assert himself in the face of the forces transcending

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time and place” (p. 106), has founded a dry-cleaning factory on the Spree to the West of the city. It is a vast Gothic edifice emitting noise, smoke and the stench of chemicals. Curiously, he lives next door to it, in a Neo-Renaissance villa called ‘Lippoldesheim’ in honour of his poet father-in-law. The final, emblematic scene in the story is a striking expression of wishful thinking. Asche has described Berlin earlier as a “mangy nest” under a cloud of smoke (p. 136) and Eberhard has noted the maltreated Spree appearing to “drag itself, half fainting with disgust”, out of the city in the direction of Spandau (p. 134). He remarks on the cheek of Asche’s invitation to him and Jenny to sample “the beauties of nature” right next to his factory (p. 173). Yet Raabe leaves us with an idyllic scene, with Asche’s wife and children playing in their garden, overlooking a river which, despite the pollution, is teeming with pleasure craft. On his deathbed, Eberhard Pfister’s father had indicated people like Asche were the best placed in the modern world to preserve the old traditions of his mill, in the shadow of factory chimneys and polluted rivers (p. 185). The final touch in Raabe’s narrative, where he indicates Asche is learning Greek and reading Homer (p. 188), underlines his symbolic significance as a figure reconciling culture and learning with science, technology and commerce, uniting the beautiful with the useful and fusing creative imagination with practical common sense. The coexistence of modern industry side by side with the quasi-rural idyll of the factory-owner’s villa must even in its time have been implausible, and is, given its dependence on the ability of the river Spree to dispose of the factory’s chemical effluents at the same time as serving recreational purposes, doubly strange in a story whose central focus is the pollution of that other river on which the Pfister family mill stands. The threat of development hanging over cemeteries such as that described in Pfisters Mühle is ever present in the case of allotment colonies, which have typically existed in a state of merely temporary reprieve. A brief digression into the history and socio-cultural significance of the German allotment is necessary at this point, to contextualise Paul Gurk’s depiction in Laubenkolonie Schwanensee. In Britain, many green urban spaces have come into being accidentally, as the remnants of commons, fragmented marginal areas of wasteland and temporarily vacant sites awaiting development. As David Crouch and Colin Ward write in The Allotment. Its Landscape and Culture (1988), the allotments which have sprung up there over the last two centuries, often overlooked by factory chimneys and railway embankments, provide models for a reconciliation of nature and culture, the rural and the urban,

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and for the practice of an alternative way of life uniting individual selfdetermination with community spirit. Allotments combine in varying degrees functions associated with public health, recreation for the working classes, small-scale food production for the family, education and the protection of areas of beauty and endangered species. Some allotment colonies have been the products of social policy, and originated in urban planning, housing reform, educational and agricultural schemes. Others, however, have sprung up in a spontaneous counter-movement to urbanisation and industrialisation. In recent years, allotments, traditionally scorned for their petty bourgeois associations and banal aesthetics, have begun to attract interest not only as a sociological but also as a cultural phenomenon. Crouch and Ward argue they exemplify a ‘make do’ philosophy of self-sufficiency. George Orwell, Virginia Woolf and latterly Germaine Greer are among the writers who have celebrated the British allotment. German allotments, according to Hartwig Stein, the author of a recent account of their cultural history up to the Second World War (Stein 2000), have similarly served three principal functions: providing food, facilitating meaningful leisure activity and affording spiritual regeneration. Though historians have traced their roots back to the early nineteenth-century Armengärten, which were placed at the disposal of the ‘deserving poor’ and beyond, the Kleingarten or allotment in the modern sense of the word emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was inspired by the writings of the doctor, educationalist and proponent of physical exercise Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber. Schreber was a key figure in promoting a natural way of life, and probably the most important single link in Germany between Rousseau and the Life Reform Movement at the end of the century. The initial aim of the first Schreberverein, which was founded in Leipzig in 1865, was to provide a place for the children of a city school to play, part of which was given over to a small botanical garden. However, adults’ recreational needs soon displaced children’s as the focus of activities. The socalled ‘Schrebergarten’, a colony of lovingly tended gardens each with neatly planted vegetable and flower beds, fruit trees and bushes arranged around its own wooden hut, surrounded by clipped hedges and raked paths, and laid out around a communal building and recreational area, became, as Hermann Rudolph writes in his entry on the subject in François and Schulze’s collection of essays on Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (Rudolph 2005), a common sight on the edge of German cities. It is a quintessentially German institution. The Schreber allotment colonies, which were managed by self-governing associations,

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complete with statutes and elected committees, who organised local works, duties and events, fostered a strong sense of their members’ social and cultural importance. They saw themselves as practising a way of life different from the rest of industrial society, and constituting a model for social development. The Schrebergarten is, however, deeply ambivalent as a social phenomenon: on the one hand, as Rudolph writes, it anticipated the Wandervogelbewegung and the Life Reform Movement, its intimacy and seclusion providing a crystallisation point for community and familiarity with neighbours in the anonymous city. On the other, it has been associated with inwardness and social apathy, Philistinism and bourgeois self-satisfaction, naïve sentimentality and a taste in kitsch. The Schrebergarten has not, though, been the only kind of allotment in Germany: other ‘planned’ colonies include the Arbeitergärten, plots of land allocated by large firms to their employees and Red Cross gardens (for instance in Berlin-Charlottenburg), where alcohol and even tobacco were forbidden. On a much larger scale, there have also been the largely unplanned Laubenkolonien of Greater Berlin and other cities. It is with one of these that Paul Gurk’s novel is concerned. The Laubenkolonien emerged from the 1860s in response to acute housing shortages in the rapidly growing city. The word ‘Laube’ (originally ‘Laubhütte’, a simple construction of branches and twigs), acquired a dual meaning as garden bower and as a designation for the makeshift constructions on these allotments, which were commonly built of planks and covered in roofing felt. The usage as a synonym for ‘Kleingarten’ or ‘Schrebergarten’ spread from Berlin to the rest of Germany after the First World War. The bulk of Berlin allotment colonies were effectively shanty towns, largely populated by economic migrants from Silesia, Thuringia, Pomerania and East Prussia. By the 1890s there were some 40,000 Lauben in Berlin, and they had become a permanent part of the urban scene, not only easing the housing conditions of city tenants, but also meeting the desire of commercial developers to derive income from land awaiting commercial development. (Leases were usually annually renewable.) The colonisation of the Third World proceeding apace at the end of the century was reflected in the choice of names for the steadily expanding ring of Laubenkolonien around Berlin and other major German cities such as ‘Kamerun’, ‘Transvaal’, ‘Kapland’, ‘Grönland’ and ‘Togoland’. The First and Second World Wars saw a rapid expansion of allotments in Germany, when they not only provided valuable fresh food but were also a focus of support for the war effort on the home front.

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The buildings on the Berlin allotments, which were usually more substantial than the allotment sheds serving to store tools and provide shelter in Britain, acquired a new significance at the end of the First World War, when they were lived in by demobbed soldiers. From 1919 on, the Berlin Lauben were legally recognised as habitations in the summer months (from 15 April to 15 October). However, poor insulation and the lack of gas or electricity meant most of them were unsuitable for winter habitation. Cold and damp, many also lacked drains, running water and fire protection and were regarded by contemporaries as little better than gypsy encampments. The depression at the end of the 1920s again forced families whose breadwinners became unemployed, and who were evicted from their flats for non-payment of rent, to live in Wohnlauben. Until now, there had been few permanent residents in the allotment gardens of most German cities, though Greater Berlin was an exception, some 35,000 Lauben having been inhabited all year round there since the early 1920s (Stein 2000: 586). During the depression it remained technically illegal to live in Lauben all year round, but in practice many people were officially registered there and supported by the social services. The change is reflected in Hans Fallada’s bestselling novel Kleiner Mann, was nun? (1932), in which the unemployed shop salesman Pinneberg, his wife and child end up in a colony situated some 40 kilometres East of the centre of Berlin. On the verge of criminality, Pinneberg starts drinking but is saved by Lämmchen’s love. Fallada depicts the allotment as the last resort of the down-and-outs and a scene of altercations between political extremists but also as a home. In a scene at the end of the book, the reddish glow of the petroleum lamp symbolises family warmth and security. Fallada’s faith in human goodness and resilience contrasts with the bleakness of Gertrud Kolmar’s Die jüdische Mutter, a novel written in the same years (1930–1), in which an abandoned Laube in Berlin-Charlottenburg is the scene of child rape and murder. Stein describes the German allotment as a logical response to the threefold social challenge of urbanisation, industrialisation and proletarianisation. In a society increasingly characterised by materialism, mass production, anonymity and the cultivation of appearance rather than reality, allotments have served disadvantaged sectors of the population as recreational spaces offering scope for healthy self-realisation. Fresh air and sunshine, and the opportunity to grow one’s own fruit and vegetables and keep small animals were particularly popular in Berlin, where many workers had migrated from the country. The advocates of the allotment claimed moral, educational, social and even political

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benefits: “Time spent on the allotment fills people with joy in nature. Working with plants, and seeing plants and animals grow ennobles the soul”, Heinrich Förster, later president of the Reichsverband der Kleingartenvereine Deutschlands, wrote optimistically in 1929. It brings together people from all walks of life, gives them the freedom to shape their own lives and promotes community spirit: Der Mensch, heute vielfach zur Maschine geworden, hat im Kleingarten die Möglichkeit, selbst zu gestalten. Dort ist er sein eigener Herr. Von Bedeutung ist auch, daß Menschen verschiedener Berufe, Konfessionen und politischer Parteien hier ein gemeinsames Betätigungsfeld finden. Die Tätigkeit im kleinen Garten regt an zum Austausch der Gedanken und Gesinnung, zur gegenseitigen Hilfeleistung, zur gemeinsamen Arbeit. Die gemeinschaftliche Herstellung und Instandhaltung der Einfriedungen und Wege, die gemeinschaftlichen Feste und Vereinsabende, alles das bringt die Menschen der verschiedenen Berufe und Klassen einander näher. Das Verständnis für andere Lebensanschauungen, anderer Menschen Meinungen wird gepflegt.8 In a brochure entitled Deutsche Schreberjugendpflege Gerhard Richter wrote of the power of the allotment to ‘redeem’ the creative powers lost through repetitive work: In jedem Menschen steckt ja schließlich ein Künstler nach seiner Art, aber er wird gemordet durch das Einerlei des Berufs, durch den vorgeschriebenen Handgriff, durch das tickende und tackende Eisen, durch sein Stampfen und Rollen in Motor und Maschine. Technik und Mechanisierung sind die Mörder unseres schöpferischen Tuns. Da kommt der Kleingarten wie ein Erlöser, wie ein Erretter aus Alltagsnot. Wir erobern in ihm seelische Provinzen des Friedens und der innerlichen Ruhe, der wahren Herzensfreude zurück.9 Allotment holders in the 1920s and 1930s saw themselves as engaging in activities which compensated for the estrangement from nature, the spiritual impoverishment which went with city life and the culture of immediate gratification in cinema, music-hall and theatre. However, Stein notes the element of self-deception inherent in this response to modern life: “The end product of the critique of industrial society associated with allotments was [ … ] a figure of petty bourgeois helplessness, who affirmed the foundations of modern society while disapproving its

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political, economic and cultural consequences” (p. 237). Constituting an unpolitical alternative to contemporary Marxist theories of alienation and party-political activity, allotment holding appealed particularly to the lower middle class. The potential of the Laubenkolonie to constitute a community united by radical political ideology was explored by Slatan Dudow and Bertolt Brecht in the film Kuhle Wampe (1932). The eponymous colony on the Müggelsee to the East of Berlin, whose cheerful cabins set in allotment gardens contrast with the dark interiors, back yards and busy streets of the city centre in the first section of the film, provides a new home for Anni Böhnike and her family, when they are evicted from their flat after her brother’s suicide. The colony is a sphere of leisure and individual freedom, nature and love. But it is a very orderly place, pedantically clean and tidy with its bird baths and hanging flower baskets. Like the Schrebergarten, it is an apotheosis of very German qualities, which may be virtues or vices depending on the context: calm, order, diligence, cleanliness and naturalness. As Rudolph notes, the German allotment is “dubious terrain” (p. 202). A product of the best German traditions of idealism and practical social reform, it symbolises at the same time the worst German longings: its trivial romanticism and narrow-mindedness were co-opted by the Nazis into their cult of Blood and Soil. Kuhle Wampe undergoes a transformation in the third and final part of the film, when a workers’ Youth Sports organisation meets there for a weekend camp. The individualistic, petty bourgeois refuge where Anni’s nonpolitical boyfriend Fritz has a second home becomes a symbol of hope for a better future. Cooperative planning, group activities, noncompetitive races and a theatrical sketch about neighbourhood solidarity give a foretaste of communist society (see Silberman 1995). The Berlin allotments were to provide hiding-places for some Jews during the war, and for members of the resistance such as Erich Honecker and Jan Petersen. In general, however, the Laubenkolonie did not become a site of political mobilisation in the economic recession and political troubles of the 1930s but rather facilitated individual retreat to a life of self-sufficiency. The ethos of the allotment, a blend of practical realism with escapism which Stein sums up as the attempt to realise a utopian vision on a miniature scale, living the good life in one’s leisure time without seriously challenging socio-economic structures of exploitation and alienation, is formulated with a certain charm in a booklet published by Ernst Wilhelm Schmidt in 1947 entitled In Utöpchen.10 Schmidt notes in the preface that he had written the story during the Third Reich: “I wrote it for myself, for consolation. It was an

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escape from suffering and anguish to utopia” (p. 5). It is, then, consciously calculated to help contemporaries in the difficult post-war years put the hardships and indignities in their everyday lives into perspective and see them with humour and detachment. Making a virtue of necessity, it encourages readers to value the simple life as a better alternative to the vanity and materialism of professional existence in the city, whose disruption through wartime bombing is recognised as probably short-lived. Schmidt’s narrative of retreat to early retirement on a rented plot of land on the outskirts of a village in the North of Germany is told in the first person. It reads as an authentic autobiographical account, though it includes elements of essay and fictional narrative alongside entries in diary form. Notwithstanding the irony already evident in the title and the tongue-in-cheek idealisation of country life, the narrator is serious in his incitement to the reader to follow him in adopting a life of simple self-sufficiency and modesty. He celebrates the joy of picking one’s own strawberries in the morning dew and the pleasures of companionship with a faithful dog, includes recipes for raspberry tea and summer pudding, discusses different ways of cooking potatoes and gives advice on growing vegetables. Life on the allotment is also a voluntarily adopted position mid-way between the extremes of mastery over nature and subservience to its whims: Sie [Utöpchens Lebensform] liegt so glücklich mitten drin zwischen den beiden Polen menschlichen Daseins. In der Mitte zwischen Herrseinwollen und Knechtseinmüssen. Hier ist man Herr und Diener zugleich. Beherrschen will ich nichts anderes als mich selbst. Und meinen Dienst, den setze ich mir aus freien Stücken an Menschen, Tieren, Pflanzen. Just wie es kommt und wer es braucht. (p. 67) The narrator’s service to others can take the form of curing his neighbour’s mare of colic, replacing a swallow which had fallen out of its nest or freeing an old apple tree of moss. Mankind is different from nature but we have lessons to learn from it: “We could learn much from the grass in the fields! What seems easiest and is yet the most difficult thing: being natural” (p. 68). The allotment-holder respects the dignity of his fellow man and fellow creatures. “Reverence for living things of every kind is our joyful obligation”, he remarks, echoing Albert Schweitzer (p. 72). The problematic aspects of life in the Wohnlaube, midway between an alternative way of life freely sought out and involuntary social exclusion, are foregrounded in Ulrich Plenzdorf’s teenage novel Die neuen

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Leiden des jungen W., written in the GDR in the phase of political optimism following Honecker’s accession to power in 1971. Edgar Wibeau, who has left his job and family and taken refuge, without registering his change of address, in a Laube awaiting demolition (Plenzdorf 1973: 5), dies in what is probably an accident but might just be suicide, shortly before the buildings are bulldozed. The allotment provides a temporary haven for this nonconformist outsider in GDR society, while the references to Robinson Crusoe and Goethe’s Werther link the narrative with a broader tradition of literary envisionings of withdrawal from modern society and return to a simpler, more natural life. Herr Graumann, Paul Gurk’s protagonist in Laubenkolonie Schwanensee, is a literary predecessor of Edgar Wibeau’s, in withdrawing semi-voluntarily, in a mixture of escapism and protest, to live in a Berlin allotment colony. Like Wibeau, Graumann meets his death in ambivalent circumstances the night before his Laube is to be demolished. However, unlike Die neuen Leiden, Gurk’s novel also anticipates later narratives of environmentalist protest such as Otto F. Walter’s Wie wird Beton zu Gras (1979), Peter Härtling’s Das Windrad (1983), Franz-Josef Degenhardt’s Die Abholzung (1985) and Gudrun Pausewang’s Die Wolke (1987). It is no accident that it was reprinted in the decade dominated by the Greens.11

6.3 Laubenkolonie Schwanensee: An elegy on a disappearing way of life Paul Gurk’s novel is a passionate plea for retention of islands of green in the “sea of houses” which constitute the modern city: the allotment whose fate it tells of is not merely a last, miserable refuge for social drop-outs but also a blueprint for a sustainable society. Laubenkolonie Schwanensee combines utopian and dystopian elements, reflecting the dual origins of the allotment as Laubenkolonie and Schrebergarten. Its author was born in 1880, in Frankfurt an der Oder, but spent nearly all his life in Berlin, a city with which he maintained a love–hate relationship. He experienced success as a dramatist and playwright in the early 1920s but died in relative obscurity, impoverished and embittered, in 1953. (I am indebted to Emter 1995 for biographical details in the following.) Gurk was both a social and literary outsider. When his father, a coachman, died of pneumonia, the five-year-old Gurk was sent to live with an uncle in Berlin. He proved a gifted pupil, and, in the absence of funding for further study, completed a two-year training course as a teacher. However, his constitution was not robust enough for the classroom, so he joined the civil service, and worked his way up through the ranks of state employment for the next 24 years. Every spare minute

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was, however, spent writing (poems, novels and plays), painting and composing songs. Gurk was over 40 when his literary breakthrough finally came. In 1921 the theatre critic Julius Bab awarded him the prestigious Kleist Prize for his historical tragedy on the leader of the Peasants’ War, Thomas Münzer (1922), praising its “ironic melancholy” and “cynical pathos”. Other plays were produced in Berlin and elsewhere, and stories and a novel appeared in print. However, this recognition was short-lived. When Gurk resigned from the civil service to devote himself to full-time writing, it was a move from whose financial consequences he was to suffer for the rest of his life. His prolific oeuvre – according to Emter, 50 plays, 30 novels and 53 novellas – was influenced by Expressionism, but written when the movement was already in decline. Gurk’s observation of contemporary urban society and in particular his portrayal of the ordinary man in the street, have been compared with the social realism of Fallada’s Kleiner Mann, was nun?, Kästner’s Fabian (1931) or Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). However, he was too conservative in his opposition to contemporary modernity and too traditional in form and language to interest a public accustomed to New Sobriety, the dominant cultural movement in the 1920s. His relationship with the Nazis was, like that of many contemporaries, ambivalent: though his novels reveal antipathy towards key aspects of National Socialist ideology, he shared their critique of modern urban civilisation. Gurk was elected a member of the Reichsschrifttumskammer in 1934. However, his novel Tresoreinbruch was banned for its realistic depiction of corruption behind the façade of respectability in contemporary Berlin and its sympathetic portrayal of ‘honest’ criminals. Gurk’s trilogy of Berlin novels (Berlin, written 1923–5 but only published 1934; Tresoreinbruch, 1935; Laubenkolonie Schwanensee, written 1936 but only published 1949) and the science fiction novel Tuzub 37 (1935) were reprinted in the 1980s but he remains largely ignored by literary scholars and historians.12 Gurk’s writing on Berlin draws on all the negative images used by Naturalists, Bund Heimatschutz authors and Expressionists in their portrayal of the city. In the opening lines of Laubenkolonie Schwanensee it is personified in a curious conflation of the organic with the inorganic as a monster-machine, crushing or sweeping aside those individuals in whom feeling and idealism persist: Die große Stadt gleicht einem Fabeltier der Vorzeit. Sie wächst nicht. Sie schuppt sich an oder schuppt sich ab. Die große Stadt atmet nicht.

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Die große Stadt fühlt nicht. Das Fabeltier hat einen Motor in sich, der ungleichmäßig stößt. Sein Blut heißt nicht Traum, Hoffnung, Schwermut, Glück, Verdämmern, Tod: sondern Geschehen! (Gurk 1987: 7) As in Max Kretzer’s novel Meister Timpe (1888), where the “stone desert” of the city served as a visible sign of an abortive social development (see Freisfeld 1982: 21f.), Gurk presents Berlin as an increasingly uninhabitable environment leading to dehumanisation and de-individualisation. His semi-autobiographical protagonist, Herr Graumann, has resigned early from a position teaching trainee teachers, despite the financial loss this incurs, out of disillusionment with the arrogance, superficiality and materialism of his pupils and colleagues. He has withdrawn to an allotment colony in the northernmost part of the city, where he lives as a recluse, eking out an existence in loneliness, poverty and ill health. Passages of indignant protest and satirical criticism are to be found in Laubenkolonie Schwanensee but melancholy resignation dominates in the face of a society which rates journalism, commercial illustration and dance music above the artist’s struggle for self-expression and search for the truth. Despite an outpouring of creative activity in plays and stories, paintings and musical compositions while he was a young man, Graumann has been ignored by the critics and the public. Unable to comply with the whims of cultural fashion, he loses confidence in the value of his artistic gifts and burns his pictures and manuscripts. Disappointed by his experiences with women, disenchanted with modern life, suffering from depression and expecting an early death from a heart condition he is periodically incapacitated by, he adopts a way of life which reduces social contact to an absolute minimum. Gurk takes a quasi-monastic vow of silence. However, his attempt at complete selfeffacement is a failure, for he is forced to break his silence periodically, overcome by the urge to speak, just as he was unable to desist from creative activity as a young man, despite the absence of public interest in his work. The uneasy peace he finds in the Laubenkolonie is shattered when the residents are given notice by the authorities to leave, so that a road can be extended through the middle of the colony to relieve traffic congestion.13 They are made generous offers of compensation and alternative accommodation, either in “permanent allotments” half an hour further from the city centre, where they are assured there are no plans to build for the next five to ten years, or in new flats or housing estates. The allotment holders make their various arrangements. Graumann stays to the

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very end, and finally determines to blow himself up in his home with an explosive device left behind by a neighbour who was a former miner. At the last minute he changes his mind and tries to put out the fuse. But he is prevented from doing so by a heart attack. Gurk’s elegiac account of the fate of a sensitive, creative individual, who combines classical literary education with old-fashioned courtesy, conforms to the traditional Romantic dichotomy of bourgeois and artist. Graumann is, as we are repeatedly reminded (e.g. p. 10), one of the last “individual persons”, a man with “soul” (i.e. creativity and integrity), respectful of others and not motivated by material greed. His marginalisation and suffering are presented as inevitable in an indifferent world. Like Prometheus, who was punished for stealing fire from the gods, Graumann, who has “seen through a tiny hole in the curtain and caught a glimpse of the face of the gods and the demons”, is “welded to the rocks of loneliness” (p. 120). Creativity is incompatible with success and inevitably brings ridicule (p. 35). Gurk makes satirical jibes at the educational establishment (in the figure of Professor Brümmer, Graumann’s former teaching superior) and the world of contemporary art, music and publishing (in the persons of a young musician, an artist and a journalist). Though there is little that is particularly insightful or innovative in the characterisation of these figures or in the reflections on the position of the artist in modern society in Graumann’s conversations with them, their visits to the Laubenkolonie provide a provocatively critical external perspective on his life, and introduce elements of satire and humour which enliven a narrative otherwise bordering on self-indulgent pathos. The realism present in Gurk’s description of individual inhabitants of the allotment colony, their everyday lives and how they respond when they are forced to leave it, and the ironic detachment in some of the passages on Graumann’s habits are among the qualities which make it worth reading today. Berlin, a city unceasingly in motion, but where people lead lives of mechanical repetition, has a secret heart and soul in the allotment colony: “In the Laube the heart of the big city is revealed” (p. 7). In a world of constant change, the Laubenkolonie where Graumann and others have made their home has remained the same for as long as people can remember: here they have found a ‘Heimat’ (e.g. pp. 112 and 124f.). “The Laube was our one and all! We didn’t have electric light, not even gas. But when the paraffin lamp was lit, Lothar sat doing his school homework, my husband read things out from the newspaper, and the wind was blowing outside, it was cosy in our living room”, one of Graumann’s neighbours laments (p. 155). The colony is situated in a

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no-man’s-land on the dividing line between city and country: “The city has a strange green border, which is foolish and faintly ridiculous, yet moving and beautiful, like everything which lacks a practical purpose and can’t be immediately turned to profit: the Laube!” (p. 7). A remnant of nature in the sense of not yet being subjected to rationalism, instrumental ordering and commodification, it is to be found at the end of the tram line, where dreary streets lined by uniform facades fronting rented flats give way to a disorderly landscape of factories and highrise buildings, single-storey warehouses and petrol stations, timber yards, breakers’ yards and empty lots. In a recent article on the southern suburbs of Vienna, which formed part of a research project ‘Kulturlandschaftsforschung’ led by Helmut Haberl and Gerhard Strohmeier, Christine Gamper has described the urban periphery as a transitional zone challenging modernity and a site of possible alternatives. An indefinable non-place characterised by contradictions, a formless, incoherent, random area in which residential, industrial, retail, leisure and transport needs are met cheek by jowl, it is nevertheless a “reserve space”. As a “sphere of hope”, harbouring the possibility of a symbiosis of the urban and the rural, it holds the promise of providing a home for those whose aspirations have not been fulfilled elsewhere (Haberl and Strohmeier 1999: 79–84). These are precisely the qualities described by Gurk: “Neither city nor country, neither fish nor flesh”, “an eighth Ruhr industrial area, an eighth Lüneburg Heath, an eighth San Francisco, an eighth colony, an eighth poor man’s paradise – and so on” (p. 122). The periphery of Berlin is “where the last bits of city clash with the first bits of nature, so abruptly and suddenly that it makes strangers stop and look all around them in confusion” (p. 7). The skyline is punctuated by factory chimneys, but there are still open fields and woods on the horizon. Here, in an area which includes streets which have been laid out but are as yet only provisionally paved and have yet to be built on, as if challenging the hegemony of calculating reason, live Gypsies and other social outsiders. Gurk presents the colony quite realistically as a refuge for the destitute and dreamers, the poor and elderly, the victims of inflation and bankruptcy, work-related accidents, physical and mental illness, alcoholism and marital breakdown. The land on which the allotments stand is municipally owned, and most of the buildings on the rented plots, more or less ramshackle constructions, are only inhabited in the summer. They have no electricity, gas, running water or sewers. Daily life in Schwanensee consists of growing vegetables, keeping hens and geese, and tending fruit bushes and trees, in a community depending as much

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on barter and the services of itinerant tradesmen as on shops and the normal economy for the satisfaction of their other needs. Whatever freedom, dignity and tranquility it affords, these are precariously gained at the expense of comfort, security and social inclusion. Living here is tantamount to a dangerous departure from social norms and normality: visitors are warned symbolically of the danger in approaching through a sign saying: “Private way! Owners accept no liability for use!” (p. 14). The names of the allotment colonies reflect hopes for a better existence: “All the allotment colonies have ringing, flattering names, redolent of sunshine, peace and happy dreams” (p. 9). We are, however, constantly reminded of the ironic contrast between the aspirations of the inhabitants and the reality of their lives. There is no lake or even pond in the Schwanensee colony: at one point the name is attributed to an artificial lake in a nearby park. Nor is there any sense of the primary ecological benefits of allotment gardens in Gurk’s novel, unless one is to take the references to the appearance of a rare butterfly, the Ordensband (probably the catocala nupta, or Red Underwing), which is mentioned (pp. 28, 117, 147) as evidence of their providing a habitat for such species. Yet the colony constitutes an alternative sphere associated with the dream of a simple life: “Here longing for simplicity is fulfilled, and – at times – the last aspirations of the lonely, the exceptional and the impoverished” (p. 7). The inhabitants have the freedom to build and shape their houses according to their needs and interests, to keep pets, grow flowers, sunbathe and relax outdoors. Whether it is financial loss, illness or a work-related accident which has jolted the colonist out of bourgeois existence, he has been freed from the necessity to conform to normal expectations and the dictates of reason. The otherness of the allotment dwellers is perceived as a potential threat: their disorderly homes are described as an eyesore and constantly threatened by intervention from the authorities. The Lauben are popularly regarded as a hide-out for “criminals and uncontrollable riff-raff”, and Graumann learns from one of his visitors of articles in the newspaper demanding “that the current primitive constructions be demolished and replaced by a proper layout of allotments in orderly rows, with communal play areas, washrooms, clothes lines and so on, so that the unsightly products of an earlier age are no longer a blot on the city’s skyline” (p. 125). The allotment holders’ resistance to the regimentation of the individual in modern society is linked with a particular attachment to nature, for life in the colony fosters an awareness of the changing seasons and reminds the inhabitants of the natural boundaries of human life.

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The allotment, described by Graumann as “a room furnished by the Earth” (p. 33), “my green citadel” and “the last green habitation of the soul” (p. 77), is associated with an attitude of reverent wonder towards nature (p. 49), “cosmic fear” (p. 55) and an awareness that humankind may not be the be-all and end-all of creation (p. 118). “All this is a mere breath, a momentary glance of eternity”, Graumann muses, “it will cease to exist when the Earth is flung into the corner or trampled on, like a toy in the hands of an angry child, by some incomprehensible event!” (p. 50). Graumann’s resolutely non-conformist, hermit-like way of life disconcerts and challenges visitors, reminding them of the petty pretence of their own lives: Wer ihn gesprochen hatte, fühlte sich von Fremdheit angeweht oder vergiftet oder in seiner tiefsten Eitelkeit und Streberei entlarvt. Hatte er etwas Verwandtes uneingestanden in seinem tiefsten Wesen, so erschrak er, als habe die Gorgo ihr Gesicht im Spiegel gesehen. Er schauderte dann vor der Sprache der Laube zurück, und suchte so schnell wie möglich, diesen sonderbaren Einsiedler, seine Sätze und seine Bewegungen zu vergessen. (p. 117) The phrase “Sprache der Laube” links the allotment holder’s way of life with that of the writer or artist. They are both social outsiders and opponents of the dominant values of society. Ironic passing references to Graumann’s ‘simple life’ as a “Rousseauvian return to nature” (p. 88), to his hospitality as a reenactment of Uhland’s poem ‘Einkehr’ (“Bei einem Wirte wundermild [ … ]”, p. 129) and to the scene after the expulsion of the colonists, with old beds, mattresses and blankets lying around, as the last resting place of a tired and starved Pan, abdicated, bankrupt and homeless in this technological world (p. 191) take a darker turn when Graumann is presented with a gramophone and a record of Carl Loewe’s ‘Herr Oluf’ by his parting neighbour. Herder’s doom-laden ballad (the inspiration for Goethe’s ‘Erlkönig’) recounts the fate of those who once enter “the realm of poetry, art, the irrational, the intuitions, things that cannot be quantified or purchased” (p. 181). The clash between progress, mobility, utilitarianism and self-interest on the one hand and a gentler way of life based on tradition, rootedness, appreciation of natural beauty and respect for one’s neighbours on the other comes to a head half way through the book when Graumann learns that they will have to give up their Lauben. He immediately interprets this as an attack on the last manifestation of Heimat in an alien world and the end of a process whereby the soul is driven out of modern

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society: “Is there then no feeling, no soul left in the world, only utility, traffic, technology?”, he bursts out: Hat denn der einzelne Mensch gar nichts mehr zu bedeuten? Ist er nur dazu da, ausgeschlachtet zu werden und dann in die Müllkute mit ihm, ins Massengrab! Muß denn dies verfluchte Geschlecht ewig herumrasen, fortwährend Handel treiben und immer mehr, immer dichter zusammenlaufen, bloß weil sie alle für sich leer sind und sich zu Tode langweilen, wenn sie sich nicht selbst in Haufen bewundern und immer mit dem Ellenbogen zusammenstoßen, ganz gleich, ob sie sich zanken oder nach der Molle in die Arme fallen? Nur Krach muß sein, Betrieb! Je mehr Verkehrsunfälle, desto lebendiger ist das Leben! Das sind doch keine Straßen mehr, unsere Straßen! Sie verbinden doch nichts! Sie überrennen nur alles! [ …] Wer kann mir meine Laube zurückgeben, den Blick in den Himmel, den einzigen Horizont, diesen Horizont mit diesen Schornsteinen, fernen Masten, Park- und Waldgrenzen und dem ungeheuren Kampfplatz der Wolken darüber, an dem ich mein Verborgenstes seit Jahren genährt habe? [ …] Verzeihen Sie meine Erregung! Aber es muß doch etwas geschehen! Wir haben uns doch alle an diese Erde, an diese Gärten, an diese Lauben gewöhnt! Sie sind wir selber geworden! Man kann sich doch nicht ausreißen, sich vernichten – und doch weiterleben! (pp. 156f.) This cri de coeur over the loss of sense of place, time and identity, the massification of society, the pace of modern life and the commercialisation of relations reflects Gurk’s roots in the conservative critique of urban modernity of the turn of the century and does not differ greatly from Georg Simmel’s diagnosis of the impact of city life on the individual a generation earlier (see Midgley 2000: 276f.). His tirade culminates in the words: “I must do something now! For the first time I must do something! I will go and speak to everyone. We must act together. We must stay here! We must put up resistance!” (p. 157. Emphasis in original). Gurk’s allotment holder is a last heroic individual with soul, holding out against the pressures of modern society. “You are a bad case. You have actually got a soul! What does somebody like you expect of the world?”, he is asked by an unexpectedly understanding official in the City Planning Department, who concludes the whole colony is “contaminated with soul” (pp. 172, 174). Graumann bows to the inevitable, recognising that other men too live lives of “quiet desperation”, and

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that, as he had been told before, he and his neighbours have no legal grounds not to comply: “Everything was settled, signed and sealed, perfectly legal and in line with the intentions of the authorities and the wishes of the public” (p. 158). Gurk’s melancholy conclusion is that it is the end of an era, individual integrity can no longer survive: “The time for individuals was over” (p. 211). Graumann’s mistake is, it would seem to today’s readers, that rather than seeking sanctuary in the allotment colony in order to devote himself to a life of creative fulfilment, he has retreated into silence, renouncing his gifts. “I have deliberately killed off that nonsense in me”, he says to a young musician and composer: “I have become dumb, close to nature, I can’t go on, don’t wish to go on, won’t go on!” (pp. 36, 38). He describes the Katzenvater, an old man who lives in an empty allotment, surrounded by his cats, and has completely stopped communicating with the outside world, as an almost perfect role model (p. 106). Such extreme self-discipline and modesty, however preferable to his contemporaries’ affectations and vices, do not, however, provide a viable model for society. Though Graumann rises to the challenge of social responsibility, and shows kindness and generosity towards strangers as well as his fellow colonists, his masochistic asceticism is deeply ambivalent. The view of life expounded by Graumann’s former colleague, Professor Brümmer (pp. 93–101) suggests that Gurk subscribed to a Nietzschean conception of nature as governed by the principles of interdependence and balance, determining human history in ways cruelly indifferent to the suffering of individuals. Like Schopenhauer (and Loerke), though, he holds that out of suffering can come comfort, for those who yield to nature’s laws. In fleeting moments, we are witnesses to the sublime natural beauty that accompanies unadorned truth. The final chapter of the book is reminiscent of Stifter in associating the beauty and tranquility of nature with renunciation of human happiness. Gurk describes the onset of winter in a scene whose intoxicating clarity and vivid colours transcend earthly existence: Die Straßenbahnen klangen klarer und näher herüber, und doch fühlte Herr Graumann, als er durch den Laubenweg bis zur Straße ohne Häuser ging, die unerklärliche, wie Wein schmeckende Wintereinsamkeit. Noch einmal betrachtete er die Hügellinie des großen Parks. Die entlaubten Bäume standen in der schönen Klarheit ihres kostbaren Baues bläulich lila, weit entfernt und doch zauberhaft gegenwärtig. Der lilagoldene Rauch eines Fabrikschornsteins zog sich endlos weit

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geradeaus wie eine hauchdünne Wolke durch die feurige Morgenlohe über dem verdämmernden Wald … Über dem Ocker, dem Gelb der Horizontalstreifen wölbte sich das durchsichtige, blasse Grün des Himmels auf, wurde blasser und schwamm endlich in das milchige Blau der Höhe hinüber. In unauslöschlicher ewiger Schönheit schwang sich die Halbkugel des Äthers über der schlafenden Scheibe Erde … (pp. 197f.) The beauty of nature is here inseparable from a coldness reflecting its indifference to the individual’s struggle for self-realisation, to human suffering and death. Graumann recognises and accepts this, seeking to become one with nature, in a process which involves renunciation of all human striving: “The individual must learn to do nothing and want nothing” (p. 38). His Schopenhauerian goal is “to be dumb, nothing but Laube, so as to have in the end at least the pleasure of the Earth, sky, sun, clouds, winds, trees, flowers and butterflies, of the cold, storms and freedom from traffic” (p. 36). He spends much of his time watching the clouds come and go. They demand to be appreciated as more than mere meteorological phenomena: mysterious and beautiful correlatives of creative inspiration and non-material values, they are also images of the transience of human life. It is Graumann’s wish to die in the allotment, which he describes as “my last refuge, the possibility of ending and overcoming all illusion and pretence” (p. 113), evaporating like a cloud: “In this sky, in this landscape I will pass away, like a small cloud which has neither rained nor thundered” (p. 114).14 The crushing inhumanity of such a philosophy of submission to nature’s laws as a greater order and harmony, in which the trials and tribulations of ordinary mortals lose their significance (p. 116), when taken to its logical conclusion, is provocatively formulated in Professor Brümmer’s Darwinist lecture. The history of mankind is, Brümmer insists, “a kind of gymnastic exercise of nature”. Individual genius is of no significance: “We can never outwit nature! Nature determines everything” (pp. 98f.). For Graumann himself, nature, however preferable it may be to the “scented hypocrisy” of city life, is a combination of “unfeigned, genuine cruelty and beauty” (pp. 33f.). The limits of Gurk’s social realism and his anticipation of environmental activism are set by this Nietzschean conception of nature, which we have seen earlier in the plays of Georg Kaiser. Though allotment-holders also feature in Günter Seuren’s recent novel Die Krötenküsser, they are no longer Gurk’s tragic, creative outsiders. My attention in the following shifts to the ecology park, a mani-

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festation of the urban utopian experiment more characteristic of the late twentieth century, in which communal repossession of lost common land came to accompany the individual cultivation of enclosed private gardens. Gurk wrote in a period of rapid urban growth, which continued into the post-Second World War period. However, population growth slowed and stopped in many of the old European industrial centres in the 1960s, and a phase of counter-urbanisation began. The longstanding flight to the suburbs, the modern quest for Arcadia, accelerated, and greater mobility permitted both businesses and individuals to move to the countryside beyond, leaving behind considerable areas of dereliction in our larger cities. In the subsequent efforts to make cities more livable in, the renaturalising of wasteland and secondary wilderness has played a significant role. Gurk was unable to imagine the utopian way of life he associates with allotment gardens other than as a phenomenon barely tolerated by mainstream society and threatened with extinction. In Seuren’s novel, this lament at failure to preserve nature in the city is replaced by a satirical commentary on the consequences of misguided attempts to do so. If Gurk is a pre-environmental novelist, Seuren can thus be described as a post-environmental writer, who critically observes the confused thinking behind well-intentioned efforts to green the city.

6.4 Die Krötenküsser: A satire on the environmental movement In many of the novels which addressed environmental issues most overtly in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Carl Amery’s Der Untergang der Stadt Passau (1975), Silvio Blatter’s ‘Freiamt’ trilogy (1976–88), Hanns Cibulka’s Swantow (1980), Monika Maron’s Flugasche (1981), Jurij Koch’s Der Kirschbaum (1984) and Günter Grass’s Die Rättin (1986), the city retained its negative image from the earlier part of the century. Works such as Max Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (1979), Gudrun Pausewang’s three autobiographical Rosinkawiese books (1980–90), Uwe Wolff’s Papa Faust (1982) and Klaus Modick’s Moos (1996) [1984], as well as Günter Grass’s Die Rättin (1986) and Christa Wolf’s Sommerstück (1989) contained passages which constituted ecologically oriented variants of traditional narratives in which the protagonist withdraws from the city to live in harmony with nature. They revisit themes and perspectives from Hermann Hesse’s Peter Camenzind (1904), Ernst Wiechert’s Das einfache Leben (1939), Max Frisch’s Homo faber (1957) and Marlen Haushofer’s Die Wand (1963). A smaller number of environmentally committed writers in the 1970s and 1980s also explored the ecology

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of urban communities, including Peter Härtling (Das Windrad, 1983) and Christine Brückner (Die letzte Strophe, 1989). Günter Seuren’s Die Krötenküsser has, however, been chosen for closer analysis here because it reflects critically on tensions and contradictions within the environmental and alternative movements, from a vantage point at the end of the century. Like Gurk, Seuren was at the time of writing all but forgotten in the literary world. Born in 1932 in the Rhineland, he had started professional life as a journalist in Düsseldorf, writing stories, comic strips and film reviews. These were followed by screenplays for film and television. Seuren established a literary reputation in the 1960s as a member of Günter Wellershoff’s ‘Cologne School of New Realism’, alongside Nicolas Born, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Günter Herburger. His novel Das Gatter (1964) was filmed by Peter Schamoni under the title Schonzeit für Füchse and became one of the early successes of the New German Cinema. However, the novels that followed found ever less favour with the critics and Seuren ceased writing altogether after the harsh reviews of Die Asche der Davidoff (1985), turning to film documentaries. However, Die Krötenküsser was an exception. It broke a fifteen-year literary silence when it was published by Franz Greno’s Eichborn Verlag. It was well received and has since appeared in paperback. The action takes place in the North-Eastern suburbs of Munich, between Bogenhausen, Englschalking and Denning. The area, in which the author has lived since the early 1980s (see Müller 2002), has seen considerable change since the Second World War. With the expansion of the city and the increase of traffic, recognition has come of the need to preserve and develop the remaining areas not built on. The skyline towards the city centre is now dominated by the high-rise buildings of the Hypobank and Allianzversicherung, but the Arabellapark, an allotment colony and even fields of maize, on land now owned by the city, which are invaded in summer by tramps, young couples and playing children, remain as open spaces: Früher, vor einem halben Jahrhundert, sagen die Einheimischen, die hier als Kinder gespielt haben, brauchten wir keine Schutzzonen. Das war alles eine einzige Wildnis, keine steilaufragende Hypobank, kein zubetonierter Horizont. Wer heute sechzig ist, schwamm damals in den klaren Baggerseen der Kieswerke. Die alten Witwen, deren Männer an Magenkrebs oder Herzversagen starben, erzählen, daß sie als kleine Mädchen nicht einschlafen konnten, weil die Tiere nachts lauter waren als die wenigen Autos. Man hatte Strohhalme und blies

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Frösche auf, man fummelte im Gras an Bluse oder Hosenschlitz, heiratete, erbte das kleine Elternhaus mit Vorgarten und lebt noch immer auf der Schotterebene aus der letzten Eiszeit. (pp. 236f.) Traces of the glacial moraine which once gave the landscape its character are evident in disused gravel pits now surrounded by the ever-expanding housing estates. These vestigial “steppes” are still populated by wildlife: “Die Steppe ist ein Versammlungsplatz für aussterbende Arten, die auf einen Noah mit der Arche warten. Ein verstörter Hase hoppelt herum, ein Fasan fliegt über Autodächer, ein Fuchs hat sich im Unterholz gehalten, sagen Frühaufsteher, die ihn gesehen haben” (p. 22). Seuren’s story is concerned with an area of waste land some 10,000 square metres in size which has been “adopted” by a local biology student.15 Staudinger, aged 25, is assisted in his efforts to reclaim and renaturalise the area by the narrator and a handful of other volunteers. Their efforts reflect the experiences of the initiators of the many ‘pocket parks’, ‘urban nature parks’, ‘community gardens’ and ‘neighbourhood gardens’ which have sprung up in European and North American cities since the 1970s. With the support of the City Planning and Environment Department, they first clear the ground of cans, bottles and condoms, and set about trimming and clearing the existing vegetation and sowing native wild flowers. Staudinger is particularly interested in saving the population of Wechselkröte or European Green Toad (bufo viridis). He goes to great lengths to return parts of the area to the original sparse vegetation which constitutes the natural habitat of the insects and butterflies on which the toads feed, and lays out ponds for them to spawn in. Die Krötenküsser deconstructs central myths of the environmental movement, showing how visitors to the nature reserve project their own dissatisfaction with modern life and their longing for a “return to nature” (Seuren 2000: 219) onto the project. They assume the volunteers are “good people”, living healthily and working for a better world (p. 121). One of the many people attracted by the site is the former owner of a city-centre shop for leather and hunting wear. After a serious injury in a car accident, he has begun a new life, sleeping rough and avoiding contact with the authorities by living “invisibly” (p. 171). “I’ve stopped taking part in the madness of normal life”, he observes (p. 167). However, tramps are not welcome in Staudinger’s conservation area. Indeed, he initially tries to discourage the public in general from entering it by putting up notices asking them not to disturb the wildlife and creating a natural barrier of thorn and bramble around it. This is naturally unpopular with the local dog owners and with the children who

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were used to riding their mountain bikes here and skating on the ponds in winter. The opposition of many of the locals is reflected in the title of the novel: “Toad-kissers” (“Krötenküsser”) is one of several openly abusive names shouted by children and unsympathetic passers-by – others are “green weirdos”, “eco-shits” and “eco-arseholes”. Toad-kissing is clearly a metaphor for the exaggerated, sycophantic adulation of nature of certain members of environmental groups. However, Seuren also hints at a literal meaning behind the term ‘Krötenküsser’. The narrator describes kissing a toad in his childhood in the hope it would fulfil his wishes (p. 33) and later seeing Staudinger as a young boy appearing to kiss a toad, in a gesture which suggests the closeness of children with animals (p. 34).16 The different terms used for the nature reserve reflect diverging conceptions of its function: Staudinger’s “Reservat” and “Biotop” put the emphasis on the preservation of indigenous plants, birds, butterflies and amphibians. His obsession with raking away the footprints left in the sand by trespassers where he has sown wild flower seeds (pp. 89f.) indicates his desire to recreate a pristine nature unsullied by human hand. The city authorities, on the other hand, whose priorities lie with the educational and leisure needs of the city’s inhabitants, plan a “demonstration park” or “adventure area” (pp. 79, 113), with paths for wheel chair access and an observation platform. The narrator, who becomes increasingly disillusioned with the shape the project is taking, repeatedly uses the words “Gehege” (which has associations of restricting enclosure and precious artificiality) and “Filz” (alluding to the tangled motivation of the activists as much as the tangle of vegetation on the site). These differences of opinion over the use of the area reflect the tensions between anthropocentrism and biocentrism inherent in many environmental enterprises. Seuren’s book charts the problematic consequences of Staudinger’s biocentric approach and implies the necessity of balancing environmental against social needs. But the extent to which humans should shape and control nature in general is also queried. Staudinger’s ultimate aim is a kind of botanic garden, in which it is forbidden to tread on or pick the plants, while the narrator would prefer the place to look “natural” and remain a wilderness. Seuren probes the motivation for the volunteers’ ‘Nature Activity’ (the presumptious logo on a baseball cap given to the narrator). The project is introduced as an initiative to preserve endangered species (p. 5), and as a Noah’s Ark (p. 22). However, Staudinger and the narrator see themselves from the start as “reviving” the area (p. 8) in a more interventionist sense, by sanitising it.17 Staudinger, who uses the phrase “doing our duty for creation” (“Dienst an der Schöpfung”), albeit half jokingly, regards himself

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as “godfather” of the endangered species (p. 33). The narrator becomes increasingly conscious of Staudinger’s preoccupation with power and control: “He wants to understand everything and have it under control” (p. 32). His aim is even described at one point as “reconquering” the area (p. 33). Impatient to speed up the metamorphosis of the tadpoles in the Spring, he brings in an excavator to dig a series of shallow basins in which the sun can warm the water quickly. When the water seeps away through the clay, he proceeds to line the basins with plastic sheeting. To prevent the expensive wildflower seeds he has bought being smothered by indigenous weeds, he similarly resorts to sterilising the soil with a gas burner, and in the end he is reduced to concreting over areas of ground, leaving small holes for his plants. The gas burner becomes a symbol of his heavy-handed technological approach to managing the environment. (Its sinister appearance comes into its own when a stranger steals it and uses it to rob a bank, striking terror into the bank staff by passing it off as a biological weapon.) Excavating a new basin for the toads to breed in, because Staudinger needs to collect experimental data for a university project, the narrator finds himself slicing the limbs off hibernating toads. “We are really killers, though people think we are doing good”, he notes with distaste (p. 298). Staudinger also treats the site as his private property: “He took liberties himself which broke all the rules. But when children came round with jam jars [to fetch tadpoles], he threw them out of his enclosure” (p. 54). A habit of Staudinger’s which particularly annoys the narrator is letting his fingers play on the surface of the water, in a gesture implying ownership and mastery: Ich wunderte mich, warum mich diese Handbewegung anwiderte. Er tauchte seine Hand ein, ließ das Wasser durch die Finger gleiten, und dann begannen sie, auf dem Wasserspiegel zu “klimpern”. Je länger ich hinsah, um so mehr wurde mir klar, daß Staudinger sich für den Besitzer eines großen, unsichtbaren Klaviers hielt, auf dem nur er zu spielen verstand. (p. 54) The narrator accuses Staudinger of being a control freak (p. 66), of taking over the whole area on an ego trip (p. 91) and even practising “ecological masturbation” (p. 82). He compares Staudinger’s obsessive toad-breeding project with the Nazis’ Lebensborn, the brothels reserved for SS officers: Sein unerschütterliches Selbstvertrauen steht ihm gut, blond, raumergreifend, er geht nicht, er marschiert. Damals hätten sie ihn

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gebrauchen können, er hätte perfekt organisierte Gehege ausgedacht, Lebensborn, Zuchtstationen, immer nur das Beste. Damals hätte er Karriere machen können mit seiner deutschen Gründlichkeit. (p. 84)18 What started out as an initiative to preserve an endangered species has become a concentration camp for animals from which the genetically selected toads must not be allowed to escape: Wenn er durch sein Gehege geht, denkt er sich wieder Verbesserungen aus, um das Ganze genauer kontrollieren zu können. Er kommt zu mir und erklärt, daß unser System Lücken hat. In den umliegenden Gärten werden ab und zu Wechselkröten gesehen. Wenn sie das Gehege verlassen, sind das Verluste für die Population. Man muß ihren Wandertrieb stoppen. Man könnte ein Gehege im Gehege bauen. Staudinger wollte einen ausbruchsicheren Plastikzaun um dreißig Quadratmeter errichten, eine größere Anzahl Kröten selektieren und dort isolieren. (p. 85) Half way through the book, the narrator rows with Staudinger and drops out of the project for a time. At several points (pp. 44, 90f.), he fantasises about sabotaging it. However, his own aims are no less confused than Staudinger’s. His initial self-understanding as “a kind of nature guard” is gradually modified. He acknowledges his own participation in the project is less an act of idealism, or even motivated by the simple desire for physical exercise, than a way of working through the depression he suffers from, his writer’s block and his difficult on-and-off relationship with his partner. He recognises physical labour on the project site is a therapy necessary to get over what he calls his “Oedipus affair”,that is the tensions in the relationship with his partner over her eight-year-old son’s behaviour (p. 44). Furthermore, both the narrator and Staudinger are engaged in a protracted struggle against potentially terminal illness. Staudinger is undergoing treatment for Hodgkin’s disease, while the narrator fears a recurrence of an auto-immune disease contracted on a trip to Turkey some years earlier. Work which is allegedly “in the service of creation” is thus revealed as motivated by fear for their own survival (p. 136). “The people don’t know why we are working so hard, they aren’t aware we are working off our fear. They think we are just trying to improve the environment”, the narrator comments (p. 57).19 He shares many of Staudinger’s feelings, but retains an ironic self-awareness lacking in his younger companion: “I try to laugh at myself and at this attempt to heal

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myself with an impossible therapy” (p. 84). As the novel progresses, the difference in standpoint between the two men, the technologically oriented environmentalist and romantic ecologist, is blurred. A division of labour eases the tension between them. Staudinger, we learn, “was perhaps no longer quite so sure he was entitled to a green vision in which others had so little space” (p. 209), while the narrator has long since observed himself becoming a petty-minded guard of the site (p. 116). The story ends with a paradox: Staudinger receives glowing press coverage, official support and significant private donations at the very point in time when the tadpoles in the reserve are dying in their thousands for the third summer running. No one seems to notice or care that the “success” of the project is a lie. The precise reason for this disaster is never established, but it appears to be due to damage to the amphibians’ liver cells caused by a toxic concentration of iron and calcium in the clay, possibly deriving from subsoil dumped there during excavation work for the Munich underground. Die Krötenküsser thus suggests symbolically that attempts such as Staudinger’s and the narrator’s to recreate nature and restore meaning to their lives in a world of empty affluence are blighted by the “Altlasten”, or legacy of contamination left behind by the affluent society. Seuren’s critique of the pampered prosperity of his contemporaries verges on the cynical: “People have it too good”, says a friend of the narrator’s. “They eat and drink, are spoiled and fat. And if there is a puddle they have to walk round, they look for someone to put the blame on” (p. 278). In the narrator’s dreams, Hitler’s ghost returns in his open Mercedes on the old road to Riem airport, whose asphalt is only concealed by a thin layer of soil under the nearby trees. A mindset of “cosy fascism” lives on among the local people (p. 105). Ultimately, however, the environmental project suffers from being tainted by the wish of its originator to “play God” (p. 130) and by the unrealistic expectations of contemporary society, in which people’s imagination is dominated by TV advertising and popular film (p. 239), and their wishes are determined by the hedonistic “pleasure industry” (p. 271). The public themselves seem to the narrator threatened with extinction, having lost faith in their ability to shape their own future. They regard Staudinger’s environmental project as a waste of time but support it out of a sense of guilt and anxiety regarding the future: “Somehow everyone feels affected by it and doesn’t want to die out” (p. 106). Die Krötenküsser is then highly critical of the muddled thinking of the environmental movement and its projection of emotions onto nature. Staudinger’s behaviour shows the obsession with environmental

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management inherent in ecological fundamentalism as leading to totalitarian control of hapless animals and antisocial exclusion of the people who had previously enjoyed use of the site. Seuren’s critique extends, however, beyond such obsessive activists to the general public. The ecology park acts as a focal point for the false consciousness of the local people. An overworked nurse who comes there to get away from her cancer patients for a moment (“She had seen too much sick flesh and longed for some animal peace” p. 120), muses that we are relying more and more on instruments to postpone the degeneration of our bodies. Many of the visitors border on the ridiculous in their longing for “Do-gooders [ … ] who one could entrust oneself to” (p. 122) and the narrator becomes increasingly irritated by their naivety. “We must bring animals, plants and humans closer together, they enthused. [ … ] A tape was playing in my head, answering their questions about the reunification of humans with animals and plants” (pp. 213f.). He feels he has lost control over himself: “I had somehow become the lackey of a system which longed for more life” (p. 216). Yet Seuren holds out the possibility of a better life and calls for change. “More and more people visited the site in whose imagination my digging the soil seemed to stand for a revolution in human relations”, the narrator comments: Irgendwie waren sie verschüttet, und die Leute sahen mir angespannt beim Ausgraben zu, in der Hoffnung, es würde im Lehm plötzlich eine Hand, ein Fuß, ein Körper oder wenigstens ein Gesicht erscheinen, in dem sie sich wiedererkannten. Sie taten so, als interessierten sie sich für aussterbende Arten, aber ihnen lag viel mehr daran, etwas auszusprechen, was sie woanders nicht entsorgen konnten. (p. 122) Yet for all his critical detachment, Seuren does not deny the legitimacy of their dissatisfaction with society. Behind his satire there lies sympathy with the deep-seated longing for a more natural way of life which finds expression in their support for the ecology park as a utopian project.

6.5 Heterotopian dimensions of allotment and ecology park Laubenkolonie Schwanensee and Die Krötenküsser both possess an obvious autobiographical dimension but their authors also both combine selfanalysis with reflection on the redemptive social potential of green spaces in the city. For all their scepticism about the possibility of reconciling country with city, nature with civilisation, humans with plants and

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animals, Gurk and Seuren inscribe into the allotment and recuperated wasteland traces of a utopian alternative to mainstream society. Unmistakable parallels between details in the authors’ lives and those of their fictional protagonists (figures coming to terms with their failure to achieve public acclaim with their writing, confronting illness and depression) reveal the latter as self-portraits. However, they are equally figures diagnosing the weaknesses of their originators and critically exploring the consequences of these weaknesses. Graumann is a 58year-old teacher who has taken early retirement, forfeiting his pension rights: Gurk, who published for a time under the pseudonym Franz Grau, had retired from the civil service after only 24 years of service and was 56 at the time of writing. Passages in the book undoubtedly reflect the author’s threefold talent in writing, art and music, and his feelings about his lack of public recognition. Graumann’s way of life is, however, described (admittedly from the perspective of an insensitive young visitor) in terms accentuating Gurk’s own situation, as “the total foundering of an old man” (p. 19). Alone and unheeded on his birthday, he refers to himself as “dead and buried in the Laube” (p. 46). His presentation as a man stranded on the edge of society (p. 126), a belated Romantic, oldfashioned enough to persist in projecting his own sentimentality into nature (p. 136), is of course provocative and does not indicate the values he stands for are entirely unfounded. On the contrary, Gurk demands our sympathy for this victim of modern life and our respect for his protest. Seuren’s narrator, a middle-aged has-been writer who drinks more than is good for him, a drifter whose attitude towards life is frequently one of apathy and cynicism, and who is ineffectual and disingenuous in his “romantic” attachment to nature, is a similarly unflattering self-portrait of the author. The process whereby nature becomes a repository for the city-dweller’s longings for a better life endows allotment and ecology park with the functions of the ‘heterotopia’. In his essay ‘Of other spaces’ (1986), Michel Foucault defines the heterotopia as a real place which has acquired special symbolic significance in a particular culture, through association with values which negate those of mainstream society. The heterotopia, in which traces of ancient traditions of privileged, sacred or forbidden places survive, exemplifies Otherness, in that it is outside normal society, and behaviour there inverts and contests the human relations designated, mirrored and reflected elsewhere. Allotment and ecology park differ from the first set of examples Foucault gives, in that the people who live or go there do so more or less voluntarily. They may be acting under pressures from society, but are not forcibly placed or

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incarcerated there, as in the case with Foucault’s boarding schools, military barracks, psychiatric hospitals and prisons. However, the green urban spaces in Gurk’s and Seuren’s novels are places embodying a psychological need, where the perceptual and the actual merge. They act, like the gardens, fairgrounds and holiday villages which Foucault goes on to discuss, as heterotopias, in the sense of “counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia” (p. 24). Foucault introduces the cemetery as one of his examples, discussing its shifting significance over the centuries as a place of the dead, though he does not mention the function it possesses in Raabe’s Pfisters Mühle as a retreat from and resistance to the instrumental rationalism of modernity. Gurk’s allotment and Seuren’s ecology park combine elements of each of the two categories of heterotopia outlined by Foucault, “crisis heterotopias” and “heterotopias of deviation”. Inasmuch as they are places reserved for individuals in a state of crisis, they correspond to the former, and inasmuch as persons whose behaviour is deviant in relation to required norms are placed there or gravitate there, they belong to the latter. The heterotopian dimension of the novels discussed here is present in the alternative social order and alternative cultural values associated with the ‘simple life’ in Laubenkolonie and Biotop. These are idealised through fleeting visions of beauty and harmony and allusions to them as “paradise”. The garden or paradise, traditional site of a state of innocence and harmony with self, others and environment, is one of the principal tropes in which the redemptive project of a reconciliation of nature and culture has found expression. Just as the Garden of Eden in the Old Testament is the scene of human life before sin and the fall from grace, its New Testament equivalent, the Garden of Gethsemane, is the site of redemption through Christ’s sacrifice. The story of expulsion from Eden encapsulates the severing of the union with Mother Earth which, according to Freud, lies behind all erotic longing, and loss of the animal-like state of preconsciousness before individuation. As Hartwig Stein has shown, there is a long history of allotment holders seeing their activities as devoted to regaining paradise. He cites Max Demuth’s vernacular poem ‘Vom Garten Eden zum Dauergarten’: Wohlbekannt ist einem jeden, daß dereinst im Garten Eden Adam lebte; erst allein, doch weil’s besser ist zu zwei’n hat ihm Gott für’s spät’re Leben

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Eva noch dazu gegeben. Aus der Rippe ihm entnommen, ist sie auf die Welt gekommen, und so war denn, dies ist klar, hier das erste Schreberpaar. (Stein 2000: 23) More sophisticated allusions to paradise are to be found in the writings of the proponents of the Garden City idea and the colonies founded at the turn of the twentieth century. Bruno Wilhelmy for instance, originator of the vegetarian Obstbaumkolonie Eden in 1893, explained its biblical name as follows: “Eden” ist der verheißungsvolle Name unseres Unternehmens, also ein Eden, ein Paradies wollen wir uns schaffen? Allerdings, nur nicht von heut auf morgen. Auch müssen alle, welche noch an die Möglichkeit eines Paradieses auf dieser Erde glauben, tatkräftig mithelfen. Entwickeln wir unser Programm, um Mitarbeiter zu werben. Im Paradies herrscht Friede: lassen wir zunächst den Tiermord. Das Paradies ist ein Garten: In einen Garten wollen wir unseren Acker verwandeln, in einen Garten, der alle Sinne entzückt. (quoted from Linse 1983: 41. Emphasis in original) Eberhard Pfister’s family mill is described as a “foundering paradise” (Raabe 1980: 123) surrounded by “forfeited trees of paradise” (p. 75, in reality chestnut trees, which are felled to make way for the new factory), and its new owners joke that they are driving out Eberhard and Jenny with fiery swords like the guardian angels in the Book of Genesis (p. 143). Ulrich Plenzdorf has his Edgar Wibeau die (on Christmas Eve!), “in a Laube in the Colony Paradise II in the District of Lichtenberg” (1973: 5). Gurk and Seuren engage with this trope in different ways. In Laubenkolonie Schwanensee, the allotment is for instance described as the site of a way of life which gives the individual “immortality, providing both leisure and an Earthly garden” (p. 121). Graumann is referred to, albeit ironically, as a “hermit” and an “allotment saint” (pp. 129, 133). Accepted by the dumb animals, he finds serenity in union with nature: “Only in the Laube do I have the seclusion and security to be in clouds, winds, flowers and the sun” (p. 75). References to paradise form a leitmotif throughout Die Krötenküsser, though in many instances they are mere clichés. Visitors to the ecology park exclaim: “A paradise! Right in the middle of the city!”; “It’s quite a little paradise out here” (pp. 120,

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187f.). Seuren gives a twist to the term when Staudinger transforms the area into a private enclosure by planting a hedge of thorns around it. The exclusion of the public is likened to expulsion from the garden of Eden: “It’s to go back to how it was, said Staudinger, a paradise. And then, the people asked, will we be allowed to go back into this paradise again?” (p. 42). Later, we are reminded of the artificiality of the so-called paradise, created by digging out ponds with bulldozers, building toad habitats out of limestone boulders, spreading lorryloads of chippings to prevent grass from smothering the wild flowers, and wholesale removal of unwanted vegetation: “Die Kolonne arbeitete eine Woche lang, dann stand ich mit den beiden verdreckten Mädchen auf einem Hügel, und wir sahen uns die Erschaffung der Welt an – wüst und leer lag vor uns das geschotterte Paradies” (p. 63). The narrator’s dream of an “asphalt savannah” which recurs throughout the novel parallels the ‘paradise’ topos. The motif first appears when we are told of the “longing for a savannah” (p. 7) aroused by the tales of foreign travel told by a wildlife photographer who lives in the area. It reappears when the “strange, wild scent” of a tree transports the narrator on an imaginary safari: Ab und zu, wenn ich alles um mich herum vergessen will, schnüffele ich an diesem Baum, schließe die Augen und bin dann weit weg, als sei ich gestorben und in der Savanne ein Baum geworden, an dem Tiere ihre Haut reiben. Ein Leopard hängt eine Gazelle in die Äste, ich kann die Fliegen hören, die über dem Kadaver summen, wenn die Katze satt im Schatten des Baumes liegt. (p. 66) A spectacular sunset and several bottles of beer trigger another vision: “The large pond resembles a waterhole in the savannah, its clay banks trampled by thirsty herds, and at any moment a lion could sink its claws into a straying zebra” (p. 240). “It was like a dream, herds of animals gathered cautiously around the waterhole, fearful of carnivores in the long grass. I was surrounded by a smell of blood and dung” (p. 243). Does Seuren intend the reader to take this “bit of savannah in the middle of the asphalt” for more than “a fleeting and ridiculous dream of a completely different life” (p. 243)? The images are clichés derived from TV nature programmes and betray a dubious fascination with predatory violence. The author’s distaste is unmistakable in certain passages, for instance where he describes men who play at regressing to an animal-like state preceding human consciousness of self: “[Sie] spielen noch einmal das Vordringen in die Natur nach, Überlebenstraining, essen Würmer,

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schlafen in Betten aus Laub und waschen sich frühmorgens am Fluß, erschauern wehmütig, wenn sie spüren, was Dr. Benn feststellte: ‘Das Ich ist eine späte Stimmung der Natur’ ” (p. 279). It does not seem, however, as if Seuren is quite closing the door on the vision of a simple life in urban surroundings. The narrator’s activities are not invalidated by either the complexity of his own motivation or the naïve expectations of others. The dream of an authentic experience of nature, at least one passage suggests, can still enrich our (sub)urban lives, so long as we remain aware of the artificiality of our surroundings: Stadteinwärts ragen die Steilwände der Hypobank in den Himmel, daneben das Arabella Hotel, auf beiden Gipfeln hinterläßt die untergehende Sonne gelegentlich eine Art Alpenglühen. Ab und zu holt sich der Sperber eine der verwilderten Tauben, die unter dem durchlöcherten Dach des Holzschuppens nisten. Dann ist Strategie in der Luft: Er greift im Tiefflug an, treibt den Schwarm vom abgemähten Kornfeld, fliegt unten durch, zieht eine Schleife über dem verwirrten Schwarm und stößt mit verdoppeltem Angriffstempo zu. Die Beute scheint zu explodieren, Federn wirbeln, der Sperber landet gut abgefedert auf der Taube. Ich bin jedesmal hingerissen, wenn ich sehe, daß sich die alten Jadgregeln nicht weit vom Portal der Hypobank gehalten haben, als gäbe es das Stahlgebirge des Kapitals überhaupt nicht. (p. 22) Katrin Hillgruber interprets this passage as an example of the narrator’s self-deception: “A country boy is retaining his sense of the original in the big city. He is constructing an anachronistic reserve, a preservation zone for utopians.” He has extricated himself from the miasma of the affluent society, she argues, only to acquiesce in the limitation of his freedom within an idyllic enclosure (Hillgruber 2000). This understanding of the book and the passage ignores the tension between human ideals (including the longing for nature) and their corruption in social practice which lies at the heart of Seuren’s writing. His narrator’s pleasure at nature returning to the city may be dubiously motivated by lust for the kill. But is it too far-fetched to interpret the “alpenglow” behind Munich’s highrise buildings as exemplifying the symbiosis of natural beauty with constructed environment which we need to cultivate today? The author’s approval rings through his narrator’s captivation at the sight of the age-old ritual he describes with such eloquence. Admittedly, Seuren does not make it easy for us to accept this interpretation. His book ends with the narrator’s longing to regress to

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animality and divest himself of the “smiling endurance” of civilised society – aspirations cynically reduced to sex with Lena, returning the narrator to a problematic relationship (p. 311). And Die Krötenküsser is certainly a scathing commentary on our sentimental relationship with the natural environment. The narrator sneers at the pathetically generous donations of rich survivors of heart attacks and ridicules as “ecokitsch” the importation of a lorryload of Alpine quarzite by the Secretary General of the Bund Naturschutz to construct a “fairy mound” (p. 298). Yet for all the inauthenticity of their articulation, the narrator’s and the public’s dreams possess a utopian dimension. Seuren’s standpoint is less one of cynicism than of profound scepticism and regret at the seemingly inescapable corruption of such feelings in our media-saturated society. Gurk’s and Seuren’s books are fictional scenarios testing the viability of forms of protest against the society of their time rooted in the dream of return to a more natural way of life. These involve appreciation of natural beauty, a sparing use of natural resources and solidarity with one’s fellow men and women. Gurk’s protagonist’s inwardness and ascetic qualities are at odds with the emancipatory self-realisation and grass-roots participation which was to prove essential to the success of green politics in 1970s Germany and he concludes pessimistically that the simple life is not merely likely to be painful, but also doomed to failure. Seuren is no less sceptical about the possibility of regaining nature and living a ‘natural’ life today. His narrative reveals the project to save endangered species and conserve a pocket of nature in the suburbs of Munich as a deeply problematic undertaking. Undermined by the consumerism and egoism of our age, good intentions become empty, symbolic and merely compensatory acts. Nevertheless, Graumann’s way of life challenges his visitors and the book’s readers to rethink comfortable assumptions. Also discernible in Die Krötenküsser is a determination to prevent us from being completely cut off from a nature in which the meaning of our lives seems to continue to reside. The heterotopian green urban spaces in Gurk’s and Seuren’s books are responses to a longstanding and deep-rooted nature quest for a zone of purity and sanctity, offering psychic regeneration to the individual. This remains as powerful as ever today. Gurk and Seuren acknowledge our thwarted quest for wilderness and the need for nature as numinous other of which David Nicholson-Lord has written in The Greening of the Cities (1987). Nature, as ‘reality’, truth, value and sacred space for an animate universe incorporating myth, marvel and mystery, is essential to our psychological health. But it can no longer be located

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in distant countries: we need to reintegrate the wild in our own cities. Previous attempts to implant elements of wildness in cities, such as Victorian and early twentieth-century parks, failed in Nicholson-Lord’s eyes, because, under the physical and cultural pressures, they became bureaucratised, regulated and standardised. Ornamental, tamed and tidied, they ended up only fit for passive spectatorship and not for active use. They lost their integrity as importations of the country into the city and became adjuncts of the planned and constructed environment, no longer facilitating wonder, veneration or a sense of kinship with plants and animals. The inexorable growth of cities in the twentieth century has intensified the old distortions whereby city and countryside became respective emblems of the man-made and the natural, by destroying wilderness: it is up to human skills in the working of land to recreate it (pp. 54f.). By greening our cities, according to Nicholson-Lord, we can not only begin to regain a lost relationship of interdependency, partnership and companionship with animals and plants but also to reintegrate in our lives two increasingly divergent traditions: one the one hand, the rationalist and technological, and on the other, the imaginative and the primitive – the source of creativity and psychic energy. “It is of immense significance”, Nicholson-Lord writes, that in the greening of the cities people have been able to rediscover the miraculous and marvellous among the common, the ordinary and the near-at-hand. If a garden is a game reserve and a city park a forest, distant latitudes lose their allure. [ … ] The urge to escape remains. But in showing that we can reconcile and transcend it, that we can “escape inwards”, bring wilderness back into our homes and our minds and our settlements and thus make it something more than wilderness, we have planted a small seed of hope for the future. (p. 230) The conception of nature as a cultural product hinted at here is central to the final chapter of this book.

IV Conclusion

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7 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 twentiethcentury German authors which exemplify five principal conceptions of nature, between which Hartmut Böhme has distinguished: nature as cosmos, and as a hermeneutic, technological, ecological and cultural project. The chapter ends with a closer look at Christine Brückner’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.

7.1 Conceptions of nature In the past 30 years, the historical development of conceptions of nature and environment in the Western world has been a subject of interest to historians and anthropologists (for the former see Zimmermann 1982, Sieferle 1984, Worster 1994, Soper 1995 – Margaret Meade, Claude LéviStrauss, Norbert Elias and Marshall Sahlins are among the principal anthropologists who have examined social conceptions of nature) and has attracted the attention of cultural geographers as well as political scientists and ecological theorists (see Cosgrove and Daniels 1988, Evernden 1992, Dobson 2000). The American cultural geographer William Mills has distinguished between three broad historical phases in 255

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the development of the idea of nature in the Western world (Mills 1982). Each of these is, he argues, characterised by a dominant metaphor for nature. In the Middle Ages, nature was commonly described as a book. In the Renaissance, it was believed to be organised in the manner of the human body. In the Modern Age, it has most commonly been regarded as a machine. The book, the human macrocosm and the machine are not, of course, images exclusive to their respective periods. They have, however, served as central metaphors constituting the characteristic vision of their time. (The role played by metaphor in the perception and comprehension of our environment, bringing selected aspects of material reality to the fore and delineating, however vaguely, the boundaries of phenomena, has been a central concern for environmental philosophers and linguists. See Rorty 1979, Harré et al. 1999, Lakoff and Johnson 1999.) The choice of one metaphor rather than another is, Mills writes, indicative of the needs and aspirations of that society. The transition from one to another is associated with a reorientation of attitudes and reflects a fundamental change in the way we regard our position in relationship with nature. The machine image thus suggests human ability to control the world and contrasts with intelligibility in the Middle Ages and integration in the Renaissance. It has, in turn, encouraged us to see nature as a resource at our free disposal. But the gain in our control over the environment is achieved at a cost; nature is no longer resonant with meaning to us as in the Middle Ages, and no longer can we feel at one with it in the Renaissance manner. The logic of the machine metaphor is now perhaps unravelling, as its negative implications become apparent in the form of pollution and resource depletion, leaving behind feelings of guilt and anxiety. Other metaphors, Mills implies, may come in time to appear more attractive. Neil Evernden, Professor of Environmental Studies in Ontario, adopts a similar threefold classification of Medieval, Renaissance and modern Empiricist in Part II of his book The Social Creation of Nature (1992). His starting point was the conviction that if we are to understand why, – despite the increase in environmental awareness and the will to save the Earth, so little has changed in the 1970s and 1980s, – we must be aware of the sense of nature we have inherited, its ambiguities and appropriations, and grasp the hidden assumptions that today constrain our deliberations (p. xi). Today, we can easily assume that we are making a rational decision to align ourselves with one side or the other in the environmental debate. But we may simply be acting out roles created for us by playwrights or wordsmiths of old; our only apparent options are

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the ones they set forth, and these effectively block the way to further exploration (p. 22). To the medieval mind, nature was God’s handiwork, and the aim of discerning its messages was not control, or even so much prediction, as comprehension of the significance of things and the meaning of human life in relation with them. It was redolent with human analogy and sensitive to man’s behaviour. Evernden is particularly concerned with the dualism which began in the Renaissance, the “watershed to modernity”, when nature became the “not-human”. By the seventeenth century, subjectivity, will, valuation and meaning were all lodged exclusively in the domain of humanity. Knowing nature was no longer an intuition of shared properties and meanings beyond appearances but a deduction of systemic rules from a mathematical blueprint of the natural world. Locked into the fiction of dualism, we have, he argues, become practically incapable of encountering the ‘other’ in nature. Hartmut Böhme, Professor of Cultural Theory and History of Mentality at the Humboldt University, Berlin, has refined such threefold distinctions of phases in the historical development of the idea of nature in the Western world. Writing in the introduction to German cultural studies, Orientierung Kulturwissenschaft. Was sie kann, was sie will, Böhme proposes the “cultural history of nature” as one of six main areas of research and study in the field (Böhme et al. 2000: 118–31). He sketches a conceptual framework for a history of our understanding of nature which begins before Mills’s and Evernden’s with the ancient Greeks and extends beyond them into the twenty-first century. Our knowledge of nature, Böhme notes at the outset, is determined in two ways: by what we are able to do with it on the one hand, and by what we wish to do with it on the other. Clearly, our technological expertise determines how we perceive and experience nature. Yet at the same time it is equally true that our treatment of nature depends on how we conceptualise it and feel it to be. Social historians tend to adopt the first of these standpoints, while historians of mentality and ideas, literary historians and theorists of aesthetics regard forms of perception and thought as models determining our practical actions. It is the latter, the ‘cultural apriori’ of nature, with which Böhme is concerned. European perceptual and interpretative perspectives on nature have been determined, he argues, by five cultural paradigms. In turn, it has been understood as a cosmos or unified, ordered structure (in the Ancient World), as a hermeneutic project (in the Middle Ages), a technological project (since the Renaissance and especially since the Enlightenment) and an ecological project (beginning in the nineteenth century). Today

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we need to conceive of it as a cultural project: 1. In the nature philosophy of the ancients (the theory of the elements developed above all by Empedocles, Plato and Aristotle), nature was regarded as a cosmos. It was contemplated but not worked on. 2. In the Middle Ages (beginning with St Augustine’s theory of the dual revelation of the divine in the Bible and the book of nature), nature was regarded as a hermeneutic project. It was read but not brought under our control. 3. In the Early Modern period (since Galileo, Francis Bacon and Descartes), it became a technological project. Nature was instrumentally controlled and constructed, but not understood. 4. In the period of Late Modernity, nature emerged as an ecological project. The damage inflicted on it has been repaired or compensated for selectively, but it has not been intentionally shaped. 5. In the contemporary world, nature has become a cultural project. It is our responsibility to form it, but not to seek to exercise absolute control over it. (Böhme et al. 2000: 123) There are aspects of this outline one could take issue with. The difference between the first phase and the others, each of which conceives of nature as a project, detracts from the neatness of an otherwise elegant scheme foregrounding planned human interaction with nature. (In an earlier version (Böhme 2000), Böhme did not actually distinguish between the first two phases.) There is also the disappearance of the Renaissance as a phase in its own right; the Italian Humanists’ revival of the Classical philosophers’ cosmic conception of nature is presented here as insignificant in comparison with their geometrical world view and the beginnings of experimental science. Also new and initially puzzling is the addition of not merely one but two phases since the technological: the first, ecological, and the second, cultural. The distinction between the two hinges on Böhme’s idiosyncratic use of the term ‘ecological’. He ignores the threefold distinction commonly made by historians, sociologists and political scientists between ‘conservationism’ (a movement dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, responding to urbanisation and industrialisation by focusing on the preservation of landscapes, for instance as nature reserves or national parks), ‘environmentalism’ (a phenomenon of the past 35 years, seeking to limit and compensate for the degradation of the wider natural environment resulting from the burning of fossil fuels, the use of pesticides and other chemicals, and the expansion of the nuclear industry), and

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‘ecologism’ (which calls for more radical changes in our lifestyle in view of global warming, resource consumption, pollution and population growth). In Böhme’s parlance, the ecological project tolerates the uninhibited social utilisation of most of nature while saving memorial enclaves of the past. He concedes that it goes beyond mere preservation to rehabilitation, but argues they share a museum-like approach (p. 128). “Bewahrungsökologie”, as he calls it, is also oriented towards a harmonious model of nature, and excludes its constantly changing, violent and life-threatening dimensions. Defined in such terms, nature as an ecological project can only fail to afford a practicable solution to contemporary problems. Böhme’s final paradigm, which seeks to meet this need, is only tentatively outlined. We may interpret it as follows. Since nature as a given, untouched by human hand, no longer exists after the ‘end of nature’ (Bill McKibben),1 we must acknowledge our responsibility to use it wisely and shape it aesthetically. Böhme implies this is not only a forward-looking stance but also an essentially anthropocentric one, which should replace the (in his perception) backward-looking, biocentric approach of the ‘ecological project’. The five paradigms of nature outlined above provide a serviceable heuristic basis for the classification, contextualisation and ecocritical evaluation of works of German literature. Böhme’s foregrounding of the conceptualising of nature as a project, as matter which human beings live in and interact with, also gives a helpful focus by directing our attention to literary works depicting projects with a utopian dimension. Much of Hartmut Böhme’s collection of essays Natur und Subjekt (1988) and the history of the four elements Feuer, Wasser, Erde, Luft coauthored with his brother Gernot (1996) is concerned with premodern conceptions of nature. Though these were swept aside in the eighteenth century, traces of them have survived in art, literature and aesthetics. The recuperation of these superseded conceptions of nature, expressed in images, narratives and poems as well as myths and philosophies, can, he suggests, offer us alternatives today.2 While we must indeed turn to the past for the first conceptual formulation of such approaches, they can also be found reflected in works of twentieth-century literature. We will do well, however, to remember that the relationship between literature and other public discourses on nature is a multi-dimensional one involving critical reflection and opposition to contemporary theories, playful experimentation and adaptation more often than their straightforward transmission. The chronological progression in respect of Western conceptions of nature which Böhme, Mills and Evernden

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outline is therefore only indirectly reflected in works written over the past 200 years. Given the complexity which characterises literary writing, individual works are also likely to resist prima facie assignment to one category rather than another.

7.2 Nature as cosmos and as a hermeneutic project The medieval understanding of nature as a hermeneutic project did not disappear overnight in the Renaissance. Galileo’s famous dictum in Il saggiatore (1623) that the language of nature was one of mathematical symbols was a decisive modification of the topos of the ‘book of nature’, marking a shift away from intuition and interpretation towards experimental science and technological invention. However, the older conception lived on in painting, literature and philosophy up to Goethe and Novalis, and experienced a revival in Symbolist poetry at the end of the nineteenth century (see Rothacker 1979, Blumenberg 1981, Böhme 1988). The idea of nature as ordered and unified cosmos in Plato and Aristotle was similarly revisited in the Renaissance in the conceptions of macrocosm and microcosm, implying manifold correspondences between the different spheres of reality. These Neoplatonist ideas exercised a powerful fascination over the Romantics, and in turn late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Neoromantics. The Monist movement, which influenced many German Neoromantics, reflected the same deep-seated desire for unity and meaning in the universe. The cosmic and the hermeneutic approaches to nature are both illustrated by the poems of Oskar Loerke. As we have seen in Chapter 4 earlier, Loerke’s early poems express belief in an underlying rhythmic unity of all being and position humans midway between simpler vegetable and animal life forms and larger, more slowly evolving spheres such as mountains and the heavenly bodies. ‘Pansmusik’, which is probably Loerke’s best-known poem, and certainly one of his more subtle and complex, was inspired by the West Prussian landscape and music played by Polish loggers, who the poet saw rafting down the river Vistula at sunset. It was written after a visit to Graudenz, his childhood home, in the spring of 1912, as Reinhard Tgahrt has established in an extended commentary which elucidates the themes and structure of the poem, while reconstructing its creation from the extant drafts (Tgahrt 1989: 269f.). Ein Floß schwimmt aus dem fernen Himmelsrande, Drauf tönt es dünn und blaß Wie eine alte süße Sarabande. Das Auge wird mir naß.

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Es ist, wie wenn den weiten Horizonten Die Seele übergeht [ … ] Heut fährt der Gott der Welt auf einem Floße, Er sitzt auf Schilf und Rohr, Und spielt die sanfte, abendliche, große, Und spielt die Welt sich vor. [ … ] Er baut die Ebenen und ihre Städte Mit weichen Mundes Ton Und alles Werden bis in dieses späte Verspieltsein und Verlohn [ … ] So fährt sein Licht und ist bald bei den größern, Orion, Schwan und Bär: Sie alle scheinen Flöße schon mit Flößern Der Welt ins leere Meer. Bald wird die Grundharmonika verhallen, Die Seele schläft mir ein, Bald wird der Wind aus seiner Höhe fallen, Die Tiefe nicht mehr sein. (Loerke 1983: 99f.) The scene is laden with emotion: it is an epiphanic experience in which the poetic subject gains intuitive recognition of his own participation in the great soul of the universe, which is personified by the god Pan. Despite the motifs associated with Pan as the satyr-like figure, half man and half goat, who watched over the shepherds in Arcadia, and who symbolised male lust and variously aroused inspiration, sexual feelings and panic with his pipe music, Pan is here above all the god of all nature, originator of the universe (see Tgahrt 1989: 283f., also Adami 2000: 9–18). His music creates the world by giving order to chaos and meaning to meaningless matter. It is the dance of creation, the divine rhythm from which not only the natural world but also all human works spring. The neologism ‘Grundharmonika’ refers simultaneously to a class of musical instruments and the Ancients’ harmony of the spheres – the song of the Earth. Towards the end of the poem, this timeless cosmic vision acquires a modulation, which is characteristic of the turn of the twentieth century. An elegiac note is introduced by the idea of natural decline and death expressed in the phrase “Verspieltsein und Verlohn”, the futility of all human endeavour, which is evoked by the boatsman’s plaintive tune (the “arme Weise” is a sarabande, i.e. a stately dance in the minor key, combining emotionality with rigorous structural form),

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and the image of the river and those travelling on it ending in the “empty sea” of cosmic unity. These all suggest the modern individual’s suffering from the burden of civilisation and human consciousness. As Tgahrt has noted, ‘Pansmusik’ constitutes a melancholy response to the optimistic panentheism of Goethe’s ‘Weltseele’. On the one hand, it is a poem expressing sorrow at the ‘death of God’, alluding to Loerke’s loss of his childhood faith. On the other, it was conceived as a dance of death and a homage to the omnipresence of mortality in the universe. However, it still shows a determination to repeat, parallel and intensify through articulation in human language the fleetingly heard music of the world, making it ring out, even if in a funeral music. The poet’s task is to transform the world, to transcend fear and self-commiseration by revealing its melody (see Tgahrt 1989: 297f., 304f., 332f., 337f.). The peace which ‘Pansmusik’ promises, relieving individuals of their anguish by situating their existence and death in an ordered whole, symbolised by the constellations in the night sky, which become visible as the daylight fades, struck a chord in Loerke’s contemporaries. It acknowledged their unease at the industrial and technological transformation of society and held out the prospect of a harmony and stability integrating humankind into the wider natural world. The poems Loerke wrote in the 1920s are typically closer to the hermeneutic approach outlined by Böhme. The bare branches of trees in winter are described as a calligraphic script, and the rustling of the wind in the leaves as a form of speech. In ‘Die Vogelstraßen’, Loerke interprets the paths of migratory birds and their flight formations as timeless ‘magical figures’ and traces of the transcendent order he alludes to in his essays as “physical–metaphysical symbol”: Du hast die magische Figur befragt [ … ] Und Bild um Bild erbangt nach einem Sinn Ob Worten, die wir sonst im Sinne hatten. (pp. 255f.) In ‘Keilschriftzylinder’ the cuneiform writing on ancient clay cylinders forms similar figures, which give access to a higher reality and extend into the greater formations of the natural world: Auf braunen Tonzylindern winden sich die Zeilen Weiser Schrift, im Feuer erprobt, im Ofen gebacken; In Spiralen ein Gedränge von Keilen, Die wie Schnäbel nach dem Weltsinn hacken. (p. 301)

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Loerke’s conception of poetry as a revelation of the hidden meaning of nature, a translation of the hieroglyphic self-expression of things into corresponding poetic symbols, was shared by Wilhelm Lehmann (see especially ‘Die Signatur’, in Lehmann 1982, I: 108), and the influence of their Magic Realism can be traced in twentieth-century nature poetry from Eich, Bobrowski and Huchel to Wulf Kirsten and Sarah Kirsch. While continuing to celebrate the intuitive recognition of meaning in ‘reading’ nature, these younger poets have accentuated the sense of its inherent strangeness, increasing illegibility and erosion by human influence (including environmental damage). In seeking to read the language of nature, they nevertheless imply human affinity with it and the need to treat the environment as more than a mere material resource.

7.3 Nature as a technological project The conception of nature as a technological project presupposes the natural environment is morally insignificant matter, “Bestand”, or “standing reserve” (Heidegger), to be mastered by technologically proficient humans. This resource-management relationship with nature is legitimated by confidence in human rationality. Since the Romantic period, we have come to expect literature to serve as the advocate of nature in the face of the triumph of its instrumental exploitation by science and technology and to champion values opposing modern rationalism and materialism. Literary nature in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century is typically a realm of reassuring order and permanence, a counter-sphere to the hated bourgeois civilisation, in which the individual can escape social isolation and alienation. Yet nineteenth-century literary commentaries on industrialisation and the railway were, as we have seen in Chapter 2, divided between rejection, acclamation and anxious scepticism. In the atmosphere of technological euphoria which prevailed towards the end of the century, popular authors such as Max Maria von Weber, Kurd Laßwitz and Max Eyth embraced the engineering achievements of the age. Bernhard Kellermann’s novel Der Tunnel, published on the eve of the First World War, is perhaps the bestknown German example of the late nineteenth-century wave of utopian science fiction which is principally associated internationally with the names Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Kellermann celebrates the engineer as an upright, brave, sober and essentially benevolent man, morally superior to the idle rich. However, he possesses a brutal streak, driving on batallions of workers in a fanatic battle against nature and subordinating the emotions to a stern work ethos (see Segeberg 1987b: 416–21).

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In the 1920s and 1930s nature again emerges as a technological project. Thomas Rohkrämer, who has identified the attempt to solve the problems of modernity through technology as characteristic of the period 1925–1940 in Germany, discusses a range of technocratic standpoints adopted by members of the Conservative Revolution. In what is perhaps the best-known work, Ernst Jünger’s Der Arbeiter (1932), man is for instance fused with technology in a heroic construction (Rohkrämer 1999: 301–38). Carl Wege also discusses the clash between the proponents of extreme pessimism and technological euphoria (which was associated with “Americanism”) in the1920s, noting that assimilation and rejection of modernity were often interwoven and that technophilia was not limited to the political right. Among its enthusiasts were Helmuth Plessner, Walter Ruttmann, Arnolt Bronnen and Joseph Roth, as well as Jünger (Wege 2000: 42–71). Optimistic faith in the ability of humans to shape their own destiny through technology and emancipatory political action speaks from Brecht’s ‘Kleines Organon für das Theater’. “Welches ist die produktive Haltung gegenüber der Natur und gegenüber der Gesellschaft, welche wir Kinder eines wissenschaftlichen Zeitalters in unserm Theater vergnüglich einnehmen wollen?”, he asks, and answers: “Die Haltung ist eine kritische. Gegenüber einem Fluß besteht sie in der Regulierung des Flusses, gegenüber einem Obstbaum in der Okulierung des Obstbaums, gegenüber der Fortbewegung in der Konstruktion der Fahr- und Flugzeuge, gegenüber der Gesellschaft in der Umwälzung der Gesellschaft” (Werke XXIII (Schriften 3): 65ff.). ‘Der Flug der Lindberghs’, a radio play broadcast in 1929, celebrates the first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic. Brecht was impressed by both Charles Lindbergh’s personal courage and the technological achievement: Es ist eine Schlacht gegen das Primitive Und eine Anstrengung zur Verbesserung des Planeten Gleich der dialektischen Ökonomie Welche die Welt verändern wird von Grund auf. Jetzt nämlich Laßt uns bekämpfen die Natur Bis wir selber natürlich geworden sind. Wir und unsere Technik sind noch nicht natürlich Wir und unsere Technik Sind primitiv. Technological progress is equated with the emancipation of the rational subject,that is, with the subjugation of nature, the struggle for a new

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socialist order and the overthrowing of religious belief. Economic development will dispel the semblance of a god: Baut Straßen durch das Gebirge, dann verschwindet er. Flüsse vertreiben ihn aus der Wüste. Das Licht Zeigt Leere und Verscheucht ihn sofort. Darum beteiligt euch An der Bekämpfung des Primitiven An der Liquidierung des Jenseits und Der Verscheuchung jedweden Gottes, wo Immer er auftaucht. (Werke III (Stücke 3): 16f.) In the years after 1945, the quest for technological mastery over nature was generally regarded with scepticism in West German, Austrian and Swiss literature, and the machine was frequently represented as a threat to human freedom. However, the GDR production novels and plays of Eduard Claudius, Erik Neutsch and Heiner Müller again celebrated technological endeavour. The Faust figure provided one focus for literary representations of nature as a technological construct. Peter Matussek has written of the appropriation of Faust as founder and coloniser in Imperial Germany after 1871: “Faust as a founder: not exactly of railway companies with the backing of the state, or of industrial concerns listed on the stock market, but nonetheless as initiator of and ruler over a colony which renders fertile land it has reclaimed from the sea, taking possession of it for human cultivation and use” (1992: 325). This implied a philosophy of technological exploitation, as indeed did the ‘Faustian’ slogan of the National Socialists, who saw in the end of the play a legitimation of aggressive self-defence and mobilisation. The official reading in the GDR of Faust’s last monologue (11559–11580), in which Faust plans to drain the marshes and surround the reclaimed land with dykes, of course associated them with new political content, but continued to be affirmative and optimistic up to the 1970s. Volker Braun’s early poem ‘Von Gagarin’s Flug’ adapted, as we have noted in Chapter 2, the Faustian vision of humanity casting off the fetters of superstition and material want: In die nähern Bezirke des Alls: hin geht er Aus diesen Bücherhaufen, gut für Archäologen Aus den zähen Sturzäckern, den Mörtelmulden Aus der schwierigen Schalung der Schlote

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Aus Böhlens und Bitterfelds schwärzlicher Luft, aus Dem Abraum der Kohle und der Gedanken, aus Den Beichtstühlen Gottes und der Brigaden, losgeschnallt Vom Kruzifix der Schwäche, aus der Helme Geringem Horizont, aus Einsamkeiten, ausgebrochen Aus dem Kleinmut der Krämer, aus der Schußweite des Golds Aus der Grenze des Möglichen. (Texte in zeitlicher Folge I: 71f.) Although traces of the human cost and the potentially dangerous consequences are present in the poem, Braun continued to express a vitalist conception of human nature throughout the 1960s and to celebrate the often violent transformation of the natural environment. ‘Prometheus’ adapted Goethe’s poem of the same title to a socialist context of collective self-assertion and self-realisation: Ich fliege am Himmel Nicht nur in Gedanken: Was uns Neues gelingt, sprengt Fast die Adern vor Schmerz, und dröhnt In den Ohren. Noch die Luft Müssen wir uns erzeugen Im leeren Raum. [ … ] Auf diese Zeit nicht, auf nichts Vertrauend, nicht Mit freudig geschlossenen Augen; Bedroht, aber nicht gedrillt Sieht mich der Tag Der widerstrahlt Wenn wir unser Feuer tragen In den Himmel. (II: 94f.) Braun’s poem ‘Durchgearbeitete Landschaft’ (1971), which stands at the centre of a chain of thematically linked plays, poems and essays beginning in the late 1950s, can be described as the locus classicus of heroic self-assertion over nature in post-war German literature. Dieter Schlenstedt writes: “Das Ja zu der technischen Landschaft kam aus dem Erleben der eigenen Arbeit mit sichtbaren Ergebnissen, dem Erleben zugleich vom Anfang eines Weges, der Entfremdung aufheben könnte: Theorie geht in die Beschreibung ein. Begrüßt wird, wie das Land zu einem anderen umgebildet, ummontiert, umgewälzt wird” (Schlenstedt

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1993: 82). However, the poet’s erotically charged enthusiasm for the transformation of the landscape, which echoed the revolutionary confidence of Mayakovsky’s Russian poetry, is overlaid by other concerns. The brutality of the exploitation of the landscape involved in open-cast mining is provocatively foregrounded: Hier sind wir durchgegangen Mit unseren Werkzeugen Hier stellten wir etwas Hartes an Mit der ruhig rauchenden Heide Hier lagen die Bäume verendet, mit nackten Wurzeln (Texte in zeitlicher Folge IV: 88) The harshness of these lines is probably motivated less by regret at the destruction of the environment than by disillusionment with the ability of the repetitive, one-sided, uncreative work involved to engender the promised self-realisation of the individual or the masses. The conception of nature as a technological project continued to serve Braun as a key metaphor for socialism and as a vehicle for the exploration of his increasing disillusionment with the State up to the prose poem Bodenloser Satz (1990) and beyond.

7.4 Nature as an ecological project Literary depictions of pollution accompanying industrialisation and critiques of the exploitation of the natural environment have been common since the 1970s – Monika Maron’s Flugasche (1981) and Günter Grass’s Die Rättin (1986) are perhaps the best-known German examples – but have of course precursors reaching back to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Die Bergwerke zu Falun (1819), Immermann’s Die Epigonen (1836) and Raabe’s Pfisters Mühle (1884). Narratives in which nature is envisaged as an ecological project (in Böhme’s sense of the word) are rarer; among the novels explicitly concerned with conservationist or environmentalist initiatives are Otto F. Walter’s Wie wird Beton zu Gras (1979), Uwe Wolff’s Papa Faust (1982), Peter Härtling’s Das Windrad (1983) and Franz-Josef Degenhardt’s Die Abholzung (1985). Carl Amery, Jurij Koch and Wulf Kirsten shall serve here as examples of writers adapting respectively the genres and forms of science fiction, Heimat narrative and poetic elegy, in order to explore the wider implications of an understanding of

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nature as a harmonious but damaged sphere needing repair, restitution and protection. The teenage novel Der Untergang der Stadt Passau (1975) is the most popular work of the prominent environmental campaigner, political activist, theorist and novelist Carl Amery. The story is set some decades in the future. A catastrophic epidemic has wiped out most of the human population, leaving behind small groups of survivors who happened to be immune. The peaceful lives of communities of nomadic hunter-gatherers and village-dwelling agriculturalists are endangered by an attempt to restore an urban, technological civilisation (in the city of Passau) and gain control of the region. Amery’s protagonists are village dwellers, who, keen to avoid the mistakes of twentieth-century civilisation, seek to establish a sustainable way of life. Amery sketches out the contours of a possible future society living in ecological stability, consisting of ‘cooperatives’ of semi-nomadic hunters and sporadic crop-raisers practising a form of grass-roots democracy. Their efforts to “reinstate natural conditions”, however, are almost terminated by those who seek to restart modern civilisation, and Amery hints that the “salt empire” (centred on Salzburg) which is founded in the final pages will repeat the errors of the past. Jurij Koch, who has been at the forefront of resistance to the evacuation and demolition of the Sorbian villages in his native Lausitz to make way for open-cast mining, confronts Ina, the central figure in his novella Der Kirschbaum (1984), with a choice between Mathias, the steady but dull neighbouring farmer to whom she is betrothed, and the alluring outsider Sieghart. When Sieghart, an engineer who has come to survey the area in preparation for the construction of a dam, flirts with Ina on the eve of her wedding, Mathias takes them both for a mad gallop in his traditional wedding carriage, which ends in the three of them crashing into a mysterious pond in the woods. Mathias is presumed dead, but his body is never found. Some time later, Ina marries Sieghart and follows him to Paris, where he works with an international organisation. Haunted by the ghost of Mathias and memories of her Sorbian Heimat, she returns home. Believing she is pursued by Mathias, she shoots him, only to find it is actually Sieghart she has killed. Koch’s story is an environmental reworking of motifs familiar from the literature of the Heimat movement, exploring the tension between the harmony of a traditional country way of life lived according to the rhythm of the seasons and the tempting glamour of technological control, foreign travel and consumption. The tragic ending of the narrative, which is rooted in Sorbian cultural tradition and makes striking use of elements of myth

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and folk tale, questions the possibility of reconciling tradition with progress. Wulf Kirsten’s poems have recorded the changing landscape (social and physical) of rural Saxony over the past five decades. In ‘Der Bleibaum’ (1975), the magic figures which Loerke and other earlier nature poets had found in nature reappear, but as scarcely legible signs hewn in weathered granite: Die kennworte im geriffelten granit mit verwitterungsfarben ausgestrichen. noch zu entziffern ist ein einziger satz, wie geschaffen, als zauberspruch in die wolle der schafe gemurmelt zu werden. (Kirsten 2004: 98) The ‘leaden tree’ in the title symbolises both a landscape darkened by pollution and political oppression (ironically juxtaposed with references to Enlightenment equality, Goethe’s nature poem ‘An den Mond’ and the Greek poetry of Sappho), and the poet’s articulation of it in the written word. Kirsten gives Romantic lament for what is passing a political edge and indicates the sombre form any modern extension of Eichendorff’s ‘magic spell’ (in ‘Wünschelrute’) must take. ‘Das Haus im Acker’ (1981) tells of an old farm house which has become an obstacle in the path of the heavy machinery used by the GDR agricultural collectives: das haus im acker, dorn im auge der planstrategen, großraumdenker, flurbereiniger, landschaftsausräumer, megalomanischer steppenfürsten, die von hundert-hektar-flächen, glatt wie rennpisten, träumen. Hedges have already been grubbed up, rights of way ploughed in, rivers diverted into culverts, whole valleys levelled and avenues of trees felled, and now the authorities are only waiting for the elderly couple living in the house to die before demolishing it. The Earth is becoming “our underling, made thoroughly shipshape”. The loss of history and local identity in this process of technological rationalisation is implicitly situated in an apocalyptic perspective through association with Philemon

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and Baucis (it is “inhabited by two old folk: Philemon und Baucis”), who, as we have seen in Chapter 2 earlier, were saved from the flood that drowned the rest of the country’s wicked inhabitants in Ovid’s tale, but fell victim to Faust’s ruthless ambition in Goethe’s retelling of their story at the end of Faust II. Devoured by the “shredder of progress”, the landscape of Kirsten’s childhood is fast becoming a “non-place” and no-man’s-land: alles versunken! verschlungen vom reißwolf des fortschritts, was einst mir gehört hat wie dem vogel die luft und dem fisch das wasser. alle fußpfade ins paradies nur im gedächtnis bewahrt. das reich der kindheit weglos geworden. die heimat verödet zum allerweltsbezirk und niemandsland. (pp. 186f.) Amery, Koch and Kirsten go beyond mere indictment of the destruction of nature. In addition to pleading for the preservation of specific threatened landscapes, they reflect on the attitudes and assumptions behind our treatment of the natural environment and begin to envisage alternatives. However, they do not actually see the shaping of nature as a human responsibility. In this sense, though it is difficult to draw a line between writers belonging to this category and the next, and between works exemplifying one or other of the conceptions of nature in question, they may serve as representatives of the standpoint described by Böhme as ‘nature as an ecological project’.

7.5 Nature as a cultural project The premodern understanding of nature associated with its conception as cosmos and hermeneutic project approximates to Deep Ecologists’ understanding of nature’s intrinsic value, and to the respiritualisation of the landscape by a part of the environmental movement in the1980s. Intrinsic value and respiritualisation created a counter-balance to the hegemony of anthropocentrism and instrumental reason but have not in themselves constituted a viable alternative. Hence the importance of the question whether there are writers who have succeeded in articulating a conception of nature as cultural project. Traces of a conception of nature as a human environment for whose prudent management and aesthetic shaping we must accept

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responsibility are present in the work of many of the authors already discussed. Brecht, Amery and Braun, for instance, stand in a philosophical tradition going back to Marx’s vision of a “resurrection of nature” (the term derives from Schelling) through “reconciliation” of nature and civilisation (Marx 1968: 536–8). Heidegger’s view of technology as something which cannot be done without, but which must avoid converting things (and humans) into mere standing-reserve, by ‘enframing’ them, has been discussed earlier in Chapter 4. Téchne, practised as a mode of ‘revealing’, as it is in poetry, is according to Heidegger one of the distinctively human ways of being-in-the-world. Glimpses of a reconciliation of humankind with nature are also to be found in Adorno’s otherwise more pessimistic thinking – for instance, in his conception of nature as something destined to comfort and warm humankind (“die Vorstellung von Natur als einem tröstlich, wärmend den Menschen Zubestimmtem”, Adorno 1967: 49)3 – and in Ernst Bloch’s conception of a technology “without violation” in Das Prinzip Hoffnung. ‘Communication’, ‘mediation’ and ‘alliance’ are among the terms Bloch uses in his efforts to formulate the necessary relationship with the natural environment, one of “technology as delivery and mediation of the creations slumbering in the womb of nature”. In his view, this can only go hand in hand with fundamental social change: Und erst wenn das Subjekt der Geschichte: der arbeitende Mensch, sich als Hersteller der Geschichte erfaßt, folglich das Schicksal in der Geschichte aufgehoben hat, könnte er auch dem Produktionsherd in der Naturwelt nähertreten. [ … ] Naturströmung als Freund, Technik als Entbindung und Vermittlung der im Schoß der Natur schlummernden Schöpfungen, das gehört zum Konkretesten an konkreter Utopie. Doch auch nur der Anfang zu dieser Konkretion setzt zwischenmenschliches Konkretwerden, das ist, soziale Revolution voraus; eher gibt es nicht einmal eine Treppe, geschweige eine Tür zur möglichen Naturallianz. (Bloch 1959: 813)4 Brecht and Braun are also to a greater or lesser extent participants in a literary tradition going back to Hölderlin and Schiller, in presenting landscape as inhabited ‘Kulturlandschaft’ or ‘culturescape’. Novalis also stands out as a proponent of the conception of nature as cultural project among the Romantic and Classical writers discussed by Kate Rigby under the heading ‘The Return of Nature as Art’ in chapter 3 Topographies of the Sacred. In Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (1802), the project into which the apprentices are being initiated is not one of war on nature but rather one in

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which nature is taken as an evolving community of life, which we can only understand by combining empirical examination with imagination and empathy. The knowledge gained from such scientific practice is to be directed towards the “total humanisation” of nature, an “unwilding” (see Rigby 2004: 107f.) which can be interpreted as an ecologically sensitive shaping of the natural environment. Brecht is probably the most important twentieth-century literary representative of the Marxist conception of a productive interaction between man and nature, which leads to the abolition of the individual’s alienation from nature, in a process of “naturalisation of humanity” and “humanisation of nature”. Jürgen Haupt writes in his discussion of Brecht in Natur und Lyrik (1982: 135–62) of the shifts and interplay between different conceptions of nature throughout Brecht’s writing. It is possible to trace an overall development from the sensuality of radicalised Neoromanticism in the early poetry, through aggressive bitterness and self-subjugation to nature’s indifference to man in the works of the twenties, to a predominance of feelings of empathy in the mature work. What distinguishes Brecht from most of his contemporaries is, however, the dual understanding of nature as both autonomous and a field of human activity which is implicit in much of his work. The Keunergeschichte ‘Herr Keuner und die Natur’, written around 1931, presents nature at once as a place of contemplative empathy with an organically grown subject independent of human control and as a sphere of human self-realisation: “Befragt über sein Verhältnis zur Natur, sagte Herr Keuner: Ich würde gern mitunter aus dem Haus tretend ein paar Bäume sehen. Besonders da sie durch ihr der Tages- und Jahreszeit entsprechendes Andersaussehen einen so besonderen Grad von Realität erreichen” (Werke XVIII (Prosa 3): 19f.). “It is necessary for us to be sparing in our use of nature”, he says in one breath, yet in the other he reminds us: “Whoever tarries in natural surroundings without working gets into a sickly state, and is overcome by something like a fever” (p. 20). As Jürgen Haupt notes: “Use value and the inability to be put to use of nature as a subject here stand in a dialectic relationship of legitimate subjective identity and equally legitimate functional deployment in society” (1982: 143). Brecht’s mature writing balances material against emotional value, and the functional against the aesthetic, finding in nature’s harmony a premonition of the “kindness” he presents as an ideal in human behaviour and as a requisite in the ideal society. My final example, Christine Brückner’s novel Die letzte Strophe (1989), shows that literary representation of nature as a cultural project does not

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have to subscribe to a socialist vision of utopian technology. Brückner, author of a string of successful popular novels and children’s books from the mid-1950s up to her death in 1996, is best known for her ‘Poenichen trilogy’, a saga of wartime displacement from Pomerania beginning with Jauche und Levkojen (1975). Die letzte Strophe is, like her other books, a middle-brow work, aiming to entertain, inform and to a certain extent educate readers, without making serious demands or challenging them unduly. The subject of the book is the quest for an environmentally oriented way of life by a semi-autobiographical protagonist. Hannah Pertes, a wealthy widow, founds a small community of single people of retirement age. She gathers around her a group of widowers and divorcees, who share her desire to live the rest of their lives healthily and environmentally soundly rather than spending their money on foreign holidays and consumer goods, and builds them apartments in the spacious park surrounding her home. The paradigm shift from nature as technological to cultural project is neatly realised through the localisation of the end of the “atomic age” in personal terms: Hannah’s husband was an atomic physicist who had taken a leading role in the “peaceful development of atomic energy” (p. 21). The project on which she embarks after his death coincides with the 50th anniversary of nuclear fission. Seeking to live as free of dependence on nuclear power as possible, she describes it as a “restitution” for her involvement in and benefit from the “atomic age”. The ‘Pertes project’ combines moral and environmental dimensions with personal, social and gender liberation. The atomic age is associated with self-exploitation through overwork on the part of Hannah’s husband, and stultifying restrictions on her own. His interpreter and personal assistant before their marriage, she spent years as his companion, cut off from her own family and prevented from pursuing her own interests. Hannah’s life reform project begins with instructing the gardener not to trim the hedges and weed the paths around the house (p. 31), and the decision to stop dying her hair and give up her diet. Her initially vague idea for a community housing project gains shape through a chance meeting with the investigative journalist and writer Bernd Britten. When Hannah explains her financial and personal position, he enthusiastically expounds a vision of a community of people living healthy lives with and for each other, in harmony with nature, enjoying life and accepting responsibility for the Earth (p. 37). He refers to this as “an unprecedented undertaking”, a phrase borrowed from the opening lines of Rousseau’s Confessions. It is, however, symptomatic of

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Brückner’s writing that she does not develop the link with Rousseau’s return to natural simplicity.5 In her letters to prospective participants, Hannah Pertes stresses, like Britten, as the common denominator of the group, discontent with the affluent society, throwing things away, and our exploitation of the world. “Are we not all searching for a new, more modest way of living?”, she asks (p. 68). Later in the book, a group of student cleaners take advantage of their access to the community to publish an article in the local paper gently poking fun at them. They are described as “ecos”, “muesli eaters”, and “die alten Naiven” (a pun on ‘die Alternativen’). Half-Spartans and half-Epicureans, it is hinted they practise free love (pp. 206–9). After the initial shock, the group rise to the occasion and laugh at themselves. It is as if Brückner is seeking to deflect accusations of naivety on the part of her readers. If so, there is some justification for her fears. Among the few points at which the narrative goes beyond clichés popularly associated with the green movement is her discussion of ‘domistic’ living. The source of this concept is openly acknowledged as the Kassel Psychology professor Horst von Gyzicki (see von Gyzicki 1983). Brückner summarises Gyzicki’s ideas over several pages in a lecture delivered by Dr Britten to prospective participants in the project (pp. 84–92). The idea of the domistic community (the term is derived from the Latin word ‘domus’, which means ‘home’, but has associations of ‘peace’) was conceived as an optimistic response to the pessimism of the early eighties and Orwell’s vision of 1984. Marital relationships, Britten suggests, no longer provide a viable form of living, and the nuclear family restricts individual development. We need to live in communities which enable us to remain creative in all phases of life. Quoting Gizycki’s characterisation of these as “lived out utopias” and “oases of freedom” (p. 85), he pleads for a form of practical humanism which he associates vaguely with the early Christians, Kant and Marx. Imagination and oppositional spirit will be required to counter public apathy and the “threat of destruction of the very basis of life” (p. 86). Members of the new community will practise a “Franciscan spirit”, share decisions, work together, respect each other’s abilities and needs, and accept responsibility for the Earth we are walking on, the products we live from, the air we breathe, the water we drink and the spirit we wish to permeate the society (p. 87). In this way they will overcome anxiety, depression, loneliness and fear of old age. Britten speaks of releasing the potential of the generation retiring or approaching retirement, who are no longer needed by their children and are on the point of being excluded from production but not yet so infirm that they cannot play a

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meaningful role in society. A community of such people could practise a way of life balancing leisure with self-improvement and voluntary limits on consumption with active responsibility for others. He paints a rosy picture of a gentle revolution spreading through society from these small-scale experiments in communal living. Awareness of the utopian implausibility of the project is, however, shown in passages where bursts of idealistic enthusiasm from one or other of the characters are interrupted by ironic rejoinders. The ‘Pertes Project’ exemplifies a conception of nature as a ‘cultural construct’, using the environment prudently as a place to live in and shaping it in a third way which avoids the extremes of over-exploitation and museum-like preservation through the buildings designed for it. Hartmut Böhme illustrates his conception of nature as a cultural project in Orientierung Kulturwissenschaft with specific reference to the potential for architecture to be an ‘extension and metamorphosis’, indeed a ‘metaphor’ of the natural environment: Es macht einen Unterschied, ob man ‘Kultur’ (z.B. Häuser mit Hilfe von Kalk bauen) als Abhebung oder Entgegensetzung zur Naturgeschichte versteht oder als ihre Verlängerung und Metamorphose. Das Haus als Metamorphose oder Metapher der Natur ist ein anderes Haus als das, das den Triumph des Baumeisters darstellt. Im ersten Fall bleibt man der Abhängigkeit des kulturell Geleisteten von Natur eingedenk. Von hier aus ist die Natur ‘als Projekt’ zu verstehen. (Böhme et al. 2000: 129) Inspired by the house built by the artist Hundertwasser in the Löwengasse in Vienna (p. 64), the buildings in Brückner’s narrative seek to remind their viewers and users of this dependence of culture on nature. Constructed in wood, stone and glass, they curve around a southfacing slope, are painted in washed colours and make a feature of utilities rather than hiding them. Gardening is a second aspect of creating nature as a cultural product. All the members of the commune are involved in some way in garden work, be it planting trees and a hedge around the property to replace the rusting barbed wire or growing vegetables and flowers. They make plans to remove refuse from the stream which runs along one side of the property, plant its banks with reeds, shrubs and wild flowers, and approach a neighbouring farmer who is polluting it with fertilisers. A wooden bridge is also planned over the stream bordering the property to give access to the surrounding countryside. In theory, communes allow optimal self-realisation in a just social order, by by-passing the bureaucracies and hierarchies of the state and

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public life. In practice, however, their success has depended on rare qualities of selfless dedication to the community, individual virtue and trust in others. Seen in the historical context of the quest for an alternative mode of human relationships in the communities founded by the Baptists, Hutterites and Pietists, the German colony movement at the turn of the twentieth century referred to in Chapters 2 and 6 earlier and alternative communes in the 1970s, Brückner’s fictional project seems superficially conceived. Britten does, however, cite monasteries, Soviet collective farms, turn-of-the-century communes and the Israeli Kibbutzim as models in his lecture to the prospective members of the group, pointing out that many of them failed because they depended too much on enthusiastic idealism in the absence of rational planning. Despite Brückner’s copious allusions to religious, philosophical and literary works, Die letzte Strophe also fails to reactivate or adapt to present needs earlier imaginings of a community whose members live in harmony with each other, with society as a whole and with the environment. Roland Koch has described the novel as one of a series of books with which Brückner jumps on the bandwagon of a topical subject. The ecological theme is treated “in a narrative framework which is at once didactic and harmless, promotes consumption and pays lip service to cultural tradition and edification” (Koch 1997: 7). Humorous touches are present in passages on the human failings of various members of the group, foibles and spats, and in tensions between the via activa and the via contemplativa (e.g. pp. 270, 303). The integration of (mildly) critical perspectives and the openness of the ending, where the group seems on the verge of breaking up, introduce a degree of realism. However, the Pertes project makes a rather modest contribution to the envisioning of nature as a cultural project. Nonetheless, Brückner did meet the taste and needs of a wide, mainly female readership and fulfilled their wish for guidance and encouragement with her narratives of the ability of women to take charge of their lives (though this generally involved a measure of renunciation). In Die letzte Strophe, the optimistic thrust of Hannah’s project contrasts effectively with a depressing lecture about ageing given by a gerontologist at the local Volkshochschule (pp. 234–42). The book had an initial print run of 100,000, and was reprinted in 1999. While the critics have found little of merit in Brückner’s books, their sales, the issue statistics in public libraries and serialisation in newspapers (see Koch 1997: 3) all speak for her success in reaching out to a significant sector of the reading public.

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7.6 Conclusion Two arguments have run through the chapters of this book. The first has been that a realistic, practical, even pragmatic understanding of nature, human nature and our interaction with the natural environment is required of us, if we are to face the challenges of the twenty-first century. This will involve avoiding the idealisation of nature as a harmonious and stable community of beings and the vilification of mankind as depraved and disordered other. However, the dualism of humanity and the non-human cannot simply be collapsed into a formless unity. Extreme formulations of anthropocentrism and physiocentrism are equally unhelpful. The way forward lies in positions located between a physiocentrism which recognises the primacy of our interest in the survival and well-being of humanity as a species and an anthropocentrism which recognises our intuitive feelings that nature is more than just a resource. This is the premise on which my analysis of the conception of science in Goethe and twentieth-century writers influenced by him has been based, and my evaluation of conceptions of technology, control over nature and human history in Kaiser and Enzensberger, of human habitation in the landscape in the poetry of Loerke and Bobrowski, of hunting and interaction with wild animals in the writing of Alscher and Stern, and of retaining and creating spheres in which we remain in contact with nature in the modern city in the novels of Gurk and Seuren. The second argument has been the contention that literature, and by implication the arts and film, without necessarily being able to provide solutions to individual environmental problems or answers to broader philosophical questions concerning the environment, have played and continue to play a role in the ongoing process of construction and modification of public attitudes. In the eighteenth century, writers such as Rousseau and Pope, Haller and Klopstock exercised a palpable influence over public opinion. Since the divergence of artistic from scientific discourse in the early nineteenth century, the social significance of writers and intellectuals has been more difficult to define, and since the emergence of film and the mass media, works of popular culture and media adaptations might seem more promising subjects for a study of the public consciousness. If novels, plays and poems have been examined here rather than film and TV, journalism and popular science, it is because they still seem to perform two important functions. On the one hand, they throw critical light on hegemonic conceptions of nature and articulate alternatives.

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On the other, however momentarily and obliquely, they act as secondorder systems, expressing a critical awareness of the very shortcomings of the solutions their narratives seem to be offering. This function was, as we have seen, crucial in Adorno’s conception of modern art. By focusing on representations of the cultural landscape, that is a landscape adapted to human dwelling, bearing the marks of exploitation and denaturalisation, nevertheless harbouring utopian potential, literature and art could in his view keep alive the hope for a possible future reconciliation with nature. One form taken by such representation of the modern cultural landscape, recording the traces of past violence but never losing sight of a mythical other, has been identified in the magic realism of Bobrowski’s poetry. More generally, Loerke’s verse exemplified a non-exploitative form of technology and an alternative form of interaction with nature releasing the latter into its true potential of immediacy, individuality and freedom, of diversity and harmonious coexistence. In Gernot and Hartmut Böhme’s eyes, it is the task of literature to foster a caring attitude towards nature by enlisting feelings, developing a sensual culture and awareness of the physical impact of landscapes on us. Texts from Alscher to Modick examined here have sought to reintegrate corporeality and to sensitise us to the consequences of industrialisation. It would be rash to assert that all the more ambitious claims rehearsed in Chapter 1 concerning the ability of literature, art and film to go beyond mere compensation for the ravages of modernity and actually change society have been entirely vindicated in the course of my textual analyses, and to conclude that literature and art constitute, in the words of Peter Finke, a “sanatorium of our general cultural existence and its self-inflicted damage” (2003: 273). Hubert Zapf may also be unduly optimistic when he writes of literature acting as a metadiscourse integrating and balancing out the deficiencies of other, socially dominant discourses. However, in serving as a site where the consequences of prevailing and alternative value systems and conceptions of nature can be staged and explored in fictional scenarios, literature and other cultural media do seem to possess a special value. The openness of creative writing towards other social systems and discourses may indeed enable it to restore richness and complexity to cultural ecosystems threatened by impoverishment in the increasingly standardised contemporary world. On the level of the individual work, my findings suggest that this ability is the preserve of a small number of particularly complex texts. The ensemble of texts in a given culture may, however, perform the function of keeping

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society open to alternative thought paradigms and thus contribute to its long-term survival. In any case, I hope to have demonstrated that literature provides insight into contradictions, tensions and shifts in the conceptions of nature and technology in twentieth-century Germany which are relevant for the understanding of our own position today.

Notes Introduction 1. The phrase echoes the subtitle of an influential book from the early days of the environmental movement, Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle: Nature, Man and Technology (New York: Knopf 1971).

1 Nature in German Culture: The Role of Writers in Environmental Debate 1. The inscription, which reads: “Der gebildete Mensch macht die Natur zu seinem Freund – Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805)”, is taken from the poet’s Letters ‘Ueber die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen’ (Schiller 1962: 318). The poet contrasts primitive man, who lived at the mercy of nature and of his inner nature, with the modern ‘barbarian’, who scorns and dishonours outer nature by ruthlessly imposing his rational will on it, only to suffer himself from its destruction. He recommends a middle way to his contemporaries, combining respect for nature’s freedom and multiplicity with control over its more dangerous vagaries. In short, actively forming it, but on a basis of empathy. Schiller’s thinking on nature finds most eloquent expression in his great elegy ‘Der Spaziergang’ (1795), whose narrative and poetic images explore the problem that the freedom from nature we gain through civilisation and modernity is won at the price of alienation from it. See Riedel 1989 and Rigby 2004, 94–101. 2. The word ‘ecology’ did not at the time possess its current cultural, political and public policy meanings. It referred to a minor branch of botany and zoology concerned with the individual organism’s relationship with its environment, rather than interdependent relationships between species in symbiotic communities, let alone the study of the impact of pollution on public health and biotic diversity. Only since the Second World War has ‘ecologism’ come to designate the philosophy and political ideology promoting a non-anthropocentric view of nature with which it is perhaps primarily associated today. 3. Greg Garrard writes similarly; in our age of “expropriation of the senses” (the phrase is taken from Ulrich Beck), we suffer from an alienation deriving from the disjunction between official estimates of risk and any conceivable lay assessment based on personal experience. Therefore ecocriticism has an important function to perform alongside science, revealing the cultural reasons why we think about environmental and technological risks in particular ways, and promoting educated critique in place of ignorant paranoia (2004: 11f.). 4. See the Association’s homepage
http://www.asle.umn.edu/index.html. This is a powerful resource which includes links to introductory articles on ecocriticism, bibliographies, syllabuses, the Association’s newsletter and handbook 280

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5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

for prospective graduate students, details of a mentoring programme and an email discussion list. In a sharp critique of ecocriticism as the work of scholars who “would rather be hiking”, and who tended to use the traditional author–work approach, focusing on particular landscapes, periods or genres, Michael Cohen has similarly cautioned against the fashion for ‘narrative scholarship’ (the blending of criticism with creative writing, juxtaposing literary analysis with meditative reflection in a semi-autobiographical narrative framework) and ontological naivety (seeking hope and comfort in the texts examined and subscribing to an implicit historical perspective of the development of ever finer environmental consciousness). See Cohen 2004 paragraphs 60–70. The degree of National Socialist commitment to environmental reform, which remains, in the words of Thomas Lekan, a highly contentious issue, has attracted considerable attention in recent years: see Bramwell 1989, Dominick 1992, Radkau and Uekötter 2003, Lekan 2004 and Brüggemeier et al. 2005. Lekan emphasises that for all their rhetoric, the Nazis “systematically subordinated environmental concern to economic recovery and war mobilisation, threatening decades of preservation efforts through Autobahn reconstruction, rearmament, land reclamation, and dam building” (Lekan 2004: 14). The environmental historians Thomas Lekan and Thomas Zeller nevertheless observe a gulf between German politics and scholarship in their field. Writing for an American readership, they note that there is “something odd” about the state of environmental history in Germany. When Americans think of a Western country with a strong environmental record, Germany will be among the top contenders. Yet it is relatively weak when it comes to scholarship in environmental history. While certain historians in Germany have been practising environmental history for years, their work has not entered the historiographical mainstream. The mere handful of designated professorships at Germany’s universities contrasts with dozens of chairs in the United States and a vigorous American society for environmental history, with lively annual meetings and its own journal. Despite, or perhaps because of, the “profligate consumption of natural resources, and reckless attitudes towards the environment” with which the country is commonly associated, there is widespread American interest in the field (Lekan and Zeller 2005: 1). Manon Maren-Grisebach also quotes a series of literary authorities in her Philosophie der Grünen (1982) and Walter Sauer writes in his reader of ‘abandoned ways to nature’: “Wenn nun Beiträge ausgewählt werden sollen, die von einem ganzheitlichen Naturverständnis zeugen, so ist vorrangig an dichterische Texte zu denken, die die sinnliche Erscheinungsform der Natur in Worte zu fassen vermögen, die über den Intellekt hinaus Dimensionen des Gefühls, der Phantasie, der Ästhetik, des Geistes erreichen und die zu einer tieferen Naturschau führen, das Empirische transzendierend” (Sauer 1992: 364). See also the following themed issues of socio-political journals: Das Argument (‘Mutter-Natur’  172 (1988)), ‘Öko-Kunst. Zur Ästhetik der Grünen’  183 (1989) and ‘Umweltfeminismus’  205 (1994); Ästhetik und Kommunikation (‘Linker Konservatismus’  36 (1979) and ‘Zivilisationskritik’  43 (1981)); Kürbiskern (‘Wissenschaft und Literatur. Wie wird man durch Schaden klug?’  86, no. 3 (1986)); Kursbuch (‘Ökologie und Politik oder Die Zukunft

282 Notes

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

der Industrialisierung’  33 (1973), ‘Utopien 1. Zweifel an der Zukunft’  52 (1978) and ‘Zumutungen an die Grünen’  74 (1983)). As well as the publications of Jost Hermand listed above, see for instance Grimm 1982, Mallinckrodt 1987, Hope 1992, Hunt 1992, Stapleton 1993, Jarka 1994, Morris-Keitel 1994, Jucker 1995, Atkins 1996, Goodbody 1997, 1998 and 2002, Riordan 1997, Barkhoff 1999, 2000 and 2003, Corkhill 2001, Rigby 2001, 2004, Bullivant 2002, Meacher 2002 and Liston 2004. For an extreme statement of this position see von Uthmann 1986, and for the link between Neonazism and environmentalism see Geden 1999. Scott Slovic, ‘Nature Writing’, in Encyclopedia of World Environmental History, II, 888, quoted from Buell 2005: 144. The somewhat different English tradition of non-fiction writing about nature, countryside, landscape and natural history by naturalists, ramblers and autobiographers from Izaak Walton and Gilbert White to William Cobbett and Henry Williamson has, according to Terry Gifford, shaded over into rural fiction and acted on the whole as a form of pastoral escape, a ‘therapy of retreat’ for readers (1999: 72–80). A ‘European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment’ was founded during the conference ‘Literatur, Kultur, Umwelt: Ecocriticism – eine Standortbestimmung’ at the University of Münster in 2004, and the theme of the Deutscher Germanistentag 2007 is ‘Natur – Kultur’. MA, doctoral and Habilitation theses such as Gülseven 2006, Jambon 1999, Seiderer 2006 and Wanning 2005 suggest that a new generation of German scholars is now engaging with ecology-oriented developments in cultural theory, and two academic publishers, the Weidler Buchverlag (Berlin) and Rodopi (Amsterdam) are publishing book series dedicated to ecocriticism. In political theory, there is a clear parallel in the debate between proponents of the view that nature is a domain of intrinsic value, truth and authenticity (e.g. Goodin 1992) and those arguing that it is a social construction subject to inherent instability (e.g. Evernden 1992). Like the Grohs, he also rejects the Böhmes’ call for a rehabilitation of the idea of a ‘language of nature’: “Kann ein solcher Rückgriff auf vormodernes Denken die erhofften Resultate bringen? Ich bezweifle es. Denn die monierte Verlegenheit gegenüber der schönen Natur hat ihre guten Gründe, die aus der Theoriegeschichte hervorgehen” (Matussek 1992: 14). Götz Großklaus (1990) comes to a similar conclusion in a short but stimulating essay on the impact of early industrialisation and modernity on aesthetic perception in the first half of the nineteenth century. The general shift from the emancipatory nature discourse of the Enlightenment and early Romanticism to the regressive, compensatory representations of nature which predominate in nineteenth-century art and literature is reflected but simultaneously subjected to ironic commentary in more complex texts such as Heine’s Harzreise and Büchner’s Lenz: “Die historische Zäsur, der Umbruch, die Material- und Mentalumwälzung wird schon bei Heine dialektisch erfahren: emotional fällt Schmerz an, nostalgische Trauer über das, was verloren geht, die Verluste und Defizite des Fortschritts werden benannt; rational jedoch steht Heine auf der Seite des notwendig historisch fortschreitenden Veränderungs- und Modernisierungsprozesses; rational ist seine Betonung der

Notes 283

18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

Unumkehrbarkeit des historischen Prozesses. Dasselbe dialektische Moment von Verlust/ Emanzipationsschmerz und Fortschrittsbewußtsein taucht bei Heine mehrfach auf (Paradigma der Zerrissenheit) – zum Teil ironisch gebrochen” (p. 193). Groh and Groh 1991: 151f. Marquard’s ‘Kompensationsthese’ is to be found in Marquard 1976. The quotation is from Humphrey Repton’s Enquiry into the Changes of Taste in Landscape Gardening (1806), and the allusion in the final sentence to the ‘Brief vom Juni 1799’, in Hölderlin 1943ff.: III, 400. Cf. Adorno: “Das Bild des Ältesten an der Natur ist umschlagend die Chiffre des noch nicht Seienden, Möglichen: als dessen Erscheinung ist sie mehr als Daseiendes; aber schon die Reflexion darauf frevelt fast” (1970: 115). The idea of the ‘language of nature’, which is discussed in further detail in Chapter 5 below, is encountered in Adorno 1970: 105, 114f. and 120f. Hartmut Böhme 1988: 30f. The quotations in the passage are from Adorno 1970: 103, 105 and 107. The Grohs contrast the Böhmes’ position with that of Martin Seel, citing the latter’s Ästhetik der Natur (1991) as an example of the ‘post-metaphysical’ environmental aesthetic and ethics they call for.

2 Goethe as Ecophilosophical Inspiration and Literary Model 1. Karl Robert Mandelkow, ‘Natur und Geschichte bei Goethe im Spiegel seiner wissenschaftlichen und kulturtheoretischen Rezeption’, in Matussek 1998: 233–58, here p. 233. 2. In his study of ‘Green utopias in Germany’, for instance, Jost Hermand discusses the influence of Goethe on Gustav Fechner, Ernst Haeckel and Wilhelm Bölsche (1991a: 70–4), Rudolf Steiner (pp. 94f.), Werner Heisenberg (pp. 117f.), Karl Jaspers and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (pp. 120f.), Ernst Hass (pp. 122f.), Fritjof Capra (p. 165) Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich (p. 178) and Joseph Beuys (pp. 184f.). 3. See Mandelkow 1998 and Wolfgang Kaempfer, ‘Einige Bemerkungen zur Geschichte des Problems’ (Glaser 1986: 15–22). 4. It is salutary, Mandelkow suggests, to remember that if Goethe resorted to the study of nature as a sphere principally characterised by sublime calm and security, this was not least because of the respite it offered from the chance, arbitrariness and disorder of contemporary politics. 5. Jost Hermand, ‘Freiheit in der Bindung: Goethes grüne Weltfrömmigkeit’ (1991b: 29–51). 6. With the exception of Faust, for which line numbers are given, Goethe is cited in the following from the fourteen-volume Hamburger Ausgabe edited by Erich Trunz (Goethe 1998), with volume and page numbers. 7. Goethe’s conception of scientific investigation is perhaps most succinctly summed up in a short text entitled ‘Bedenken und Ergebung’, first published in 1820 (XIII 31). 8. Kreutzer quotes (p. 386) the aphorism from ‘Makariens Archiv’ in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre: “Das ist eben das größte Unheil der neuern Physik, daß

284 Notes

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

man die Experimente gleichsam vom Menschen abgesondert hat und bloß in dem, was künstliche Instrumente zeigen, die Natur erkennen, ja, was sie leisten kann, dadurch beschränken und beweisen will.” (VIII 473) The phrase, which is found in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (“Es gibt eine zarte Empirie, die sich mit dem Gegenstand innigst identisch macht und dadurch zur eigentlichen Theorie wird”, VIII 302), signifies allowing natural entities to disclose themselves on their own terms, in their complex and dynamic interrelations with other entities and phenomena (see Rigby 2004: 35f.). The volume of essays Goethe’s Way of Science (Seamon and Zajonc 1998), which contains new scientific studies conducted on Goethean principles in a range of disciplines, alongside chapters on Goethe’s science in the historical context, shows the continuing importance of the poet. An earlier anthology, Deutsche Landschaften (Schneider 1981) includes a comparable range of Goethe texts – letters from Goethe’s Werther, descriptions and drawings of the Alps from the Tagebuch in der Schweiz 1775, the poem ‘Harzreise im Winter’, the essay ‘Über den Granit’, passages from the Reise in die Schweiz 1797, Goethe’s Novelle and ‘Lenardos Tagebuch’ (from Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre). The threat to nature today, Schneider argues cautiously in his introduction, “permits us to see the historical circumstances of its aesthetic idealisation in sharper focus, and to avoid jumping to hasty conclusions” (p. vi). In Ist der Mensch zu retten? Vision und Kritik der “Moderne in Goethes ‘Faust’” (1994), Kaiser sums up the argument of his earlier book Mutter Natur und die Dampfmaschine (1991a): At the very moment when humanity was setting out on the path of scientific objectivisation and technological domination of the natural world, it evolved a new, complementary, sentimental life ideal. Success in planning and manipulating the environment led men to long for things spontaneous and free of external control – on the one hand, the heart, feelings and imagination, and on the other, nature as an autonomous sphere in which growth energies circulated and interacted freely, and as the loving, maternal origin of all life. Though the ‘modern’ sentimental relationship with nature predated the industrial revolution in Germany, “Mother Nature and the steam engine appeared simultaneously on the stage of history, turned away from one another, but intimately connected” (1994: 21f.). My comments in the following are largely based on Matussek’s essay ‘Formen der Verzeitlichung. Der Wandel des Faustschen Naturbildes und seine historischen Hintergründe’ (Matussek 1998: 202–32), in which he revisits and further systematises the conceptions of nature identified in his earlier monograph. According to Matussek, the ‘Osterspaziergang’ passage “foregrounds Faust’s selective compositional arrangement so blatantly that it is revealed as a means to an end, and casts doubt on the implied reconciliation of nature and history”. The arbitrary nature of Faust’s harmonisation is evident from the start in the pontificating gesture with which he directs Wagner’s gaze from the hill they are standing on, and the conventional images he uses (1998: 226). A total of 200,000 copies were sold within two years, and a further 100,000 copies when the paperback edition in the ‘Fischer Alternativ’ series came out in 1978.

Notes 285 16. Marshall Berman, ‘Goethe’s Faust: The Tragedy of Development’, in Berman 1983: 37–86, here p. 38. 17. See Erich Trunz’s commentary on Faust in the Hamburger Ausgabe (III: 713). 18. Jeffrey Barnouw has described the play as “notoriously ambiguous” (1994: 34), and Rigby comments similarly on the “many uncertainties which Goethe leaves us with” (2004: 213). 19. As Jeffrey Barnouw puts it: “In his expansive ‘striving’ Faust embodies an indifference to our vulnerability and fallibility that is too often attributed misguidedly to a ‘Faustian’ ethos of technology” (1994: 40). 20. Whereas Lukács had argued the last Act of Faust was a tragedy of capitalist development in its early, heroic industrial phase, reflecting its internal contradictions (see his ‘Faust-Studien’, in Lukács 1950: 200–39), Berman suggests Goethe had socialism in mind: he points to the poet’s recorded interest in the technological utopias of the French Saint-Simonian movement in the second half of the 1820s, when he was writing this part of the play. However, Kaiser argues that Goethe’s attitude towards the Saint-Simonian fusion of socialism with technocracy was no less ambivalent than his views on the impact of capitalist industrialisation. Citing a conversation of the poet’s with Eckermann on 30 October 1830, he asserts: “Goethe turned his back on SaintSimonism with a shudder, and it is likely that this shudder is present in the last phase of his work on Faust” (1994: 62 and note 32, p. 114). 21. Harro Segeberg, ‘Technik und Naturbeherrschung im Konflikt I. Johann Wolfgang von Goethes Faust. Zweiter Teil V. Akt (1832) und die Modernität vormoderner Technik’ (1987a: 13–54). 22. Segeberg cites the use of the term ‘Weltvernutzung’ (destructive utilisation) by the Faust commentator Max Kommerell in 1939, and remarks: “Today, we would speak of the plundering of the planet” (p. 46). 23. Hanns Cibulka, Sanddornzeit. Tagebuchblätter von Hiddensee (Halle-Leipzig: Mitteldeutscher Verlag 1971). References in the text are to the reprint in Cibulka 1991 (pp. 5–73). 24. Hanns Cibulka, Swantow. Die Aufzeichnungen des Andreas Flemming, HalleLeipzig: Mitteldeutscher Verlag 1982. References are to the reprint in Cibulka 1991 (pp. 75–171). 25. As a result of the controversy surrounding the publication of extracts in the journal Neue deutsche Literatur in 1981, all 150,000 copies of the book edition which appeared the following year sold out in three days (Heise 1999: 6). 26. Klaus Modick, Moos. Die nachgelassenen Blätter des Botanikers Lukas Ohlburg, Zurich: Haffmans 1984. References in the text are to the second edition (Modick 1996). 27. The name is a homage to Karl Robert Mandelkow, whose lectures Modick attended as a student at the university of Hamburg, but the echo of Benoît Mandelbrot, author of The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982) may also be intentional. 28. Sabine Jambon has noted the parallel with William Harvey’s seventeenthcentury treatise on this subject (1999: 119f.). 29. See Reid 1990 on Hans Faust and Hinze und Kunze, and Grauert 1995: 166–206 on Iphigenie in Freiheit. 30. Volker Braun is cited here and in the following from the Texte in zeitlicher Folge (Braun 1992ff.).

286 Notes 31. See Reid 1990: 151. ‘Der Ostermarsch’ (II: 76) is a slightly later poem alluding to the scene ‘Vor dem Tor’ (Faust, lines 808–1177), by now in clearly ironic intention. 32. Marshall Berman notes that the Marxist–Leninist enthusiasm for grand technological projects such as the notorious White Sea Canal project of 1931–3, Stalin’s first showcase development (since described in its tragic absurdity by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago), had led to a special identification with Faust the engineer and the developer in the early years of the GDR (1983: 76). 33. Though the manuscript was rediscovered in 1988 in the archives of Braun’s West German publisher, Suhrkamp, and is advertised as available as a theatre script, it remains unpublished. The following remarks therefore refer to Hinze und Kunze, Braun’s revised version of the play dating from 1973. 34. ‘Material 1: Wie herrlich leuchtet mir die Natur’ (V 85–8) shows Braun unable to find the elusive ‘stuff of life’ in nature or nature poetry. Goethe’s ‘Mailied’ and Paul Gerhardt’s ‘Sommergesang’ appear grotesquely implausible when juxtaposed with the urban landscape (including a Goetheplatz) and recollections of instances of alienation. ‘Das innerste Afrika’ (VIII 87–90) is a key poem from the mid-eighties, in which blacks and women represent utopian alternatives to GDR bureaucracy and the calcification of modern civilisation, and Africa becomes a metaphor for democratic socialism and a humane way of life with an ecological dimension. Fragments of Mignon’s song ‘Kennst du das Land’ (HA VII 145) are similarly incorporated alongside passages from Hölderlin and allusions to Rimbaud.

3 From Modernist Catastrophe to Postmodern Survival 1. For a more detailed discussion of the poem see Chapter 14, on “Die ersten Technik-Schocks”, in Schneider et al. 1987, vol. I (pp. 323–48), and Wolfgang Hädecke’s section on ‘Technikkatastrophen’ in Hädecke 1993 (370–8, here p. 373). 2. See Garrard’s helpful summary in the chapter ‘Apocalypse’ of his book on ecocriticism (Garrard 2004: 85–107). Similar points are made in German studies of apocalyptic writing, e.g. Grimm et al. 1986, Vondung 1988, Lilienthal 1996 and Bullivant 2002. 3. Karl Robert Mandelkow was one of the first to give insight into the Expressionists’ understanding of technology with his essay ‘Orpheus und Maschine’ (1967). In addition to the anthologies of Bullivant and Ridley (1976), Schneider et al. (1987) and Krause (1989), see Segeberg 1987a, b, Schütz 1988, Großklaus and Lämmert 1989, Wagner 1996, Platen 1997, Heimböckel 1998, Korber 1998, Midgley 2000: 304–52 and Wege 2000. The educational significance of the topic is reflected in Peter Bekes’ introductory anthology for use in German secondary schools, Mensch und Technik (Bekes 1990). 4. In America, Leo Marx, one of the most important precursors of the ecocritical movement, published his landmark study of the nineteenth-century American adaptation of the pastoral tradition, The Machine in the Garden. Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, in 1964. German studies approaching representations of technology in the context of nature and the pastoral include some of the essays in Seeber and Klussmann 1986, Kaiser 1991a, Detering 1992 and Bergner 1998.

Notes 287 5. See Odo Marquard, ‘Verspätete Moralistik. Bemerkungen zur Unvermeidlichkeit der Geisteswissenschaften’, in Marquard 1995: 108–14, here pp. 108f. Also Wege 2000: 24. 6. Like many of his contemporaries, Kaiser participated in what Götz Großklaus has described as a specifically German post-Romantic nature discourse, whose one-sided critique of modernity can be seen as a form of psychosocial loss management: “Thematisiert wird immer die affektiv-emotionale Linie des Emanzipationsschmerzes: des Verlustschmerzes, des Heimatverlustes als Naturverlust, als Verlust ursprünglicher Lebenseinheit” (Großklaus 1990: 195). 7. The Ford Model T was launched in 1908, and the first moving assembly line was built for its production in 1913. It was some time before such production methods became common in German industry, but the concepts of Fordism and Taylorism were already familiar to the German public in the years leading up to the First World War. 8. Considerably less has in fact been written about nature in Kaiser’s plays: it is one of many themes touched on by Audrone B. Willeke (1995); Mikyung Chu provides further insights in her study of women in Kaiser’s plays (2002). 9. Here and in the following, volume and page number references to Kaiser’s plays refer to the six-volume edition of Kaiser’s works edited by Walther Huder (Kaiser 1971–2). 10. Klaus-Dieter Bergner has shown how Döblin, who expounded his nature philosophy discursively in a series of extended essays in the 1920s, after representing it in fictional narratives from the story ‘Die Ermordung einer Butterblume’ (1910) on, fused elements of Romantic pantheism and Schopenhauerian pessimism with Nietzschean vitalism (see Bergner 1998: 102–9). 11. Gunter Martens has traced echoes of Also sprach Zarathustra in Gas and the essay ‘Formung von Drama’ (Kaiser 1971–2: IV, 573). The structure and central motifs of Hölle Weg Erde (Erde and Aufbruch) are manifestly indebted to Nietzsche (see Martens 1974: 147–52). 12. The figure of Rosamunde Floris may have been partly inspired by Helene Stöcker, founder of the Deutscher Bund für Mutterschutz in 1905, who drew on Nietzsche in support of her radical campaign for women’s emancipation. She argued for women’s right to vote, work, choose their sexual partners (including extra-marital) and control their own reproductivity by employing contraception and abortion. These demands were in her view, like everything which strengthened and intensified life, ‘natural’ – see Bergner 1998: 197–205. 13. Enzensberger has published a translation of the poem which is as elegant as it is faithful to the original. In this chapter, I therefore depart from my practice elsewhere in this volume of citing primary German texts in the original, and merely translating phrases and shorter passages embedded in the text, so as to avoid the distraction of code-switching. Page numbers given in brackets refer to Hans Magnus Enzensberger, The Sinking of the Titanic. A Poem. Translated by the author (1981), rather than Der Untergang der Titanic (1978a). 14. Richard Howells has estimated a membership of some 6000 worldwide (Howells 1999: 2). 15. For instance in Bainbridge 1996, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

288 Notes 16. Lubin 1999: 12. Lubin shows how the film celebrates technology and social modernisation at the same time as expressing anxieties about them. 17. Experts were already concerned about global warming in the 1950s, and research began in earnest in the 1970s, although it only became a matter of broad public concern in the late 1980s. 18. I use this term, like Thomas Kniesche in his study of Günter Grass’s Die Rättin, to signify an apocalyptic text which is directed against apocalypse, that is, which belongs to and engages with apocalyptic tradition, but in order to subvert the ideological instrumentalisation of apocalyptic scenarios (see Kniesche 1991: 52f.). 19. See http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/volc_images/europe_west_asia/ heimaey/heimaey.html. 20. In his article on Enzensberger’s “utopian pragmatist politics”, Jonathan Monroe writes of the celebration of a similar cluster of positive values in Enzensberger’s later poetry associated with a position “outside ideology’: resilience and endurance, personal honesty and integrity, calm acceptance of the limits of knowledge and self-knowledge, and a caring yet thick-skinned way of seeing and being (1997: 69). 21. I draw in the following text on Tim Woods’s Beginning Postmodernism (1999) and Wolfgang Welsch’s Unsere postmoderne Moderne (2002) as convenient introductions to and overviews of Postmodernism. 22. German literary critics have tended to doubt that French postmodern theory had a significant influence on writing in the Federal Republic in the 1980s. In the introduction to his book Pluralismus und Postmodernismus, for instance, Helmut Kreuzer discusses the arrival of postmodern theory in 1985–6, and presents Heiner Müller and Patrick Süskind as postmodern authors. However, listing the principal characteristics of the decade, he concludes there is no reason to see these as aspects of literary Postmodernism. (Helmut Kreuzer, ‘Pluralismus und Postmodernismus. Zur Literatur und Literaturwissenschaft der 80er Jahre im westlichen Deutschland’, in Kreuzer 1996: 11–27) Thomas Kniesche on the other hand suggests that the rediscovery of apocalyptic thinking in the 1980s was itself a German equivalent of French Postmodernism, both being responses to the resignation which followed the decline of the Student Movement (1991: 36). 23. Dante’s Divine Comedy is echoed formally in the division of the poem into thirty-three Cantos (like each of the three sections of Dante’s work), and the use of tercets in the first Canto. Both works also combine autobiographical elements (self-examination of the poet in middle age, in a spiritual journey leading to self-recognition) with timeless questions concerning the meaning of human existence. Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional character ‘Gordon Pym’ is among the other passengers on Enzensberger’s doomed liner: as in Der Untergang der Titanic, a sequence of shipwrecks provides the framework for the author’s reflections on the truth and deception of literary representation in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. 24. Meeker 1974, quoted from the chapter reprinted in Glotfelty and Fromm 1996: 228. 25. ‘Theaterprobleme (1954)’, in Dürrenmatt 1980: 62.

Notes 289

4 Heideggerian Ecopoetics and the Nature Poetry Tradition 1. See Martin Heidegger, ‘ … dichterisch wohnet der Mensch … ’ and ‘Bauen, Wohnen, Denken’, in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Heidegger 2000: 191–208 and 147–64, here pp. 191 and 152). In view of the idiosyncrasies of Heidegger’s language, I quote in the following from translations of his works: Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter (Heidegger 1975) and Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings from Being and Time (1927) to the Task of Thinking (1964) (Heidegger 1993). The essay ‘Poetically Man Dwells’ is in Heidegger 1975: 213–29; ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ in Heidegger 1993: 347–63. The sentences quoted above are on pp. 213 and 352, respectively. 2. Thomas Rohkrämer has for instance written on Klages and Ernst Jünger (1999: 162–211 and 301–38) and Stefan Breuer on Friedrich Georg Jünger (1995: 121–53). 3. Greg Garrard has also engaged with Heidegger. See, in addition to Bate 2000, Rigby 2001b, 2004 and Garrard 1998. Further references to Heidegger may be found in Glotfelty and Fromm 1996 and Coupe 2000. American critics such as David Abrams, Leonard Scigaj and Louise Westling have also explored the relevance of phenomenology to ecocriticism but focused on Maurice MerleauPonty, who devotes greater attention to corporeality and human participation in the larger community of kindred beings in the biosphere (see Westling 2006). Gernot Böhme’s ecological aesthetics, which builds on Hermann Schmitz’s theory of atmospheres (see Gernot Böhme 1995), is an example of the productive development of Heideggerian phenomenology in the Germanspeaking world, which would, as Rigby notes, reward further examination in the context of ecocritical theory. 4. See for instance Thomas Rohkrämer, ‘Martin Heidegger, National Socialism, and Environmentalism’, in Brüggemeier et al. 2005: 171–203. 5. See Martin Heidegger, ‘Die Frage nach der Technik’ (2000: 7–36, here 15–18). Translated as ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1993: 311–41, here 320–2). 6. ‘Wozu Dichter? ’, in Holzwege (Heidegger 1977: 269–320). The essay, which was delivered as a lecture in 1946 and first published in 1950, is translated in Heidegger 1975 (pp. 89–142). However, I quote here and in the following from a more recent translation by Kenneth Haynes, which is closer to the original (Heidegger 2002: 200–41). 7. “By a primal oneness the four – earth and sky, divinities and mortals – belong together in one. Earth is the serving bearer, blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water, rising up into plant and animal. [ … ] The sky is the vaulting path of the sun, the course of the changing moon, the wandering glitter of the stars, [ … ]. The divinities are the beckoning messengers of the godhead. Out of the holy sway of the godhead, the god appears in his presence or withdraws into his concealment. [ … ] The mortals are the human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death as death. [ … ] This simple oneness of the four we call the fourfold.” (1993: 351f.)

290 Notes 8. It is also helpful to know that the mysterious term “fourfold” is derived from the Pythagorean tetraktys, a mathematical symbol of the cosmos alluding to the four elements. 9. Bate elucidates his account of Heidegger’s thinking (p. 265) with reference to Rilke’s ninth Duino Elegy: “Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,/ bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window, –/ at most: column, tower? … but to say them, you must understand,/ oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves/ ever dreamed of existing” (quoted from Rilke 1987: 199). The act of naming possesses similar significance for Loerke and Bobrowski, as we shall see. 10. In Topographies of the Sacred, Rigby lists four main shortcomings in Heidegger’s thinking from an ecocritical standpoint: his conceptions of nature and place are not in practice politically neutral; his insistence on a gulf between humans and animals is unjustifiable; his claim that the things need us so they can be named reveals anthropocentric hubris; and his consideration of Greek and German as the only languages which can answer the call of being exposes him as a cultural chauvinist (2004: 7f.). 11. Rigby returns to the idea of a negative ecopoetics in Topographies of the Sacred (2004: 119–27), as one which recognises that the work of art is no substitute for nature and constantly reminds us of how it always falls short of conveying the experience of nature. She follows Heidegger in describing us as called on to respond to the self-disclosure of the other but agrees with Haar that in order to protect the otherness of the earth from disappearing into a humanly constructed world of words we must acknowledge the inadequacy of our response and show that we remain open to what lies beyond the self and the text. 12. Loerke’s poems are cited in the following, with page number from the revised text edited by Reinhard Tgahrt (Loerke 1983). His essays are quoted from the two-volume edition of Gedichte und Prosa prepared by Peter Suhrkamp in 1958. 13. Edith Rotermund thus comments in her study of the imagery of Loerke’s poetry that the images are “an end in themselves”, “inasmuch as they are an expression of an ecstatic state and constitute an inner landscape”. We can thus speak of an “expressive landscape” (Rotermund 1962: 172). 14. Walter Gebhard’s book on Loerke’s poetic theory and practice (Gebhard 1968) is most helpful in understanding the principles underlying it. See also Kohlroß 2000. 15. See Reinhard Tgahrt’s note in Loerke 1996: 82 on the Donnerstagsrunde, Gebhard 1968: 31 and 268–71 on the importance of Fechner for Loerke and Loerke 1996: 61 for the titles of books of Fechner’s which are among those still in Loerke’s library. 16. ‘Kosmische Verwandlung’ (pp. 318f.) reflects a position close to the Buddhist conception of the transmigration of souls. See also the motif of human “brotherhood” with nature, which is present in the poems ‘Brüder’ (p. 63), ‘Das Wort’ (p. 79) and ‘Einschlafen auf dem Fischdampfer’ (p. 157), and implicit in ‘Mit Sankt Francisci Geist’ (pp. 95f.). 17. Gerhard Schulz (1984) describes the central themes in Loerke’s work, for instance the quasi-religious cultural mission of the poet, his cosmic/ mystical world view, the idea of poetry as translation of the language of nature, the

Notes 291

18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

lament over social exclusion of the writer from bourgeois society and his conception of nature as refuge, as in themselves banal and derivative. His originality is located in their shifting and at times contradictory combination in pursuit of self-knowledge, in the context of contemporary political reality. In his account of Loerke as mid-way between Nietzsche’s life-affirmation and Schopenhauer’s ascetic resignation, Überwindung des Welt-Leids. Loerkes Lyrik im Spannungsfeld zwischen Nietzsche und Schopenhauer (1992), Thomas Pieper describes the poet’s prescription for redemption as ascetic and monastic. Pieper argues that Loerke advocates meditative devitalisation and an ultimately life-denying form of self-discovery, and that his construction of nature may avoid the twin dangers of the sentimental/ idyllic and human domination, but involves a melancholy sense of the helplessness of the individual. Gebhard comments in greater detail on the similarities and differences between the poetic theory and practice of Loerke and Rilke (1968: 37f.). I am particularly indebted in the following pages to David Scrase’s helpful introduction to the poet and his excellent translations in Understanding Johannes Bobrowski (1995) and also to John Wieczorek’s authoritative study of Bobrowski’s life and works, Between Sarmatia and Socialism (1999). See Tgahrt 1993: 273, 274, 291f., 295, 304. Bobrowski’s relationship with Lehmann’s poetry was by contrast one of distant respect mixed with irritation. Lehmann, who tended to be dismissive of the efforts of younger poets in the post-war years, criticising the lack of botanical detail in their work, showed an unexpected interest in Bobrowski when he made acquaintance with the latter’s poems in 1963, aged over eighty (see Tgahrt 1993: 97–9). Tgahrt writes, with a sensitivity perhaps born out of his own geographical displacement, of the extent of Bobrowski’s moral and aesthetic achievement, putting behind him any hope of regaining his lost childhood home, and constantly rejecting and reworking drafts of his poems about it over a period of some 20 years before his first poetry volume was published. Tgahrt comments how “danach, in einer anderen Sprachbewegung und in einem weiteren Kontext, es ihm möglich wird, ‘zurückzurufen’, ‘herzurufen’, ohne zurück zu wollen und ohne mißverstanden zu werden. Dem entspricht, so scheint es, ein poetisches Verfahren, das zurückgreifen kann, bewahren, aufheben, aber mit dem Aufgehobenen nicht mehr zurückfällt” (1993: 266). Tgahrt quotes from letters revealing the “fear and trembling” with which Bobrowski wrote, and the painful effort involved in his determination to arrive at a form and language permitting him to remember, mourn, conjure up the past and express hope for the future again (Tgahrt 1993: 319 and 290). Bobrowski’s poems are cited, with page number only, from volume 1 of the Gesammelte Werke edited by Eberhard Haufe in 1987. The motif of birds’ feathers as pointers to nature’s secrets, which may have its origin in the Grimms’ Fairy Tale ‘The Three Feathers’, where they magically point the king’s youngest son the way to his fortune, was by this time a familiar topos in nature poetry, having appeared in poems of Loerke’s, Lehmann’s and Günter Eich’s. See Bobrowski’s comment in a letter to Peter Jokostra in 1959: “Ich hab ein ungebrochenes Vertrauen zur Wirksamkeit des Gedichts, – vielleicht nicht

292 Notes ‘des Gedichts’, sondern des VERSES, der wahrscheinlich wieder mehr Zauberspruch, Beschwörungsformel wird werden müssen” (Tgahrt 1993: 411). 27. Bobrowski introduced a reading in 1963 with the provocatively optimistic argument that advancing technology meant the age of taking possession of territory and laying claim to it was coming to an end, rendering invalid concepts such as ‘Heimat’ and ‘Heimweh’ (longing for the Heimat), the nation state and national consciousness. “In this awareness”, he announced, “I have sketched out an overview of what is irrevocably disappearing, in an area in which these claims to living space [he uses the Nazi word ‘Lebensraum’] were taken particularly seriously: but as a traveller, a person merely passing through, no longer belonging there, as someone who comes and goes away again” (Tgahrt 1993: 325).

5 The Call of the Wild: Hunting and Ecology 1. I am indebted in this chapter to Matt Cartmill’s informative and thoughtprovoking book A View to a Death in the Morning (1996), which combines cultural history with a persuasive anthropological critique of hunting. I have also drawn on the chapter ‘The Greenness of Hunting’ in Donna Landry’s book The Invention of the Countryside (2001). The essays in Werner 1999 provide more detail on the history of hunting in Germany (especially in the Palatinate), and its cultural significance. Bode and Emmert 2000, which focuses on ecological concerns, has also been a useful source. Dinzelbacher 2000 and Spehr 1994 provide further background information. 2. There is, however, one exception: “You must not eat flesh with life, that is to say, blood, in it.” In the immediately following lines, God also demands account of human and animal “life-blood”, and goes on to establish a covenant with Noah, his descendants and every living creature on the ark, that never again will He destroy all living creatures by a flood. 3. Cartmill notes that the symbolic elevation of deer to noble and supernatural status may be in part traceable back to the ancient Celtic tradition of reverence for the stag (see chapter 4: ‘The White Stag’, of Cartmill 1996). The supposedly virtuous elements of endurance and ethical responsibility in his hunting practice provided a bridge for imagining the forgiveness of the saint. The curious development of St Hubert (rather than the second-century Roman St Eustace, St Giles or St German, about all of whom similar legends existed) into the patron saint of German hunters met a need of the nobility for ideological vindication. Hunting was invested with positive cultural attributes through the link with the French legend and the aura of saintliness. 4. See Nimtz-Köster 2001 and the webpages of the Initiative zur Abschaffung der Jagd (Initiative for the Abolition of Hunting), which has organised protest marches in Berlin for several years, at http://www.abschaffung-der-jagd.de. 5. Apart from general debarking, silver fir, maple, ash and beech have suffered disproportionately from deer grazing their young shoots, leaving behind a monoculture of planted spruce susceptible to storm damage and increasing erosion. 6. See the aims of hunting as formulated on ‘Jagd-online’ http://www.jagdonline.de, the website of the Deutscher Jagdschutzverband (literally, the ‘German Hunting Protection Association’). The page on Waidgerechtigkeit,

Notes 293

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

the traditional ethos of hunting subscribed to by professionals and amateurs, lists regulations and practices concerning the care for and protection of animals, which include elements of environmental protection alongside the avoidance of unnecessary suffering. The rapid increase in the deer in Europe and North America over the last 40 years (there are now more roe deer, muntjac, fallow, red and sika in Britain than at any time in the past century, and about £50 million of damage is caused by road accidents annually) has made them something of a pest species and led to increasing conflicts over land use between hunters and recreational users of the countryside on the one hand and farmers, foresters and gardeners on the other. See, however, Thomas Dupke’s study of the hunter and writer Hermann Löns (1993), to which I refer below. Useful background information is also provided by Jost Hermand’s chapter on animals in nineteenth-century German literature, ‘Gehätschelt und gefressen. Das Tier in den Händen der Menschen’ (1991b: 53–74). Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory (1995) and Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forests: The Shadow of Civilisation (1992) discuss these motifs in German myths and fairy tales. For a fuller account of Alscher’s life and a general introduction to his writing see Goodbody 2003. It is likely that Alscher absorbed Nietzsche’s ideas indirectly, like Löns and many other contemporaries, from the popular works of Julius Langbehn and Paul de Lagarde (see Dupke 1993: 167–72). In the case of Löns, this was posthumous, for he lost his life in the First World War. In chapter 1 of his book, Dupke discusses the role which the monument erected to Löns in the Lüneburg Heath played in Nazi ceremonies and how the author was transformed into a patron of rearmament, self-sacrifice for the fatherland and Blood and Soil. Ideological parallels with internationally better-known contemporaries writing on nature and animals such as Knut Hamsun (Growth of the Soil, 1917) and Henry Williamson (Tarka the Otter, 1927) are discussed in chapter 7 (‘The Literary Ecologist’) of Bramwell 1989. Horst Fassel edited a comprehensive anthology of Alscher’s stories on behalf of the Landsmannschaft der Banater Schwaben in 1995, but the only edition currently available is the recent reprint Die Bärin, edited by Hela Korodi (Alscher 2000), which contains 11 of the 14 stories in the original volume of the same name together with eight other stories of Alscher’s. Further biographical details and a very useful discussion of Stern’s media work, journalism and writing are to be found in the interviews and articles in Stern 1997 and Fischer 1997. Stern’s adoption of the term “Verhausschweinung” (‘turning into a domestic pig’, p. 63) from the ethologist Konrad Lorenz prompts the question whether using pigs as symbols of docility and thoughtless gluttony does not play into the hands of those who underestimate their intelligence and capacity for pleasure and suffering, and consequently see them as falling outside the sphere of our moral concern. Stern reflects on the process of domesticating wild animals, for instance p. 81, where Joop notes that the winter feeding of red deer in the Bavarian Alps was begun by the Wittelsbach dynasty centuries ago. However, he

294 Notes seems to fall short of not only the insights formulated in Gernot Böhme’s Natürlich Natur (1992) but also his own aim to combine emotional attachment to animals with rational understanding and argument (a goal which Heimbach describes as critically inflected love of animals [“reflektierte Tierliebe”] and empathetic knowledge of them [“sensible Tierkunde”] – Fischer 1997: 150).

6 Greening the City 1. See also ‘The Social Claim on Urban Ecology. Interview with Andrew Ross’ – Bennett and Teague 1999: 15f. 2. The form of urban writing so far seized on most often by ecocritics is, according to Lawrence Buell, “the narrative, essay or poem of rediscovery of unexpected signs of nature in the city”. These are, however, relatively modest in ambition, constituting “epiphanies [ … ] against the background of enclosure” rather than engaging in a reimagining of the urban bioregion (Buell 2005: 86f.). 3. Hermand 1991a: 152f. It is an indication of the broken tradition of green thinking in Germany that the mix of the utopian and the practical in the latter idea, which emerged from a seminar of Robert Jungk’s (see Jungk 1976), was derived from the writings of the American and British environmentalists Murray Bookchin and E.F. Schumacher rather than earlier German theorists such as Landauer and Hart. 4. Heinrich Hart, ‘Gartenstädte’ (first leaflet of the Deutsche Gartenstadtgesellschaft), quoted from Bergmann 1970: 151. 5. See Ulrich Linse, ‘Einführung. Landkommunen 1890–1933’, in Linse 1983: 7–23, here p.7. 6. David Midgley has already argued along these lines in his study of the literature of the Weimar Republic, noting in the chapter on ‘The City and the Country’ that it is too simplistic to assume a categoric association of the city with the forces of modernisation and the provinces with those of reaction in the wider culture of the time (Midgley 2000: 262f.). 7. As in the case of Eberhard’s father’s inn, ‘mother’ nature serves as a substitute for a deceased mother, providing a womb-like security and warmth. Raabe is not the only writer for whom nature plays a central role in a masculine, tendentially regressive and patriarchal discourse, in which women are often absent as equal partners (see Boa and Palfreyman 2000: 26f.). 8. Heinrich Förster, ‘Wesen und Bedeutung der Kleingartenbewegung’, Zeitschrift für Kommunalwirtschaft (1929), no. 17, column 1238. Quoted from Stein 2000: 160. 9. Gerhard Richter, Deutsche Schreberjugendpflege (Schriften des RVKD 19), Frankfurt am Main 1930, p. 16. Quoted from Stein 2000: 236. 10. In Utöpchen. Geschichte einer Sehnsucht is another of the forgotten minor works discovered by Jost Hermand (1991a: 124). 11. First published in 1949, it was reprinted by the Verlag Peter Selinka (Ravensburg) in 1987. 12. Apart from Irmgard Elsner Hunt’s article on Gurk’s ‘Berlin’ trilogy (Hunt 1991), Kähler (1986: 205–9) and Midgley (2000: 282–4) briefly discuss Gurk’s best-known novel, Berlin. Gurk is not, however, mentioned in Andreas

Notes 295

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

Freisfeld’s study of some hundred twentieth-century city novels (Freisfeld 1982), Klaus Scherpe’s Die Unwirklichkeit der Städte (1988 – a collection of essays on literary representations of the city between Modernism and Postmodernism) or the essays on literature about Berlin between the Gründerzeit and National Socialism edited by Klaus Siebenhaar (1992). There is an oblique reflection here of Gurk’s own experiences. He moved, for financial reasons, from the city centre to a flat in Berlin-Wedding, situated on a ‘Privatweg’ close to the Laubenkolonie Togo, between the Afrikanische Straße and the Müllerstraße (see Emter 1995:12). In the ideal of becoming “naturnahe” (p. 38), and merging painlessly into nature in death (p. 114), which has been noted above in Klaus Modick’s novella Moos, there is an echo of the metamorphosis of Greek myth. “The text is tantamount to an invitation to visit the place, and parts of the nature reserve are still there”, writes Katrin Hillgruber (Hillgruber 2000). Seuren further alludes to the special biological properties of toads’ skin, referring to a newspaper article telling us licking toads has become a new fashion in America replacing the use of cocaine and designer drugs, since their glands possess a stimulant (p. 94). References to the term by the narrator’s partner Lena (e.g. p. 269) suggest a parallel between self-renewal through sex and the attempt to regain the immediate relationship with nature experienced in childhood. Finally, Seuren also plays on the figurative meaning of ‘Kröten’ (‘money’) with respect to Staudinger’s preoccupation with obtaining municipal funding and private donations. And Katrin Hillgruber has suggested that Seuren may be echoing the title of Arthur Koestler’s novel The Case of the Midwife Toad (German title Der Krötenküsser, 1971). “Wir wollten 10.000 Quadratmeter sanieren, eine verwahrloste Landschaft” (pp. 8f.). See also: “Er [ … ] wollte mir den Paß zeigen, den er sich bei der Stadt verschafft hatte, um seine alte, kaputte Wildnis aus Kindertagen zu sanieren” (p. 41). Seuren was to return to the theme of the Nazis’ relationship with nature in the historical novel Die Galapagos-Affäre (2001). Staudinger in particular resembles Max Frisch’s Walter Faber (in the novel Homo faber) in being driven to impose order on nature with the help of technology by fear of what is beyond his control. His own ageing and illness, incontrovertible proof that he is himself a part of nature and subject to its laws, are the real source of his anxieties.

7 Nature as a Cultural Project 1. In The End of Nature (1989) Bill McKibben lamented the lost autonomy of nature, which we have killed off through humanisation, and rendered a cultural artefact. Hartmut Böhme’s position, like that of his brother Gernot (see Böhme 1992), is closer to that of Donna Haraway in Primate Visions and the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (Haraway 1989, 1991). He differs from McKibben in reminding us that even pre-industrial nature was given shape by virtue of its location in a cultural project and in welcoming the blurring of the distinction between the natural and the artificial. 2. Harré et al. argue similarly that we need to pool the insights from as many metaphors for nature as possible so as to limit the damage resulting from the

296 Notes unforeseen negative consequences of living by any one metaphor (1999: 95). Carl Amery has given the idea fictional form in his novel Das Geheimnis der Krypta (1990), where one of his protagonists applies for a research grant for a project on ‘Sphaghistics’. Anchored in Systems Theory, sphaghistics (Greek: ‘sphage’  ‘defeat’) is concerned with rediscovering historical developments in thought which have been discarded and forgotten in the course of Western civilisation: “Indem sie sich weigert, auf den Erfolgs-Strich zu gehen, behält die Sphaghistik das ganze Feld der Potentialität im Auge, tut sie den Schritt in eine höhere Dimension, in die Komplexität nicht-linearer Formeln” (pp. 109–10). 3. See Jürgen Haupt’s discussion of Adorno’s conception of nature and technology in Natur und Lyrik (1982: 129–34). 4. Jürgen Haupt’s discussion of Bloch is again helpful. See Haupt 1982: 215–24, where similar ideas in Herbert Marcuse, Alfred Schmidt and Jürgen Habermas, representing positions between Bloch’s militant optimism and Adorno’s radical pessimism, are also examined. 5. This is one of a series of references to religious, philosophical and literary works, which seem primarily intended to add weight to an otherwise lightweight narrative. Each of the 24 chapters begins with a motto (from the Bible, Seneca, Epicurus, Walter von der Vogelweide, etc.) and further classical tags are introduced as entries in the scrap-books kept by a retired teacher. Fragments of poems by Eichendorff, Bürger and Benn are affectionately remembered by members of the group, and there are allusions to the Psalms, Luther and Shakespeare, Goethe and Schiller, etc. Roland Koch describes them fittingly as “cultural ballast introduced to impress readers” (1997: 6).

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Index Adorno, Theodor W., 21, 23, 26, 31–2, 39, 119, 129, 136, 203, 271, 278, 283, 296 aesthetics, ecological, 3, 6, 7, 9, 16, 18, 19, 21, 23, 24, 26–7, 28–38, 46, 47, 59, 78, 144, 148, 149, 172, 259, 270, 284, 289 Agrarian Romanticism, 15, 214 allotments, 218–9, 221–38, 246–8, see also Laubenkolonie; Schrebergarten Alscher, Otto, xiii, 181–96, 277, 278, 293 Gogan und das Tier, 183, 193–5 other novels, 183, 189–90 stories, 183, 184–7, 191–3, 195–6, 200, 206–7 American literature, 5, 7, 8, 9–10, 12, 22, 39, 45, 124, 187, 210, 286 Amery, Carl, 17, 74, 296 Der Untergang der Stadt Passau, 238, 268, 270, 271 Anders, Günther, 16, 23 animals, 14, 15, 24, 31, 57, 61, 73, 106, 134, 143, 144, 149, 154, 158, 162, 168–208, 209, 224, 225, 240–3, 249, 252, 260, 277, 290, 292, 293–4 animism, 56, 163 anthropocentrism, 10, 28, 36, 37, 55, 63, 93, 95, 105, 120, 125, 139, 140, 152, 159, 165, 181, 187, 205, 210, 241, 259, 270, 277, 290 anthropomorphism, 79, 143–4, 188, 196, 207 Anthroposophy, 4, 45, 76 apocalypse, apocalypticism, xii, 6, 10, 14, 17, 20, 34, 85, 88–91, 97, 108–9, 115–17, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126, 199, 216, 269, 286, 288 ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and Environment), 8, 14, 280–1

atom bomb, 16, 17, 51, 54, 71, 85, 90, 91, 99, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 117, 125, 136 Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 170 Bacon, Francis, 6, 56, 258 Bahro, Rudolf, 17, 85 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 12 Bate, Jonathan, xiii, 8–9, 10–11, 13, 129–32, 134–5, 137–40, 153, 167, 290 Bateson, Gregory, 13, 38, 53 Berger, John, 196 Berman, Marshall, 66–8, 70–1, 72, 285, 286 Bible, biblical stories and images, 27, 91, 104, 107, 123, 137, 141, 171–2, 209, 258, 296 Adam and Eve (Garden of Eden), 69, 97, 247–9 Flood, 68, 115, 292 Sodom and Gomorrha, 216 Blatter, Silvio, 238 Bloch, Ernst, 23, 31, 129, 271, 296 Blood and Soil, 16, 190, 214, 215, 226, 293 Bobrowski, Johannes, xiii, 4, 138–9, 159–67, 263, 277, 278, 290, 291, 292 Böhme, Gernot, xii, 18, 21, 24, 30–4, 36–8, 259, 278, 282, 289, 294, 295 Böhme, Hartmut, xii, xiv, 18, 19, 21, 24, 30–34, 36–38, 39, 41, 74, 255, 257–60, 262, 267, 270, 275, 278, 282, 295 Bölsche, Wilhelm 143, 144, 213, 283 Bonsels, Waldemar, 190 Born, Nicolas, 96, 239 Braun, Volker, xii, 50, 75, 81–6 Hans Faust (Hinze und Kunze), 82–3, 286 poems, 81–2, 84, 265–7, 271 323

324 Index Brecht, Bertolt, x, 4, 81, 93, 104, 107, 132, 226, 264, 271 Der Flug der Lindberghs, 264–5 Herr Keuner und die Natur, 272 Leben des Galilei, 90 Brezan, Jurij, 74 Brückner, Christine, xiv, 239, 255, 272–6 Büchner, Georg, 60, 282 Buell, Lawrence, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 24, 45, 294 Burke, Kenneth, 7 Eapek, Karel, 95 Capra, Fritjof, 49, 52–3, 55, 283 Cartmill, Matt, 168–70, 175, 179, 205, 292 Celan, Paul, 135, 138 children’s literature, 20, 268 Cibulka, Hanns, xii, 50, 75–7, 81, 238 city, urbanisation, urban ecology, x, xi, xiii-xiv, 12, 28, 41, 91, 93, 102–3, 104, 141, 159, 189, 191–2, 209–52, 268, 277, 294–5 city-country divide, 8, 18, 210, 213, 214, 215–17, 219–21, 232, 245–6, 252, 294 see also Garden City Claudius, Matthias, 173 colonies, rural and urban, 69, 71, 101, 102–3, 213, 214–15, 218, 221–3, 224, 226, 228, 230, 231, 232, 233–6, 248, 265, 274–6 see also allotments comedy, 124–6 compensation theory (Marquard), 28–9, 34, 40, 92, 158, 278, 283 conservation, 3, 15, 16, 21, 134, 172, 174, 175, 176, 178, 191, 201, 202, 207, 214, 240, 258–9, 267 country, countryside, 3, 16, 61, 81, 159, 160, 176, 180, 219–20, 224, 227, 238, 268, 275, 282, 292, 293 see also city-country divide Cramer, Friedrich, 74 cultural ecology, 13, 24, 38–40, 278–9 cultural pessimism, Zivilisationskritik, xi, 14–17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 31, 90–1, 102, 107, 115–17, 124, 148, 204, 214, 217, 281

Darwin, Charles, viii, 34, 45, 54, 63, 173, 185, 189, 237 death (as reunion with nature), 79–80, 133–4, 136, 140, 142, 145, 146, 147, 170, 174, 175–6, 189, 218, 228, 261–2, 289, 295 Deep Ecology, 24, 34, 35, 36, 37, 49, 105, 130, 167, 270 Degenhardt, Franz-Josef, 228, 267 Derrida, Jacques, 90 Descartes, René, 6, 258 Ditfurth, Hoimar von, 17 diversity (natural and cultural), ix, 13, 29, 31, 35, 39, 40, 163, 178, 211, 278, 280 Döblin, Alfred, 90, 104, 105, 229, 287 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, 90, 121, 125 dwelling, xiii, 14, 32, 41, 129–30, 131, 132, 133, 134–6, 138, 140, 149, 152, 163, 165–7, 278 ecocriticism, ix, 5–14, 24–5, 27–8, 280 ecofeminism, 11–12, 37, 281 in Germany, ix, x, 5, 14, 18–24, 28, 282 literalism, 10–11 nature-endorsing vs. naturesceptical approach, 25–8 social ecocriticism, 12–13, 211–12 ecolinguistics, 13–14 ecologism, 12, 49, 130, 259, 280 ecology, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 29, 45, 47, 53, 110, 211–12, 217, 280 ecology park, 218, 219, 237, 245–8 ecopoetics, 129–31, 132, 135, 137, 138, 139–40, 149, 153, 156, 158, 164, 167, 290 ecospiritualism, 12, 30–1, 49, 52–3, 59, 103, 132, 133–4, 142, 144, 145–6, 270 see also Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; New Age; pantheism Eich, Günter, 16, 91, 104, 138, 263, 291 Eichendorff, Joseph Freiherr von, 11, 18, 31, 137, 155, 215–16, 269, 296 Elias, Norbert, 34–5, 255 English literature, 8–9, 10–11

Index Enlightenment, viii, 9, 19, 30, 34, 36, 41, 47, 48, 52, 54, 55, 84, 119, 122, 139, 215, 257, 269, 282 environmental concern, viii, 4, 8, 9, 14–15, 16, 19, 48, 75, 113, 281 environmental ethics, 18, 37, 46, 55 environmental literature, xi, 9–10, 19, 21 environmentalism, environmental movement, 7, 12, 13, 14–15, 17, 18, 65, 75, 123, 124, 178, 215, 238, 240, 244, 258, 270, 280, 282 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, xii, 17, 96–7, 109–26, 277 poems, 90, 113–14, 288 Untergang der Titanic, 109–10, 112–13, 114–19; as postmodern work, 123–4, 126 Zur Kritik der politischen Ökologie, 114, 116 evolution, 4, 20, 35, 45, 48, 63, 104, 125, 169, 172, 173–4 Expressionism, 90–1, 93, 96, 100, 102, 105, 107, 120, 123, 142, 145, 191, 192, 216, 217, 229, 286 Fallada, Hans, 218, 224, 229 Fechner, Gustav Theodor, 139, 142, 143–4, 145, 146, 283 Ferry, Luc, 130–1 film, 4, 13, 33–4, 74, 96, 110, 111, 112, 169, 198, 226, 239, 277 Finke, Peter, xii, 13, 38–9, 278 Fontane, Theodor, 4, 88, 216 Foucault, Michel, 24, 26, 63, 246–7 Frisch, Max, 4, 238 Homo faber, 74, 90, 238, 295 Fromm, Erich, 169, 174–5, 180–1, 194 Garden City, 102, 210, 213, 214, 248 Garrard, Greg, 7, 14, 125–6, 209, 280, 286, 289 GDR (German Democratic Republic) 17, 20, 46, 75, 76, 81–2, 159–60, 177, 228, 265, 269, 286 gender, see under nature/gender of genre, x, 6, 9, 11, 13, 14, 18, 19, 20, 22, 26–7, 125, 132, 198, 209, 267, 281

325

Gifford, Terry, 9, 210, 282 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, xii, 4, 18, 19, 27, 30–1, 33, 45–86, 138, 141, 143, 151, 160, 215–16, 260, 269 Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 57–61, 75, 228, 284 Farbenlehre, 49, 50, 54, 57, 76, 78–9 Faust, 26–7, 46, 50, 63–73, 74–5, 81–4, 86, 238, 265, 270, 285, 286 gentle empiricism, 47, 51, 55, 72, 77 morphology, organic unity, 45, 46, 52, 76 poems, 57, 58, 59, 61, 65, 79, 86, 262 reception, 46, 74–86, 265–6, 283, 296 Über den Granit, 61, 64, 284 ‘Weltfrömmigkeit’, 41, 49 Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, 47, 54, 62, 94, 283–4 Grass, Günter, x, 91, 160 Die Rättin, x, 123, 238, 267, 288 Groh, Ruth and Dieter, 18, 21, 28–9, 34–8 Gruhl, Herbert, 17, 65, 67–68 Gurk, Paul, xiii, 74, 218, 223, 228–38, 246–8, 251, 277, 294–5 Laubenkolonie Schwanensee, 218, 228, 229–38, 245–6, 248 Gypsies, 183, 189–90, 191, 193, 232 Haeckel, Ernst, 3–4, 20–1, 45, 131, 142, 143, 144, 145, 283 Hamann, Johann Georg, 139, 165 Haraway, Donna, 12, 295 Hart, Heinrich and Julius, 142, 144, 213, 294 Härtling, Peter, 228, 239, 267 Haushofer, Marlen, 238 Heidegger, Martin, 13, 24, 129–40, 146, 152, 153, 155, 163, 263, 271, 289 Heidenreich, Gert, 74 Heimat, ix, 20, 22, 26, 160–1, 167, 231, 234, 267–8, 270, 287, 292

326 Index Heimatschutzbewegung (Homeland Protection Movement), 3, 15, 214–15, 229 Heine, Heinrich, 93, 215, 282–3 Herder, Johann Georg, 4, 15, 58, 120, 136, 141, 143, 173, 234 Hermand, Jost, 18, 19, 25, 47–9, 69–70, 212, 213, 214, 217, 283, 293, 294 Hesse, Hermann, 4, 104, 238 heterotopias, 246–7, 251 Heym, Georg, 91, 123, 216 Hitler, Adolf, 177, 244 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 146 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 4, 30, 51, 81, 120, 129, 132, 138, 139, 141, 151, 159, 165, 216, 271, 286 holism, 7, 35, 36, 40, 41, 45, 47–8, 51, 53, 55, 60, 61, 77, 120, 146, 205 hubris, xii, 68, 82, 88, 96, 97, 111, 113, 185, 290 Humboldt, Alexander von, 3, 45, 172 hunting, xiii, 16, 168–208, 240, 277, 292, 293 identity, ix, 5, 8, 15, 20, 24, 40, 119, 124, 169–70, 175, 193, 212, 235, 269, 272 idyll, 13, 18, 27, 33, 72, 92, 120, 147–8, 189, 190, 209, 215, 219, 221, 250, 291 see also pastoral imagery, literary, 6, 12, 14, 18, 26, 27, 28, 33–4, 47, 48, 49, 50, 59, 65, 69, 70, 74, 84, 85, 86, 91, 100, 103, 106, 107, 110, 115, 116, 117, 118, 121, 123, 124, 135, 136, 140–1, 147–50, 149, 151, 152–3, 154, 159, 191, 198, 199, 209, 216, 229, 237, 249, 256, 259, 262, 280, 284, 290 see also metaphor Immermann, Karl Leberecht, 90, 267 Inner Emigration, 76, 138, 142, 147, 150–2, 159 Jaspers, Karl, 16, 283 Jonas, Hans, 18, 26, 34, 73

Jugendbewegung (Youth Movement), 15–16, 214, 223 Jünger, Ernst, 23, 95, 129, 264, 289 Jünger, Friedrich Georg, 16, 129, 159, 289 Jungk, Robert, 17, 294 Kafka, Franz, 86, 216 Kaiser, Georg, xii, 90–109, 217, 218, 237, 277, 287 ‘Gas’ plays, 90, 94, 96, 97–103, 104, 106 Hölle Weg Erde, 103–4, 108, 287 as Modernist, 118, 119, 121, 122–3, 126 Rosamunde Floris, 106–7, 287 Kaiser, Gerhard, 19, 20, 26–7, 58, 69, 72–3, 284, 285 Kant, Immanuel, 30, 31, 34, 35, 36, 65, 78, 274 Kästner, Erich, 229 Kellermann, Bernhard, 72, 111, 263 Kerner, Justinus, 81, 90 Kirsten, Wulf, 138, 263, 269–70 Klages, Ludwig, 15, 23, 97, 129 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 81, 159, 277 Koch, Jurij, 74, 238, 268, 270 Kolmar, Gertrud, 224 Kramer, Theodor, 138 Kroeber, Karl, 11, 13 Kulturlandschaft (cultural landscape), 3, 31–2, 232, 271, 278 Kunert, Günter, 4, 90, 91 Landauer, Gustav, 102–3, 213, 294 landscape, 3, 5, 8, 12, 13, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 27, 28, 29–30, 32, 33, 38, 39, 45, 53, 57, 60, 68, 72, 75, 76, 79, 84, 85, 113, 140–1, 142–3, 147, 160, 162, 163, 166–7, 172, 177, 182, 183, 184, 188, 191, 195–6, 198, 214, 220, 221, 232, 237, 240, 258, 260, 266–7, 269–70, 277, 278, 286, 290 see also Kulturlandschaft language of nature, 30–2, 34, 51, 79, 135, 136–7, 139, 156, 166–7, 260, 262–3, 282, 283, 290–1

Index Laubenkolonie, 223–4, 226, 227–8, 230–7, 246, 248 Lebensreformbewegung (Life Reform Movement), 214, 222, 223 legends Faust, 46, 66, 71, 74–5, 81, 82–4, 86, 238, 265, 267, 285, 286 St Francis, 172 St Hubert, 175–6, 292 Titanic, 87–8, 96, 109–12, 112–26, 288 Lehmann, Wilhelm, 22, 76, 138, 145, 159, 162, 163, 165, 195–6, 263, 291, 295 Loerke, Oskar, xiii, 104, 138–9, 140–59, 163, 165, 236, 269, 277, 278, 290, 291 poems, 140–3, 144–5, 146–7, 149, 150–9, 260–3 poetological essays, 145–6, 149, 150, 152, 153, 154, 155 Löns, Hermann, 4, 20, 25, 188–9, 190–1, 194, 293 Lorenz, Konrad, 73, 293 Lukács, Georg, 46, 285 Lyotard, Jean-François, 119 Magic Realism, 147–8, 159, 263 Marcuse, Herbert, 23, 31, 296 Maron, Monika, 238, 267 Marx, Leo, 7, 210, 286 Marxism, 8, 46, 75, 84, 89, 96–7, 99–100, 112, 114, 117, 119, 226, 271, 272, 274, 286 see also socialism Matussek, Peter, 19, 26, 58, 63–5, 73–4, 75, 265, 284 McKibben, Bill, 259, 295 Meeker, Joseph, 7, 13, 39, 124–5 metamorphosis, 46, 68, 79–80, 275, 295 metaphor, 14, 19, 26, 34, 35, 40, 48, 51, 109–10, 113, 121, 136, 141, 147, 150, 155, 158, 198–9, 203, 209, 256, 275, 286, 296 Meyer-Abich, Klaus Michael, 17, 18, 34, 46, 49, 51, 52, 55, 77, 283 Modernism, xii, 16, 118, 119–22, 124, 148, 216, 295

327

see also Expressionism Modernity and modernisation, critiques of, viii, xi, 14, 16, 22–3, 25, 27, 40, 41, 53, 62–3, 66, 70–2, 75, 83, 85, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 98, 101, 110, 113, 119, 120, 122–3, 129, 132, 139, 145, 146, 148–9, 158, 160, 175, 190, 191, 210, 211, 212, 214–16, 218, 219, 225–6, 229, 235, 247, 257, 258, 264, 278, 280, 282, 287, 288, 294 Modick, Klaus, xii, 50, 75, 77–81, 206, 238, 278, 295 Monism, 45, 76, 132, 139, 142, 143, 145–5, 190, 260 Moritz, Karl Philipp, 20 Morris, William, 9, 103, 131, 210 Mother Nature, 27, 56, 57, 59, 80, 144, 247, 281, 284, 294 Mumford, Lewis, 210, 211 Murphy, Patrick, 11, 12, 14 Muschg, Adolf, xii, 26, 49, 53–5, 73–4 myth, 69, 74, 88, 91, 111, 119, 141 Diana, 175, 205 fairy tales, 141, 269, 291, 293 Gaia, 59, 80, 144 nature myths, 15, 16, 24, 25, 26, 27, 57, 160, 190, 215–16, 240, 251, 259, 268, 278 Orpheus, Orphism, 165 Pan, 156, 234, 260–1 Philemon and Baucis, 65–6, 68, 70, 71, 269–70 Prometheus, 69, 81, 85, 97, 231, 266 Sarmatia, 160, 161, 163 names and naming, xiii, 136–9, 152–5, 164–5 National Socialism, Nazis, 16, 21, 129, 130, 150, 174, 176–7, 183, 189, 191, 214, 229, 242, 244, 265, 281, 282, 292, 293, 295 Naturalism, Naturalists, 122, 216, 229 nature alienation from, viii, 41, 47, 51, 60, 62, 77, 94, 145, 146, 211

328 Index nature – continued conceptions of, 9, 16, 18, 24, 25–6, 28, 30, 34–6, 39, 41, 45–8, 53, 56–8, 60–1, 63–5, 73–5, 77–9, 92, 96, 97, 102, 105, 119, 122, 143, 150, 151, 168, 171, 204, 236, 237, 241, 252, 255, 258–60, 263, 267, 270–2, 275, 277–9, 283, 284, 290, 291, 296 cult of, viii, 16, 105, 226 as cultural product, xiv, 252, 255–8, 270–6 disenchantment of, 56, 144, 146 gender of, 7, 12, 25, 35, 59, 73, 169–70, 175, 191; see also Mother Nature human nature, 64, 68, 168–9, 179, 180, 266, 277 literary representation of, ix, 4, 9, 21, 29, 32, 40, 55, 86, 132, 141, 148–9, 278 mastery over, domination of, viii, 6, 8, 12, 16, 48, 49, 51, 59, 66, 67, 69, 70–1, 100, 102, 111, 120, 137, 227, 242, 265, 284, 291 nature writing, 6, 7, 8, 22, 282 New Age, 37, 52, 76 Neoromanticism, Neoromantics, 142, 148, 260, 272 Nietzsche, Friedrich, viii, 15, 46, 60, 96, 97, 104–6, 145, 174, 184, 186, 189, 236, 237, 287, 291, 293 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 11, 31, 33, 120, 141, 260, 271–2 nuclear technology, accidents, 16, 17, 26, 31, 50, 66, 71, 74, 76–7, 85, 91, 109, 111, 113, 115, 117, 123, 178, 258, 273 see also atom bomb Ortega y Gasset, José, 179–80, 181, 184, 205 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 269–70 pantheism, 18, 47, 49, 58, 61, 113, 132, 156, 195, 262, 287 pastoral, 6, 12, 14, 16, 18, 60–1, 75, 76, 209, 210, 212, 215, 217, 234, 247, 251, 282, 286

see also idyll; simple life Pausewang, Gudrun, 228, 238 phenomenology, 13, 33, 289 see also Heidegger physiocentrism, biocentrism, ecocentrism, 10, 34, 36–7, 55, 63, 93, 241, 277 Plenzdorf, Ulrich, 75, 218, 227–8, 248 place, 13, 20, 33, 133–5, 137, 232, 235, 270, 290 Plumwood, Val, 12, 181 Postmodernism, postmodern, xii-xiii, 21, 25, 26, 28, 97, 109–10, 118–19, 121–6, 288 poststructuralism, constructivism, deconstruction, 11, 12, 13, 15, 23, 24–5, 26, 27–8, 55, 59, 64–5, 88, 90, 121, 141, 181–2, 188, 190, 191, 209, 240, 290, 291 Raabe, Wilhelm, 27, 94, 218, 219–21, 247, 248, 267 Reformbewegung (Lifestyle Reform Movement), 15 Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich, 3–4, 214 Rigby, Kate, 11, 31, 48, 56, 72–3, 130, 134, 135, 139–40, 164, 167, 271–2, 285, 289, 290 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 138, 140, 149–50, 164–5, 290, 291 risk, 87–8, 99, 107, 113, 115, 121, 280 Romanticism, Romantics, viii, 4, 5, 8–9, 10–11, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22, 24, 30, 31, 35–6, 48, 49, 53, 56, 58, 60, 89, 120, 132, 137, 141, 143, 175, 215–16, 231, 246, 260, 263, 269, 282, 287 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 46, 58, 61, 96, 97, 104, 172, 190, 234, 273–4, 277 Scheidewege, 77 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 11, 65, 143, 271 Schiller, Friedrich von, 3, 20, 31, 45, 65, 81, 138, 271, 280, 296 Schmidt, Arno, 17, 91 Schmidt, Ernst Wilhelm, 226–7

Index

329

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 60, 96, 104–5, 139, 157, 173, 236–7, 287, 291 Schreber, Daniel Gottlob Moritz, 222 Schrebergarten, 222–3, 225–6, 228, 248 Schwab, Günther, 74 Schweitzer, Albert, 172, 227 science, conceptions of, 5, 12, 22, 29–31, 46, 49–52, 55, 69, 77–8, 81, 86, 99, 107, 119, 146, 210, 221, 255, 260, 277, 283, 284 science fiction, 6, 13, 93, 229, 263, 267–8 Seel, Martin, 18, 283 Segeberg, Harro, 19, 20, 71–2, 93, 96, 98, 107–9, 263, 285 Seuren, Günter, xiii, 237–51, 277, 295 Sieferle, Rolf Peter, 18, 22, 56–8 simple life, 65–6, 183, 209–10, 212, 217, 227, 233–4, 247, 250–1 see also pastoral Snow, Charles Percy, xi, 92 Social Darwinism, 16, 20, 131, 185 socialism, 15, 70, 75, 81–4, 86, 93, 97, 99–100, 103, 112, 114, 117, 131, 183, 210, 264–5, 266–7, 273, 285, 286 Soper, Kate, xii, 24–5, 255 space, 21, 38, 101, 138, 210, 218–21, 224, 232, 239, 245–7, 251, 292 Spengler, Oswald, 15, 97, 115–16, 117, 124, 214 Steiner, Rudolf, 4, 45, 283 Stern, Horst, xiii, 178, 182, 196–208, 277, 293–4 Jagdnovelle, 199–208 novels, 198–9 work for television, 197–8 Stifter, Adalbert, 4, 141, 216, 236 sublime, 8, 57, 113, 236, 283 sustainability, 4, 15, 28, 29, 39, 228, 268 systems theory, 38–40, 52–3, 296

technology, critiques of, 20, 23, 46, 51–2, 76, 77, 81, 85–6, 90–6, 98–102, 107–9, 113–14, 115, 118, 121, 122, 132, 133, 263–7, 277 Thoreau, Henry David, 7, 9, 22, 45, 210 Toller, Ernst, 91, 95 travel writing, 10, 22, 198, 249 tropes, 14, 209, 247–8

Waldsterben (forest dieback), 17, 91 Walter, Otto F., 228, 267 Wandervogelbewegung, see under Jugendbewegung (Youth Movement) Wiechert, Ernst, 76, 238 Wille, Bruno, 144, 145 wilderness, the wild, 7, 12–14, 22, 40, 41, 148, 168, 172, 174, 180, 182, 187, 190, 192, 193, 194–6, 200, 203–4, 205, 207, 211, 219, 238, 239, 241, 249, 251, 252, 293–4 Williams, Raymond, 8, 93, 210, 216 Williamson, Henry, 282, 293 Wolf, Christa, x, 4, 73, 74, 91, 238 Störfall, x, 74, 90 Wolf, Friedrich, 217–18 Wolff, Uwe, 238, 267

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius, 4 Taoism, 52, 103, 104–5

Zapf, Hubert, xii, 13, 24, 38, 39–40, 278

Uexküll, Jakob von, 38 utopias, 15, 27, 29, 32, 47, 67, 69, 70, 71, 97, 103, 112, 117, 119–22, 130, 131, 136, 146, 150, 173, 209, 210, 212, 226–7, 228, 238, 245–7, 251, 259, 263, 273, 274–5, 278, 283, 285, 286, 288, 294 Vietta, Silvio, 18, 93, 98, 100, 119–22, 212 von Gizycki, Horst, 274 von Weizsäcker, Carl Friedrich, 17, 46, 50, 283