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Abstract
The six stories in Ulrike Almut Sandig's Buch gegen das Verschwinden, each multi-layered in itself, are linked by leitmotifs so making a cycle that invites repeated reading, rather as a symphony invites repeated listening. The later stories, especially the last sci-fi adventure, cast retrospective light back over the collection, so highlighting ecological issues in stories which juxtapose threatened disappearances (of species, of wilderness) on a geological time scale, with disappearances (a lost child, declining bodily health, death of loved ones, memory loss) on the time scale of individual human life. Sandig's vividly atmospheric writing has affinities with poetic realism, notably Storm's ‘Der Schimmelreiter’, and stands more broadly in a long post-Enlightenment tradition of fascination with scientific enquiry, yet tension between instrumental reason that seeks mastery over nature and anguished feeling for the natural world under threat from human activity.
Notes on Contributor
Elizabeth Boa is Professor Emerita of German at the University of Nottingham. She has published studies of Wedekind and of Heimat discourse, and is the author of Kafka: Gender, Class and Race in the Letters and Fictions (1996). She has also written extensively on writing by women and co-edited along with Heike Bartel Anne Duden — A Revolution of Words (2002) and Pushing at Boundaries: Approaches to Contemporary German Women Writers from Karen Duve to Jenny Erpenbeck (2007). Her publication ‘The New Woman as Satirist or Butt of Satire’, (OGS, 2017) is a recent essay on Mascha Kaléko, Hannah Höch, Thea von Harbou, and Irmgard Keun.
Notes
1 On the short story cycle see Jim Jordan, ‘From Guest Worker to Cultural Cosmopolitan: Evolving Identities in Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Short Story Cycle Der Hof im Spiegel’, Oxford German Studies, 45.3 (2016), 330–48 (p. 331).
2 Jonathan Creary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 3.
3 See Dirk Göttsche, Kleine Prosa in Moderne und Gegenwart (Münster: Aschendorff, 2006).
4 F. T. Marinetti, ‘Manifesto of Futurism 1909’, in Futurist Manifestos, ed. by Umbro Appolonio (London: Tate Publishing, 2009), pp. 19–23 (p. 21).
5 Anne Fuchs, ‘Defending Lateness: Deliberations on Acceleration, Attention, and Lateness, 1900–2000’, New German Critique, 42.2 (2015), 31–48 (p. 33).
6 ‘Introduction: Faulty Clocks, Human Errors, and the Management of Time in Modernity and Late Modernity’, in Time in German Literature and Culture, 1900–2015: Between Acceleration and Slowness, ed. by Anne Fuchs and J. J. Long (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 1–17.
7 See also John Tomlinson, The Culture of Speed: The Coming of Immediacy (London: Sage, 2007), pp. 146–53 on decelerating movements such as slow cities or slow food.
8 Ulrike Almut Sandig, Buch gegen das Verschwinden (Frankfurt a.M.: Schöffling & Co., 2015), p. 15; p. 152. Subsequent page references following quotations refer to this edition.
9 Thomas Freedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2017), p. 3.
10 Ibid., pp. 178–81.
11 The Anthropocene: The Human Era and How It Shapes our Planet (London: Synergetic Press, 2014), p. x; p. 226. The German original, Menschenzeit. Zerstören oder gestalten? Die entscheidende Epoche unseres Planeten appeared in 2011. Schwägerl also helped prepare Willkommen im Anthropozän. Unsere Verantwortung für die Zukunft der Erde, an exhibition which ran at the Deutsches Museum in Munich from December 2014 to January 2016.
12 Timothy Clark, Ecocriticsm on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 9.
13 Ibid., p. 14.; pp. 43–44.
14 Ibid., p. 191.
15 Ibid., p. 160.
16 ‘Campervan’ would be a more accurate translation, but mobile home better catches the metaphorical potential of ‘Wohnmobil’.
17 Ingo Schulze's Simple Storys about east German experiences after 1989 came out in 1998.
18 The Cultural Turn (London: Verso, 1980), p. 50.
19 See http://ulrike-almut-sandig.de/ for links to YouTube and other material.
20 Cf. Ian McEwan's resort to magic realism in The Child in Time (1987) to convey such traumatic loss.
21 UK press coverage of the disappearance in 2007 of Madeleine McCann may be one explanation for the pervasive trope of the disappeared child in recent television drama.
22 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Section VII, Part 1, 7 (New York: Collier & Son, 1909), p. 20.
23 See Elizabeth Boa, ‘Aping and Parroting: Imitative Performance in Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften’, in Performance and Performativity in German Cultural Studies, ed. by Carolin Duttlinger, Lucia Ruprecht and Andrew Webber (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003), pp. 21–40.
24 See Heike Bartel, ‘Karen Duve: Taxi (2008): Of Alpha-males, Apes, Altenberg and Driving in the City’, in Emerging German-Language Novelists of the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Lyn Marven and Stuart Taberner (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011), pp. 179–94.
25 See Schwärgerl, The Anthropocene, p. 45 on the disappearing ‘‘great outdoors’’ of the Holocene and the ‘‘great inside’’ of the Anthropocene.
26 Goethe's ‘Prolog im Himmel’ in the Faust drama is already anachronistic in an age when the ‘Verzeitlichung’, the modern temporalization of history and of nature, was well underway.
27 On scale framing see Clark, Ecocriticism, chapter 5.
28 Matthew Taylor and Hannah Ellis-Petersen, ‘Sorrow as World's Last Male Northern White Rhino Dies’, The Guardian, 21 March 2018, p. 3.
29 See Patrick Barkham, ‘Catastrophic decline of France's farmland birds signals Europe-wide Crisis’, The Guardian, 22 March 2018, p. 4.
30 Clark, Ecocriticism, p. 108.
31 Schwägerl, The Anthropocene, p. 11 notes that the slight incline along one side of Heidelbergerplatz in Berlin is an almost imperceptible trace of the bank of a gigantic river at the end of the last Ice Age.
32 See Clark, Ecocriticism, chapter 7 on ‘Anthropocene disorder’ or derangement.
33 See Fuchs, ‘Defending Lateness’, pp. 40–1 on the temporal logic of Freudian ‘Nachträglichkeit’ according to which delayed recall of a first event is triggered by memory of a second event which creates the conditions for trauma.
34 See Monika Maron's ecocritical novel Flugasche (1995).
35 Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetischismus’, in Studienausgabe, Bd. III, Psychologie des Unbewußten, (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1982), pp. 383–88 (p. 383).
36 Ibid., p. 388.
37 The mason's speech of blessing in Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften makes a comparable point about seemingly unshakable foundations.
38 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10z8SV6BMNA for a dramatic report by Bild on YouTube [accessed 15 April 2018].
39 See note 23
40 See Kate Rigby, ‘Gernot Böhme's Ecological Aesthetics of Atmosphere’, in Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches, ed. by Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby, (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011), pp. 139–54.
41 Theodor Storm, Der Schimmelreiter (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1992), p. 134.