Perspectives on German Ecocriticism: Introduction

German literature has a long memory for the relationship between people and the environments they inhabit. Let us consider Goethe: Goethe’s late novel Wahlverwandschaften, first published in 1809, opens in a tree nursery on a large landed estate, where the owner Eduard has been busy with the task of budding new trees, ‘frisch erhaltene Pfropfreiser auf junge Stämme zu bringen’. He stops work to survey his carefully arranged garden and then goes to join his wife, who has also been industriously engaged in landscaping improvements, noting the well-ordered grounds as he passes through:

Dieser stieg nun die Terrassen hinunter, musterte, im Vorbeigehen, Gewächshäuser und Treibebeete, bis er an’s Wasser, dann über einen Steg an den Ort kam, wo sich der Pfad nach den neuen Anlagen in zwei Arme theilte. Den einen, der über den Kirchhof ziemlich gerade nach der Felswand hinging, ließ er liegen, um den andern einzuschlagen, der sich links etwas weiter durch anmuthiges Gebüsch sachte hinaufwand; da, wo beide zusammentrafen, setzte er sich für einen Augenblick auf einer wohlangebrachten Bank nieder, betrat sodann den eigentlichen Stieg und sah sich durch allerlei Treppen und Absätze auf dem schmalen, bald mehr bald weniger steilen Wege endlich zur Mooshütte geleitet.¹

The novel explores the complexity of attraction between two couples against a background of an entirely managed landscape; gardens that have been turned to productive spaces (Gewächshäuser, Treibebeete) or made aesthetically pleasing and comfortable for human purposes and pleasures. When Uwe Timm, in his novel Vogelweide (2013), took up Goethe’s plot of dangerous attractions between two couples, reimagining the predicament of the four lovers in twenty-first century Berlin, he chose to tell the story from a rather different setting, and using a different form. The novel is narrated in flashbacks by his protagonist Eschenbach from a tidal island of Germany’s North Sea coast.

Die Insel verlagert sich langsam nach Osten. Drei bis vier Meter im Jahr, je nach Stärke der Winterstürme und Sturmfluten. Hier, wo er jetzt stand, war vor vierzig Jahren Wasser nur und Watt.²

The contrast between Eschenbach’s tidal island and Goethe’s managed garden could hardly be greater. The nature that forms the backdrop to human passions in the early nineteenth century, so perfectly tended and trained to provide for and please its human tenants, is absent from Timm’s novel: in its place is a tiny island on the littoral and literal periphery of the continent that is moving — also quite literally ⁠— out of human reach. The tidal islands on the Wadden Sea are historically mutable, and today threatened more than ever by rising seawater levels and increasingly unstable weather. The long history of land reclamation and improvement on these coasts has changed into a losing battle to protect them as a habitat for wildlife and as a last defence against flood tides. Timm’s protagonist, Eschenbach, has taken a position there to count the migrating birds; a transitory position on a transitory island that gives us a view of, not human mastery, but human powerlessness.

The long memory of German Studies incorporates this big shift⁠ — a sea change, no less — in the way that humans have thought about and related to their environment. In recent years, efforts to understand and map this changing relationship has been the subject of a number of edited collections and monographs.³ One of the most important publications has been the pioneering work of Axel Goodbody, whose 2007 book Nature, Technology and Cultural Change in Twentieth-Century German Literature: The Challenge of Ecocriticism has done much to raise the profile of ecocriticism in German-speaking countries, while edited collections and comparative work by scholars such as Gabriele Dürbeck, Ursula Heise, Kate Rigby, Heather Sullivan, Christine Kanz and Hubert Zapf have each contributed Germanist expertise to international conversations. More recently, the publication of Anthropozän: Eine Einführung by Hannes Bergthaller and Eva Horn⁴ confirms a growing interest in the Anthropocene in the German-speaking countries: this concept has been productively employed in newer work in German Studies, moving beyond ecological awareness towards a deep-time, geological understanding of the human impact on the planet.⁵ In editing this volume, we became aware that Caitríona Ní Dhúill and Nicola Thomas were working in parallel to publish a special issue of the Austrian Studies Yearbook entitled ‘Anthropocene Austria’, and their many excellent contributors (some of whom also contributed to this issue) are continuing to develop the conversation between Austrian culture and the planetary dimensions of the Age of Humans.

In his 2015 chapter on ecocriticism Axel Goodbody considers reasons ‘why ecocriticism has not taken off as a label in Germany’⁶ and the authors of numerous introductions reference ecocriticism’s genesis in the Anglophone world and slow import via Auslandsgermanistik into German-speaking countries.⁷ Our issue of Oxford German Studies is no outlier in showcasing contributions by German scholars working in the English-speaking world and British scholars working in Germany, represented by editors from these two positions respectively. But there are clear signs that ecocriticism, if not always the label itself, is growing in prominence in German-speaking German Studies. The aforementioned work by Hannes Bergthaller and Eva Horn has been published in English too, but it was written and published in German first;⁸ and the books Ecocriticism: Eine Einführung (2015), edited by Gabriele Dürbeck and Urte Stobbe as well as Ecocriticism: Grundlagen — Theorien — Interpretationen (2016) by Benjamin Bühler provide first introductions to the topic for German readers.⁹ German ecocriticism is indeed a somewhat scattered affair — we might say, somewhat fancifully, that it has been wild-seeded more than it has been planted by gardeners — and it is still to date without any formal network or association⁠, apart from small, short-term projects funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft and the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung since 2013. But if it has not (yet) become a major force in Germany, to use Goodbody’s term, insights grown from the seeds of ecocriticism can be found nonetheless across all kinds of literary analysis. The articles gathered here show in particular how ecocriticism is allied with other progressive movements in German literary criticism, and presents the exciting work that emerges in these intersectional spaces.

The idea for this volume first came about in the course of the workshop ‘Ecology in German Literary Criticism — Recent Developments and Approaches’, sponsored by the DAAD Cambridge Research Hub in German Studies and organised by Daniela Dora. Held at the height of the Covid pandemic’s second wave, the workshop took place virtually, as did almost everything else at that time, but despite this a sense of community emerged around the approach of ecocriticism and the drive to contribute through scholarship to understand a planet in the midst of crisis. This special issue is a reflection of community that is deeply supportive across academic generations and national systems. Not only do the contributions by early career researchers come, variously, from Ireland, North America, England, and Germany, but they have been buttressed by a team of committed and generous peer reviewers, from first-generation ecocritics to new recruits. As editors we want to thank Hannah Bingel-Jones, Andrea Capovilla, Caitríona Ní Dhúill, Axel Goodbody, Kiley Kost, Ina Linge, Solvejg Nitzke, Dora Osborne, Alexis Radisoglou, Nicole Seymour, Heather Sullivan, Nicola Thomas, and Hubert Zapf for their insights and support, and of course the contributors for their willingness to revise and rework.

The original workshop covered a wide range of literary texts, genres, and time periods and this is also reflected in this issue. Our contributions range from analyses of some of the most written about women and men of letters in the German-speaking world (Kafka, Rilke, Haushofer), alongside some of its most contemporary novelists (Edelbauer, Kracht, Winkler) and cover genres ranging from poetry to novels to travel writing. They investigate German-language texts on or in relation to Yugloslavia, Poland, Australia, and India, as well as Germany and Austria, from the nineteenth century to the present day. As a collection, the contributions here indicate the degree to which ecocriticism ⁠ — as a term for the reading of the interactions between texts and the environments in which they have been written and read⁠ — has become a useful angle from which to explore and understand German literary production in its engagement with discourses from feminist theory, disability studies, queer theory, and migration studies. The implicit anti-nationalism of environmental discourses, which privilege geographical and topographical spatialities over the cultural spaces of the nation state, are ideally suited to examining German literature in an international world-literary context. Just as ecological processes, biodiversity loss, and the warming climate cannot stop for national or linguistic borders or hierarchies, ecocriticism too compels us to understand German literature in a larger cultural landscape, with many different agencies at play.

The first contributions in our special issue look, from very different angles, at German-speaking ‘dark ecologies’ and the Anthropocene. The term dark ecology, coined by Tim Morton, labels a new way of ecological thinking in which one becomes aware of humans‘ coexistential ties with nonhumans. According to Morton, this ecological knowing aides us in (re)discovering a joy and playfulness within the ‘strange loop’ that we traverse. Robert Craig (University of Bamberg) sees in the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke’s middle period a recognition of ecological decay in an urban setting. In his contribution, he focuses on the nature that appears in Rilke’s poems where it is least looked for, in the places in his poetry where culture (and the city) is most prominent. In so doing, he presents a new perspective on Rilke’s aesthetics of cultural and natural decay. According to Craig — in line with Morton — the instances of incongruity and alienation in Rilke’s poetry are what is most intriguing. The contribution looks at the intricate entanglement of subject and object, nature, and artifice in Rilke’s Neue Gedichte (1907 and 1908), and in Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) and suggests that this shift in ecological perspective opens the potential of appreciating non-identity and coexistence in ecosystems.

Daniela Dora (University of Cambridge) finds a dark ecological awareness in the contemporary writing of Austrian author Josef Winkler. Her contribution argues for the ubiquitous plastic that circulates through Winkler’s travel accounts on India as a queer intervention that resists the binary of nature and culture, human vs non-human. Drawing from Timothy Morton’s theoretical concept of the ‘mesh’, the contribution traces the interconnectedness and coexistence of all animate and inanimate things in Winkler’s texts on India thereby noting that the author’s work also reveals a form of queer desire that cannot undo the effects ecological change, particularly when it comes to plastic’s omnipresence or its participation in waste colonialism but suggests ways of forming a future and living with plastic.

In his contribution, ‘An Axe for the Rising Sea: Kafka’s Anthropocene Afterlives’, Conor Brennan (Trinity College Dublin) engages the concept of the Anthropocene in considering Kafka’s legacy as a world writer. How can we think about Kafka as a writer of the Anthropocene in reading contemporary writing on planetary crisis? The article focusses on a transnational corpus consisting of the Australian writer Richard Flanagan and the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk and traces ‘scales’, ‘bounds’ and ‘parables’ as conduits for Kafka’s influence on these contemporary authors’ writings. In analysing, against the backdrop of the precarious climate crisis, Kafka’s aesthetic techniques, such as the disruption of insides and outsides, the parabolic form, narrative distance and mechanisms of denial, Brennan identifies fruitful tools for understanding the state of denial, the scale and complexity of the present in the context of the Anthropocene.

The next two contributions in our issue both engage with the intersection of feminist theory and ecocriticism in two different Austrian novels. In ‘Feminism, Disability, and a Dragon’, Kassi Burnett (Ohio State University) explores Marlen Haushofer’s 1969 novel Die Mansarde. Her contribution shows how the narrator’s rejection of an overbearing, traditional and patriarchal science that aims to classify and delineate can be read with the emancipatory programme not just of feminist literary scholarship, but also that of disability rights and animal studies. Reading the novel with the help of such a combined method, Burnett’s article follows the protagonist’s evolution from an outsider to a defiant and resilient woman who frees herself from species-centred norms, oppressions and misinterpretations and eventually embraces self-love.

The novel analysed by Rebecca Wismeg-Kammerlander (King’s College London) also considers Austrian history through a feminist lens. In her contribution ‘Nature and femininity in Raphaela Edelbauer’s Das flüssige Land⁠ — Fluid Concepts in a Liquid Land’, Wismeg-Kammerlander looks at the 2019 Austrian novel and carves out the complex and paradoxical self-stylisation of Austria and its seemingly pristine natural landscapes. The article traces the female protagonist’s rejection of essentialist views on femininity and women’s presumably inherent connection with nature. Wismeg-Kammerlander proposes a social ecofeminist approach to overcome the exploitation of non-human nature and women alike and to eventually achieve the necessary systemic changes.

The next article entitled ‘Deconstructing Utopia: Nature, Colonialism and Satire in Christian Kracht’s Imperium (2012)’ by Katharina Forster (UCL) examines how Christian Kracht’s 2012 work Imperium serves as a critique and satire of narratives of nature as utopia. Against the theoretical backdrop of Timothy Morton’s notions of ‘space’ and ‘place’ and Eva Horn’s reflections on the Anthropocene, the paper analyses the ‘aesthetics of the Anthropocene’ (a term coined by Horn) in the novel. Forster identifies the rejection of traditional ideas of nature — as an object or alterity — as a primary characteristic of such an aesthetic. The extremist and speculative potential as well as colonial implications of utopia are revealed resulting in a questioning of utopia as an effective interpretative framework for experiences with nature.

In the final contribution, ‘Communing with Figs and Palm Trees: Nature Mysticism, Migration and Moral Maturity in Marica Bodrožić’, Yvonne Zivkovic (Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz) analyses how the German-Croatian author Marica Bodrožić develops a new form of feminist ecocriticism from a post-migrant perspective in her nature mysticism. Zivkovic examines the author’s 2014 novel Mein weißer Frieden and stresses Bodrožić’s suggestion, based on Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of moral maturity, that a certain set of nature’s qualities, i.e. epistemological and aesthetic ones, can educate individuals in terms of independent, critical but also empathetic thinking and acting. Zivkovic points out that it is vital to find our way back to an enchantment of the world — a ‘re-enchantment’ in her words — to create mature citizens equipped to face the challenges of postmodernity. The paper concludes by acknowledging that the literary nature mysticism illustrated by Bodrožić offers helpful tools to approach the patriarchal exploitation of nature, systemic injustice and oppression.

The range of contributions showcases the many different approaches to the ecological in German-language literature. That the work being done in ecocriticism in German studies has not been formalised into a single movement might even be, we suggest, an advantage: on the intersectional seams between approaches and turns, ecocriticism is well seeded, diverse and thriving, opening up rich new vistas on the literary archive. In returning to the examples with which we opened this introduction, we will recall once more the trees of Eduard’s carefully managed Baumschule, which are perhaps the trees that Timm’s narrator Eschenbach — his name a reference to German literary tradition — thinks of with nostalgia from his North Sea island:

Sie fragte, was er hier auf der Insel am meisten vermisse. Er hätte sogleich antworten können, was er hier nicht vermisse. So aber stand er und überlegte und forschte in sich und sagte schließlich: Bäume. Ja. Bäume. Du hast ja gesehen, es gibt nur dieses Gebüsch, die Kamschatkarosen und Kriechsträucher. Und vier, fünf Bäume auf der Nachbarinsel Nigehörn. Erlen, mit denen die Baumvegetation beginnt. Was mir hier fehlt, ist das Blätterrauschen, die Verbindung von Himmel und Erde.¹⁰

The protagonists in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften are able horticulturalists, with hopes of taming even their own human passions. From his island in the North Sea, Eschenbach can only feel nostalgia for the arboreal nature of his past, and of the German literary past, as he stands in the path of waters that threaten all of human life. In these texts and in their intertextual connection, as in many others, we find traces of the shifting relationship between the German literary imagination and the physical world it has been written and read within. We hope that this volume on ecocriticism in German Studies provides new perspectives from which to think and read in our transitory space on a changing and vulnerable planet.

Additional information

Funding

Katie Ritson's work on this publication was enabled by the German Research Foundation [grant number 429022880].

Notes on contributors

Katie Ritson

Katie Ritson is a scholar of comparative literature with a particular interest in Northern European environments. She studied German at the University of Cambridge, and Comparative Literature and Scandinavian Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, where she gained her doctorate in 2016. Her first book, The Shifting Sands of the North Sea Lowlands: Literary and Historical Imaginaries, was published by Routledge in 2019. Katie is currently a research fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich; together with Graham Huggan at the University of Leeds she leads the project ‘Corridor Talk: Conservation Humanities and the Future of Europe's National Parks’ (AHRC-DFG 2020–2023).

Daniela Dora

Daniela Dora is DAAD Teaching Fellow at Gonville & Caius College and Trinity College, University of Cambridge. Her research interests lie at the intersection of literary studies, travel and tourism as well as gender and queer studies. Prior to her appointment at Cambridge, Daniela taught and researched at Ghent University in Belgium, the University of Luxembourg and King’s College London.

Notes

1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Wahlverwandschaften, in Gesammelte Werke: Band VI (Herisau 1837), p. 127.

2 Uwe Timm, Vogelweide (Munich: Kiepenhauer & Witsch, 2013), p. 5.

3 Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture, ed. Gabriele Dürbeck, Urte Stobbe, Hubert Zapf, and Evi Zemanek (Lanham, MA: Lexington Books, 2017); German Ecocritcism in the Anthropocene, ed. by Caroline Schaumann and Heather Sullivan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

4 Anthropozän: Eine Einführung, ed. Hannes Bergthaller and Eva Horn (Hamburg: Junius, 2019).

5 German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene; Readings in the Anthropocene: The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond, ed. Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnstone (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).

6 Axel Goodbody, ‘German Ecocriticism. An Overview’, in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, ed. by Greg Garrard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 547⁠−59 (p. 547).

7 Ursula Heise, in her preface to German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene, writes that ‘German ecocriticism (…) was first practiced by Germanists working in England or the United States and only began to be adopted by Germanists in Germany somewhat later’ (p. 2).

8 Anthropocene: Key Issues for the Humanities, ed. Hannes Bergthaller and Eva Horn (London: Routledge, 2020).

9 Ecocriticism: Eine Einführung, ed. Gabriele Dürbeck and Urte Stobbe (Cologne: Böhlau, 2015). Benjamin Bühler, Ecocriticism: Grundlagen, Theorien, Interpretationen (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2016).

10 Timm, Vogelweide, p. 327.