Abstract
Philipp Weiss’s five-volume debut novel Am Weltenrand sitzen die Menschen und lachen (2018) features five contrasting protagonists who navigate fractured relationships amid the damaged lifeworlds of industrial modernity, the atomizing tendencies of global capitalism and the pitfalls of ever-optimizing virtuality. This article reads Am Weltenrand as Anthropocene literature, showing how the difficulty and necessity of forming and sustaining close interpersonal and interspecies relationships are central concerns for Weiss in his exploration of the Anthropocene predicament. Across its five volumes, the pentalogy portrays vexed relationality — from missed meetings and misunderstandings to conflicts and failures to relate — as a symptom and effect of ecological crisis. In response to ecological crisis and climate breakdown, Am Weltenrand counters radical pessimism with a renewed emphasis on relationality and dialogue.
Ja, mein Schreiben kommt aus der Trauer. […] Es ist eine Thanatographie, ein Sterbensbericht. Aber es ist unklar, was stirbt und was daraus entsteht.Footnote1
Philipp Weiss’s five-volume debut novel Am Weltenrand sitzen die Menschen und lachen (2018, henceforth Am Weltenrand) features five contrasting protagonists who each navigate fractured relationships within the damaged lifeworlds of industrial modernity, the relentlessly atomizing tendencies of global capitalism and the pitfalls of ever-optimizing virtuality.Footnote2 At the time of writing (October 2023), Weiss, whose output prior to the publication of the novel was mainly in theatre, was in receipt of a three-year Robert Musil literature stipend from the Austrian ministry for art and culture. Alongside his fictional and dramatic works, Weiss has also written travel pieces in which he explores issues of ecological breakdown, extractivism, global social injustice, and resistance.Footnote3 His project, in the novel and in other works such as the drama Der letzte Mensch (2020) and the novel Die Unruhe der Planetenhaut on which he is currently working,Footnote4 is to give literary form to a plural consciousness of the enmeshed sociocultural and planetary predicaments of ecocidal modernity. Weiss is not the first author to explore what it feels like to face the future from within the tangle of forces and effects created over centuries by capitalist development, techno-scientific rationality, colonial extractivism, and industrial fossil-fuelled growth, and neither will he be the last.Footnote5 But the ambitious scale of his debut novel as an approach to these conditions certainly invites closer attention.
This article focuses on the Am Weltenrand pentalogy, showing how the difficulty but also crucial necessity of forming and sustaining close interpersonal and interspecies relationships are central concerns for Weiss in his exploration of the Anthropocene predicament. In Am Weltenrand, vexed relationality — from missed meetings and misunderstandings to conflicts and failures to relate — is a symptom and effect of ecological crisis and vice versa. Furthermore, the sparse lines of flight and vectors of hope that the novel does offer proceed not through imagined solutions or utopias but through the arduous work of building and sustaining relationships. It should be acknowledged at the outset of this discussion that while Weiss described his multi-perspectival epic as an ‘Anthropocene’ text in early interviews, he has since distanced himself from the term.Footnote6 I use it here with due acknowledgement of its limitations as a shorthand to refer to the relentlessly ‘wicked problems’ of our time.Footnote7 Across its five volumes, Weiss’s Am Weltenrand demonstrates clear-sighted apprehension of the catastrophic — and catastrophically uneven — effects of industrial global modernity, its all-encompassing technosphere, and their consequences for the biosphere and for humans as part of this biosphere. The pentalogy’s historical and geographical settings, from the Paris commune of 1871 to the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, exemplify the modernities that pave the way to the Anthropocene as a self-conscious condition of the human in its relation to the non-human and to the future. Chronologically speaking, the narrative begins in the time and place — nineteenth-century urban European modernity — in which the Enlightenment manifests itself in its full ambivalence through industrialization, colonialism, class conflict, and technological progress. One volume, which features a child narrator and numerous interspecies encounters and relations of care, tentatively suggests possibilities for a more livable mode. Taken together, the five volumes acknowledge the frames of planetary ecocide and technospheric enmeshment as new ontological and epistemological conditions that exceed inherited capacities to inhabit and navigate them. As the title of Weiss’s current work in progress, Die Unruhe der Planetenhaut, suggests, the notion of the technological membrane or ‘technosphere’ that encircles the earth and increasingly determines human life is one which continues to preoccupy him.Footnote8
While Am Weltenrand has garnered several awards,Footnote9 some of the more critical reviews of the novel indicate that it is not always experienced as a pleasurable or even rewarding read.Footnote10 The demands it places on readers are various: scale and information overload are noted alongside symptoms of style, including perceived tendencies to kitsch, cliché and didacticism. All reviewers mention the dimensions of the text, which within its thousand-odd pages nests a hundred and forty years of narrated time within the dizzying geological and cosmic timescales of evolutionary and planetary history. The novel’s formal heterogeneity — the fact that it consists of a compendium of text-types, from encyclopaedia-style self-writing to audio transcription, graphic novel and didactic pamphlet — is also frequently remarked upon. For some readers, these formal devices and conceits, while interesting, do not compensate for a certain stylistic heaviness. Weiss mines countless sources in theoretical physics, evolutionary biology, history of science, philosophy, and cultural theory in his bid to narrate the Anthropocene, and the result can leave the reader feeling hectored, particularly in the volume Cahiers (on which more below). ‘Es ist also eigentlich wirklich alles drin, in diesen fünf Heften’, writes Insa Wilke in Süddeutsche Zeitung, ‘[n]ur eines nicht: der gute Satz’.Footnote11 What Wilke’s response, like those of other reviewers, suggests but leaves unexplored is the realization that the reading experience itself and the frustrations it may occasion reflect the cognitive and affective difficulties of engaging with the realities and prognoses of the planetary situation we now inhabit. What I propose here is that the overwhelming or relentless effects of this discursive and factual onslaught are best countered, both within the pentalogy and in our response to it, through an intensified focus on relationships and relationality, both interhuman and interspecies.
In four of the volumes, the protagonists and settings squarely confront the reality of the ‘Great Acceleration’, the rapid upward surge of human activity and attendant transformations in Earth’s systems since the 1950s. According to Will Steffen and other Earth System scientists, the Great Acceleration refers to ‘the holistic, comprehensive and interlinked nature of the post-1950 changes simultaneously sweeping across the socio-economic and biophysical spheres of the Earth System’.Footnote12 By distinguishing the period since the mid-twentieth century from the wider unresolved and extensively debated question of when the Anthropocene can be said to have begun, the Great Acceleration concept highlights ‘the dramatic change in magnitude and rate of the human imprint from about 1950 onwards’.Footnote13 To visualize the relationships between intensifying human activity and changes in the Earth’s natural systems, including climate (greenhouse gas levels, global temperature), ocean acidification, degradation of the biosphere, species loss, and related measures, discussions of the Great Acceleration usually feature the famous ‘hockey-stick’ graphs which map socio-economic trends onto Earth System trends, showing how both human activity and Earth System changes follow similar sharply rising curves from about 1950 onwards, ‘with no end in sight’, as Steffen and his co-authors put it. These graphs have become ‘an iconic symbol of the Anthropocene’.Footnote14
The difficulty of bridging discursively from literary criticism to contemplation of the Anthropocene is already evident in the question of how to continue this discussion of Am Weltenrand: the deliberate jump in the previous paragraph from feuilleton reviews to Earth System transformations is intended to illustrate the challenge. The scalar discrepancy that troubles any attempt to gearshift between the hockey-stick graphs that chart causes and effects of runaway climate breakdown and the question of how to read a literary text is a symptom of what Timothy Clark calls Anthropocene disorder:Footnote15 consciousness of planetary ecocide moves us beyond the reach of the methodologies we are accustomed to using when we read texts, whether our main focus is on deriving meaning and pleasure from them, allowing them to resonate with us, understanding their genesis, or linking them to their wider context. Weiss’s pentalogy is a text of the Anthropocene as much as a text about it: any relation we enter into with this text is also a relation to the ecocidal moment that produces it, and which it reflects.
Because there is no easy fix for scalar discrepancy — the effect of which is precisely to refuse the possibility of an easy fix — an inventory of the pentalogy’s contents is as good a place as any to continue the present discussion. Left to right in order of insertion into the slipcase, the volumes of Am Weltenrand are presented as stand-alone novels, as follows: Paulette Blanchard, Enzyklopädie eines Ichs; Jona Jonas, Terrain vague; Chantal Blanchard, Cahiers; Akio Itō, Akios Aufzeichnungen; and Abra Aoki, Die glückseligen Inseln, a manga-style graphic novel with artwork by Raffaela Schöbitz. While the covers and spines playfully suggest multiple or heteronymic authorship, the front matter of each volume reveals these attributions as part of the fiction. Each protagonist-narrator is embarked on a search for relation, sometimes literally for relations in the sense of lost family members or ancestors. The searches take them on journeys to Greenland, to the French Alps, across the contamination zone of Fukushima, through Tokyo and its nightlife, back to a family home in Yerres outside Paris, on the Transsiberian Railway towards Japan. These quests are defined by their frustration, and frequently fail to culminate in genuine encounter. Rather, Weiss's protagonists tend to remain caught in the mode of Vergegnung, the term coined by Martin Buber to suggest the missed meeting or failed encounter in which Begegnung — which for Buber involves a full coming into mutual co-presence and awareness — remains unachieved.Footnote16 Chantal and Jona, the lovers of two of the volumes, are more apart than together, their sporadic intimacy alternating with distance and conflict; Paulette climbs ever higher in her quest for knowledge and experience until she disappears into Alpine ice; Abra descends through the Tokyo night into the rabbit hole of virtuality, driven by childhood trauma including the loss of her twin sister; and Akio is searching for his parents, his grandmother, his iguana and at various points in the narrative his younger sister too.
The quests, all of which involve Japan, provide thematic continuity across the five stylistically and typographically distinct volumes. Weiss acknowledges the founding importance for the entire project of a 2011 journey he made to Fukushima.Footnote17 Christian Metz in his review for the FAZ offers a sceptical take on the novel’s transcultural imaginary, asking to what extent Am Weltenrand partakes in an orientalizing stance through its construction of Japanese culture as a projection screen for Western desires and anxieties: ‘Gibt es da nicht eine Grenze, über die hinaus sich ein deutschsprachiger Autor nicht in das Bewusstsein eines japanischen Jungen einschreiben kann?’Footnote18 The answer to Metz’s rhetorical question might lie in the reframing of cultural difference by the context of planetary ecocide: literary transcultural explorations of this kind, for all their potential pitfalls of projection, othering and ventriloquism, might be a risk worth taking if what is at stake is the ability to apprehend or imagine a shared humanity in the face of Anthropocene challenges. While a fuller exploration of these issues lies outside the scope of this discussion, it is worth noting the central importance Weiss accords to intercultural encounters for his own creative process. ‘Zu schreiben bedeutet für mich zu erforschen, wie es ist, eine andere zu sein. Wie es ist, anderswo zu leben und auf dieses Weltgeflecht zu blicken. Also muss ich aufbrechen’.Footnote19 Whether Japanese or European, Weiss’s protagonists are united by the narrative trope of the search for a lost loved one, which may be read as an allegory of ecocide in the age of the Great Acceleration. Connecting the disparate narratives is an underlying awareness that our very relation to the biosphere is fractured and dysfunctional, constituting a kind of planetary-level Vergegnung, to use Buber's term.
Besides affording a variety of settings from the Paris commune to present-day Japan, the five narratives of Am Weltenrand also allow for a range of reading approaches. Reading each volume as a self-contained text, we become immersed in the perspective of a single protagonist. Standing back from the individual volumes to view them as one novel, we perceive their interconnections. While each centring a first-person narrative of their own, Paulette, Chantal, Jona, Abra, and Akio also move in and out of each other’s narratives. The multiple perspectives are sequential — inevitably, we read one volume at a time, although the choice of sequence is notionally up to the reader — and layered, in that each new perspective retrospectively complicates the one that came before. Commenting on this structure, Weiss has said that ‘[h]erkömmliches Erzählen […] die heutige Welt nicht mehr adäquat abbilden [kann]’,Footnote20 implying that the pentalogy’s juxtaposition and accumulation of formats, protagonists and styles produces the effects of weirding, scalar distortion and proliferation that Timothy Clark and others have argued are hallmarks of Anthropocene aesthetics.Footnote21 However, while the volumes with their five heteronyms and contrasting typefaces may be a novel format, the texts they consist of in fact stand in clear relation to familiar genres and styles: coming-of-age novel, manga, dystopia, manifesto, disaster testimony. Alternations of narrative voice over the course of a prose epic is also a well-tested format in contemporary eco-fiction, as recent examples such as Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) attest. This reworking of available generic and narrative templates is not a weakness of Am Weltenrand, however. On the contrary, it would be arguably incongruous to affirm formal innovation or novelty as a necessary quality of literary response to a condition — the Anthropocene — that is marked by exhaustion, overload, the closure of futures, and the imperative to work within recognized constraints. To narrate ‘the possibility of life in capitalist ruins’Footnote22 is to narrate within the generic ruins of capitalist modernity’s literature: perhaps this is an overarching meta-message of Am Weltenrand, quite apart from how we may read, ‘relate to’ or ‘identify with’ its various plots, protagonists and ‘contents’. Weiss’s novel is novel not so much in respect of its form, then, as by dint of the sheer relentlessness of its confrontation with the Anthropocene, its refusal to look away. In this way it resonates with the earlier ecological thought of Bernard Charbonneau, who already in 1980 emphasized ‘relentlessness’ as a quality of ecological awareness.Footnote23
Weiss’s indebtedness not just to generic repertoires but to earlier thinkers and traditions is explicit, embracing also pre-modern and classical sources. Insofar as the future is that with which we stand in perpetually deferred relation, one appropriate way to rehearse this relation, for Weiss, is the Stoic technique of premeditatio malorum, imagining the worst. As a form of spiritual vaccination technique,Footnote24 premeditatio malorum resembles death-awareness practices in various spiritual traditions, including Buddhism, that involve visualizing the decomposition of first any corpse and then one’s own corpse. Excessive attachment to life, at least to one’s own life, is the illusion to be shattered through contemplation of one’s own demise; the question of how this might work collectively, how related topoi such as memento mori and vanitas might be rescaled for the Anthropocene to embrace the civilizational and species level, certainly preoccupies Chantal in the Cahiers volume. Of all Weiss's protagonists, it is she who bears the weight of Anthropocene consciousness most heavily (which may explain why she commands more attention than the others in the academic articles that have discussed Am Weltenrand to date).Footnote25 A climate scientist whose disciplinary knowledge combines with her own neuroses to produce a radically pessimistic and misanthropic diagnosis of the contemporary conditio humana, her journal is interleaved with a manifesto entitled Zerstört euch!, complete with suicide instruction manual, in which she exhorts the self-extermination of humankind. Chantal’s view chimes with that of contemporary anti-natalist extinction imaginaries — her rhetorical question ‘Aber wer hat schon das Glück, nicht geboren zu sein?.’Footnote26 would not be out of place in the work of David BenatarFootnote27 — and her pessimism at times extends to other complex life-forms beyond the human. ‘Sie könnten aufgrund der auffälligen Häufung von Tieranalogien auf die falsche Idee verfallen, ich könnte Lebewesen gut leiden. Dem ist durchaus nicht so. (Am wenigsten dieses seltsame Tier, den Menschen.)’Footnote28 But this performative misanthropy or biophobia is clearly marked as a symptom of her neurotic narcissism: for Chantal, one appealing aspect of the end of the world is that it promises to coincide with the extinction of the suffering subject. As the author puts it, ‘Chantals Wunsch zu verschwinden wird nicht nur durch die Weltlage hervorgerufen.’Footnote29 Trenchantly post-anthropocentric in its dethronement of homo sapiens not just as a ‘creature without qualities’ or ‘defizitäres Wesen’ but as a waste product of evolution (as indicated by the terms ‘Bioautomat’ and ‘Abfall’), Chantal’s misanthropy stops short of exploring the insights of philosophical anthropology, namely that the very deficit of our species condition is also the condition of radical openness to whatever future we may still be capable of bringing into being.Footnote30 She is thus caught in Anthropocene consciousness without becoming ecological. Through her bravura performance of a thorough-going misanthropy which is also directed at herself (and from which she only seems to exempt her lover Jona), Chantal also dramatizes the dead-end of narcissism in such a way as to throw the reader back on relationality as a line of flight that, whatever else it might promise, at least offers a retreat from the harsh demands of (self-)annihilation. It will be up to the other protagonists to offset Chantal’s radical pessimism by committing to relation and dialogue — interhuman, intergenerational, interspecies — as the foundation of a liveable mode. While Chantal ultimately moves beyond the reach of dialogue,Footnote31 her counterparts in the other volumes are vouchsafed moments of encounter and solidarity, whether in Abra’s community of alternative hedonists, Akio’s unflagging curiosity or even Paulette’s naïve openness to the world.
The most extensive example of the role of dialogue as a counterweight to the horizon of extinction is in Terrain vague, which according to the author was the first volume to be written and is the core text from which the other volumes emanate.Footnote32 The tortuous love story of Jona and Chantal gives way in the second half of Terrain vague to a series of deathbed dialogues between Jona and the unhoused day-labourer Satoshi, who is dying of radiation poisoning after having been drafted in to clean up in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. Through the dialogues, Satoshi becomes an internal or sixth first-person narrator in his account of the earthquake, tsunami and fatal clean-up operation. While the historical culture shock of the collision between Japanese culture and the industrial West resonates through the technological shock of Fukushima in a sort of mega-Vergegnung, the Satoshi-Jona encounter holds open the possibility of establishing genuine relation in the face of disaster, a relation based on bearing witness (Satoshi) and active listening (Jona). In a novel in which the protagonists are almost always on the move, these dialogues are distinguished by stillness insofar as the interlocutors are immobilized: Satoshi is bed-bound in hospital and Jona sits listening by his side. Jona, who himself had suffered the shock of sudden temporary deafness at the start of the narrative, finds an equilibrium of sorts in his new role as a death doula. In this his story anticipates elements of Akio's, whose navigation of the Fukushima chaos is likewise facilitated by relationships of mutual care. Akio is both preoccupied and comforted by his interactions with animals, his mute younger sister and the radiation-poisoned ‘Man in the Moon’ who, it turns out, is none other than Satoshi of the Terrain vague volume. To quote Weiss: ‘Die Fähigkeit, mit dem Anderen in Beziehung zu treten, [ist] “Gegengift” gegen die Weltlage’.Footnote33 It is above all Akio who exposes the ecocidal blindspots of techno-scientific patriarchy as represented by his own father and the nuclear power plant, but he does so without succumbing to the misanthropic pessimism vented by Chantal, and his child’s idiom is a welcome leaven to her professorial tone. ‘Mir kommt langsam der Verdacht, dass Otōsan [Papa] keine Ahnung hat’:Footnote34 in observations of this kind, Akio irreverently dismantles the braggadocio of the industrial growth society, but not without honouring its scientific knowledge in his own eclectic way. In line with the established literary trope which figures children as bearers of hope, the boy is endlessly curious and open to encounter; his concern with getting from day to day and finding his loved ones does not prevent him from having a rich, humorously pop-culture-infused inner monologue (often featuring his pet turtles Justin Bieber and Michael Jackson, alongside vivid memories of his grandmother) in which he ranges from speculation on species evolution to sharp analysis of family dynamics. Akio's story not only foregrounds the precarity of life against the backdrop of an Anthropocene ‘Natech’ such as Fukushima (in which natural disaster is multiply compounded by technological malfunction and vice versa),Footnote35 it also highlights the resourcefulness of children and affirms the regenerative potential of relations of mutual care.
It should be clear by this point what Am Weltenrand is ‘about’, and thus evident also that the critical emphases in reviews on formal devices, perceived stylistic shortcomings, perilous transculturalism, and information overload, while all understandable responses to the reading experience, in fact deflect attention from the novel’s intervention as Anthropocene literature. What centres and drives Weiss’s pentalogy is the awareness that the discovery by humans of fossil fuels as an energy source represents a catastrophic turn in human history. Modernity itself is an energy regime; to invoke Dipesh Chakrabarty, the mansion of its various freedoms has been built on an ever-expanding foundation of fossil fuel use.Footnote36 All five volumes of Am Weltenrand are preoccupied with the literal and figurative fallout of the fossil fuel and nuclear ages and with the energy systems that have brought human societies to a peak of extraordinary complexity but also and concomitantly to the brink of collapse. As Chantal proclaims in her Zerstört euch! manifesto: ‘Der Mensch ist das nackte Tier mit dem Feuer. Er ist das pyromanische Tier’.Footnote37 We, the protagonist-beneficiary-victims of the industrial growth society, shift from being Promethean — taming and unleashing the vast energy reserves stored in the earth — to being pyromaniac, setting fire to and consuming the very life-support systems on which our existence and that of future generations depends.
The modern energy revolutions, whether one dates from James Watt’s steam engine, widespread electrification or the plutonium spike, have profound philosophical and existential implications. By analogy with Weiss’s assertion, quoted earlier, that ‘herkömmliches Erzählen kann die heutige Welt nicht mehr adäquat abbilden’,Footnote38 inherited categories of Western philosophy also beg the question of whether they remain fit for purpose in the face of the exponential intensification of human energy consumption since the Enlightenment. The mismatch between available thought-styles and fossil-fuel-driven ecological collapse provides for some cognitive dissonance in Am Weltenrand and thus becomes a source of dark humour. At one point in the Cahiers volume, the protagonist finds herself in a personal crisis. She has travelled to Vienna to see her lover Jona and stands at his door unable to make herself ring the bell. At this moment, she recites Kant’s foundational questions ‘Was kann ich wissen? Was soll ich tun? Was darf ich hoffen? Was ist der Mensch?’.Footnote39 This would be a rare comic moment were it not for the fact that the entire pentalogy can be read as an extended grappling with these very questions in the face of the planetary crisis into which humanity has been (unevenly) propelled by the industrial age. The Kantian question catalogue, which was that of the sovereign subject of the Enlightenment, is not cancelled but rather infused with an anxious tonality and extended to embrace other questions: What am I entangled with? What and who am I dependent on? What am I complicit with? What must I fear? The very ability to formulate these questions in the first-person singular comes under pressure in Anthropocene consciousness, owing to intensified awareness of the enmeshment, materiality and intersubjectivity of the I. To the key terms of Anthropocene aesthetics and affect outlined by Timothy Clark, Timothy Morton, Clive Hamilton, and others — from weirding and scalar discrepancy to ecological irony and the proliferation of dread —Footnote40 must be added a further term: relationality. Weiss’s pentalogy suggests that any attempt to write the Anthropocene must commit to a relational aesthetics; in this, his writing resonates with contemporary ecological thinking, in which concepts such as entanglement, enmeshment, interdependency, or connectivity are prominent. As Amy Elias and Christian Moraru write,
[…] if today’s planetary life consists in an incessantly thickening, historically unprecedented web of relations among people, cultures, and locales, to comprehend the planetary must entail grasping the relationality embedded in it. Consequently, relatedness, dialogue, and interactivity are central to major aesthetic initiatives stirring at this stage in world history.Footnote41
Es war Marx, der darauf hinwies, dass Geld nicht etwa eine Sache sei, sondern ein Symbol für menschliche — und ich möchte hinzufügen, auch nicht menschliche — Beziehungen. Und dass der Fetisch des Geldes diese Beziehungen überdecke. Es gilt, sie wieder bloßzulegen.Footnote42
One implication of the ‘Kind von Gyokusendo’ strand is that modern subjectivity is itself a sort of fossil that has washed up on the shores of the Anthropocene, its anachronistic structure now as fractured and disassembled as the scattered skeletons of bygone eras. This insight helps us to make better sense retrospectively of Paulette. From her cossetted bourgeois girlhood as the daughter of a wealthy industrialist in 1860s Paris, we follow the narrator of Enzyklopädie eines Ichs through the cataclysm of the Paris commune, her work as a reporter at the World Exhibition in Vienna in 1883 and her unhappy marriage in Japan, finally losing her on a paleo-archaeological expedition in the Alps. She washes up later as a mummified corpse, her reappearance a side-effect of global heating as the Alpine glaciers begin to recede. Paulette’s story is one of partial or fractured emancipation. The structure of her volume — roughly chronological but divided into alphabetized ‘entries’ in an ‘encyclopedia of self’ — allows a multi-faceted portrait to emerge: striving to embrace both modernity and alterity, in her gushing and emotional tone she rarely escapes sentimentality and kitsch. As her descendant Chantal exclaims on reading Paulette’s text: ‘Schon zwei Mal habe ich das Buch in eine Ecke geschleudert’. As one reviewer drily comments: ‘Da erkennt man sich als Leser wieder’.Footnote44 Intra- or extradiegetic frustration with a kitschy narrative voice is, like all such reader responses, symptomatic, pointing the way to a possible meaning, in this case to the question of why Weiss chose to begin his Anthropocene epic with this particular mode of modern subjectivity: rebellious femininity on the brink of emancipation, riven by the contradictions of modernity and fascinated by alterity. One might be tempted to dismiss the Paulette volume as a manneristic curiosity, a temptation underscored by the busy image-text relations created by the numerous line drawings — many taken from nineteenth-century sources — featured in the text. The construction of an historical female perspective raises the spectre of the unfulfilled project of women’s emancipation: the intrepid nomadic Communard of high capitalism washes up in the Anthropocene as a mummified corpse. Paulette, with her ambivalent modernity and her ambition to determine the origins of humanity, sets the parameters for the pentalogy and, as revenant, haunts the remaining volumes, raising the question: what will remain of us, and of our emancipatory projects, after we have disappeared?
The diagnosis of the stark planetary outlook offered in Am Weltenrand has begun to percolate more widely into mainstream cultural consciousness even in the five years since the novel appeared. Again, the scalar discrepancy that dogs all discussions of ecology and literature snarls up our inherited desire for a clear conclusion. It would be stretching the point to suggest that a niche literary debut had any part in or ‘impact’ on the marked shift in the wider cultural conversation around ecological crisis that can be observed now. Extreme weather events linked to anthropogenic climate breakdown provide daily headlines across the mainstream media in a way that would have been difficult to imagine (if not impossible to predict) as recently as a decade ago. Weiss’s work is of the current ecologically anxious Zeit-geist, anticipatory and participatory at the same time. Am Weltenrand offers a courageously scaled take on the Anthropocene predicament. In its sheer verbosity and scale, Weiss’s novel could be said to respond to the provocation of Greta Thunberg and others that discourse, including literary discourse, on climate breakdown and ecological crisis is mere idle chatter, ‘bla bla bla’;Footnote45 such a sceptical stance would embrace the suspicion, too, that even environmental activism or indeed ecocritical research of the kind represented by this article risks adding to the plentiful hot air and becoming a sort of displacement activity, a form of doing or grasping instead of being in the face of catastrophe.Footnote46 One must tread carefully here to avoid co-opting the pentalogy as activism or, conversely, suggesting that Am Weltenrand is to be read in the spirit of the ‘doomer imaginary’ that preaches resignation in the face of Anthropocene harms. The pentalogy gives copious airtime to a card-carrying doomer in the person of Chantal, it is true, but the narrative direction of sympathy persistently calls the validity of her worldview into question, as does the fact that she is only one of several protagonists, her stance embedded within a more complex and varied set of possible orientations towards the future. It should be noted, too, that the pentalogy’s title eschews the apocalyptic cliché of the end of the world in favour of the stranger, more open image of the edge of the world. ‘Am Weltenrand’ suggests a precarious position on the periphery which might allow a new if unstable angle of vision. While the laughter we hear there may be ambiguous, it is nevertheless a shared release of vital energy occasioned by whatever it is the people seated on this uncomfortable edge are witnessing together, and it has the potential to break the hold of the relentlessly mesmerizing spectacle of ecological collapse. It is often said that the crises we confront are not least failures of imagination, a view Weiss himself also espouses. In the preamble to his 2020 play Der letzte Mensch he writes:
Wir scheitern heute grundlegend daran, das Zukünftige vorzustellen, fühlbar zu machen und zur Sprache zu bringen. Doch nur, was wir erzählen und somit vorstellen können, können wir auch verantworten und folglich verändern.Footnote47
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Caitríona Ní Dhúill
Caitríona Ní Dhúill teaches modern German and Austrian literature at the University of Salzburg. Her current research focusses on the relationships between literature and ecological consciousness in the Anthropocene. She has worked on utopian theory and fiction; gender theory and representations of gender; and the relationships between biography and literature. She is the author of Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography (Palgrave 2020) and Sex in Imagined Spaces: Gender and Utopia from More to Bloch (Legenda 2010).
Notes
1 Philipp Weiss, author interview, May 2022. The German original remains unpublished; for the English translation, see Philipp Weiss and Caitríona Ní Dhúill, ‘The Deceleration of Terror: An Interview with Philipp Weiss’, Austrian Studies, 30 (2022), 185–96.
2 Philipp Weiss, Am Weltenrand sitzen die Menschen und lachen. Roman. 5 vols. (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2018). While the volumes are not numbered in the published edition, I have numbered them here 1–5 in order of insertion left to right into the slipcase. I include the respective titles and protagonist-narrator names in square brackets with each citation.
3 Philipp Weiss, ‘Die Containerisierung der Welt’, Der Standard (Album), 7 December 2019, A1-3; Philipp Weiss, ‘Der Kapitalismus ohne Maske’, Der Standard (Album), 11 January 2020, A1-3.
4 Philipp Weiss, Der letzte Mensch (Berlin: Suhrkamp Theatertext, 2020).
5 On the nexus of ecocide, colonialism, capitalist development and industrial growth, see, for example, Patrick Hossay, Unsustainable: A Primer for Global Environmental and Social Justice (London: Zed, 2006).
6 Weiss and Ní Dhúill, ‘Deceleration’, 188; Philipp Weiss, author interview, https://oe1.orf.at/artikel/650309/Am-Weltenrand-sitzen-die-Menschen-und-lachen [accessed 14 August 2023].
7 The coinage ‘wicked problem’, which goes back to Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber’s paper ‘Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning’, Policy Sciences, 4 (1973), 155–69, has been widely adopted in sustainability research and other disciplinary contexts to designate a complex set of interlocking problems for which no clear solution readily presents itself, and which can even be further exacerbated by the search for or attempt to implement solutions. On ‘wicked problems’, including climate breakdown as a ‘super wicked problem’, see also Kelly Levin et al., ‘Overcoming the Tragedy of Super Wicked Problems: Constraining Our Futures Selves to Ameliorate Global Climate Change’, Policy Sciences, 45.2 (2012), 123–52; see also Johanna Lönngren and Katrien van Poeck, ‘Wicked Problems: A Mapping Review of the Literature’, International Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology, 28.6 (2021), 481–502. For a brief account of the wider debate surrounding the merits and demerits of the term Anthropocene, see Caitríona Ní Dhúill and Nicola Thomas, ‘Introduction’, in special issue ‘Anthropocene Austria’, ed. by Ní Dhúill and Nicola Thomas, Austrian Studies, 30 (2022), 1–13.
8 For a discussion of the ‘technosphere’ concept, see Yuk Hui and Pieter Lemmens, ‘Reframing the Technosphere: Peter Sloterdijk and Bernard Stiegler’s Anthropotechnological Diagnoses of the Anthropocene’, Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, 2 (2017), 25–41.
9 In 2018, the Klaus Michael-Kühne Prize for best German-language debut and the Jürgen Ponto-Stiftung Prize; in 2019, the Rauris Festival Prize; the French translation by Olivier Mannoni was shortlisted for the Prix Femina Étranger in 2021.
10 The reviews in the major venues are referenced, some with links, at https://www.perlentaucher.de/buch/philipp-weiss/am-weltenrand-sitzen-die-menschen-und-lachen.html [accessed 8 August 2023].
11 Insa Wilke, ‘Und weiter wirbelt das Kunsthandwerk’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 30 September 2018, online edition, https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/debuet-und-weiter-wirbelt-das-kunsthandwerk-1.4149598 [accessed 15 August 2023].
12 Will Steffen et al., ‘The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration’, The Anthropocene Review, 2.1 (2015), 81–98 (p. 82).
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., p. 83.
15 Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 23.
16 Martin Buber, ‘Begegnung: Autobiographische Fragmente’, in Werkausgabe, ed. by Paul Mendes-Flohr and Bernd Witte, vol. 7: Schriften zur Literatur, Theater und Kunst. Lyrik, Autobiographie und Drama, ed. by Emily D. Bilski et al. (Munich: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2016), pp. 274–309 (p. 275).
17 Weiss and Ní Dhúill, ‘The Deceleration of Terror’, p. 190.
18 Christian Metz, ‘Wir haben wirklich die komischsten Sachen gesehen’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 4 October 2018, online edition, https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/rezensionen/belletristik/am-weltenrand-sitzen-die-menschen-und-lachen-von-philipp-weiss-15784621.html [accessed 25 October 2023].
19 Weiss, author interview; translation in Weiss and Ní Dhúill, ‘The Deceleration of Terror’, p. 190.
20 Weiss, author interview, https://oe1.orf.at/artikel/650309/Am-Weltenrand-sitzen-die-Menschen-und-lachen [accessed 14 August 2023].
21 Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge; see also Eva Horn and Hannes Bergthaller, Anthropozän: Zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2019).
22 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
23 Bernard Charbonneau, The Green Light: A Self-Critique of the Ecological Movement [1980], trans. by Christian Roy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), p. 143.
24 See Weiss and Ní Dhúill, ‘The Deceleration of Terror’, p. 189.
25 Joana van de Löcht, ‘Literarische Naturgeschichten: Zum Import naturkundlicher Gattungen, Schreibweisen und Formate in der Gegenwartsliteratur’, in Anthropozäne Literatur, ed. by Gabriele Dürbeck, Simon Probst and Christoph Schaub (Berlin: Metzler, 2022), pp. 145–62. Van de Löcht rightly describes Zerstört euch! as a popular science treatise about the development of human life on earth, which it also is, but the fact that its entire trajectory is to argue for humanity’s self-annihilation sets it apart from other such treatises (p. 158). See also Reinhold Münster, ‘The Anthropocene, Technology and Fictional Literature’, Humanities, 9.56 (2020), 1–12.
26 Weiss, Am Weltenrand, vol. 3 [= Chantal Blanchard, Cahiers], p. 87.
27 David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006).
28 Weiss, Am Weltenrand, vol. 3 [= Blanchard, Cahiers], p. 79.
29 Philipp Weiss, personal communication, 15 September 2021, my emphasis.
30 Key ideas of philosophical anthropology such as ‘Weltoffenheit’ or Arnold Gehlen’s notion of the human as a ‘Mängelwesen’ (being defined by lack) echo through Am Weltenrand and particularly the Cahiers volume, for example on p. 261. See Gehlen, Der Mensch: Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt [1940] (Wiesbaden: Athenaion, 1986). See also Weiss and Ní Dhúill, ‘The Deceleration of Terror’, p. 189.
31 Weiss, Am Weltenrand, vol. 3 [= Blanchard, Cahiers], pp. 298–301.
32 Weiss and Ní Dhúill, ‘The Deceleration of Terror’, p. 187.
33 Philipp Weiss, personal communication, 15 September 2021.
34 Weiss, Am Weltenrand, vol. 4 [= Akio Itō, Akios Aufzeichnungen], p. 87.
35 On Fukushima as ‘Natech’, see Weiss and Ní Dhúill, ‘The Deceleration of Terror’, p. 186.
36 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry, 35.2 (2009), 197–222.
37 Weiss, Am Weltenrand, vol. 3 [= Blanchard, Cahiers], p. 263.
38 Weiss, author interview, https://oe1.orf.at/artikel/650309/Am-Weltenrand-sitzen-die-Menschen-und-lachen [accessed 14 August 2023].
39 Immanuel Kant, ‘Logik. Ein Handbuch zu Vorlesungen’, in Gesammelte Schriften, 26 vols, ed. by Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. 9: Logik, Physische Geographie, Pädagogik, ed. by Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche (Berlin: Reimer, 1972), pp. 1–150 (p. 25). See Weiss, Am Weltenrand, vol. 3 [= Blanchard, Cahiers], p. 114.
40 On dread as the essential Anthropocene disposition, see Clive Hamilton, ‘Towards a Fifth Ontology of the Anthropocene’, Angelaki. Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 25.4 (2020), 110–19.
41 Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru, The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015), p. xii.
42 Weiss, ‘Die Containerisierung der Welt’, see footnote 4 above, p. A3.
43 Weiss, Am Weltenrand, vol. 3 [= Blanchard, Cahiers], p. 55.
44 Insa Wilke, ‘Und weiter wirbelt das Kunsthandwerk’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 30 September 2018, online edition, https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/debuet-und-weiter-wirbelt-das-kunsthandwerk-1.4149598 [accessed 15 August 2023].
45 Kate Rigby, ‘Writing in the Anthropocene: Idle Chatter or Ecoprophetic Witness?’ Australian Humanities Review, 47 (2009), 173–87; Damian Carrington, ‘Blah, blah, blah: Greta Thunberg lambasts leaders over climate crisis’, The Guardian, 28 September 2021.
46 For a similar argument, see Alexis Radisoglou, ‘Anthropocene Realism: On Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Erde, and the Limits of a Cumulative Aesthetic’, Austrian Studies, 30 (2022), 48–62.
47 Philipp Weiss, Der letzte Mensch (Berlin: Suhrkamp Theatertext, 2020), n.p.