Communing with Figs and Palm Trees. Nature Mysticism, Migration and Moral Maturity in Marica Bodrožić

Abstract

In her writings, the German-Croatian author Marica Bodrožić develops a new form of feminist ecocriticism from a postmigrant perspective, which portrays the mystical encounter with the natural world as essential for the understanding of the postmodern self and the survival of diverse postmigrant communities. Drawing on Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of moral maturity, Bodrožić suggests that the epistemological and aesthetic qualities of nature may help educate individuals towards critical, independent, but also empathetic thought and action. The key to this educational experience lies in contextualizing nature within political and social processes, while also acknowledging its transcendental dimension. In her novel, Mein weisser Frieden (2014), Bodrožić merges the genres of autobiography and essay to explore the relationship between memory, nature and identity via the lens of a hybrid German and post-Yugoslav intellectual heritage. By weaving together personal narrative and intertextual references from Romanticism to the contemporary period, she also challenges common assumptions about postmigrant writing and national belonging. Bodrožić suggests that a re-enchantment of the world is necessary to create the community of morally mature citizens that is needed to meet the challenges of alienation, displacement, and systemic violence in the postmodern world.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• Nature
• Mysticism
• Yugoslavia
• Ecocriticism
• Mediterranean
• Memory
• Heritage
• Nationalism
• War

German migration literature and writings about nature have not commonly been thought together. While ecocriticism has highlighted the role of climate migration in the age of the Anthropocene,² it has not sufficiently examined the relationship between existing nature and migrants in the here and now. Another reason for the neglect of nature in migrant writing may be owed to the fact that migration narratives are usually set in urban environments, with the natural world appearing mostly as a retrospective idyll of the countries that were left behind, only to be revisited during holidays or on heritage trips.

In her autobiographical novel, Mein weisser [sic] Frieden (2014, henceforth MWF), the Croatian-German writer Marica Bodrožić associates her migration to Hessen, Germany in the 1980s with a loss of nature and the sensuous comfort of the Southern climate in which she was raised: ‘Die Natur der Kindheit war über Nacht nahezu verschwunden, aber der Kopf ein Ort geworden. Auch der Sommer war in Hessen anders (es gab ihn nicht). Die achtziger Jahre waren im Schnitt eine sehr verregnete Zeit’ (MWF, 20). The external relocation is followed by an internal shift towards intellect exploration (‘der Kopf’), which turns the mind and its imagination into the new home. Another prominent German writer with Yugoslav roots, Saša Stanišić, conveys a similar sentiment in his debut novel Wie der Soldat das Grammophon repariert (2006), when he has his protagonist Aleksandar compare the wild river Drina of his upbringing in Višegrad, Bosnia favourably to the river Ruhr in Essen, Germany in a letter to his childhood friend Asija: ‘Asija, ich vermisse die launische Drina. Hier gibt es angeblich einen Fluss, die Ruhr, aber ich finde, nicht jedes Wasser, das fließt, muss gleich Fluss genannt werden.’³ This remark is placed within a long list of cultural contrasts between Bosnia and Germany, which also includes differences in food cultures, language confusion and reflections on a bi-furcated national identity. Stanišić’s depictions produce comic effect via exaggerated contrast, but by presenting Germany as the country of harsh weather, environmental pollution and industrialization, a place not of comforting landscapes but of spatial alienation, they also humorously interrogate assumptions of a reactionary Heimat discourse which has always pitted foreigners and minorities as being at odds with both so-called ‘natives’ and their presumably naturally assigned land.⁴ The Russian-German author Wladimir Kaminer, who has written both on German rural communities (Mein deutsches Dschungelbuch, 2003) and the German tradition of ‘Schrebergärten’ or allotment gardens (Mein Leben im Schrebergarten, 2007, and Diesseits von Eden. Neues aus dem Garten, 2013)⁵ has made light of the German unease with wilderness, which results in all forms of nature, especially in urban environments, being curtailed.⁶ These literary examples reflect a complex reality which has recently also been explored in sociological studies. Christine Katz has examined the relationship between migrants and their natural environment along the lines of differing religious and cultural notions.⁷ Both migrants from eastern Europe and Turkey affirm the value of nature per se but display diverging views on what they identify as nature in Germany (excluding, for example, urban parks). This divergence may explain the engrained public perception that migrants struggle to grasp the German dedication to environmentalism, which forms a crucial part of contemporary German identity.⁸ This is also confirmed by Katz, who points to the bias against Turkish and Arab migrants in German environmental organizations in particular, since these migrant groups are perceived as being too consumed by social issues to care about environmental causes.⁹ Finally, a number of more recent journalistic articles have identified a lacking sensibility for sustainability and environmental conservation in migrant communities in Austria and Germany, but have linked this phenomenon to class, rather than ethnicity or religion.¹⁰ Assuming that postmigrant writing reflects the diverse experience of migrants in Germany, one may conclude that the depiction of nature in postmigrant literature has not been given enough attention or been properly understood given a bias towards more political readings.

On the one hand, Bodrožić’s texts can be situated within a tradition of what I would like to call contemplative nature literature, where the reflection on nature is used to gain insights about the self and the world at large, which has been part of the German literary tradition from the Baroque age through Goethe and the Romantics. On the other, her politically aware nature mysticism also situates her within a newer trend of German nature writing¹¹ within social and political contexts, which has become particularly relevant in the second half of the twentieth century. This includes reflecting on the fraught relationship between nature writing and memory politics in the aftermath of the Shoah. The entanglement of nature writing with totalitarianism during the Third Reich, which saw the appropriation of nature and landscapes for the purposes of the Blut-und-Boden ideology, delayed the reception of environmental writing in Germany after 1945.¹² While its influence continued in the ‘naturmagische Schule’, a mode of poetry which evoked mythical imagery of an untainted and sublime natural world and was popular from the 1920s until the 1950s, for the new generation of postwar writers any remaining anti-political and escapist tendencies in nature poetry caused growing unease.¹³ As Axel Goodbody has shown, writers of the 1950s and 60s such as Ingeborg Bachmann, Günter Eich, Marie Luise Kaschnitz and Hans Magnus Enzensberger frequently combined their critique of industrial development and ecological destruction with a critique of the failed memory politics concerning the Nazi period.¹⁴ The anti-fascist commitment that the political left and environmental activists shared was still influential for the ‘green poetry’ in the 1970s and 80s, which advocated a return to harmonious life in and with nature but was also inspired by a ‘syncretist religiosity reflecting the New Age view of Germany’s Alternative Movement’.¹⁵ Bodrožić’s writings on nature combine a critical approach to memory with a philosophy of transcendental embodiment, while also acknowledging the postmigrant reality.

Remarkably enough, the establishment of the German Prize for Nature Writing in 2017, co-sponsored by the Umweltbundesamt, coincided with the abolishment of the Adalbert-von-Chamisso Prize for migrant writing.¹⁶ Postmigrant literature, the Chamisso Prize sponsoring Robert-Bosch foundation argued, had finally become part of the German mainstream and was thus not in need of specialized support anymore. Given the environmental crisis, on the other hand, writings about nature and the environment were perceived as deserving more representation in the literary establishment in order to promote ‘einen achtsameren Umgang mit der Natur.’¹⁷ Not surprisingly, recent literary writings on nature emphasize the role of social processes in nature’s imminent destruction. Examples for this can be found in Esther Kinsky’s prose and poetry reflections in her book FlussLand Tagliamento (2020), which follows a deteriorating river landscape, and Daniela Danz’s poetry collection Wildniß (2019), which laments the demise of the last remaining pockets of wilderness on the European continent. Nature has thus turned from a utopian imaginary to a topos of collective crisis. This has notably affected terminology — contemporary nature writing cannot be disentangled from reflections on literary ecology, literary ecocriticism and writing in the Anthropocene. While eschewing escapism, the new nature writing seems to challenge the disenchantment of modernity and rejects purely rationalist discussions on environmentalism. It thus includes nature in what Jürgen Habermas has observed as the ‘post-secularization’ of the Western world,¹⁸ resurrecting it as the teleological reference point it still was until the Enlightenment.¹⁹ It is significant that the Gaia hypothesis, which was co-developed by the chemist James Lovelock and the microbiologist Lynn Margulis,²⁰ and proposed that living beings and inorganic elements on planet Earth were entangled in a complex, reciprocal relationship which formed a synergistic, self-regulating entity (named Gaia after the ancient Greek goddess representing nature) was rejected for its perceived teleological and thus un-scientific implications.²¹

These contexts matter when reading Bodrožić, since her writings testify to her intellectual socialization in Germany as an immigrant on the one hand, but also locate the roots of her moral and spiritual evolution in the natural landscapes of her Dalmatian childhood. This essay will explore the relationship between nature mysticism, moral maturity and postmigrant identity in Bodrožić’s writing, with a particular emphasis on Mein weisser Frieden. The book, which defies clear genre categorizations and can be described as a mix of autobiographical novel, travelogue, and intertextual patchwork essay, follows the first-person female narrator, a German-Croatian writer, on a heritage trip back to Croatia and Bosnia. The protagonist’s initial motivation for the trip is the suicide of her cousin Filip, a close childhood friend and war veteran who never succeeded in processing his traumatic experiences from fighting in the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s. Filled with remorse for not having been able to prevent Filip’s death, her personal grief inspires a wider investigation of the totalitarian and patriarchal violence in the region in the twentieth century. The narrator arranges meetings with relatives, veterans, and war survivors to engage them in a dialogue about war, memory and morality, seeking to expose the nationalist views expressed by many of them as morally immature, and insisting that a prevention of the warred conflict would have been possible if enough people had resisted ideological indoctrination.

In her appeal to moral maturity, Bodrožić relies on Theodor W. Adorno’s call for a post-1945 education towards ‘moral maturity’ or ‘Erziehung zur Mündigkeit’, whose objective is to prevent the re-occurrence of fascism and genocide.²² Adorno had based his concept of moral maturity on Kant’s understanding of ‘Mündigkeit’ as the capacity for autonomous and rational thought,²³ but also added the capacity for immediate experience and resistance against authoritarianism (‘Erfahrungsfähigkeit’ and ‘Widerstand’)²⁴ as crucial components. In contrast to Adorno, however, who had famously declared that both morality and art had become corrupted after the reification brought on by late capitalism and the evils of Auschwitz,²⁵ Bodrožić believes in the human potential for ethical action even in the aftermath of atrocity. In her writings, the moral education of humanity is aided by the natural world, which she simultaneously describes as immutable and embedded in dynamic socio-political contexts. Bodrožić also links moral immaturity to gender: Throughout MWF, the perpetrators of war, the distorters of memory and disseminators of hate speech are men — chapter 7 begins with the observation, ‘“Krieg” ist ein Maskulinum und bedeutet “bewaffnete Auseinandersetzung”’ (MWF, 87). By contrast, reconciliation and self-awareness are mostly found in the encounters with women (many of them victims of war) as well as in natural sites such as the Adriatic coastline, which are often associated with feminine metaphors: ‘Das Meer scheint mir freundlich und großzügig in seinem Blau, mit dem Himmel verschmelzend, ein pralles Gedächtnis, eine allumfassende Mutter’ (MWF, 85).

Her understanding of gender in MWF is also situated within specific cultural geographies, with the feminized and peaceful imagery of the Adriatic being repeatedly juxtaposed to the aggressive masculinity of the Balkans. While Bodrožić rejects the orientalist representation of the Balkans as anti-modern, violent and anti-civilized as ‘eine […] Erfindung des Westens’ (MWF, 41), she simultaneously confirms these stereotypes in her portrayal of decidedly ‘Balkan’ patriarchal masculinity. Alienated from their own emotions (‘Diese Männer vom Balkan weinen nicht’, 119), the Balkan men in MWF follow the dictates of a belligerent tribe instead of their own conscience: ‘Das Eintauchen in die Masse … macht das Individuum zum unsichtbaren Teil einer Gemeinschaft, in der nur die kriegerische Gesinnung zählt […] in den Balkandörfern wurde während des Krieges genau das durch ein starres Denkkollektiv gestützt … ’ (MWF, 52). These quotes echo Adorno’s criticism of a masculinity defined by harshness and emotional suppression, ‘Die Vorstellung, Männlichkeit bestehe in einem Höchstmaß an Ertragenkönnen […] bedeutet Gleichgültigkeit gegen den Schmerz schlechthin (EZM, 96),’ which in turn leads to collective moral immaturity: ‘Menschen, die blind in Kollektive sich einordnen […] löschen sich als selbstbestimmte Wesen aus’ (EZM, 97).

Like Adorno, Bodrožić views both moral immaturity and the suppression of memory as a product of patriarchal and nationalist conditioning. The remedy for this conditioning, as I will explain in the following pages, is the educational and revelatory experience of nature mysticism. I will also explore Bodrožić’s views overlap with Adorno’s on the effects of natural beauty in his Aesthetic Theory to some extent but affirm nature’s immanence and immediacy regardless of historical events.

The landscapes the narrator visits in MWF to process the past and find reconciliation are located both within personal memory sites, such as the Dalmatian village of Svib, where she was raised, as well as collective symbolic sites, such as Sarajevo and Knin, both embattled cities during the Yugoslav civil war. During her travels, she repeatedly reflects on her dual identity as both insider and tourist, and the unique vantage point of distance and empathy it offers her. Nostalgia alternates with melancholy, as she describes a childhood of alienation and loneliness: born in a Dalmatian village during Socialist Yugoslavia, she was left in the care of her grandparents in Svib, while her guest worker parents sought to make a living in Germany. Often left to her own devices, she mostly found solace in nature:

Ich wuchs ohne Eltern und Geschwister auf, unser Haus lag weit vom Dorf entfernt, und es kam selten jemand zu Besuch.[…] Meine Hauptbeschäftigung war damals den ganzen Tag lang das Anschauen der Dinge, der Bäume und der Insekten wie etwa jenes überirdisch grünen Rosenkäfers, der Sommer um Sommer regelmäßig in den Mäulern der Katzen landete. Ich sah mir Stunde um Stunde die Veränderungen am Himmel an, beobachtete die Wolken, die sich um den Gipfel des Biokovo sammelten, eines mächtigen Abschnitts des Dinarischen Gebirges, welches zu meinen stärksten inneren Bildern zählt. Aber erst im Schreiben begriff ich, was mein Kinderblick im Betrachten alles eingesammelt hatte und dass sich dieser Blick von damals zu einer Art Grund-Blick entwickelt hatte. (11–12)

The idea that intuitive knowledge can be transferred from nature onto the attentive human subject appears repeatedly in Bodrožić’s writings. She recalls how her contemplative gaze, which formed through her observation of her natural environment shaped her creative consciousness as a writer, but also her fundamental perception of the world (‘Grund-Blick’) and how one should act within it. As Bodrožić later asserts, critical thinking and self-reflection are preconditions for moral human relationships: the interaction with nature thus provides not just a blueprint for knowing the world, but also for knowing each other. In MWF, nature is presented as a crucial environmental factor for moral development, a notion that is introduced via a reference to Martin Buber: ‘Der Charakter ist kein Zufall. Martin Buber hat darauf hingewiesen, dass er eine Aufgabe ist. Das Wort “Charakter” stammt aus dem Griechischen und besagt “Einprägung”. Unser Charakter ist das, was uns der Stempel unserer Umgebung einprägt’ (MWF, 27). Bodrožić’s understanding of ‘Umgebung’ also includes the intellectual space created through the exposure to art and literature, as her use of quotations from a wide range of European philosophy, art and literature shows. The plot of MWF is structured along a transnational network of references to diverse European philosophers, writers, which introduce her encounters with nature and her reflections on war, from Romantic thinkers like Novalis (38, 134) and Jean Jaques Rousseau (288), to the Holocaust writers Imre Kertesz (163, 234) and Ruth Klüger (268), Jewish philosophers such as Martin Buber (27–28, 267–68), as well as the Yugoslav dissident writers Vlado Gotovac (127–34), Danilo Kiš (89–90), Dubravka Ugrešić (90–91, 278–79). These references map her own multicultural path to intellectual maturity across time and space.

Natural and intellectual environment are closely intertwined for Bodrožić, mirroring the affective and investigative strains in her writing. Her poetry and prose affirm a radical subjectivity which seems at odds with the post-1945 writers and philosophers in the German-speaking sphere whom Bodrožić is fond of quoting in MWF, in particular Hannah Arendt and Adorno.²⁶ Marked by a lyrical tone and rich symbolism, Bodrožić’s poetry and prose employs aestheticization and pathos for affective appeal in ways that are reminiscent of Else Lasker-Schüler and Paul Celan.²⁷ Her work also highlights the spiritual elements of human experience, but departs from mainstream religious convictions. For example, Bodrožić reflects critically on the fetishization of suffering in Catholicism, which she sees as having stifled the capacity for moral maturity in Croatia: ‘Jesus und jeder der ihn ansieht muss leiden, muss die Dornenkrone tragen. […] Bei soviel Leid ist es den Menschen hier verboten, selbst zu denken, sich selbst zu befragen, sich selbst zweifelnd zu begegnen’ (MWF, 25). Instead, she advocates an unmediated, mystical approach to both nature and spiritual principles throughout her writing. Such an approach rejects religious dogma and highlights individual experience instead. This has earned her both critical praise, such as in the recent jury statement for the Manès-Sperber-Preis, which lauds her ‘neoromantic style’ (‘neoromantisch grundierte Sprachkunst’) and sensuous depiction of reality (‘eine von sinnlicher Anschaulichkeit geprägte Form der Darstellung’),²⁸ but also skepticism. While some consider Bodrožić’s effusive style, which includes the typically Romantic evocation of grand concepts such as ‘Liebe’, ‘Seele’, ‘Güte’, or ‘Herz’, as enhancing her ideas on political commitment,²⁹ critics such as Insa Wilke have stated that the heightened lyricism of Bodrožić’s metaphors often borders on emotional oversaturation and kitsch: ‘In Mein weisser Frieden ist viel von Schönheit die Rede, von Poesie und Liebe, von den Bäumen und dem Meer, von Ehrfurcht und der Gnade, wenn einem das “Lebendigwerden” des Wortes “beschützen” zuteil wird.’³⁰ Going one step further, Astrid Kaminski argues that the confluence of the political and mystical produces mainly verbal commonplaces and generalizations, and resorts to facile binary conclusions such as ‘Die Natur scheint gut, die Menschenmasse schlecht […].’³¹

While these reviews identify problematic tendencies in Bodrožić’s aesthetics, they do not contextualize her effusive style within her affinity for mysticism, or the ecstatic union between human subject and divine entity. The idea of mystical revelation arises most prominently in the depiction of nature as a conduit for spiritual experience. Not surprisingly, mystical thinkers such as Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart and Martin Buber are referenced frequently in Bodrožić’s texts and are affirmed as important influences.³² But while monistic mystical tradition assumes the dissolution of the self in the presence of the divine, Bodrožić sees mystical revelation and critical thought as operating in tandem. In her writings, assessing nature leads to assessing the world, but it is only through the pathway of mystical immersion that a moral education and ethical practice can be realized: Her poetry collection, Ein Kolibri kam unverwandelt (2007),³³ Bodrožić depicts nature mystics and lovers being exulted by the presence of palm trees, mountain, flowers and birds, resisting those who preach violence and alienation, in her novel, Kirschholz und alte Gefühle (2012),³⁴ the appearance of birds and memories of Adriatic summers in nature help the protagonist Marijeta, a Yugoslav refugee in Paris, reflect on her war trauma and fractured sense of self, and in Mein weisser Frieden, the narrator’s explorations of the Yugoslav past are interspersed with experiences of nature mysticism (both past and present), which serve as catalysts for her investigations of memory.

Even though Bodrožić’s texts echo many beliefs held by early feminist eco-critics, such as a latent identification of nature with the feminine, and and consequently a belief that the subjugation of nature by the patriarchy mirrors the subjugation of women,³⁵ they do not directly address the exploitation and destruction of the planet through humans. Instead, they focus on the exultation of nature in the present moment. Bodrožić’s nature mysticism is compatible with beliefs expressed by the Deep Ecology movement, which views a spiritual approach to nature, and the mystical encounter with the natural world as a crucial strategy against authoritarian structures that threaten both nature and the so-called human world.³⁶ The demand for a re-sacralization of nature expressed by deep ecologists,³⁷ however, is still a fringe position mostly associated with the religious practices of indigenous communities.³⁸ Bodrožić’s writings perform a re-enchantment of the natural world by presenting it as divinely structured, thus touching on beliefs that were firmly embedded in antiquity and the mediaeval world:

In der Antike wie im Mittelalter erblickten die meisten Philosophen ihr Ideal in einer kontemplativen Naturbetrachtung im Sinne der ‘Theoria,’ der geistigen Schau von Wahrheit und Erkenntnis als Selbstzweck […]. Für das Mittelalter war die Natur fraglos eine Schöpfung Gottes […]. Die Natur trat als Offenbarung ihres Schöpfers gleichberechtigt neben die biblischen Schriften und wurde als Sinnzusammenhang aufgefasst, dem sich der Mensch verstehend und interpretierend zuwandte.³⁹

The contemplative method is also Bodrožić’s approach to nature, as described in MWF:

Ich sehe mein Leben lang zu, den Fliegen, den Vögeln, dem Gras, den Perseiden, dem Muster und den Nachrichten der Wolken. Allem und allen. Und irgendwann fange ich auch damit an, mir selbst zuzusehen. Der Atem hilft mir dabei, der Atem hilft mir zu sehen. Die Bilder haben immer eine tiefere Schicht, je länger ich sie ansehe, desto mehr lösen sie sich auf, wie Punkte in meinem Kopf; Punkte und Wunden, die zu Wundern werden, zu meiner Einweihung ins innere Leben. (15–16)

The continued contemplation of the natural world, of flora, fauna, and meteorological conditions reveals not just messages and patterns (‘Muster,’ ‘Nachrichten’) about the world at large, but also leads to a deepened observation of the self (‘irgendwann fange ich auch damit an, mir selbst zuzusehen’). These observations echo Arne Naess’s concept of ecological self-realization, in which a life lived in ecological harmony corresponds to true human self-realization, not just on behalf of the human subject, but as part of an interconnected ecosystem.⁴⁰ A fully realized self is an expanded self that relates to all living beings (not just humans) and thus demonstrates ‘all-sided maturity.’⁴¹ It is crucial that the knowledge gained from immersion in nature is communicated via the body first, which serves as a bridge to the natural world by means of the breath. Bodrožić’s reference to the breath as a pathway to perception alludes to the Greek concept of pneuma, or the similarly used Hebrew term ruach as it also appears in the works of Paul Celan, where the breath serves as the mystical mediator between the physical-animal and the spiritual-mental realms that rule human life.⁴² More importantly, conscious breath and listening can deliberately invoke past experiences of mystical oneness in nature:

Ich höre den Insekten bis heute so lange zu, bis ich in eine innere Trance versinke, einerseits alles im außen genau wahrnehme, andererseits innerlich jener sichtbaren Weltschicht entrücke, die wir gemeinhin Wirklichkeit nennen. Der alte Zustand des Wachtraums ist auch jetzt schnell erreicht, ich mache die Augen zu und atme ruhig, werde unmittelbar dorthin gerückt, wo der Garten sprach, die Bäume melodisch im Wind tanzten, die Schmetterlinge zitternde Boten der sich wandelnden Welt waren. (MWF, 42)

The spontaneous joy and revelation gained through nature may be summoned by conscious recall at any time. By combining sensory focus (‘ich mache die Augen zu und atme ruhig’) with creative imagination, a synergistic dialogue between the human and more-than-human realm (insects, the garden, trees, butterflies) can be re-established even in the absence of material nature. What Bodrožić describes here is a sense of immediacy and effortless communication with the natural world which Adorno and other Frankfurt School thinkers had questioned. But I believe that there are a few parallels between Bodrožić’s and Adorno’s understanding of the aesthetics of nature which may be useful for the reading of MWF.

Adorno examined the effects of natural beauty in his Aesthetic Theory, challenging the premises of Enlightenment thinkers such as Hegel and Kant, who had deemed natural beauty inferior to artistic beauty, since it lacked the refinement of human made art and did not seem to be made specifically for humans.⁴³ By contrast, he emphasized that the appreciation of natural beauty was extolled by the revolutionary movements of the eighteenth century, where it was closely associated with the notion of human rights, thus situating the natural firmly in the context of the political.⁴⁴ The flight into nature which bourgeois revolutionaries had advocated to counter an authoritarian political system repeated itself in the industrialized age, where ‘the subject’s powerlessness in a society petrified into a second nature becomes the motor of the flight into a purportedly first nature.’⁴⁵ According to Adorno, this idealized ‘first nature’ relied on notions of sequestered immediacy and purity, which made it equally subject to commodification as culture. The escape into nature therefore only perpetuated the structures of domination by encouraging complacency in the face of injustice, since it suggested that there was an experience of nature that was impervious to the social and political. While Adorno acknowledged that the experience of mystical harmony and freedom through immersion in nature offered relief from the world of domination, this relief had to be pursued within historical reality lest it became reactionary.⁴⁶

Bodrožić responds to the ambivalent experience of nature in a world of systemic domination by allowing both the immanence and the vulnerability of the natural world to co-exist in her narratives. On the one hand, natural space remains a utopian refuge, on the other, the experience of nature is impacted by processes of historical violence. Whenever we encounter a bucolic natural scenery in MWF, it is ruptured by the historical experience of trauma shortly after: When the narrator visits the Dalmatian hinterland, she witnesses a group of Croatian soldiers ridicule another comrade because a butterfly lands on his shoulder (MWF, 209), the seemingly Edenic island of Vis is overshadowed by its former function as a Yugoslav military base and the presence of war veterans with prosthetic legs (MWF, 192), and the visit to a former Serbian village has her discover an orphaned girl who declares ‘dass die Natur böse ist, besonders die Bäume’ (MWF, 327). The beginning of the book already sets the tone for these repeated ruptures, when the narrator recounts a traumatic childhood encounter with her father on a peaceful Dalmatian summer night. The father forces his fiercely resistant daughter to shoot a gun into the starry night sky over the Adriatic, encouraging her to ‘shoot the stars’: ‘Schieß den Sternen in den Bauch, sagte er und hielt meinen Körper fest […]’ (MWF, 15). This brutal passage of patriarchal subjugation disrupts the illusion of teleological guidance offered by the stars, which are always depicted within the sensory unity of sky, land and sea of the Dalmatian landscape in MWF and are thus imbued with both transcendental and sensual qualities. The father is later identified as an ardent Croatian nationalist and admirer of Ante Pavelić (the leader of the fascist Independent Republic of Croatia between 1941 and 1945); the forceful submission of his daughter thus appears as one of many manifestations of a patriarchal Balkan culture which, as I have already shown, Bodrožić presents as being at odds with both nature and moral maturity.

One crucial observation in MWF is that the epistemological lessons of nature, such as the intrinsic connections between all living beings or the power of self-awareness, are not accessible to those who have become alienated from themselves and each other through systems of oppression. Antun, a traumatized war veteran, admits that during the war, he realized in a moment of desperate prayer that ‘die Natur alles und alle verbindet’, representing a higher power which ruled all human actions, but that during combat, nature became ‘ein Teil der feuchten Hölle, der man mit seinem Körper ausgeliefert ist und der man niemals entkommt … ’ (MWF, 58). To the morally immature, both the body and the natural world within which it exists feel like modes of entrapment instead of liberation.

The alienated individual is unable to connect to their true self and the revelatory experience of nature if no template for these experiences has been provided on the collective level. Bodrožić places both the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia and the emergence of neo-nationalist tendencies in the 1990s within a continuum of authoritarian structures that were implemented during the NS-allied Independent Republic of Croatia (NDH) and have stinted the development of critical thinking and emotional literacy in the population. One of the characters embodying the consequences of systemic domination is the protagonist’s uncle, whose son Filip, a war veteran who fought on the Croatian side during the Yugoslav civil war committed suicide shortly before her visit (MWF, 76). The father expresses rage and shame over his son’s suicide instead of compassion, and is portrayed alternatively as abusive and emotionally paralyzed: ‘Das Gesicht meines Onkels ist wie zementiert. Fühlt er je etwas, frage ich mich.’ (MWF, 35). The uncle, she concludes, is unable to express compassion because he is bound to a patriarchal ideal of family honour and patriotic responsibility. She believes that the same thought patterns made the rehabilitation of fascist leaders in the newly independent Croatian state possible, leading not to moral maturity, but a counterfeit maturity, ‘Scheinmündigkeit’ instead (MWF, 36). Bodrožić’s reflections echo Adorno’s in his essay, ‘Erziehung nach Ausschwitz,’ where he highlights the main obstacles to the moral maturity needed to prevent a recurrence of fascism and genocide in Europe after 1945: the fear of individual freedom, the disconnection from one’s own body and the tendency to conform to mindless masses.⁴⁷ Adorno acknowledges that the antidote to the emotional coldness of an alienated society would be love, which however, cannot be implemented on the systemic level:

Ich möchte nicht die Liebe predigen. Sie zu predigen, halte ich für vergeblich: keiner hätte auch nur das Recht, sie zu predigen, weil der Mangel an Liebe — ich sagte es schon — ein Mangel aller Menschen ist ohne Ausnahme, so wie sie heute existieren.⁴⁸

In MWF, nature is described as endowing those with love and empathy who have retained the capacity for enchantment and independent thought. In a passage often cited by critics to illustrate Bodrožić’s naïve assumptions about the ennobling effects of natural beauty, the narrator wonders why this ubiquitous lack of love, that is at the heart of all violent conflict, cannot be remedied by the ‘Gegenmeer von Liebe’ created by nature’s sublime beauty. Imagining a stroll along the Dalmatian coast while eating figs and looking out at the mystically animated islands at the horizon, ‘Urwale im gütigen Blau der Adria’, she asks a rhetorical question to highlight the seemingly incongruous co-existence of violence and natural beauty:

Immer noch ist es für mich undenkbar, dass diese Schönheit nicht stärker war, nicht die eigentliche Waffe, das Gegenmeer der Liebe, die einen Krieg hätte verunmöglichen müssen. Wie kann man Menschen erschießen, während der Wind in den Palmen singt? (MWF, 78).

This juxtaposition of bucolic palm trees, a cliché image of a touristic Mediterranean landscape, to the seemingly random shooting of human beings, a stereotypical image of the violent Balkans, has gathered justifiable ridicule⁴⁹ for the implicit fallacy that horrific things do not happen in beautiful places. But palm trees hold a more complex meaning in Bodrožić’s writing. For one, they are a symbol of resilience — when the narrator visits the Dalmatian city of Split at the height of summer, she finds comfort and companionship in the presence of palm trees, which have braved destruction: ‘Der Krieg hat die Palmen unversehrt gelassen’ (MWF, 113). Unlike the many hostile encounters with war veterans the narrator mentions, her encounters with palm trees provide affective bonding: ‘Bäume spenden mir Schatten und werden als Freunde erkannt, aus Not, aber auch aus Einsicht — ein Leben ohne Bäume wäre schrecklich’ (MWF, 113). The emotional relationship with trees and the distress that their imagined absence causes is placed above utility. Nature and natural beauty have to be felt in order to educate humans into a more permanent moral maturity, which has become difficult for those who have become alienated from their own emotional capacity or ‘Empfindungswelt’ (119). But more importantly, any emotional relief that nature mysticism may offer must remain temporary if it is not followed up by critical self-reflection. In another passage in MWF, Bodrožić describes how her cousin Kristijan, who was serving as a soldier during the siege of Vukovar, experienced mystical insight while observing a sunset by the local river:

Die Natur war derart voller Unschuld, dass er sich in einen Zustand greifbarer Luzidität gerückt gefühlt habe, ohne einen Zeitsinn, in dem er sich selbst habe zuhören und befragen können, was er von seinem Leben noch zu erwarten habe. Es habe sich etwas in ihm aus der Zeit ausgeschaltet, und er habe verstanden, dass sein Ich nicht sein Selbst sei, sich zuschauend habe er gewusst, dass er überleben würde, dass es möglich war, in diesem Raum der inneren Zeit zu überdauern. Ein Rascheln im Gebüsch und das Auffliegen eines winzigkleinen Vogels habe seine Aufmerksamkeit auf die andere Seite der Vuka und einen plötzlich dort stehenden Mann gelenkt, der offenbar genauso wie er auf den Sonnenaufgang gewartet hatte und eine Zigarette rauchte. Er erblickte dort einen jungen Mann, der früher sein Nachbar war und den auch ich kannte. Lächelnd erkundigte sich dieser nach dem Gesundheitszustand unseres Großvaters und fragte nach seinem seit Wochen entzündeten Auge. An dem einen Ufer stand ein Kroate, an dem anderen ein Serbe, und der Fluss machte sie beide wieder zu Menschen. (MWF, 59)

Here, nature assumes conciliatory agency in the form of a river. At first reading, this passage contains the kind of idealization of nature that Adorno cautioned against, since the soldier perceives his natural surroundings as both innocent (‘voller Unschuld’) and timeless (‘ohne Zeitsinn’). This impression, however, is mediated by a moment of mystical revelation: the sensation of being beyond time, in complete unity with one’s surroundings, an all-pervasive feeling of bliss and aliveness, as well as lucidity of thought are all phenomena described by mystics.⁵⁰ It is thus not nature by itself that is pure and whole in its essence, rather, it is the moment of the mystical experience that is facilitated by it. The sense of wonder and awe that the soldier experiences in the bucolic river setting is symbolized through the unexpected appearance of the ‘winzigkleinen Vogel’, which in turn leads to the discovery of the second soldier on the other riverbank and thus transforms a moment of self-awareness into an experience of communion. Nature thus reverses the dehumanization of armed conflict by returning the soldiers back to their shared humanity and their previous life as neighbours. But the moment remains fleeting: after the beauty of the sunset has faded away, the combatants return to their new roles as enemies. The experience of nature’s timelessness and of natural beauty as ethical imperative thus turns out to be contingent on inner maturity and at least momentary peace.

Bodrožić sees an enlightening effect not just in natural beauty, but also in the aesthetics of art and literature. Like Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory, she views art as working in tandem with nature.⁵¹ This becomes apparent through her juxtaposition of sensual experience in nature to the contemplation of architectural heritage, painting, and crafts. Her memories of playing in flower-filled meadows with her cousin Filip are followed by admiring thoughts on the flower ornaments on the ceremonial dress of the ‘Dalmatik’ worn by Catholic deacons (MWF, 76–77). She consciously divests her appreciation of this local religious craft, however, from any patriotic attachment, pointing instead to beauty and resilience as universal qualities: ‘ … stolz bin ich auf nichts Nationales, durchaus aber auf etwas, das Schönheit verströmt und von ihrer Dauer berichtet’ (MWF, 77). The narrator goes to great lengths to position both the cultural and natural beauty of Dalmatia as part of a mobile cultural heritage that can be enjoyed by all, as is demonstrated by her discovery of a Dalmatik in an altar painting by Hans Memling (MWF, 76). Aware of the fact that both Dalmatia’s natural and cultural heritage has been appropriated for a nationalist Croatian narrative, Bodrožić highlights the transnational, pluricultural and multilinguistic history of the region:

Dalmatien trägt ein ganzes Universum von Mentalitäten, Sprachen, Dialekten und Nationen in sich. All das verbindet auch mich mit diesem wandlungsfähigen Landstrich Europas, seine Widersprüche sind so einzigartig wie seine Überschreibungen, seine Schönheit und seine rauen Winde fordern heraus, sind niemals nur glatt und eindeutig. So hat sich hier eins im anderen abgespeichert und bildete, Schicht um Schicht, eine Art Geistkern des Kontinents, in dem alle kulturellen Ideen und vitalen Schauplätze, Kriege, Nöte und Schönheiten komprimiert einsehbar sind, ein Palimpsest, allein von den Zeiten übermalt. (MWF, 66–67).

The narrator feels at home in Dalmatia precisely because the region defies nationalist appropriations and reflects her own hybrid and diverse identity as a postmigrant writer. For Bodrožić, the mutable and palimpsestic character of Dalmatian history does not contradict its status as a pastoral realm of childhood memory and nature mysticism:

Die unsteten Zeiten haben Dalmatien von alle Seiten Europas verändert und so ihre Spuren in der Sprache, Architektur, in der Kultur und letztlich in der Mentalität hinterlassen. Ein Baum aber war immer noch ein Baum. Die Natur hatte mich an erste Fragen herangeführt, war gleichbleibend, wie in jener Zeit der Kindheit […]. (MWF, 76)

Despite her repeated evocations of a quasi-utopian Adriatic landscape, she thus rejects the reactionary myth of the Mediterranean as a Eurocentric, homogenous site of ‘origins’ and ‘lost perfection, often due to an idealization of its classical times.’⁵² Even though it is subject to historical change, nature in MWF offers an unwavering repository of sensual experience in the present, provided that at least parts of a natural setting have been preserved. Strangely enough, the environmental pollution and destruction that increased industry, development, and tourism have brought to the Adriatic coast since the end of the Yugoslav wars three decades ago never become apparent in MWF.

Nature mystics and those writing within a postmigrant reality share a common experience which the deep ecologist Arne Naess had called a ‘widening of the self.’⁵³ He argued that relating to nature as a sacred living entity expanded a typically narrow, egocentric human perspective, thus also allowing for a deeper understanding and empathy towards cultural diversity.⁵⁴ In MWF, Bodrožić implies that exiles and migrants also undergo this ‘widening of the self’, since they, having experienced the transience of possessions and the uncertainty of home, have obtained a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the self, compared to those who cling to ideas of nationhood:

Jeder wahre Mensch ist seine gute Sache, er ist ein Land und eine Epoche’ [sagt Ralph Waldo Emerson]. Keiner, der das Exil sowie die Tiefen des Lebens kennt und von ihnen beschriftet wurde, wird einem solchen Satz widersprechen […]. Ein Weltbürger ist mehr, als ein Athener je sein konnte. (MWF, 50)

At the end of her heritage trip, the protagonist realizes that communion with the enchanted landscapes of her childhood has helped construct her own inner home in her imagination, which remains untouched by outer turmoil: ‘das Innenland, das unbesetzbare’ (MWF, 297). Again, outer nature holds the keys for exploring inner nature. In her novel Kirschholz und alte Gefühle, Bodrožić suggests an expansion of traditional conceptions of national, spatial, and ethnic belonging by similar means. Declaring allegiance to a natural environment instead of a homeland or passport, the protagonist Anastazija subverts the common cliché of the migrant author who is always caught between two culturally distinct worlds, a notion which scholars such as Leslie Adelson have challenged.⁵⁵ Instead, Bodrožić presents an associative, patchworked notion of the self:

Meine Erinnerung ist ein großes Haus. Zimmer an Zimmer reiht sich in meinem Kopf. Sie sagen mir hier, das liege an meiner Herkunft, die mich verfolgt. Aber ich weiß, dass mein leuchtender Faden überhaupt keinen Pass hat. Ich lächle nur. Seit langem korrigiere ich niemanden mehr. Hinterland. Karst. Berge. Das Meer. Immer wieder das Salz jener uralten, flimmernden Sommerluft. Dort komme ich her. Mein Geist ist autark, er weiß das alle Pässe schon überall gestempelt worden sind […].⁵⁶

Not only does nature allow access to a larger cultural memory (‘ein großes Haus’) and kinship that transcends familial and national bonds, but it also nourishes the moral maturity (‘Mein Geist ist autark’) needed to relate to different parts of the self and the other. Anastazija claims the natural landscape of her upbringing, characterized by mountains, the sea and the salty air of Adriatic summers as her authentic home, and as a substitute for national identifiers such as passports. She refutes stereotypical assumptions about a haunted migrant heritage (‘meine […] Herkunft, die mich verfolgt’) and meets them with equanimity (‘Ich lächle nur’). Moreover, she describes her true identity with the metaphor of a ‘radiant thread’ (‘mein leuchtender Faden’), which affirms a transcendental essence underneath her expansive postmigrant experience. The postmigrant nature mystic thus develops their own moral maturity through the defiance of conventional categorizations and territorial borders, and by examining the historical narratives and collective memories that shape the self critically. They proclaim their allegiance both to the world of the mind, as well as the planet, which they see as belonging equally to all human beings.

To conclude, the nature mysticism portrayed in Bodrožić’s MWF and her other writings deconstructs common perceptions of German nature writing, ecocriticism, as well as postmigrant literature. Joining a trend towards a more spiritual understanding of nature in anglophone nature writing,⁵⁷ her evocations of nature aim to re-enchant the relationship between humans and their environment, thus fostering what Kathy Rigby has called a ‘rematerializing of religion and spirituality’ to address the challenges of a collapsing world.⁵⁸ The qualities gained from this new sensibility — awe, respect, contemplation, affection and empathy — counter two psychological postwar phenomena, which Adorno had identified as hindering the education towards moral maturity: alienation (‘Entfremdung’, EZM, 113) and the inability for immediate experience (‘Nicht-Erfahrungsfähigkeit’, EZM, 114). By anchoring the human subject firmly in the here and now of both revelatory and sensual experience without surrendering historical responsibility, the literary nature mysticism illustrated by Bodrožić thus offers tools to approach not just the patriarchal exploitation of nature, but any type of systemic injustice and oppression.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yvonne Zivkovic

Yvonne Zivkovic is a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Graz, where she is working on a book on the transfer of intangible heritage in contemporary migrant writing in Germany and Austria. Her book, The Literary Politics of Mitteleuropa — Reconfiguring Spatial Memory in Austrian and Yugoslav Literature after 1945 was published in 2021 with Camden House. Her research focuses on the relationship between German speaking lands and Eastern Europe, with particular interests in migration, memory, gender, affect, film and Jewish Studies.

Notes

2 The term Anthropocene commonly refers to the period ‘during which human activities have had an environmental impact on the Earth regarded as constituting a distinct geological age’, according to Merriam-Webster dictionary, <https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Anthropocene> [accessed 11 June 2022]. This includes our current age of climate change and severe ecological disruption. See also Linda Russo and Marthe Reed, Counter-Desecration. A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018).

3 Saša Stanišić, Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (Munich: Luchterhand, 2006), p. 142.

4 See Peter Blickle, Heimat. A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002), p. 17, which points to the opposition of ‘Heimat’ and ‘Fremde’, and consequently extends to the opposition between the locals (those who know and value the land) and foreigners, who disrupts the natural balance of the ‘Heimat’.

5 Wladimir Kaminer, Mein deutsches Dschungelbuch (Munich: Goldmann, 2003), Mein Leben im Schrebergarten (Munich: Goldmann, 2007), and Diesseits von Eden. Neues aus dem Garten (Munich: Goldmann, 2013).

6 Wladimir Kaminer, ‘Jeder Mensch ist ein Gärtner’, Interview with BUND Landesverband Berlin, N.N., also published in BUNDzeit 2014-02. <https://www.bund-berlin.de/themen/stadtnatur/stadtgruen/schriftsteller-wladimir-kaminer-im-gespraech/> [accessed 3 June 2022].

7 Christine Katz, ‘Was aber ist Wildnis? Wildnis und kulturelle Vielfalt. Wildnis-Naturverständnisse in anderen Kulturen und von Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund’, Laufener Spezialbeiträge 2010. Wildnis zwischen Kultur und Natur: Perspektiven und Handlungsfelder für den Naturschutz, published by the Bayerische Akademie für Naturschutz und Landschaftspflege, pp. 53–61. <https://www.anl.bayern.de/publikationen/spezialbeitraege/doc/lsb2010_006_katz_was_ist_wildnis.pdf>.

8 Joela Jacobs, ‘Refuge and Refuse. Migrant Knowledge and Environmental Education in Germany’, Migrant Knowledge, Scholarly Network and Blog, 13 September 2019. <https://migrantknowledge.org/2019/09/13/refuge-and-refuse-migrant-knowledge-and-environmental-education-in-germany/>.

9 Katz, ‘Was aber ist Wildnis’, p. 59.

10 See Nada El-Azar, ‘“Bei uns fährt niemand mit dem Fahrrad.” In migrantischen Familien spielen Klima-und Umweltschutz oftmals keine große Rolle. Warum eigentlich? Ein Erklärungsversuch’, 31 August 2020 <https://www.jetzt.de/das-biber/umweltschutz-und-klimaschutz-in-migrantischen-familien>, Christian Hunziker, Migranten entdecken ihr Umweltbewusstsein. NZZ, 27 April 2009. <https://www.nzz.ch/migranten_entdecken_ihr_umweltbewusstsein-ld.562167?reduced=true>.

11 I use the term nature writing in the broadest possible sense, as literature reflecting on the natural world. A detailed discussion of the more recent literary trend identified as ‘nature writing’ in anglophone texts since the late 20th century cannot be provided here due to constraints of space. See Robert Finch and John Elder, eds. The Norton Book of Nature Writing (New York: Norton, 1990); Richard Mabey, The Oxford Book of Nature Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), and Frank Stewart, A Natural History of Nature Writing (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994), as well as Jos Smith, The New Nature Writing. Rethinking the Literature of Place (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

12 Axel Goodbody, ‘Ökologisch orientierte Literaturwissenschaft in Deutschland’, in Ecocriticism. Eine Einführung, ed. by Gabriele Dürbeck and Urte Stobbe (Köln: Böhlau, 2015), pp. 123–35, here p. 124.

13 Ulrich Kittstein, Deutsche Naturlyrik. Ihre Geschichte in Einzelanalysen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2009), p. 16–17.

14 Axel Goodbody, ‘German Ecopoetry’, in Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture, ed. by Gabriele Dürbeck, Urte Stobbe, Hubert Zapf, and Evi Zemanek (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017), pp. 263–79, here, p. 269.

15 Goodbody, ‘German Ecopoetry’, p. 271.

16 See ‘Deutscher Preis für Nature Writing 2022’, Matthes and Seitz Verlag website, <https://www.matthes-seitz-berlin.de/news/deutscher-preis-fuer-nature-writing-2021.html> [accessed 21 May 2022], as well as ‘Nachricht: Deutscher Preis für Nature Writing für Marion Poschmann’, Suhrkamp Verlag Website. 11 January 2017, <https://www.suhrkamp.de/nachricht/deutscher-preis-fuer-nature-writing-fuer-marion-poschmann-b-2311>. On the discontinuation of the Chamisso prize, see Kathrin Hillgruber, ‘Wegen Erfolgs eingestellt. Finale ohne Protest: in München wurde zum allerletzten Mal der Adalbert-von-Chamisso-Preis für Migrationsliteratur vergeben’, Tagesspiegel, 11 July 2017, <https://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/adelbert-von-chamisso-preis-wegen-erfolgs-eingestellt/19504162.html> [accessed 3 May 2022].

17 Eva Demmelhuber, ‘Vögel, Bäume, Himmelsdramen — Faszination Nature Writing. Helen Macdonald, Marion Poschmann und Jan Wagner’, Bayrischer Rundfunk, 6 June 2018. <https://www.br.de/radio/bayern2/sendungen/radiotexte/nature-writing-macdonald-poschmann-das-offene-buch-100.html> [accessed 3 May 2022].

18 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Notes on Post-Secular Society’, New Perspectives Quarterly (2008), 16–29.

19 Kittstein, Deutsche Naturlyrik, p. 11. Kittstein argues that the paradigm shift of de-sacralization only occurred with Charles Darwin.

20 James Lovelock, Gaia. A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000/1979) and Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet. A New Look at Evolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1998).

21 Damiano Bondi, ‘Gaia and the Anthropocene; or, the Return of Teleology’, Telos, 172 (2015), 125–37.

22 See Theodor W. Adorno, Erziehung zur Mündigkeit (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2017 (1963)). English translations of Erziehung zur Mündigkeit, a collection of radio interviews with Hellmut Becker, translate the German term Mündigkeit as ‘maturity and responsibility’ or ‘autonomy’ (see for example Robert French and Jem Thomas, ‘Maturity and Education, Citizenship and Enlightenment: An Introduction to Theodor Adorno and Hellmut Becker’, ‘Education for Maturity and Responsibility’, History of the Human Sciences, 12.3 (1999), 1–19). I will be referring to moral maturity in this article, since this translation in my opinion includes both autonomous thought and responsible action. Bodrožić directly references Adorno only once in Mein weisser Frieden, in a passage on the use of foreign words (MWF, pp. 299–300), but her reflections on morality, memory and nature can be clearly traced back to his philosophy. She does list Adorno’s Erziehung zur Mündigkeit in the appendix with reading recommendations.

23 Immanuel Kant, ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’, Projekt Gutenberg, <https://www.projektgutenberg.org/kant/aufklae/aufkl001.html> [accessed 3 June 2022].

24 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Erziehung wozu?’, pp. 105–19, here p. 113, and ‘Erziehung nach Auschwitz’, pp. 88–104, here pp. 95–96, in Adorno, Erziehung zur Mündigkeit.

25 See Adorno’s famous dictum ‘Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch’, in Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’, in Prismen (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1963), p. 26.

26 While Arendt insisted in Between Past and Future (1961) that subjectivity did not form in an isolated manner but only in relationship to others, and should thus be diversified as much as possible, Adorno’s pessimistic moral philosophy in Minima Moralia and his Negative Dialectic exposes the crisis of the modern subject in general. See ‘Hannah Arendt’, subsection ‘Judgement and Vita Activa’ in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/> [accessed 10 June 2022].

27 Bodrožić has dedicated a poem in her collection, Ein Kolibri kam unverwandelt to Lasker-Schüler, and repeatedly references Celan in her other texts such as Kirschholz und alte Gefühle.

28 Webseite Otto Müller Verlag, ‘Marica Bodrožić erhält den Manès-Sperber-Preis für Literatur 2021’, <https://www.omvs.at/marica-Bodrožić-erhaelt-manes-sperber-preis-fuer-literatur-2021/> [accessed 10 June 2022].

29 The Manès-Sperber-Preis jury comments on Bodrožić‘s ‘beeindruckende Fähigkeit […] Verdichten von Empfindungen und kritisches Engagement rhetorisch wirkungsvoll zu verbinden.’ Ibid.

30 Insa Wilke, ‘Reißverschlüsse in den Augen. Die deutsch-kroatische Autorin Marica Bodrožić hat ein streitbares Manifest für eine Sprache des Friedens geschrieben’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Nr. 28, 4 February 2015, p. 14.

31 Astrid Kaminski. ‘Böse Menschen haben keine Palmen. Die Schriftstellerin Marica Bodrožić schreibt distanzlos über den Bosnien-Krieg’, FAZ, Nr. 276, 27. November 2014, p. 12.

32 Marica Bodrožić. Das Auge hinter dem Auge. Betrachtungen (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 2015), p. 56:

… sprechend ganz besonders durchliebe ich die Welt: liebe Julia Kristeva genauso wie Teresa von Ávila, ich liebe Colette genauso wie Hannah Arendt, ich liebe Giordano Bruno genauso wie Kafka, ich liebe Kieselsteine genauso wie Schachbrettblumen, ich liebe Esel genauso wie den Heiligen Antonius von Padua, ich liebe den wildes Englisch redenden ‘Pnin’ genauso wie Camus Liebe für Hölderlin, ich liebe ‘ … und offen gab/ Mein Herz, wie du, der ernsten Erde sich,’ ich liebe den Satz, dass ein Nein ein ganzer Satz ist, ich liebe Meister Eckharts Bitte an Gott, ihn bitte von Gott freizumachen, … 

33 Marica Bodrožić, Ein Kolibri kam unverwandelt (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 2007).

34 Marica Bodrožić, Kirschholz und alte Gefühle (Munich: Luchterhand, 2012).

35 See Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies, Ecofeminism. Vol. [2nd edn]. Critique Influence Change (London: Zed Books, 2014), and Karen Warren, and Nisvan Erkal, Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997).

36 Arne Naess, ‘The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement. A Summary’, Inquiry, 16, 95–100.

37 See David Landis Barnhill, Roger S. Gottlieb, and American Academy of Religion National Meeting, Deep Ecology and World Religions: New Essays on Sacred Grounds (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), and D. Bruce Martin, ‘Sacred Identity and the Sacrificial Spirit: Mimesis and Radical Ecology,’ in Critical Ecologies: The Frankfurt School and Contemporary Environmental Crisis, ed. by Andrew Biro (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018/2011).

38 See Fikret Berkes, Sacred Ecology (New York: Routledge, 2012 (1999)) and Michael S. Northcott, Place, Ecology and the Sacred: The Moral Geography of Sustainable Communities (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

39 Kittstein, Deutsche Naturlyrik, p. 12.

40 Arne Naess, ‘Self-Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World’, The Trumpeter, 4.3 (1987), 35–42.

41 Naess, ‘Self-Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World’, p. 35.

42 Lydia Koelle, Paul Celans pneumatisches Judentum. Gott-Rede und menschliche Existenz nach der Shoah (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald, 1997).

43 Jordan Daniels, ‘Adorno, Benjamin, and Natural Beauty on “This Sad Earth”’, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 34.2 (2020), 159–78, here p. 160.

44 Ibid, Daniels, ‘Adorno, Benjamin, and Natural Beauty’, p. 169.

45 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans by C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge, 1984), p. 65.

46 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 66.

47 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Erziehung nach Ausschwitz’, in Theodor W. Adorno, Erziehung zur Mündigkeit (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2017 (1963)), pp. 88–104.

48 Adorno, ‘Erziehung nach Ausschwitz’, pp. 101–02.

49 Kaminski, ‘Böse Menschen haben keine Palmen’.

50 See ‘Mysticism’ in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, especially subpoint 3, ‘The Attributes of Mystical Experience’, <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mysticism/> [accessed 3 June 2022].

51 See André Krebber, ‘Traces of the Other: Adorno on Natural Beauty’, New German Critique 47.2 (2020), 169–89: ‘[Adorno believes that] as independent objects, artworks thus bring to our memory what reason, capitalism, and a false humanism have repressed: the independent voice and activity of nature as a longing and force for peace’, p. 184.

52 Serenella Iovino, ‘Mediterranean Eco-Criticism’, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 24.2 (Spring 2017), 325–40, here p. 330.

53 Arne Naess, ‘Identification as the Source of Deep Ecological Attitudes’, in Deep Ecology, ed. by Michael Tobias (San Diego: Avant, 1985), pp. 265–70, here p. 258.

54 Naess, ‘Identification as the Source of Deep Ecological Attitudes’, p. 261.

55 Leslie A. Adelson, ‘Against Between: A Manifesto’, in Unpacking Europe. Towards a Critical Reading, ed. by Sarah Hassan and Iftikar Dadi (Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 2001), pp. 244–55.

56 Bodrožić, Kirschholz und alte Gefühle, p. 82.

57 Douglas E. Christie, ‘Nature Writing and Nature Mysticism’, in Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology, ed. by Willis Jenkins, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 229–36.

58 Kathy Rigby, ‘Spirits That Matter: Pathways Toward a Rematerialization of Religion and Spirituality’, in Material Ecocriticsm, ed. by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016), pp. 283–90.