Readings in the Anthropocene: The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond 9781501307751, 9781501307782, 9781501307775

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN GERMAN STUDIES

Vol. 18

Series Editor:

Imke Meyer

Editorial Board: Katherine Arens, Roswitha Burwick, Richard Eldridge, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Catriona MacLeod, Stephan Schindler, Heidi Schlipphacke, Ulrich Schönherr, James A. Schultz, Silke-Maria Weineck, David Wellbery, Sabine Wilke, John Zilcosky.

Volumes in the series: Vol. 1. Improvisation as Art: Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives by Edgar Landgraf Vol. 2. The German Pícaro and Modernity: Between Underdog and Shape-Shifter by Bernhard Malkmus Vol. 3. Citation and Precedent: Conjunctions and Disjunctions of German Law and Literature by Thomas O. Beebee Vol. 4. Beyond Discontent: ‘Sublimation’ from Goethe to Lacan by Eckart Goebel Vol. 5. From Kafka to Sebald: Modernism and Narrative Form edited by Sabine Wilke Vol. 6. Image in Outline: Reading Lou Andreas-Salomé by Gisela Brinker-Gabler Vol. 7. Out of Place: German Realism, Displacement, and Modernity by John B. Lyon Vol. 8. Thomas Mann in English: A Study in Literary Translation by David Horton Vol. 9. The Tragedy of Fatherhood: King Laius and the Politics of Paternity in the West by Silke-Maria Weineck Vol. 10. The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the New Poems by Luke Fischer Vol. 11. The Laughter of the Thracian Woman: A Protohistory of Theory by Hans Blumenberg, translated by Spencer Hawkins Vol. 12. Roma Voices in the German-Speaking World by Lorely French Vol. 13. Vienna’s Dreams of Europe: Culture and Identity beyond the Nation-State by Katherine Arens Vol. 14. Thomas Mann and Shakespeare: Something Rich and Strange edited by Tobias Döring and Ewan Fernie Vol. 15. Goethe’s Families of the Heart by Susan E. Gustafson Vol. 16. German Aesthetics: Fundamental Concepts from Baumgarten to Adorno edited by J. D. Mininger and Jason Michael Peck Vol. 17. Figures of Natality: Reading the Political in the Age of Goethe by Joseph D. O’Neil Vol. 18. Readings in the Anthropocene: The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond edited by Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnstone

Readings in the Anthropocene The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond

Edited by Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnstone

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

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BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Sabine Wilke, Japhet Johnstone, and Contributors, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the editors. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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Contents

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Rethinking Literary History, Critical Reading Practices, and Cultural Studies in the Anthropocene Sabine Wilke

vii

1

Part I Entanglements 1 A World Without Us: Aesthetic, Literary, and Scientific Imaginations of Nature Beyond Humankind Wolfgang Struck

17

2 Hybrid Environments in the Anthropocene: Recent Fiction Caroline Schaumann and Heather I. Sullivan

38

3 Looking Behind Walls: Literary and Filmic Imaginations of Nature, Humanity, and the Anthropocene in Die Wand Sabine Frost

62

Part II Excess/Sustainability 4 Care and Forethought: The Idea of Sustainability in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy Klaus Vieweg

91

5 Save the Forest, Burn Books: On the Science and Poetics of Sustainability in Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Markus Wilczek

107

6 Mocking the Anthropocene: Caricatures of Man-Made Landscapes in German Satirical Magazines from the Fin de Siècle Evi Zemanek

124

vi Contents 7 The Darkness of the Anthropocene: Wolfgang Hilbig’s Alte Abdeckerei Sabine Nöllgen

148

Part III Periodization and Scale 8 Immanuel Kant, the Anthropocene, and the Idea of Environmental Cosmopolitanism Amos Nascimento

169

9 Adalbert Stifter and the Gentle Anthropocene Sean Ireton

195

10 Engineering the Anthropocene: Technology, Ambition, and Enlightenment in Theodor Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter Katie Ritson

222

Part IV Diffusion, the Lithic, and a Planetary Praxis 11 Petrifiction: Reimagining the Mine in German Romanticism Jason Groves

245

12 The Anthroposcene of Literature: Diffuse Dwelling in Graham Swift and W. G. Sebald Bernhard Malkmus

263

13 Planetary Praxis in the Anthropocene: An Ethics and Poetics for a New Geological Age Sabine Wilke

296



Epilogue: The Anthropocene in German Perspective Axel Goodbody

313

Index

321

Notes on Contributors

Sabine Frost is an independent scholar residing in Seattle, Washington. She has published a book on “Whiteouts” in literature since 1800 and is now working on a project on “Friends of Nature/Enemies of People,” which examines the environmental critiques of civilization in literature. She holds a PhD from the University of Erfurt and was a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the University of Washington. Axel Goodbody is Professor of German in the Department of Politics, Languages, and International Studies at the University of Bath, UK. He is a leading authority on German environmental literature with numerous publications on nature poetry and nature writing. He edits the journal Ecozon@ and the book series “Nature, Culture, and Literature” (Brill). His current work focuses on climate change fiction. Jason Groves is Assistant Professor of German in the Department of Germanics at the University of Washington, Seattle. His current work focuses on two main projects: a monograph, Mineral Imaginaries: Literature for the Anthropocene, which articulates the shared “minerality” of the human and the Earth in literature since 1800, and a translation of Sonja Neef’s The Babylonian Planet, a wide-ranging study of language and globalization in a time of mass migration. Sean Ireton is Associate Professor of German in the Department of German and Russian Studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia. His research interests encompass the intersections between philosophy and literature from the late eighteenth century through the twentieth. His current book project examines conceptions of nature in Fichte, Hölderlin, Stifter, Heidegger, and Hans Jonas within the broader parameters of anthropocentrism and biocentrism. It also incorporates the ecological theories of pivotal figures like Ernst Haeckel, Aldo Leopold, and Arne Næss.

viii  Notes on Contributors Bernhard Malkmus is Associate Professor of German in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the Ohio State University. His book on the German pícaro and modernity appeared in 2012 (Continuum). He is now working on two book projects tentatively entitled “Becoming Human: The Humane in the Anthropocene” (“Menschwerdung: Das Humane im Anthropozän”) and “The Scandal of Nature: Imagination, Reading, and the Environment.” Amos Nascimento is Professor of Philosophy in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Tacoma. His work focuses on critical theory, discourse ethics and its applications to morality and politics, especially human rights and cosmopolitanism, as well as its ethical and aesthetic implications for cultural and environmental issues. He also works on cultural and philosophical issues related to Europe (especially Germany) and Latin America (especially Brazil). Sabine Nöllgen is Visiting Assistant Professor of German at Kalamazoo College. Her teaching and research interests include nineteenth to twenty-first-century German literature, culture, and film, as well as environmental humanities, ecocriticism, critical animal and plant studies, sound studies, eco-pedagogy, and second language acquisition. She is currently working on publications on the aesthetics of petrochemical waste-scapes and the discourse of future viability. Katie Ritson is managing editor at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich. She studied German, Comparative Literature, and Nordic Philology at the University of Cambridge and Ludwig-MaximilianUniversity Munich, and received her doctoral degree in 2016 with a dissertation entitled “Shifting Sands: The North Sea Lowlands in the Literary Imagination of the Anthropocene.” Caroline Schaumann is Associate Professor of German in the Department of German Studies at Emory University. Her book Memory Matters: Generational Responses to Germany’s Nazi Past in Recent Women’s Literature was published by de Gruyter in 2008. Together with Sean Ireton she edited Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century (Camden House, June 2012), the first collection of essays on this subject. Wolfgang Struck is Professor of German and Film at the University of Erfurt. He has published books on German historical drama, the cinema of Kathryn Bigelow, and German colonialism. He explores

Notes on Contributors  ix the concept of the Anthropocene in articles on mapping, the conquest of natural spaces, the relationship between space and time, the genre of the atlas, and the touristic gaze. Heather Sullivan is Professor of German in the Modern Languages and Literatures Department at Trinity University. Most recently, she was co-editor (with Bernhard Malkmus) of a special collection of essays for the New German Critique on “The Challenge of Ecology to the Humanities: Post-Humanism or New Humanism?” (2016) and guest co-editor (with Caroline Schaumann) of a special collection of essays on “Dirty Nature” in Colloquia Germanica (2014). Klaus Vieweg is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Jena. He is an expert on Hegel and the philosophy of German Idealism with books and edited volumes on Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit, skepticism, transcendental poetry, Hegel’s philosophy of history, and Hegel’s early philosophy of nature. He is currently researching and writing a new biography of Hegel. Markus Wilczek is Associate Professor of German in the Department of International Literacy and Cultural Studies at Tufts. His first monograph was an archaeology of structuralist thought in which he examines the historical foundations of structuralism and poststructuralism. Currently, he is writing a book on literary, philosophical, and economic discourses of sustainability from the eighteenth century to the present. Evi Zemanek is Assistant Professor of German and Intermediality at the University of Freiburg. She co-founded the research network on “Ethics and Aesthetics of the Literary Representation of Ecological Transformations” and is currently editing an essay collection on ecological genres and a volume with essays on rhetorical models of sustainability. She is also co-editing a book on “Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture.”

x 

Introduction: Rethinking Literary History, Critical Reading Practices, and Cultural Studies in the Anthropocene Sabine Wilke

Readings in the Anthropocene brings together a number of scholars from different backgrounds and asks them to interpret the German tradition of the last 200 plus years from a perspective that is mindful of the challenges posed by the concept of the Anthropocene. This new age of man holds that humans have become a geological force in shaping the Earth’s future. Among the biggest challenges facing this future are climate change, accelerated species loss, ocean acidification, and a radical transformation of land use. What are the historical, philosophical, cultural, literary, and artistic responses to this new concept and how does literary and cultural history have to be reframed as an intellectual endeavor in order to address these issues? The essays assembled in Readings in the Anthropocene engage the German tradition from a perspective that acknowledges radical interconnectivity between the human and non-human world and probes the role of human agency in the past and future formations of the Earth.

The Science

The science of the Anthropocene, a concept first pronounced by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer and since widely repeated, proposes that we have entered a geological epoch in which humankind exerts ever greater power over the Earth’s biochemical cycles resulting in vast surface changes and massive extinctions.1 The Anthropocene denotes a geological epoch that follows the relatively stable patterns of the 1

Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene G. Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” IGBP Newsletter 41 (2000): 12. For a translation of the science into a museum concept, see Reinhold Leinfelder, Christian Schwägerl, Nina Möllers, and Helmuth Trischler,

2  Readings in the Anthropocene Holocene. It is marked by a new scale of human activity and agency that extends well beyond the Holocene’s range of variation.2 A common means of visualizing these changes observed by Earth scientists is the figure of the hockey stick that Al Gore so famously performed in his slide show captured on DVD as An Inconvenient Truth.3 Scientists are collecting and interpreting data that suggest that over the past 200 years, but especially following World War II, humanity has exerted an alarming influence over the Earth’s ecosystems, changing not only the planet’s surface appearance but also its chemistry and geology.4 A growing number of scientists and scholars are now considering the possible value of understanding this concept as an early phase of a new geological epoch.5

Reactions

Even though the term has not yet officially been approved by the scientific community and although there is significant disagreement

2

3 4

5

“Die menschengemachte Erde: Das Anthropozän sprengt die Grenzen von Natur, Kultur und Technik,” Kultur und Technik 2 (2012): 12–17. An excellent introduction to the science of the Anthropocene written by a historian is John R. McNeill’s “Introductory Remarks: The Anthropocene and the Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 49.2 (2016): 117–28. For a broad survey of geographical issues, see Eckart Ehlers, Das Anthropozän: Die Erde im Zeitalter des Menschen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008). For a legal perspective, see Jens Kersten, Das Anthropozän-Konzept: Kontrakt—Komposition—Konflikt (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2014). Philosophical issues are raised in Joanna Zylinska, Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, University of Michigan Library, 2014). For questions of design, see Etienne Turpin (ed.), Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science, and Philosophy (London: Open Humanities Press, 2013); and for the arts, see Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (eds), Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environment, and Epistemologies (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015). “Political Critiques of the Anthropocene” are collected in a special issue of Telos 172 (2015). Essays adopting a critical philosophical perspective on the Anthropocene appeared in a special issue of Telos 177 (winter 2016); another volume, also edited by Richard Polt and Jon Wittrock, is planned for 2017. See Davis Guggenheim, An Inconvenient Truth, DVD, 2006. See, for example, Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36.8 (2007): 614–27. The body in charge of deciding the scientific validity of the concept of the Anthropocene is the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), which is expected to make a decision by 2017. One of the sub-commissions of this body, the Anthropocene Working Group, is charged with making a recommendation to the sub-commission which, in turn, will make a recommendation to the ICS, and a vote will determine whether or not the Anthropocene will be accepted as the name for a geological epoch in the scientific community.

Introduction 3 about when the Anthropocene began,6 it has already prompted strong reactions and sharp criticism from historians and social scientists. While the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty welcomes the challenge to his discipline to integrate deep history and the potential for a new universal category beyond class, race, and even postcolonial divides,7 others like Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg base their critique of the Anthropocene narrative on the conviction that the term blends out differences in terms of relations of power and thus sustains historical inequalities.8 The eighteenth-century historian Alan Mikhail welcomes the fact that “the idea of the Anthropocene allows for a new, expanded, ecologically inflected understanding of the beginnings of modernity, one that invites both humanists and scientists to the table of a long tradition of trying to explain the emergence of the modern world.”9 In the conflation of environmental and intellectual history the “human not only emerges as a political, economic, and morally self-conscious agent but also as a geological and atmospheric one.”10 At the same time, Mikhail points out, this strengthening of the standard narrative about the Enlightenment as the period that gave us everything we know about the modern world—democracy, capitalism, freedom, nationalism, even human rights—is given an ecological spin. Now we understand that the Enlightenment also gave us fossil fuels, pollution, 6 On the different theories about the birthday of the Anthropocene, see McNeill, “Introductory Remarks,” 120–4. The main scientist to argue for an early start date of the Anthropocene related to activities associated with agriculture is William F. Ruddiman. See, for example, his “The Anthropocene,” Annual Reviews of Earth and Planetary Sciences 41 (2013): 4–24. 7 See Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 197–222; Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” New Literary History 43 (2012): 1–18; Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories,” Critical Inquiry 41 (2014): 1–23; Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Human Agency in the Anthropocene,” Perspective on History 50 (2012), https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/ perspectives-on-history/december-2012/the-future-of-the-discipline/humanagency-in-the-anthropocene (accessed March 17, 2016); Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Brute Force,” Eurozine (2010), http://www.eurozine.com (accessed March 17, 2016). 8 See Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative,” Anthropocene Review 1 (2014): 62–9. See also Ninad Bondre and Sabine Wilke, “Beyond the Anthropocene’s Common Humanity: Politicizing the Anthropocene,” GeoCritique (May 2014), http:// www.geocritique.org (accessed March 17, 2016). 9 Alan Mikhail, “Enlightenment Anthropocene,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 49.2 (2016): 211–31, 212. 10 Mikhail, “Enlightenment Anthropocene,” 217. See also Timothy Morton, “The Oedipal Logic of Ecological Awareness,” Environmental Humanities 1 (2012): 7–21.

4  Readings in the Anthropocene melting polar ice, species extinction, and excessive carbon emission. But this narrative is problematic because it establishes “too clean a break between the modern age and everything before it, a divide between nature and human, a discourse of homogenizing universality too often used in the service of exerting differential power over the weak.”11 John L. Brooke and Christopher Otter make a passionate plea for what they call the organic Anthropocene against the conception of the age of mankind as a mineral-based phenomenon resulting from industrialization and the great acceleration of the postwar era. Instead, they locate the pivotal turning point in the Early Modern period during which a global economy was established based on wind, water, animal power, and human power leading to “biological exchange and species invasion accompanying human colonization; and the destruction and reconstruction of multiple ecologies.”12 While these concerns articulated by historians, anthropologists, and social scientists remind us that the concept and narrative of the Anthropocene are still very much contentious and need to be applied with caution, they are, at the same time, too important to be left to natural scientists and their critics. The humanities, especially the environmental humanities, must contribute their voices to this discussion. What does all this mean for the environmental humanities, in particular the way we study literature and culture? We tend to think historically in terms of periods and movements and we are organized, at least institutionally, along the lines of political entities such as nation states and linguistic and cultural groupings. We do not tend to think in terms of geological scales, global movements, or deep history when we discuss the meaning of individual cultural documents. How should we process information about unsustainable fossil fuel use or the connection between the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and rising temperatures on the Earth’s surface?13 This essay collection attempts to articulate the connection between the broader framework of the environmental humanities that are emerging as a transdisciplinary zone of inquiry and the field of German Studies construed broadly to include the study of German literature, history, philosophy, anthropology, and culture in its European context and mindful of its global dimensions. It achieves this articulation by asking contributors to address a set of topical questions 11 Mikhail, “Enlightenment Anthropocene,” 226. 12 John L. Brooke and Christopher Otter, “Concluding Remarks: The Organic Anthropocene,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 49.2 (2016): 281–302, 282. 13 See also the special issue edited by Tobias Boes and Kate Marshall, “Writing the Anthropocene,” Minnesota Review 82 (2014), and the first monograph on the Anthropocene and Ecocriticism, Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

Introduction 5 related to the Anthropocene in the form of readings of literary texts, historical contexts, philosophical ideas, and cultural products that highlight the transdisciplinary connections that emerge between these particular zones of inquiry and overlapping thematic concerns.

The Environmental Humanities

A central concern of the broader field of the environmental humanities is the counterbalance of human agency with the agency of nature and the environment without reducing the issue to the question of how nature and the environment can assist people and shape society and culture. This tension gives the environmental humanities a transformative agenda by acknowledging literary, historical, and philosophical scholarship’s potential for environmental interventions and the power to make a difference. These Readings in the Anthropocene probe the question of value; they make justice an explicit purview of literary scholarship and cultural studies; they hope to encourage thinking towards sustainable futures in a world where humankind and the environment are intricately intertwined and need to be rethought as such. Such a reading strategy can only be accomplished across disciplines and by capitalizing on profound synergies and affinities between different fields and adjacent disciplines such as the arts or the humanistic social sciences that share our stance on environmental advocacy. Our methods are based on hermeneutic interpretation, and we rely on structural analysis, rhetorical criticism, historical and archival research, philosophical reasoning, and cultural critique in nuanced readings of environmental topics. Readings in the Anthropocene, in sum, are transdisciplinary investigations of literary, historical, cultural, and philosophical materials and concepts, sites of interaction between humans and non-humans, and expressions of environmental entanglements. They highlight a dimension in texts, contexts, and concepts that has yet to be systematically foregrounded in critical practice. The historical and intellectual scope of the primary materials considered in this collection spans from late eighteenth-century German-language texts to contemporary film and photography. Primary materials include literature, visual material, life settings, philosophical ideas, and theoretical concepts. The individual contributions are arranged according to ecological and poetological nodes, thus modeling the deep intertwinement of nature and culture that is reflected in literature and that the contributors wish to articulate.

German Ecocriticism

While the study of German literature and culture, especially the study of romanticism and contemporary culture, reflects a long-standing commitment to investigating the topic of nature, ecocritical approaches

6  Readings in the Anthropocene proper did not emerge until the 1990s.14 An important impulse came from British critic Axel Goodbody in his work on romanticism and modern poetry15 and more recently on the culture of environmentalism,16 the literary imaginings of water,17 and European ecocritical approaches.18 A comprehensive survey of ecocritical scholarship in German Studies can be found in my essay on “German Ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities.”19 With respect to the Anthropocene specifically, the first international and interdisciplinary symposium on “Culture and the Anthropocene” was held at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU in Munich in June 2013 as one of the capstone activities supported by the Transatlantic Research Network of Scholars in the Environmental Humanities founded in 2011 with seed money from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation through their Alumni Prize program. A small selection of papers from that workshop was published as a thematic cluster on “Culture and the Anthropocene” in the fifth volume of the new online journal Environmental Humanities.20 All contributors in Readings in the Anthropocene are either associated with this network or with the Rachel Carson Center either as current fellows or former and future collaborators. To that extent this collection of essays also serves as documentation of work that began in 2012 with our first workshop in Seattle and which continues into the future. It is my hope that the environmental humanities within German Studies will have a much broader profile in the future. This collection of essays joins other current efforts to draw attention to environmental themes and ecocritical practices in a vision for our discipline that is able to transcend narrow boundaries and overcome constraints.21 14 See, for example, Wolfgang Hädecke, Poeten und Maschinen: Deutsche Dichter als Zeugen der Industrialisierung (Munich: Hanser, 1993); Axel Goodbody, Literatur und Ökologie (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998). 15 Axel Goodbody, Natursprache: Ein dichtungstheoretisches Konzept der Romantik und seine Wiederaufnahme in der modernen Naturlyrik (Novalis—Eichendorff— Lehmann—Eich) (Neumünster: Wachholtz, 1984). 16 Axel Goodbody, The Culture of German Environmentalism: Anxieties, Visions, Realities (New York: Berghahn, 2002). 17 Axel Goodbody and Berbeli Wanning (eds), Wasser, Kultur, Ökologie: Beiträge zum Wandel im Umgang mit dem Wasser und zu seiner literarischen Imagination (Göttingen: v&r unipress, 2008). 18 Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby (eds), Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011). 19 Sabine Wilke, “German Ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities,” German Studies Review (2015): 635–52. 20 Sabine Wilke (with Greg Garrard and Gary Handwerk), “Culture and the Anthropocene,” Environmental Humanities 5 (2015). 21 See Gabriele Dürbeck and Urte Stobbe (eds), Ecocriticism: Eine Einführung (Vienna: Böhlau, 2015). A number of other similar projects are also currently

Introduction 7

The Collection

Essay collections in literary and cultural studies commonly follow either a historical or thematic organization, arranging the individual contributions along chronological lines or in thematic clusters. Readings in the Anthropocene takes a different approach since the project foregrounds the interconnectedness of literature and culture with environmental contexts. Instead of reflecting periods of intellectual history, new constellations of cultural material emerge that bring together processes of nature and/or natural history with poetic and specifically poetological concerns. These recombinations at the contact zone of nature–culture and the non-human and human world suggest new and interesting modes of thinking. Sections on entanglements, the relationship between excess and sustainability, the challenge of rethinking periodization, and the role of planetary visions group individual papers into nodes where literary-critical readings and philosophical investigations meet nature and the environment in the Anthropocene. The result is an offer to rethink literary and cultural history, the relationship of textual and visual representation, and their environmental connections.

Entanglements

Wolfgang Struck’s essay, “A World without Us: Aesthetic, Literary, and Scientific Imaginations of Nature beyond Humankind,” probes the fantasy worlds that inhabit visions of a world without us. Historically speaking, since the nineteenth century, blank spaces have vanished from the maps of the world, while the most remote places are now within reach and, more importantly, affected by human activity. This has paradoxically led to the creation of imaginary worlds without people. Science, art, and literature ask what such a world might look like and question how and by whom it can be imagined and observed. Among the many books, films, and artworks that try to give answers to these questions are novels like Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and Judith Schalansky’s Der Hals der Giraffe (2011; The Giraffe’s Neck), scientifically based visions like Alan Weisman’s The World without Us (2007), in addition to images of natural spaces without people like Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, Hiroshi Sugimoto‘s “Seascapes,” Alan Taylor’s “A World without People,” and films like Werner Herzog’s underway, such as Caroline Schaumann and Heather Sullivan’s volume with essays on “German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene” (scheduled to appear with Palgrave in 2017), Bernhard Malkmus and Heather Sullivan’s special issue on “The Challenge of Ecology to the Humanities: Post-Humanism or New Humanism?” of New German Critique 43.2 (2016), and the contributions in the new journal of European ecocriticism, Ecozon@, founded in 2011.

8  Readings in the Anthropocene Aguirre—Der Zorn Gottes (1972; Aguirre—The Wrath of God) or Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity (2009). These documents bring forth a vision of a world without us that is committed to representing deep time and radical forms of interconnectedness on a large scale. Caroline Schaumann and Heather Sullivan’s essay on “Hybrid Environments in the Anthropocene: Recent Fiction” concentrates on the description of hybrid environments documented in contemporary German short stories, novels, science fiction, and eco-thrillers. Hybrid environments are sites whose vague contours emerge in the interaction of human and non-human activities. They are neither defined as landscapes nor as cityscapes and might appear as the expanses of radioactive deserts, space stations, wastelands of industrial debris, freeways racing across continents, human zoos, or even the “world climate.” Navigating these spaces, the protagonists experience altered terrains that are not mere backdrops to human circumstances but turn out to be rather active and alienating ecologies. The authors of these tales avoid apocalyptic scenarios, instead depicting resilience and creative adaptations to hybrid environments that transcend tropes of the urban, pastoral, wilderness, or catastrophic, often merging aspects of these in new combinations that materialize in startling new forms with energies of their own. Sabine Frost’s essay on “Looking Behind Walls: Literary and Filmic Imaginations of Nature, Humanity, and the Anthropocene in Die Wand” reflects on differing imaginations of nature and humanity in the 1963 novel by Marlen Haushofer and Julian Pölsler’s recent filmic adaptation (2012). In the novel, the protagonist encounters an invisible wall that separates her from the external world, where all life has been extinguished overnight. She is isolated in the mountain forest and devotedly cares for the remaining animals. The utopian project to become an integral part of the forest, however, fails in the novel. Pölsler’s film, on the other hand, realizes the woman’s utopian vision and romanticizes her relationship to nature. The essay examines how and why the film departs from the novel’s imagination of nature and humanity, thereby asking how form and medium affect these differences and how they result from authorial and directorial choices.

Excess/Sustainability

Klaus Vieweg’s philosophical reflection on “Care and Forethought: The Idea of Sustainability in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy” starts with the observation that in the literature on sustainability, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel has—wholly unjustifiably—played almost no role. This blind spot in the scholarship on sustainability deserves detailed scrutiny. Hegel’s reflections on sustainability occur within the framework of his practical philosophy,

Introduction 9 specifically in Foundations of the Philosophy of Right, in the context of his chapter on formal rights that contains Hegel’s theory of personhood. The focus here is upon two key concepts: care (Sorge) and forethought (Vorsorge). Hegel’s theory of personhood becomes the cornerstone of his philosophy of freedom. The palette of problems Hegel deals with includes concepts of personhood, personality and inter-personality, fundamental rights, property, the formation of the natural as self-formation and the formation of external nature, appropriation, intellectual property, contracts, and injustice. Vieweg shows how, for Hegel, the external goods that are decisive for a rational preservation of life—water, air, forests, ecological systems—are resources for the common good and belong under strict public supervision and control. Most importantly, they must largely be withheld from profit-making interests. The demand for sustainability emerges as a fundamental dimension of modern society. Societies that fail to act sustainably and that allow, tolerate, or even promote these predatory excesses must consequently be denied the status of “modern.” In his contribution on “Save the Forest, Burn Books: On the Science and Poetics of Sustainability in Georg Christoph Lichtenberg,” Markus Wilczek shows how German forestry science formulated the first version of sustainability in response to a concern about the increasing scarcity of wood. Just how powerful this concern was during the late eighteenth century is demonstrated by the only half-joking suggestion of the physicist-philosopher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99) that, in light of the “dwindling forests,” one might simply burn books to keep warm. In addition to this shared concern about the potential lack of wood, forestry science and Lichtenberg share a methodological approach: just as forestry science develops ever more sophisticated methods of inventorying forests in order to establish a fixed baseline for their sustainable use and subsequent replenishment, Lichtenberg obsessively draws up lists in order to inventory everything from curse words to bad ideas. Beyond these methodological similarities there are, however, also important differences: rather than cataloging a necessarily finite number of things in the world, these lists strive to enumerate the infinite possibilities of the literary imagination. These excessive lists thus represent a first development beyond a purely static and descriptive conception of sustainability toward a more narrative and dynamic one. The environmental challenges of the Anthropocene—of which wood scarcity and deforestation are early indications—not only require new scientific approaches, but also new modes of poetic representation. Evi Zemanek’s essay on “Mocking the Anthropocene: Caricatures of Man-Made Landscapes in German Satirical Magazines from the Fin de Siècle” explores illustrated newspapers and literary journals of

10  Readings in the Anthropocene the late nineteenth century in search of accounts of technical innovations—bridges, tunnels, pipelines, electricity, and gas—that surmount the natural elements. In the nineteenth century, most artworks tell us rather uncritical success stories about humans’ transformation of landscapes at the beginning of the Anthropocene. In this essay, however, Zemanek foregrounds some lesser known examples of a rare and early critical consciousness of the human impact on nature in the form of caricatures. These long forgotten artworks, which appeared in German magazines at the turn of the century, satirize man-made landscapes in the humorous manner typical of the genre. Usually dismissed as mere illustrations in literary and cultural studies, they deserve to be studied as a medium of cultural critique that reveals problematic developments and imagines alternatives by combining texts and images. Different and unique modes of representing and criticizing environmental transformations emerge at a time when the world was less flooded with images than today. In Sabine Nöllgen’s contribution on “The Darkness of the Anthropocene: Wolfgang Hilbig’s Alte Abdeckerei,” the Anthropocene emerges not so much in terms of a new chapter in the Earth’s geophysical history but as a metaphor that points to humankind’s aggression and excess. In a critical reading of Wolfgang Hilbig’s Alte Abdeckerei, a short prose text published in 1991, an old knackery becomes the location for a literary negotiation of this metaphor. The text features the Anthropocene as a dark age and presents a future without the epoch’s most prominent indicator: the use of fossil fuels. In the context of such an excessive dark age, Wolfgang Hilbig treats the environmentally degraded, industrial landscapes of the former GDR not as autobiographic landscapes of the soul (Seelenlandschaften) but as poetic negotiations of disproportionate pollution and what Lawrence Buell has termed “toxic discourse.” Aesthetically responding to the gratuitous combustion of fossil fuels in this new environmental era, Alte Abdeckerei frames the Anthropocene as an age of darkness, both on a metaphorical level and as a reference to the very real environmental practices of our time.

Periodization and Scale

In his paper on “Immanuel Kant, the Anthropocene, and the Idea of Environmental Cosmopolitanism,” Amos Nascimento proposes that we turn to the Enlightenment, specifically Immanuel Kant, to discuss early articulations of the contemporary concept of the Anthropocene and connect them to Kant’s notion of cosmopolitanism. Kant’s world citizen is concerned with the impact of a common humanity upon nature and pleads for a responsible attitude towards the Earth. Nascimento shows how Kant moves from a pre-critical phase of his

Introduction 11 thinking in his work on physical geography and anthropology to then later develop a normative philosophical framework for cosmopolitanism in his critical phase. In his early work, Kant reflects on how human and humanitarian actions can be motivated, for example, in reaction to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which was felt in most of Western Europe and generated a variety of responses by his contemporaries. This experience led Kant to expand his philosophy to include thoughts on anthropology and the nature of human beings. In his later critical philosophy Kant is finally able to develop an ethics of care as normative ideal. Nascimento proposes that Kant’s cosmopolitanism can be extended to include an environmental dimension and serves as an ideal toward which humanity should be striving towards. This normative dimension should inform our science, politics, and daily actions. Sean Ireton’s contribution on “Adalbert Stifter and the Gentle Anthropocene” interprets Adalbert Stifter’s gentle law (sanftes Gesetz), which the author famously elaborated in the preface to Bunte Steine (1853), as a universal ethical principle that is predicated on a correspondence between the equilibrium of nature and humanity’s moral status quo. Stifter consistently integrates this normative notion of cosmic order into the thematic structure of his texts, particularly those written after the 1848 uprisings, and he further employs the terms sanft and sanftmütig in leitmotif-like fashion in order to underscore the ubiquity of this gentle law in everyday reality. Yet das sanfte Gesetz not only governs the operations of nature and the ethical conduct of humanity, but can also be applied to the interaction between humans and the environment as a pragmatic environmental ethic. Ireton explains how this Stifterian version of the early Anthropocene works in a critical reading of two unique examples of humankind’s “gentle” manipulation of nature: Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters (1848) and Stifter’s novel Der Nachsommer (1857). Katie Ritson’s essay on “Engineering the Anthropocene: Technology, Ambition, and Enlightenment in Theodor Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter” reads the 1888 novella in the context of the complex engineered landscape of the reclaimed saltmarsh and diked-in settlements on the edge of the North Sea. The text presents attitudes to technology and the natural world and how such attitudes might reflect the beginning of the Anthropocene. The analysis of Storm’s tale against the backdrop of the Anthropocene brings the relationship between human progress and ecological disaster into sharper focus. Storm’s ideas about human culture and the natural world are reflected both in thematic and formal elements of his work and they situate his literary writings in the current discourse on human progress, technology, and environmental understanding.

12  Readings in the Anthropocene

Diffusion, the Lithic, and a Planetary Praxis

Jason Groves’s essay on “Petrifiction: Reimagining the Mine in German Romanticism” reconsiders Tieck’s and Wackenroder’s visit to the iron ore mines in upper Franconia in 1793, which has long been regarded as an advent of German romanticism. Groves critically reassesses the affinity of romantic writers such as Tieck, Goethe, Novalis, Heine, and Droste-Hülshoff for mines and other sites of mineral extraction in light of the Anthropocene diagnostic. His essay looks at scenes of the mine and mining in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature as sites where the relationship between the human and the mineral is renegotiated along the lines of what today we could call an anthropocenic imaginary, in which the mineral basis of imagination is exposed, inviting us to attend to the entanglement between the literary and the lithic. Bernhard Malkmus’s contribution on “The Anthroposcene of Literature: Diffuse Dwelling in Graham Swift and W. G. Sebald” reads Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) and W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995) as exhibiting awareness of the Anthropocene avant la lettre through their literary use of natural history and its historical and philosophical implications. Both Swift and Sebald think within an epistemic and epochal framework that abandons the often unproductive discussion surrounding the distinction between modernity and postmodernity. In doing so their works formulate a new existential urgency. What does the ability to interfere with the macrosystems of the Earth mean for our human self-understanding as a species? The texts employ an “aesthetics of diffusion” designed to undermine the “aesthetics of penetration” associated with the great narratives of modernity. Finally, my essay on “Planetary Praxis in the Anthropocene: An Ethics and Poetics for a New Geological Age” reflects on the tradition of social analysis rooted in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and suggests a reshaping of that tradition to include a global perspective of radical diffusion. The popularity of these ideas and methods of social analysis is attributed to a culture of protest in the Germany of the 1960s and 1970s, where a young generation was hungry for a critical analysis of society, politics, and culture that laid bare the root causes of these injustices and provided tools to imagine a different future. What happens to this project of social analysis and critique that shaped much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought in the Anthropocene? The essay suggests the need for reshaping late-Holocene critique without entirely abandoning its critical impulse by focusing on the need for a critical praxis in the Anthropocene that sees itself as truly global in scope, complex in its strategies, informed by historical knowledge and aesthetic values, and grounded in critical interpretation.

Introduction 13 These readings and philosophical discussions are intended to create a space for discussion in which German literary historians, philosophers, and cultural critics participate in the larger pursuits of the environmental humanities. Readings in the Anthropocene probes the need for collaborations across disciplinary boundaries.

Bibliography

Berman, Russell, ed. “Political Critiques of the Anthropocene.” Special Issue of Telos 172 (2015). Boes, Tobias and Kate Marshall, eds. “Writing the Anthropocene.” Special Issue of The Minnesota Review 82 (2014). Bondre, Ninad and Sabine Wilke. “Beyond the Anthropocene’s Common Humanity: Politicizing the Anthropocene.” GeoCritique (May 2014). http:// www.geocritique.org (accessed March 17, 2016). Brooke, John L. and Christopher Otter. “Concluding Remarks: The Organic Anthropocene.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 49.2 (2016): 281–302. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 197–222. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Brute Force.” Eurozine (2010). http://www.eurozine.com (accessed March 17, 2016). Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Human Agency in the Anthropocene.” Perspective on History 50 (2012). https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/ perspectives-on-history/december-2012/the-future-of-the-discipline/humanagency-in-the-anthropocene (accessed March 17, 2016). Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change.” New Literary History 43 (2012): 1–18. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories.” Critical Inquiry 41 (2014): 1–23. Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Crutzen, Paul J. and Eugene G. Stoermer. “The Anthropocene.” IGBP Newsletter 41 (2000): 12. Davis, Heather and Etienne Turpin, eds. Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environment, and Epistemologies. London: Open Humanities Press, 2015. Dürbeck, Gabriele and Urte Stobbe, eds. Ecocriticism: Eine Einführung. Vienna: Böhlau, 2015. Ehlers, Eckart. Das Anthropozän: Die Erde im Zeitalter des Menschen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008. Goodbody, Axel. Natursprache: Ein dichtungstheoretisches Konzept der Romantik und seine Wiederaufnahme in der modernen Naturlyrik (Novalis—Eichendorff— Lehmann—Eich). Neumünster: Wacholtz, 1984. Goodbody, Axel. Literatur und Ökologie. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. Goodbody, Axel. The Culture of German Environmentalism: Anxieties, Visions, Realities. New York: Berghahn, 2002. Goodbody, Axel and Kate Rigby, eds. Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Goodbody, Axel and Berbeli Wanning, eds. Wasser Kultur Ökologie: Beiträge zum Wandel im Umgang mit dem Wasser und zu seiner literarischen Imagination. Göttingen: v&r unipress, 2008.

14  Readings in the Anthropocene Guggenheim, Davis. An Inconvenient Truth. DVD, 2006. Hädecke, Wolfgang. Poeten und Maschinen: Deutsche Dichter als Zeugen der Industrialisierung. Munich: Hanser, 1993. Kersten, Jens. Das Anthropozän-Konzept: Kontrakt—Komposition—Konflikt. BadenBaden: Nomos, 2014. Leinfelder, Reinhold, Christian Schwägerl, Nina Möllers, and Helmuth Trischler. “Die menschengemachte Erde: Das Anthropozän sprengt die Grenzen von Natur, Kultur und Technik.” Kultur und Technik 2 (2012): 12–17. Malm, Andreas and Alf Hornborg. “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative.” Anthropocene Review 1 (2014): 62–9. McNeill, J. R. “Introductory Remarks: The Anthropocene and the Eighteenth Century.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 49.2 (2016): 117–28. Mikhail, Alain. “Enlightenment Anthropocene.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 49.2 (2016): 211–31. Morton, Timothy. “The Oedipal Logic of Ecological Awareness.” Environmental Humanities 1 (2012): 7–21. Ruddiman, William F. “The Anthropocene.” Annual Reviews of Earth and Planetary Sciences 41 (2013): 4–24. Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and J. R. McNeill. “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36.8 (2007): 614–27. Turpin, Etienne, ed. Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science, and Philosophy. London: Open Humanities Press, 2013. Wilke, Sabine. “German Ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities.” German Studies Review 38 (2015): 635–52. Wilke, Sabine (with Greg Garrard and Gary Handwerk), ed. “Culture and the Anthropocene.” Environmental Humanities 5 (2015). Zylinska, Joanna. Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, University of Michigan Library, 2014.

Part I Entanglements

16 

One A World Without Us: Aesthetic, Literary, and Scientific Imaginations of Nature Beyond Humankind

Wolfgang Struck

“On the teaching schedule it said: convey a sense of time.”1 “Nature as we know it is a concept that belongs to the past.” This declaration opens one of the most ambitious cultural explorations of the scientific model of “the age of man,” the Anthropocene Project, in 2013 at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin: “We are to declare and acknowledge the dissolution of the opposition between humans and the earth.”2 But how—and when—was nature “as we know it”? And how is it related to an Earth opposed by humans? If the “Anthropocene model suggests” a new “mobility to the relationship between humanity and the world,”3 what static elements defined this relationship before? Who (or what) are these actors, “humanity” and “the world,” and how did they become antagonists in the first place? In order to acknowledge the human impact on the Earth, the Anthropocene model has to create antagonists of a fairly large scale. The humanities as well as art and literature, it seems, have to follow suit. Challenged by disastrous changes in the global ecosystem, 1 Judith Schalansky, The Giraffe’s Neck, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 172; Der Hals der Giraffe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2011), 183: “Im Lehrplan stand: Ein Gefühl für Zeiträume vermitteln.” 2 Bernd M. Scherer and Katrin Klingan, introduction, in Bernd M. Scherer, Reinhold Leinfelder, and Christian Schwägerl (eds), The Anthropocene Project: An Opening (Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2013), 2–6; 2–3. 3 Ibid., 3.

18  Readings in the Anthropocene ecocriticism is, as Greg Garrard writes, in search of “an ethics of planetary representation”;4 it has to overcome its cultivation of proximity, its often nostalgic, poetic “sense of place,” and create, in the words of Ursula Heise, “a sense of planet—a sense of how political, economic, technological, social, cultural, and ecological networks shape daily routines.”5 These demands, however, seem to follow not only the global processes but rather their representation within a science that is epistemologically rooted in exactly the opposition between humanity and nature, observer and the observed, that the Anthropocene model claims to question. An ethics of planetary representation has to be aware of the tensions within representation itself. Particularly, it has to consider the preconditions of the planetary model, the isolation and antagonistic configuration of its two actors, humanity and Earth. To think of the Earth as a whole is an operation that is by no means self-evident: it is rooted in techniques and practices associated with modern science, like cartography, as well as in daily routines that are not only shaped by the global networks that Heise lists but conversely shape the images of the globe. It requires looking at the Earth from the position of a distant observer, who does not see it as his or her lifeworld, but as autonomous nature, as a field of study and appropriation. The Earth appears as an independent actor when, for example, its geological deep time was discovered around 1800. The idea that there was an Earth before humanity makes it possible to think of an Earth without humanity or, alternately, humanity no longer on Earth but somewhere else in space. In the first part of my essay, I read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) as a reaction to this discovery, where the sea and its “antediluvian” inhabitant, the “eternal whale,”6 mirror the deep time into the present of the nineteenth century and put it in front of an observer, who, however, fails to approach his object of study scientifically. Instead, he is affected by it and drawn into it by multiple ways of belief, desire, and anxiety. Obscured by this affection as well as by the routines of, for example, seafaring or library research, the image of a nature purified of humanity reveals itself as a human intellectual construction—not only in Melville’s novel, but again more recently in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs, which depict not only an “eternal” ocean but the desire for pure nature that has hounded the photographic apparatus since the nineteenth century. 4

Greg Garrard, “Worlds without Us: Some Types of Disanthropy,” SubStance 41.1 (2012): 40–60; 43. 5 Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 55. 6 Herman Melville, Moby Dick, ed. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford (New York: Norton, 2002), 351, 354.

A World Without Us  19 In the second part, I follow the archaeology of the distinction between humanity and the Earth, concentrating on the contemporary German author Judith Schalansky, who explores in her work a form of knowledge that emerges in nineteenth-century Germany, usually labeled by the ambivalent term Naturkunde (the study of nature or natural history). Under the serial title Naturkunden, Schalansky has so far edited 12 volumes that present mostly forgotten works from enthusiastic amateurs who explored often very specific segments of nature in all its variety, be it herrings, monkeys, or the language of flowers. One such enthusiast was Korbinian Aigner, a village priest who devoted his life to the study of apples and pears. His drawings of more than 1,000 different species, many of them long lost in the economization of fruit growing, are still unchallenged in their vividness and precision and therefore still in use in many botanical textbooks.7 In Schalansky’s Naturkunden, such forgotten specimens reappear together with similarly forgotten practices of breeding and drawing, collecting and conserving, describing and exhibiting, in which the distinction between objects and signs, that is, between nature, as formless matter, and culture, as forming activity, collapses. What reveals itself in these Naturkunden is a form of knowledge that the historian of science Lynn Nyhart has associated more broadly with the German suffix -kunde: a knowledge that aims not at unifying laws but rather at exploring its subject in a variety of aspects; a knowledge that emerges not from the laboratory but from institutions like the museum, the zoological or botanical garden, the aquarium, or agricultural practice; a knowledge that surpasses rational argument and follows a range of practical experiences and skills. The knowledge of -kunde is also open to the influences of aesthetic and religious values.8 And finally, as it becomes evident in Schalansky’s Naturkunden, it is closely related to the modes and media of its representation. In her novel The Giraffe’s Neck (Der Hals der Giraffe, 2011) she portrays a biology teacher in contemporary Germany, who experiences the breakdown of her professional, scientific as well as her personal discipline and finds comfort in the idea of a world without humans, which she perceives in the deserted landscape of the German northeast, where abundant nature prepares to reconquer abandoned villages and towns. This vision, however, unfolds between images from the nineteenth century: the drawings of Art Forms in Nature (Kunstformen der Natur) by the naturalist Ernst 7 Korbinian Aigner, Äpfel und Birnen. Das Gesamtwerk, ed. Judith Schalansky (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2013). 8 See Lynn K. Nyhart, Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), esp. 251–6.

20  Readings in the Anthropocene Haeckel, and Claude Monet’s paintings of water lilies. These images display the variety of Naturkunden, in which “nature as we know it” was treated as something much more complex and much more integrated into cultural techniques than its expulsion during the age of the Anthropocene suggests. Thus, the exploration of Naturkunden is more than a nostalgic memory. It provides modes of representation emerging from a proximity to their objects, binding them to an environment inhabited both by the observer and the observed. Schalansky’s novel tells about the risks we run if we try to overcome this proximity. “Think bigger, beyond the puny human scale,”9 her protagonist reminds herself, trying to look at the world from a planetary, evolutionary point of view—while she is losing both herself and the world. Ultimately, she fails to develop a sensory apparatus that could have offered her a sense of planet.

Ocean Reveries

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.10

At the end of probably the most excessive sea voyage in the Western literary canon, the sea closes over the opponents in a war from centuries past, a hunt that went on for years and years, and a battle that lasted three days; it closes over Moby Dick, the white whale, and captain Ahab, his fanatical hunter, over the ship Pequod, named after a people almost extinguished by European colonizers, and over the ship’s multinational crew. The whale, “floundering down upon us from the head-waters of the Eternities,”11 has, so it seems, dragged the aggressive intruders down into the abyss. The sea itself withstands the attack, erasing all traces. It is smooth,12 as it was 5,000 years before, when the Flood extinguished the human world. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) portrays the smooth, pristine sea in a complex web of adventure narrative and epistemological reflection, exploring the multiple desires that ultimately merge in this image. “The drama’s done” begins the novel’s short epilogue: the shroud is also a 9 Schalansky, The Giraffe’s Neck, 61. “Man mußte größer denken, weiter denken, über das mickrige menschliche Maß hinaus” (Schalansky, Der Hals der Giraffe, 70). 10 Melville, Moby Dick, 427. 11 Ibid., 351. 12 To use Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s opposition of the “smooth” and the “striated.” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 474–500.

A World Without Us  21 curtain, the sea a stage, and that indicates a backstage as well as an audience. The first spectator is the sole survivor, who, “floating on the margin of the ensuing scene,” observes the catastrophe from a more or less safe distance.13 Luckily rescued and returned to his point of departure, he will write down the story we have just read. His survival of the disaster, however, betrays the desire that in the beginning sends him on his way. On “a dreamy Sabbath afternoon,” he joins “thousands upon thousands” of “water-gazers” on their pilgrimage to the “extremest limit of the land,” the “extreme downtown” of Manhattan, “where that noble mole is washed by waves”—a point, where the city leans out into the sea, or the sea closes around the city. Here, “fixed in ocean reveries,” he—like all the others—looks out into the unlimited, vast expanse of the ocean.14 In front of him is nothing but nature; at his back, however, lies the city of New York, the metropolis of economy, science, and religion that forms the constitutive, epistemic background of his story. Here, within the metropolis, a desire emerges and reaches out into the sea, a fantasy of transgression: “I love to sail forbidden seas.”15 The ensuing journey directs this desire away from the metropolitan background, away from the position of the melancholic, contemplating observer into the realm of the observed, into nature, that is, into a community of whalers, who, in the middle of the nineteenth century, promise to be the last men to transgress the borders of the striated Earth of civilization, pursuing their prey into remote, wild, lonely, and uncharted seas. Ahab, the fanatical hunter, seems to be driven by the same desire. There is no economic motivation behind his search across the whole planet for the one, singular whale. Even personal revenge does not fully explain his motives. Long before he was confronted by the one whale who took his leg, he, himself “more a demon than a man,” chased a thousand whales, “furiously, foamingly.”16 The sea itself is his enemy, hated as much as cherished. It is a sea, where not man but the whale is “king of creation.”17 The novel employs religion as well as science to create a space of otherness that is both utopian and cursed. Whether it is the 5,000-year-old sea of the Flood or the millions-of-years-old sea of the geological tertiary, it is a world where man is not at home—even the whaler can be at home there only as the enemy, who “in all seasons and all oceans declared everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood.”18 13 Melville, Moby Dick, 427. 14 Ibid., 18–19. 15 Ibid., 22. 16 Ibid., 405. 17 Ibid., 350. 18 Ibid., 65.

22  Readings in the Anthropocene The narrator encounters the other world not during his journey on the Pequod but when he visits various geological sites where relics of whales have been found, and when he imagines himself among them: When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebrae … I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man. Here Saturn’s grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of this world’s circumference, not an inhabitable hand’s breadth of land was visible. The whole world was the whale’s; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab’s harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaohs’. Methuselah seems a schoolboy. I look round to shake hand with Shem. I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all human ages are over.19 The whale lives in another timeframe, transcending both biblical time and the geological time of humankind. He swam the seas before the continents broke water; he once swam over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. In Noah’s flood he despised Noah’s Ark; and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the top-most crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.20 Defiantly rejecting the world of God as well as the human world, the whale distinguishes himself from even the wildest animals of the land, who only survived the Flood because they entered the Ark and placed themselves in the care of Noah—and, later, in the care of the zoological gardens that could be found in the cities of the nineteenth century, where tigers, lions, and elephants could safely be observed. Following John Berger, humankind celebrates in such expositions its triumph over nature, which occupies no longer the same space but is assigned to an

19 Ibid., 350. 20 Ibid., 354.

A World Without Us  23 artificial, controlled space of observation.21 Only the whale resists the objectifying gaze. He may—not in the least through Melville’s stupendously scholarly novel itself—have appeared on the stage of human knowledge, but his lifeworld remains for humans a space not only of threats and dangers, but of a fundamental failure of representation— an abyss that cannot be penetrated by the human gaze. “Floating on the margin of the ensuing scene,” Melville’s narrator finds himself in a paradoxical position: driven by a desire to enter a world without people, he extends the world where people, through the fundamental preconditions of observation and representation, are everywhere. The more knowledge he collects about whales, the more the whale—the extraordinary, singular “eternal whale”—withdraws into “the headwaters of the Eternities,” into the abyss of deep time. Here, the Pequod and her captain can only follow it when they, like the whale, disappear from the surface of the human world forever. The narrator, in contrast, who has to return to tell the story, permanently erases the borders of those “forbidden seas” he seeks to transgress. Melville’s ocean reveries imagine a time/space that is, in the mid-nineteenth century, relatively novel. When the narrator, “ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales,” presents his “credentials as a geologist,”22 he is referring to a discipline that emerged only half a century earlier, when James Hutton presented his observation of stone formations. Hutton’s findings gave evidence that the world must have existed for much longer than the estimated 7,000 years of biblical time—in his words, for an “indefinite space of time.”23 In 1788, Hutton led one of his friends, the mathematician John Playfair, to one of those multilayered rock formations on the coast of Scotland. As Playfair later reported, this vista opened up an “extraordinary perspective” through which he actually could look into the “space of time”: We felt ourselves necessarily carried back to the time when the schistus on which we stood was yet at the bottom of the sea … Revolutions still more remote appeared in the distance of this extraordinary perspective. The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.24 21 John Berger, “Why Look at Animals,” in About Looking (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 1–28. 22 Melville, Moby Dick, 350. 23 James Hutton, “Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe,” in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Vol. 1, Part 2 (1788), 304. 24 John Playfair, Hutton’s Unconformity (1805), quoted from John McPhee, Annals of the Former World, 6th edn (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1999), 78–9.

24  Readings in the Anthropocene Neither God nor a human being is involved in those “revolutions.” The view into the abyss reveals, for the first time, the “immeasurable force” of an autonomous nature that restructures again and again the surface of the Earth, and that has done so long before the first humans left their marks upon its surface. The giddiness caused by this “extraordinary perspective,” however, is an intellectual experience that derives more from Hutton’s theory than from the actual vista. Over centuries, people have looked at the same rocks without feeling carried back in time. From its discovery onward, the world without people is an intellectual construction. It was, of course, fundamental for the self-conception of modern science, which studies nature as precisely that autonomous object discovered by Hutton and experienced by Playfair, but it also stimulated transgressive fantasies like Melville’s ocean reveries, where the world without us—that is, not only before the arrival of humanity, but also beyond it—attracts and frustrates the desire to surpass the ordinary. Only one decade after Moby Dick, in Jules Michelet’s great history of the sea, The Sea (La mer, 1861), the scene has dramatically changed: whales are almost extinct, and thanks to steamships, the industrialization of seafaring and fishing, and increasingly accurate maps, “Man has conquered the seas, and dominated his whole planet.”25 No longer as part of an autonomous nature, but as subjects of a “Law of the Ocean,” negotiated and obeyed by all seafaring nations, the whales as well as the natural balance of the sea in total will have a chance to survive.26 Michelet’s “Law of the Ocean” is a remarkable concept. In contrast to the existing Admiralty Law, it does not rule the relations between different seafaring nations but the relation between all nations (that is, humankind) and the ocean, which is granted the status of a legal subject—an idea that recurs in Michel Serres’s Natural Contract (1990).27 As a legal subject, however, the sea no longer attracts ocean reveries. But, in spite of his apocalyptic vision of nature, Michelet does not abandon the idea of the sea as an extraordinary space. “The sea as seen from the shore,” as the first chapter of The Sea is entitled, still offers the image of an infinite, wild, and untamable power. To be sure, Melville’s ocean reveries do survive the human appropriation of the sea.28 A recent witness of this survival is the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. Looking for landscapes without any trace of human activity, he was driven to the sea. Only from exposed shorelines did it seem possible to capture a photographic image of 25 Jules Michelet, The Sea, trans. by M. J. Michelet from the French (New York: Rudd and Carleton, 1861), 321. 26 Ibid., 319–28. 27 Michel Serres, Le contrat naturel (Paris: Bourin, 1990). 28 Allan Sekula, Fish Story (Düsseldorf: Richter, 2002).

A World Without Us  25 pristine nature. Sugimoto thus traveled the world for more than three decades in search of his seascapes. He produced more than 200 black and white photographs of identical format and composition: an empty sea and an empty sky merge at a horizon line that runs precisely through the middle of the image. None of the photographs reveals a trace of animated life. This does not, of course, necessarily mean that we are really looking at untouched nature. There may well be a ship, a windmill, or an oil-platform just outside the view or hidden behind a soft mist that appears on several photographs. The water itself may be polluted or radioactive, but this is not detectable by the camera for which the sea remains smooth. Sugimoto intensifies this specific invisibility produced by the photographic apparatus through the use of an old-fashioned large-format camera, an apparatus basically identical to the first cameras that already existed when Melville’s narrator had his ocean reveries. That no trace of animated life appears on the photographs is at least partly an effect of the long exposure time required by this camera of up to three hours, which erases any moving object—as in the famous images of nineteenth-century Paris by Charles Marville, where streets and buildings appear in the finest detail, but seem to be abandoned by the people who moved too fast to be captured by the high-resolution camera. In Sugimoto’s photographs, not even single waves appear, but only patterns of recurring movements of the water. Thus, object and apparatus converge to open a window into another timeframe, the deep time of the sea, the abyss of time. Only one single feature of the sea becomes visible: its ability to erase traces, its smoothness.29 Sugimoto is not the only photographer who tries to capture images of a world without people. Under this title, Alan Taylor, the editor of the online edition of The Atlantic, has collected photographs by various artists, depicting places “recently evacuated or otherwise abandoned” for different reasons. Gathering images of deserted areas into a single photo essay, one can get a sense of what the world might look like if humans were to vanish from the planet altogether. Collected here are recent scenes from nuclear-exclusion zones, blighted urban neighborhoods, towns where residents left to escape violence, unsold developments built during the real estate boom, ghost towns, and more.30 29 Hiroshi Sugimoto/Munesuke Mita, Seascapes (Bologna: Damiani and Matsumoto Editions, 2015). 30 Alan Taylor, “A World without People,” The Atlantic, March 15, 2012, http:// www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/03/a-world-without-people/100264 (accessed March 17, 2016).

26  Readings in the Anthropocene Taylor’s photo essay explores, in contrast to Sugimoto’s seascapes, a world that has been completely remodeled by humans, and that has become uninhabitable precisely through this activity. The effect, however, is similar: when people disappear, other actors become visible, actors who have always been there but were hidden in a different timeframe: the abundant vegetation recovering the sites of nuclear disaster in Chernobyl and Fukushima, trees growing out of abandoned railway stations and construction sites, sand covering a never used highway in Libya. These are not particularly friendly images of a romanticized nature healing the wounds of human hubris.31 Some of the places rather give the impression that they will never recover, and even if we cannot see the nuclear pollution, an image like the “view of the abandoned city of Prypiat near the failed Chernobyl nuclear power plant, on April 15, 2011” creates a deeply uncanny, disturbing atmosphere. In The World without People, we see decaying monuments, ruins of failed investments, and relics of uncompleted utopias, designed to control a future that never occurred. The processes that unfold instead may be interdependent with human activity, but they contradict, already in the present of their inception, human visions of the future. To this extent, they also allow a view into the abyss of time. One book that has raised the awareness of those traces of human activity that remain invisible in Taylor’s and Sugimoto’s photographs is Alan Weisman’s The World without Us (2007), a thought experiment and at the same time a scientific extrapolation of what would happen if humans suddenly vanish from the world, and if and how nature will restore itself and reconquer the planet.32 Weisman offers an image of the Anthropocene. He erases humanity only to find its traces almost everywhere—to the very end of our solar system. He also invents a transhuman observer, an alien intelligence that will someday look at these traces in wonder and dismay, contemplating what kind of species may have destroyed its own habitat in such a lasting way. This, of course, is an artificial construction that invites us to take this position and ask ourselves if this is really the future we long for. But who are 31 It is not the “beautiful clean thought” envisioned by a character of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, who introduced the thought experiment of a world without us, asking his companion, “Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare siting up?” D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (London: Penguin, 1999 [1920]), 152. Greg Garrard, in Worlds Without Us, reads this passage as an example of a misanthropic desire to escape humanity that he calls disanthropy. He highlights, however, that this view is already contradicted within Lawrence’s novel by a “diabolical knowledge of the horrors of persistence” (Lawrence, Women in Love, 153, quoted in Garrard, Worlds Without Us, 41). 32 Alan Weisman, The World without Us (London: Virgin, 2008).

A World Without Us  27 we? We can only enter the thought experiment if we distance ourselves from our individuality, our social practices, and our specific habitat through the tools and media of science. This is a lesson from Sugimoto’s seascapes, which explore the ocean reveries not only in their epistemological preconditions but also in their medial preconditions through the use of a nineteenth-century camera. Looking at photographs of William Henry Fox Talbot or Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, which also exposed urban streets emptied of people, some observers expressed the same giddiness that John Playfair experienced when looking at geological formations. Like Melville’s narrator looking at fossils of whales, they all were looking at images that reveal a world without people, but moreover seemed to be drawn, in Talbot’s famous expression, by The Pencil of Nature itself.33 In all these cases, however, we can only see these “drawings” through scientific calculation and technical apparatuses that allow something to appear and, at the same time, make something else—“us”—disappear. Thus, Sugimoto’s seascapes contribute to a contemporary desire for a world without us in more than one sense. They allow us a glimpse into this world and they hint at its preconditions in the nineteenth century, the romantic or misanthropic desire for transgression and the scientific desire for objectivity. But while the camera may offer a glimpse into the abyss of time, it operates in the here and now. The photographer has to be present at least, like Melville’s shipwrecked observer, “on the margin of the ensuing scene.” He is denied the position of the alien observer constructed by Weisman and, in a much more obvious way, by the many visual representations of his thought experiment that brought the world without us to movie and television screens. None of them, of course, was filmed on the sidelines or margins of an actual event; instead they were made using computers and special-effects technology. Although Sugimoto’s photographs, in contrast, may not be created by the pencil of nature, his apparatus still requires a proximity between the representation and the represented. Not the intellectual awareness of the omnipresent traces of humanity, but the presence of an individual human “on the margin of the ensuing scene” is inscribed into the world without us.

Histories of Nature

A two-page spread full of jellyfish: the left side is dominated, from below, by a Periphylla mirabilis pulled from a depth of 6,600 feet by an expedition ship off the east coast of New Zealand around the end of the nineteenth century. To the right is a side view of a Thamnostylus dinema 33 William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (New York: Da Capo, 1969/ London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1844).

28  Readings in the Anthropocene unfurling across the page in precise symmetry its very long tentacles that resemble a string of pearls. They are surrounded by additional, smaller perspectives: from above, from below, from the side, in crosssection, in a schematic projection of the internal organs. These images belong to panels from Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature (Kunstformen der Natur). Between 1899 and 1904, the biologist Haeckel published 100 large-sized and magnificently colored drawings, mostly drawn by himself, which, along with an explanatory page of text for each one, aimed to open up for a wider public a world that even science only first began to discover around the end of the nineteenth century. Not only in the mammals and flowering plants familiar to human beings but also especially among the “lower forms of life that hide in the depths of the sea or remain concealed from the naked eye due to their minute size” (die niederen Lebensformen, die versteckt in den Tiefen des Meeres wohnen oder wegen ihrer geringen Größe dem unbewaffneten Auge verschlossen bleiben) we will find, according to Haeckel, an “inexhaustible abundance of wonderful creatures whose beauty and variety far surpass all forms of man-made art” (eine unerschöpfliche Fülle von wunderbaren Gestalten, durch deren Schönheit und Mannigfaltigkeit alle vom Menschen geschaffenen Kunstformen weitaus übertroffen werden). Often recent discoveries, these “organisms with beauty of form” (diese formschönen Organismen) would have hidden themselves again in “precious and rare works” (teuren und seltenen Werken) that are only accessible to scientific specialists who tend to lack an aesthetic sensibility for nature.34 Haeckel’s art forms in nature are expressly located at the border of nature and culture. For the evolution theorist Haeckel, who was the most important popularizer of Darwin in Germany, it is a foregone conclusion that human art has arisen from the imitation of natural forms and can only develop further through its study. He thus guides his audience into those depths of the ocean that were inaccessible to Melville’s ocean reveries, in order to communicate messages from a world without us. In 2011, a German novel follows him into this world, namely, Judith Schalansky’s Der Hals der Giraffe (The Giraffe’s Neck). The book presents a reproduction of a spread from Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature. The story of a high school biology teacher in a western Pomeranian province in the former GDR builds around this reproduction. Inge Lohmark discovered the drawings in a discarded “Monograph of the Medusas” in the school archive, removed them from the book, and had them framed and hung up by the custodian. They now replace the politically motivated wall decoration that is then banished to 34 Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1904), Foreword, n.p.

A World Without Us  29 the “archive,” a dark cellar.35 For Lohmark, it is a logical exchange, a triumph for the natural sciences and nature itself over the ideologies of the fallen state as well as of those more difficult to comprehend ideologies of the new state. Biology, nature studies (Naturkunde), is not merely a school subject that Lohmark teaches but also the perspective from which she observes the world. The school becomes “her theatre of nature,”36 in which she observes, analyzes, and classifies with an objective, pitiless gaze the frustrations, bitterness, and desperation of her colleagues, but above all the “development” of the children in her class: “Ellen. Dull, patient beast. Arched brow and rabbit eyes. Face teary from breaktime teasing. Superfluous as a spinster even now. Lifetime victim.”37 In a furious stream of consciousness, The Giraffe’s Neck displays a world that is profoundly shaped by the struggle for existence, but in which this struggle always already appears to have been lost: lost by the school that is faced with being closed as a victim of the decline in the birthrate and an exodus from the eastern German province after unification, lost by the city that is being abandoned by its inhabitants, lost by the schoolchildren: Future indeed. These children here weren’t the future. Strictly speaking they were the past: Year Nine was sitting in front of her. They were the last class there would be at Charles Darwin Gymnasium, and would be doing their school-leaving exam in four years … No, these children really didn’t strike her as jewels in evolution’s crown.38 Only a nature that is older than humans and will outlive them has a future here. In fact, it is already preparing to reconquer the space that can barely be defended by the few humans who remain. Lohmark observes with fascination how wild plants prepare to make their way from the edge of the city and vacant lots towards the market square: 35 Schalansky, The Giraffe’s Neck, 24–7. 36 Ibid., 4. 37 Ibid., 14. “Ellen. Dumpfes Duldungstier. Gewölbte Stirn und Kaninchenblick. Die Miene weinerlich vom Pausengehänsel. Schon jetzt überflüssig wie eine alte Jungfer. Opfer auf Lebenszeit” (Der Hals der Giraffe, 20). 38 Ibid., 7. “Von wegen Zukunft. Diese Kinder hier waren nicht die Zukunft. Genau genommen waren sie die Vergangenheit: Vor ihr saß die neunte Klasse. Es war die letzte, die es am Charles-Darwin-Gymnasium geben sollte und die in vier Jahren ihr Abitur machen würde … Nein, diese Kinder hier kamen ihr wirklich nicht vor wie Diamanten auf der Krone der Evolution” (Der Hals der Giraffe, 14–15).

30  Readings in the Anthropocene You couldn’t ignore the fact that flora lay in wait. In ditches, gardens and greenhouse barracks they waited for their deployment. Soon they would take everything back. With their oxygen-producing tentacles they would take control of the abused territories, defy the weather, burst tarmac and concrete with their roots. Bury the remains of the past civilisation under a solid covering of leaves … Everything already bore within it the seed of future nature, future landscape, future forest. Well-tended parks? Troublesome forestry? A greater power was at work here! No one could stop it. Eventually, in just a few centuries, stately mixed woodland would stand here. And of all the buildings, the church at most would remain, hollowed out, a brick skeleton, a ruin in the forest, like in a painting. Wonderful. You had to think bigger, further, beyond the puny human scale. What was time?39 However, the flora has not yet taken over, and human life does not smoothly comply with the laws of nature. Lohmark accepts it as one such law that the schoolgirl she classifies as “victim for life” is systematically bullied and abused in her class. She thus does not intervene, and the violation of her supervisory responsibilities leads to her being reprimanded and might even cost Lohmark her position. For quite some time now, her coldness that she had studied from nature, her image of herself as an authoritarian, performance-oriented, incorruptible, and aloof educator had claimed other victims. She destroyed her relationship with her daughter; she alienated colleagues whose courting of the schoolchildren’s affection she can only observe with scorn. When she herself feels affection toward a schoolgirl, she can only chalk up this inexplicable germination of sympathy to embarrassing sentimentality. Her discipline, scientific as well as personal, protected Lohmark from succumbing to ideologies—a concept for survival in the 39 Ibid., 62–3. “Es war nicht zu übersehen, dass die Flora auf der Lauer lag. In Gräben, Gärten und Gewächshauskasernen warteten sie auf ihren Einsatz. Schon bald würde sie sich alles zurückholen. Die missbrauchten Territorien mit sauerstoffproduzierenden Fangarmen wieder in Besitz nehmen, der Witterung trotzen, mit ihren Wurzeln Asphalt und Beton sprengen. Die Überreste der vergangenen Zivilisation unter einer geschlossenen Krautdecke begraben … Alles trug schon den Samen zukünftiger Natur in sich, zukünftiger Landschaft, zukünftigen Walds. Angelegte Grünflächen? Mühsames Aufforsten? Hier war eine größere Macht am Werk! Niemand konnte sie aufhalten. Irgendwann, schon in ein paar Jahrhunderten, würde hier ein stattlicher Mischwald stehen. Und von allen Gebäuden würde höchstens die Kirche übrig sein, ausgehöhlt, ein Gerippe aus Backstein, eine Ruine im Wald, wie auf einem Gemälde. Herrlich. Man mußte größer denken, weiter denken, über das mickrige menschliche Maß hinaus. Was war schon Zeit?” (Der Hals der Giraffe, 69–70).

A World Without Us  31 GDR that saved her from the upheavals connected with unification: “Of course she’d been lucky. Biology and sport. The pursuit of life. The sciences didn’t need to be rewritten. They weren’t about thought and opinions. They were about observation and investigation, definition and explanation!”40 Yet this discipline also destroys her sensitivity for the traces of life (of others as well as her own) that cannot be dealt with from the distance of observation. The narrative follows Inge Lohmark over the course of three days and allows us to experience a daily routine that begins to unravel when the experience of aging, loneliness, and the yearning for closeness and familiarity prove increasingly difficult to hold in check through the presumed laws of nature. While chapter titles and page headings proceed with the soberness of entries in a class roster, the body, Lohmark’s stream of consciousness, appears fragile, erratic, and incoherent. The impressions, the reflections, the forced distance, the self-censorship that flow together here form a heterogeneous mixture. This is especially true with attempts to differentiate art and nature from one another. In Lohmark’s stream of consciousness, the two seamlessly transform into each other like two intertwined figures in an optical illusion. Her grandiose vision of a world abandoned by human beings, with which she seeks to console her aging self, thus does not emanate from sober observation alone but also from an at once aesthetic and empathic turn to the “organisms with a beauty of form” praised by Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature.41 Art has crept into the vision of the biologist: the “ruin in the forest, like in a painting,” can be found in precisely this form in numerous paintings by Caspar David Friedrich depicting the ruins of the Eldena monastery in Greifswald. A further step into geological deep time, in which all human traces are lost, is first taken by a vision from a schoolbook that Lohmark ponders with her students. The description begins, “On a single page in front of them was everything that lay behind them,” as Lohmark’s pupils behold a visualization of geological eras that mixes spatial and temporal deixes: Depicted as the spiral whorls of a snail’s house, from the Archaic to the Quarternary, from nothing to the present, in its various different stages of development and manifestations … At the centre of the spiral was a blackish-grey maw, a vortex into the unimaginably distant past, a maelstrom into the depths of an ocean from which 40 Ibid., 41–2. “Klar hatte sie Glück gehabt. Biologie und Sport. Dem Leben auf der Spur: Die Naturwissenschaften mussten nicht neu geschrieben werden. Da ging es nicht um meinen und denken. Es wurde beobachtet und untersucht, bestimmt und erklärt!” (Der Hals der Giraffe, 48–9). 41 Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur, Foreword, n.p.

32  Readings in the Anthropocene everything grew, dark and misty as all theories of the beginning: Haeckel’s primordial slime, Oparin’s seething primordial soup, Miller’s primordial atmosphere in gas-filled flasks.42 A maelstrom, however, does not give rise to anything, but engulfs instead all that is drawn into it—like the ocean at the end of Moby Dick. The nature described here is no longer that of Haeckel’s art forms, but a primordial world (an Urwelt) like the one first sketched in the mid-nineteenth century by a contemporary of Melville, the Austrian botanist and paleontologist Franz Unger.43 Lohmark projects the theories and visions of the primal beginning into a future that does not appear so distant in the northeastern German province. Here church ruins are no longer discernible, nor is a “splendid mixed forest,” but an unstructured, rampant vegetation that rather resembles the primeval forest of Carboniferous described a hundred pages later by Lohmark’s unloved model student, “with ferns, forty-metre-high club-moss trees and ten-metre high horsetails.”44 At the beginning of the three-day storyline, Lohmark harshly dismisses a very similar vision, when the art teacher, with whom she shares the hall, mounts a print of one of Claude Monet’s numerous water lily paintings next to Haeckel’s jellyfish. For Lohmark it is an obvious transgression, an encroachment of art not only upon this section of the hall that she claims as hers but also upon the realm of nature. The crude horizontal sprawl revealed a hideous shimmer. Spots of mould on musty colours. All rooted in mud, against the background of a pond, a brackish lakelet. Damp, decaying sweetness and a fusty stench. Modern art or not. The beauty of nature didn’t need alienation. You could approach it with the utmost precision.45 42 Schalansky, The Giraffe’s Neck, 171–2. “Dargestellt als die spiralige Windung eines Schneckenhauses, vom Archaikum bis zum Quartär, vom Nichts bis in die Gegenwart, in seinen unterschiedlichen Entwicklungsstadien und Erscheinungsformen … Das Zentrum der Spirale war ein schwarzgrauer Schlund, ein Strudel in die unvorstellbare Vorvergangenheit, ein Mahlstrom in die Tiefe eines Ozeans, aus dem alles erwuchs, neblig und dunkel wie alle Theorien des Anfangs: Haeckels Urschleim, Oparins brodelnde Ursuppe, Millers Uratmosphäre in gasgefüllten Glaskoben” (Der Hals der Giraffe, 182). 43 Franz Unger, Die Welt in ihren verschiedenen Bildungsperioden (Munich, 1847). 44 Schalansky, The Giraffe’s Neck, 174. “Mit Farnen, vierzig Meter hohen Bärlappbäumen und zehn Meter hohen Schachtelhalmen” (Der Hals der Giraffe, 185). 45 Ibid., 27. “Das plump ausufernde Querformat zeigte ein ungeheures Geflirre. Schimmelige Flecken auf fauligen Farben. Alles wurzelte im Schlamm, auf dem Grund eines Tümpels, eines brackigen Gewässers. Verwesende Süße und

A World Without Us  33 Lohmark sees this precision in Haeckel’s art forms, emanating from observations of nature, well structured, lucid, and transparent. She finds refuge in them from the jolting experience of Monet’s water lily impressions: Of what irresistible clarity, what resolute magnificence, on the other hand, were Haeckel’s jellyfish; the underview of a helmet jelly, with its curly wreath of lilac rays, its octagonal mouthpipe like a whorly sepal. In the middle, the violet funnel of the discus jelly. Flowing poison hairs spilling from a ruched blue petticoat. Flocking around, its sisters, adorned with crystal stars. And on the right the glazed wonder of the flower jelly, from whose nubby cap two nearly symmetrical tentacles grew. Sweeping garlands, set with red stinging pouches as if with pearls. Framed by two cross-sections. One with the blazing red and white plumage of a Rembrandt tulip, the other as regular as a Caucasian brain.46 Described here are not simply jellyfish, but Haeckel’s jellyfish. Just like Schalansky, Lohmark did not find them in an ocean, but in a book—in the case of Lohmark, not even in Art Forms in Nature itself, but in a textbook. The extensively narrated pre-history of the “magnificent pages” that now hang “in silver box frames” on the wall of the hallway between the biology and art room of the Charles Darwin High School tells of a migration through different storage locations and media. But the account does not lead back to an origin, neither to Haeckel’s own publications nor to his drawing board, and also not into the depths of the ocean east of New Zealand from which the Periphylla mirabilis, as can still be read in Haeckel’s text, were once captured. At the moment it left its natural environment at the bottom of the sea in the fishing nets of the Challenger expedition, it embarked on a journey that not only led Modergeruch. Moderne hin oder her. Die Schönheit der Natur bedurfte keiner Verfremdung. Ihr war nur mit äußerster Präzision nahezukommen” (Der Hals der Giraffe, 34). 46 Ibid., 27–8. “Von welch bestechender Klarheit, von welch entschlossener Pracht waren dagegen Haeckels Quallen: Die untere Ansicht einer Taschenqualle mitsamt ihrem fliederfarbenen, gekräuselten Strahlenkranz, das achteckige Mundrohr wie ein Blütenkelch. In der Mitte der purpurne Trichter der Scheibenqualle. Wallendes Tentakelhaar, das einem blau gerüschten Unterrock entsprang. Von winzigen, mit Sternen kristallin verzierten Schwestern umschwärmt. Und ganz rechts die gläserne Herrlichkeit der Blumenqualle, aus deren genopptem Schirm zwei nahezu symmetrische Fangfäden wuchsen. Ausladende Girlanden, mit roten Nesselköpfen wie von Perlen besetzt. Gerahmt von zwei Querschnitten. Einer mit dem rotweiß-flammenden Gefieder einer Rembrandt-Tulpe, der andere gleichmäßig wie ein Kaukasierhirn” (Der Hals der Giraffe, 34).

34  Readings in the Anthropocene it to the other side of the globe but also into the depths of the archive in which the border between the natural sciences and art has long dissolved by the time nature’s art forms finally turn up again. Schalansky’s Bildungsroman constitutes an additional station along this journey that removes the jellyfish from their origin. Both of the reproduced plates are in black and white, and compared to Haeckel’s originals are distinctly scaled down, thereby recalling more illustrations in biology textbooks than Haeckel’s artistic originals. In the text, that is to say, in the image description stored in Lohmark’s stream of consciousness, they regain their colorfulness. Moreover, three plates form a triptych here: an altar of nature that profanes the religious form, yet can also be read as a sacralization of nature. Furthermore, “Rembrandt tulip” and “Caucasian brain” signal just how much the experience of nature, even and precisely when it is based on the most extreme precision, is always already anchored in a cultural history that is present here in aesthetic experience and racial-biological ideologization—two variations that can already be found in Haeckel’s work. Haeckel can only attain nature’s art forms by wresting the “organisms with a beauty of form” from their natural habitat, by isolating and dissecting them. These forms are no closer or similar to nature than the paintings by Monet, who through painting observed for over 30 years again and again the water lily pond in his garden. What he discovered in the process is an impure nature of interpenetrating organisms that constantly dissolve their own borders as well as those of others: a macro-organism that presents itself to the external gaze as an amorphous biomass. To this extent, modernism (die Moderne) does in fact emanate, as Lohman puns, from a mold (Moder) observed with the utmost precision. This is not only true for aesthetics but also for biology: the scientific modernity of Haeckel consists in having coined the term ecology and thereby dissolving the borders between individual creatures. Lohmark also follows this educational path when in her vision she discovers geological deep time in depopulated western Pomerania. The novel begins abruptly on page one with a parody of the story of creation: “‘Sit down,’ said Inge Lohmark, and the class sat down. She said, ‘Open the book at page one,’ and they opened the book at page one.”47 Yet at the same time, it parodies the godlike narrator whose words form a world by creating and ordering its elements. At the end of the three days that we follow Inge Lohmark, this original sovereignty has decomposed, all the way down to the last word that can no longer 47 Ibid., 1. “‘Setzen,’ sagte Inge Lohmark, und die Klasse setzte sich. ‘Schlagen Sie das Buch auf Seite sieben auf,’ und die Klasse schlug das Buch auf Seite sieben auf” (Der Hals der Giraffe, 7).

A World Without Us  35 order anything: “Inge Lohmark stood by the fence and watched.”48 However, even the passivity of viewing hides an arrangement which places Lohmark at the fence, on the border, separating her from a world that she can only look at: ocean reveries in the present of the eastern German province. What might first appear as a—misanthropic—flight from a menacing present and its excessive ideological baggage leads to a complex juxtaposition of different worlds. The study of nature (Naturkunde) enables insights into a world without us that does not exist before or after humanity but alongside it, a world that follows its own processuality in temporal rhythms of its own. Yet this nature study is not an objectifying natural science that observes its object from a distance with instruments for measuring and calculating. The knowledge of nature studies results in proximity, in the chain of individual, small operations that, for instance, allow a jellyfish from the depths of a distant ocean to arrive in the hallway of a school. Not all of these operations have to be conducted by human agents; something like a “pencil of nature” might have in fact co-signed several of them. Such is the case with the piece of amber that the seven-year-old Jenny, the protagonist of Schalansky’s first novel, Blue Doesn’t Suit You (Blau steht dir nicht), finds on the beach of the Baltic Sea. A “spider from time past” (eine Spinne aus vergangener Zeit) is enclosed in it as if in a “translucent grave” (in ihrem durchsichtigen Sarg).49 It must be 35 millions of years old, her grandfather explains, because back then the continent was covered with endless forests, from whose giant trees the resin originated, which trapped the spider and then ossified into amber. But how do we know about the forests, Jenny asks, if human beings did not yet exist? “Because the stones tell it” (Weil das die Steine erzählen).50 Like photographs, stones can deliver messages from a foreign world, snapshots in which a moment is able to appear but which can only be submitted through a “daring interpretation” (eine kühne Interpretation)51 to the coherency of a narrative or a worldview, and can always repeatedly capsize into something else. It is also a daring interpretation when in the oceanic museum Jenny makes “in her thoughts flesh grow on the bones of the skeleton of a whale, covers it with shining skin and imagines how the heavy body thrusts through the ocean” (Sie hatte … 48 Ibid., 210. “Inge Lohmark stand am Zaun und schaute” (Der Hals der Girfaffe, 222). 49 Judith Schalansky, Blau steht dir nicht. Matrosenroman (Hamburg: mare, 2008), 101. 50 Ibid., 102. 51 Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands, trans. Christine Lo (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 10, translation modified; Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln (Hamburg: mare, 2009), 9.

36  Readings in the Anthropocene in Gedanken Fleisch an die Knochen wachsen lassen, es mit blau glänzender Haut überzogen und sich vorgestellt, wie der schwere Körper sich durch den Ozean schob).52 Through even longer gazing, the body becomes transparent once again, in order to be transported from the ocean to another, equally distant, world: “At some point the ribs of the whale became indistinct from the ribs of the vault” (Irgendwann verschwammen die Rippen des Wals mit den Rippen des Gewölbes).53 The vault is a former church ship that, secularized into a museum of nature, has become the ark of a foreign world—estranged from both the nature from which the skeleton descended and from the Christianity that built cathedrals. One can follow this ocean reverie because in the book there is a photograph of the whale in the church ship. The spider in amber, the whale in the church ship, the Periphylla mirabilis from the depths of the Pacific Ocean in the North German Plain: Schalansky’s books function like nets in which precise reproductions and bold interpretations are caught and assembled into narratives about the dissolution of borders. An abyss of time can thus potentially open up in every present moment, while in every abyss a bold interpretation can also be found. The Giraffe’s Neck moves, like other texts by Schalansky, between the poles of (active) creation and (passive) viewing. There is no divine word at the beginning, nor is there a fence that only a melancholic gaze could pierce through. Diverse communications that are collected and can be r­ epeatedly (re)ordered shift between observer and nature, and they rupture the autonomy of the literary work just as much as they do the autonomy of a nature that, like a world without us, cannot be observed. The opposition between scientific precision and artistic alienation invoked in the confrontation between Haeckel and Monet proves to be an illusion. Both are activities that emanate from the concrete operations of sketching, in which Schalansky also partakes when she draws the illustrations for her books—or when she traces what others have drawn and thereby repeats the gesture. Schalansky’s texts, and above all the sketches in which she allows past nature studies to recur anew, inscribe themselves into operational chains in which nature and culture are just as mediated by one another as are the present and deep time. In such operational chains, and only in them, does a “sense of planet”54 arise that does not marginalize individual locations or let them disappear in the abyss of insignificance. Here, the books intersect with Sugimoto’s photographs, which do not capture the ocean but entirely different oceans that, as underscored by the uniformity of the pictorial composition, bring forth completely 52 Schalansky, Blau steht dir nicht, 19. 53 Ibid. 54 Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet.

A World Without Us  37 different vistas—from the proximity of the camera’s point of view, from the materiality of the production process to the gelatin silver prints.

Bibliography

Aigner, Korbinian. Äpfel und Birnen. Das Gesamtwerk. Edited by Judith Schalansky. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2013. Berger, John. “Why Look at Animals.” In About Looking. New York: Vintage Books, 1980, 1–28. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Garrard, Greg. “Worlds Without Us: Some Types of Disanthropy.” SubStance 41.1 (2012): 40–60. Haeckel, Ernst. Kunstformen der Natur. Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1904. Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Hutton, James. “Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the Laws observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe.” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Vol. 1, Part 2, 209–304. 1788. Lawrence, D. H. Women in Love. London: Penguin, 1999 (1920). McPhee, John. Annals of the Former World, 6th edn. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1999. Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. Edited by Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford. New York: Norton, 2002. Michelet, Jules. The Sea. Translated by M. J. Michelet from the French. New York: Rudd and Carleton, 1861. Nyhart, Lynn K. Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Schalansky, Judith. Blau steht dir nicht. Matrosenroman. Hamburg: mare, 2008. Schalansky, Judith. Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln. Hamburg: mare, 2009 Schalansky, Judith. Atlas of Remote Islands. Translated by Christine Lo. London and New York: Penguin Books, 2010. Schalansky, Judith. Der Hals der Giraffe. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2011. Schalansky, Judith. The Giraffe’s Neck. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Scherer, Bernd M. and Katrin Klingan. “Introduction.” In Bernd M. Scherer, Reinhold Leinfelder, and Christian Schwägerl (eds), The Anthropocene Project: An Opening, 2–6. Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2013. Sekula, Allan. Fish Story. Düsseldorf: Richter, 2002. Serres, Michel. Le contrat naturel. Paris: Bourin, 1990. Sugimoto, Hiroshi, and Munesuke Mita. Seascapes. Bologna: Damiani and Matsumoto Editions, 2015. Talbot, William Henry Fox. The Pencil of Nature. New York: Da Capo, 1969/ London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1844. Taylor, Alan. “A World without People.” The Atlantic, March 15, 2012. http:// www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/03/a-world-without-people/100264 (accessed March 17, 2016). Unger, Franz. Die Welt in ihren verschiedenen Bildungsperioden. Munich, 1847. Weisman, Alan. The World without Us. London: Virgin, 2008.

Two Hybrid Environments in the Anthropocene: Recent Fiction

Caroline Schaumann and Heather I. Sullivan

Ecocritical attention to anthropogenically impacted environments is inevitable in the Anthropocene, which is, per definition, the geological epoch in which human activity has left traces across the entire surface, the ocean floors, and the atmosphere of the Earth. The Anthropocene denotes the era of rapidly expanding alterations to humanly occupied places while it also brings broader attention to the fact that every part of the biosphere now contains traces of human activity no matter how distant from industrial, agricultural, or residential sites. Emerging from the expansion of agriculture and continuing with the Industrial Revolution along with the concomitant upswing in the human population, the human reshaping of environments accelerates around 1800 and then explodes in the twentieth century with nuclear testing and the expanded use of fossil fuels after 1945. The Anthropocene highlights one of the foremost concerns of ecocriticism, that is, the distinction between nature and culture, or the lack thereof indicated by the neologism “natureculture.” With the assumption that ecocritical inquiries deal primarily with so-called natural rather than man-made environments, ecocritical attention focused initially on the North American wilderness and the history of the frontier, on nature preservation and conservation, on nature writing and landscape painting. Second-wave scholarship, in the wake of Bruno Latour’s critique of nature’s romanticization, third-wave ecocriticism connecting to feminist studies and post-colonialism, and fourth-wave scholars working in the new materialisms have dedicated more attention to urban and hybrid ecologies, including industrial and polluted spaces.1 The task of investigating human engagement 1 See Lawrence Buell, Ursula K. Heise, and Karen Thornber, “Literature and Environment,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 36 (2011): 417–40,

Hybrid Environments in the Anthropocene  39 within the cityscape and hybrid environments more generally is not only a timelier but arguably a more important project in our age of global­ ization, technological expansion, and continued urbanization, and has moreover moved scholarship from place-based, locally focused concerns to transnational and global pursuits.2 Turning away from prioritizing either “pristine” landscapes or man-made metropolises and questioning the distinction between them altogether, this chapter concentrates on hybrid environments of the Anthropocene documented in contemporary German short stories, novels, and genre fiction (science fiction and eco-thrillers) by Clemens Meyer, Tanja Dückers, and Andreas Eschbach. These late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century texts depict various possibilities of adaptation, awareness, and resilience for living within these altered places rather than engaging in the alluring (melo)drama of apocalyptic or declensionist narratives. By hybrid environments we mean sites whose contours emerge in or through the interaction of human and non-human activities. Their demarcations are less precise, and they cannot be defined as either landscapes or cityscapes,3 such as, for example, the expanses of radioactive deserts, wastelands of industrial rubble, freeways racing across continents, and railway tracks along the outskirts of cities. As material ecocriticism reminds us, human and non-human agents such as microorganisms, toxins, pollutants, and greenhouse gases transcend corporeal, municipal, and national borders. In terms of environmental concerns, they render obsolete simple distinctions between the local and the global as well as between cities, suburbs, and the countryside. In addition to these rather unbounded and expansive places, Meyer, Dückers, and Eschbach also portray manufactured and segregated forms of hybrid environments emerging in the Anthropocene in the wake of both human and non-human impacts. These spaces function as mini-ecosystems unto

2 3

419, http://www.environ.annualreviews.org (accessed March 17, 2016). For a summary of the four waves, see Pippa Marland, “Ecocriticism,” Literature Compass  10/11 (2013): 846–68; Christopher Schliephake, Urban Ecologies: City Space, Material Agency, and Environmental Politics in Contemporary Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014); Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). See Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). As Dorothee Brantz and Sonja Dümpelmann point out, the distinction between city, understood as a primarily man-made environment, and country, understood as “nature,” prevailed since the sixteenth century, when urban centers were no longer self-sufficient but required a network of cultural, economic, and social production. Dorothee Brantz and Sonja Dümpelmann (eds), Greening the City: Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 1–3.

40  Readings in the Anthropocene themselves: Meyer’s mega-mart that is vast enough to signify a new form of labyrinthine wild(er)ness, containing virtually all one needs to survive; Dückers’s terraria with extinct desert creatures who no longer survive outside in the rubbish-filled desert; Eschbach’s space station as the ultimate human-built space and yet therefore all the more inhumane, in addition to his enclosed “Humanic Park” created by intelligent insects of the future (in imitation of the dinosaurs of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park). Navigating these spaces, the protagonists experience an altered terrain whose radical, often science-fiction-like forms are no longer mere textual backdrops to human circumstances but rather active and alienating ecologies, at once frightening and fascinating. In other words, the environment shapes the characters and their actions beyond the predictable ways of established tropes of the urban, the pastoral, the wild, or the apocalyptic. These hybrid environments contain aspects of all of these tropes yet in new combinations that appear in startling new forms with energies of their own. The chapter begins with Meyer’s desolate landscapes and interior shopping spaces, moves outwards to Dückers’s deserts, and ends in space and the futuristic zoo of humans in the world of Eschbach’s science fiction and eco-thriller.

Nature in the Supermarket: Clemens Meyer’s “In den Gängen” (In the Aisles)

Clemens Meyer’s short stories evoke the challenges of evolving ecosystems in the Anthropocene by playfully highlighting multiple meanings and functions of hybrid environments. Born in 1977 in Halle an der Saale, situated in the Leuna-Buna-Bitterfeld Chemical Triangle, the largest chemical and oil refining industrial center in former East Germany, Meyer grew up intimately familiar with environmental destruction, pollution, and degradation.4 Later he moved with his 4 Because of its proximity to lignite (brown coal) mines, the large chemical company BASF built the first plant producing ammonia in Leuna, south of Halle, in 1916, and in the following decades, the complex was expanded to house I. G. Farben’s Leunawerke (Leuna works) to produce methanol, synthetic petrol, amines, and detergents. Even though Leuna became infamous for its wide use of prisoners and slave laborers in Nazi Germany and was heavily bombed by the Allies, the site was expanded after the war to process Russian crude oil and produce chemicals and plastics. A similar history concerns Buna, a subsidiary of I. G. Farben that established a factory in Schkopau in 1937 producing synthetic rubber. In Nazi Germany, the plant established a satellite branch at the Buna labor camp branch near Auschwitz, abusing forced laborers under harrowing conditions. After being seized by the Soviet Military Administration, the plant was reopened in East Germany and became the world’s largest producer of carbide in 1958. The Bitterfeld chemical complex, finally, gained notoriety for its severe environmental pollution even by GDR standards. While these

Hybrid Environments in the Anthropocene  41 family to Leipzig and became active in the peaceful protests against the GDR regime. Meyer financed his studies in literature at the German Institute for Literature in Leipzig with jobs as a security guard, mover, forklift operator, and on construction sites. He published his first novel, Als wir träumten (2006, As We Were Dreaming), through the reputable publisher Fischer with the help of Sten Nadolny. It was an instant success. The (often suburban) cityscape, especially at night, becomes Meyer’s favorite setting for his narratives replete with train tracks, deserted plots, tunnels and bridges, smokestacks, garbage dumps, and dilapidated factory sites. These sites engender violence, prostitution, alcoholism, and drugs in the post-unification era. While Meyer’s protagonists do not entirely abandon dreams of wide open “nature,” they find unexpected niches within the hybrid environments of urbanity and so establish makeshift places that satisfy their yearnings. For instance, in one of Meyer’s latest books, Rückkehr in die Nacht (2013, Return into the Night), the auto mechanic Frank, who always wanted to live by the sea, moves into a derelict yacht that he towed next to his wrecked cars at an old factory site under a railway embankment. Frank has altered the emergent environment of the old factory site by adding yet another waste product (the yacht), which, in turn, converts the site into a romanticized space of resilience. At night, Frank and the narrator sit in candlelight below deck, listening to the uniform and soothing sounds of the trains: It was dark below deck and already evening outside; only a small candle burned and we listened to the noises of the metro and local commuter trains riding across the bridge and the railroad embankment now and then. Very slowly and with a hissing sound apparently from the hydraulics of the brakes, yet with closed portholes and in the light of the candle it sounded like the hissing and growling of old steam locomotives. Further back was another railway track, on which freight trains rumbled at night.5 industrial complexes required the construction of Halle-Neustadt to accommodate employees of the growing industry, after reunification pollution and unemployment caused a significant decline in population. 5 “Es war dunkel unter Deck und draußen schon Abend, nur eine kleine Kerze brannte und wir lauschten auf die Geräusche der S-Bahnen und Nahverkehrszüge, die hin und wieder über die Brücke und den Bahndamm fuhren. Sehr langsam und mit einem Zischen, das wohl von der Hydraulik der Bremsen kam, aber bei geschlossener Luke und im Licht der Kerze klang es wie das Zischen und Fauchen alter Dampflokomotiven. Weiter hinten war noch eine andere Bahnstrecke, über die rumpelten nachts die Güterzüge.” Clemens Meyer, Rückkehr in die Nacht, illustrated by Phillip Janta (Leipzig: Connewitzer

42  Readings in the Anthropocene

Figures 2.1 and 2.2 Clemens Meyer, Rückkehr in die Nacht (2013). Illustrations by Phillip Janta. © Connewitzer Verlagsbuchhandlung.

Through these images, Meyer’s description evokes both romanticism and the Industrial Revolution. Indeed it is precisely the steam locomotive, icon of the Industrial Revolution (and, not coincidentally, the Anthropocene), whose hissing and whooshing sounds resemble sea waves, that enables the protagonists to conceptualize a deep-rooted romantic yearning in the suburban cityscape. In this hybrid environment, Frank thereby reshapes the traditional tropes of understanding both city and country and gains romantic freedom in the process. In Meyer’s book, the rich illustrations by the Leipzig graphic artist Phillip Janta highlight this fusion of human production and destruction (buildings, train tracks, electric cables, waste, rubble, and ruins) with Romantic tropes of open spaces, moonlight, and the sea, invoking both an aesthetics of and engagement with urban emergent spaces. A similar dynamic tension also structures Meyer’s “In den Gängen” (“In the Aisles”) in his second book, Die Nacht, die Lichter (2008, All Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2013), 7. All translations are our own unless otherwise noted. We wish to thank the publisher for allowing us to reprint two of the illustrations.

Hybrid Environments in the Anthropocene  43 the Lights, 2011), a collection of short stories. The title refers to the story’s setting, namely the aisles of a supermarket, a highly artificial environment that underscores the devastating practices of consumption in a free-market economy. Yet, the setting also offers opportunities for resilience. The socio-economic factors of the urban system not only form the structure and context of the story’s plot but more importantly elucidate the interrelations between humans and non-humans. The products and animals for sale in the supermarket are at once commodities of capitalism and matter with agentic potential—that is, things that advance the plot and human behavior and reveal stories of their own. In this way, the supermarket becomes a site of entangled human desires, the social construction of desire and consumption, and material agency. “In den Gängen” relates the story of Christian, the first-person narrator, who finds a job as a forklift operator in a supermarket, falls in love with his co-worker Marion, and learns of the suicide of his friend Bruno, likewise a co-worker. Although Christian is used to the hard working conditions on construction sites, he becomes unwell when he and his co-workers discover a pile of dead and decaying doves in an old roof truss. Cheered on by Portuguese migrant workers, Christian stands up to his insulting boss but is fired as a result. He then finds work at a new hub of capitalism, an unnamed wholesale superstore that sells clothing, tools, food, and beverages. In this epitome of consumption and waste, Christian makes good friends, getting to know his co-workers Bruno, Marion, and Irina by their surnames on the tags they are required to wear, as they illegally munch on expired gourmet foods destined to be thrown away. This is not their only act of disobedience. After watching what Christian calls the “forklift inferno” (Gabelstaplerinferno), that is, an obligatory instructional video on the dangers of forklifting, he is assigned to the aisles of the food section.6 While most of the official section headings, such as Processed Foods, Confectionary, Frozen Foods, and Delicatessen, serve to alienate consumers from the origin and substance of their food, Christian’s co-workers have renamed many of the supermarket’s sections with more candid and living terms, denoting the built spaces as if they were actually living or bodily spaces. The electrical lift trucks are “ants” (Ameisen),7 the Italian noodles orecchiette sound and look just like “little ears” (Ohr),8 as Irina instructs Christian, and Bruno introduces 6 Clemens Meyer, “In den Gängen,” Die Nacht, die Lichter (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2008), 194. Translated by Katy Derbyshire as “In the Aisles” in Clemens Meyer, All the Lights (High Wycombe: And Other Stories, 2011), 167–89, 173. 7 Meyer, “In the Aisles,” 169; “In den Gängen,” 190. 8 Meyer, “In the Aisles,” 178; “In den Gängen,” 199.

44  Readings in the Anthropocene Christian to “the Sea” (Meer),9 that is, the section of frozen seafood and living fish, shrimp, and crabs. At a pool reproducing the exact same salt content as the ocean, Bruno and Christian become melancholic as they watch lobsters trying to crawl away despite their claws being tied with rubber bands: I squatted down in front of the tank, my face directly in front of the glass. They [the lobsters] had strange long eyes, dark telescopic eyes that came out of their little heads like tiny fingers. The lobsters moved around in the water that flowed in and out again through the tubes, but they didn’t have much space and some of them looked as if they were dead already or just about to die, lying still between the others. Their long, thin eyes; I don’t know why, but their eyes really did my head in. “Jesus,” I said, standing up again. “Yeah,” said Bruno. We stood in silence by the tank for a good while then, looking at the water bubbling and the big pile of lobsters.10 While this experience leads to a feeling of alienation and desperation, Christian experiences an antithetical erotic moment with Marion in another section of the supermarket that, by virtue of their imagination, also resembles the natural world. When Christian substitutes in the frozen foods section, Marion leads him to the refrigerated warehouse that workers call Siberia. Indeed the experience exceeds Christian’s expectations, leading to the story’s high point: “And then we were in Siberia, twenty degrees below freezing, our breath came in clouds, and we took large hunks of frozen pork and beef and threw them in the trolleys; it sounded as if we were throwing stones” (Und dann waren wir in Sibirien, Minus zwanzig Grad, unser Atem dampfte, und wir nahmen große Stücke tiefgefrorenes Schweine- und Rindfleisch und schmissen sie in die Einkaufswagen, das klang so, als würden wir Steine schmeißen).11 It is 9 Meyer, “In the Aisles,” 180; “In den Gängen,” 201. 10 Meyer, “In the Aisles,” 181–2; “Ich hockte mich vor das Bassin, mein Gesicht war direkt vor dem Glas. Sie [die Hummer] hatten seltsam lange Augen, dunkle Stielaugen, die wie kleine Finger aus ihren kleinen Köpfen herauskamen. Die Hummer bewegten sich in dem Wasser, das durch die Schläuche rein- und wieder rausfloss, aber sie hatten ja nicht viel Platz, und einige von ihnen sahen aus, als wären sie schon tot oder kurz davor, lagen ganz still zwischen den anderen. Ihre langen, dünnen Augen, ich weiß nicht, warum, aber ihre Augen machten mich richtig fertig. ‘Scheiße,’ sagte ich und stand auf. ‘Ja, ’ sagte Bruno, ‘Scheiße.’ Wir standen dann noch eine ganze Weile schweigend vor dem großen Bassin, blickten auf das Sprudeln des Wassers und den großen Haufen der Hummer.” Meyer, “In den Gängen,” 202–3. 11 Meyer, “In the Aisles,” 185; “In den Gängen,” 208.

Hybrid Environments in the Anthropocene  45 here that Christian and Marion finally “kiss,” that is, rub their noses like Eskimos do. The fundamentally altered world in the Anthropocene calls for new human engagement with what we call nature since the categories between man-made and natural environments become blended, and new forms of wildness appear in the aisles of supermarkets. Without unmediated access to “nature” as one might traditionally have termed it, the protagonists adapt to their environment with varying degrees of success, resilience, or resignation. Bruno, the heavy-set, white-haired gentle soul who smells “bitter-sweet” (bittersüss)12 like animals and dung heaps from his farm in the suburbs, suffers from his work to the point that he, at the conclusion of the story, somewhat unexpectedly hangs himself. Bruno walks “slightly hunched, his arms splayed a little way from his body as if he expected a surprise attack from one of the shelves at any moment” (geduckt, die Arme leicht vom Körper abgespreizt, als würde er jederzeit damit rechnen, aus den Regalen ange­ griffen zu werden).13 The description points out his vulnerability within an artificial environment. Even when the narrator visits him on his farm, Bruno cannot seem to shake off the invasions of modern city life, yearning for complete darkness but not being able to shut out the city lights. For Marion, Christian’s young and unhappily married love-interest, the “nature” in the supermarket functions in contrast as a space removed from societal regulations and hierarchies—not unlike traditional nature in romantic literature. As with Frank in Rückkehr in die Nacht, the emergent environments become hybrid worlds challenging her and Christian to creative strategies of survival and adaptation. These protagonists do not nostalgically bemoan the loss of nature but are rather able to experience romantic yearning in an entirely artificial if not mechanical setting, freely linking such a setting to idealized nature, as we know it. In this way, Marion and Christian come physically closer together in “Siberia” and enjoy another moment of intimacy at the conclusion of the story atop the forklift, when Marion asks Christian to slowly lift and lower the fork. As in Rückkehr in die Nacht, the protagonists experience the mechanical noises as if they were the soothing sound of the sea bringing them closer: “The fork lowered with a hissing and whooshing sound from the air expelled from the hydraulics, and it really did sound like the wash of waves in the sea” (Die Gabel senkte sich mit einem Zischen und Rauschen, das war die austretende Luft der Hydraulikanlange, und es klang tatsächlich ein wenig wie das

12 Meyer, “In the Aisles,” 172; “In den Gängen,” 194. 13 Meyer, “In the Aisles,” 173; “In den Gängen,” 194.

46  Readings in the Anthropocene Rauschen der Wellen am Meer).14 As with their “kiss” in “Siberia,” Marion and Christian demonstrate a kind of fluidity that might be required of humans navigating their hybrid environments in the Anthropocene.

The Desert as a Trash-Filled Courtyard: Tanja Dückers’s Der längste Tag des Jahres (The Longest Day of the Year)

Tanja Dückers’s novel, Der längste Tag des Jahres (2006, The Longest Day of the Year), likewise features complex interactions between humans and objects that take place in emerging hybrid environments. In her text, cultural artifacts such as junk and waste become “storied matter” in that they relate central human concerns and meaning-making in a barren desert landscape with emergent contours.15 As one of the Popliteratur authors in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Dückers is not usually mentioned in the context of environmental writing. Instead, her poetry, short stories, and novels are most often associated with the urban cityscapes of Berlin, the town where she was born in 1968 and later studied German and North American literature as well as art history. Dückers judiciously and scrupulously examines the city’s manifestations of the Nazi era, World War II, divided Germany, and reunification and its aftermath, often from the perspective of young protagonists who rebel against paternal authority and social hierarchies. Despite numerous stays abroad in the United States, Spain, and Eastern Europe, Dückers continues to call Berlin her home, where she currently works as an author and journalist. Set in the small Bavarian town of Fürstenfeldbruck, the Mojave Desert of California, and only peripherally in Berlin, Der längste Tag des Jahres (2006) at first glance does not fit with the exclusively urban direction of Dückers’s oeuvre. Yet the chapters of the novel pursue the theme of generational conflict: in each chapter, one of the now-adult children responds to the news of their father’s death on June 21, the longest day of the year. This loss prompts them to remember their childhood, reassessing their relationship with their parents and each other in the process. Through their memories it becomes evident that their father, Paul Kadereit, following his own father’s death during the Rommel campaign in North Africa, spent his time and energy in the aftermath of World War II building a pet shop business in West Germany, which enabled him to indulge in exotic dreams of desert animals while shunning both political and familial responsibilities. 14 Meyer, “In the Aisles,” 189; “In den Gängen,” 212. 15 See also Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s definition of “storied matter” in “Introduction: Stories Come to Matter,” in Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (eds), Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 1–17, esp. 1–5.

Hybrid Environments in the Anthropocene  47 Toward the end of his life, however, not only does the pet shop fail but the relationship with his children lies in shambles, as they bitterly recall. The book’s fifth and final chapter divulges the perspective of Thomas, the family’s youngest son. Unbeknownst to his family, Thomas emigrated to Southern California to experience, in contrast to Paul, desert life in its actual environment rather than in a terrarium. Separated from his wife Chantal, Thomas raises his “desert-son” Sami by himself in two derelict mobile homes in the Mojave Desert northeast of Los Angeles. While Dückers’s family portrait over four generations of male offspring garnered mixed reviews, her much lauded description of the desert comprises both an original and detailed portrayal of anthropogenically altered landscapes. Engaging with an age-old fascination for the American Southwest in both Germany and the United States, Dückers quickly disbands any hopes of desert romanticization: “But the deserts here in California were neither biblical, mysterious, uninhabited, or surprisingly lively: they only reminded him [Thomas] of a rear courtyard covered in trash containing remarkable curiosities once in a while.”16 Thomas lives in an airplane-graveyard with 19 rusty and dysfunctional planes. With nothing else to watch, since desert animals remain uncannily absent from the site, he uses his binoculars to observe his ex-girlfriend with her new lover from his “Hausberg” (145, local mountain): Thomas rarely encountered animals here, except for stray dogs. Neither geckos nor salamanders, toads or chameleons— sometimes he wondered whether all those animals only existed in his father’s terraria. There were not even mosquitoes; the air was too dry for them. He would sometimes find the skeletons of coyotes, rats, and snakes, and in the area around the Air Force Lab even the remains of radioactively contaminated laboratory animals. Behind Twentynine Palms he once found a half-disemboweled cow and near Cameron in the mountains the carcass of some animal as tall as a stag. He had no idea what that could have been.17 16 “Aber hier in Kalifornien waren die Wüsten nicht mehr biblisch, geheimnisvoll, menschenleer oder überraschend betriebsam: Sie erinnerten ihn [Thomas] nur noch an einen zugemüllten Hinterhof—in dem hin und wieder bemerkenswerte Kuriositäten zu finden waren.” Tanja Dückers, Der längste Tag des Jahres (Berlin: Aufbau, 2006), 167. 17 “Tieren begegnete Thomas hier kaum, bis auf die streunenden Hunde. Weder Geckos, noch Salamander, Lurche oder Chamäleons—manchmal schien es ihm, als würden all diese Tiere nur in den Terrarien seines Vaters existieren. Nicht einmal Mücken gab es. Dafür war das Klima zu trocken. Manchmal fand er

48  Readings in the Anthropocene If the few animals he encounters fail to spark a connection to his father’s fascination with reptiles and only leave Thomas bewildered, the flora he sees likewise do not comprise treasured desert flowers, but merely appear as a “dark troop of succulents that surrounded the trailer park like creepy soldiers” (dunkle Schar von Sukkulenten, die wie eine unheimliche Soldateska um die Wohnwagensiedlung herumstanden),18 that threaten to overtake the space by advancing closer each year. Thomas realizes that such sites are not unique but can be found throughout the United States. In Wendover, on the border between Nevada and Utah, Thomas and his son Sami meet an employee of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, a pleasant man called John who introduces the Center as follows: “The task of the CLUI was to pay attention to the backspace of America and to document these un-sites, in John’s words, strange sites: industrial areas, prisons, military complexes, waste dumps, land-art projects, wind power plants, and so forth” (Die Aufgabe des CLUI sei es, sich mit dem Backspace of America zu beschäftigen und diese Un-Orte, in Johns Worten Strange Sites, zu dokumentieren: Industriegebiete, Gefängnisse, Militäranlagen, Müllhalden, Land-Art Objekte, Windanlagen und so weiter).19 The Center for Land Use Interpretation indeed exists and is, according to its website, “dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.”20 Situated at on old airbase at the edge of a salt flat along Interstate 80, the Wendover complex opens its facilities to artists and displays objects, artifacts, and periodic exhibits. In addition to the Wendover site, the Center has a handful of other locations: a small office and exhibit hall in Los Angeles, a trailer home with displays like “Down to Earth: Experimental Aircraft Crash Sites of the Mojave” in the Mojave Desert, and a small trailer in Lebanon, Kansas, housing the exhibit “Centers of the USA.” Founded in 1994, the Center seeks to promote interest in “human interaction with the earth’s surface.” With neither an environmental nor an industry-affiliated agenda, the Center believes that studying a variety of cultural inscriptions in the

skelettierte Kojoten, Ratten und Schlangen—im Gebiet um das Air Force Lab auch die sterblichen Überreste von radioaktiv verseuchten Versuchstieren. Hinter Twentynine Palms hatte er einmal ein halb ausgeweidetes Rind gefunden und bei Cameron in den Bergen das Gerippe irgendeines Tiers, das groß wie ein Hirsch war. Er hatte keine Ahnung gehabt, was das gewesen war.” Dückers, Der längste Tag des Jahres, 146. 18 Dückers, Der längste Tag des Jahres, 147. 19 Ibid., 162. 20 http://www.clui.org/section/about-center (accessed March 17, 2016). We wish to thank the Center for allowing us to print their photograph of the complex.

Hybrid Environments in the Anthropocene  49

Figure 2.3  Part of the old airbase at Wendover, Utah, where the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s complex is located. © CLUI. land leads to a better understanding of “who we are, and what we are doing.”21 Devoted to human activity at the fringes of civilization, the CLUI sites allow for an unburdened interpretation free from established tropes of either nature or urbanity and thus offer yet another way of examining hybrid environments. Diverging from the official CLUI description, Dückers terms these environments “Un-Orte” (un-sites), thereby pointing to the fact that they have escaped place-based definitions. In this vein, Dückers’s protagonist Thomas ceases to interpret or define the land before him. While he initially used the desert nostalgically to remember both his father’s passion for desert animals and romantic encounters with his ex-wife in dilapidated airplanes, over the course of the narrative Thomas seems to learn that the land before him is incessantly changing, an insight that also frees him from his own prefabricated expectations. It is no coincidence that after their encounter with John, Thomas and Sami come across the Newfoundland Evaporation Basin, realizing that the site is both a lake and a desert “in unstable condition” (in unbeständigem Zustand).22 The sight of giant mirrors of wind- and solar modules reflecting the evening light in an uninhabited backcountry produces happiness: “An 21 http://www.clui.org/section/about-center. 22 Dückers, Der längste Tag des Jahres, 164.

50  Readings in the Anthropocene all-encompassing feeling of happiness that he found where he least expected it: first comes waste and then nothingness, and then again nothingness, and then beauty” (Ein umfassendes Gefühl von Glück, das er dort, wo er es am wenigsten erwartete, gefunden hatte: Erst kommt der Müll und dann das Nichts und dann noch einmal das Nichts und dann die Schönheit).23 Accepting the fusion of human and non-human forces, Thomas requires no definition of the environment around him in order to appreciate it. In this way, Thomas’s positive feelings resemble Christian’s serenity atop the forklift when listening to the “sea.” Both of them are able to exist happily in anthropogenically altered landscapes, which means accepting a humanly changed Earth without ceasing to denounce its continued destruction.

Andreas Eschbach: Energy Landscapes in Science Fiction and Eco-Thrillers

Andreas Eschbach posits a variety of survival strategies in the strange new hybrid environments of the Anthropocene that appear in his science fiction and eco-thrillers, the two literary forms currently producing the most “climate change fiction” or “cli fi” (as Adam Trexlar’s and Eric Otto’s works suggest).24 There has been a recent upswing in the publication of eco-thrillers attending to all kinds of ecological havoc and possible solutions, most of which create elaborately altered environments. And science fiction famously has a long-held interest in futuristic, alien, or altered ecosystems; indeed, hybrid and alien environments dominate this genre known for its thought experiments with environmental alteration.25 Andreas Eschbach’s works are exemplary for this tendency and pay particular attention to altered and manufactured environments as well as to possible solutions to environmental crises. Born in 1959 in Ulm, Eschbach studied aerospace engineering in Stuttgart and worked with software until he turned to fiction writing. 23 Ibid. 24 Adam Trexlar, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015); and Eric C. Otto, Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012). 25 Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson claim that “SF is our culture’s vast, shared, polyvocal archive of the possible; from techno-utopias to apocalypses to ecotopian fortunate falls, it is the transmedia of SF that has first attempted to articulate the sorts of systemic global changes that are imminent, or already happening [with climate change in the Anthropocene], and begins to imagine what our transformed planet might eventually be like for those who will come to live on it.” Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014), 17.

Hybrid Environments in the Anthropocene  51 He is one of the most well-known European science fiction authors and has won major German and French science fiction prizes. He regularly publishes his work in international collections. His collected stories in Eine unberührte Welt (An Untouched World) include pieces that were initially published in Germany, France, Denmark, Switzerland, and the United States. His first novel, Die Haarteppichknüpfer (The Carpet Makers), from 1995 is a space opera describing the violence of covering an entire planet in hair carpets in an act of revenge that ironically deploys the planet-wide devastation of living environments as a mindless, mechanical process serving no purpose other than ancient whim set into unstoppable motion: a metaphor for our current ecological circumstances and political responses. Eschbach’s 2007 eco-thriller, Ausgebrannt (Burnt Out), begins with that staple of the thriller genre, a car chase on the American freeway at very high speeds. With the “open” horizon of the highway before us, we encounter the image that has captured the German imagination of the Wild West’s freedom and expansiveness. This particular chase ends in a violent crash, fire, and near death of the hero, Markus Westermann. Having set the stage with the fiery crash, Eschbach then moves the story along two different timelines: one documenting the pre-crash phase that begins when Westermann first arrives in New York in chapters labeled “past” that portray our current hybrid ecologies and environments across the globe, all shaped by use of fossil fuels; and the other documenting his post-crash phase in chapters labeled “present time” that portray near future environmental/cultural adaptations to different energy sources. The novel ends with an epilogue set 30 years in the future when Westermann finally returns from the United States to visit Germany, arriving by an old-fashioned ship. He then flies in an airship the rest of the way to see his family. This is a clear trajectory: fossil-fueled high-stakes economic and political power systems lead to a spectacular crash that is followed by a turn to slower, older forms of travel and local systems of exchange but also new technologies utilizing renewable energy. How we get there in the 749-page eco-thriller is a longer story, involving international espionage, documentation of the twentieth century’s increasing use of fossil fuels that literally shape cities and countries, and the antics of oil companies, mad scientists, and eager speculators. The novel explores how industrialized nations assume unlimited access to oil and gas reserves and maps out the political chaos at the dawn of a “post-oil” world. By speculating on oil futures, Westermann becomes extraordinarily rich in the “past” section of the novel; hence he incorporates the culmination of power offered by fossil fuels as well as their violent crash. In fact, his last name and trajectory clearly suggest the “West,” drawing a parallel between Westermann’s opening

52  Readings in the Anthropocene car crash and the crash of the fossil fuel systems that aided European colonial and capitalist power. Eschbach thus uses this beginning car crash as a metaphor for his idea that fossil fuels, specifically petroleum and gas, will take us on an ever faster ride until we and our culture crash and “burn out.” Westermann also embodies a kind of persistence and resilience, whatever the system. His early rise to power occurs by clever strategizing and taking advantage of every opportunity that comes his way. First, he remains in the USA as an illegal immigrant after his work visa expires, and then he encounters and joins up with a fellow Germanspeaker, the Austrian Karl Walter Block, who is traveling through the USA giving lectures on his scheme to find oil. Block and Westermann decide to work together, using Westermann’s high-level connections to win the support of massively powerful individuals, institutions, governments, and various oil firms, all of whom desperately want to believe the two men’s claim to be able to find new fossil fuel sites based on Block’s magical formula. Although Block’s method previously led to unexpected oil reservoirs all over the world, it finally—and with a heavy symbolic resonance for our oil-driven cultures—proves to have been simply mad intuition that fails in the end. Westermann and Block travel all over the world but discover no new oil sites. Meanwhile, the oil industry begins to collapse when its sources start to dry up and the fuel supposedly stockpiled by governments is exposed as also running dangerously low. Westermann and Block enact modern culture’s quest for oil, which Eschbach depicts as an insane overproduction creating seemingly inexhaustible wealth that all of a sudden transforms into an equally insane but now delusional search guided by nothing but a madman’s obsession. It is bound to end badly. Like Westermann’s opening crash scene, the Westermann-Block fiasco embodies the fall of the oil industry, a fall led by fools, faulty science, and greed in combination with the blind idiocy of the world’s governments in search of more fuel at any cost. Indeed, Block’s backstory mirrors the rise of fossil fuels in world politics. He takes part in many oil explorations in hybrid environments across the globe, including Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Venezuela, the North Sea, and Alaska. In each case, Block cleverly finds deposits to drill. “He could find oil where no one else could. He had a sixth sense for what was hidden under the earth. Whenever there was an opportunity, he worked in the exploration teams with the others yet with the difference that he kept silent. All he did was to look at the seismic maps.”26 As the oilman in 26 “Er konnte Öl finden, wo andere keines fanden. Er hatte einen sechsten Sinn für das, was sich unter der Erde verbarg. Wann immer sich die Gelegenheit ergab, arbeitete er in Explorationsteams mit, nur mit dem Unterschied, dass er nun

Hybrid Environments in the Anthropocene  53 Ausgebrannt, Block becomes obsolete with the decline of fossil fuels, and he thus disappears during a final visit to Saudi Arabia. In contrast, those in the novel who survive the oil crash adapt and become resilient; Westermann’s brother Werner and his wife Dorothea, for example, abandon their gas-guzzling mansion to run a small local grocery store selling local goods in the village. Westermann heroically offers a utopian solution for the entire world by creating a solar device that uses compost and farm waste to produce vast amounts of alcohol. This renewable resource prevents the collapse of remaining industrial systems, though transportation shifts back to older forms. As renewable fuel becomes available across the entire world, political pressures for fuel disappear and agrarian cultures thrive but with modern solar technology. All countries adopt the alcohol system except Saudi Arabia, which rejects the fuel since it is, after all, alcohol based. Instead, they go completely solar, and all is well. The world is on a new trajectory, a utopian one to be sure, but Eschbach dedicates hundreds of pages to delineating the madness of fossil fuels and the inevitable demise of any culture so wedded to them that they cannot quickly shift to new energies when necessary. Eschbach asserts that his thriller Ausgebrannt is not mere speculation but rather entirely based on facts gathered in his research on fossil fuels: All the numbers mentioned in this book about oil discoveries, oil inventories, reserves, and oil explorations are derived from official publications, above all from the Oil & Gas Journal, the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, and studies of the “United States Geological Survey (USGS).” The “Society of Petroleum Engineers” really exists. It is a worldwide organization of 65,000 members from all areas of the oil industry based in Richardson, Texas.27 This set-up of thriller and “documentation” allows Eschbach multiple opportunities to comment on how fuel shapes culture and creates our

schön den Mund hielt. Alles, was er tat, war, sich die Karten anzuschauen, die seismischen.” Eschbach, Ausgebrannt, 161. 27 “Alle in diesem Buch genannten Zahlen über Ölfunde, Ölbestände, Reserven und Ölförderungen entstammen offiziellen Veröffentlichungen, vorwiegend dem ‘Oil & Gas Journal,’ dem ‘BP Statistical Review of World Energy’ und Studien des ‘United States Geological Survey (USGS).’ Die ‘Society of Petroleum Engineers’ gibt es wirklich. Es ist eine weltweite Organisation von 65000 Mitgliedern aus allen Bereichen der Ölindustrie mit Sitz in Richardson, Texas.” Eschbach, Ausgebrannt, 6.

54  Readings in the Anthropocene globally emerging hybrid environments.28 Through the voice of the madman Block, we hear that President Reagan’s success, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the fall of the Shah of Iran were entirely based on oil prices. Block states that the Soviet Union was close to breakdown when Reagan was elected, and their dependency on oil funds led them to disaster. As other places like Alaska, Venezuela, and Nigeria began to flood the market with more oil, prices began to fall.29 In some ways, Block speaks insightfully about how dependent our culture is on petroleum: “Our entire technological civilization is inseparably bound to oil. To attempt to give it up would be the same as if we were to try to live without blood” (Unsere gesamte technische Zivilisation ist untrennbar mit dem Öl verbunden. Zu versuchen, darauf zu verzichten, wäre dasselbe, als würden wir versuchen, ohne Blut zu leben).30 Yet he also continues to believe that fossil fuels will never run out. His magical intuition is all we need to find the sites, even though his ability fails him throughout his appearance in the novel. Once on his own, Westermann desperately seeks Block’s documents that contain the magical oil-finding secret. He does finally find the papers but they turn out to be meaningless scribbles. At the very end of the novel, however, Westermann returns home to Germany and discovers some documents from his family that suggest that there might actually still be more oil deposits out there. He decides to destroy them, since the amount of carbon dioxide that would be released from burning all that fuel would be fatal for the world climate. He states with moral sincerity, “It wouldn’t just be the death blow for the world climate. It would be the end of humanity. We would thereby create a world in which we could no longer live” (Es wäre nicht nur der Todesstoß für das Weltklima. Es wäre das Ende der Menschheit. Wir würden damit eine Welt schaffen, in der wir nicht mehr leben können).31 Eschbach presents the global climate in the wake of fossil fuels as a hybrid environment that could possibly be fatal for human beings. This hybrid climate in which human beings can no longer live is echoed in Eschbach’s short story, “Humanic Park,” a spoof on Michael Crichton’s famous novel Jurassic Park in which dinosaurs are resurrected with DNA recovered from mosquitoes fossilized in amber. While Crichton’s dinosaurs needed a little extra from frogs to fill in the missing DNA links, Eschbach’s humans are recovered with a 28 See Gabriele Dürbeck on the contributions of eco-thrillers to discussions of energy systems, climate change, and natural-cultural disasters: Gabriele Dürbeck, “Ökothriller,” in Gabriele Dürbeck and Urte Stobbe (eds), Ecocriticism. Eine Einführung (Cologne: Böhlau, 2015), 245–57. 29 Eschbach, Ausgebrannt, 157–8. 30 Ibid., 173. 31 Ibid., 748–9.

Hybrid Environments in the Anthropocene  55 little help from rat DNA. But who is doing the resurrection is the real question. In this case, it is futuristic, evolved insects who survive after humans have destroyed their own necessary ecological conditions, or to use Val Plumwood’s phrasing, their “enabling conditions.”32 Human beings have thereby created the ideal living conditions (a new hybrid environment) for these evolved intelligent insects who look back upon their human forerunners much like we tend to view the demise of dinosaurs and the rise of mammals as a logical trajectory leading to the inevitably “superior” species. A school class of young insects visits the “Humanic Park” in order to observe the fascinatingly strange and enormous reanimated beings behind bars, large enough to make the ground shake when they move, like the Tyrannosaurus rex in Crichton’s novel and the many films: “The ground beneath them boomed as the creature behind the screen bent down on its knees. A huge head lowered down and two big surprisingly movable eyes considered the newly arrived group” (Der Boden unter ihnen dröhnte, als das Wesen hinter der Abschirmung sich auf die Knie niederließ. Ein riesiger Kopf senkte sich herab, und zwei große überraschend bewegliche Augen musterten die Gruppe der Ankömmlinge).33 The young insects then raise the relevant environmental question: how and why did the humans change the Earth so dramatically as to bring themselves to extinction without making an effort to change the trajectory? This process of altering the Earth is described at length, always with an emphasis on how it benefits the current insect civilization. Eschbach writes with deep irony about post-human insects celebrating the human devastation of the biosphere as the creation of their “ideal” world; he satirically documents our current destructive behaviors, above all emphasizing the hubristic arrogance of the (formerly human, now insect) assumption that this was a praiseworthy, inevitable process leading to the perfection of life forms and a new hybrid environment. The insects believe it must have been a brief era during which the human beings fundamentally changed Earth’s ecological conditions through aggressive technology. Speaking from an insect perspective, the scientist notes: They blew up the ozone carapace so that the light of the sun could finally fall freely to the Earth, they exterminated many of the plants that produced harmful oxygen, and with the help of other technical means, they enriched the atmosphere with fresh carbon 32 Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London: Routledge, 2006), 17. 33 Andreas Eschbach, “Humanic Park,” Eine unberührte Welt (Cologne: Bastei Lübbe, 2008), 26.

56  Readings in the Anthropocene dioxide and carbon monoxide, with aromatic nitrous oxides and fragrant hydrogen sulfides, and a thousand other important components. They dug into the Earth for all the radioactive substances that they could find, and set their radiation free; yes, they even artificially produced additional radioactively active elements. Thus they created a world that offered our ancestors optimal developmental opportunities—for this reason we name them the path breakers.34 The Humanic Park directors point out how the change of the Earth’s ecosystems led to the gradual extinction of human beings, which created the perfect circumstances for their own insect existence. When asked why the human beings finally died out, the director states simply, “With the reshaping of the Earth, they had created conditions in which they themselves could no longer survive” (Mit der Umgestaltung der Erde hatten sie Verhältnisse geschaffen, in denen sie selber nicht mehr überleben konnten).35 Again, this statement is almost a verbatim repetition of the lines from Ausgebrannt regarding the need to turn away from fossil fuels. None of the insect thinkers can answer the most important lacuna of all insect science: why the human beings did this. The insect children discuss among themselves and finally decide that human beings must not have been intelligent after all. Eschbach makes a bid for human intelligence in his eco-science fiction thriller, Solarstation (Solar Station), from 1999, emphasizing however technophile answers to ecological problems. The titular solar station is a mini-ecosystem of sorts representing the fragile human life in space and thus on spaceship Earth. Its importance surpasses its metaphorical status though: the solar station is where the fight for all Earth’s future energy takes place. As a hybrid environment, the space station presents an exacerbated sense of its humanly constructed frame that exists in the equally extreme environment of the cold, airless vacuum of outer space. Eschbach documents the challenges of space life at zero gravity in precise detail so that the “environment” 34 “Sie sprengten den Ozonpanzer, sodass das Licht der Sonne endlich frei auf die Erde fallen konnte; sie rotteten viele der Pflanzen aus, die den schädlichen Sauerstoff produzierten, und mit Hilfe anderer technischer Geräte … reicherten sie die Atmosphäre mit frischem Kohlendioxid und Kohlenmonoxid an, mit aromatischen Stickoxiden und duftenden Schwefelwasserstoffen und tausend anderen wichtigen Bestandteilen. Sie gruben in der Erde nach allen radioaktiven Substanzen, die sie finden konnten, und setzten deren Strahlung frei; ja, sie erzeugten sogar künstlich weitere radioaktiv strahlende Elemente. So schufen sie eine Welt, die unseren Vorfahren optimale Entwicklungsmöglichkeiten bot—deshalb nennt man sie die Wegbereiter.” Eschbach, “Humanic Park,” 29. 35 Eschbach “Humanic Park,” 29.

Hybrid Environments in the Anthropocene  57 is an essential part of the story and impacts every moment from the opening scene of sex without gravity to long descriptions of eating, evacuating waste, and sleeping in these inhuman circumstances. As much a documentation of a foreign environment as it is an ecological thriller, the novel directly addresses current environmental questions related to energy sources. Eschbach’s answer here, somewhat similarly to Ausgebrannt, is based on a celebration of technological innovation and clean energy solutions—especially solar energy captured by huge solar collectors in space. The plot, however, is moved forward by standard genre fiction trappings such as political intrigue, terrorists, and an international fight for access to energy. The premise is that America’s scientific prestige, specifically NASA, has faltered. The Japanese are now leading the way into space with a “solar station” that captures solar energy and beams it to Earth for fuel. The hero, Leonard Carr, is an American-trained and highly skilled astronaut who is given the dual job of “Hausmeister,” an all-round handyman and custodian, and security officer, a seemingly unnecessary duty, at least initially. But when terrorists come aboard like space pirates arriving in an impossibly small rocket, Carr’s second job becomes essential. They take over the station and begin using it to blast entire cities by diverting the energy stream away from the receiving stations on Earth. Carr cleverly unravels secrets, battles the terrorists, gets the girl, and so saves both the day and the solar station. Not surprisingly, the novel concludes with man-to-man combat in zero gravity. Solarstation promotes the idea that solar energy is the only hope for the future. Eschbach goes so far as to have the commander suggest that we must continue our expansion outwards into space as part of human destiny fueled by the sun: “Is it not clear to you that the solar station is our path into space? Our only one? And that we must take this path? Fossil fuels are running out. Soon there will no longer be any remaining intense energy sources available on Earth except for atomic energy and then?”36 The premise is typical for much of science fiction. Humanity must continue to expand, now to the stars: With the solar station we have demonstrated that it is possible to build large power stations in space, much bigger than this one, and that it is possible to transfer the energy to the Earth. We could build even more solar stations; we could tap into the 36 “Ist Ihnen nicht klar, dass die Solarstation unser Weg ins All ist? Unser einziger? Und dass wir ihn jetzt gehen müssen? Die fossilen Brennstoffe gehen zu Ende. Bald stehen uns auf der Erde keine intensive Energiequellen mehr zur Verfügung außer der Atomenergie und dann?” Eschbach, Solarstation, 139–40.

58  Readings in the Anthropocene strongest and most inexhaustible energy source of the entire solar system and put aside all energy problems for good; we could clear the path to an unlimited future …37 At its base, this claim for the inevitable move into space is a profoundly anti-ecological stance since it assumes both that we can and should leave our earthly ecosystems behind and that we would be able to sustain human life without our co-species of bacteria, other animals, and plants (or that we could bring them along). Yet Eschbach also maintains the resolutely ecological premise that solar energy is likely the most sustainable energy source for our future. In fact, he makes solar power exciting and “heroic,” associating it with weaponry. While this is stereotypical of genre fiction, it is also a significant deviation from pop literature conventions that glamorize oil, nuclear power, or some other kind of imagined fantasy energy source that is clean and limitless. Highlighting solar energy within the framework of traditional heroic genre fiction is a notable step. The choices we face in the future, if we do not pursue solar energy, are grim, asserts Eschbach in both this novel and in his nonfiction book of essays, Das Buch der Zukunft (The Book of the Future): nuclear energy means poisoning ourselves with radioactive waste; and with a return to wind, water, and wood, we would become a civilization of “oxen yoke and steam engines, of spinning wheels and paltry harvests” (Ochsengespannne und Dampfmaschinen, der Spinnräder und erbärmlichen Ernten).38 This would be a terrible fate with life consisting of “bleakly vegetating” (trostloses Dahinvegetieren).39 The novel’s celebration of solar energy leaves multiple issues unresolved, however, including the continuation of current consumer practices and the dangerous thrill of weaponizing solar energy that is hindered finally only by Carr’s heroic fist-fight in space. Eschbach features political and ecological terrorists in the novel who join forces in order to attack the space station, albeit for entirely different reasons. The eco-warriors, “Greenforce,” violently oppose all large-scale energy practices because they see no real change produced by negotiation and political protest. The eco-terrorist on board the 37 “Mit der Solarstation haben wir gezeigt, dass es möglich ist, große Kraftwerke im Weltraum zu bauen, viel größere als dieses, und dass es möglich ist, die Energie zur Erde zu übertragen. Wir könnten noch mehr Solarstationen bauen; wir können die stärkste und unerschöpflichste Energiequelle des ganzes Sonnensystems anzapfen und alle Energie Probleme ein für alle Mal beseitigen; wir könnten den Weg freimachen in eine grenzenlose Zukunft ...” Eschbach, Solarstation, 140. 38 Eschbach, Das Buch der Zukunft, 140. 39 Eschbach, Das Buch der Zukunft, 140.

Hybrid Environments in the Anthropocene  59 station, Jay, describes our current culture as a “world that has become fully suicidal” (vollkommenen selbstmörderisch gewordene Welt).40 He asserts that such a “suicidal” society requires extreme responses since peaceful environmental actions fail, and oil and chemical companies continue to do as they please, paying no regard to demonstrations: “Thousands of peaceful demonstrators occupy a ship, the ‘AMOCO TAN,’ in Rotterdam’s port, and hours later were just as peacefully removed by police so that the ship can sail out unhindered to just beyond the border and pump its load—diluted but heavily toxic chemical waste—undisturbed into the dead North Sea.”41 When asked why he would then attack the solar station as a renewable source of energy and a path away from these problems, he answers: Because the solar station is a dangerous, megalomaniacal project; a last insane attempt to rescue the forsaken situation of humanity with purely technical means—an attempt that will make everything even worse. The solar station is nothing more than a manifestation of that superstition that seeks salvation in largescale technological solutions [technologische Großprojekte].42 In despair about the larger cultural patterns that continue unabated driven by faith in technological solutions to all problems, Jay joins a radical Jihadists’ plot to use this stream of energy, up to a Gigawatt concentrated in a beam, to destroy Mecca and claim that Allah is punishing the non-believers of Islam from the heavens, literally. Thanks to Carr, the struggles in space are at least temporarily resolved. Eschbach concludes that solar energy is now back on track and humanity can still plan for the future. Indeed, in Buch der Zukunft, he similarly asserts that our best hope for the future is to seek access to the “limitless” energy of the sun. Everything else is too little (wind and water), too dangerous (nuclear), or non-renewable (fossil 40 Eschbach, Solarstation, 194. 41 “Tausende von friedlichen Demonstranten besetzen ein Schiff im Hafen von Rotterdam, die AMOCO TAN, wurden Stunden später ebenso friedlich durch Polizisten von Bord geschafft, sodass das Schiff ungehindert auslaufen kann und dann jenseits der Hoheitsgrenzen seine Ladung—verdünnte, aber hochgiftige Chemieabfälle—ungestört mitten in der toten Nordsee von Bord pumpen kann.” Eschbach, Solarstation, 195. 42 “Weil die Solarstation … ein gefährliches, größenwahnsinniges Projekt ist; ein letzter irrwitziger Versuch, die verfahrene Situation der Menschheit mit rein technischen Mitteln zu retten—ein Versuch, der alles noch schlimmer machen wird. Die Solarstation ist nichts weiter als eine neue Manifestation jenes Aberglaubens, der das Heil in technologischen Großprojekten sucht.” Eschbach, Solarstation, 195–6.

60  Readings in the Anthropocene fuels). Nothing else can maintain the current living conditions of industrialized states. This optimistic view of our human potential for finding new energy strategies in the Anthropocene is shared by many activists and authors addressing climate change action.43 In other words, Eschbach’s hybrid environments in his science fiction and eco-thrillers emerge from anthropogenic changes to large-scale systems and environments on Earth. Yet Eschbach still suggests narratives of adaptability, even if ironic with a future full of intelligent insects.

Conclusion: Resilience and Hybridity

Meyer, Dückers, and Eschbach explore various survival strategies in myriad hybrid environments of the Anthropocene. Rather than emphasizing the death and the destruction of existing ecologies, they instead depict resilience and creative adaptations to the apparent wastelands and newly developed ecosystems on all scales from terraria, supermarkets, an abandoned ship under the railway, space stations, free and open highways, vacant deserts, and human zoos. The environments are altered and strange yet become mundane in the texts as the protagonists spend their time navigating new paths, living spaces, and alternative modes of transportation and energy sources. The wilds of yore are replaced by new, hybrid places with their own vibrant energies and dangers. Meyer’s, Dückers’s, and Eschbach’s stories plumb the possibilities of these hybrid environments and so produce narratives of resilience in the face of radical change. They reshape our expectations of the apparent stability of environments, which have always been changing and evolving in the wake of living things and geological and planetary forces. But these environments are now amped up with the particular fossil-fueled velocity of the Anthropocene.

Bibliography

Brantz, Dorothee and Sonja Dümpelmann, eds. Greening the City: Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Buell, Lawrence, Ursula K. Heise, and Karen Thornber. “Literature and Environment.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 36 (2011): 417–40. environ.annualreviews.org (accessed March 17, 2016). Canavan, Gerry and Kim Stanley Robinson, eds. “Introduction,” Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction, 1–29. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014. Center for Land Use Interpretation. http://www.clui.org (accessed March 17, 2016). Crichton, Michael. Jurassic Park. New York: Ballantine, 1991 (1990). Dückers, Tanja. Der längste Tag des Jahres. Berlin: Aufbau, 2006. 43 See, for example, Christian Schwägerl’s popular science book, The Anthropocene: The Human Era and How it Shapes our Planet (originally: Menschenzeit: Zerstören oder gestalten? Die entscheidende Epoche unseres Planeten).

Hybrid Environments in the Anthropocene  61 Dürbeck, Gabriele. “Ökothriller.” In Gabriele Dürbeck and Urte Stobbe (eds), Ecocriticism: Eine Einführung, 245–57. Cologne: Böhlau, 2015. Eschbach, Andreas. Die Haarteppichknüpfer. Cologne: Bastei Lübbe, 1995. Eschbach, Andreas. Ausgebrannt. Cologne: Bastei Lübbe, 2007. Eschbach, Andreas. Eine unberührte Welt. Cologne: Bastei Lübbe, 2008. Eschbach, Andreas. “Humanic Park.” In Eine unberührte Welt. Cologne: Bastei Lübbe, 2008, 25–30. Eschbach, Andreas. Solarstation. Cologne: Bastei Lübbe, 2011 (1999). Eschbach, Andreas. Das Buch der Zukunft. Berlin: Rowohlt, 2012 (2004). Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Oppermann, eds. Material Ecocriticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Marland, Pippa. “Ecocriticism.” Literature Compass 10/11 (2013): 846–68. Meyer, Clemens. Als wir träumten. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2006. Meyer, Clemens. “In den Gängen.” Die Nacht, die Lichter. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2008. Meyer, Clemens. “In the Aisles.” All the Lights. Translated by Katy Derbyshire, 167–89. High Wycombe: And Other Stories, 2011. Meyer, Clemens. Rückkehr in die Nacht. Illustrated by Phillip Janta. Leipzig: Connewitzer Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2013. Otto, Eric. Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012. Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge, 2006. Rigby, Kate. “Writing After Nature.” Australian Humanities Review 39–40 (2006): 1–16. Schliephake, Christopher. Urban Ecologies: City Space, Material Agency, and Environmental Politics in Contemporary Culture. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. Schwägerl, Christian. Menschenzeit: Zerstören oder gestalten? Die entscheidende Epoche unseres Planeten. Munich: Riemann Verlag, 2011. Schwägerl, Christian. The Anthropocene: The Human Era and How It Shapes our Planet. Translated by Lucy Renner Jones. New Mexico: Synergetic Press, 2014. Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015.

Three Looking Behind Walls: Literary and Filmic Imaginations of Nature, Humanity, and the Anthropocene in Die Wand

Sabine Frost

This chapter reflects on the different ways that Marlen Haushofer’s novel Die Wand (The Wall) and Julian Pölsler’s film adaptation of it imagine nature and humanity.1 In the 1963 novel, the protagonist encounters an invisible wall during her vacation in the Alps. This mysterious barrier separates the woman from the external world, where all life has been extinguished overnight. She remains isolated in the mountain forest, together with a dog, a pregnant cow, a cat, and the remaining wildlife. The woman devotedly cares for the animals and tries to become an integral part of the forest. Two years later, she encounters another human survivor who disturbs her post-human– animal utopia: the stranger kills the calf as well as the dog when it tries to stop him. The woman shoots the intruder and throws him down the mountain while she buries her companion, the dog. Ultimately, the utopian project in Haushofer’s novel fails and not just because of the sudden intrusion of violence, but also for other less obvious reasons that result from the protagonist’s own actions. Pölsler’s film adaptation from 2012, however, realizes the woman’s utopian vision of becoming one with nature. The film romanticizes the relationship between humanity and nature, whereas the novel questions and rejects it. In 1 Marlen Haushofer, Die Wand (Berlin: List Verlag, 2004). Within the body of text, I use the novel’s English translation and provide the original text in the footnotes for longer quotes and in the body of the text for shorter quotes. See Marlen Haushofer, The Wall, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Pittsburgh: Cleis Press, 1990); Julian Pölsler, Die Wand (Vienna and Berlin: Studiocanal, 2012).

Looking Behind Walls  63 the following, I examine how the film departs from the novel’s imagination of nature and humanity and further how form and medium affect these differences as well as how they result from authorial and directorial choices that show a distinctly different ideological stance on human–nature relations. Finally, the chapter focuses on how these differing imaginations of nature and humanity alter the representation of the Anthropocene in both novel and film. In Haushofer’s novel, the narrator reflects on her human self and on leaving behind literary and literal traces. The film, however, makes the condition of its production forgettable and thereby ignores or erases its own medial traces. In Haushofer’s first-person novel, the nameless narrator reports how she adapted to her new situation. Her report is strikingly prosaic; it does not relate potential adventures in the mountain forest after civilization’s downfall. Unlike other novels dealing with the end of the world (e.g., George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides, M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy), Die Wand offers no explanation of the sudden catastrophe. After just a few expeditions, the protagonist stops scrutinizing the mysterious wall, which she regards as some kind of weapon. She rarely mentions it again. Instead she keeps a detailed journal of a monotonous life that primarily involves caring for her animals and supplying herself with food and fuel. Significantly, the disastrous encounter with another human survivor is related in just a few pages. The novel’s tedious repetitions and lack of plot are the main reasons why it had been deemed difficult to adapt as a film. Nevertheless, in 2012––nearly fifty years after the novel’s publication––the Austrian director Julian Roman Pölsler released a filmic adaptation of Die Wand. He waited twenty years for the rights and worked a further seven years on the script. The shoot itself took one year, during which the lead actress Martina Gedeck and eight cameramen were pushed to their physical limits because of the wintry conditions in the Salzkammergut.2 When the film was released in autumn 2012, critics praised the aesthetics of the landscape and the quality of Gedeck’s performance. They also acknowledged Pölsler’s faithfulness to the original, though not all critics considered it the film’s strong point.3 Despite such claims of faithfulness, the film deviates from 2 Andreas Kilb, “Das Ende der Welt ist der Anfang des Waldes,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 10, 2012, http://www.faz.net (accessed March 17, 2016). 3 Cf. Jens Klawonn, “Die Wand,” Filmkritiker, October 16, 2012, http://www. filmkritiker.com (accessed March 17, 2016); Martin Gobbin, “Die Wand— Im Spiegelkabinett,” Kinozeit, http://www.kino-zeit.de/filme/die-wand (accessed March 17, 2016); Jenni Zylka, “Kinodrama Die Wand: Halb lebt sie im Paradies, halb in der Hölle,” Spiegel, October 14, 2012, http://www.spiegel.de (accessed March 17, 2016); Kilb, “Das Ende der Welt ist der Anfang des Waldes.”

64  Readings in the Anthropocene the novel in interesting ways. The differences do not only result from the medial shift itself but also from Pölsler’s interpretation of Haushofer’s text. These deviations alter the presentation of nature, humanity, and the Anthropocene. For a better understanding of the changes in the film, it is first necessary to examine the complex relationship between the protagonist and the mountain forest in Haushofer’s novel. After civilization’s downfall, the woman tries to live in balance with nature and takes care of the remaining animals. Accordingly, the novel is often read as a post-human utopia or even a matriarchal form of society based on the reproduction of animals.4 Haushofer draws from several literary genres that deal not only with the collapse of civilization but also with utopian visions of a post-human society. She uses traditional modes of narration, motifs, and metaphors, but also changes and thereby exposes them as literary conventions. Haushofer refers in particular to the post-disaster Robinsonade, which imagines humankind’s near extinction. In contrast to the classic Robinsonade, the individual subject no longer leaves civilization—civilization itself gets lost. After the catastrophe, the entire world becomes, so to speak, a remote island where the stranded survivors reflect on civilization by establishing a new society, or, as in Die Wand, a post-human–animal community.5 Two impulses in particular shape the imagination of humankind’s near extinction and the establishment of a post-industrial community in these Robinsonades: the fear of a self-destructive system’s collapse and the desire for the simplification of a world that became too fast, too loud, and too complex. Further, ecological problems like overpopulation, reduced resources, and the human impact on the environment also prompt the imagination of a new society that lives in balance with nature. In contrast to earlier utopias, civilization does not have to evolve to meet everyone’s needs, but instead reverts to a purer state and even vanishes completely. In response to such romantic impulses, the science fiction writer Brian Aldiss coined the term “cozy catastrophe” for the subgenre of the post-disaster Robinsonade.6 He delivers 4 Konstanze Fliedl, “Die melancholische Insel: Zum Werk Marlen Haushofers,” Vierteljahresschrift des Adalbert-Stifter-Instituts 35 1.2 (1986): 32–52, 41. 5 Cf. Fritz Brüggemann, Utopie und Robinsonade: Untersuchungen zu Schnabels Insel Felsenburg (Weimar: Duncker, 1914); Götz Müller, Gegenwelten: Die Utopie in der deutschen Literatur (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1989), especially for the juxtaposition of utopia and Robinsonade, see 12–19; Michael Hofmann, “Verweigerte Idylle. Weiblichkeitskonzepte im Widerstreit zwischen Robinsonade und Utopie: Marlen Haushofers Roman Die Wand,” in Anke Bosse and Clemens Ruthner (eds), “Eine geheime Schrift aus diesem Splitterwerk enträtseln …”: Marlen Haushofers Werk im Kontext (Tübingen: Francke, 2000), 193–205. 6 Brian W. Aldiss, Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), 294.

Looking Behind Walls  65 a critique of civilization that questions sympathies for “the back-tonature movement, and a general feeling that industrialization had gone too far.”7 Aldiss also points out how the extinction of humankind becomes an adventurous new start for the few survivors. “The essence of cozy catastrophe,” he writes, “is that the hero should have a pretty good time … while everyone else is dying off.”8 Apparently, the protagonists in conventional post-disaster Robinsonades are not stranded in a post-apocalyptic exile but rather in a post-human idyll, one reconquered by nature and released from civilization’s restraints. Die Wand seems to achieve the radical utopia predicated on humanity’s extinction as the necessary condition for the sole survivor to live in harmony with nature. Haushofer’s protagonist, however, finds little coziness in the mountain forest where she is stranded. The great drama of humanity’s extinction is no spectacle where she can prove herself as a heroine. In contrast, she relates no adventures but rather details her monotonous everyday life. The woman is neither interested in the reasons for the end of civilization nor in re-establishing it. She assumes that the wall is some kind of military strike that randomly spared her and the remaining animals in the forest. Ultimately, the narrator does not care whether the wall is a weapon, an accident, or a failed experiment. The only thing that she is certain about is that the wall was made by humans. For this reason, she calls it “the most humane piece of devilry ever to have occurred to a human brain.”9 The narrator makes clear that she discusses only one disaster in her report––not the disaster that eradicated civilization but rather the disaster of humanity itself. Instead of mourning humankind, the narrator turns away from it and towards nature. Unlike Robinson Crusoe and his modern successors, Haushofer’s protagonist does not recreate the history of civilization but rather seeks to reverse it step by step.10 Even before she notices the mysterious wall, the woman feels estranged from humanity. Isolated in the mountain forest as the sole survivor of the catastrophe, her mistrust, feelings of not belonging, and critique of materialism all evolve into a critique of civilization and capitalism in general. In the narrator’s opinion, humans were too egocentric, rational, repressive, and destructive. Their arrogance not only precipitated their own demise, but also that of nearly the entire biosphere. “Human beings had played their own games, and in almost every case they had ended 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Haushofer, The Wall, 32. “… die humanste Teufelei, die je ein Menschenhirn ersonnen hatte.” Die Wand, 41. 10 See Ulf Abraham, “Topos und Utopie,” Vierteljahresschrift des Adalbert-StifterInstituts 35 1.2 (1986): 53–85, 77ff.

66  Readings in the Anthropocene badly,” the woman reflects. “It was better not to think about human beings. The great game of the sun, moon and stars seemed to be working out, and that hadn’t been invented by humans.”11 Later, the narrator comes to the conclusion that “[human] life could have been lived differently”: There is no impulse more rational than love. It makes life more bearable for the lover and the loved one. We should have recognized in time that this was our only chance, our only hope for a better life. For an endless army of the dead, mankind’s only chance has vanished forever. I keep thinking about that. I can’t understand why we had to take the wrong path. I only know it’s too late.12 It is too late for humanity, but not for her. The last woman treats her fellow creatures in the forest with love and respects the “great game of the sun, moon and stars.” After humanity’s downfall, she reverses the traditional opposition of nature as chaos and civilization as order. Nature and culture are still opponents, but the narrator perceives civilization as chaotic and nature as a pre-established harmony where every creature has the right to exist. The woman tries to find her own place in this “great game,” and as the last of her species, she realizes that it “was impossible … to remain a single and separate Self, a little, blind, independent life that didn’t want to fit in with a greater Being.”13 To achieve this end, the protagonist relinquishes her human self and focuses on the well-being of the remaining animals. The narrator may not use the term anthropocentrism, but she registers humankind’s tendency to focus on its own needs and ignore those of non-humans. Haushofer was not familiar with the concepts 11 Haushofer, The Wall, 184. “Die Menschen hatten ihre eigenen Spiele gespielt, und sie waren fast immer übel ausgegangen … Es war besser, von den Menschen wegzudenken. Das große Sonne-, Mond- und Sterne-Spiel schien gelungen zu sein, es war auch nicht von Menschen erfunden worden.” Die Wand, 209ff. 12 Haushofer, The Wall, 210. “Dabei wäre es möglich gewesen, anders zu leben. Es gibt keine vernünftigere Regung als Liebe. Sie macht dem Liebenden und dem Geliebten das Leben erträglicher. Nur, wir hätten rechtzeitig erkennen sollen, daß dies unsere einzige Möglichkeit war, unsere einzige Hoffnung auf ein besseres Leben. Für ein unendliches Heer von Toten ist die einzige Möglichkeit des Menschen für immer vertan. Immer wieder muß ich daran denken. Ich kann nicht verstehen, warum wir den falschen Weg einschlagen mußten. Ich weiß nur, daß es zu spät ist.” Die Wand, 238. 13 Haushofer, The Wall, 161. “Es war fast unmöglich … ein einzelnes abgesondertes Ich zu bleiben, ein kleines, blindes, eigensinniges Leben, das sich nicht einfügen wollte in die große Gemeinschaft.” Die Wand, 185.

Looking Behind Walls  67 of anthropocentrism and biocentrism.14 She does, however, refer to two different ways humans interact with nature: a repressive one and a considerate one. Similarly, her protagonist in Die Wand concludes that if humanity failed because it was too rational and egocentric, she must be more empathetic and ecocentric. Yet, Haushofer’s protagonist is not only trapped in a mountain forest but also in her role as the last human. On the one hand, the woman criticizes civilization and distances herself from it. When she refers to humanity, she talks about “them” as if she does not belong to it. On the other hand, the woman perceives herself as the last “eyesore” that has to atone for humanity’s oppression of nature before the species goes entirely extinct. The solution to her dilemma is to vanish into nature as a non-person. In her report, she omits personal details like her name and the events of her life before the wall appeared. She even describes defacement in a de Manian sense:15 at one point the woman looks into a mirror and into a strange face that no longer seems to be her own. She determines she does not need her face anymore because there is no person to look back at it. And the animals, the only other beings that acknowledge her, recognize her by smell. Haushofer’s protagonist thus reverses civilization to the point where a category like individuality no longer exists. In doing so, she becomes nameless and faceless. In contrast to the now extinct human race that focused solely on its self, the woman sacrifices her individual existence for the care of the remaining animals. She regards this stewardship as altruistic and selfless, but she actually re-enacts humanity’s oppressive attitude towards nature. There is an antagonism between the forest as a greater being and the woman’s “little, blind self.” The tension becomes clear when she describes a sensation “as if the forest has put down roots in [her], and is thinking its old, eternal thought with [her] brain.”16 The forest’s “old, eternal thought” in the woman’s brain also evokes Aldo Leopold’s

14 See Arne Næss, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-range Ecology Movement,” Inquiry 16 (1973): 95–6. 15 Paul de Man coined the term “defacement” as the inability to re-establish the self in autobiographical writing. For de Man, writing one’s own self is no act of restoration but mutilation and the dissolution of the self in text: “[T]he restoration of mortality by autobiography … deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores. Autobiography veils a defacement of the mind of which it is itself the cause.” Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” Modern Language Notes 94.5 (1979): 919–30. 16 Haushofer, The Wall, 161. “[E]s ist, als fange der Wald an, in mir Wurzeln zu schlagen und mit meinem Hirn seine alten ewigen Gedanken zu denken.” Die Wand, 185.

68  Readings in the Anthropocene famous motto “Thinking like a mountain,”17 that is, the possibility of leaving the purely human perspective behind. The protagonist’s moment of unification with the forest, however, deviates considerably from Leopold’s call to “ecocentric identification.”18 It is at this moment that the woman stops short of becoming one with the forest and instead realizes her estrangement from this absorbing and dominant agent. The forest’s violent intrusion into her mind is threatening, and she must acknowledge that sharing the forest’s thoughts also means losing control over her own thinking and thus relinquishing her human identity. Although the woman wants to overcome anthropocentrism and to vanish into nature, she clings to her status as a cultural, human being and fears becoming non-human. She may feel responsible for the animals, but it is not merely an act of compensation for humanity’s former oppression as she contends, but also the expression of her belief that it takes a human to do so. For example, when the narrator begins to fear she is losing her mind, she reminds herself that this is the one thing that distinguishes her from and elevates her above the animals: “My mind is free, it can do what it likes, but it mustn’t lose its reason, the reason that will keep me and the animals alive.”19 Sharing her mind with the forest, that is, “thinking its old, eternal thought with [her] brain,” also threatens her human reason. The woman wants to vanish into nature but this process actually reinforces her human, cultural status: her connection with the forest does not mean merging into this greater being but expressing her most human instrument, the ability to think, write, and self-reflect. Upon closer inspection, the narrator does not consider herself part of nature but rather its mediator: her brain thinks for the forest, and her hand transcribes what she imagines it is thinking. Such a relationship can hardly be construed as the romantic union with nature the text initially suggests. The woman’s understanding of herself as the forest’s human voice— as the one who speaks for it—is also integral to her relationship to animals. In contrast to the rest of humanity, Haushofer’s protagonist treats her fellow creatures with love: [F]or as long as there’s something for me to love in the forest, I shall love it; and if some day there is nothing, I shall stop living. 17 Cf. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: American Library, 2013 (1949). 18 See Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1985). 19 Haushofer, The Wall, 53. “Mein Kopf ist frei, er darf treiben, was er will, nur die Vernunft darf ihn nicht verlassen, die Vernunft, die er braucht, um mich und die Tiere am Leben zu erhalten.” Die Wand, 65.

Looking Behind Walls  69 If everyone had been like me there would never have been a wall … But I understand why the others always had the upper hand. Loving and looking after another creature is a very troublesome business, and much harder than killing and destruction.20 At first glance, the protagonist seems to speak to a utopian relationship to nature free of human oppression. However, this interpretation ignores that the woman deems human animals unworthy of love and empathy. This observation not only refers to the stranger whom the narrator shoots and throws down the mountain. It also becomes clear that there is no place for other humans in this so-called utopia when the woman pretends to speak for “the forest [that] doesn’t want human beings to come back.”21 Further, the protagonist’s relationship to animals and nature in general is hardly free of domination. Her care for the animals is but another kind of power relation and not an entirely selfless act as she maintains. Taking care of or speaking for someone also means making decisions on their behalf and thereby controlling them. The woman claims that the animals need her and her human reason. Indeed, the domestic animals like the cow and the dog are dependent on her. Of course, their dependence results from a long tradition of human interaction and oppression. The woman needs the animals as much as she presumes they need her––especially to perceive them as the other to distinguish herself as the last human. The protagonist imagines that “the barriers between animal and human come down very easily,”22 but even to mention these barriers maintains them and reinforces the human–animal difference: I have always been fond of animals, in the slight and superficial way in which city people feel drawn to them. When they were suddenly all I had, everything changed … The barriers between animal and human come down very easily. We belong to a single great family, and if we are lonely and unhappy we gladly accept the friendship of our distant relations. They suffer as we do if pain 20 Haushofer, The Wall, 140. “[S]olange es im Wald ein Geschöpf gibt, das ich lieben könnte, werde ich es tun; und wenn es einmal wirklich nichts mehr gibt, werde ich aufhören zu leben. Wären alle Menschen von meiner Art gewesen, hätte es nie eine Wand gegeben … Aber ich verstehe, warum die anderen immer in der Übermacht waren. Lieben und für ein anderes Wesen sorgen ist ein sehr mühsames Geschäft und viel schwerer, als zu töten und zu zerstören.” Die Wand, 161. 21 Haushofer, The Wall, 161. “Der Wald will nicht, daß die Menschen zurückkommen.” Die Wand, 185. 22 Haushofer, The Wall, 207. “Die Schranken zwischen Tier und Mensch fallen sehr leicht.” Die Wand, 235.

70  Readings in the Anthropocene is inflicted on them, and like myself they need food, warmth and a little tenderness.23 This quote exposes the narrator’s hierarchy of care for animals on the basis of their human likeness. Her ability to make them like herself, to anthropomorphize them, is the ultimate reason for the protagonist’s empathy. The domestic animals are very close to her. The dog, cat, and cow become a surrogate family, with her as the head making decisions for all of them. The woman feels especially close to them because they are human-like without being human. The anthropomorphized animal that does not ask questions or threaten her seems to be the better human after all. For example, the protagonist is more affected by the death of its kittens than the idea that her daughters died in the catastrophe. She also mentions that she carries a weapon in the forest not because she is afraid of wild animals but of other humans––a fear that turns out, of course, to be justified. Although the woman seems to have a closer relationship to animals than to other humans, she first has to be able to anthropomorphize them. Regarding the dog, the woman says, “Lynx was closest to me, and soon he wasn’t just my dog, but my friend; my only friend in a world of troubles and loneliness.”24 The protagonist even imagines that her dog “if he had suddenly grown hands, would soon have started thinking and talking as well.”25 The cow––needing to be milked and thus totally dependent on human help––reminds the woman “of a graceful, coquettish young woman looking over her shoulder with moist brown eyes.”26 Only the cat is different. The narrator describes her as “a brave, hard-nosed animal that [she] respected and admired, 23 Haushofer, The Wall, 207. “Ich habe Tiere immer gern gemocht, auf die leichte, oberflächliche Weise, in der Stadtmenschen sich zu ihnen hingezogen fühlen. Da ich plötzlich nur noch auf sie angewiesen war, änderte sich alles … Die Schranken zwischen Tier und Mensch fallen sehr leicht. Wir sind von einer einzigen großen Familie, und wenn wir einsam und unglücklich sind, nehmen wir auch die Freundschaften unserer entfernten Vettern entgegen. Sie leiden wie ich, wenn ihnen ein Schmerz zugefügt wird, und wie ich brauchen sie Nahrung, Wärme und ein bißchen Zärtlichkeit.” Die Wand, 235. 24 Haushofer, The Wall, 41. “Luchs stand mir am nächsten, er war bald nicht nur mein Hund, sondern mein Freund; mein einziger Freund in einer Welt der Mühen und Einsamkeit.” Die Wand, 51. 25 Haushofer, The Wall, 118. “Manchmal bildete ich mir ein, daß Luchs, wären ihm plötzlich Hände gewachsen, bald auch zu denken und zu reden angefangen hätte.” Die Wand, 137. 26 Haushofer, The Wall, 27. “Die Art, wie sie den Kopf nach allen Seiten drehte, wenn sie Blätter von den Büschen zupfte, erinnerte mich an eine graziöse, kokette junge Frau, die aus feuchten braunen Augen über die Schulter blickte.” Die Wand, 36.

Looking Behind Walls  71 but one who always insisted on her freedom. She hadn’t fallen under [her] spell at all. Of course Lynx had no choice, he was dependent on a master. A dog without a master is the poorest creature in the world.”27 The cat’s subjection to categories like domestic and feral, dependent and independent, makes it clear that Haushofer’s protagonist still thinks in these terms. These anthropomorphic descriptions hardly constitute abandoning human perspectives on animals. In contrast, the woman’s sympathy for her fellow creatures is limited to the ones she can empathize with, that is, those animals that can be anthropomorphized: “My imagination is very limited,” the woman confesses, it “doesn’t penetrate the smooth, white flesh of cold-blooded creatures. And how strange insects are to me … Sometimes I wish that strangeness would turn to familiarity, but I’m still a long way from that.”28 In the forest the woman takes care of the domestic and feral animals she can anthropomorphize. To think of them as human-like instead of as animals with their own non-human agency keeps the barriers between human and non-human intact. The anthropological difference also becomes visible in her distinction between her physical self that needs “food, warmth and a little tenderness,” like the animals, and her moral self, something her fellow creatures lack. Unlike them, she can make right or wrong decisions, she can judge and be judged. Animals are outside the realm of moral judgment. For example, the woman describes an encounter with a fox that she suspects of having killed her cat: I could have shot it; I had the gun with me, but I didn’t do it … The only creature in the forest that can really do right and wrong is me. And I alone can show mercy. Sometimes I wish that burden of decision-making didn’t lie with me. But I am a human being, and I can only think and act like a human being.29 27 Haushofer, The Wall, 41. “Ein tapferes, abgehärtetes Tier, das ich respektierte und bewunderte, das sich aber immer seine Freiheit vorbehielt. Sie war mir in keiner Weise verfallen. Freilich, Luchs hatte keine Wahl, er war auf seinen Herren angeiwesen. Ein herrenloser Hund ist das ärmste Wesen auf der Welt.” Die Wand, 51. 28 Haushofer, The Wall, 222. “Mein Vorstellungsvermögen ist sehr begrenzt, es reicht nicht bis ins glatte, weiße Fleisch der Kaltblüter. Und wie fremd sind mir die Insekten … Manchmal wünsche ich mir, daß sich diese Fremdheit in Vertrautheit verwandelte, aber ich bin weit entfernt davon.” Die Wand, 251. 29 Haushofer, The Wall, 109. “Ich hätte ihn schießen können, ich trug das Gewehr bei mir, aber ich tat es nicht. Perle mußte sterben, weil einer ihrer Vorfahren eine überzüchtete Angorakatze war. Sie war von Anfang an als Opfer für Füchse, Eulen und Marder bestimmt. Sollte ich dafür den schönen lebendigen Fuchs bestrafen? … Das einzige Wesen im Wald, das wirklich recht oder unrecht tun kann, bin ich. Und nur ich kann Gnade üben. Manchmal wünsche ich mir, diese

72  Readings in the Anthropocene After some time in the forest, Haushofer’s protagonist finally recognizes that nature is not the pre-established harmony she imagined. In contrast, she experiences life in the mountain forest as arbitrary and cruel. Here the woman again transfers human morals to natural processes and thereby walks into the same trap that she cited as the main reason for humanity’s demise: a lack of empathy and the impossibility to step out of the human perspective. The woman relinquishes her human self to the point that she seems to vanish in her own report, but nature remains indifferent. Instead of becoming part of the forest, the narrator increasingly perceives herself as the only being that does not belong there. Despite all her efforts, she feels rejected by nature: it makes no difference whether she tries to consider more than her own needs. “Thinking like the forest”––to borrow from Aldo Leopold’s phrase––does not automatically mean a deep connection between the forest and the thinker, especially when she is “thinking for the forest” to maintain her human identity. The woman perceives herself not only as different from the others––a human among animals—but also as an outsider who is uninvolved in the processes of the forest: I’m not the god of lizards, nor the god of cats. I’m an outsider, who shouldn’t get involved. Sometimes I can’t help it, and play Providence a little; I save an animal from certain death or shoot a deer because I need meat. But the forest copes easily with my confusion. A new deer is born, another runs headlong to its doom. I’m not a troublemaker worth taking seriously. The nettles beside the byre will go on growing, even if I exterminate them a hundred times, and they will survive me. They have so much more time than I do. One day I shall no longer exist, and no one will cut the meadow, the thickets will encroach upon it and later the forest will push as far as the wall and win back the land that man has stolen from it.30 Last der Entscheidung liege nicht auf mir. Aber ich bin ein Mensch, und ich kann nur denken und handeln wie ein Mensch.” Die Wand, 127ff. 30 Haushofer, The Wall, 160ff. “Ich bin nicht der Gott der Eidechsen und ich bin nicht der Gott der Katzen. Ich bin ein Außenseiter, der sich besser gar nicht einmischen sollte. Manchmal kann ich nicht widerstehen und spiele ein bißchen Vorsehung; ich rette ein Tier vor dem sicheren Tod oder schieße ein Stück Wild, weil ich Fleisch brauche. Aber mit meinen Pfuschereien wird der Wald leicht fertig. Ein neues Reh wächst heran, ein anderes Tier rennt ins Verderben. Ich bin kein ernstzunehmender Störenfried. Die Nesseln neben dem Stall werden weiterwachsen, auch wenn ich sie hundertmal ausrotte, und sie werden mich überleben. Sie haben so viel mehr Zeit als ich. Einmal werde ich nicht mehr sein, und keiner wird die Wiese mähen, das Unterholz wird in sie einwachsen, und

Looking Behind Walls  73 The protagonist underestimates her impact on nature as well as the long-term effects of humanity. She believes that after her death nature will simply go on as if nothing happened and reclaim its territory. This notion becomes more obvious when the woman describes one of civilization’s remnants as a “natural” element of the forest: Gas-pipes, electrics and oil conduits; only now that people have ceased to be do these things show how truly pitiful they are. And back then they had been turned into idols rather than functional commodities. I too have one of those things standing in the middle of the forest, [a] black Mercedes. It was almost new when we came here in it. Today it’s overgrown with vegetation, a nest for mice and birds. Particularly in June, when the wild grape blossoms, it looks very pretty, like an enormous wedding bouquet. It’s beautiful in winter, too, glittering in the hoar-frost or wearing a white helmet. In spring and autumn, between its brown struts I can see the faded yellow of the upholstery, beechleaves, bits of foam rubber and horsehair torn out and pulled apart by tiny teeth … More cars should be put in the forests, they would make good nesting-places.31 The description of the car’s transformation from civilization’s idol to a “natural” element creates the illusion of nature taking over and erasing all traces of humanity. But the forest is still replete with traces that might be reclaimed by nature but nevertheless remain human artifacts. Traces overgrown by plants are not gone but obscured; they expose those other traces of humanity that cannot be extinguished. The woman’s ignorance of humanity’s impact on the environment and her faith in vanishing traces recalls the Physico-Theologists, who believed until the late eighteenth century that humans are not able später wird der Wald bis zur Wand vordringen und sich das Land zurückerobern, das ihm der Mensch geraubt hat.” Die Wand, 184ff. 31 Haushofer, The Wall, 195ff. “Gasröhre, Kraftwerke und Ölleitungen; jetzt, da die Menschen nicht mehr sind, zeigen sie erst ihr wahres jämmerliches Gesicht. Und damals hatte man sie zu Götzen gemacht anstatt zu Gebrauchsgegenständen. Auch ich habe mitten im Wald so ein Ding stehen, (einen) schwarzen Mercedes. Er war fast neu, als wir damit herkamen. Heute ist er ein grünüberwuchertes Nest für Mäuse und Vögel. Besonders im Juni, wenn die Waldrebe blüht, sieht er sehr hübsch aus, wie ein riesiger Hochzeitsstrauß. Auch im Winter ist er schön, wenn er im Rauhreif glitzert oder eine weiße Haube trägt. Im Frühling und Herbst sehe ich zwischen den braunen Stengeln das verblaßte Gelb der Polsterung, Buchenblätter, Schaumgummistückchen und Roßhaar, von winzigen Zähnen herausgerissen und zerrupft … Man müßte mehr Autos in den Wäldern abstellen, sie gäben gute Nistplätze ab.” Die Wand, 222.

74  Readings in the Anthropocene to permanently change a world created by God. Significantly, God was seen as the author of the Book of Nature, which can neither be totally understood nor rewritten by humans.32 In contrast, the concept of the Anthropocene posits that humans leave such immense traces on the surface of Earth that the human age can be compared to a geological age. The associative connection to Physico-Theology means that humans are not just aware of their impact, for their ability to shape the world and to leave unchangeable traces also makes them god-like creators. Humans do not live in an eternal, a-historical nature anymore––they change their environment according to their needs and thereby leave unintended traces behind. Haushofer’s protagonist is aware of the destruction of nature caused by humanity. But she believes after its extinction nature will recover and attain its pre-human, original state, a conception of nature that recalls that of the nineteenth or early twentieth century.33 The woman also mentions her idea of creation’s repetition or nature’s new beginning after all animal life is extinguished on the other side of the wall: If I look at the ground behind the wall, I don’t see any ants, or beetles, not even the tiniest insect. But it won’t stay that way. With water from the streams life, tiny, simple life, will seep in and revivify the earth. I might have been quite indifferent to that, but strangely it fills me with secret satisfaction.34 The woman’s lack of consciousness that civilization has left permanent traces repeats itself in her literary claim to inscribe nature—to translate it into human words—while she pretends to erase all traces of her existence as a human and cultural being. The narrator’s literary descriptions of the forest can even be read as performative repetitions of the Anthropocene itself: she leaves literary and literal traces of her human existence; descriptions of nature become inscriptions. Humanity––the very thing she wants to overcome and forget—becomes omnipresent in her journal. The novel’s imagination of nature and humanity is ambivalent and very complex. On the one hand, the protagonist criticizes how 32 Cf. Hans Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986). 33 See, for example, Frederic Clements’s and Victor Shelford’s Bio-Ecology based on the interaction of plants (New York: Wiley & Sons, 1939). 34 Haushofer, The Wall, 196. “Wenn ich den Boden hinter der Wand betrachte, sehe ich keine Ameise, keinen Käfer, nicht das kleinste Insekt. Aber es wird nicht so bleiben. Mit dem Wasser aus den Bächen wird das Leben, winziges, einfaches Leben, einsickern und die Erde wiederbeleben. Das könnte mir ganz gleichgültig sein, aber seltsamerweise erfüllt es mich mit heimlicher Befriedigung.” Die Wand, 223.

Looking Behind Walls  75 humanity’s rationality and dependency on technology led to an estrangement from and oppression of non-human life. On the other hand, the woman is not able to reflect on her own flaws as she seeks to establish a post-human community. Instead of leaving her human existence behind and becoming one with the forest, she repeats human paternalism, distinguishes between human and non-human life, and corrupts a utopia based on love and empathy when she encounters another human survivor. The novel fails in establishing a utopia, but more significantly, it tracks the narrator’s failure as well as the subtle development from an ordinary urban woman to the last human trapped in the forest. Convinced of the necessity of humanity’s extinction, she willingly leaves her human identity behind and eventually recognizes that being human is another kind of trap, another kind of wall that separates her from the non-human world. *** Julian Pölsler’s adaptation of Die Wand differs from its source material in its imagination of humanity and nature, even though Pölsler has repeatedly emphasized how faithful his film is to the novel.35 Out of his admiration for Haushofer’s calm and fatalistic mode of narration, he has the film’s protagonist speak only a few sentences in direct speech. More often she laconically reads passages of the novel as a voice-over. This example in particular makes the difficulties of a filmic adaption of a literary text obvious: there is a difference between reading a retrospective report in which the narrator doubts her own memory and watching a film in which the protagonist, confident of her powers of recollection, tells the same story, albeit one juxtaposed with aesthetic images of the forest. Pölsler ignores the inevitable differences between the “loyal” adaptation of a novel and its transformation into filmic signs. Such a transformation reconceives the original’s content as well as its specific aesthetics, that is, both its histoire and discours.36 This means that sometimes the film even has to depart from the text’s stylistic devices to create the same effect. Pölsler’s film, however, often creates the opposite effect: when, in the novel, Haushofer describes a threatening forest from the perspective of a trapped woman, the 35 Cf. Julian Pölsler, “‘Mich fasziniert der klare Blick der Marlen Haushofer’: Julian Pölsler im Gespräch mit Christa Gürtler über seinen Film Die Wand,” in Christa Gürtler (ed.), Marlen Haushofer 1920–1970: Ich möchte wissen, wo ich hingekommen bin! (Linz: Adalbert-Stifter-Institut des Landes Oberösterreich, 2010), 163–6. 36 Cf. Tzvetan Todorov, “Die Kategorien der literarischen Erzählung,” in Heinz Blumensath (ed.), Strukturalismus in der Literaturwissenschaft (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1972), 263–94.

76  Readings in the Anthropocene film presents an aestheticized landscape from the perspective of eight cameramen who move in and out of the forest or even circle above it in helicopters. While the novel’s narrator seems to vanish into nature, the film’s close-up shots of her face bring her into sharp relief. While these differences can be explained by the medial shift itself, there are others that stem from Pölsler’s interpretation of the novel. His protagonist has a markedly different relationship to nature than Haushofer’s. Significantly, the film uses the passage in the novel that describes the narrator’s vanishing into nature—her wish to “fit in with a greater Being” of the forest and to establish an inseparable connection with nature. As in the novel, the passage represents a shift in the protagonist’s development: she is no longer the desperate survivor waiting for help from the outside; she has accepted and even embraced her fate as the last human and believes that civilization’s downfall is for the better. In the novel, the process of the forest putting down roots in the protagonist’s brain is described as both a loss of self and a source of anxiety over who is truly thinking and speaking in her mind. The illusion of becoming one with the forest later turns out to be an unfulfilled utopian fantasy. In the film, the woman reads the same passage as a voice-over while the viewer watches her walking with her dog through the majestic forest, resting by a large tree. While the moment of becoming one with nature in the novel is followed by dissolution and disillusion––the woman cannot leave her human existence behind––a harmonic symbiosis is achieved in the film. Haushofer’s novel questions the possibility of relinquishing the human perspective and “thinking like the forest.” The film, however, suggests precisely that, and the protagonist does not have to give up her human identity for this insight. In contrast to the narrator’s defacement in the novel, the film fixates on her face, which becomes increasingly expressive. She never seems to be out of place, and there is no chance of her getting lost. The cameras will capture her again and put her into the right frame (see Fig. 3.1). The novel describes how, in the moment of the unification with the forest, the woman slowly loses control over her subjectivity. The forest putting down roots in her mind is shown as a violent act that results in her dissolution. In the film, the connection between the forest and the protagonist does not weaken but rather strengthens her subjectivity, underscored by the film’s camera angles. In the novel, the narrator records all the events retrospectively. She distrusts her memory and recognizes the finite nature of her supplies. The narrator begins the report with the knowledge that it is merely a delay that records her (and thereby humanity’s) inevitable disappearance. In the film, however, the first-person narrator is simultaneously a third-person character. The viewer sees the woman writing down her memories in

Looking Behind Walls  77

Figure 3.1  Still from Die Wand. Protagonist and aestheticized landscape in perfect harmony © http://www.diewand-derfilm.at/.

the present as well as the flashbacks that render the past into filmic reality. The report’s writer is both its acting object and the narrator who reads passages from the novel/report as a voice-over. The viewer is able to observe her and closely examine her face. Film critics praised Martina Gedeck’s mastery of facial expression, but precisely because of this expressiveness, the woman in the film has little in common with the novel’s narrator, who becomes faceless and lost in the forest. The film’s protagonist gains strength through her experience. This becomes apparent when comparing her as a character before and after the catastrophe: at the beginning, the woman wears a dress, high heels and long hair. All these attributes identify her as a city dweller out of place in nature. Later, she wraps her strong, wiry body in practical clothes and makes her face even more prominent by cutting her hair (see Fig. 3.2). The differing depictions of the woman’s relationship to nature in the novel and the film also shed light on power dynamics. In Haushofer’s novel, the forest becomes an antagonist to the human protagonist. The film turns nature into an aesthetic object, one disposable at the discretion of humans, in part due to its transformation of nature into a visual medium, which works differently from the verbal description of the forest in the novel. Of course, the woman’s narration in the novel is also a medial adaptation, but the narrator reflects on that and the forest resists her verbal annexation: when the woman tries to describe the

78  Readings in the Anthropocene

Figure 3.2  Still from Die Wand. One of many close-ups of the protagonist © http://www.diewand-derfilm.at/. forest, she fails. The narrator imagines herself as a mediator who talks for the forest, but sometimes it is unclear who is actually speaking, as when the woman interprets nature’s wish, “The forest doesn’t want human beings to come back.”37 When the narrator “translates” the forest’s thoughts, it becomes a linguistic subject with a voice in the text, while the human narrator, the alleged subject talking about an object, gets increasingly lost. In other words, the forest is not simply an object but rather evinces agency, even if that agency is partially conferred by the narrator. The unification with the forest turns out to be a utopian fantasy. Nevertheless, living in and with the forest clearly influences the narrator, and the woman explains, for instance, that she has started to make note for the first time of events like the harvest or bad weather in her calendar. She later uses these notes for her report, and it becomes obvious that her life is shaped not by her agency but by her environment. In the text, this shift unsettles her position as narrating human subject, and she seems to be lost at times. She does not completely trust her memory, and she moves back and forth in time, sometimes stepping completely out of the narration to reflect on humanity and nature. 37 Haushofer, The Wall, 161. “Der Wald will nicht, daß die Menschen zurückkommen.” Die Wand, 185.

Looking Behind Walls  79 Although in the film, the protagonist also struggles at the beginning and has to adapt to the forest, she always overcomes the challenges and remains in control––of the story and the environment. By presenting the protagonist as a harmonious part of the forest through its camera work and composition, the film suggests a successful unification with nature. This aestheticized landscape, in which the ugly, threatening, and dangerous are omitted, becomes a superficial surface reminiscent of a tourist advertisement. In the novel, nature demonstrates a certain dynamism, acting as the narrator’s friend and foe at the same time. The woman talks about nature, but nature is also talking through her. She tries to prove herself, to become a respected part of the forest, and intervenes when it fails to correspond to her notion of harmony—she even feeds starving deer in the winter. This dynamic between the woman and the forest is absent in the film. Nature functions primarily as a beautiful set piece. The film’s use of aestheticized nature as a polished surface to reflect on humanity resonates not only with the reception of the film and the novel but also with the mindset of their audiences. The film’s website announced a contest for the cinematic release with subscriptions to the magazine WALD––Magazin für Draußen (FOREST––An Outdoor Magazine) as the prize.38 Nature in this context is a consumer product for the magazine readers. The glossy magazine’s actual content is hard to distinguish from the aesthetics and slogans of the outdoor companies’ advertisements that fill the pages. The articles and advertisements suggest a romanticized world of hiking with pictures of urbanites wrapped in high-tech textiles moving easily and cheerfully through breathtaking landscapes. Thanks to their outdoor equipment, they do not have to renounce civilization’s conveniences, even as they enjoy the luxury of supposedly cutting themselves off from civilization, albeit for a short time. The romanticized depiction of hiking and campfire life does not seem to apply to a catastrophe that all but eradicated humanity and the struggles of the sole survivor who must withstand the next winter without Gore-Tex. Nevertheless, the film’s protagonist experiences a “cozy catastrophe”––not in the way Brian Aldriss describes the typical post-disaster Robinsonade, but in a way that can be best explained with the film’s temporal shift. Pölsler’s adaptation of Die Wand does not take place in the early 1960s but rather in the present. The novel’s narrator does not mention an exact date, but she often refers to World War II and the beginnings of the Cold War, suggesting that the novel takes place in about the same time period it was written. The effect of this change 38 http://www.diewand-derfilm.at/ (accessed March 17, 2016); http://www. waldmagazin.at/ (accessed March 17, 2016).

80  Readings in the Anthropocene in the film creates a larger contrast between the world that vanishes behind the wall and the seemingly timeless mountain forest. Already in the 1960s, there was a clear distinction between highly technologized and overpopulated urban spaces and places like the mountain forest where civilization seems to be absent. But in the 2010s, wild spaces are even more rare, and the discrepancy between them and civilization has become wider. Setting the novel’s action in the present also changes the socio-political context. In 1962, just one year before the novel’s release, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published.39 The proximity of the dates speaks more to a shared cultural context than to any direct lineage of influence—it is doubtful that Haushofer read Carson. Silent Spring marks the beginning of modern environmental thinking: such questions were suddenly discussed in the public at large and the fear of humanity’s potential destruction was no longer limited to terms like the “Holocaust” or the “atom bomb” but also extended to ecological catastrophes. In contrast, by 2012 environmental concerns, as well as the power of anthropogenic natural disasters in our imaginations, are firmly established in the public consciousness, as witnessed in discussions of biocentrism and anthropocentrism, the revival of holism theories, or the increasingly widespread appreciation of the wild and natural.40 The tendency in contemporary perceptions of nature is clear: real and beautiful nature is where humans are not. That is also the message of outdoor magazines like WALD. The reader-hiker does not travel to remote places to encounter other people but rather to get away from them. Pölsler’s adaptation of Die Wand espouses a similar message. The last human does not survive a catastrophe in an isolated mountain forest to share it with someone else. Depopulation becomes an aesthetic factor in itself. While Haushofer’s mountain forest remains, despite its beauty, threatening, the film presents a “cozy catastrophe” where the last human is not threatened by nature but remains in charge. The film combines the aesthetics of depopulated landscapes with the romanticism of a simple pre-modern life. It idealizes the human’s place in nature, something Haushofer’s protagonist fails to do and thereby also questions. The novel criticizes civilization but offers no alternative. It is not the narrative of a successful utopian project but rather the story of the failure of such an approach.41 Moreover, it presents a story about 39 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1962). 40 See Devall and Sessions, Deep Ecology; Don E. Marietta, For People and the Planet: Holism and Humanism in Environmental Ethics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995); Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Caroline Fraser, Rewilding the World. From the Conservation Revolution (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009). 41 Cf. Wolfgang Benzel, “‘Ich glaube, es hat niemals ein Paradies gegeben’: Zivilisationskritik und anthropologischer Diskurs in Marlen Haushofers

Looking Behind Walls  81 telling stories and producing images of humanity and nature within. If we return to the concept of nature posited by the Physico-Theologists, the tension between writing nature and nature’s own writing becomes all the more complex. In contrast to the conception of God’s Book of Nature, which cannot be understood nor rewritten by humans, every human representation of nature becomes its own Book of Nature and the one unchangeable book makes place for a multitude of books by many authors––who do not just shape the world according to their needs but also write and rewrite its story, leaving behind traceable inscriptions with every description. The main difference between the novel and its filmic adaptation is how Haushofer refers to literary traditions and genres and thereby reflects on how narrations and images condition our perception of humanity’s relationship to nature. The narrator does not merely report the wall’s appearance and her survival in the forest after the catastrophe, but also recounts the great drama of humanity’s extinction and reflects on her own position as an observer and narrator. By exposing traditional literary conventions in the novel, Haushofer offers alternative ways to see and narrate nature and humanity. The novel is replete with self-reflective moments: for example, when the narrator addresses the reader, even though she suspects that no human will ever read her text and that the mice do not care whether someone has written on the paper they eat. The woman writes for the sake of writing as such. She clings to language to assure herself of her own human existence among animals: Maybe I’m afraid that if I could do otherwise I would gradually cease to be a human being, and would soon be creeping about, dirty and stinking, emitting incomprehensible noises. Not that I’m afraid of becoming an animal. That wouldn’t be too bad, but a human being can never become just an animal; he plunges beyond, into the abyss.42

Romanen Die Wand und Himmel, der nirgendwo endet,” in Bosse and Ruthner, “Eine geheime Schrift aus diesem Splitterwerk enträtseln,” 103–19; Hofmann, “Verweigerte Idylle”; Daniela Strigl, “Vertreibung aus dem Paradies: Marlen Haushofers Existentialismus,” in Bosse and Ruthner, “Eine geheime Schrift aus diesem Splitterwerk enträtseln,” 121–36. 42 Haushofer, The Wall, 34. “Vielleicht fürchte ich, wenn ich anders könnte, würde ich langsam aufhören, ein Mensch zu sein, und würde bald schmutzig und stinkend umherkriechen und unverständliche Laute ausstoßen. Nicht daß ich fürchte, ein Tier zu werden, das wäre nicht sehr schlimm, aber ein Mensch kann niemals ein Tier werden, er stürzt am Tier vorüber in einen Abgrund.” Die Wand, 44.

82  Readings in the Anthropocene The narrator announces the ephemerality of the matches and ammunition that keep her physically alive as well as the dwindling writing materials that help her maintain her humanity. In this way, the woman connects humankind’s material and spiritual achievements. The matches and ammunition, although fire is also an emblem of civilization, refer primarily to the biological survival of the species. But keeping a human body alive does not ensure the survival of the essential qualities that set off humankind from other species. This is why the writing tools, which do not primarily nurture the human body but the human spirit so to say, refer to anthropological differences––namely, the abilities of speech and of self-reflection that go far beyond the physical aspect of the species’ survival. For the narrator, the abilities to speak and to self-reflect are interconnected: the ability to verbalize, to write down her thoughts, distinguishes her from non-humans and enables her to reflect on this distinction. There are constant reminders in Haushofer’s novel that it is a written, cultural product that exposes the conditions of its own making. In such moments, the woman steps out of her fictional reality where she is the sole human survivor of a catastrophe reminding us that we have a literary text in front of us that––like other utopian texts––deals with problems in contemporary society and transfers them to other places and times. Differences between Haushofer’s manuscripts also reveal developments in her reference to literary traditions in the narration of civilization’s downfall and the establishment of a post-human society. The protagonist in the handwritten versions is less ambivalent towards humanity, whereas in the final version she slowly transforms from a desperate survivor to someone convinced of the necessity of humanity’s extinction. Her own role as the last human being also becomes ambivalent. These shifts suggest Haushofer’s awareness of the misanthropic aspects of reimagining humanity in the traditional post-disaster Robinsonade: the obvious critique of civilization is withdrawn and replaced with reflections on human nature and its representation in literary texts.43 The relationship between humans and animals automatically changes when humans are outnumbered, forced to share resources, and immediately face the consequences of ecological misconceptions. Haushofer’s protagonist has a direct connection to the forest and its animals but even she repeats the mistakes of an industrial civilization that lived estranged from nature. 43 Cf. Christine Schmidjell, “Zur Werkgenese von Marlen Haushofers Die Wand anhand zweier Manuskripte,” in Bosse and Ruthner, “Eine geheime Schrift aus diesem Splitterwerk enträtseln,” 41–58; Evelyne Polt-Heinzl, “Marlen Haushofers Roman Die Wand im Fassungsvergleich,” in Bosse and Ruthner, “Eine geheime Schrift aus diesem Splitterwerk enträtseln,” 59–77.

Looking Behind Walls  83 In the final version of the novel, several layers of the woman’s perception of nature and humanity—with all their discrepancies and contradictions—are uncovered. The most obvious problem is the protagonist’s distinction between humanity and herself as a member of the species. But this dilemma provides a meta-narration in the novel by juxtaposing the protagonist’s critique of civilization with her self-reflections. The woman repeats humanity’s failure and inverts the original critique by reflecting on the specific human perspective she cannot escape. The film, however, lacks such moments of self-reflection. While it also refers to traditional genres, it forgoes questioning them or their utopian approach. The film surely differs from classical postdisaster Robinsonades in its uneventful and non-adventurous form. But when the voice-over comments on the protagonist’s harmony with nature, her own position as well as that of the eight cameras required to transform her perspective of a depopulated into a filmic narrative are hidden. Pölsler’s choices regarding sound in the film also speak to its imagination of nature. He incorporates filtered nature sounds and Bach partitas. He claims, “The partitas are no soundtrack but another form of voice-over. In their mathematical structure, they are their own language.”44 In addition to the literary text that is cut into phrases for the voice-over, the music is a second language, and its transformation into filmic signs is no less problematic. If we follow Pölsler’s logic, then the film includes three different voices: the voice of the narrator who reads the report, the “voice” of the forest, and the music. Two of these voices are obviously human, and the third one, the forest’s voice, has to be “translated” by the protagonist. There is even a fourth voice, the voice of the wall: a buzzing sound that occurs when the protagonist touches it, which is completely silent in the novel. According to Pölsler, the electro-magnetic buzzing refers to the noise of the Earth’s rotation. He maintains that it is both noise and silence.45 This claim recalls the music of the spheres or planets,46 a theory based on an analogy between fundamental notes and nature’s order. It is nothing less than the wish to experience cosmic harmony in sound. In the film, the different voices––nature, music, and narrator––demonstrate a harmonic union, 44 Julian Pölsler: “Sie sind nicht Filmmusik, sondern eine andere Form des Voice-over. In ihrer mathematischen und schematischen Struktur sind sie eine eigene Sprache.” Quoted in Zylka, “Kinodrama Die Wand,” my translation. 45 “Der Wand-Sound sollte dem Geräusch nachempfunden sein, ‘das die Erdrotation verursacht, und das manche Menschen angeblich zu hören in der Lage sind,’ eine Art elektromagnetisches Brummen. ‘Es sollte gleichzeitig Geräusch und Stille sein,’ sagt Pölsler.” Zylka, “Kinodrama Die Wand.” 46 Cf. Johannes Kepler, Harmonice Mundi Libri V (1619), Gesammelte Werke, ed. Max Caspar and Walther von Dyck (Munich: Beck, 1938).

84  Readings in the Anthropocene only disturbed by the buzzing sound of the wall. Like the Bach partitas and their extreme mathematical abstraction, the sound of the wall represents vanished humanity––not a lost cultural heritage but the ugly, dangerous side of humanity that manifests in a deadly weapon. The wall, both noise and silence at the same time, is absent in its presence like humanity is present in its absence at all times. The point here is neither to judge the success of Pölsler’s adaptation nor to link such a potential success to a realized utopia. Watching the film throws the novel’s self-reflective moments into sharper relief. The novel becomes a medium that draws attention to itself, like the mysterious wall, which the narrator describes as most human, as something that could only have been invented by a human brain. The wall is like the anthropological difference, the barrier between human and non-human beings: it is a boundary the woman wants to forget but cannot. She can look through it, and she has to gather twigs to mark the course of the border, to get “a bit of order into the huge, terrible disorder that had invaded [her] life. Something like the wall simply could not exist. In marking it out with green sticks [she] was making [her] first attempt––since it was there––to assign to it an appropriate place.”47 But the attempt to make the wall visible renders it even more invisible: “The first summer it was almost blocked off. A few of [the] hazel-twigs had miraculously grown roots and soon a green hedge ran along the wall.”48 The wall represents the perfect medium: it only becomes noticeable in the moment of a sudden confrontation. The description of the wall as a medium can be understood as a description of other media as well: texts, films, music, even advertisements and websites that provide a certain image of nature and humanity. Haushofer’s novel does not become invisible as a medium––against the narrator’s wish to forget the wall, the text reminds the reader of it and makes it visible again. The text also reflects on itself as a written, man-made medium. Like the wall, the novel occurred to a human brain. If the novel actually included the same buzzing sound every time the wall is directly or indirectly mentioned, its soundtrack would not be as harmonic as the film’s: more noise would confront the reader at all times with this transparent medium. When the woman in the novel 47 Haushofer, The Wall, 21. “Einen Hauch von Ordnung in die große, schreckliche Unordnung, die über mich hereingebrochen war. Etwas wie die Wand durfte es einfach nicht geben. Daß ich sie mit grünen Hölzern absteckte, war der erste Versuch, sie, da sie nun einmal da war, auf einen angemessenen Platz zu verweisen.” Die Wand, 29. 48 Haushofer, The Wall, 45ff. “[Die Wand] wuchs im ersten Sommer schon fast ganz zu. Einige von meinen Haselstöcken hatten wunderbarerweise Wurzel geschlagen, und bald zog sich an der Wand ein grüner Zaun dahin.” Die Wand, 56ff.

Looking Behind Walls  85 wants to mark the wall, it makes itself invisible. But when she tries to ignore it, the wall repeatedly comes into her mind as a disruptive element. She has no control over the wall, either in the world or in her head. The confrontation with the wall seems to come out of nowhere, as if each time were the first encounter, always a shock, a disturbance of reality. Ultimately, the film encourages us to forget not only the wall but also the film itself as a medium, as a filter through which humans look at nature, while the novel reflects on different literary traditions and their specific representations of nature. The novel’s narrator is not only aware of her human perspective but also of the mediated constitution of nature in literary texts. I cannot emphasize enough this radical difference between the two works: Haushofer’s protagonist is aware of not belonging to the forest and of her status of a cultural being that makes the fulfillment of such a desire impossible. She writes about herself and reflects on her own perspective: the invisible wall that she barely mentions in the novel and that she even forgets sometimes becomes a blank surface where she can look at herself as a text-producing human. In the end, the novel’s utopian project is not to establish a posthuman–animal community but rather to reflect on human and non-human agencies and the ways of representing them in literary texts. To elaborate on this idea I want to come back to the cat that looks for shelter and food at the woman’s cabin, all the while maintaining its freedom. Haushofer called Die Wand “a cat story”49 when she submitted the manuscript to her editor Hans Weigel. There are different ways to read the novel as a “cat story”: there are several narrative threads about the cat and its kittens in the text, but more importantly, there is one passage when the protagonist looks into the cat’s eyes and her own small, distorted image is reflected: “I can see my face, small and tight, in the mirror of her big eyes.”50 The woman who becomes faceless can no longer recognize herself in the mirror but can in the eyes of the cat. The cat makes the cultural body of the human main character readable. The narrator’s description of the cat exposes how animals are used as metaphors to describe humans who are otherwise absent but become alive and powerful again in these anthropomorphic descriptions. This use of animals to express human conditions is also necessary to understand a joke made by Pölsler when a journalist asked him 49 Marlen Haushofer, “Es wird Ihnen nicht gefallen—es ist eine Katzengeschichte.” Cf. Iris Denneler, “‘Lauter Katzengeschichten’? Die Kinderbücher der Marlen Haushofer,” in Bosse and Ruthner, “Eine geheime Schrift aus diesem Splitterwerk enträtseln,” 81–99, 87. 50 Haushofer, The Wall, 41. “Ich sehe mein Gesicht, klein und verzerrt, im Spiegel ihrer großen Augen.” Die Wand, 52.

86  Readings in the Anthropocene about the difficulty of making a film with just one human character. Pölsler told the journalist about his hope of the cow winning an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.51 All joking aside, the animals in the film are nothing more than supporting actors that help the human main character express herself. But reading Die Wand as a cat story means more than the reduction of animals to metaphors. The narrator’s traditional description of the cat as an untamable and independent creature can be read as a relay between natural animals and textual ones. In the novel and in general, the cat straddles the boundary between culture and nature, belonging to both spaces at the same time but not to one exclusively. Despite all attempts at domestication, the cat stays unpredictable and resists total human control. In that sense, Die Wand could be read as a cat story in two ways: as a story that uses cats for human self-reflection but also as a story that becomes cat-like itself. It remains aloof from the author’s intention, refusing to be tamed into a mirror that reflects no more than a distorted version of the human self. Reading the text as a cat-like cat story articulates the difficulty of representing animals in literary texts, addressing their agency, and writing them from a non-human perspective. Though Haushofer was not familiar with the conception of the Anthropocene, and her protagonist keeps faith in vanishing human traces, her novel nevertheless reflects on literary and literal inscriptions of nature that can be seen as traces of humanity long after its extinction. In the novel, humanity is still everywhere: obscured, not always to be seen, sometimes just present in anthropomorphic descriptions of human-like animal surrogates. In Pölsler’s filmic adaptation of the novel, however, humanity, with the exception of his protagonist, seems to be gone for good. Of course, humanity is still present, in the music, camera perspectives, and the anticipation of the audience’s reaction. But in contrast to Haushofer’s self-reflection, the film makes the condition of its production, its filtered perception of humanity and nature, and even the requisite observer of the great drama of human extinction forget. It thereby ignores the inscriptions carved into Earth’s surface as well as those etched into Western representations of humanity’s place in nature.

Bibliography

Abraham, Ulf. “Topos und Utopie.” Vierteljahresschrift des Adalbert-Stifter-Instituts 35 1.2 (1986): 53–85.

51 “Ja, es gibt eine menschliche Hauptdarstellerin, aber für mich ist der Hund der männliche Hauptdarsteller und ich hoffe, dass die Kuh den Oscar für die beste Nebenrolle bekommt.” Pölsler, “Mich fasziniert der klare Blick der Marlen Haushofer,” 163ff.

Looking Behind Walls  87 Aldiss, Brian W. Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973. Benzel, Wolfgang. “‘Ich glaube, es hat niemals ein Paradies gegeben’: Zivilisationskritik und anthropologischer Diskurs in Marlen Haushofers Romanen Die Wand und Himmel, der nirgendwo endet.” In Bosse and Ruthner, “Eine geheime Schrift aus diesem Splitterwerk enträtseln,” 103–19. Berentelg, Wilhelm. “Der weibliche und der männliche Robinson: ‘Die Wand’ von Marlen Haushofer und Arno Schmidts ‘Schwarze Spiegel’ im Vergleich.” Der Deutschunterricht 50.1 (1998): 83–93. Blumenberg, Hans. Die Lesbarkeit der Welt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. Bosse, Anke and Clemens Ruthner, eds. “Eine geheime Schrift aus diesem Splitterwerk enträtseln …”: Marlen Haushofers Werk im Kontext. Tübingen: Francke, 2002. Bosse, Anke and Clemens Ruthner. “Einführung und Ausblick.” In Bosse and Ruthner, “Eine geheime Schrift aus diesem Splitterwerk enträtseln,” 9–22. Brandtner, Andreas, and Volker Kaukoreit. Marlen Haushofer: Die Wand: Erläuterungen und Dokumente. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2012. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1962. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” Modern Language Notes 94.5 (1979): 919–30. Denneler, Iris. “‘Lauter Katzengeschichten’? Die Kinderbücher der Marlen Haushofer.” In Bosse and Ruthner, “Eine geheime Schrift aus diesem Splitterwerk enträtseln,” 81–99. Devall, Bill and George Sessions. Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered. Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1985. Fliedl, Konstanze. “Die melancholische Insel: Zum Werk Marlen Haushofers.” Vierteljahresschrift des Adalbert-Stifter-Instituts 35 1.2 (1986): 32–52. Gobbin, Martin. “Die Wand—Im Spiegelkabinett.” Kinozeit, http://www.kino-zeit. de/filme/die-wand (accessed March 17, 2016). Haushofer, Marlen. The Wall. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. Pittsburgh: Cleis Press, 1990. Haushofer, Marlen. Die Wand. Berlin: List Verlag, 2004. Kilb, Andreas. “Das Ende der Welt ist der Anfang des Waldes.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 19, 2012, http://www.faz.net (accessed March 17, 2016). Klawonn, Jens. “Die Wand.” Filmkritiker, October 16, 2012, http://www. filmkritiker.com (accessed March 17, 2016). Knapp, Gerhard. “Re-writing the Future. Marlen Haushofer’s Die Wand: A Female Utopia of the 1960s and Beyond.” In Gerhard Knapp and Gerd Labroisse (eds), 1945–1995. Fünfzig Jahre deutschsprachige Literatur in Aspekten, 281–305. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. New York: American Library, 2013 (1949). Næss, Arne. “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-range Ecology Movement.” Inquiry 16 (1973): 95–6. Pölsler, Julian. “‘Mich fasziniert der klare Blick der Marlen Haushofer’: Julian Pölsler im Gespräch mit Christa Gürtler über seinen Film Die Wand.” In Christa Gürtler (ed.), Marlen Haushofer 1920–1970: Ich möchte wissen, wo ich hingekommen bin!, 163–6. Linz: Adalbert-Stifter-Institut des Landes Oberösterreich, 2010. Pölsler, Julian. Die Wand. Vienna and Berlin: Studiocanal, 2012. Polt-Heinzl, Evelyne. “Marlen Haushofers Roman Die Wand im Fassungsvergleich.” In Bosse and Ruthner, “Eine geheime Schrift aus diesem Splitterwerk enträtseln,” 59–77.

88  Readings in the Anthropocene Roebling, Irmgard. “Ist Die Wand von Marlen Haushofer eine weibliche Robinsonade?” Diskussion Deutsch 20.105 (1989): 48–58. Schmidjell, Christine. “Zur Werkgenese von Marlen Haushofers Die Wand anhand zweier Manuskripte.” In Bosse and Ruthner, “Eine geheime Schrift aus diesem Splitterwerk enträtseln,” 41–58. Strigl, Daniela. “Vertreibung aus dem Paradies: Marlen Haushofers Existentialismus,” In Bosse and Ruthner, “Eine geheime Schrift aus diesem Splitterwerk enträtseln,” 121–36. Todorov, Tzvetan. “Die Kategorien der literarischen Erzählung.” In Heinz Blumensath (ed.), Strukturalismus in der Literaturwissenschaft, 263–94. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1972. Venske, Regula. “’Dieses eine Ziel werde ich erreichen …’––Tod und Utopie bei Marlen Haushofer. ” In Renate Berger and Inge Stephan (eds), Weiblichkeit und Tod in der Literatur, 199–214. Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1987. Zylka, Jenni. “Kinodrama Die Wand: Halb lebt sie im Paradies, halb in der Hölle.” Spiegel, October 14, 2012, http://www.spiegel.de (accessed March 17, 2016).

Part II Excess/Sustainability

90 

Four Care and Forethought: The Idea of Sustainability in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy

Klaus Vieweg

In the philosophical treatment of the theme of sustainability, Hegel has played almost no role as of yet and unjustifiably so. This blind spot deserves detailed investigation. Hegel’s reflections on sustainability occur within the framework of his practical philosophy, specifically in his major work Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Philosophy of Right)1 in the chapter on formal right which contains Hegel’s theory of the person. The focus here is upon the two key concepts of care (Sorge) and forethought (Vorsorge), which go to the heart of the chapter’s subject matter. Hegel’s innovative theory testifies to the enduring timeliness of his practical philosophy and contains the cornerstone of the entire structure of his philosophy of freedom. In the Philosophy of Right a new concept of personhood and abstract right opens up the possibility of a sustainable understanding of rational right and facilitates a comprehension of contemporary global processes. The problems Hegel deals with encompass the concept of the person, personality and inter-personality, fundamental rights, property, the formation of 1 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox, ed. Stephen Houlgate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse, Vol. 7, Werke in Zwanzig Bänden, auf der Grundlage der Werke von 1832–1845 (Theorie Werkausgabe), ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970–1). The Philosophy of Right is hereafter cited as RPh with paragraph number (identical in the German and English editions). The Suhrkamp Theorie Werkausgabe of Hegel’s works in twenty volumes is hereafter abbreviated in the footnotes as TWA followed by volume number. In places, quotations from this and other works of Hegel have been amended slightly (translator’s note).

92  Readings in the Anthropocene the natural as self-formation and formation of external nature, appropriation, intellectual property, contracts, and wrong. At this first stage of its unfolding, the human appears as individual will in itself: “The absolutely free will, at the stage when its concept is abstract, has the determinate character of immediacy … the inherently individual will of a subject.”2 “Spirit [Geist], in the immediacy of the freedom which exists for itself, is an individual, but one that knows its individuality as an absolutely free will.”3 The will of the subject is “still abstract and empty, has its particularity and fulfilment not yet on its own part” (noch keinen eigenen Inhalt, der aus sich selbst bestimmt wäre).4 In this merely formal, self-conscious, and otherwise content-less simple relation to itself, in this exclusive individuality, the subject is a person.5 Personality entails “that as this person: I am completely determined on every side … yet nonetheless I am simply and solely self-relation, and therefore in finitude I know myself as something infinite, universal and free.”6 Hegel’s treatment of sustainability is to be found in his account of how a person comes to have property in things, that is to say, the appropriation and formation of the natural.

Property and the Actual Formation of the Natural

Property, as grounded in the changing relation between person and thing, contains the following basic structure: the appropriation of the thing,7 the use of the thing,8 and the alienation of the thing.9 Individuality that knows itself as absolutely free will, that is, the person, does not yet possess distinctiveness and fulfillment in itself. The 2 Hegel, RPh §34. “Der an und für sich freie Wille, wie er in seinem abstrakten Begriffe ist, ist in der Bestimmtheit der Unmittelbarkeit … in sich einzelner Wille eines Subjekts.” 3 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Mind: Being Part Three of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), §488. Hereafter abbreviated as ‘Enc.’ with paragraph number. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse 1830 Dritter Teil (TWA 10), §488. “Der Geist in der Unmittelbarkeit seiner für sich selbst seienden Freiheit ist einzelner, aber der seine Einzelheit als absolut freien Willen weiß.” 4 Hegel, Enc. §488; TWA 10, §488. 5 RPh §34, 35. See also Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophical Propaedeutic, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 162; Nürnberger Texte zur Philosophischen Propädeutik, TWA 4, 59. 6 RPh §35. “… daß ich als Dieser vollkommen nach allen Seiten … bestimmte und endliche, doch schlechthin reine Beziehung auf mich bin und in der Endlichkeit mich so als das Unendliche, Allgemeine, Freie weiß.” 7 RPh §§54–58. 8 RPh §§59–64. 9 RPh §§65–70.

Care and Forethought  93 knowledge of freedom is still abstract and empty. Consequently, these properties exist at first in an external thing.10 Property represents the “external sphere of law and freedom … the subsumption of something ownerless [herrenlosen] under my power and my will” (äußere Sphäre des Rechts und der Freiheit, die Subsumtion einer herrenlosen Sache unter meinen Willen).11 This pertains to both the relation to one’s own body, as well as to the relation between the will and an external, found objectivity—the external things of nature. The person, who must create an external sphere for the realization of his/her freedom (in order to become a particular), has the absolute and unconditional right of appropriation over all immediately diverse things.12 This sphere of freedom can only be “immediate” to the will in relation to “the diverse and separable” things (unmittelbar Verschiedenes und Trennbares).13 The external in general, a thing defined as unfree, remains impersonal and ownerless (Herrenloses). This thing counts as natural insofar as it is the conceptual determination of nature to be the “external in itself” (Äußerliche an ihr selbst).14 A thing, therefore, is that which constitutes a form of “the Idea existing outside itself” (Außersich-Seins der Idee), that is to say, something natural. The thing exists “in contrast to the subjectivity of intelligence and volition, without will or right” (gegen die Subjektivität der Intelligenz und der Willkür ein Willenloses ohne Recht).15 The external becomes mine (external empowerment, ownership—I am the owner). My will is housed or dwells in these things, and thus they belong to my will, a belonging bound up with the exclusion of others’ power over them. Possession is the site of voluntary empowerment.16 Two aspects of appropriation are worth noting here. On the one hand, Hegel discusses things only in their immediacy and personhood in its first immediacy—the human 10 Philosophy of Mind §483, 488; Hegel, Enzyklopädie §483, 488. 11 Hegel, Philosophical Propaedeutic, 162; Philosophische Propädeutik, 59. 12 RPh §44. 13 RPh §41. 14 RPh §42. 15 Enc. §488. 16 Hegel’s discussion of the will and property coincides here with Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, where he writes, “An external object that in terms of its substance belongs to someone is his property (dominium), in which all rights in this thing … inhere and which the owner (dominus) can, accordingly, dispose of as he pleases” (Der äußere Gegenstand, welcher der Substanz nach der Seine von jemanden ist, ist dessen Eigentum (dominium), welchem alle Rechte in dieser Sache … inhärieren, über welche also der Eigentümer (dominus) nach Belieben verfügen kann). Immanuel Kant, Werke, Vol. 6 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968), 83; Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 90. See also Hegel, The Philosophical Propaedeutic, 162; Nürnberger Texte zur Philosophischen Propädeutik, 59.

94  Readings in the Anthropocene as a natural being and its behavior in the outside world. It is not yet about developed things, not yet about things mediated by the will.17 On the other hand, he points out the manifold forms of the natural and the external world18 and already anticipates what is distinctive about actual appropriation: “An other (ein Anderes) is whatever I can take into my possession—namely only individual not general things, not the elemental.”19 Here in his analysis of appropriation Hegel already anticipates a differentiation latent in the natural. Crucially, he follows it with proposals for the exclusion of particular items from appropriation: air, water, animals, ecological systems. In acts of appropriation or makingone’s-own, in (private, individual) ownership, the free will becomes real will for the first time and each of these private individuals become persons—the life of the person is property. Property means that in owning something I am myself “objective” (gegenständlich). I am “by myself” (bei mir selbst) in this thing. Through property, the person is incorporated with itself.20 In this personal self-reference, freedom obtains its first existence,21 and the reality of freedom manifests itself as the actual will of the person in its relation to itself, in its property. “Because I give my will existence through property, property must have the determination that this thing is mine.”22 What counts as objects of appropriation or disposal, these impersonal “things” (Sachen)23 as objects of empowerment, are, firstly, the physical existence of the subject and, secondly, certain things in the external world.24 The person, as individual, has a 17 RPh §42. 18 RPh §42 Z. 19 RPh §44 Z. “Ein Anderes ist, ob und was ich in Besitz nehmen kann,—nämlich nur einzelne, nicht allgemeine Dinge, nicht elementarische.” 20 Enc. §491. 21 RPh §45. 22 RPh §46 Z. “Da ich meinem Willen Dasein durch das Eigentum gebe, so muß das Eigentum auch die Bestimmung haben, das Diese, das Meine zu sein.” 23 RPh §§41–2. 24 According to the Allgemeines Landrecht (ALR), the definition of things in general depends, legally speaking, on the object being subject to the law or obligation. Property is the authority over the substance of a thing with the mandate to exclude others by one’s own power. See Ernst Ferdinand Klein and Carl Gottlieb Svarez, Allgemeines Landrecht für die Preussischen Staaten von 1794, http://ra.smixx.de/Links-F-R/PrALR/pralr.html, Teil I, Titel 2, §1 and Teil I, Titel 8, §1 (accessed March 17, 2016). On Hegel’s close knowledge of the ALR, see Franz Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010 (1920)), 30ff. Joachim Ritter sees in the ALR one of the “first legal codes to be grounded in rational law.” See Joachim Ritter, “Person und Eigentum,” in Ludwig Siep (ed.), Hegels Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005), 57. Hegel was also familiar with the work of

Care and Forethought  95 natural existence, partly in itself, partly in relation to the outside world, and is hence constantly immediate and mediated.25 Both the appropriation of a living being as well as that of living external things include the following moments: a) the actual (positive) appropriation, that is, the will has its existence in something positive, something visible to others—“mine” as “universal permanent predicate” (bleibendes, allgemeines Prädikat);26 b) the (negative) use and exploitation of the thing from which follows the negation of each thing as mine; and c) the possibility of disposing of, or alienating, the thing. The logical structure of the positive, negative, and infinite judgment thereby comes into play.27 Here only the main line of thought can be considered. Appropriation has the following moments: a) the moment of immediate physical seizure; b) the moment of formation; and c) that of denomination. One must also bear in mind the precise assessment of the scope of the concept (Begriff) in the Hegelian sense, otherwise too much will be expected of philosophy. From the simple appropriation of objects and what is physically seized, certain problems arise in formal law that no longer concern the concept itself. The special resolution of property issues (such as finding Hegel’s autograph in my rose garden, a Roman gold coin in my Piedmontese vineyard, or my right to the flotsam and jetsam on my property on the New Zealand coast) belongs to prudence and to positive laws—“nothing further on this topic can be deduced from the concept” (aus dem Begriffe lässt sich hier nichts weiter herleiten).28

Self-Formation—The Appropriation of the Body as the Natural, Immediate Existence of the Person

The thesis that the first object of property must be the body is linked to the idea that the making-one’s-own of particular bodies29 is a fundamental element of personality.30 According to Johann Gottlieb Fichte Ernst Ferdinand Klein, one of the co-authors of the ALR. He can also appeal to the Code Civil. 25 RPh §43. 26 RPh §41 Z. 27 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §§172 and 173; Enzyklopädie §§172 and 173. See also Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), 631ff.; Wissenschaft der Logik, TWA 6, 311ff. 28 RPh §55 Z. Cf. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 89; Metaphysik der Sitten, 82. 29 On the Hegelian understanding of body and soul, see Michael Wolff, Das Körper-Seele Problem: Kommentar zu Hegel, Enzyklopädie (1830) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1992). 30 In an illuminating essay, Angelica Nuzzo documents Hegel’s view of the body as a constitutive condition of free personality. Angelica Nuzzo, “Freedom in the Body: The Body as Subject of Rights and Object of Property in Hegel’s ‘Abstract Right,’” in Robert R. Williams (ed.), Beyond Liberalism and Communitarianism: Studies in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001), 111–24.

96  Readings in the Anthropocene (1762–1814), a rational being cannot posit itself as “an individual that has efficacy without ascribing to itself, and thereby determining, a material body” (als wirksames Individuum setzen, ohne sich einen materiellen Leib zuzuschreiben, und denselben dadurch zu bestimmen).31 To understand the person as a natural and immediate existence, to understand spatio-temporal individuation, we must first understand Hegel’s recourse to Naturphilosophie and the doctrine of subjective spirit. The person as a natural being belongs to the realm of the living, closer to what is animal, and thus has individuation in itself; the person is born (without its will) as just such an individual. In addition, the paradigm of spirit entails a necessary becoming-objective-to-oneself. The elucidations of subjective spirit already deliver evidence for the constitution of the spatio-temporal individual, such as the sign-making imagination, the sounds of speech or language, and drives or inclinations. It can be shown that Hegel in no way records this spatio-temporal individuation as fact, but rather quite rigorously deduces it. Insofar as the I is taken as a person, this must be ascribed to that person’s individual, particular body in its unity of the corporeal and the intellectual, that is to say, his/her living will, and it remains within his/her discretion to appropriate his/her body only in part or not at all—for example, through self-mutilation and suicide. “Nobody may force someone else not to do something, merely for the reason that the action would harm himself” (Niemand darf den Andern, etwas zu unterlassen, blos aus dem Grunde zwingen, weil der Handelnde dadurch sich selbst schaden würde).32 The person can thus be considered the private proprietor of his/her particular, natural existence. Moreover, this particular living being demands taking-intopossession: the expression “my life and my body are my own” is an immediate corollary of an act of free will.33 Intellectual capacities are, according to Hegel, the free intellect’s own, something internal; they can, however, via the mediation of intellect, be posited as something external—a sermon, a speech, a book, an artwork—and thereby become a thing. The person is here the “author” (Ur-Heber), on which copyright (Urheberrecht) is based. For other persons, by contrast, I am basically free in the form of my body,34 which I immediately have; it is 31 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, trans. Michael Bauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §5; Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Prinzipien der Wissenschaftslehre (Hamburg: Meiner, 1991), §5. 32 ALR, Erster Teil, Dritter Titel, §27. 33 See Nuzzo, “Freedom in the Body,” 119. 34 The same applies to my own things though. For others, my will has “its definite, recognisable existence in the thing” (sein bestimmtes erkennbares Dasein in der Sache). Philosophy of Mind §491; Enzyklöpädie §491.

Care and Forethought  97 immediately mine. The inviolability of the person signifies the inviolability of my particular, natural existence. It ensures the prohibition of every abuse, including killing a person (as a living thing) and the absolute prohibition of injury, for example, mutilation and torture—a basic principle of modern constitutions. Personality therefore goes together—fundamentally and inseparably—with the right to corporeality, in other words, the individual’s right to be alive. Insofar as taking possession of one’s own body involves the formation of the natural, the person must also pay attention to the themes of care and forethought: keeping the body healthy entails conduct that preserves life and promotes a successful combination of the sensible forming of nature and letting-be.35 The right to be alive thus forms the basis for all other rights. A simple appropriation—as a simple physical seizure, which is similar to randomly picking up an apple that falls from my tree—and the subsequent formation of the thing primarily entail externalizing that which is internal. With regard to the living being of the person himself, this process includes the formation (Bildung) of his/her selfconsciousness, which understands itself as free,36 initially a compulsive self-formation. Hegel explains this development with the example of lordship: this self-formation belongs in the past, in the time before historical progress brings about general freedom. However, since free beings, those capable of freely chosen actions, can always neglect what is rationally determined, that which should be a thing of the past can always break forth again. Negativity, subjectivity, the I, and freedom are the same principles that make evil, vice, and pain possible. Subjugation and oppression may always reappear. Precisely here in the face of evidence that man has the ability to kill himself, the potential self-destruction of humanity as a whole arises.

The Formation of the External World—Property in External Things

Highly relevant to the process of formation is the idea of appropriate appropriation. Here the differentiation in terms of the things appropriated emerges clearly. This distinction is based on the position of relevant things in the natural realm, their infinite variety in terms of qualitative difference, and the diversity of subjective aims.37 This has implications for highly debated current issues, particularly ecological issues. What does talk of the rational formation of the outer world and the conservation of natural living conditions actually entail? 35 Sensible care of the body and body culture instead of bodybuilding and overwork. 36 RPh §57. 37 RPh §56.

98  Readings in the Anthropocene First, the question arises as to the appropriation of so-called elemental things which are not to be particularized as private property,38 such as air and water—a category that David Hume calls “the most valuable of all external goods.”39 To these elemental things, entire ecological systems must be added too, since they represent the basis for life. From Hegel’s perspective, these elemental things are excluded from appropriation; only individual things may be taken into ownership. This idea of a ban on the private appropriation of elemental goods deserves particular attention and has considerable consequences. In the twenty-first century the availability of water and air, alongside our wider dealings with ecological systems,40 have become problems that concern the whole of humankind. Linked to this is the issue of whether the privatization of forests and uncontrolled deforestation ought to be permitted—these questions carry fundamental significance for our collective existence because of their role in climate change. The same applies to our dealings with the Earth’s water resources—oceans, rivers, the Arctic and Antarctic—as well as the protection of the planet’s atmosphere. Today the orgy of deforestation from Brazil to Europe to Siberia in the name of maximizing profits threatens the entire future of humankind. Natural resources are being destroyed at an enormous rate. In all these cases what is central is the indisputable relevance of the appropriation of elemental things in matters of ecological equilibria, an appropriation which, from Hegel’s point of view, represents a fundamental injustice, since these goods form the preconditions of human existence. Hegel left behind no developed concept of sustainability, but he did sketch substantial outlines of this key issue for the twenty-first century. His findings on the formation of the world around us (Um-Welt), or surrounding nature, carry extraordinary weight, dealing as they do with an existential problem which in Hegel’s day was not as manifest and thus did not command the attention that it does today—despite the considerable environmental damage already inflicted during Hegel’s time. Certainly, as we have seen, he formulated his initial thoughts on care and forethought at the level of abstract laws, and they relate to what we today might call the ecological question and the challenge of sustainability. During his time in Jena, Hegel already posed this problem via a sharp critique of the theoretical abuse of nature in Kant’s and Fichte’s transcendental philosophies, which contain traces of Cartesian dualism and its attitude of domination over the natural world.41 The under 38 39 40 41

RPh §46. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 495. Hegel talks about elemental and organic things, air and electricity (RPh §61 Z). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s

Care and Forethought  99 standing of nature in Fichte’s doctrine of natural right culminates in the subjugation and enslavement of nature, in which the relation to the objective-natural is reduced to mere “having.”42 Fichte’s conception of a realm of freedom goes along with the subduction of nature, which in turn complements the great arrogance of the I, floating above the universe, displaying its hollow loftiness and delusions of grandeur.43 In the modern understanding, an image of humans as amphibians, as living in two contradictory worlds, dominates. On the one hand, humans feel oppressed and dominated by nature; on the other, they conceive of a realm of reason and freedom and prescribe universal laws to themselves. For Hegel, limited understanding (Verstand) “strips the world of its enlivened and flowering reality and dissolves it into abstractions, and spirit (Geist) maintains its present right and dignity only by abusing nature and denying it rights.”44 Such a contradiction must be resolved by philosophy; the truth consists of the reconciliation of both spirit and nature, not by ignoring the contradiction but by showing how both one-sided moments “are in reconciliation.” Hegel’s idealistic monism also seeks a solution to the problem of how humans can be at home in the surroundings of their world, how they can be “at one” (bei sich selbst)45 with themselves and by extension free in the natural as well as the cultural environment (Um-Welt). Both natural and cultural components of this challenge to practice care and forethought are taken up in the Philosophy of Right. Hegel’s discussion of the formation of the organic is essential to understanding how these terms correspond to the distinction within the sphere of the natural between the organic (as the highest form of the external world) and the working-upon of the Earth (e.g., the cultivation of plants and the domestication and husbandry of animals). This distinction corresponds to the thought found in Naturphilosophie regarding the step-by-step overcoming of the idea’s externality-to-itself. System of Philosophy, trans. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1977); Hegel, “Differenz des Fichte’schen und Schelling’schen Systems der Philosophie,” TWA 2, 8–138. 42 Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, 83, 142ff. “Differenz des Fichte’schen und Schelling’schen Systems der Philosophie,” TWA 2, 13, 80ff. 43 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts,” TWA 2, 416ff. 44 Georg Wilhelm Friedric Hegel, Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 54–5; Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I, TWA 13, 81f. “… entkleidet nun der beschränkte Verstand die Welt von ihrer belebten, blühenden Wirklichkeit und löst sie zu Abstraktionen auf, indem der Geist sein Recht und seine Würde nun allein in der Rechtlosigkeit und Misshandlung der Natur behauptet.” 45 RPh §3.

100  Readings in the Anthropocene A necessarily distinct way of dealing with the organic emerges that includes plants and animals and the environment as an ecological system at large. Through the formation of the organic, the thing changes into that which is a person’s own. This owned thing must be maintained. It must be durable, sustainable. In Hegel’s words, what is mine “ceases to be restricted to my presence here and now and to the direct presence of my awareness and will” (auf meine Gegenwart in diesem Raum und in dieser Zeit und auf die Gegenwart meines Wissens und Wollens beschränkt zu sein).46 The here-and-now is sublated, allowing its future appropriation. Hegel makes the reasoning behind this relationship explicit in his theory of recognition. It consists of the communality of the individual’s life-needs and the concern for his/ her current and future satisfaction—care and forethought. This means replacing the raw consumption and destruction of the natural object with its “caring” formation and preservation. This form of the universal is a “permanent means and a provision which takes care for and secures the future” (ein dauerndes Mittel und eine die Zukunft berücksichtigende und sichernde Vorsorge)47—the “forethought of future use” (Vorsorge für künftigen Gebrauch).48 The relevance of measure in the satisfaction of needs means that there must be measured dealings with the natural resources of life—Hegel uses the example of animal husbandry. “Measured” in the context of the entire ecological fabric implies behavior that respects the peculiarity of a system indispensable to a person’s existence—husbandry (Hegen) in the widest sense. Thus, the principle of the German Constitution (Article 14) applies here without restriction: “Property entails obligations. Its use shall also serve the public good.”49 The principle of sustainability is also explicitly mentioned in Article 20a of the Constitution.50 As with “elemental things,” the “specific characteristics pertaining to private property may have to be subordinated to a higher sphere 46 RPh §56. 47 Enc. §434. 48 RPh §56 A. In its judgment on genetic technology (1 BvF 2/05), the German Federal Constitutional Court speaks of the constitutionally mandated “responsibility to protect the natural basis of life for future generations” (in Verantwortung für die künftigen Generationen die natürlichen Lebensgrundlagen zu schützen) in accordance with “the highest possible forethought” (einer größtmöglichen Vorsorge), https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/Shared​ Docs/Entscheidungen/DE/2010/11/fs20101124_1bvf000205.html (II, 135, 142) (accessed March 17, 2016). 49 Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Article 14, http://www.gesetzeim-internet.de/gg/art_14.html (accessed March 17, 2016). 50 Ibid., Article 20a, http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_20a.html (accessed March 17, 2016).

Care and Forethought  101 of right (e.g., to a society or the state)” (die Bestimmungen, die das Privateigentum betreffen, höheren Sphären des Rechts, einem Gemeinwesen, dem Staate, untergeordnet werden).51 The private ownership of these objects that are essential for sustaining the ecological balance (these could even be relatively simple things such as stone, sand, meadows, etc.) would then be revoked, in part or in full, in the interests of society and the common good. In the context of the formation of the organic, Hegel also mentions somewhat cryptically the mediated use of other elemental matter—the use of wind by windmills, for instance—or “contrivances for utilizing raw materials or the forces of nature and processes for making one material produce effects on another” (veranstaltete Einwirkungen eines Stoffes auf einen anderen).52 This raises the issue of more complex patterns of formation, which require a realization that is rational and in keeping with nature. I act rationally, in a measured way. I act with husbandry, insofar as I forego something that would severely damage the natural, ecological balance. My action constitutes a foregoing out of respect for the natural balance, a holdingback or a suspension before some momentous intervention. Husbandry (Hegen) or caring (Schonen) are about “behaviour with consideration to how objects may be preserved” (ein Benehmen in Rücksicht auf die Gegenstände, wodurch sie erhalten werden)53—a first attempt at a principle of sustainability, the conservation of life, the truthful, rational dealing with the environment. Sustainable use is grounded in a knowledge of current and future situations which takes into account the current and future rights of free subjects.

Natural Sustainability—The Forest as Paradigm

The term ‘sustainability’ originated in the field of forestry. It was first formulated by the forestry scientist and former student at the University of Jena, Hans Carl von Carlowitz, who famously referred to “continuous, enduring and sustainable use” (continuirliche, beständige und nachhaltende Nutzung).54 This phrasing is in no way accidental, but rather arises from the long-term care that the forest needs as one of the most valuable goods on Earth and whose significance for climate, soil, and water is indisputable. The forester knows the long lifecycles of trees (which often outlast his own lifetime); he knows about the 51 RPh §46. 52 RPh §56. 53 RPh §56 Z. 54 See Hans Carl von Carlowitz’s Sylvicultura Oeconomica, oder Hauswirthliche Nachricht und Naturgemäße Anweisung zur wilden Baum-Zucht etc. (Leipzig, 1713). For this information I am grateful to Dr. Georg Sperber who, for decades, has dedicated himself to the principle of sustainability: in particular, to the maintenance of the most important foundation of life on Earth, our forests.

102  Readings in the Anthropocene relationships between ecological systems and their vulnerabilities; he has life knowledge and understands eco-logic; he is a ‘husband’ by vocation. Dealings with the forest cannot merely be conducted with the goals of occupation and maximization of profit, but must also be oriented towards common interests—the forest as public good. Thus, forestry involves conservation and forethought. The relation to the forest, “forestry consciousness” (forstliche Bewußtsein), forms a model for the principle of sustainability. Its highest concern is the long-term maintenance of the forest as a functioning ecological whole. It shows, in terms of the history of ideas, how an “intuitive concern for the future crystallizes into a concept” (intuitives Vorsorgedenken sich zu einem Begriff kristallisiert), a concept which combines gravitas and elasticity, in keeping with the traditional meaning of the terms conservare and sustenare.55 In his study Sylvicultura Oeconomica, Hans Carl von Carlowitz gives the term “sustainability” its conceptual shape and current form. For the “conservation and expansion of the woods” (Conservation und den Ausbau des Holtzes), it is crucial that “there is a continually enduring and sustainable usage, because it is an indispensable thing without which the land may not remain in its being.”56 Different strains of thought converge upon this category: we can use no more wood than the forest can withstand; we must ensure a balance between tree growth and their removal; the forest must be granted the right to recover if it is to sustain itself. Sylvicultura Oeconomica sets out its own rational silviculture: the woodlands are “to be rationally arranged” (vernünftig einzurichten),57 and use of the forest should be tied to maintaining its balance. In §56 of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel outlines this idea in a cursory manner in his conceptualization of the natural as based on two pillars: first, my will becomes objective, external, and enduring in the formed thing and the determinations of time and space are overcome; second, the thing is objectively left alone or permanently sustained, whereby the parameters of space and time are also conserved, and we orient ourselves according to this permanence. The making-one’s-own of the natural should be brought into a rational unity with the leaving 55 On this, see the excellent study by Ulrich Grober, Die Entdeckung der Nachhaltigkeit (Munich: Kunstmann, 2010). 56 Von Carlowitz, Sylvicultura Oeconomica, quoted in Grober, Die Entdeckung der Nachhaltigkeit, 116: “… es eine continuierliche beständige und nachaltende Nutzung gebe, weil es eine unentbehrliche Sache ist ohne welche das Land in seinem Esse nicht bleiben mag.” 57 Ibid., 116. In 1760 the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar began to reform its forestry in line with the principle of sustainability. Duchess Anna Amalia decreed that the forests receive a new and sustainable forest management based on the science of forestry. See Grober, Die Entdeckung der Nachhaltigkeit, 122.

Care and Forethought  103 alone of the natural, the letting-it-be-so. This second element upholds the important addendum of “forethought for future use” (Vorsorge für den künftigen Gebrauch).58 It clearly supports the adequate, careful use of the natural and cautions against the extinction of plants and animals, which as living things carry a certain intrinsic value. It also advocates for care with attention to conservation, in which the principles of respect for alterity and posterity combine. I suggest that the principle of sustainability found in Sylvicultura Oeconomica, of care and forethought, should be applied to the economy at large. The present age demands a new cultura oeconomica, an economy oriented towards natural as well as social sustainability, in contrast to the market fundamentalism that has now gone bankrupt with its mania for deregulation and has led to the plundering of the world and destructive environmental consequences. Striving for profit alone massively undermines sustainability and thereby endangers the forest and the entire ecological fabric of the world; any use of the forest should be mindful of its healthy preservation, which is really in the deepest interests of humankind.59 And what applies to the forest can be extrapolated to the entire economic sphere as a new cultura oeconomica in which the ecological economy teaches us to treat nature with care and husbandry in order to vouchsafe its enduring usage. In the present, however, we are confronted—frighteningly—with a very different program. Not only is the tropical rainforest in Brazil being brutally cut down, but also the beech woods in Germany and forests in many other regions too. A perverse frenzy for timber reigns, but it is a drastic violation of our common interest and of the idea of preserving creation. Despite assurances from some politicians, the forests—the very basis for securing human, animal, and plant life—are becoming more and more the objects of economic exploitation and profiteering. The moment of natural, ecological sustainability must be considered in connection with the promotion of the general well-being of the land. Hegel’s notion of the formation of the natural and its principles of care and forethought serve exactly this end, for instance, when it comes to bourgeois society, or the idea of a social state that guarantees social sustainability.60 In this way, sustainability, both natural and social, can be raised to a basic principle in free, modern societies. The so-called “triangle of sustainability”—economy, ecology, and social justice—which was formulated during the “Earth Summit” in 58 Hegel, RPh, §56. 59 On this issue, see Josef Köstler, “Grenzen des Kapitalismus in der Forstwirtschaft” (PhD thesis, Ludwig Maximilians-Universität, Munich, 1927). 60 For an extended discussion, see Klaus Vieweg, Das Denken der Freiheit (Munich: Fink, 2012).

104  Readings in the Anthropocene Rio de Janeiro in 1992 points in this direction. With regard to the air as one of our most important external assets, knowledge of increasing (and increasingly dangerous) carbon dioxide pollution must lead to actions that take into consideration the needs of future generations and protect their air quality. Water, as an essential good, requires a similar approach, otherwise this scarce resource will be further depleted and may even become a cause of wars in coming decades. Those things that humanity needs for life, according to Hegel, “cannot be mere dead means, but rather through them he must feel alive with all of his senses and self and through close connection with them give them their own human soul and individuality.”61 The temple of the world in which humans live must be preserved from being turned into logs and stones. We must not allow the woodland grove to be reduced to a collection of timber. This pertains especially to the preservation of natural diversity, which is under threat from various influences, including climate change and the negative effects of industrialization, such as monoculture, overexploitation, pollution, and so on. For humanity, the “escape door on climate change is barely open a hair’s breadth … If we do indeed add five or six degrees [Celsius] of global warming this century, then advanced civilization—as we know it—will no longer be possible on this planet.”62 The external goods which are decisive for the rational preservation of life, such as water, air, forests, and ecological systems, are common resources for the common good and belong under strict public supervision, and as such must be generally withheld from profit-making interests— this would be a thoroughly plausible conclusion to draw from the Hegelian approach. The demand for sustainability is a fundamental criterion for belonging to a community of modern societies. Societies that fail to act in a sustainable way and thus allow, tolerate, or even promote these predatory excesses, must consequently be denied the status “modern.” Translated by Adrian Wilding

Bibliography

Carlowitz, Hans Carl von. Sylvicultura Oeconomica, oder Haußwirthliche Nachricht und Naturgemäße Anweisung zur wilden Baum-Zucht. Leipzig, 1713.

61 Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III, TWA 15, 341. “… Nicht nur ein totes Mittel sein, sondern er muss sich noch mit ganzem Sinn und Selbst darin lebendig fühlen und dadurch dem äußeren Zusammenhang mit den menschlichen Individuen ein selber menschlich beseeltes individuelles Gepräge geben.” 62 Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, “Manchmal könnte ich schreien,” Die Zeit, March 26, 2009. Schellnhuber is a leading international climate researcher.

Care and Forethought  105 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Prinzipien der Wissenschaftslehre. Hamburg: Meiner, 1991. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Foundations of Natural Right. Translated by Michael Bauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Global Footprint Network. Advancing the Science of Sustainability, http://www. footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN (accessed March 17, 2016). Grober, Ulrich. Die Entdeckung der Nachhaltigkeit: Kulturgeschichte eines Begriffs. Munich: Kunstmann, 2010. Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland, http://www.gesetze-im-internet. de/gg (accessed March 17, 2016). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Science of Logic. Translated by A. V. Miller. London: Allen & Unwin, 1969. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. “Differenz des Fichte’schen und Schelling’schen Systems der Philosophie.” Vol. 2 of Werke in Zwanzig Bänden, auf der Grundlage der Werke von 1832–1845 (Theorie Werkausgabe). Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970–1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse 1830 Dritter Teil. Vol. 10 of Werke in Zwanzig Bänden, auf der Grundlage der Werke von 1832–1845 (Theorie Werkausgabe). Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970–1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse. Vol. 7 of Werke in Zwanzig Bänden, auf der Grundlage der Werke von 1832–1845 (Theorie Werkausgabe). Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970–1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Nürnberger Texte zur Philosophischen Propädeutik. Vol. 4 of Werke in Zwanzig Bänden, auf der Grundlage der Werke von 1832–1845 (Theorie Werkausgabe). Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970–1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I. Vol. 13 of Werke in Zwanzig Bänden, auf der Grundlage der Werke von 1832–1845 (Theorie Werkausgabe). Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970–1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III. Vol. 15 of Werke in Zwanzig Bänden, auf der Grundlage der Werke von 1832–1845 (Theorie Werkausgabe). Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970–1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Wissenschaft der Logik II. Vol. 6 of Werke in Zwanzig Bänden, auf der Grundlage der Werke von 1832–1845 (Theorie Werkausgabe). Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970–1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Philosophy of Mind: Being Part Three of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Aesthetics. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy. Translated by Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1977.

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Five Save the Forest, Burn Books: On the Science and Poetics of Sustainability in Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Markus Wilczek

Heating Crisis: Lichtenberg’s Fireside Thoughts

In October 1776, the Göttingen-based physicist-philosopher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg enters the following remark into his notebook: “Forests are shrinking ever smaller, wood is in decline, what are we to do? Oh, but at the point that the forests are no more, surely we can burn books as long as it takes for new forests to grow back.”1 Dating back to Roman antiquity, the phenomenon of biblioclasm is, to be sure, nothing new.2 Yet presenting the practice of burning books not as a matter of political or theological ideology but rather of ecology—namely, as a measure to prevent deforestation—puts an unexpected spin on it. Although Lichtenberg frequently expresses his misgivings about a scholarly culture that he views as too book-centered, it is remarkable that he connects this “Socratic hatred for books” (sokratischer Bücherhass)3 1 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. The German reads: “Die Wälder werden immer kleiner, das Holz nimmt ab, was wollen wir anfangen? O zu der Zeit, wenn die Wälder aufhören, können wir sicherlich so lange Bücher brennen, bis wieder neue aufgewachsen sind.” Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Schriften und Briefe, ed. Wolfgang Promies (Munich: Hanser, 1998), 1:495. This entry is catalogued as F 234; in what follows, I will quote Lichtenberg’s Waste Books (Sudelbücher) entries by their catalogue number. 2 For a definition of “biblioclasm” and a brief historical overview, see Rebecca Knuth, Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 1–16. 3 Hans Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 200.

108  Readings in the Anthropocene with a concern for the environment. In The Readability of the World (Die Lesbarkeit der Welt), Hans Blumenberg characterizes Lichtenberg’s aperçu aptly as an “ecological proto-eschatology” (ökologische ProtoEschatologie),4 but focuses nonetheless on Lichtenberg’s skepticism against book learning while neglecting his concern for the forests. It is, however, not by coincidence that Lichtenberg links his scholarly aversion towards books with an ecological-economic awareness of dwindling wood resources. To fully understand Lichtenberg’s remark, we need to investigate this connection that brings together the products of scholarly learning with those of organic growth—a connection, in short, between culture and nature. Given that Lichtenberg makes dozens of unorthodox suggestions in his Waste Books (Sudelbücher) without ever following up on them, it is tempting to dismiss the idea of burning books for fuel as one of his many witty yet inconsequential provocations. Yet both the philological and ecological contexts suggest otherwise. Philologically speaking, Waste Book entry F 234 is neither the first nor the last time that Lichtenberg articulates this idea. Already at the beginning of 1776, he briefly notes the “suggestion to burn books in a cold winter” (Vorschlag in einem kalten Winter Bücher zu brennen; E 309) and elaborates this line of thought a short while later: “Suggestion to burn books, and thereby transform them again into hemp and flax” (Vorschlag Bücher zu brennen, und dadurch wieder in Hanf und Flachs zu verwandeln; F 330). Even after almost ten years have passed, Lichtenberg still ponders this thought in a letter composed in, as he puts it, “Göttingen in snow blossom above the ears” (Göttingen in der Schneeblüthe bis über die Ohren): “What inclement weather this is! … Since I can buy absolutely no wood anymore, I have taken it upon myself to burn books, and tomorrow I will begin with the Dogmaticis and make my way to the Polemecis, and then might just hope to warm my feet for once.”5 Over the course of a decade, then, the peculiar idea of burning books is, with slight variations, a recurring motif in Lichtenberg’s writings. What all of these instances have in common is that they conceptualize books not as containers of knowledge, but as material objects suitable to replace firewood. The reason why Lichtenberg proposes to burn these books is not that he 4 Ibid. 5 “Was das für eine Witterung ist! Fast glaube ich selbst, was einmal ein [sic] Dame in meinem Vaterland behauptete, daß die Welt näher nach Amerika gerückt ist! Da ich schlechterdings kein Holz mehr kaufen mag, so habe ich mir vorgenommen, Bücher zu brennen, und morgen werde ich mit den Dogmaticis den Anfang machen, und sodann zu den Polemicis schreiten, und da hoffe ich doch einmal einen warmen Fuß zu kriegen.” Lichtenberg to Johann Gottwerth Müller, March 31, 1785, in Briefwechsel, ed. Ulrich Joost and Albrecht Schöne (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1983–2004), 3:79.

Save the Forest, Burn Books  109 wants to destroy the ideas expressed in them, but simply that they share a material property—inflammability—with wood. Lichtenberg’s irreverent suggestion thus exposes materiality as the common ground between culture and nature. Before we take a closer look at this connection, though, let us briefly reconstruct the ecological context. With regard to the condition of the Göttingen forest, there is indeed good reason for Lichtenberg to obsess in his writings of the 1770s and 1780s over alternatives to wood in order to keep warm in the winter. Already at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the main supply of firewood for his hometown had been exploited to such an extent that the privy councilors describe its state as “very much ruined” (gar sehr ruiniret).6 In 1713—incidentally, the year in which Carl von Carlowitz coins the term “sustainable” (nachhaltende) in his Sylvicultura oeconomica7—the foresters of Göttingen had already raised the alarm about the forest’s condition, claiming that “undiminished harvesting of firewood would soon lead to the forest’s ruin.”8 In response to this “wood crisis” (Holznot),9 the Göttingen town council reduced by half the amount of firewood to which each household was entitled, a measure upheld by the authorities for decades despite the angry protests of the townspeople.10 Even though in 1741 the state’s official expert on forestry—who travelled to Göttingen at the request of the town council to assess the situation—deemed the town’s forest to be in “fairly good shape” (ziemlich guten Stande), his final report contains a long list of criticisms of how the Göttingen forest was managed as well as suggestions for improvement—suggestions that, nevertheless, continued to be largely ignored.11 Many passages from Lichtenberg’s 6 Richard, Grund=Riß des Göttingschen Jagd= und Forst=Wesens (Göttingen, 1766), quoted in Bettina Borgemeister, Die Stadt und ihr Wald: Eine Untersuchung zur Waldgeschichte der Städte Göttingen und Hannover vom 13. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Hannover: Verlag Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2005), 293. 7 See the first mention of “continuous steady and sustainable use” (continuierliche beständige und nachhaltende Nutzung) in Hannß Carl von Carlowitz, Sylvicultura oeconomica oder haußwirthliche Nachricht und naturmäßige Anweisung zur wilden Baum-Zucht (Freiberg: TU Bergakademie, 2000, originally published in Leipzig, 1713), 105–6. 8 “Würde beim Brennholzhieb das ‘Bedürfnis’ nicht eingeschränkt, so ließen sie den Rat wissen, stünde der ‘baldige Ruin der Waldungen’ zu befürchten.” Borgemeister, Die Stadt und ihr Wald, 295. 9 Environmental historians caution that the “wood shortage” so often diagnosed in official documents may not always be actual, but at times also a means employed by the authorities to assert its control over the forest. See Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 213. 10 Borgemeister, Die Stadt und ihr Wald, 295. 11 Ibid., 297–300.

110  Readings in the Anthropocene correspondence attest to just how precious wood is for him and his fellow Göttingers—for instance, when he mentions full of envy the “abundance” (Ueberfluß) of wood that enables Sweden to face its “cold winters” (kalte Winter),12 when he reports on inaccuracies in the wood rationing for municipal employees that suggest embezzlement,13 when he details how a servant stole wood from his home,14 or when he complains about an “extraordinary wood shortage” (ungewöhnlichen Holtzmangel) that led to high prices.15 In all of these instances, wood is as essential for human comfort as it is scarce: not surprisingly, the scarcity of firewood leads Lichtenberg to muse on alternatives.

Deforestation as the First Environmental Crisis of the Anthropocene

Although the market for firewood itself is regional—firewood could only be transported economically within the radius of a horse’s food ration16—the issue of actual or perceived wood scarcity is not confined to Göttingen, but extends to most of the German lands. In addition, it is more than just Lichtenberg’s cold feet, more than mere human comfort that is at stake in this crisis. To fully appreciate the magnitude of the wood crisis, it is helpful to turn to Werner Sombart’s account of the material make-up of eighteenth-century culture and society. Sombart explains in the 1917 edition of his magnum opus Modern Capitalism (Der moderne Kapitalismus), Wood reached so deeply into all spheres of cultural being, was the precondition for the blossoming of all branches of economic life, and so thoroughly constituted the basic stuff of all ordinary objects, that culture prior to the nineteenth century carried a markedly wooden imprint: and it remains, also in its materialsensual particularity, an “organic” culture.17 12 Lichtenberg to Christiane Dieterich, June 12, 1772, in Briefwechsel, ed. Joost and Schöne, 1:112. 13 Lichtenberg to Joel Paul Kaltenhofer, June 21, 1772, in Briefwechsel, ed. Joost and Schöne, 1:115. 14 Lichtenberg to Johann Christian Dieterich, April 9, 1782, in Briefwechsel, ed. Joost and Schöne, 2:205–6. 15 Lichtenberg to Friedrich August Lichtenberg, March 20, 1786, in Briefwechsel, ed. Joost and Schöne, 3:173. 16 See Joachim Radkau on the “oats limits” (Hafergrenze) in Joachim Radkau, Wood: A History, trans. Patrick Camiller (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012), 160; Joachim Radkau, Holz: Wie ein Naturstoff Geschichte schreibt (Munich: Oekom, 2007), 153. 17 “Das Holz griff in alle Gebiete des Kulturdaseins hinein, war für alle Zweige des Wirtschaftslebens die Vorbedingung ihrer Blüte und bildete so sehr den allgemeinen Stoff aller Sachdinge, daß die Kultur vor dem 19. Jahrhundert ein ausgesprochen hölzernes Gepräge trägt: sie bleibt auch in

Save the Forest, Burn Books  111 Given the all-pervasiveness of wood, it is clear that dwindling resources at the end of the eighteenth century would have a catastrophic impact on all realms of human endeavor, potentially even bringing about, as Sombart suggests, the end of capitalism. For Sombart, wood shortage poses “the question of European culture” (die Frage der europäischen Kultur) around 1800—a question that, in his estimation, was “more significant” than any quandary over “whether Napoleon would remain the victor, or the allied European powers” (ob Napoleon Sieger bleiben werde oder die verbündeten europäischen Mächte).18 Sombart’s contention that wood scarcity figures as the key problem defining the end of the eighteenth century will sound provocative in the ears of dixhuitiemistes who conventionally conceptualize history as driven by humans, and who may first think of Kant’s philosophy or, for that matter, the geopolitical unrest brought about by Napoleon’s troops as the main challenges of the epoch. But even though Sombart’s interpretation at first glance seems to privilege nature’s materiality over cultural and historical agency, human action does remain pivotal to his account. For woods, of course, do not simply vanish, but disappear as a result of continuous overuse. While it is true that humans have made use of wood for millennia, Michael Williams points out that the “late eighteenth and the bulk of the nineteenth centuries were a period of maximum deforestation in the temperate lands of the world.”19 Accelerated deforestation in the second half of the eighteenth century, then, can be understood as the first ecological crisis at the dawn of the Anthropocene: a human-induced change in the environment that affects the ecological system in ways that often escape the intuitive understanding and control of humans. Given the major threat that deforestation posed to human culture and society, it comes as no surprise that humans began to study its effects even before the process intensified in the eighteenth century. Already in the thirteenth century, humans had begun to acknowledge that deforestation affects the environment, and by the seventeenth century scholarly works had begun to investigate the “wider environmental effects of deforestation, especially its impact on regional climates.”20 ihrer stofflich-sinnlichen Eigenart eine ‘organische.’” Werner Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus: Historisch-systematische Darstellung des gesamteuropäischen Wirtschaftslebens von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, Vol. 2.2, Das europäische Wirtschaftsleben im Zeitalter des Frühkapitalismus, 2nd edn (1916; repr., Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1969), 1138. 18 Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus, Vol. 2.2, 1153. 19 Michael Williams, Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 276. 20 S. Ravi Rajan, Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial Eco-Development 1800–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 22–3.

112  Readings in the Anthropocene Over the course of the eighteenth century, additional research on the link between deforestation, precipitation, waterways, and climatic change established the study of deforestation as a scientific field.21 The scientific community develops, in other words, a quite sophisticated understanding of the system-wide implications of deforestation: in this regard, deforestation poses not only the first environmental challenge of the Anthropocene, but also figures as the first instance in which humans become aware of their own responsibility for changes in an intricately connected ecological network. As humans learn to better understand the consequences of their overuse of wood, the emerging field of forestry science seeks to formulate a practical response to the crisis. The aforementioned treatise Sylvicultura oeconomica by Carl von Carlowitz, for instance, describes a model of sustainable-yield forestry, requiring that for each felled tree another tree of equal quality must be planted.22 While it is important to keep in mind that the idea of sustainability predates the discourse of forestry science, it is von Carlowitz’s treatise that coined the word “sustainable” (nachhaltend) and thus invented a label that already in the eighteenth century rose to prominence within the context of forestry science and quickly became popular in a variety of other discourses as well. If we view deforestation as the first environmental crisis of the Anthropocene, then the principle of “sustainability” is the first attempt to name a strategy in response to this crisis—the first linguistic creation, as it were, that specifically reflects and addresses the Anthropocene condition. Shifting easily between discourses, “sustainability” functions as an economic and ecological principle but also, I wish to argue, as a poetic one. Situated at the intersection between science, philosophy, and literature, Lichtenberg’s work lends itself to probing this claim.

Lichtenberg, Forestry, and the Science of Sustainability

Lichtenberg is both a scientist and a writer, but it is impossible to compartmentalize his existence into that of a physicist by day and a writer by night. Rather, scientific methods and practices often influence Lichtenberg’s “writing laboratory” (Schreiblabor) and enable his “writing experiments” (Schreibexperimente) in the first place.23 Primarily, experimental physics and its open-ended curiosity about 21 Ibid, 23–4. 22 For a brief overview of von Carlowitz’s treatise and its context, see Christof Mauch, The Growth of Trees: A Historical Perspective on Sustainability, trans. Katie Ritson (Munich: oekom, 2014), 22–30; and Jeremy L. Caradonna, Sustainability: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 32–54. 23 Jens Loescher, Schreiben: Literarische und wissenschaftliche Innovation bei Lichtenberg, Jean Paul, Goethe (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 2.

Save the Forest, Burn Books  113 the limits of what is possible inform Lichtenberg’s writing style: the inquiry into the unknown in the world of physics is mirrored by his preference to express thoughts in the subjunctive mode.24 Given the prominent cross-pollination between Lichtenberg’s science and poetics, it appears likely that there will be other areas of spillover. In particular, since we have traced Lichtenberg’s obsession with wood shortage in the first part of this chapter and the pervasiveness of the idea of sustainability in the second, it follows that we might now investigate the link between the discourse of forestry science, the idea of sustainability, and Lichtenberg’s writing style. In this vein, we will briefly turn to the discourse of forestry in Lichtenberg’s reading and writing and then to the question of how this discourse affects his style. While it is impossible to pinpoint exactly how forestry science influences Lichtenberg’s thought, his personal library and borrowing history at the university library in Göttingen give us an indication of the discourse in which he operates. In Lichtenberg’s comprehensive library, only a few titles deal with forestry directly or exclusively. There are a couple of books authored by Johann Beckmann, a colleague of Lichtenberg’s at the University of Göttingen, whose lectures summarize, in the comprehensive fashion typical of the cameralist tradition, the findings of forestry science.25 In his influential textbook Principles of German Agriculture (Grundsätze der teutschen Landwirtschaft),26 Beckmann includes an extensive section on forestry that proposes to keep the forest “continually in a good stand” (beständig in einem guten Stande zu erhalten) by partitioning it off into as many segments as the number of years a particular tree requires to grow, only felling trees in that section, and then allowing this section enough time to recover.27 To this end, it is necessary to first determine exactly the 24 See Albrecht Schöne, Aufklärung aus dem Geist der Experimentalphysik: Lichtenbergsche Konjunktive, 3rd edn (Munich: Beck, 1993), 50: “Here [in experimental science] was the nursery of his subjunctive linguistic expressions and figures of thought” (Hier lag die Pflanzschule seiner konjunktivischen Sprachformen und Denkfiguren). 25 See, in particular, the titles listed in Bibliotheca Lichtenbergiana: Katalog der Bibliothek Georg Christoph Lichtenbergs, ed. Hans Ludwig Gumbert (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1982), 75 and 160. For an overview of the establishment of forestry science as a field of scientific inquiry at the University of Göttingen, see Karl Hasel, “Die Entwicklung der Forstwissenschaft in Göttingen und Hannoversch Münden” in Hans-Heinrich Voigt (ed.), Naturwissenschaften in Göttingen: Eine Vortragsreihe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), 98–102. 26 This textbook was so successful that it reached six editions. Lichtenberg’s library contains the fourth edition from 1790, but it is likely that Lichtenberg was acquainted with the work of his colleague much earlier than that. See Bibliotheca Lichtenbergiana, 160. 27 Johann Beckmann, Grundsätze der teutschen Landwirtschaft, 4th edn (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1790), 336.

114  Readings in the Anthropocene make-up of the forest, which means specifying the kind of trees, their age, and volume as well as developing methods to subdivide the forests into equal cutting areas.28 It is important to note that seen through the lens of “abstract, mathematics-based forestry … during the 1780s and 1790s,” the “German forest” does not constitute a site of romantic enchantment, but rather poses a quantitative problem.29 Just as Beckmann and the cameralists stand for a quantifying trend in the conceptualization of the forest, another author whose work can be found on Lichtenberg’s shelves, Christian Ernst Bornemann, stands for an approach that focuses on the physical properties of wood. This approach informs Bornemann’s “Forestry Science and Forest Matters” (Forstwissenschaft und Forstwesen), an unpublished seven-page manuscript in Lichtenberg’s possession, as well as a book on coal, which he published in Göttingen with Johann Christian Dieterich, Lichtenberg’s close friend.30 In order to prepare his argument on the benefits of coal, Bornemann devotes one chapter of the latter work—entitled Attempt at a Systematic Treatise on Coals (Versuch einer systematischen Abhandlung von den Kohlen)—to an analysis of the physical components and qualities of wood.31 The reason why Bornemann regards coal as one of the “prime … means of human felicity” (ersten … Mitteln der menschlichen Glückseligkeit)32 is that coal consists mainly of “inflammable matter” (brennliche Materie).33 Accordingly, when Bornemann analyzes the properties of wood as one of the components of charcoal, his main interest lies in how the individual components of wood contribute to or reduce its inflammability. By conceptualizing wood not as an integral whole but as an aggregate of more or less inflammable components, this approach transforms wood from a symbolically charged element of the life-world to an abstract and material commodity—a transformation comparable to the one of water from an element to the chemical formula H2O that Ivan Illich describes.34 28 Ibid., 339–40. 29 Henry E. Lowood, “The Calculating Forester: Quantification, Cameral Science, and the Emergence of Scientific Forestry Management in Germany,” in Tore Frängsmyr, J. L. Heilbron, and Robin E. Rider (eds), The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 328. 30 Christian Ernst Bornemann, “Forstwissenschaft und Forstwesen: Ein Fragment” (unpublished manuscript, n.d., c. 1770), Niedersächsische Staatsund Universitätsbibliothek, Cod Lichtenberg Ms VI 18. 31 Christian Ernst Bornemann, Versuch einer systematischen Abhandlung von den Kohlen (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1776), 10–15. 32 Ibid., 3. 33 Ibid., 4. 34 Illich claims that “H2O and water have become opposites. H2O is a social creation of modern times, a resource that is scarce and that calls for technical

Save the Forest, Burn Books  115 Although not part of the discourse of forestry science proper, Buffon’s writings serve as another important reference point. In the second half of the 1770s and the 1780s, Lichtenberg avidly studies Buffon: he checks out the Histoire naturelle from the Göttingen Library for the first time in December 1775,35 and owns, among other works of Buffon’s, a German translation of the Histoire naturelle from the first half of the 1770s and a 1781 edition of Epochen der Natur (Epochs of Nature).36 While the great natural historian Buffon is, of course, not interested in the practical details of managing forests, he develops a narrative that contrasts nature in its primordial state with nature shaped by humans. In his natural-historical rewriting of the biblical seven-stage progression of creation, he calls the last stage of how the world came into being “de l’Homme,” foreshadowing the very terminology of the Anthropocene.37 Among other signs of environmental degeneration, Buffon presents deforestation as a key attribute of this epoch.38 Beyond the realm of academic discourse, Lichtenberg appears to have studied and formed an opinion about the character and behavior of those who were charged to implement the theory of forestry science on the ground. That he views the professional managers of forests with skepticism becomes clear in an unfinished vignette called “The Head Forester” (Der Oberförster), in which he gives a rather unflattering portrait of the protagonist as a habitual drunk and simpleton. His description of the way in which the head forester carries out his job—a job that, Lichtenberg notes scathingly, any peasant could do better for less money—ridicules the protagonist’s self-importance and corruptibility: “[F]our days in the week, he mounted his horse and then did not ride through the forest like other people, but rather went frequently in between the shrubs, cursed heavily whenever he found a young tree broken off, remembered its location so that he could have it felled for his own use, and rode back home.”39 In a letter to Dieterich, Lichtenberg

35 36 37 38 39

management.” Ivan Illich, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness: Reflections on the Historicity of “Stuff” (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 1985), 76. Lichtenbergs Bücherwelt: Ein Bücherfreund und Benutzer der Göttinger Bibliothek, ed. Wiard Hinrichs and Ulrich Joost (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1989), 54. Bibliotheca Lichtenbergiana, 148 and 43. Georges Louis Leclerc Buffon, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (Paris: L’imprimerie royale, 1778), supplement, Vol. 5, 225. Hansjörg Küster, Geschichte des Waldes: Von der Urzeit bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Beck, 1998), 169–70. “[V]ier Tage in der Woche schwung er sich auf seinen Ungar und ritt den Wald nicht so wie andere Leute durch sondern öfter zwischen den Sträuchen, fluchte etliche Donnerwetter wenn er einen jungen Baum zerknickt fand, merkte sich den Platz damit er ihn vor sich konnte abhauen lassen, und ritt nach Haus.” Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, “Der Oberförster,” in Wolfgang Promies (ed.), Schriften und Briefe (Munich: Hanser, 1992), Vol. 3, 606.

116  Readings in the Anthropocene pokes fun at a certain “Head-forester from Darmstadt” (Darmstädtischer Oberförster)—a play on Ludwig VIII of Hesse-Darmstadt, who was known for his preoccupation with hunting—suggesting that foresters do little more than eat and drink a lot.40 “Being like a forester” even becomes a fixed attribute in Lichtenberg’s writing. In his description of the queen of Denmark, he characterizes her stature as “fat, but without taking on greasy forester-like qualities” (dick, doch ohne in das schmalzigte Forstmeistermäßige zu fallen).41 In short, Lichtenberg’s writings show no trace of engagement with the theoretical discourse of forestry science, but betray a distinct dislike for the personnel that were supposed to put the principles of forestry into practice.

Lichtenberg and the Poetics of Sustainability

If there is no direct trace of an academic engagement with the teachings of forestry science in Lichtenberg’s writings, how, then, does a poetics of sustainability manifest itself in his texts? And what, exactly, would such a poetics of sustainability look like? Rather than looking for a translation of individual themes from forestry science into Lichtenberg’s writings, I propose asking how the principles that govern sustainability—or, to be more precise, sustainable-yield forestry— might inform his style. Based on our discussion above, the first such principle is inventorying. Because sustainable-yield forestry aims at keeping the stand of the forest stable, it needs to develop sophisticated methods to take stock of the status quo: “It all starts with counting. Carl von Carlowitz introduced stocktaking. It’s about the proper inventorying and understanding of that which is there … This brings to mind the ideal of the honorable merchant.”42 The methods employed to determine the state of the forest rely on a second characteristic of sustainable-yield forestry: the paradoxical interplay between detailed observation and abstraction. For in order to register the state of the forest that ought to be maintained, one must pay close attention to the character of individual trees, only to then subsume these individual findings under 40 Lichtenberg to Johann Christian Dieterich, April 19, 1770, in Briefwechsel, ed. Joost and Schöne, 1:27. 41 Lichtenberg to Friedrich Christian Lichtenberg, August 13, 1773, in Briefwechsel, ed. Joost and Schöne, 1:347. 42 “Mit dem Zählen fängt alles an. Carl von Carlowitz führte die Bestandserfassung ein. Es geht um das richtige Erfassen und Verstehen dessen, was der Bestand ist … Das erinnert an das Ideal des ehrbaren Kaufmanns.” Günter Bachmann, “Die historischen Wurzeln des Leitbildes Nachhaltigkeit und das 21. Jahrhundert” in Sächsische Hans-Carl-von-Carlowitz-Gesellschaft (ed.), Die Erfindung der Nachhaltigkeit: Leben, Werk und Wirkung des Hans Carl von Carlowitz (Munich: oekom, 2013), 36.

Save the Forest, Burn Books  117 broader and more easily quantifiable categories. In the second half of the eighteenth century, for instance, Johann Gottlieb Beckmann—a practicing forester with no relation to the cameralist scholar mentioned in the previous section—suggests using different colored nails for different sized trees. He instructs his assistants to then put the appropriate nails into the corresponding trees and afterwards tally the approximate volume of wood present in the forest from the amount of unused nails.43 Another method to survey the forest relies on the notion of the “standard tree” (Normalbaum), a “construct of tables, geometry, and measurements.”44 As becomes clear from both of these examples, care for the forest—at least according to forest economy and forest mathematics—might start with an appreciation for individual trees or nature “as is,” but it is ultimately premised on a quantifiable model of nature in the abstract. Lichtenberg’s style, particularly the one that he develops in the Waste Books, is conventionally understood within the context of double-entry bookkeeping or laboratory notes.45 While these discursive frameworks undoubtedly hold significance, I suggest that we can gain a better understanding of Lichtenberg’s writing strategies if we bear the principles in mind that we have outlined in the preceding paragraph. If there is one guiding principle of the Waste Books, it is indeed inventorying. Not only does Lichtenberg record his thoughts spontaneously—comparable to the function of the journal in double-entry bookkeeping—but he also employs different methods of organizing this inventory of ideas: through cross-references, enumerations, bibliographies, and lists, among others.46 By taking stock of words, ideas, books, or other items without a filter, Lichtenberg strives to gain an accurate and unbiased understanding of everything that is there: ranging from a compilation of the books he intends to read to a list of words starting with the letters “ab.” We also find the paradoxical interplay between detail and abstraction at work in the organization of Lichtenberg’s Waste Books: on the one hand, the method of the notebooks accumulates knowledge through a careful focus on the very uniqueness of a phenomenon; on the other hand, the process of notetaking inserts the individual phenomenon into a stream of disparate 43 See Lowood, “The Calculating Forester,” 325. 44 Ibid., 329. 45 See, for instance, the recent contributions by Benedikt Jessing, “Doppelte Buchführung und literarisches Erzählen in der frühen Neuzeit,” in Judith Klinger and Gerhard Wolf (eds), Gedächtnis und kultureller Wandel: Erinnerndes Schreiben—Perspektiven und Kontroversen (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2009), 187–200; and by Jens Loescher, Schreiben, 46–50. 46 For this and the following, see Markus Wilczek, “Ab: Lichtenberg’s Waste,” Germanic Review 87.4 (2012): 309–15.

118  Readings in the Anthropocene observations that form a whole, which, without the help of an index, makes it practically impossible to retrieve this information. It is, as it were, hard to see the trees for the forest. What is more, Lichtenberg’s writing does not simply operate in accordance with the underlying principles of sustainability; it also anticipates and responds to a common criticism of sustainability. Many ecologists and ecocritics argue that it privileges stability over change—a preference that, in their opinion, does not adequately account for the dynamic forces inherent to nature.47 Particularly the principle of taking stock appears to be premised on a fixed state of the entity being inventoried and thus contradicts “the dynamic and often incalculable development of our environment.”48 Indeed, simply replanting a tree of equal quality for every felled tree, as von Carlowitz’s inauguration of the term would have it, seems like a rather narrow approach that cannot do justice to the complex interdepen­ dencies of an ecosystem. Lichtenberg’s way of inventorying, however, works differently. In Lichtenberg’s lists, “Taking stock of what is there provides the springboard for invention of what is not.”49 In the list of words that start with the letters “ab,” for instance, Lichtenberg begins by excerpting existing words from dictionaries, but then goes on to recombine morphological units in a fashion that creates something new. His enumeration of rather humdrum dictionary entries, such as “abdrohen” or “abenteuerlich,” culminates in the intriguing neologism “abdenken.” In this movement from inventorying existing words that start with “ab” to the invention of a new word, dynamic forces are not opposed to stability, but rather grow out of a comprehensive inventorying of that which already exists. By developing this figure of dynamic stasis or static dynamics, Lichtenberg’s poetics offers a way of thinking sustainability that escapes the disjunctive binarism inherent to the above-mentioned criticism.50

Recycling Knowledge: Of Books and Trees

Beyond the intricacies of Lichtenberg’s style, it is important to consider the material foundation of his writing; for paper, similar to firewood, becomes another scarce resource that affects the material make-up of eighteenth-century culture. As the market for print products expands in the wake of a wider circulation of books as well as the creation of frequently appearing weekly or monthly 47 See Markus Wilczek, “Water and Words: Narrating Sustainability,” New German Critique 43.2 (2016): 180–1. 48 Ibid., 181. 49 Wilczek, “Ab: Lichtenberg’s Waste,” 308. 50 Wilczek, “Water and Words,” 181.

Save the Forest, Burn Books  119 publications, the method of obtaining paper from rags—a method that had assured a high-quality and high-value product—could no longer keep step quantitatively with the increased demand.51 Lichtenberg documents the consequences of this bottleneck in a letter to Johann Andreas Schernhagen in 1777, complaining that “due to the lack of paper” his publisher Dieterich “has allowed only 96 pages [for the Göttingen Pocket Calendar], because he gave 136 pages to the Erxleben the year before.”52 The excess of pages by which the progress of physical knowledge can be measured in the physics textbook Erxleben leads immediately to a paucity of pages for Lichtenberg’s reflections elsewhere: “I didn’t know that in advance,” Lichtenberg continues his complaint, “and this is why the articles are not as diverse this time” (Ich wußte dieses nicht vorher, und daher sind die Artickel nicht so gemischt).53 What becomes clear in this passage is that paper does not simply serve as a passive medium carrying specific contents, but rather influences—even by virtue of its absence—the very constitution of its contents. In another letter, Lichtenberg confirms that “Dietrich in the proper sense did not have any paper any more, and that thus some wonderful articles were left out” (Dietrich hatte in sensu proprio kein Papier mehr, und es blieben einige herrliche Artickel heraus).54 In order to satisfy the growing demand for paper, the scholarly community embarked on a search for alternatives to rags.55 In the same year in which von Carlowitz first coined the term “sustainable” (1713), Réaumur brought a proposal before the Royal French Academy that it ought to be possible to procure paper from wood, as he had observed in the building of wasp nests. Even though Réaumur himself never experimented with the production of paper from wood, his statements still gave impetus to the search for alternative materials. Jacob Christian Schaeffer, who was a member of the German Academy in Göttingen, authored a six-volume work entitled Experiments and Samples in Papermaking Without Any Rags, or With Only a Minor Admixture of Them, which not only gave a theoretical description of the manufacture of paper from various kinds of wood, but even enclosed samples in

51 Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (New York: Dover Publications, 1978), 309–11. 52 “HE Dieterich konnte mir, wegen Mangel an Papier nur 96 Seiten erlauben, da er Erxleben 136 Seiten voriges Jahr gab.” Lichtenberg to Johann Andreas Schernhagen, August 21, 1777, Briefwechsel, 1:723. 53 Lichtenberg, Briefwechsel, 1:723. 54 Lichtenberg to Georg Heinrich Hollenberg, October 12, 1777, Briefwechsel, 1:740. 55 For this and the following, see Lothar Müller, White Magic: The Age of Paper, trans. Jessica Spengler (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015), 135.

120  Readings in the Anthropocene its first edition.56 Lichtenberg, who was familiar with Réaumur’s57 and Schaeffer’s58 suggestions and experiments, followed the problem of paper production with great interest.59 He visited stationers during his stay in England in order to appraise new forms of paper there.60 In short, Lichtenberg was keenly aware of the materiality of books, and of the ways in which the cultural production of knowledge was plugged into the availability of natural resources. A particularly compelling example for this interconnection can be found in Lichtenberg’s short essay “Of Wastepaper-Bleaching” (Von Makulatur-Bleichen). In response to the scarcity of paper, Lichtenberg develops the idea of using less permanent ink for print products that will likely not enjoy a long “shelf life,” thus making it easier to break down these books into pulp that could be reused for new books.61 While Lichtenberg would not live to experience the first successful mass production of paper from wood pulp in the 1840s, he already envisions the method of pulping paper not as an act of production, but of recycling: as the value of that which is printed on the page fades, the page is decomposed into its material properties. In this process, recycling paper figures as the necessary precondition for recycling knowledge. Just how intricately the natural–material and cultural–ideal cycles of production are intertwined becomes even more evident in Lichtenberg’s Waste Book entry J 846, in which he likens a tree’s production of unripe fruit to “printing wastepaper” (Makulatur drucken): “I praise the higher order of nature that destines a large part of everything that is born to become—dung and waste paper, which is a kind of dung; may the gardeners, I mean, the booksellers say what they want.”62 56 Jacob Christian Schaeffer, Versuche und Muster, ohne alle Lumpen oder doch mit einem geringen Zusatze derselben, Papier zu machen (Regensburg, 1765), 6 vols. 57 Lichtenberg had consulted Réaumur‘s Histoire des insectes, in which Réaumur presents the principles of his idea. See DII 690 and JII 1387. 58 When Lichtenberg notes in KA 229 that “the husk of corn … makes for splendid paper” (die Samen-Hüllen [involucra] des Mais (türkischen Weizen) geben ein vortreffliches Papier), he is most likely referring to Schaeffer’s findings. 59 See, for example, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, “Wie die Schinesen ihr großes Papier verfertigen,” in Göttinger Taschen Calender (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1796), 169. 60 See Hans Ludwig Gumbert (ed.), Lichtenberg in England: Dokumente einer Begegnung (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1977), Vol. 1, 52. 61 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, “Von Makulatur-Bleichen,” in Göttinger Taschenkalender für das Jahr 1793 (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1792), 159. I am indebted to Dietlind Willer at the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, who informed me that the text originally was published anonymously and untitled as part of an essay called “Einige physicalische Merkwürdigkeiten.” 62 “Bete ich vielmehr die hohe Ordnung der Natur an, die es überall will, daß von

Save the Forest, Burn Books  121

Conclusion: Reconnecting Nature and Culture in the Anthropocene

At the beginning of this chapter, we examined Lichtenberg’s (from today’s perspective) rather curious suggestion to burn books instead of firewood in order to keep warm on a cold winter’s day. In the course of our investigation it became clear that Lichtenberg’s focus on the material properties of books—in particular, inflammability— does not amount to a disparagement of the books’ “inner” value as a container of knowledge, but on the contrary attests to an understanding of the fluid boundaries between nature and culture. As we have seen throughout this chapter—both in the discursive framework that informs Lichtenberg’s writing and in Lichtenberg’s writing itself— the presupposition of materiality as the common ground of nature and culture offers an opportunity to reinsert environmental concerns into the act of cultural production. As the first environmental challenge of the Anthropocene, deforestation forces humankind to leave behind Cartesian dualisms and instead to reconnect the spheres of culture and nature: in a quite provocative manner, Lichtenberg’s treatment of books thus raises our awareness of the state of the forests. In a much more subtle fashion, the intricacies of his style work through some of the problems associated with the idea of sustainability meant to improve the forests. What we learn from Lichtenberg’s seemingly scattered remarks, then, is that environmental challenges always also pose cultural challenges, and that thinking through the environmental challenges brought about by the rise of the Anthropocene may only succeed if we conceptualize these challenges as both natural and cultural.

Bibliography

Bachmann, Günter. “Die historischen Wurzeln des Leitbildes Nachhaltigkeit und das 21. Jahrhundert.” In Sächsische Hans-Carl-von-Carlowitz-Gesellschaft (ed.), Die Erfindung der Nachhaltigkeit: Leben, Werk und Wirkung des Hans Carl von Carlowitz, 31–40. Munich: oekom, 2013. Beckmann, Johann. Grundsätze der teutschen Landwirtschaft, 4th edn. Göttingen: Dieterich, 1790. Bibliotheca Lichtenbergiana: Katalog der Bibliothek Georg Christoph Lichtenbergs. Edited by Hans Ludwig Gumbert. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1982. Blumenberg, Hans. Die Lesbarkeit der Welt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. Borgemeister, Bettina. Die Stadt und ihr Wald: Eine Untersuchung zur Waldgeschichte der Städte Göttingen und Hannover vom 13. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert. Hannover: Verlag Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2005. Bornemann, Christian Ernst. “Forstwissenschaft und Forstwesen: Ein Fragment.” allem, was geboren wird, ein großer Theil zu—Dünger wird und zu Makulatur, welches eine Art von Dünger ist; die Gärtner, ich meine die Buchhändler, mögen auch sagen, was sie wollen.” Lichtenberg, Waste Book entry J 846.

122  Readings in the Anthropocene Unpublished manuscript, n.d., c. 1770. Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Cod Lichtenberg Ms VI 18. Bornemann, Christian Ernst. Versuch einer systematischen Abhandlung von den Kohlen. Göttingen: Dieterich, 1776. Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc. Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière. Supplement, vol. 5. Paris: L’imprimerie royale, 1778. Caradonna, Jeremy L. Sustainability: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Carlowitz, Hannß Carl von. Sylvicultura oeconomica oder haußwirthliche Nachricht und naturmäßige Anweisung zur wilden Baum-Zucht. Freiberg: TU Bergakademie, 2000 (Leipzig, 1713). Gumbert, Hans Ludwig, ed. Lichtenberg in England: Dokumente einer Begegnung. 2 vols. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1977. Hasel, Karl. “Die Entwicklung der Forstwissenschaft in Göttingen und Hannoversch Münden.” In Hans-Heinrich Voigt (ed.), Naturwissenschaften in Göttingen: Eine Vortragsreihe, 98–114. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988. Hunter, Dard. Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft. New York: Dover Publications, 1978. Illich, Ivan. H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness: Reflections on the Historicity of “Stuff.” Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 1985. Jessing, Benedikt. “Doppelte Buchführung und literarisches Erzählen in der frühen Neuzeit.” In Judith Klinger and Gerhard Wolf (eds), Gedächtnis und kultureller Wandel: Erinnerndes Schreiben—Perspektiven und Kontroversen, 187–200. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2009. Knuth, Rebecca. Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006. Küster, Hansjörg. Geschichte des Waldes: Von der Urzeit bis zur Gegenwart. Munich: Beck, 1998. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. “Von Makulatur-Bleichen.” In Göttinger Taschenkalender für das Jahr 1793, 158–60. Göttingen: Dieterich, 1792. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. “Wie die Schinesen ihr großes Papier verfertigen.” In Göttinger Taschen Calender, 169–71. Göttingen: Dieterich, 1796. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. Briefwechsel. Edited by Ulrich Joost and Albrecht Schöne. Göttingen: Wallstein, 1983–2004. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. Schriften und Briefe. Edited by Wolfgang Promies. 4 vols. Munich: Hanser, 1998. Lichtenbergs Bücherwelt: Ein Bücherfreund und Benutzer der Göttinger Bibliothek. Edited by Wiard Hinrichs and Ulrich Joost. Göttingen: Wallstein, 1989. Loescher, Jens. Schreiben: Literarische und wissenschaftliche Innovation bei Lichtenberg, Jean Paul, Goethe. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. Lowood, Henry E. “The Calculating Forester: Quantification, Cameral Science, and the Emergence of Scientific Forestry Management in Germany.” In Tore Frängsmyr, J. L. Heilbron, and Robin E. Rider (eds), The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century, 315–42. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Mauch, Christof. The Growth of Trees: A Historical Perspective on Sustainability. Translated by Katie Ritson. Munich: oekom, 2014. Müller, Lothar. White Magic: The Age of Paper. Translated by Jessica Spengler. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015. Radkau, Joachim. Holz: Wie ein Naturstoff Geschichte schreibt. Munich: oekom, 2007.

Save the Forest, Burn Books  123 Radkau, Joachim. Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment. Translated by Thomas Dunlap. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Radkau, Joachim. Wood: A History. Translated by Patrick Camiller. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012. Rajan, S. Ravi. Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial Eco-Development 1800–1950. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. Réaumur, René Antoine Ferchault de. Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des insectes. 6 vols. Paris: Académie Royale des Sciences, 1734–42. Schaeffer, Jacob Christian. Versuche und Muster, ohne alle Lumpen oder doch mit einem geringen Zusatze derselben, Papier zu machen. 6 vols. Regensburg, 1765. Schöne, Albrecht. Aufklärung aus dem Geist der Experimentalphysik: Lichtenbergsche Konjunktive, 3rd edn. Munich: Beck, 1993. Sombart, Werner. Das europäische Wirtschaftsleben im Zeitalter des Frühkapitalismus. Vol. 2.2 of Der moderne Kapitalismus: Historisch-systematische Darstellung des gesamteuropäischen Wirtschaftslebens von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, 2nd edn. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1969 (1916). Wilczek, Markus. “Ab: Lichtenberg’s Waste.” Germanic Review 87.4 (2012): 305–24. Wilczek, Markus. “Water and Words: Narrating Sustainability.” New German Critique 43.2 (2016): 177–97. Williams, Michael. Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Six Mocking the Anthropocene: Caricatures of Man-Made Landscapes in German Satirical Magazines from the Fin de Siècle

Evi Zemanek

Since the catchy label Anthropocene (the epoch in which humans have altered the Earth to a degree that their activities will leave permanent traces in the geological record) has been taken up by the humanities, scholars of ecocritical literary and cultural studies have reread texts from different periods as documents that demonstrate humans’ intention to master nature.1 Yet, many of the texts written before the late nineteenth century, that is, before the negative effects of industrialization became visible, do not display an awareness and much less a self-critical consciousness of humans’ impact on their environment. Throughout the greater part of the twentieth century, most artworks, be they texts, paintings, or buildings, tell us rather uncritical success stories about humans’ conquest of nature in various domains and often do so implicitly. This is especially true for man’s transformation of landscapes. In this chapter, however, I will present some unknown examples of a rare early consciousness and critique of humans’ impact in the particular form of satirical caricature. These long-forgotten artworks appeared in German magazines at the fin de siècle.2 1 The reason that texts from very different periods are being ascribed to the Anthropocene is due to the difficulty in agreeing on a start date for the era. I follow Paul Crutzen, who, in view of atmospheric evidence, proposed the Industrial Revolution as a date for the beginning of the new geologic epoch; cf. Paul Josef Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415 (2002): 23. 2 To this day, caricatures depicting man-made environmental transformations have not received any attention. Literary ecocriticism has so far neglected the

Mocking the Anthropocene  125 As various publications from the period indicate, humans’ building, cultivating, and landscaping activities in the later nineteenth century were judged along the ambiguous lines of “creation/formation” versus “disfigurement/deformation” (“Gestaltung” and “Entstellung”)— terms used by the German architect and first chairman of the Deutscher Bund Heimatschutz (German Association for Homeland Protection) Paul Schultze-Naumburg in his 1905 book Die Entstellung unseres Landes (The Disfigurement of Our Country) and in his very popular, widely read series Kulturarbeiten (Works of Culture, 1901–17), particularly in the three volumes altogether titled Die Gestaltung der Landschaft durch den Menschen (The Creation of Landscape by Man, 1916–17).3 In the introduction of the latter work we find exceptionally explicit reflections on humans’ creative power, the downside to that power, and our subsequent responsibility: “Landscape? Creation? Well, how can we contribute to that? … I deliberately chose the term ‘creation’ to emphasize the responsibility we all bear when it comes to the face of our country. Because it is man alone who endows it with expression once he has completely subjugated it to his needs as we have seen in our homeland.”4 treasures that can be found in old perodicals, mainly because, until the recent wave of digitalization, they were difficult to access, and still, screening them remains very time-consuming. I owe thanks to my assistants Carina Engel and Anna Rauscher for searching through countless numbers of magazines. 3 All translations of German titles and quotes are mine unless otherwise noted. The title Kulturarbeiten encompasses all human cultural activities. The three volumes most relevant for my chapter train the reader to find good solutions and to avoid bad ones for road and railway construction, forest and water management, coal mining, industrial construction, and city planning. I read this popular series of books, which since 1900 have also been published in parts in the art journal Der Kunstwart (The Art Warden), as context for the caricatures. Its importance for the emerging landscape protection movement is often downplayed, because of its author’s later turn to Nazi ideology. Paul Schultze-Naumburg (1869–1949) started as a painter and published on painting in the late 1890s before he made himself a name as an architect advocating for traditionalist building. Until the end of World War I his name was associated with life reform (Lebensreform), monument protection (Denkmalpflege), and homeland protection (Heimatschutz, i.e., landscape preservation). In the late 1920s, however, he combined his art theory with the then prevailing racist ideology. 4 Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Die Gestaltung der Landschaft durch den Menschen, Vols 7–9, Kulturarbeiten, 3rd edn (Munich: Georg D. W. Callwey Verlag, 1928), 9: “Landschaft? Gestaltung? Ja, was können wir denn dazu tun? … Ich wählte mit Absicht das Wort ‘Gestaltung,’ um damit die Verantwortung zu betonen, die wir alle für das Angesicht unseres Landes tragen. Denn der Mensch ist es, der ihm den Ausdruck verleiht, sobald er es ganz seinem Zwecke unterworfen hat, wie es bei unserem Vaterlande der Fall ist.”

126  Readings in the Anthropocene Schultze-Naumburg concedes that a few areas still might exist that seem untouched by humans, such as some high mountains and heaths, but, As for the rest, I presume, not a single patch of the Earth’s surface in Germany looks the way it did before it was cultivated by men; since everything else we see around us, from forests to fields, from meadows to mill weirs, is man-made or, actually, nature; nature that has been tamed and altered by human hands.5 He complains that this interference is “too much of a good thing, a monomania of utilization” (ein Zuviel des Guten, eine Monomanie der Nutzbarmachung), and suggests that we take into account “whether, with this ruthless method, goods might be destroyed which no human hand will ever be able to replace” (ob man bei dieser bedenkenfreien Methode nicht Güter zerstört, die uns keines Menschen Hand je wieder ersetzen kann).6 Although he watches humanity’s intrusions into nature with a very critical eye, he clarifies that not only the untouched, but also cultivated nature can be beautiful when humans respect the laws of “necessary harmony” (notwendige Harmonie) between their own and God’s creations.7 Such aesthetic considerations were quite common in these early pleadings for the protection of nature. The aesthetic rules proposed by Schultze-Naumburg advocate for the imitation of organic, natural forms instead of geometrical, and thus artificial, forms. Interestingly, Ernst Rudorff, a pioneer in the nature protection movement, also criticizes river regulations and plot realignments that sought to create rectilinear waterways and rectangular plots, but his critique is rooted in ecological thinking.8 He introduced his ideas, to which we will come back later, as early as 1880 in his journal article “On the relationship between modern life and nature” (Über das Verhältnis 5 Schultze-Naumburg, Die Gestaltung der Landschaft durch den Menschen, 9–10: “Im Übrigen dürfte nicht ein Stück Erdoberfläche in Deutschland mehr so aussehen, wie es vor der Kultivierung durch Menschenhand der Fall war, denn alles, was wir sonst um uns sehen, vom Forst bis zum Feld, von der Wiese bis zum Mühlenwehr, ist Menschenwerk oder doch Natur, von Menschenhand gebändigt und verändert.” 6 Schultze-Naumburg, Die Gestaltung der Landschaft durch den Menschen, 10. 7 Ibid., 11. 8 Ernst Rudorff (1840–1916), also known as a composer, undertook various individual initiatives for the protection of nature and landscapes. He coined and popularized the idea of “Homeland Protection,” in particular with his long essay “Heimatschutz,” which first appeared in 1897 in the journal Grenzboten 56.2 and 56.4, eventually leading to the foundation of the “German Association for Homeland Protection” (Deutscher Bund Heimatschutz).

Mocking the Anthropocene  127 des modernen Lebens zur Natur) as a reaction to the planned railway construction on the famous Dragon’s Rock (Drachenfels) of the Seven Hills (Siebengebirge) on the shores of the Rhine river.9 The extract from Schultze-Naumburg and the reference to Rudorff provide two contexts that serve as a temporal frame for the artworks from the fin de siècle that I am going to discuss below. In order to show human attempts to transform the surface of the Earth or even to discover an early consciousness of the possible scope of human interventions, it is worth looking into nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines. In these early mass media publications, we can trace the emergence of discourses revolving around various symptoms that demonstrate humans’ conquest of nature. Readers were being informed continually about new findings in the natural sciences and technical innovations, the expansion of industrialization and infrastructure (for example, the expansion of the railroad, the building of bridges and tunnels), and, last but not least, the spread of tourism to the remotest regions. In illustrated newspapers that appeared weekly from the mid-century, like the Illustrirte Zeitung (Illustrated Newspaper, 1843–1944), as well as in the entertaining and educational bourgeois journals Die Gartenlaube (The Arbor, 1853–1944) and Über Land und Meer (On Land and Sea, 1858–1923), these stories of success, but also of spectacular disasters such as railroad accidents, were communicated in illustrated reports and travelogues.10 Only after the readers had been made familiar with all these aspects of sweeping modernization could the “achievements” be called into question through a demonstration of their downsides. The papers and journals mentioned above, however, usually did not intend to alarm or even agitate their readers, not even in their pictorial satires. This goal was eagerly pursued in satirical magazines instead. Besides poems, short narratives or serial novels, and advertisements, Fliegende Blätter (Flying Leaves, 1845–1928) and Simplicissimus (1896–1944), for example, featured countless caricatures mostly combined with short texts. These humorous drawings implicitly criticize certain social developments and politics. Unfortunately, literary scholars and cultural historians commonly neglect drawings, treating them as mere illustrations of historical events, and thus greatly underestimate their potential as 9

On the history of Heimatschutz, especially in the Siebengebirge and the Rhineland region, see the comprehensive study of Germany’s environmental history by Thomas M. Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). See in particular the introduction and chapter 1, “Nature’s Homelands: The Origins of Landscape Preservation, 1885–1914.” 10 Again, all translations of German newspaper titles that never appeared in English are mine.

128  Readings in the Anthropocene forms of satire. As a unique pictorial medium of cultural criticism that inventively reveals problematic developments and imagines alternatives by combining text and image, they certainly deserve more attention and an approach informed by intermedia studies. Caricature as a term, concept, and pictorial technique was already well known by the mid-nineteenth century. In the Brockhaus encyclopedia we find a detailed definition of caricature as a “picture of mockery or deformation” (Spott- oder Zerrbild) in which characteristics of the depicted subject are exaggerated.11 As the opposite of the norm or of an ideal—caricatures were also defined as an “inverted ideal” (verkehrtes Ideal)12—the depicted persons seem ugly or ridiculous. Early encyclopedia entries concentrate on deformed portraits, while later entries include depictions of social phenomena as well. In this latter perspective, caricature serves to criticize a society’s values and activities, sometimes being the only possible form of a critique otherwise too dangerous to be expressed publicly, depending on the times and the governing political system. For our purpose it makes sense to follow the common and broad definition of caricature as a visual satire. According to the same mid-nineteenth-century edition of Brockhaus, “The task of satire is to radically expose the futile efforts, the prevalent foolishness, and the vices of one’s time, especially the social conditions of particular nations and classes.”13 Since a satirical caricature aims at making its readers or beholders realize that something is wrong, it distorts, deforms, and exaggerates its subject, often to a degree that makes it seem ridiculous, although not all satires provoke laughter. Even if it uses wit to attract attention, its main goal is to make people think about the problem it displays. Its other common techniques are parody, irony, and sarcasm. Additionally, caricatures rely on allegation and provocation. They cannot be understood without knowing their horizon of reference, which corresponds to the sociopolitical status quo in the real world. Thus, they are intrinsically linked to the ideal they thwart, and they need to be associated with this beautiful ideal in order to be recognizable as dissent. Like any revolutionary strategy, caricature relies upon the system it attacks.14 11 Cf. “Caricatur,” in Allgemeine deutsche Real-Enzyklopädie für gebildete Stände. Conversations-Lexikon, Vol. 3 (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1843), 201. 12 Cf., for example, Handbuch der Philosophie und der philosophischen Literatur, Vol. 2 (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1821), 53. 13 Cf. “Satire,” in Allgemeine deutsche Real-Enzyklopädie für gebildete Stände, Conversations-Lexikon, Vol. 12 (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1847), 558: “Die Aufgabe der Satire ist, die nichtigen Bestrebungen und herrschenden Thorheiten und Laster der Zeit, besonders der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse, einzelner Staaten und Stände, in ihrer ganzen Blöße darzustellen.” 14 Cf. Werner Hofmann, Die Karikatur: Von Leonardo bis Picasso (Hamburg: EVA Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2007), 35.

Mocking the Anthropocene  129 We have to keep in mind, however, that magazines had to respect censorship regulations for mass media.15 Significantly, the first successful satirical papers—among others Kladderadatsch (1848–1944) and Die Leuchtkugeln (Maroons) (1848–51)—appeared shortly before and around the German Revolution of 1848–9, when unrestricted freedom of the press was demanded, and, indeed, preventive censorship was suspended for a short time. In reaction, the rules were tightened again, until freedom of the press was guaranteed by the new press law of the Reich (Reichspressegesetz), which went into effect in 1874. However, this freedom was revoked again by the Anti-Socialist Laws (Sozialistengesetze) in effect from 1878 to 1890 and responsible for the closing of many newspapers. Good times for satirical papers began again in 1890 when these laws expired after Bismarck resigned. Thus, the authors of the most prominent satirical magazine that appeared near the end of the century, Simplicissimus, were free to speak out for a few years. Yet another threat arose with the legislation referred to as the Lex Heinze, suggested by Kaiser Wilhelm and adopted in 1900. It forbade the public display of immorality (Unsittlichkeit), be it in mass media, art museums, or theaters. The law provoked strong protest by many artists, who succeeded in getting artworks removed from the ban. There were similar attempts at restrictions during the Weimar Republic, but the worst case of censorship came, of course, with the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. These developments, however, are not relevant for the caricatures I discuss in this chapter, which stem from the fin de siècle. It should be added that censorship rules hindered the satire of politicians, regents, and other authorities much more than the satirical comments about the bourgeoisie’s or the gentry’s attitudes toward nature. In the second half of the nineteenth century, verbal and visual critiques primarily targeted the lifestyles of bourgeoisie and gentry, class conflicts, patriarchy, marriage, women’s emancipation, family life, and children’s education. During the German Empire, much critique was directed against the monarchy and imperialism, the politics of the Kaiser and Chancellor Bismarck, legislation and jurisdiction, the military, international conflicts, and wars.16 Of the far fewer caricatures 15 For detailed information, see Rudolf Stöber, Deutsche Pressegeschichte: Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, 2nd edn (Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2005), 136–55. 16 For an overview of the main topics and targets of caricatures in Simplicissimus, which has received much more attention from scholars than other satirical papers, see Hasso Zimdars, Die Zeitschrift Simplicissimus: Ihre Karikaturen (PhD thesis, Universität Bonn, 1972); and Gisela Vetter-Liebenow (ed.), Zwischen Kaiserwetter und Donnergrollen: Die wilhelminische Epoche im Spiegel des Simplicissimus von 1896 bis 1914 (Hannover: Wilhelm-Busch-Gesellschaft e.V., 2013).

130  Readings in the Anthropocene that do depict rapid industrialization, modernization, and urbanization, some call attention to the consequences of these events for human life and the natural world. But then the outbreak of World War I brought public interest in nature to a halt. Among the caricatures from the last decades of the nineteenth century that reflect upon humanity’s ambivalent relation to nature, the most popular topics are hunting and tourism. While one would expect caricatures about hunting to expose humans’ questionable handling of animals, most of them, in fact, simply mock the hunter’s hubris and his difficulties in catching the animal. This is also true for caricatures about poaching and the theft of wood, still common crimes in the nineteenth century. Most satires of tourism, respectively, focus on humans by tending to mock the bourgeois urbanites’ sentimental romanticization of nature, their awkwardness when going on excursions, and their pretentiousness in contrast to the locals, rather than giving thought to landscapes and their flora.17 All these depictions are amusing and interesting, but not relevant for the central question of my chapter. There is one topic, however, that focuses on human’s destruction of landscapes and that was picked up by some caricatures: the excessive clear-cutting of forests, which, incidentally, Schultze-Naumburg also considered historically the first step of humanity’s destruction of nature.18 As is well known, Germany’s pristine woodlands had been drastically shrinking and transformed, notably through being turned into timber, throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Environmental historians have asserted that an early consciousness of nature’s value can be discerned in complaints of a wood shortage (Holznot), complaints that had been widespread and persistent in central Europe since the eighteenth century.19 Whether these complaints were justified or not, they were motivated mainly by economic calculations and the fear of losing one’s primary source of livelihood rather than by the impulse to protect nature for its own sake. And when the 17 For caricatures of “tourists” and “natives,” see Wolfgang Hackl, “‘Sommerfrischler’ und ‘Eingeborene’: Eine kulturgeschichtliche Lektüre des Simplicissimus,” in Gertrud Maria Rösch (ed.), Simplicissimus: Glanz und Elend der Satire in Deutschland (Regensburg: Universitätsverlag Regensburg, 1996), 161–73. To my knowledge, this is the only essay on caricatures in Simplicissimus whose topic is relevant for studies in ecocriticism or environmental humanities. 18 Schultze-Naumburg, Die Gestaltung der Landschaft durch den Menschen, 12. 19 In our context it suffices to refer to the debate that existed, regardless of the thesis first expressed by Joachim Radkau that the degree of the alleged wood shortage did not correspond to reality. Cf. Joachim Radkau, Die Ära der Ökologie: Eine Weltgeschichte (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2011), 40–2, and Joachim Radkau, “Holzverknappung und Krisenbewusstsein im 18. Jahrhundert,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 9 (1983): 513–43.

Mocking the Anthropocene  131 romantics, who mythologized the “German Forest” (Deutscher Wald), joined in the protests, they also wished to preserve the woods for the sake of humans instead of thinking ecologically. Both motivations, however, underlie the pleas against forest clearances by SchultzeNaumburg, who bemoans at length the loss of pristine woods and their substitution with timber for four reasons: the importance of natural woods for ecosystems, for aesthetic pleasure as well as spiritual shelter and—because one can only love a beautiful homeland, as he says—for German national identity (an argument also central in the later Nazi ideology).20 Such patriotic motivations, however, do not seem relevant for the first caricature, which attacks the unscrupulous commercialization of the forest. The topic had by then already been introduced by famous voices in objection to destructive exploitation, namely Ernst Moritz Arndt and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl.21 But their protest did not appear in the form of satirical artworks. In fact, when this caricature appears, the highest waves of protest had already ebbed, since extensive reforestation had already begun around mid-century. The reason why the lament about forest clearance was (still) being satirized most likely lies in the media history of caricatures and their journals, and maybe, as the second artwork to be presented suggests, in a revival of a post-romantic or pre-nationalistic mythologization of the forest. In January 1898, at the end of the second year of Simplicissimus, we find a caricature titled “Deforested” (Abgeholzt, Fig. 6.1).22 It fills half of the journal’s page and is the only contribution addressing this topic. Thus, it stands in no relation to other texts and caricatures in this issue. The drawing by Josef Benedikt Engl, who contributed caricatures to all issues of the journal until his early death in 1907, shows a hunter or forester (left) and a nobleman in front of a deforested area. Below the picture it says in Gothic print, “My goodness, my Lord the Baron has cleaned up nicely. Soon there will be nothing else left but the family tree” (Donnerwetter, da hat der Herr Baron aber schön aufgeräumt. Da wird bald nichts mehr da sein, als der Stammbaum). The comic effect of this caricature derives from the pun made by the hunter, who, while primarily mocking the aristocracy’s ancestry, also criticizes the selling out of the forests. Of course, this caricature indirectly complains 20 Cf. Schultze-Naumburg, Die Gestaltung der Landschaft durch den Menschen, 44–6, 55–71. 21 For their objections, see Jost Hermand, “Erst die Bäume, dann wir! Proteste gegen das Abholzen der deutschen Wälder 1780–1950,” in Jost Hermand (ed.), Mit den Bäumen sterben die Menschen: Zur Kulturgeschichte der Ökologie (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 1993), 14ff. 22 Josef Benedikt Engl, “Abgeholzt,” Simplicissimus 1897.43 (January 21, 1898): 339, http://www.simplicissimus.info/index.php?id=6 (accessed March 17, 2016).

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Figure 6.1  Josef Benedikt Engl’s “Abgeholzt,” Simplicissimus, January 21, 1898.

about the extensive deforestation and pleads for more sustainable forestry. Caricatures that use text so sparingly heavily rely on the public awareness of the problem they address. The forest clearance is immediately evident, but without the text we would not know how the artist judges this fact. Both this format and this type of text–image interrelation were popular at the end of the century. The precursor of this format is a combination of a poem and a drawing that are not mutually interdependent. One rare example of this on the same topic can be found in the journal Fliegende Blätter in an issue from 1895. Again, without any thematic connection to other contributions in this issue, we find “A Farewell to the Forest” (Abschied vom Walde), a poem by Friedrich Detjens,23 and an illustration signed by Erdmann Wagner (Fig. 6.2). The image is inserted after the first three stanzas, right above the final one. The poem begins with an apostrophe to the beautiful forest, asking who has cut it down and bidding farewell, resounding four times in the refrain “Farewell, 23 Friedrich Detjens (text) and Erdmann Wagner (picture), “Abschied vom Walde,” Fliegende Blätter 1895.2626, 195, http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ diglit/fb103/0194 (accessed July 1, 2016).

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Figure 6.2 Friedrich Detjens’s (text) and Erdmann Wagner’s (image) “Abschied vom Walde,” Fliegende Blätter, 1895. farewell—beautiful forest!” (Lebe wohl, lebe wohl—du schöner Wald!). Those familiar with German romantic poetry will recognize the text as a parody of Joseph von Eichendorff’s similarly structured poem “The Hunter’s Farewell” (Der Jäger Abschied 1810/1837), whose opening question, “Who has built you, beautiful forest, so high up there?” (Wer hat dich, du schöner Wald/Aufgebaut so hoch da droben?),24 is cited in Detjens’s opening lines. The only difference is that Detjens replaced “built” (aufgebaut) with “cut” (abgeholzt). Concerning Eichendorff’s poem, it suffices to say that it is the men who leave the forest to fulfill their duty in the real world, while the forest will always be their true spiritual home—an idea we find in other poems by Eichendorff as well, particularly in the equally famous “Farewell” (Abschied, 1810/1837). Both poems were set to music by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (Op. 50, No. 2 and Op. 59, No. 3). While Eichendorff synaesthetically celebrates the living forest, Detjens’s parody argues that the loss of the forest is visible, as a damaged landscape, but also 24 Joseph von Eichendorff, Gedichte (Stuttgart: Reclam 1997), 107ff.

134  Readings in the Anthropocene audible: the sawing of the trees and the whipping of the horses has replaced the sounds of hunter’s horns and the poets’ songs inspired by nature. The picture illustrates the new situation: it shows a bald hill, sawing woodworkers, and a wagoner handling the horses. There is no longer any sign in the picture of those people who once emitted the bemoaned lovely melodies. Instead, there are two deer observing the whole scene from above, and since the next stanza states, “Humans are deadhearted and coldblooded” (Fühllos ist der Mensch und kalt), they could very well be seen as the speakers of the poem. Indeed, they are in the typical observer position in the picture. The final lines blame the new generation for destroying, out of greed for money, what their ancestors had protected. Regarding the relation between the poem and the drawing, it is, as in the first caricature, the poem that evaluates and interprets the facts visible in the rather neutral picture. The image, in turn, reinforces the effect of the poem, for the sight of a stumpy forest floor is more appalling than its mere description. Just as the beauty of nature appeals to multiple senses, the combined verbal and visual work tries to communicate the visual and audible dimensions of the absence of beauty. In contrast to these depictions of the destruction and loss of nature from the early Anthropocene, other caricatures show the damage caused by humans’ attempts to substitute, improve, or beautify nature. For the latter, the Germans invented “beautification societies” (Verschönerungsvereine). Their purported goal was to preserve nature for future generations and fend off industrial intervention, but in reality they were successful in attracting tourists and thus profited economically. For all aesthetic questions concerning beauty in art and lifestyle, another journal was founded in Munich in 1896, Die Jugend: Münchner illustrierte Wochenschrift für Kunst und Leben (Youth: Munich’s illustrated weekly paper for art and lifestyle), which derived its name from the art nouveau movement Jugendstil. While scholarship usually focuses on how this style developed in the context of this magazine, it overlooks interesting contributions within the journal that reflect upon humans’ changing relationship with nature. In its first year, we already find two drawings by Fritz Rehm next to each other (Fig. 6.3). Below the first one (left), the text reads, “Before the Foundation of the Beautification Society” (Vor der Gründung des Verschönerungsvereins); below the second one (right), “After the Foundation of the Beautification Society” (Nach der Gründung des Verschönerungsvereins).25 Both show the 25 Fritz Rehm, “Vor der Gründung des Verschönerungsvereins,” “Nach der Gründung des Verschönerungsvereins,” Jugend: Münchner illustrierte Wochenschrift für Kunst und Leben 1896.41 (October 10, 1896): 658ff., http:// www.jugend-wochenschrift.de/index.php?id=24 (accessed March 17, 2016).

Mocking the Anthropocene  135 same view of a landscape consisting of trees, a small hill, a spring, and a pond. In the second picture, however, we see various traces of human activities and interventions: houses, smoking chimneys in the background, artful bridges and park benches, and a fountain decorated with a lion’s head. There are also signs indicating the way to a tavern, instructing visitors to keep their dogs on leashes, prohibiting fishing, and informing the onlooker that all this was made by the “Verschönerungsverein.” In contrast to this evidently man-made landscape, the first scenery is supposed to look pristine. Yet in its apparent, but quite artificial naturalness it rather resembles an English landscape garden. The two pictures point to a process of development and imply a narrative that does not need to be told explicitly because by comparing the pictures, the reader can deduce what happened in the time span between both representations. In this respect, the two-part ensemble is similar to a picture story or a comic strip. It shows how men restructure and cultivate nature for their own needs, and thus degrade it to a mere backdrop. Without verbal elaboration the name “Verschönerungsverein” is exposed as a euphemism. Astonishingly, we find a description of Fritz Rehm’s drawing of the “beautified” landscape in an article by Ferdinand Avenarius that appeared in the journal Der Kunstwart in 1898 under the heading

Figure 6.3  Fritz Rehm’s “Vor der Gründung des Ver­schö­ner­ungs­ver­ eins” and “Nach der Gründung des Ver­schö­ner­ungs­ver­eins,” Jugend, October 10, 1896.

136  Readings in the Anthropocene “Verschönerungsvereine”26—as if Avenarius had known this picture.27 The text begins as a narration. The homodiegetic narrator is on a summer holiday in a secluded village he knows from a vacation years ago. He goes for a walk to search for a fountain he once encountered in the middle of the woods. However, this formerly idyllic place has changed. The path into the woods is wider and leads to a spacious clearing where he is surprised to see a Greek-style altar and water running from a lion-head fountain into a stone shell.28 “My fountain!” he exclaims, grievously remembering the once lively, playful running water. Back then, it seemed to be chatting. The author emphatically describes pristine nature as a living organism. Where the water had once crisscrossed moss and rocks there is now a gravel square with park benches whose cast iron imitates natural wood. Above the lion-head fountain a panel reads, “Erected by the Beautification Society, 1897” (Errichtet vom Verschönerungsverein, 1897). The sight of this artificial ensemble puts him to flight; he wanders deeper into the forest looking for a place not yet touched by the beautification society. Then the narration stops and turns to serious reflection. The author changes his strategy, stops complaining, and starts giving advice as to how beautification societies—which he generally considers good—should make their improvements. He is well aware that the beautification of villages for the joy of their inhabitants is just one motivating factor; another factor is the economic benefit to be had in creating an infrastructure to attract tourists. According to Avenarius, most beautification societies in rural areas unfortunately try to reach this goal by modernizing their villages with urban architecture. His views resemble those articulated and illustrated by SchultzeNaumburg in Die Entstellung des Landes. Both clearly judge from an aesthetic perspective. Fearing that beautification societies tend to make wrong aesthetic decisions themselves, Avenarius asks them simply to watch over any building initiatives attentively; in fact, he defines the task of beautification societies as the “prevention of uglification” (Verhinderung von Verhäßlichung).29 26 Ferdinand Avenarius, “Verschönerungsvereine,” Der Kunstwart: Rundschau über alle Gebiete des Schönen. Monatshefte für Kunst, Literatur und Leben 19.1 (July 1898): 197–201, http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kunstwart11_2/0207 (accessed July 1, 2016). 27 Avenarius was one of the editors of Der Kunstwart, which was linked to the Life Reform Movement, and Schultze-Naumburg worked for this journal as editorial journalist and author. 28 Here, again, is the lion-head fountain that Schultze-Naumburg despises as a terribly artificial form. Cf. Schultze-Naumburg, Die Gestaltung der Landschaft durch den Menschen, 83, 86. 29 Avenarius, “Verschönerungsvereine,” 201.

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Figure 6.4  Bruno Paul’s “Kunsttraum eines modernen Landschafters,” Simplicissimus, November 6, 1897.

138  Readings in the Anthropocene In journals mainly dedicated to art, like Jugend and Der Kunstwart, most judgments about nature and suggestions of how to treat it follow aesthetic principles without considering nature as worth protecting for its own sake. Jugendstil artworks in particular shape landscapes in their own flamboyant manner. The artists’ unscrupulous appropriation of nature is satirized in a caricature by Bruno Paul that appeared in Simplicissimus in 1897, covering the whole last page of this issue (Fig. 6.4). The color picture “Artistic Dream of a Modern Landscapist” (Kunsttraum eines modernen Landschafters) shows a park on a seashore framed by dynamic lines which continue in a playful arabesque manner in the lower part of the drawing.30 These merely decorative lines entangle a couple looking closely at the landscape through their glasses, until one of them finally concludes, “The landscape is alright. It can stay like this” (Die Landschaft ist gut. Die kann so bleiben). The artist here has become used to transforming nature according to his aesthetic ideals and has lost the ability to discern the artificial from the natural. Another caricature from Simplicissimus implies that it is not only the artists taking part in the aesthetic movement who no longer distinguish between art and nature, or between artificial and natural landscapes. In 1896, Thomas Theodor Heine, one of the two founders of Simplicissimus and its chief illustrator, presents a drawing (Fig. 6.5) under the heading “The Artificial Alp near Leipzig (the so-called Saxon Switzerland)” (Die künstliche Alpe bei Leipzig, sogenannte Sächsische Schweiz).31 To understand the confusing title one should know that there is in fact a hilly region in Saxony that has been called Saxon Switzerland or Swiss Saxony since the early nineteenth century, an allusion to Switzerland’s mountainous landscapes, but this area is southeast of Dresden, thus more than 100 kilometers away from Leipzig with its then booming coal and steel industry. Thanks to its striking sandstone rocks, Saxon Switzerland had already attracted many tourists in the nineteenth century. Thus, Ernst Rudorff complained as early as 1880, in his essay “On the relationship between modern life and nature” (Über das Verhältnis des modernen Lebens zur Natur), that Saxon Switzerland, just like the Harz, the Thüringer Wald, and the Rhine region, “is totally deformed; its nativeness has been completely destroyed” (total verdorben; ihre Ursprünglichkeit ist bis auf die Neige vernichtet).32 In 30 Bruno Paul, “Kunsttraum eines modernen Landschafters,” Simplicissimus 1897.32 (November 6, 1897): 256, http://www.simplicissimus.info/index. php?id=6 (accessed March 17, 2016). 31 Thomas Theodor Heine, “Die künstliche Alpe bei Leipzig (sogenannte Sächsische Schweiz),” Simplicissimus 1896.45 (February 6, 1897): 6, http://www. simplicissimus.info/index.php?id=6 (accessed March 17, 2016). 32 Cf. Ernst Rudorff, “Über das Verhältnis des modernen Lebens zur Natur,” Preußische Jahrbücher 45 (1880): 266.

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Figure 6.5  Thomas Theodor Heine’s “Die künstliche Alpe bei Leipzig (sogenannte Sächsische Schweiz),” Simplicissimus, February 6, 1897. contrast, Wilhelm Bölsche, who extensively explored the geological formation of Saxon Switzerland, does not mention any destruction of the landscape in his book published almost half a century later.33 It has to be added, though, that Rudorff blames tourism, not the industries visible in Heine’s caricature. In fact, ideas regarding the protection of Saxon Switzerland were already circulating around the mid-nineteenth century, and since 1850 several initiatives were launched to protect certain mountain ranges. But it was not until 1990 that the whole area was turned into the Saxon Switzerland National Park.34 Heine’s caricature shows a solitary chamois tethered on the plateau of a rock standing in the midst of a sea of factories with excessively smoking chimneys. In this example, there is no text below the picture; instead there are four signs integrated into the scenery. One of them labels the lonely animal, isolated from its natural habitat and flock, with the correct Latin term for its species and informs us that it feeds solely on edelweiss. However, the chamois seems doomed to die because, on the one hand, picking edelweiss is strictly forbidden by 33 Wilhelm Bölsche, Erwanderte deutsche Geologie: Die Sächsische Schweiz (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1925). 34 For detailed information, see Frank Richter, Nationalpark Sächsische Schweiz: Von der Idee zur Wirklichkeit (Dresden: Eigenverlag Nationalparkregion Sächsische Schweiz, 1991).

140  Readings in the Anthropocene another sign, and on the other hand, the highly symbolic plant could not grow in this environment anyway. Indeed, there is none to be seen in the picture. The scene seems solely set up for men and is somehow comparable to a zoo, but the chamois’s situation here is worse. At first sight, we might think that the “Alp” is a natural relict, a last remnant left over after men have eradicated nature to make room for their factories.35 However, by announcing an “artificial Alp” in the title, Heine suggests that men have either designed and built the Alp themselves, or they have transposed the rock from Saxon Switzerland to Leipzig, in both cases with the goal of bringing urbanites in touch with some form of nature. Maybe the caricature implies an analogy: just as humans have created an artificial habitat for the chamois, so too have they enclosed themselves within an artificial (urbanized and industrialized) environment, and thus have maneuvered themselves into a similar situation to that of the animal. So far, Heine’s caricature is the most complex among those discussed in this chapter. First, it exposes the grim consequences of industrialization and urbanization—which, by the way, do not only affect animals but humans, too, as suggested by the air pollution from factory emissions in the picture. Second, it mocks the failure of contemporary preservationists’ all too optimistic goal of balancing nature and modern industrialism. The artificial Alp neither offers aesthetic pleasure nor does it successfully contribute to forming a regional or national identity, a Heimat feeling, as was hoped would be sparked from beautifully preserved landscapes. In fact, the Alp only demonstrates how industrialism and urbanism marginalize or even exclude nature. And third, it indicates humans’ increasing alienation from nature by criticizing their attempts to museify it. Ernst Rudorff critically observes that the exposition of nature as if it were an artifact is not limited to cities. It was also typical for tourist resorts. Referring to advertisements for “beautiful nature” omnipresent in magazines of his time, he despairs that “Man celebrates nature, but only by prostituting it … The world is obsessed with the destruction of nature in its essence in order to surrender it to human pleasures” (Man feiert die Natur, aber man feiert sie, indem man sie prostituirt … Eine wahre Manie hat die Welt ergriffen, die Natur in ihrem eigensten Wesen zu zerstören 35 A rapid increase in industry in the 1880s and 1890s is reported in the fifth edition (1896) of Meyers Konversationslexikon, and the sixth edition informs us that in 1904 there were 877 factories in Leipzig alone. Cf. Meyers KonversationsLexikon: Ein Nachschlagewerk des allgemeinen Wissens, 17 vols (Leipzig/Vienna: Bibliographisches Institut, 1893–7), Vol. 11 (1896), 197; and Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon: Ein Nachschlagewerk des allgemeinen Wissens, 20 vols (Leipzig and Vienna: Bibliographisches Institut, 1902–8), Vol. 12, 381.

Mocking the Anthropocene  141 unter dem Vorgehen, daß man sie dem Genuß zugänglich machen will).36 Tourism, he continues, debases nature “to a mere decoration” (zur Decoration herabgewürdigt), so that it no longer makes any difference “whether the effect is produced by nature or achieved artificially with the help of cardboard, paint-pots, and all sorts of lighting equipment” (ob der Effect von der Natur producirt oder mit Hülfe von Pappe, Farbentöpfen und allerhand Beleichtungsapparaten künstlich herge­ stellt ist).37 By transforming landscapes, humans are not only harming nature, but themselves as well, Rudorff argues. Referring to Friedrich Schiller’s belief in the moral value of nature, he explains, “If nature is supposed to have a moral, that is, a cathartic and elevating effect on us, it must not itself be defiled and falsified” (Soll aber die Natur moralisch, d.h. reinigend und erhebend wirken, so muß sie vor Allem selbst unentweihte, unverfälschte Natur geblieben sein).38 While the beholders of Heine’s caricature do not quite know how modern urbanites could or should approach the Alp and its lonely resident, since this exhibit forces them into the role of passive observers, another artificial mountain depicted in a different caricature in Fliegende Blätter in 1887 entices men with the promise of interaction (Fig. 6.6). Under the heading “New Enterprise” (Neues Unternehmen),39 we see a snow-covered rock and many climbers. Only a few reach the mountaintop, whereas most of them are tumbling down. Compared to the caricatures discussed earlier, this drawing by an unnamed artist is the most humorous. The figures resemble the yokels drawn by the famous caricaturist Wilhelm Busch. As in “Max und Moritz,” the wittiness rests upon brutality: three climbers are depicted in free fall; two others are being blown away by the force of a water cannon; one is being hit by heavy stones; one is stuck in a crevasse; and another is being carried away on a stretcher. We are tempted to laugh because the scenery looks like a playground, which it is in a way. The drawing is full of funny details to be discovered by the reader. Some are selfexplanatory; others (like the clerk sitting in a little hut on the left busily writing) require a lengthy explanation. Below the picture we read: To satisfy urgently felt needs an enterprise has been established, which aims at creating the experience of all the dangers a hiking-trip might entail, all the risks a vigorous mountaineer can ask for, accessible to those who cannot afford an actual 36 Rudorff, “Über das Verhältnis des modernen Lebens zur Natur,” 263ff. 37 Ibid., 265. 38 Ibid., 266. 39 Anon., “Neues Unternehmen,” Fliegende Blätter 1887.2164: 21ff., http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/fb86/0021 (accessed July 1, 2016).

142  Readings in the Anthropocene

Figure 6.6  Anonymous, “Neues Unternehmen,” Fliegende Blätter, 1887.

Mocking the Anthropocene  143 journey to the mountains, at an inexpensive fee. For this purpose, on newly purchased property artificial rocks will be erected, which, even though not quite able to rival the Großglockner or the Schreckhorn in terms of height, will allow visitors to crash comfortably. In suitable places, falling rock will be supplied as well. So far, it has not been possible to satisfactorily imitate ice crevasses to fall into and be frozen to death and spilling avalanches; however, we have been able to produce sudden fog (helpful for getting lost and, eventually, falling down) with a water diffusing machine. Moreover, great pains will be taken to ensure that the fates of those who have an accident in our establishment will be announced by name in several widely read papers on a daily basis.40 Each sentence of this announcement is full of irony and thus counts on a strategy we have not yet encountered in other caricatures. Just like holidays in the mountains and activities such as hiking and climbing, caricatures of clumsy mountain tourists were in vogue in the second half of the nineteenth century. Usually, though, the mockery was directed against wealthy tourists from the bourgeoisie or gentry. Now, the need for distraction and the love of adventure is seen as a vice across classes. By explicitly inviting the less wealthy, the artist jokingly responds to Ernst Rudorff’s demand to grant them access to nature.41 Nowadays, creative adventure playgrounds, impressive climbing gyms, and tropical island swimming halls can be found in every major city, but, needless to say, these were a mere fantasy 120 years ago. 40 “Um einem dringend gefühlten Bedürfnis nachzuhelfen, hat sich hier ein Unternehmen gebildet, welches den Zweck verfolgt, auch solchen Leuten, welche nicht die Mittel zu kostspieligen Reisen in’s Hochgebirge besitzen, Gelegenheit zu geben, sich womöglich all den Gefahren, die sich ein tüchtiger Bergsteiger nur wünschen kann, gegen ein mäßiges Entrée auszusetzen. In diesem Zweck werden auf einem hierzu angekauften Grundstücke künstliche Felsen errichtet, welche, wenn sie auch vertikaler Erhebung einigermaßen hinter dem Großglockner oder dem Schreckhorn zurückbleiben, doch immerhin die Möglichkeit zum bequemen Abstürzen gewähren. An passenden Stellen wird auch für Steinfall gesorgt. Gletscherspalten zum Hineinstürzen und Erfrieren, sowie verschüttende Lawinen haben bis jetzt noch nicht in zufriedenstellender Weise nachgeahmt werden können; hingegen werden plötzlich einfallende Nebel (sehr praktisch zum Verirren und schließlichen Abstürzen) durch einen Wasserzerstäubungsapparat hergestellt. Ferner ist Sorge getragen, daß über die in dem Etablissement Verunglückten täglich in einigen stark gelesenen Blättern mit Namensnennung Bericht erstattet wird.” Anonymous, “Neues Unternehmen,” 21ff. 41 Cf. Rudorff, “Über das Verhältnis des modernen Lebens zur Natur,” 273, 275.

144  Readings in the Anthropocene This satire attacks other social phenomena and human vices as well. First of all, the enumeration of dangers to which urbanites are being exposed in this adventure park mocks those who boisterously underestimate the risks involved, revealing their lack of knowledge about nature. Furthermore, the style of the announcement pokes fun at the reports of success and their naïve belief in progress. Admitting that there are still certain limits to humans’ capacity to imitate nature, the advertisement proudly lists technical inventions meant to entertain and challenge the masses, and, last but not least, to allow them to experience “nature” far away from nature. It additionally ridicules both sensational journalism and people’s need for public attention or recognition. And finally, it satirizes humans’ commercialization of nature and their marketing measures. All of these works stimulate readers and viewers to start thinking critically about the topics they depict, but they reach this goal in quite different ways. This is due in part to their varying text–image relations. Today’s advanced text and image studies claim that concrete pictures are processed faster and remembered better than texts containing abstract ideas. This has been proven for simple subjects, but is this also true for complex issues whose evaluation is difficult? In the first two caricatures (Figs 6.1 and 6.2) the forest clear-cutting is evident, and the sight of the stumpy forest floors surely reinforces the critique communicated in the text. However, especially in the picture with the heading “A Farewell from the Forest” (Fig. 6.2), the evaluation of the scene is solely communicated through the text. And the critical context of the two pictures “Before/After the Foundation of the Beautification Society” (Fig. 6.3) and “Artistic Dream of a Modern Landscapist” (Fig. 6.4) is only reliably indicated by the headings or the words below the picture, respectively. In other cases, such as in “The Artificial Alp near Leipzig” (Fig. 6.5) and “New Enterprise” (Fig. 6.6), it is obvious from the pictures alone that they are satires, but it is hard to guess what we are looking at in the pictures and their message remains vague. The first picture (Fig. 6.5) only shows that something is wrong, that the animal is being kept in a bad environment; the second picture (Fig. 6.6) makes us laugh, but we would not guess that we are facing some sort of adventure park where climbers fall down on purpose. In all these artifacts, then, the pictures depend upon the texts, while the texts—except for the poem in “A Farewell to the Forest” (Fig. 6.2)— depend upon the pictures to an even greater degree, all the more so the shorter the texts are. Mostly, text and image are interdependent—they complement and reinforce each other. In some caricatures, all the components (heading, additional text, and picture) are funny independently of one another, but in others the humor only works when the different parts deliver the punchline

Mocking the Anthropocene  145 together. While a certain kind of wit is more easily communicated visually, as in “New Enterprise” (Fig. 6.6), whose humor would perfectly complement verses by Wilhelm Busch, other pictures can hardly be called funny, like the chamois chained to the artificial Alp (Fig. 6.5). This picture nevertheless exerts a great effect on the viewer by forcing eye contact with the animal, creating a specific proximity between the two species that pictures can mediate better than text. For this example it might be helpful to borrow Wolfgang Iser’s concept of the implied reader to examine the picture’s effect on its implied viewer.42 The latter is tempted to read the animal’s face, but he will not be successful, since the strength of its gaze lies in its suggestiveness. This caricature contains a strong critique, but its complexity might be a hindrance for a great part of its contemporary audience—all the more so given that complexity reduces the entertainment factor for those who do not want to have to think too hard about a joke. Furthermore, caricatures vary in the strictness, resoluteness, and explicitness of their judgments. The critique is most explicit in the two caricatures dealing with forest clear-cutting. The judgment in “Deforested!” (Fig. 6.1) (in contrast to “A Farewell from the Forest,” Fig. 6.2) is relatively mild. Deploring a practice that had been criticized for quite some time when the caricature appeared, its humor predominantly relies upon verbal wit and sarcasm whose tone guarantees that the hunter’s utterance is understood as a critique. The difference between sarcasm and irony becomes clear when we look at “New Enterprise” (Fig. 6.6), whose text is entirely ironic, a euphemistic announcement of a ludicrous enterprise that reacts to humans’ absurd and perilous wishes. When we strip the text of its ironic tone, the author’s judgment of high-spirited society is still evident, whereas judgment is completely left to the reader in “Before/After the Foundation of the Beautification Society” (Fig. 6.3). These two realistic pictures, which are not distorted and barely exaggerated—thus, stylistically not a caricature in the narrow sense—require readers to evaluate the beautification society’s work on their own through a comparison of the pictures. Lastly, caricatures differ in the norm or value system they refer to when it comes to making judgments either implicitly or explicitly. While other nineteenth-century caricatures that show breaches of law (such as poaching and the theft of wood) clearly refer to legal norms, these caricatures of humans’ treatment of nature cannot rely upon precise rules of conduct supported by the majority. Instead, their point of view refers to a morality or ethics—a recognition of nature’s value, its uniqueness and inimitability, and thus the need to consider it worthy 42 Especially for caricatures this has been suggested by Bernard, P. Woschek, Zur Witzigkeit von Karikaturen (Moers: edition aragon, 1991), 33.

146  Readings in the Anthropocene of being protected for its own sake—that in the late nineteenth century still has to be introduced, explained, and fought for in the face of the cultural trends mocked in the caricatures. This ideological horizon of reference is complemented by aesthetic ideals as in the caricatures about the beautification society and the one about the landscapist’s nature painting. Except for the latter, all caricatures discussed communicate and popularize some knowledge about the environment and call attention to its anthropogenic transformation. Being satirical caricatures, their prime concern is making fun of annoying problems, without offering any explicit proposals for sociopolitical reform or individual activism. The main reason for the lack of proposed solutions lies in the genre of caricature itself, which usually only points out an issue. Another reason is the fact that the artists creating them are not ideologically involved, since they professionally create caricatures on a daily basis about all kinds of subjects. Nevertheless, by demonstrating wrong approaches towards nature, these caricatures do implicitly give some indication of better approaches: The ones about forest clear-cutting suggest rethinking current paradigms and practices in forestry; the double picture invites a re-evaluation of the aims and practices of beautification societies; the caricature about the landscapist suggests that we all reconsider our treatment of nature as a subject or mere backdrop; the caricature showing the artificial Alp invites us to reflect upon how we can integrate nature into a modern urban world and appeals for the protection of nature; and finally, the caricature depicting the alpine adventure park recommends experiencing “real” nature instead of imitating and commercializing it. By articulating their cultural critique in a humorous, witty, or artful way, these caricatures succeed in reaching people who would not have read an essay on the same subject published in a scholarly journal. Regardless of whether caricatures might eventually have any long-lasting effects, they are not to be underestimated in their function of calling attention to various environmental transformations, and we can read them as documentations of an early critical consciousness of the Anthropocene.

Bibliography

Avenarius, Ferdinand. “Verschönerungsvereine.” Der Kunstwart: Rundschau über alle Gebiete des Schönen: Monatshefte für Kunst, Literatur und Leben 19.1 (July 1898): 197–201, http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kunstwart11_2/0207 (accessed March 17, 2016). Bölsche, Wilhelm. Erwanderte deutsche Geologie: Die Sächsische Schweiz. Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1925. “Caricatur.” In Allgemeine deutsche Real-Enzyklopädie für gebildete Stände: Conversations-Lexikon, 9th edn, 201–2. Vol. 3 of 15 vols. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1843. Crutzen, Paul Josef. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature 415 (2002): 23.

Mocking the Anthropocene  147 Eichendorff, Joseph von. Gedichte. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997. Hackl, Wolfgang. “‘Sommerfrischler’ und ‘Eingeborene’: Eine kulturgeschichtliche Lektüre des Simplicissimus.” In Gertrud Maria Rösch (ed.), Simplicissimus: Glanz und Elend der Satire in Deutschland, 161–73. Regensburg: Universitätsverlag Regensburg, 1996. Hermand, Jost. “Erst die Bäume, dann wir! Proteste gegen das Abholzen der deutschen Wälder 1780–1950.” In Jost Hermand (ed.), Mit den Bäumen sterben die Menschen: Zur Kulturgeschichte der Ökologie, 1–24. Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 1993. Hofmann, Werner. Die Karikatur: Von Leonardo bis Picasso, 2nd edn. Hamburg: EVA Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2007. Krug, Wilhelm Traugott. Handbuch der Philosophie und der philosophischen Literatur in zwei Bänden. 2 vols. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1820–1. Lekan, Thomas M. Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon: Ein Nachschlagewerk des allgemeinen Wissens, 6th edn. 20 vols. Leipzig and Vienna: Bibliographisches Institut, 1902–8. Meyers Konversations-Lexikon: Ein Nachschlagewerk des allgemeinen Wissens, 5th edn. 17 vols. Leipzig and Vienna: Bibliographisches Institut, 1893–7. Radkau, Joachim. “Holzverknappung und Krisenbewusstsein im 18. Jahrhundert.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 9 (1983): 513–43. Radkau, Joachim. Die Ära der Ökologie: Eine Weltgeschichte. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2011. Richter, Frank. Nationalpark Sächsische Schweiz: Von der Idee zur Wirklichkeit. Dresden: Eigenverlag Nationalparkregion Sächsische Schweiz, 1991. Rudorff, Ernst. “Über das Verhältnis des modernen Lebens zur Natur.” Preußische Jahrbücher 45 (1880): 261–77. “Satire.” In Allgemeine deutsche Real-Enzyklopädie für gebildete Stände: ConversationsLexikon, 557–8. Vol. 12 of 15 vols. 9th edn. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1847. Schultze-Naumburg, Paul. Die Entstellung unseres Landes, 2nd edn. Munich: Kastner & Callwey, 1908. Schultze-Naumburg, Paul. Die Gestaltung der Landschaft durch den Menschen. Vols 7–9, Kulturarbeiten, 3rd edn. Munich: Georg D. W. Callwey Verlag, 1916–17. Stöber, Rudolf. Deutsche Pressegeschichte: Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, 2nd edn. Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2005. Vetter-Liebenow, Gisela, ed. Zwischen Kaiserwetter und Donnergrollen: Die wilhelminische Epoche im Spiegel des Simplicissimus von 1896 bis 1914. Hannover: Wilhelm-Busch-Gesellschaft e.V., 2013. Woschek, Bernard P. Zur Witzigkeit von Karikaturen. Moers: edition aragon, 1991. Zimdars, Hasso. Die Zeitschrift Simplicissimus: Ihre Karikaturen. PhD thesis, Universität Bonn, 1972.

Seven The Darkness of the Anthropocene: Wolfgang Hilbig’s Alte Abdeckerei

Sabine Nöllgen

In Wolfgang Hilbig’s prose text Alte Abdeckerei, first published in 1991, a teenage first-person narrator relates in one long stream of consciousness how he frequently escapes an oppressive domestic situation and goes wandering through a deserted industrial area on the outskirts of his hometown. “Absorbed in the obsession of a child’s games of hunting and combat” (inmitten der versunkenen Besessenheiten kindlicher Jagden und Gefechtsspiele),1 “the ruined industrial parks” become his “playground” (der zerstörten Industrieanlagen, die meine Spielplätze waren);2 as he moves through “stretches of fallow land” (Brachflächen),3 enveloped in “the haze of ever-gloomier” autumn days (Dunst der immer trüberen Tage),4 he encounters a number of perplexing natural and built landmarks. Occupying “the lowest point of the hollow” (den tiefsten Grund der Senke)5 is an old water mill, a place banned by the adults, as “everyone had different stories to tell of the dangers of getting too close to the mill” (Von jedermann waren andere Geschichten zu hören, die davon abrieten, der Mühle zu nahe zu kommen).6 The mill sits adjacent to a “strangely shimmering” (seltsam schimmerndes),7 formerly clean waterway (ein 1 Wolfgang Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, trans. Steve Lake and Caroline Mähl, with Steven Lindberg and Sebastian Thomas, Grand Street 48 (1994): 85; Wolfgang Hilbig, Alte Abdeckerei (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1991), 15. 2 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 84; Abdeckerei, 16. 3 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 81; Abdeckerei, 7. 4 Ibid. 5 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 86; Abdeckerei, 19. 6 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 87; Abdeckerei, 21. 7 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 81; Abdeckerei, 7.

The Darkness of the Anthropocene  149 vordem sauberer Fluss),8 now a repugnant sewer (Kanal für undefinierbare Abwässer),9 the disgusting smell and awkward consistency of which can be traced to the eponymous boneyard that sits in the grounds of the former industrial site of a factory that bears the conspicuous name Germania II. The industrial past of the otherworldly terrain with the old boneyard at its center appears to have led to a state of environmental degradation that goes beyond a general lack of healthy plant life (völlig brach und wüst).10 Everywhere the vegetation appears to be harmed and destroyed beyond any hope of recovery; due to its “fatigue and perpetual grief” (Müdigkeit und beständiger Trauer),11 the body of standing water near the old boneyard has begun to absorb poison and waste. It has grown into a zone of repugnancy (wo der Aussatz der Stadt blühte).12 Metaphors of disease (Aussatz) abound and point to the pathological consequences of industrialization out of control (Metastasen der Industrie).13 The “insistence” with which Wolfgang Hilbig has treated the industrial landscapes of the former GDR in his literary oeuvre has caught the attention of a number of scholars, most importantly Erk Grimm.14 Hilbig has been typically dealt with as a “GDR-writer” despite his unwillingness to follow the Bitterfelder Weg.15 Moreover, his texts’ tendencies to give voice to taboos in East Germany meant that very few of them could be published in the East and were never really considered “GDR literature.”16 Especially in German scholarship, the 8 Hilbig, Abdeckerei, 73. Non-paginated English quotes for the text are courtesy of Robin Ellis (Davidson College) who translated select passages of Knacker’s Yard from the second half of the story, for which there is no published translation as of yet. 9 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 81; Abdeckerei, 73. 10 Hilbig, Abdeckerei, 62. 11 Ibid., 88. 12 Ibid., 66. 13 Ibid. 14 In “Im Abraum der Städte,” Grimm discusses “die Insistenz, mit der Hilbig innerhalb seiner Prosatexte die industrielle Landschaft der ehemaligen DDR behandelt.” See Erk Grimm, “Im Abraum der Städte. Wolfgang Hilbigs topographische ‘Ich’-Erkundung,” in H. L. Arnold (ed.), Wolfgang Hilbig (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1994), 64. 15 Bitterfelder Weg refers to the Communist Party’s attempt to involve authors in projects oriented towards the new reality of socialism. Promoted during two conferences (1959 and 1964) held in the industrial city of Bitterfeld, this political-aesthetic program encouraged artists to work in factories and, at the same time, called upon workers to become cultural producers. 16 Today, the author Hilbig is not widely known among readers and scholars in German Studies, but is cherished among a smaller circle of fans and admirers, for whom the S. Fischer Verlag more recently republished some of Hilbig’s

150  Readings in the Anthropocene fascination the author radiated—Hilbig suffered from alcoholism and led a life on the edge—frequently resulted in his works being reduced to their biographical essence and to an analytical approach described by Heribert Tommek as “overly empathetic.”17 Such biographical readings were further encouraged by the fact that the first-person narrative voice is predominant in Hilbig’s prose, as a consequence of which scholars and critics have frequently read his prose as statements that bear witness to personal or regional experiences.18 Consequently, the profoundly degraded environments in Hilbig’s poetry and prose have mainly received attention as autobiographic “landscapes of the soul” (Seelenlandschaften) or irrecoverably “injured” landscapes that primarily point to the author’s injured self.19 In the context of the Anthropocene, I propose renewed attention to Hilbig’s “insistence” on the GDR’s industrial demise. While the planet’s environment remained surprisingly stable during the Holocene, which means for the past 10,000 years, this stability now seems to be in question: as atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, along with chemist Will Steffen and environmental historian John R. McNeill, suggested in 2007, for the first time in geological and environmental history, human forces have become so pervasive and profound that they have to be acknowledged as the most important power in nature. For this new geological era, Crutzen, Steffen, and McNeal coined the term Anthropocene: future geologists, these scientists argue, will be able to distinguish new geological layers unambiguously from previous ones, as the concentration of carbon dioxide, heavy metals, radioactive isotopes, and persistent hazardous chemicals in the environment is dramatically increasing. Christian Schwägerl terms this new geological era the “toxic Anthropocene” (toxisches Anthropozän)20 and characterizes it further as an age marked by excessive atmospheric aerosol loading, leading to incalculable climate change and, therefore, another level of profound destabilization. In the current Anthropocene discourse, a wide range of debates come together from questions about the cultural implications of this major texts with commentaries by well-known contemporary writers such as Ingo Schulze and Katja Lange-Müller. 17 Heribert Tommek, “Teilnehmende Beobachtung: Ein neues Autorenporträt von Wolfgang Hilbig,” http://www.iaslonline.lmu.de/index.php?vorgang_ id=3490 (accessed March 17, 2016). 18 See Tommek, “Teilnehmende Beobachtung.” 19 See, for example, Ralph Rainer Wuthenow, “Verwerfungen, Verwesungen. Zur Prosa von Wolfgang Hilbig,” in H. L. Arnold (ed.), Wolfgang Hilbig (Munich: edition text+kritik, 1994), 28–36. 20 Christian Schwägerl, Menschenzeit: Zerstören oder gestalten? Die entscheidende Epoche unseres Planeten (Munich: Riemann, 2010), 299.

The Darkness of the Anthropocene  151 new geological era to questions of what future life on Earth will look like. For a number of reasons, Alte Abdeckerei constitutes a primary example of a literary contribution to these debates. In Hilbig’s oeuvre, Alte Abdeckerei, partially translated into English in 1994 as Knacker’s Yard, stands out as one of his most notable, complex, and poetically dense works. As I propose, Alte Abdeckerei aesthetically responds to the excessive combustion of fossil fuels that is characteristic of the Anthropocene by employing “toxic discourse,” a term coined by Lawrence Buell in his ground-breaking 1998 essay, which refers to a discourse of environmental poisoning, the main characteristic of which is the Gothic mode. Thus, Alte Abdeckerei poetically negotiates the Anthropocene as an age of darkness, both on a metaphorical level and as a reference to the very real environmental practices of our time. With my analysis, I intend to strengthen Karen Thornber’s observation that stories are significant in constructing our relationships with our surroundings and can complement if not surpass data in terms of the “capacity to awaken, reinforce, and redirect environmental concern.”21 For his frequent excursions to “the other side of town” (nach der anderen Seite der Stadt),22 the teenage first-person narrator in Alte Abdeckerei prefers the onset of darkness that comes with dusk. These hours of the day exert an attraction he cannot relate to the adults: “How could I have explained convincingly that I could not renounce the experience of that hour from which I usually felt banished: the hour of transition, when the limitlessness that preceded the coming of night reigned.”23 Despite its attraction, the darkness frequently spooks him: “When darkness fell, I began to reckon with horrors” (wenn es dunkel wurde, began ich mit einem Schrecken zu rechnen).24 Consistently, the text draws from the symbolic and metaphorical value of darkness as the antithesis of life and light, at times crossing the border to the genre of the horror story: “I did not want to miss that hour when unknown and supposedly dead crept out under cover of shadow … the hour of concealing shadows lurking in the sepulcher of night, the hour when the disappeared began their day.”25 Here and elsewhere in the 21 Karen Laura Thornber, Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 5. 22 Hilbig, Abdeckerei, 72. 23 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 91. “Wie auch nur hätte ich begreiflich davon sprechen sollen, dass ich auf das Erlebnis jener Stunde nicht verzichten konnte, von der ich mich am meisten gebannt fühlte: auf die Stunde des Übergangs, auf die des Waltens jener Grenzenlosigkeit, die dem Einbruch der Nacht vorausging.”Abdeckerei, 30. 24 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 81; Abdeckerei, 7. 25 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 91. “[N]icht missen wollte ich die Stunde, da unbekanntes und totgesagtes Leben auskroch im Schutz der Schatten … in der Stunde der

152  Readings in the Anthropocene text, darkness functions as a metaphor for the hidden, unconscious, potentially dangerous, the overall eeriness further enhanced by the old industrial site’s conspicuous landmarks, most importantly, the old water mill. It is reminiscent of ghost and criminal stories of the romantic period, in which the mill, because of its out-of-the-way location, served as a popular literary device.26 The only inhabitants of “the other side of town”27 appear to be hiding in the old mill: “foreigners” who “had settled on the abandoned property, people from Eastern Europe who had survived the war” (Leute aus Osteuropa, die hier den Krieg überstanden hätten).28 Taken together, time, setting, and characters make for an uncanny atmosphere in Hilbig’s story. The eeriness of the abandoned industrial terrain appears to be closely connected with its industrial past, as a consequence of which the intermittently wooded surface was undercut by an endlessly branching system of no-longer functioning mines, so that broad expanses had been deemed non-arable and—apart from a number of abandoned industrial ruins, pointing toward the sky like storm-beaten rocky islands—lay utterly fallow and desolate.29 Here, the “abandoned industrial ruins” evoke the first line of the former GDR’s national anthem, “Auferstanden aus Ruinen,” and thus comment on the socialist state’s proclamation of post-World War II reconstruction, which, despite all propaganda measures, profoundly failed. As “storm-beaten rocky islands,” they evoke Arnold Böcklin’s desolate islet in a series of paintings titled Die Toteninsel: with its precipitous cliffs set against an expanse of dark water, Böcklin’s images of a rocky island are symbolic of desolation and oncoming death. In addition, an “endlessly branching system of no-longer functioning mines,” seemingly out of proportion, points to a “monstrously enlarged underworld” (monströs vergrößerte Unterwelt) that is not only a common topographical element in Hilbig’s prose but also its most conspicuous verschleiernden Schatten, die sich im Grab der Nacht bargen, und in der Stunde, da die Verschwundnen ihren Tag begannen.” Abdeckerei, 31. 26 See, for example, Clemens Brentano’s The Story of Just Casper and Fair Annie, first published in 1817. 27 Hilbig, Abdeckerei, 72. 28 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 87; Abdeckerei, 21. 29 “Das Unheimliche dieser Gegend bestand darin, dass ihre in Abständen bewaldete Fläche von einem unabsehbar verzweigten System nicht mehr arbeitender Bergwerke unterhöhlt war, so dass hier weite Gebiete für unbebaubar galten und—abgesehen von einer Anzahl verlassener Industrieruinen, die wie sturmverfallene Felseninseln gen Himmel zeigten—völlig brach und wüst lagen.” Hilbig, Abdeckerei, 62.

The Darkness of the Anthropocene  153 one, as Grimm points out.30 This endless network of shafts and tunnels underground (nicht enden wollende Keller, in denen sich das Geräusch meiner Schritte endlos fortsetzte)31 hollows out the terrain, resulting in acoustic repercussions of one’s steps that lead to profound disorientation. Consequently, to the wandering teenager, the sensation is that the ground he walks on appears to be constantly shifting. At times, he believes he is “walking on ash; underneath me sand and gravel, in some places almost scree, demolished and scorched concrete, on which my steps produced a sharp noise, not sharp, dull and resounding, as if I were entering spacious vaults.”32 Here, the narrator’s auditory sensations appear to be incoherent. The noise he perceives appears to be first “sharp,” then “not sharp”; furthermore, he repeatedly corrects himself when referring to the material he puts his feet on—material that alternately feels like “ash,” “sand,” “gravel,” “scree,” and “concrete.” His perceptions appear to shift as he walks on what is by no means “firm subsoil … perhaps one could not even describe it as earth, this substance on which I placed my feet that crumbled beneath my step and sometimes, deep down, seemed to sigh with a hollow reverberation.”33 Both the physical hollowness and its auditory effect evoke the ruined abbeys and castles with their network of trapdoors, underground dungeons, stairs, and secret passages prominent in Gothic fiction. But while chase and escape through passageways below the surface serve as common plot elements in the Gothic genre, in Alte Abdeckerei it is the navigation above ground that causes the protagonist feelings of fear and dread. Path-finding unavoidably appears to come with a profound lack of steady footing and sensory disorientation on multiple levels. Central to the state of degeneration on “the other side of town” (der anderen Seite der Stadt)34 is the morbidity of all plant life. Adjacent to the old water mill is a stream that winds through the eerie landscape “like the bluish blade of a long, straight knife slicing the land in two, 30 In “Im Abraum der Städte,” Grimm discusses the “monströs vergrößerte Unterwelt aus Kellern, Kanälen und Kesselhäusern” that can be called “eines der auffälligsten Kennzeichen der Prosa Hilbigs.” Grimm, “Abraum der Städte,” 62. 31 Hilbig, Abdeckerei, 100. 32 “[A]uf Asche zu gehen; Sand und Kies waren unter mir, mancherorts fast Geröll, zertrümmerter verbrannter Beton, auf dem meine Schritte einen scharfen Lärm erzeugten, nicht scharf, stumpf und widerhallend, als ginge ich in geräumige Wölbungen hinein.” Hilbig, Abdeckerei, 97. 33 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 94–5. “[K]eineswegs war es fester Untergrund … und es war vielleicht nicht einmal Erde zu nennen, worauf ich die Füße setzte, diese Materie, die sich da unter meinem Schritt krümmte und manchmal mit hohlem Widerhall in der Tiefe zu seufzen schien.” Abdeckerei, 39. 34 Hilbig, Abdeckerei, 72.

154  Readings in the Anthropocene and it seemed as if one could see the long wound still steaming.”35 The degenerated vegetative life at the riverside shows symptoms of modern, industrial agriculture: what grows here is “overfertilized,” “overrefined,” and “morbidly overfed,”36 resembling plants in largescale monocultures which rely on the excessive use of pesticides and fertilizer and, increasingly so, the use of genetic manipulation. Corresponding with such practices of technological and chemical excess is the overabundance of morbid imagery in Alte Abdeckerei: while still taking semi-natural forms, the abnormal has become a characteristic of all plant life, resulting in large-scale degeneration. The lack of light that comes with the onset of darkness at dusk—the narrator’s preferred hours of wandering—further exaggerates the abnormalities: I believed I saw the willows mutating with unprecedented savagery: at dusk, when the fog crept up even thicker from the riverbanks, they seemed transformed into fantastic creatures, monstrous products of an unpredictably fertile subsoil, ugly and crippled outgrowths whose degeneration had endowed them with a malevolent power.37 Due to the lack of daylight, the trees growing at the riverside appear so “crippled”38 and grotesque that they can no longer be identified as plants; rather, they resemble “invalids who, creaking and gray from their very cunning, scuttle through tales of horror” (Invaliden, die knirschend und grau vor Verschlagenheit durch Schauergeschichten tappten)39 or even “monstrous creatures” (monströsen Lebewesen) long thought extinct.40 What significantly adds to the spookiness of the scene is the fact that these creatures are mobile. They seemed “forever ready to haul their roots like worms from the mud, taking up their unsteady foothold to walk on tangled claws along the course of the water that 35 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 81. “[O]ft glich es der bläulichen Klinge eines langen geraden Messers, das durch entzweigeschnittenes Gelände fuhr, man meinte die langgezogene Wunde noch dampfen zu sehen.” Abdeckerei, 7. 36 “Während mir aller übrige Pflanzenwuchs längs des Gewässers einen krankhaft übersättigten Eindruck machte—alle Vegetation erschien mir feist und phlegmatisch, überdüngt und überzüchtet.” Hilbig, Abdeckerei, 47–8. 37 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 98. “… glaubte ich die Weiden zu niegekannter Wildheit ausarten zu sehen: in der Dämmerung, wenn der Nebel immer dichter vom Ufer heraufkroch, schienen sie in phantastische Lebewesen verwandelt, Ausgeburten eines unberechenbar fruchtbaren Untergrunds, hässlich verkrüppelte Auswüchse, denen gerade Dank ihrer Degeneration Macht und Bosheit zugefallen war.” Abdeckerei, 47–8. 38 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 98. 39 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 99; Abdeckerei, 48 40 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 99; Abdeckerei, 49.

The Darkness of the Anthropocene  155 was both their nourishment and their undoing.”41 As crippled, yet wandering invalids, the disfigured willow trees add to the narrator’s feeling of dread during his excursions to “the other side of town” (nach der anderen Seite der Stadt), a phrasing that deliberately evokes the title of Alfred Kubin’s fantastic 1909 novel, Die andere Seite (The Other Side), set in a world of decay and doom that closely mirrors the horror and morbidity of the old boneyard. Besides the general lack of light during the narrator’s excursions, the omnipresent aerosols further exaggerate both the pathology of plant life and the overall eeriness of the terrain. As the narrator walks with increasing haste, “a strange, pale gray haze envelops” him, “a sweet-tasting breath that parched my throat, seemed to hamper my stride, and lay heavily on my face and limbs.”42 This abnormally poor visibility is caused by a haze that affects the narrator physically, and further adds to his state of disorientation when walking on hollow ground. In order to show how Alte Abdeckerei becomes linguistically hyperbolic when referring to this conspicuous haze, I will quote only a segment of one excessively long sentence: The slope of the riverbank invisible before me: fog-shrouded mirage and confused purling … but then, again, level ground, crusted surfaces cracking under my feet, coagulated and already on the verge of turning into dust … into a strange kind of snow … strange snow that whirled up, stinging, and I blew my nose with a loud echo, stumbling on, rushed … now I saw a fluff on the ground, gray-white and powdery, a loose sediment that had settled softly in the hollows and flew up when I jumped over it, with a single, horrified leap I would not consider again … echoed loudly, resounding far in front of me, far in front of me somebody heard it, deposits from the fog floating over the course of the river, whirls of strange dust or flour, spilling from the misty cauldron of the water, settling as bright precipitation among the blades of grass; and I stirred it up as I walked, faster, to pass through the fog that swallowed a long, dark shadow in front of me, causing the dust to swirl … a spray flew at me, a trickle, shimmering like the light mists of the sheets in the blurred bedroom, an 41 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 98–9. “[I]mmerfort schienen sie bereit, die Wurzeln, von denen sie mit wenig Verläßlichkeit gehalten wurden, wie Gewürm aus dem Schlamm zu ziehen, um wirr und vielfüßig zu wandeln, dem Lauf der Wasser nach die ihnen Nahrung und Tod zugleich waren.”Abdeckerei, 48. 42 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 83. “[I]ch wusste, während ich weiter hastete, dass ein sonderbarer hellgrauer Dunst mich einhüllte, ein süßschmeckender Atem, er trocknete mir die Rachenhöhle aus, schien meinen Schritt zu hemmen und lag mir schwer auf Gesicht und Gliedern.” Abdeckerei, 11.

156  Readings in the Anthropocene overpowering, sweet-tasting purling, the taste of the evil smells of dusk, flying clouds like milky gas, striking the eardrums of my consciousness with a dull thud … until, all of a sudden, I was empty, and a figure moved ahead of me, ghostly as the condensed fog I swallowed, a figure I saw hurriedly fleeing along the river meadows, plunging into the hard shadow of the embankment, where it disappeared.43 Again, the reader is confronted with a plethora of nominal denotations. Due to the large numbers of nouns used, the description of the phenomena appears tentative: “dust,” “strange kind of snow,” “fluff,” “loose sediment,” “deposits from the fog,” “strange … flour,” and “spray” all refer to an excess of particulate matter in the air and on the ground. As the narrator tastes “the evil smells of dusk” (Geschmack der übelriechenden Dämmerung), a visual phenomenon (“dusk”) becomes an olfactory (“evil smells”) as well as a gustatory sensation. The same is true for the “overpowering, sweet-tasting purling” (betäubenden süßschmeckenden Rieseln): the tactile-visual sensation of “purling” is perceived as both sound and taste. As sensations “strike” the “eardrums” of his “consciousness with a dull thud” (dumpf wie Trommelfelle meines Bewusstseins attackierend),44 the narrator can no longer reliably classify them; the “tricks of the senses” (Täuschungen der Sinne)45 he perceives are further radicalized. Furthermore, the sheer length of the sentences and the ensuing breathlessness of the narration point to an overstimulation of the senses. The fact that sentences in Alte Abdeckerei never seem able to end correlates with environmental conditions in which neither the discourse nor the state of toxicity is terminable. As the narrator returns home, aerosols penetrate “all the corners of the apartment” (Substanzen, die in alle Winkel der Wohnung drangen), “coating every object with their sediment” (ihren Bodensatz über alle 43 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 95. “Unsichtbar vor mir der Hang des Ufers: nebelbedeckter Trug und wirres Rieseln … doch dann wieder ebener Boden, Strecken, wo ein Schorf knirschte, geronnen und schon im Begriff, Staub zu werden, sonderbarer Schnee zu werden … zu sonderbarem Schnee sterben, den ich aufwirbelte, beißend, und ich schneuzte mich laut und hallend, und stolperte weiter, eilig … nun sah ich Flaum am Boden, grauweiß und pulvrig, ein lockerer Bodensatz, der sich weich in die Mulden gesetzt hatte, aufstiebend, wenn ich darübersetzte … Ablagerungen aus dem Nebel, die über dem Flusslauf wallten, Wirbel von sonderbarem Staub oder Mehl, aus dem Dunstsud der Wasser gemahlen, und wieder gesetzt als heller Niederschlag zwischen den Gräsern: und ich rührte ihn auf, während ich ging, schneller, um durch die Nebel zu kommen, die einen langen dunklen Schatten vor mir verschluckten, der den Staub wirbeln ließ …” Abdeckerei, 40–1. 44 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 95; Abdeckerei, 41. 45 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 90; Abdeckerei, 28.

The Darkness of the Anthropocene  157 Dinge senkten), “like fog, purling from the crevices like armies of ants running over paper” (wie Nebel, und rieselnd aus allen Ritzen kamen, wie Scharen von Ameisen, die über Papier rannten), and “like smoke from the hearths and from the coal like a precipitation of sweat and blood” (die aus den Herdfeuern rauchten wie Gerüche, und aus der Kohle wie Niederschlag von Schweiß und Blut).46 This reference to coal as the origin of the textual atmospheric aerosol loading allows us to anchor Alte Abdeckerei in the very real practices of pollution in the former GDR, a country whose “economic trajectory involved extraordinary ecological strains.”47 From early on, East Germany committed itself to the Soviet model of economic growth through heavy industry.48 Because of the international “oil crisis” in the 1970s, which resulted in decelerated, overpriced oil deliveries, the GDR government felt forced to shift back to the use of lignite in order to cover their energy needs in the early 1980s, subsequently becoming the world leader in the production of industrial waste, specifically sulfur dioxide and ash. Two-thirds of the annual lignite production was combusted in outdated and poorly maintained power plants.49 The remaining third was refined into briquettes. Because low quality coal can contain as much as 3–5 percent sulfur and 25–40 percent ash,50 coal combustion can produce a lot of particulate matter (soot and fly ash) and the toxic gas sulfur dioxide. Soil acidification (Waldsterben), increased rates of bronchitis and allergies, the crumbling of building stock and cultural monuments were all consequences of the emission of toxic by-products of combustion into the air.51 Consequently, the Alte Abdeckerei’s “fog” that creeps into every corner of the apartment and clouds the deformed willows on “the other side” of town does not refer to fog as a weather phenomenon. Rather, it denotes a phenomenon of pollution as expressed in the English word “smog,” formed by combining smoke and fog, the key characteristic of which is “its pervasiveness: one did not simply live with the problem of smoke, 46 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 96; Abdeckerei, 42–3. 47 Frank Uekötter, The Greenest Nation? A New History of German Environmentalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 133. 48 Gerhard Lenz, Verlusterfahrung Landschaft. Über die Herstellung von Raum und Umwelt im mitteldeutschen Industriegebiet seit der Mitte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1999), 157. 49 See Cord Schwartau, “Die Entwicklung der Umwelt in der DDR: Neue Probleme durch Renaissance der Braunkohle,” in Umweltprobleme und Umweltbewußtsein in der DDR, Redaktion Deutschland Archiv (Cologne: Verlag Wirtschaft und Politik, 1985), 9–38. 50 See Vaclac Smil, “Coal,” in Shepard Krech et al. (eds), Encyclopedia of World Environmental History, Vol. 1 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 239–40. 51 Lia Pirskawetz, “Umweltkritische Literatur in der DDR zwischen Totalverbot und Erfolg,” in Pia Pirskawetz (ed.), Literatur und Umwelt (Rostock: Universität Rostock, 1997), 51.

158  Readings in the Anthropocene but literally in it,” as Frank Uekoetter argues with regard to the severe air pollution caused by the incomplete combustion of coal in the late nineteenth century.52 In Alte Abdeckerei, this pervasiveness is poetically realized with a rhetoric that Lawrence Buell calls, in a different context, “toxic discourse’s Gothicism.”53 The overabundance of particulate matter leads to a horror of entrapment constitutive of the story’s literary style and to the collapse of perceptual boundaries: with “the condensed fog” that the narrator “swallowed” (der komprimierte Nebel, den ich schluckte),54 the boundaries of body and environment become profoundly blurred. The narrator increasingly begins to suffer from an “openness and lack of ability to distance himself from the world that surrounds him” (Offenheit und Unabgeschlossenheit des Erzählers zu der ihn umgebenden Welt).55 Such blurring of perceptual boundaries is indicative of an enhanced sensibility to the environment, and has, according to Timothy Morton, “something intrinsically uncanny about it, as if we were seeing something we shouldn’t be seeing, as if we realized we were caught in something.”56 Heightened environmental awareness means gaining the dreadful insight of being irrevocably trapped. A closer investigation of the topographical elements in Alte Abdeckerei reveals additional layers of meaning. On the abandoned industrial site next to the old factory sits an abandoned train station that exists only as a ruin. With Grimm, I read the factory and train station as “icons of urban modernity” that, as ruins, point to modernity’s demise.57 Next to the old mill and Germania II, the most prominent landmark of the built environment is a railroad embankment: At the provisional end of each of my journeys, the embankment of a coal railway-line completely scrambled the parallel lines of the path and the brook and the rows of willows, which had become 52 Frank Ueköttter, The Age of Smoke: Environmental Policy in Germany and the United States, 1880–1970 (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2009), 1. 53 Lawrence Buell, “Toxic Discourse,” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 654. 54 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 95; Abdeckerei, 41. 55 Ingo Schulze, “‘Erzähle, sage ich mir, sonst wird alles ins Vergessen taumeln.’ Nachwort,” in Jörg Bong, Jürgen Hosemann, and Oliver Vogel (eds), Wolfgang Hilbig: Werke, Vol. 3: Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2010), 304–5. 56 Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 58. 57 According to Grimm, “icons of urban modernity” such as the train station or the factory in Hilbig’s prose appear as “signs of demise”: “Die Ikonen der urbanen Modernität, sei es der Bahnhof oder die Fabrik, tauchen auch in Hilbigs Prosa als Zeichen des Niedergangs auf.” Grimm, “Im Abraum der Städte,” 62. Accordingly, Julia Hell states in “Wendebilder” that Hilbig “turns the project of modernity into a landscape of ruins.” Julia Hell, “Wendebilder: Neo Rauch and Wolfgang Hilbig,” Germanic Review 77.4 (2002): 298.

The Darkness of the Anthropocene  159 boring … The path led steeply up the embankment, ending in a kind of plateau, or it ran out into the fragment of a road that, similarly elevated, plunged at a right angle into the railway line. At first glance it looked like indiscriminately disgorged earth, though on closer inspection one could see the ruined fragments of the concrete foundations, which were completely overgrown with shrubs and grass evidently buried under coal freight of overturned dump cars, and mixed with the debris of the crumbled concrete covering: it was apparent that a roadway had been brought up to the tracks: I called this rotting concrete foundation, visibly out of place in this meadowland, the ramp.58 In the quoted passage, the word “ramp” is doubly accentuated: it is set in italics and is the last word in the sentence. This emphasis points to the central role the ramp plays in the textual topography as the terminal of both the railroad line and the railroad embankment as well as the final destination for the dead animal bodies that are unloaded here to be processed into soap and detergent. The cultural connotation of the railway appears as “the first mode of transportation” that allowed the state to “move the masses,” but also to implement mass deportation.59 “We see train tracks somewhere and think of Auschwitz. This will be the case for a long time to come” (Wir sehen irgendwo Eisenbahngleise und denken an Auschwitz. Das wird auf lange Sicht so bleiben), states the German artist Anselm Kiefer with regard to the question of how historical knowledge informs our perception.60 In 58 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 83–4, emphasis by the author. “Am vorläufigen Ende meiner Wanderungen warf der Damm einer Kohlenbahnlinie die schon langweilig gewordenen Parallele von Weg und Bach, mitsamt den Weidenreihen, gründlich durcheinander … Der Weg führte steil den Bahndamm hinauf, oben endete er in einer Art Plateau, oder er lief in das Bruchstück einer Straße aus, welche, ebenfalls erhöht, im rechten Winkel an die Bahnstrecke stieß. Im ersten Augenblick bot sich das Bild einer wahllosen Erdaufschüttung, doch bei genauerem Hinsehen erkannte man die ruinösen Fragmente der Betonfestigung, die völlig verwachsen waren von Gesträuch und Gras, überschüttet offenbar von der Kohlenlast umgestürzter Bahnloren, und durchmischt vom Geröll der zerbröckelten Betondecke; es war zu sehen, dass hier eine Fahrbahn an die Geleise herangeführt worden war: ich nannte dieses in dem Wiesengrund sichtlich deplatziert wirkende und verrottende Betonfundament die Rampe.” Abdeckerei, 13–14. 59 Todd Samuel Presner, Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 3. 60 See Christian Kämmerling and Peter Pursche, “‘Nachts fahre ich mit dem Fahrrad von Bild zu Bild’: Interview mit Anselm Kiefer,” http://www. engramma.it/rivista/saggio/italiano/ottobre02/Kiefer.html (accessed March 17, 2016).

160  Readings in the Anthropocene Alte Abdeckerei, “embankment,” “ramp,” and railroad tracks (Geleise)61 taken together evoke the death camps of the Third Reich, where arriving prisoners were unloaded after being confined in cattle cars for days on end. The name of the former factory, Germania II, pushes this association even further, given that Germania—the national, female personification of the German nation that came to prominence during the nineteenth century—became a popular eponym during the Nazi era. Given the icons of failed modernity that surround it, Germania II clearly evokes the humanitarian catastrophe of the Holocaust and, therefore, the darkest chapter of the German past. From this perspective, the story’s omnipresent aerosols assume an additional metaphorical value. As an end product of both combustion and cremation, ash is both an environmental phenomenon and a trope with multiple, and potentially contradictory, meanings. The symbolic value most prevalent is closely linked to the incineration of millions of dead bodies in the death camps of the Third Reich: ash has become the main symbol of a genocide carried out through the technical means of the industrial age. The Nazi regime’s mass murder was, like other genocides to follow, understood as “ethnic cleansing.” It was not only the first of its kind but it remains up until today the most horrific example of systematic annihilation of a people. The most famous literary text that makes use of this symbolism is Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge,” a poem in which the deaths in the gas chamber and the subsequent incinerations are evoked by the metaphors of the “ashen hair” and the “grave in the air.”62 Witnesses from that time repeatedly tell of the smell that confronted them when getting physically close to the death camps: thick smoke and the sweetish smell of the incinerations necessitated the building of crematories, in order to hide the horrific acts in the concentration camps. Combined with the topographical element of the ramp, the omnipresent “taste of the evil smells of dusk, flying clouds like milky gas” (Geschmack der übelriechenden Dämmerung, stiebende Wolken wie milchfarbenes Gas)63 and the “stinging sweetness of their smell” (die stechende Süße ihres Geruchs) all evoke the horrific acts in the concentration camps and cause the narrator “impenetrable horror” (undurchdringliches Grauen).64 The reader may feel the same. 61 Hilbig, Abdeckerei, 14. 62 See Paul Celan, Ausgewählte Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Suhrkamp, 1981), 18–19. The themes of the Todesfuge have been a preoccupation of Kiefer. As a response to Celan’s poem in the 1980s, he created a series of paintings that visualize ash in a number of ways, of which “Margarete” (1981) is the concluding work. See Andréa Lauterwein, Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan: Myth, Mourning and Memory (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007). 63 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 95; Abdeckerei, 41. 64 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 94; Abdeckerei, 38.

The Darkness of the Anthropocene  161 The remains of organic material in the stream’s “milky waters” (milchfarbenen Flut)65 line up metaphorically with the topographical elements of the ramp and the railroad tracks, as well as the ash in the air. Once again, environmental phenomena, such as the stream’s repulsive “stench” (Gestank),66 become pieces of circumstantial evidence for destructive human action. In the description of the remains of the dead animal bodies processed into soap in the old boneyard, we also read about the “tallow” that covers “the tangle of blades on the brook’s edge” (Talg bedeckte das Halmgewirr am Bachrand), the “age-old fat” that clings “irremovably to the slopes of the banks” (uraltes Fett saß untilgbar auf den Hängen der Böschung), “the decoction of rancid bacon” (der Absud von ranzigem Speck), as well as “boiled-down horn” (ausgekochtes Horn).67 All these details evoke the historically accurate processing of human body parts into soap that took place in the death camps of the Third Reich. Meanwhile, the small stream has turned into “warm soapsuds” (warmer Seifenlauge vergleichbar),68 a “puree of organic scraps” (Brei von organischen Resten), “hardly neutralized by soaps whose stifling glycerine solutions seemed to speed unduly the flow of the almost simmering water” (Seifen, deren stickige Glyzerinlösungen den Lauf des beinahe siedenden Gewässers über Gebühr zu beschleunigen schienen).69 The multiple by-products of the soap-making process have created an ecological nightmare. The dead animal bodies that are unloaded at the ramp evoke the corpses of the murdered victims of the Holocaust, whose further processing into soap, as well as the incineration of these corpses, was made possible through the use of the natural resource coal.70 Metaphors of darkness abound as the age of darkness proceeds, set in motion by the excessive use of this fossil fuel. While it starts out as a story that makes frequent use of Gothic elements such as the conspicuous landmarks of the old water mill, the ruins, the mysterious underworld, as well as the omnipresence of fog and darkness, Alte Abdeckerei increasingly employs “the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal”: the eco-apocalypse.71 In a monstrous 65 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 97; Abdeckerei, 45. 66 Ibid. 67 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 97–8; Abdeckerei, 46. 68 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 97; Abdeckerei, 45–6. 69 Hilbig, Knacker’s Yard, 98; Abdeckerei, 47. 70 Jean-Claude Pressac shows in detail to what degree the technique of mass murder relied on the use of coal. See Jean-Claude Pressac, Die Krematorien von Auschwitz. Die Technik des Massenmordes, trans. Eliane Hagedorn and Barbara Reitz (Munich: Piper, 1993). 71 Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1995), 285.

162  Readings in the Anthropocene the-planet-strikes-back scenario, the center of the old, industrial terrain (and all human existence it seems) is swallowed up by an angry planet Earth. The term “apocalyptic” applies to this scenario for two reasons. First, the text negotiates a being thrown into a catastrophic situation and the possibility of survival. Second, it makes use of religious language, prophecy, and radicalism—all characteristics of the apocalyptic discourse that differentiate it from other discourses of crises and catastrophes.72 As a sinkhole opens up behind the Germania II factory, Earth divests itself of all industrial facilities, with “blaze and steam” (Glut und Dampf), “boiling rocks” (kochendes Gestein), “flaming ash” (flammende Asche),73 and “scorched grasses and bushes” (vom sengenden Hauch rasierten Gräser und Büsche),74 all evoking a volcanic eruption that, as a natural catastrophe, in the biblical Book of Revelation lends its imagery to the poetic configuration of mankind’s punishment by God. The predominant fire imagery in the final section of Alte Abdeckerei further makes reference to the environmental turning point that the age of industrialization constitutes, having set the very extraction and combustion of fossil fuels in motion that continues to this day to release excessive amounts of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. The by-products of fossil fuel combustion, these chemical compounds significantly contribute to what now appears as global climate change with its range of incalculable effects. Today, climate change is considered one of the primary indicators of the Anthropocene, and the image of the “burning planet” in Alte Abdeckerei serves as the main metaphor for this new chapter in Earth’s geophysical history. In the final section of Alte Abdeckerei, the biblical fire imagery accentuates the “shrill apocalypticism of antitoxic advocacy”75 in a literary configuration of the imminent end of world and civilization, which humankind has brought onto itself because of its own insatiability: “It was as if the Earth, rearing up, had catapulted itself with a last desperate grasp of servile forbearance, and had bitten out and devoured the smoldering ulcer on its skin.”76 Here, the narrator employs a concept essential to the Gaia hypothesis: the view of the 72 See Ansgar Weymann, “Gesellschaft und Apokalypse,” in Alexander Nagel, Bernd Ulrich Schipper, and Ansgar Weymann (eds), Apokalypse: Zur Soziologie und Geschichte religiöser Krisenrhetorik, 13–48, 15 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2008. 73 Hilbig, Abdeckerei, 103. 74 Ibid., 104. 75 Buell, “Toxic Discourse,” 622. 76 “Es war, als ob sich die Erde selbst, in einem Aufbäumen, mit letztem verzweifelten Zugriff aus hündischer Langmut katapultiert hatte, und sie hatte das auf ihrer Haut glimmende Geschwür zerbissen und gefressen.” Hilbig, Abdeckerei, 105.

The Darkness of the Anthropocene  163 planet’s surface as skin. According to this axiom, the surface of planet Earth, seen as a great organism, has a regulating function meant to secure homeostasis. Just as human skin serves as a barrier between inside and outside and as a protection from exterior factors and environmental influences, the Gaia principle projects the planet’s skin as a vulnerable tissue that can be abraded by farming or poisoned by pollution.77 In Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus spoke Zarathustra), Friedrich Nietzsche anticipates this image of the planet’s skin being severely hurt and harmed by human action: “The earth has a skin and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man” (Die Erde hat eine Haut; und diese Haut hat Krankheiten. Eine dieser Krankheiten heißt zum Beispiel:‘Mensch’).78 In Alte Abdeckerei, the respective disease has turned into an open ulcer (glimmendes Geschwür),79 manifesting yet another symptom of industrialization out of control. The post-apocalyptic water landscape in the wake of Germania II’s collapse and subsequent sinking points to the apocalypse’s redemptive potential. The former shafts of the mining site become fish catacombs (Fischkatakomben); coal seams turn into coral reefs (Korallenbänke).80 The old industrial site with the boneyard as its center becomes a fantastical underwater world. The scene evokes the water landscapes that now occupy most of East Germany’s former opencast lignite mining sites after they were fully exhausted: today, coal pits have been replaced by lakes.81 Contrary to the poisoned, repugnant waterways in the vicinity of the old boneyard, the post-apocalyptic underwater world that comes into existence in the wake of the cleansing flood (Flut)82 teems with aquatic life, bringing about a world of “Oystrygods gaggin fishygods” (the rivaling oyster gods and fish gods) evoked in this cryptic quote from Finnegan’s Wake in one of the epigraphs to Alte Abdeckerei. Past the ruins of Germania II “where the signs of the zodiac play, where minotaurs are grazing” (wo in der Flut die Sternbilder spielen, wo die Minotauren weiden),83 a proto-mythical world emerges. This world appears to be devoid of any human life: a World without Us in the wake of the very sudden and complete disappearance of the planet’s 77 James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 2. The narrator mentions “Gaia, the mother” (Gaia, die Mutter) on page 93 of Alte Abdeckerei. 78 Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra II, in Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (eds), Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, Vol. 4 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980), 168. 79 Hilbig, Abdeckerei, 105. 80 Ibid., 115. 81 Lenz, Verlusterfahrung Landschaft, 202. 82 Hilbig, Abdeckerei, 117. 83 Ibid., 116–17.

164  Readings in the Anthropocene keystone species, the human being.84 While Alte Abdeckerei’s firstperson perspective dissolves into a third-person narration, mere poetic wordplay and mythical images replace the former interminable toxic discourse. Just as the human species has been extinguished from Earth, the correlation of language and reality also begins to dissolve. To conclude, Alte Abdeckerei presents the altered conditions in the Anthropocene as an era of darkness on a number of levels. It tells a story of perceptual disorientation caused by excessive atmospheric aerosol loading. It is also the story of the aftermath of a “burning planet” and the horror of pollution in the shadow of the horrific crimes committed during the Holocaust. Therefore, Hilbig’s most notable prose text not only responds aesthetically to the Anthropocene as an age of excess, an age of toxic disruptions, and an age of profound environmental destabilization, but also anticipates a debate discarded by some as inappropriate and merely provocative, namely, the parallelization of genocide and ecocide. As the planet Gaia strikes back to allow for a new beginning, the collapse of Germania II becomes an overdue act of cleansing and the only escape from a state of pollution out of control. Consequently, only in a “world without us” can the encompassing degradation of our planet be reversed—the return to a pre-modern, mythical condition ecologically undisturbed by the presence of humans.

Bibliography

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 1995. Buell, Lawrence. “Toxic Discourse.” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 639–65. Celan, Paul. Ausgewählte Gedichte. Frankfurt am Main: Edition Suhrkamp, 1981. Grimm, Erk. “Im Abraum der Städte: Wolfgang Hilbigs topographische ‘Ich’-Erkundung.” In H. L. Arnold (ed.), Wolfgang Hilbig, 62–74. Munich: edition text + kritik, 1994. Hell, Julia. “Wendebilder: Neo Rauch and Wolfgang Hilbig.” Germanic Review 77.4 (2002): 279–303. Hilbig, Wolfgang. Alte Abdeckerei. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1991. Hilbig, Wolfgang. “Knacker’s Yard.” Translated by Steve Lake and Caroline Mähl, with Steven Lindberg and Sebastian Thomas. Grand Street 48 (1994): 81–99. Kämmerling, Christian and Peter Pursche. “‘Nachts fahre ich mit dem Fahrrad von Bild zu Bild’: Interview mit Anselm Kiefer,” http://www.engramma.it/ rivista/saggio/italiano/ottobre02/Kiefer.html (accessed March 17, 2016). Lenz, Gerhard. Verlusterfahrung Landschaft: Über die Herstellung von Raum

84 For the term “keystone species,” see Alan Weisman, The World without Us (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007), 82. I employ the title of Weisman’s nonfiction book here as a pointed reference to his convincing thought experiment about the mark humankind will leave on Earth in case of its, however unlikely, overnight disappearance from the planet.

The Darkness of the Anthropocene  165 und Umwelt im mitteldeutschen Industriegebiet seit der Mitte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1999. Lovelock, James. The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity. New York: Basic Books, 2006. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Also sprach Zarathustra II. In Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (eds), Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, Vol. 4, 103–90. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980. Pirskawetz, Lia. “Umweltkritische Literatur in der DDR zwischen Totalverbot und Erfolg.” In Pia Pirskawetz (ed.), Literatur und Umwelt, 45–76. Rostock: Universität Rostock, 1997. Presner, Todd Samuel. Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Pressac, Jean-Claude. Die Krematorien von Auschwitz: Die Technik des Massenmordes. Translated by Eliane Hagedorn and Barbara Reitz. Munich: Piper, 1993. Schulze, Ingo. “‘Erzähle, sage ich mir, sonst wird alles ins Vergessen taumeln.’ Nachwort.” In Jörg Bong, Jürgen Hosemann, and Oliver Vogel (eds), Wolfgang Hilbig: Werke, Vol. 3: Erzählungen, 283–346. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2010. Schwägerl, Christian. Menschenzeit: Zerstören oder gestalten? Die entscheidende Epoche unseres Planeten. Munich: Riemann Verlag, 2010. Schwartau, Cord. “Die Entwicklung der Umwelt in der DDR: Neue Probleme durch Renaissance der Braunkohle.” In Umweltprobleme und Umweltbewußtsein in der DDR, Redaktion Deutschland Archiv, 9–38. Cologne: Verlag Wirtschaft und Politik, 1985. Smil, Vaclav. “Coal.” In Shepard Krech, J. R. McNeill, and Carolyn Merchant, Encyclopedia of World Environmental History, Vol. 1, 239–40. New York: Routledge, 2004. Thornber, Karen Laura. Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. Tommek, Heribert. “Teilnehmende Beobachtung: Ein neues Autorenporträt von Wolfgang Hilbig,” http://www.iaslonline.lmu.de/index.php?vorgang_id=3490 (accessed March 17, 2016). Uekötter, Frank. The Age of Smoke: Environmental Policy in Germany and the United States, 1880–1970. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2009. Uekötter, Frank. The Greenest Nation? A New History of German Environmentalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Weisman, Alan. The World without Us. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007. Weymann, Ansgar. “Gesellschaft und Apokalypse.” In Alexander Nagel, Bernd Ulrich Schipper, and Ansgar Weymann (eds), Apokalypse: Zur Soziologie und Geschichte religiöser Krisenrhetorik, 13–48. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2008. Wuthenow, Ralph Rainer. “Verwerfungen, Verwesungen: Zur Prosa von Wolfgang Hilbig.” In H. L. Arnold (ed.), Wolfgang Hilbig, 28–36. Munich: edition text + kritik, 1994.

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Part III Periodization and Scale

168 

Eight Immanuel Kant, the Anthropocene, and the Idea of Environmental Cosmopolitanism

Amos Nascimento

In this chapter I propose a turn to the German Enlightenment and to Immanuel Kant’s philosophy in order to show connections between this particular tradition and contemporary discussions on the Anthropocene in the environmental humanities. I follow four steps: first, I introduce the concepts of the Anthropocene and cosmopolitanism, observing how debates on these themes within the natural sciences and the humanities can be related to the context of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe. Second, I focus on Kant’s Enlightenment project to propose that his theories on physical geography, reflective judgment, and world citizenship can be viewed as antecedents to many contemporary environmental discussions. Third, I show that Kant’s considerations on teleology and normativity can be interpreted in relation to his cosmopolitanism. In conclusion, I propose “environmental cosmopolitanism” as a project worth pursuing in light of the current debates on the Anthropocene and environmental humanities.

Connecting the Anthropocene and Cosmopolitanism

To set the stage for my discussion of Kant’s philosophy, I begin by considering the meaning of the terms Anthropocene and cosmopolitanism and their relation to the context of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe.

170  Readings in the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene

“Anthropocene” is a new term,1 but it brings together two ancient Greek terms that can be reinterpreted in light of contemporary environmental issues. The term anthropos traditionally refers to human beings while the term cene (kainos) brings to the fore the historical and eschatological dimension of a new developmental stage of Earth’s history. Brought together, these terms form the concept of the Anthropocene, which sheds light on how Earth’s systems are highly affected by anthropogenic processes. Debates on this topic are interdisciplinary, but the term’s descriptive and normative implications still need to be spelled out more clearly. Descriptively, the Anthropocene denotes a new geological epoch. According to geologists, the Earth is more than 4.5 billion years old, and its evolutionary history is divided into eons, periods, and eras. The last period in this evolution, the Quaternary, began just 2.6 million years ago and includes two epochs, the Pleistocene and the Holocene.2 The influence of humans began to be felt more strongly towards the end of the Pleistocene epoch and most of the changes leading to a relative climate stability benefiting human adaptations to the natural environment occurred in the last 11,500 years, marking the Holocene.3 Recently, Paul Crutzen proposed the term Anthropocene to mark a shift in current scientific research and acknowledge how anthropogenic forces influence terrestrial and atmospheric changes.4 The International Commission on Stratigraphy began systematic studies to define whether geological events related to climate change justified defining the Anthropocene as a new epoch.5 At the 34th International Geological Congress held in 2012, the “Anthropocene” was proposed as “a potential geological epoch,” with the implication that the Holocene has terminated.6 Commenting on these events, Bruno Latour explored the geo-historical and political meanings of this concept.7 These discussions have opened new perspectives for research on global anthropogenic climate change. 1 2 3 4 5 6

7

Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’” Global Change News 1 (May 2000): 17–18. Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “Stratigraphy of the Anthropocene,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369 (2011): 1036–55. See 1037–8, 1047–8. Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene?” GSA Today 18.2 (2008): 4–8, 6. Crutzen and Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’” 17. Zalasiewicz et al., “Stratigraphy of the Anthropocene,” 1036–55. Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Alan Haywood, and Michael Elli, “The Anthropocene: A New Epoch of Geological Time?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369 (2011): 835–41. Bruno Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” New Literary History 45.1 (Winter 2014): 1–18.

Idea of Environmental Cosmopolitanism  171 Normatively, the relationship between geo- or biophysical history and human development leads to different considerations. Eileen Christ engaged very critically with discourses on this new concept and argues that, “The linguistic ushering in of the Anthropocene conceptually hardens modern humanity’s perceived entitlements, thereby reinforcing how human beings act within the biosphere.”8 She contends that the idea of the Anthropocene ideologically discourages critical reflection and revolutionary action on environmental issues.9 Dipesh Chakrabarty asks how the crisis of climate change appeals to our sense of human universals and at the same time challenges our capacity for historical understanding.10 In response, he suggests that the idea of the Anthropocene “severely qualifies humanist histories of modernity/ globalization,”11 forcing us to reassess the legacy of the Enlightenment and to consider how to deploy human moral and intellectual resources to address crises in the Anthropocene. For Chakrabarty, the issue of human freedom is at the core of this new age.12 Noel Castre summarizes the discussions on the Anthropocene within environmental humanities and points out that, “The environmental humanities often have an overt normative dimension.”13 These descriptive and normative dimensions help us identify the main trends in current debates. On the one hand, there is the search for evidence of climatological and geological changes influenced by humans in a long-term historical development. Many researchers in paleoclimatology study ancient Mesopotamia or China and argue that humans have left clear marks on geological strata since the mid-Holocene, around 7,000 years ago.14 Others argue that it makes more sense to consider 1945 as the beginning of the Anthropocene because there is a clear acceleration of radioactive exposure due to human-induced nuclear reactions around this time.15 Between these two extremes, it has become standard to relate the Anthropocene to the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century. 8 Eileen Crist, “Beyond the Climate Crisis,” Telos 141 (Winter 2007): 29–55, 53. 9 Ibid., 51–3, 55. 10 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197–222, 201. 11 Ibid., 207. 12 Ibid., 212. 13 Noel Castre, “The Anthropocene and the Environmental Humanities: Expanding the Conversation,” Environmental Humanities 5 (2014): 233–60, 234 n.3. 14 Yijie Zhuang and Tristam Kidder, “Archaeology of the Anthropocene in the Yellow River Region, China, 8000–2000 cal. BP,” The Holocene 24.11 (2014): 1602–23. 15 Jonathan Dean, Melanie Leng, and Anson Mackay, “Is There an Isotopic Signature of the Anthropocene?,” Anthropocene Review 1.3 (2014): 276–87.

172  Readings in the Anthropocene Eighteenth-century Europe saw an intensive exploitation of natural resources, and mass production began to leave a more visible impact on the environment.16 This also corresponds to the period when chemist Joseph Black identified “thick air”—known today as carbon dioxide (CO2)—and when new sciences were emerging to study changes in the environment.17 Around this time, a new aesthetic sensibility also emerged, as can be seen in the romantic movement with its appeal to nature and critique of urban settings and pollution.18 It is not surprising, therefore, that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses 1750 as the threshold year for the measurement of CO2 emissions from land use and fossil fuels as well as other major indicators of global anthropogenic climate change.19

Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism is another concept that merges two Greek words, cosmos and polis. Cosmos is a pre-Socratic metaphysical notion generally translated as “universe,” in the sense of integrating several parts into a consistent whole that, according to Heraclitus, “is the same for all.”20 Polis refers to the political project for the ancient city of Athens, in which the citizen (polites) was sharply distinguished from the non-citizen (apolis). An early reference to the connection between cosmos and polis is the Greek cynic, Diogenes of Sinope, one of the first to express the idea of belonging and pledging allegiance to universal 16 Christopher Freeman and Francisco Louçã, As Time Goes By: From the Industrial Revolutions to the Information Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 17 James Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 11–19. As Fleming shows, David Hume, in a text written around 1750, was well aware of the relationship between the depletion of natural resources and the change in climate at a global level: “Our northern colonies in America become more temperate, in proportion as the woods are felled; but in general, every one may remark that cold is still much more severely felt, both in North and South America, than in places under the same latitude in Europe.” David Hume, “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations,” Essay XI, 495, quoted in Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change, 19. 18 Tim Cloudsley, “Romanticism and the Industrial Revolution in Britain,” History of European Ideas 12.5 (1990): 611–35. 19 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), IPCC—Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. S. Solomon, D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K. B. Averyt, M. Tignor, and H. L. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 100–3. 20 Heraclitus, Fragment B4, in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ed. Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz (Hildesheim: Olms, 1989).

Idea of Environmental Cosmopolitanism  173 values, of being at home anywhere, and of having rights beyond the limits of an established community.21 Cosmopolitanism is no less interdisciplinary or controversial than the concept of the Anthropocene. Contemporary research in politics, international law, ethics, sociology, gender studies, and philosophy applies this concept to complex global processes.22 Ulrich Beck criticizes the traditional sociological focus on nationalist frameworks and identifies a world risk society. In view of the challenges affecting the European experience, he proposes the idea of a cosmopolitan Europe.23 Gerard Delanty defines cosmopolitanism as a new field to study issues of cultural pluralism and heterogeneity, global–local relations, the negotiation of territorial borders, and the reinvention of a political community around global ethics.24 Following a “liberal cosmopolitanism” inspired by John Rawls, Simon Caney argues for a “humanity-centered” cosmopolitan political morality that addresses issues of justice emerging as a result of climate change.25 Samuel Scheffler uses the terminology of “extreme and moderate” cosmopolitanism to contrast the strong demand to justify global obligations and commitments with the more accommodating view that relaxes this demand and focuses on limited duties.26 Thomas Pogge distinguishes between “moral and legal cosmopolitanism” in order to combat global poverty,27 while Gillian Brock criticizes some of these views to suggest a greater focus on poverty in relation to humanitarian intervention and 21 Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” Boston Review 19.5 (October–November 1994): 3–6; Martha Nussbaum, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). Eric Brown, “Die Erfindung kosmopolitischer Politik durch die Stoiker,” in Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, Andreas Niederberger, and Philipp Schink (eds), Kosmopolitanismus: Zur Geschichte und Zukunft eines umstrittenen Ideals (Weilerwist: Velbrück, 2010), 9–24. 22 For a detailed discussion of cosmopolitanism, see Amos Nascimento, Building Cosmopolitan Communities (Basingstoke: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2013), 173–216, and “Humanity, Rights, and the Ideal of a Global Critical Cosmopolitanism,” in Sybille de la Rosa and Darrell O’Byrne (eds), The Cosmopolitan Ideal: Challenges and Opportunities (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 13–38. 23 Ulrich Beck, The Cosmopolitan Manifesto (Cambridge: Polity, 1998); Ulrich Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision (Cambridge: Polity, 2006); and Ulrich Beck and Eduardo Grande, Cosmopolitan Europe (Cambridge: Polity, 2007). 24 Gerard Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 7, 15, 51–68, 79. 25 Simon Caney, Justice Beyond Borders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). See also Simon Caney, “Cosmopolitan Justice, Responsibility, and Global Climate Change,” Leiden Journal of International Law 18 (2005): 747–75. 26 Samuel Scheffler, “Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism,” Utilitas 11 (1999): 255–76. 27 Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 175.

174  Readings in the Anthropocene global working conditions.28 Against the impartiality of liberalism, Toni Erskine proposes a more radical feminist and communitarian approach in the idea of an “embedded cosmopolitanism.”29 Discussions of cosmopolitanism reveal possible challenges such as the weakening of nation states, the deregulation of economies, volatile financial markets, increased inequality, growing poverty, political instability, ongoing military conflicts, global migratory movements, transnational environmental problems, and the irreversible impacts of climate change. Many argue that cosmopolitanism is an ambitious goal that lacks specificity and blurs the lines demarcating nations, individual initiatives, economic development, and localized agency. In order to clarify these issues, it has become common to go back to the eighteenth century and reconsider the cosmopolitan philosophy of Immanuel Kant.30 Kant was initially influenced by the scientific developments of his time and later proposed a “critical turn” to submit metaphysical claims to scrutiny. Similarly, he moved beyond the Greek metaphysical origins of the term cosmopolitanism, applied it in concreto to the emerging paradigm of human rights in Western Europe, proposed the term world citizen (Weltbürger), and laid the ground for contemporary cosmopolitan studies on peace, immigration and human rights, trade and colonialism, political organizations, and environmental concerns. Examples of this confluence of scientific, political, and environmental concerns can be read in early scientific articles published around 1755 and in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, published in 1790.31 However, in his 1795 treatise, Towards Perpetual Peace, he summarizes his views in a central statement: “The community of the nations of the earth has gone so far that a violation of right in one place of the earth is felt in all” (Da es nun mit der unter den Völkern der Erde einmal durchgängig überhand genommenen [engeren oder weiteren] Gemeinschaft so weit gekommen ist, daß die Rechtsverletzung an einem Platz der Erde an 28 Gillian Brock, Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 45ff., 232. 29 Toni Erskine, Embedded Cosmopolitanism: Duties to Strangers and Enemies in a World of Dislocated Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 39–42, 51ff. 30 See Pauline Kleingeld, Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 31 Immanuel Kant’s texts are cited in English according to The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995–) and their original pagination in Kants Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: German Academy of Sciences, 1900–), commonly known as Akademieausgabe (AA). The Cambridge Edition uses the volume and page number from the Akademieausgabe, hence there is often only one page number reference for both the English and the German.

Idea of Environmental Cosmopolitanism  175 allen gefühlt wird).32 This allusion to a shared impact upon nature and collective responsibility towards the Earth and natural resources opens the possibility for an environmental interpretation of cosmopolitanism. Despite the many justified critiques of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, this historical moment appears as an underlying assumption of discussions about both the Anthropocene and cosmopolitanism. This is more than mere coincidence. Increasing evidence about the human impact on the environment and the need for a cosmopolitan right emerged at the time of the Industrial Revolution and the European Enlightenment. The Industrial Revolution produced an increase in carbon emissions that could be detected prominently in modern times, not only by scientific measures, but also in terms of aesthetic sensibility. Painters and poets in eighteenth-century Europe described these emissions very vividly. This particular historical moment is also important because it helps to locate the beginnings of geology as a modern science, the initial philosophical debates around environmental issues, a new aesthetic environmental sensibility, and cosmopolitanism. In what follows, I want to show that Immanuel Kant was aware of many of these debates and offered his own contribution to environmental issues, expressing concerns about the worldwide occupation of the Earth and the impact humans were having on the planet. In fact, the systematic way in which Kant connected these themes can be described in terms of an environmental cosmopolitanism that can provide interesting insights into contemporary discussions on the Anthropocene.

Immanuel Kant: From Physical Geography to the Normativity of Cosmopolitanism

Kant started his career with studies in the area of science and physical geography.33 For him, geological transformations could be considered in descriptive scientific terms as well as from a normative ethical perspective. On the one hand, he wrote many articles on questions about the age of the Earth, reasons for morphological changes, and other geological themes. On the other hand, he derived many precautionary lessons from these natural processes. For instance, an earthquake prompted him to observe how humanitarian actions can be motivated. 32 Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace, in Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 311–51; Zum ewigen Frieden, 8:360. 33 To interpret Kant’s Physische Geographie, I rely on the original text published in the Akademieausgabe and on Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta (eds), Reading Kant’s Geography (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011). See Amos Nascimento, “Putting Kant’s Geography on the Map”: Review of Elden, S. & Mendieta, E. (eds) Reading Kant’s Geography (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011), Radical Philosophy Review 15.2 (2012): 397–401.

176  Readings in the Anthropocene Although these ideas were initially left undeveloped, he later affirms more vehemently that the solidarity emerging as a result of geological processes was something like a natural moral reaction that could be applicable in situations of war and social tumult. This insight leads to his views on moral cosmopolitanism.

The Connection between Geological and Moral Processes

Immanuel Kant’s initial interest in geological questions predates the earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal, on November 1, 1755. However, his further studies on this matter were likely motivated by this event. The tremors in Portugal were felt in France, Switzerland, and Italy, leading to the destruction of property and loss of lives. They were accompanied by a tsunami that caused devastation across the Iberian Peninsula, the Northern Atlantic coast of Europe, Northern Africa, and even the Caribbean. The magnitude of this event motivated not only a series of religious movements with apocalyptical messages, but also the sober attention of many scientists and philosophers, including Voltaire and Kant. Before and after this event, Kant published a series of texts of a geological nature. One of the first was The Question, Whether the Earth is Ageing, Considered Physically (1754).34 In his famous book, General Natural History and Theory of Heavens (1754), he presents his views on cosmology and briefly touches on geomorphological issues. After the earthquake, he wrote the study Natural Description of the Most Remarkable Cases of the Earthquake which Towards the End of 1755 Shook a Great Part of the Earth that was complemented by other studies such as Continued Observations of the Earthquakes Experienced for Some Time and History and On the Causes of Earthquakes: On the Occasion of the Calamity that Hit the Western Lands of Europe toward the End of Last Year (1756).35 He analyzed various reports on this event and provided his own diagnostic, stating that the problem was not necessarily a matter for religious enthusiasts, but rather for scientists studying moving cracks and caverns deep in the Atlantic Ocean.36 Although many of 34 Immanuel Kant, Die Frage, ob die Erde veralte, physikalisch erwogen, 1:193–213. See English translation by Olaf Reinhardt and David Roger Oldroyd, “The Question, Whether the Earth is Ageing, Considered Physically,” Annals of Science 39.4 (1982): 349–69. 35 See, for example, Immanuel Kant, Von den Ursachen der Erderschütterungen bei Gelegenheit des Unglücks welches die westlichen Länder von Europa gegen das Ende des vorigen Jahres betroffen hat, 1:417–27. A partial translation of this text is provided by Olaf Reinhardt and David Roger Oldroyd, “Kant’s Theory of Earthquakes and Volcanic Action,” Annals of Science 40.3 (1983): 253–9. See translators’ comments, 247–53. 36 Kant, Von den Ursachen der Erderschütterungen, 1:425–6. English translation in

Idea of Environmental Cosmopolitanism  177 Kant’s conjectures are not valid today, his reflections on this event made him one of the pioneers of geology and seismology.37 At the time, these disciplines were understood as subparts of an emergent science, defined as physical geography.38 Kant’s approach was not only descriptive, but normative as well. In The Question, Whether the Earth is Ageing, Considered Physically, he writes, “This decline, they say, can be observed not only in the natural constitution of the Earth but also extending to the moral condition. The old virtues are extinguished; in their place are new vices” (Diese Abnahme, heißt es, ist nicht allein bei der natürlichen Verfassung der Erde zu bemerken, sie erstreckt sich auch bis auf die sittliche Beschaffenheit. Die alten Tugenden sind erloschen, an deren statt finden sich neue Laster).39 At the beginning of his lectures on physical geography, in 1756, he affirmed that “global knowledge” has to rely on the experience of both nature and humanity (Die Erfahrungen der Natur und des Menschen machen zusammen die Welterkenntnisse aus).40 This reveals his concern with the relationship between natural processes and human behavior. The same holds for his analysis of the Lisbon earthquake. He concludes his Continued Observations of the Earthquakes with remarks on the social impact of natural disasters: “The view of so much misery caused to our co-citizens by this last catastrophe should motivate our love of humanity and make us sympathize with part of this misfortune that affected them with such hardness” (Der Anblick so vieler Elenden, als die letztere Katastrophe unter unsern Mitbürgern gemacht hat, soll die Menschenliebe rege machen und uns einen Theil des Unglücks empfinden lassen, welches sie mit solcher Härte betroffen hat).41 In his opinion, natural Reinhardt and Oldroyd, “Kant’s Theory of Earthquakes and Volcanic Action,” 257–8. 37 Reinhardt and Oldroyd, “Kant’s Theory of Earthquakes and Volcanic Action,” 251–2. 38 Kant, Physische Geographie, 9:151–436. This publication was edited by Friedrich Theodor Rink in 1802. The translation of this work in English for The Cambridge Edition, by Olaf Reinhardt, has not yet been completed. See Olaf Reinhardt, “Translating Kant’s Physical Geography: Travails and Insights into Eighteenth Century Science (and Philosophy),” in Elden and Mendieta, Reading Kant’s Geography, 103–14. See also Werner Stark, “Kant’s Lectures on ‘Physical Geography’: A Brief Outline of Its Origins, Transmission, and Development: 1754–1805,” in Elden and Mendieta, Reading Kant’s Geography, 69–85. 39 Kant, The Question, Whether the Earth is Ageing, Considered Physically, 358; Die Frage, ob die Erde veralte, physikalisch erwogen, 1:196. 40 Kant, Physische Geographie, 157. 41 See partial English translation by Reinhardt and Oldroyd, “Kant’s Theory of Earthquakes and Volcanic Action,” 259–69. Immanuel Kant, Geschichte und Naturbeschreibung der merkwürdigsten Vorfälle des Erdbebens welches an dem Ende des 1755sten Jahres einen grossen Theil der Erde erschüttert hat, 1:429–61.

178  Readings in the Anthropocene processes require that humans learn more from nature, be sensitive to it, and orient their actions towards morally relevant goals. Therefore, he asks: If it is permitted for humans to use foresight [in the face of such terrible catastrophes], if it is not regarded as an audacious and futile effort to oppose general misfortune with some measures suggested by common sense, then should not the unhappy survivors of Lisbon take precaution in rebuilding along the length of the same river, which indicates the direction along [which] earthquakes must naturally occur in that country?42 Moreover, Kant affirms the need for scientific, not religious answers to this question: A presentation of the history of mankind must recommend to the human being in order to serve him as a lesson and an improvement, showing him that he must not blame providence in any way for the troubles that harm him; that also his own destruction cannot be ascribed to an original sin committed by his primitive parents … but that he ought to recognize every single event as if it in all respects were produced by himself, and that he therefore must accept himself the full responsibility for his own hardships, also those occasioned by abuse of reason.43

42 Reinhardt and Oldroyd, “Kant’s Theory of Earthquakes and Volcanic Action,” 254. “Wenn in so schrecklichen Zufällen den Menschen erlaubt ist einige Vorsicht zu gebrauchen, wenn es nicht als eine verwegene und vergebliche Bemühung angesehen wird allgemeinen Drangsalen einige Anstalten entgegen zu setzen, die die Vernunft darbietet, sollte nicht der unglückliche Überrest von Lissabon Bedenken tragen sich an demselben Flusse seiner Länge nach wiederum anzubaun, welcher die Richtung bezeichnet, nach welcher die Erderschütterung in diesem Lande natürlicherweise geschehen muß.” Kant, Von den Ursachen der Erderschütterungen, 1:420–1. 43 Immanuel Kant, Conjectural Beginnings of Human History, in Anthropology, History, and Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 160–75. “Es ist also dem Menschen eine solche Darstellung seiner Geschichte ersprieß­ lich und dienlich zur Lehre und zur Besserung, die ihm zeigt: da er der Vorsehung wegen der Übel, die ihn drücken, keine Schuld geben müsse; daß er seine eigene Vergehung auch nicht einem ursprünglichen Verbrechen seiner Stammeltern zuzuschreiben berechtigt sei … sondern daß er das von jenen geschehene mit vollem Rechte als von ihm selbst gethan anerkennen und sich also von allen Übeln, die aus dem Mißbrauche seiner Vernunft entspringen, die Schuld gänzlich selbst beizumessen habe.” Kant, Muthmaßlicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte, 8:123.

Idea of Environmental Cosmopolitanism  179 As the passage above mentions explicitly, a human being “ought to recognize every single [natural] event as if it in all respects were produced by himself” (daß er das von jenen geschehene mit vollem Rechte als von ihm selbst gethan anerkennen [habe]). However, in his “pre-critical writings,” Kant simply establishes a somewhat loose connection between a purpose of nature, as observed in the geological transformation of the Earth, and human moral and historical actions. Therefore, we need to consider Kant’s critical texts.

A Common Critical Principle for Nature and Humanity

It is only after Kant’s “critical turn” in 1781, with the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason and other texts, that he considers the connection between environmental and moral processes more explicitly. This leads to the development of his cosmopolitanism and the postulate of a teleological principle capable of unifying these two dimensions. The connection between cosmopolitan and environmental ideals can be observed in a series of moral and political texts published in the 1780s as well as in his Critique of the Power of Judgment, published in 1790. First, Kant’s moral theory emphasizes freedom and autonomy, so the assumption that a natural purpose could equip humans and make them capable of dealing with global challenges needs to be made compatible with this claim. To see this connection, we need to observe how he expands on examples found in his pre-critical texts and lectures on political geography, later integrating them into the mature texts of his critical juridical doctrine. For instance, in early notes for his lectures on physical geography, he starts by discussing the spherical form of the Earth.44 Although his aim is to explain the power of gravitational attraction, he later uses this same reference, the spherical form of the planet, to derive anthropological, moral, and juridical consequences. Thus, in the “Doctrine of Right” from his Metaphysics of Morals, he states that the spherical surface of the Earth naturally drives humans toward cooperation and creates the conditions for human relationships to one another, individual property, and the appropriation of land: “The spherical surface of the earth unites all the places on its surface; for if its surface were an unbounded plane, men could be so dispersed on it that they would not come into any community with one another” (ein gemeinsamer Besitz wegen der Einheit aller Plätze auf der Erdfläche als Kugelfläche [ist]: weil, wenn sie eine unendliche Ebene wäre, die Menschen sich darauf so zerstreuen könnten, daß sie in gar keine Gemeinschaft mit einander kämen).45 44 See Kant, Physische Geographie, 9:166, §7. 45 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Metaphysik der Sitten, 6:262, §13 and 6:352–3, §61.

180  Readings in the Anthropocene This shows that Kant starts with scientific descriptions, later connects them to cosmopolitan developments in arts and sciences, and arrives at juridical principles regarding the relationship of humans among themselves and with nature. This is not simply an empirical drive—otherwise it would contradict his moral theory—but a matter of principle, based on the autonomous mandate of practical reason: freedom is “the only original right belonging to every human being by virtue of their humanity” (ist dieses einzige, ursprüngliche, jedem Menschen kraft seiner Menschheit zustehende Recht).46 When translated into juridical norms, this principle is applied to regulate the occupation of land, the use of natural resources, and the relationship between individuals and their private property.47 Second, in a series of political writings human freedom is seen as compatible with natural processes. In “What is Enlightenment?” Kant asks, “Are we living in an enlightened era?” (Leben wir jetzt in einem aufgeklärten Zeitalter?). He then answers, “No, but we live indeed in a time of Enlightenment” (nein, aber wohl in einem Zeitalter der Aufklärung).48 To him, that particular historical period was opening many opportunities to pursue the goal of exercising freedom and developing the arts and sciences according to a natural purpose. Nature had “carefully cultivated the seed within the hard core—namely the urge for and the vocation of free thought” (Wenn denn die Natur unter dieser harten Hülle den Keim, für den sie am zärtlichsten sorgt, nämlich den Hang und Beruf zum freien Denken).49 However, this goal has not yet been achieved. Therefore, in The Idea of History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, Kant postulates a convergence between natural history and human history. In an evolutionary approach, he sees a progression towards world citizenship rights, exercise of hospitality, and a cosmopolitan form of collective agency as the outcome of a natural purpose.50 In Towards Perpetual Peace this same motif reappears when Kant affirms that perpetual peace “is guaranteed by no less authority than the great artist Nature herself (natura daedala rerum). The mechanical 46 Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals; Metaphysik der Sitten, 6:237. 47 Jeffrey Edwards, “‘The Unity of All Places on the Face of the Earth’: Original Community, Acquisition, and Universal Will in Kant’s Doctrine of Right,” in Elden and Mendieta, Reading Kant’s Geography, 233–63. 48 Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?,” in Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 11–22; “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?,” 8:35–42. See also Volker Gerhardt, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, and R. Schumacher (eds), Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung: Akten des IX. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001). 49 Kant, “What is Enlightenment,” 22; “Was ist Aufklärung?,” 8:42. 50 See Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace; Zum ewigen Frieden, 8:341–485.

Idea of Environmental Cosmopolitanism  181 process of nature visibly exhibits the purposive plan of producing concord among men, even against their will and indeed by means of their very discord” (Das, was diese Gewähr (Garantie) leistet, ist nichts Geringeres, als die große Künstlerin Natur [natura daedala rerum], aus deren mechanischem Laufe sichtbarlich Zweckmäßigkeit hervorleuchtet, durch die Zwietracht der Menschen Eintracht selbst wider ihren Willen emporkommen zu lassen).51 This assumption could seem like a return to metaphysical ideas of his pre-critical writings or even a fallback to problematic empiricism, since it supposes a teleological intention of nature and appears to derive norms from facts. However, further developments in his philosophy, especially his aesthetics, shed light on this issue. Third, it is possible to interpret Kant’s point about nature serving as guidance for human development in light of the teleological principle developed in his Critique of the Power of Judgment.52 In the two versions of the introduction to the third Critique, he defines the faculty of “reflective judgment” as the ability to find a universal concept in a particular empirical experience according to a transcendental principle of purposiveness (Zweckmäßigkeit). This same principle, he later adds, leads to an “obligation to give a mechanical explanation of all products and events in nature” (alle Producte und Ereignisse der Natur, selbst die zweckmäßigsten so weit mechanisch zu erklären), including our own human actions based on freedom.53 Although this seems puzzling and even contradictory, it can be explained in both aesthetic and teleological terms. For instance, based on Kant’s “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment,” it can be argued that humans are indeed entitled to relate the purpose guiding their actions and lives to purposes they identify in nature. One example given by Kant is the analogy between our own judgment about beautiful art and our perception of beauty in nature. We seek something common in these experiences—a system—not necessarily as a projection of our own biases, but rather as a way of subsuming both nature and humanity to universal laws. This does not necessarily mean that the purpose of humanity is to be found in nature, but that 51 Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace; Zum ewigen Frieden, 8:360. 52 See Karl-Otto Apel, “Kant’s Toward Perpetual Peace as Historical Prognosis from the Point of View of Moral Duty,” in James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (eds), Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambride, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 79–110. See also Rachel Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology: An Interpretation of the “Critique of Judgment” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1–22, 64–86. 53 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Kritik der Urteilskraft, 5:415, §78. Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology, 101–4, 146–9.

182  Readings in the Anthropocene humans can identify similar purposes in themselves and in nature. In the “Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment” Kant expands on this point: As the sole being on earth that has reason, and thus a capacity to set voluntary ends for himself, he is indeed certainly the titular lord of nature, and, if nature is regarded as a teleological system, then it is his vocation to be the ultimate end of nature; but always only conditionally, that is, subject to the condition that he has the understanding and the will to give to nature and to himself a relation to an end that can be sufficient for itself independently of nature, which can thus be a final end, which, however, must not be sought in nature at all.54 While this passage may open room for a critique of Kant as both chauvinistic and anthropocentric, especially when he affirms that “man” is the ultimate end of nature, it is also possible to reinterpret this statement as positing humanity as more directly related to a natural end without positing nature as merely a means to human ends. Thus, humans are in direct relation to nature, though not in a relation of subordination. To be sure, the sublime experience of volcanoes, storms, and natural catastrophes shows that nature has not yet been fully captured by the human imagination. Kant also adds that humans have the capacity of setting ends for themselves independently of nature. This setting of goals is based on freedom and a cosmopolitan culture: This splendid misery is bound up with the development of the natural predispositions in the human race, and the end of nature itself, even if it is not our end, is hereby attained. The formal condition under which alone nature can attain this its final aim is that constitution in the relations of human beings with one another in which the abuse of reciprocally conflicting freedom is opposed by lawful power in a whole, which is called civil society; for only in this can the greatest development of natural predispositions occur. For this, however, even if humans were clever enough to discover it and wise enough to subject themselves willingly to its 54 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment: “Als das einzige Wesen auf Erden, welches Verstand, mithin ein Vermögen hat, sich selbst willkürlich Zwecke zu setzen, ist er zwar betitelter Herr der Natur und, wenn man diese als ein teleologisches System ansieht, seiner Bestimmung nach der letzte Zweck der Natur; aber immer nur bedingt, nämlich daß er es verstehe und den Willen habe, dieser und ihm selbst eine solche Zweckbeziehung zu geben, die unabhängig von der Natur sich selbst genug, mithin Endzweck sein könne, der aber in der Natur gar nicht gesucht werden muß.” Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 5:431, §83.

Idea of Environmental Cosmopolitanism  183 coercion, a cosmopolitan whole, i.e., a system of all states that are at risk of detrimentally affecting each other, is required.55 The parallels are striking. In the same way a tree is the result of a previous tree and the condition for other trees in the future, and in the same way as the various parts of a tree—its roots, trunk, branches, and leaves— are “reciprocally dependent on the preservation of the others” (daß die Erhaltung des einen von der Erhaltung der andern wechselsweise abhängt), so it must be with human beings. It is true that, beyond this point, Kant goes on to add a physico-theological dimension to his argument and postulates a supersensible intelligent cause: God as the “original being” (Urwesen).56 However, we do not need to get entangled in these theological discussions. Relevant for us is only the point that both nature and humanity are set in relation to a greater system. From a normative point of view, this system is identified by Kant as “cosmopolitan.”

Kant and the Possibility of Environmental Cosmopolitanism

The points presented thus far show the possibility of connecting geological and moral processes in Kant’s thought. Although this was loosely presented in his pre-critical writings, he later understands this connection critically, in light of a transcendental principle applied to his moral theory as well as to aesthetics and nature. In this section, I stress this point more systematically and explore some elements that support the idea of an environmental cosmopolitanism.

Environmental Cosmopolitanism and its Connections to the Anthropocene

More examples from Kant’s texts are needed in order to derive concrete relationships to contemporary discussions on the Anthropocene, cosmopolitanism, and the environmental humanities. To this end, I 55 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment: “Aber das glänzende Elend ist doch mit der Entwickelung der Naturanlagen in der Menschengattung verbunden, und der Zweck der Natur selbst, wenn es gleich nicht unser Zweck ist, wird doch hiebei erreicht. Die formale Bedingung, unter welcher die Natur diese ihre Endabsicht allein erreichen kann, ist diejenige Verfassung im Verhältnisse der Menschen untereinander, wo dem Abbruche der einander wechselseitig widerstreitenden Freiheit gesetzmäßige Gewalt in einem Ganzen, welches bürgerliche Gesellschaft heißt, entgegengesetzt wird; denn nur in ihr kann die größte Entwickelung der Naturanlagen geschehen. Zu derselben wäre aber doch, wenn gleich Menschen sie auszufinden klug und sich ihrem Zwange willig zu unterwerfen weise genug wären, noch ein weltbürgerliches Ganze, d. i. ein System aller Staaten, die auf einander nachtheilig zu wirken in Gefahr sind, erforderlich.” Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 5:432, §83. 56 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 5:371. See Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology, 162. On Kant’s physico-theology, see Kritik der Urteilskraft, 5:436, §85.

184  Readings in the Anthropocene would like to revisit three points that help us relate the Anthropocene to cosmopolitanism. First, relying on the volume Reading Kant’s Geography, we can see a connection between Kant’s physical geography, pragmatic anthropology, and cosmopolitanism. In his lectures he connects geography to cosmopolitan goals when, in later editions of his course, he says that his goal is to educate a citizen in a world perspective. Conversely, in his lectures on anthropology he admonishes his students to expand their views on anthropology in order to become world citizens.57 In fact, Robert Louden and Holly Wilson identify Kant’s unique contribution in an educational plan that saw geography in pragmatic terms and related to cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment.58 Kant began his anthropological considerations with a problematic empirical and physiological approach that opens him to charges of racism, sexism, and chauvinism.59 On the other hand, he was later compelled to acknowledge humans—independently of race or gender—as freeacting beings capable of playing an important moral role in relation to nature. The Anthropology has many contradictory statements stemming from pre-critical texts, but in his critical remarks Kant explicitly states that a pragmatic anthropology requires both seeing humans as “citizens of the world” and educating them toward the Enlightenment in order to constitute a cosmopolitan republic. Cosmopolitanism provides the norms enabling persons to address the moral issues that affect human relationships and respond to large natural and humaninduced catastrophes.60 Second, Nigel Clark’s Inhuman Nature helps us see an overlooked connection between geology and moral theory.61 In his lectures on physical geography, Kant asks about the geological constitution of the planet in terms of a mathematical geography that deals with the 57 See Kant, Physische Geographie, 9:165. These passages, edited by Rink, stem from notes written by Kant in 1775. Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, 7:122. The text was published by Kant in 1798, based on lecture notes. The English translation is Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 58 Robert Lowden, “‘The Play of Nature’: Human Beings in Kant’s Geography,” in Elden and Mendieta, Reading Kant’s Geography, 139–43; Holly Wilson, “The Pragmatic Use of Kant’s Physical Geography Lectures,” in Elden and Mendieta, Reading Kant’s Geography, 161–71. 59 See Eduardo Mendieta, “Geography is to History as Woman is to Man: Kant on Sex, Race, and Geography,” in Elden and Mendieta, Reading Kant’s Geography, 345–68. 60 See Kant, Physische Geographie, 9:309; Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, 7:119–20, 331. 61 Nigel Clark, Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life in a Dynamic Planet (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2011).

Idea of Environmental Cosmopolitanism  185 shape, size, and motion of the Earth.62 There are many controversial claims in these texts,63 but as Rodney Stark shows, there is also an emerging view of “humanity” as a cosmopolitan entity—that is, as a concept that reflects Kant’s mature ethical theory and the “formula of humanity” in one of the iterations of the categorical imperative: “So act that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means” (Handle so, daß du die Menschheit sowohl in deiner Person, als in der Person eines jeden anderen jederzeit zugleich als Zweck, niemals bloß als Mittel brauchst).64 Kant was excited about the possibility of writing a natural history of the Earth and accepted theories stating that the Earth had required millions of years to develop, but instead of emphasizing the threat that these geological powers could pose to human freedom, he thought that environmental processes could offer a learning opportunity for humans to exercise their highest moral vocation. This explains why he says explicitly—in earlier writings and in the analytics of the sublime in the Critique of the Power of Judgment—that radical natural events prompt the humanity in us in a way that other humans or we as individuals could not. Clark not only interprets Kant’s early writings to assert that natural events such as the Lisbon earthquake expose us to finitude and extinction, but he also shows how humans are motivated to take responsibility for others, their actions, and their impact on nature when natural catastrophes occur.65 As examples, he shows the global response to natural catastrophes such as the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and many other disasters.66 He then concludes: We are still a long way from the cosmopolitan thought we need, the kind that might point the way to forms of justice and hospitality fitting for a planet that rips away its support from time to time: for an earth that is not nearly as human or as homely as we tend to assume. And yet, across the world, ordinary folk redirect their ceremonial feasts to bereft neighbours, they offer beds to complete strangers, assemble ramshackle armadas of rescue vessels, dig 62 See Kant, Physische Geographie, 9:166. 63 Ibid., 9:160–6. 64 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten 4:429. 65 Clark, Inhuman Nature, 85–90. 66 Ibid., 55–79, 137–61.

186  Readings in the Anthropocene into their wallets or their wardrobes to make offerings to people they will never meet.67 Third, in my own interpretation, I suggest that Kant’s cosmopolitanism can be related to current discussions on climate change and the Anthropocene. In his proposal for world citizenship, he appeared to anticipate some thoughts and situations similar to those presented in current debates. The human solidarity he expects after the earthquake in Lisbon can be translated as a moral duty in reaction to the many catastrophes that occur due to natural causes as well as those resulting from global anthropogenic climate change. In fact, the global character of climatic challenges demands a global, cosmopolitan response and this has motivated an incipient but promising global solidarity. This indicates an environmental aspect of cosmopolitanism, evident in Kant’s famous statement, “The greater or lesser social interactions among the nations of the earth, which have been constantly increasing everywhere, have now spread so far that a violation of rights in one part of the earth is felt everywhere” (Da es nun mit der unter den Völkern der Erde einmal durchgängig überhand genommenen [engeren oder weiteren] Gemeinschaft so weit gekommen ist, daß die Rechtsverletzung an einem Platz der Erde an allen gefühlt wird).68 The violations alluded to above have many sources. For instance, regarding other humans, Kant criticizes the European colonial exploitation of people based on the argument that all humans are free and have the right to a common possession of the Earth. This mirrors what he says in his “Doctrine of Right.” Although this conclusion can be criticized as anthropocentric, it also has an implicit ecocentric dimension if one reads it as a deterministic argument according to which nature exercises some kind of pressure upon humans that prompts them to act morally according to a higher natural purpose. As Kant says in the same passage, “Nature irresistibly wants the supremacy of rights” (Die Natur will unwiderstehlich, dass das Recht zulezt die Obergewalt erhalte).69 It is possible to identify two dimensions here. On the one hand, humans attempt to dominate nature, but we must recognize that the ends of nature are independent of human power. Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcano eruptions, and other similar natural processes identified as aesthetically sublime are independent of human control.70 However, if we choose to judge these processes deterministically, we would be forced to accept that the inexorable end of nature would be 67 Ibid., 214. 68 Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace; Zum ewigen Frieden, 8:360. 69 Ibid., 8:360–6. 70 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment; Kritik der Urteilskraft, §§23–9.

Idea of Environmental Cosmopolitanism  187 to kill many innocent humans, destroy ecosystems, and generate chaos for no apparent reason or purpose. On the other hand, Kant does not want to follow this route and prefers to see the projection of a higher moral purpose in all this: nature awakens human moral sensibility and motivates humans to moral action. Therefore, I conclude that Kant holds humanity and nature as parallel dimensions that are in constant tension but can be made compatible. The best way to understand this parallelism is to compare the aesthetic purposes in human and natural processes. The Critique of the Power of Judgment shows both dimensions following a higher principle of purposiveness. This yields some new environmental perspectives based on Kant’s thought.

Beyond the Dichotomy of Anthropocentrism and Ecocentrism

A common critique of Kant is his alleged anthropocentrism. However, based on the preceding points we can conclude that Kant includes both nature and humanity in various moments of his philosophy. He starts with a pre-critical understanding of science, but also makes room for humanity and morality; he increasingly includes the historical and cultural dimension, but makes room for natural aesthetic processes; he then proposes a cosmopolitan perspective that includes human action on a global level, not only taking humans into consideration but also their relation to the planet and its natural resources. There is some ambiguity here, for he seems to be saying that natural law and a historical process can forge a global understanding of moral and legal norms. Although he does not spell out this suggestion any more clearly, it is possible to interpret him as trying to make room for environmental concerns on a global scale. So interpreted, Kant’s Enlightenment project can help us understand and criticize the Anthropocene by relating environmental aesthetics to a cosmopolitan ethics of environmental responsibility. In Inhuman Nature, Clark presents a critique of Kant in his analysis of how the earthquake in Lisbon presented a concatenation of horrors that “signalized not only physical and corporeal annihilation but the collapse of a way of making sense of the event itself,” an issue that would haunt Kant throughout his career as he attempted to explore and explain the gap between nature and human freedom.71 As Clark shows, Kant had hoped that an interpretation of the natural disaster would lead to human “self-improvement,” but later he postulated the possibility of a transition and mediation between these two realms without giving up the assumption that objects of the world conform to human knowledge.72 This is expressed in terms of the sublime, a form 71 Clark, Inhuman Nature, 90. 72 Ibid., 91.

188  Readings in the Anthropocene of aesthetic feeling prompted by geological events such as earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and other natural occurrences certainly reminiscent of the Lisbon event in 1755.73 Reflecting on the Kantian sublime, Clark concludes, quoting Werner Hamacher, “Only when human beings, as physical entities, are subjected to the violence of nature do they rise up as moral beings and transcend the forces that could destroy their physical existence.”74 This statement appears as an exaggeration, especially due to its use of the word “only.” Humans do not always rise up as moral beings when subjected to the violence of nature. In a certain way, however, a weaker version of this statement would coincide with the views I expressed in previous sections, for this statement accepts that geological factors may serve as a motivational element to generate a cosmopolitan attitude. Yet, a tension with Kant’s moral theory still remains, so this argument needs to be translated into new vocabulary. Approaches to the Anthropocene based on the environmental humanities, especially discussions of Kant’s ethics and aesthetics, may offer an alternative. In Inhuman Nature, Clark provides interesting contributions in this regard. He confirms Kant’s point by providing empirical evidence based on contemporary events—from reactions to the Holocaust in Auschwitz and the bombing of Hiroshima to the surge of solidarity and generosity toward victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.75 He questions the scientific limits to a mere disengaged description of nature and denounces the dangers of anthropocentrism in the radical gap between nature and humanity. He is directly concerned with normative questions regarding humanity’s ability to modify natural environments for various purposes and the fact that this continuous intervention in the planet’s shape and form leads to self-destruction. All this is relevant for the project of promoting environmental cosmopolitanism. Ultimately, however, Clark faults Kant for being too anthropocentric and putting too much faith in humans as free agents supposedly capable of controlling any natural threat to human existence. In order to defend the possibility of an environmental cosmopolitanism based on Kant’s Enlightenment project, I need to criticize this point. One critique that can be brought against Clark is that he rejects Kantian anthropocentrism but is still limited by Kant’s pre-critical metaphysics and deterministic physical geography, without exploring later developments in his anthropology, aesthetics, and cosmopolitanism. In fairness, Clark does seem to propose an environmental cosmopolitanism based on a practice of hospitality promoted by citizens who react with 73 See Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 5:244–66, §§23–9. 74 Clark, Inhuman Nature, 92. 75 Ibid., 95–8, 139–40.

Idea of Environmental Cosmopolitanism  189 generosity to support the victims of natural disasters in many parts of the world. However, he does not relate it to the transcendental principles made explicit by Kant’s critiques. Thus, there is a danger of allowing determinism to enter through the blind spot of a naïve ecocentrism. It is possible to defend a Kantian cosmopolitanism in relation to environmental issues without falling into these problems. To do so, all we need to say is that natural events may prompt the humanity in us and may move us to gestures of solidarity in a way that humans would not normally act, based on an aesthetic sensibility to the sublime communicated to us by nature in an overwhelming way. This means that humanity still maintains its position as the ultimate end of nature, due to freedom, but this can also be interpreted as a call to humans to claim a higher sense of duty and responsibility and to act in response to nature’s demands. In order to perceive and respond adequately to the demands posed by nature, humans would be dependent on social interactions and be required to motivate enough solidarity to address one part of the Earth that suffers a violation. Because humans occupy the space of the Earth as a whole and relate to the available natural resources on the planet, such global response needs to take non-human entities into account as well.

Environmental Cosmopolitanism as a Project for the Anthropocene

In my view, Kantian philosophy can be applied to global anthropogenic climate change and the challenges of the Anthropocene. One strategy would be to define environmental cosmopolitanism in terms of the normativity of collective environmental responsibility, that is, the ability of humans to aesthetically “perceive” and morally “respond” to environmental challenges. Another would be to develop new aesthetic sensibilities to recognize that we are facing a global environmental crisis, now defined as the Anthropocene. The awareness of the global scale of the problem and the necessary global response should motivate humans to a new environmental ethics that prompts us to realize the need for global norms.76 This global outlook for environmental action is what I define as environmental cosmopolitanism.

Environmental Cosmopolitanism as an Ethical Norm

If the Anthropocene brings to the fore the global and geological impact of anthropogenic climate change, the first obstacle to environmental cosmopolitanism is the traditional view of Western ethics as concerned with individual answers to moral dilemmas in particular cases. We need collective approaches compatible with freedom that avoid falling into 76 Robin Attfield, Environmental Ethics (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 1, 181.

190  Readings in the Anthropocene authoritarian rules, universalism, rigorism, ethnocentrism, insensitivity to differences, and abstractions. Kant’s proposal for cosmopolitanism, combined with the recent developments in environmental ethics and aesthetics, leads to an ethics of global environmental responsibility.77 An environmental cosmopolitanism based on a global collective environmental responsibility is a way of updating Kant’s philosophy according to more recent concepts. The idea of collective responsibility allows for the possibility of maintaining the dimension of humanity as a collective species that interacts with the environment and has the obligation to act responsibly, without necessarily falling into a blind acceptance of anthropocentric values. This simple adaptation can accommodate the aesthetic idea—explored by Rachel Zuckert in Kant on Beauty and Biology—that in the Critique of the Power of Judgment Kant sees the environment as expressing a certain systemic purpose, without relying on strict metaphysical and deterministic arguments.78 If we consider an intuitive view of responsibility as the ability to “respond,” we can see human interaction with nature as a process in which nature prompts reactions, that is, ethical responses from humans. Why or how would anyone be compelled to respond to nature or the environment? There is some empirical evidence that people often respond to natural disasters in the way anticipated by Kant. Therefore, we have to define more clearly a norm that would compel humans to act in this way always, without contradicting their autonomy. If the environment “communicates” with us in various ways, and humans have the ability to perceive and respond, then we can define the duty of collective environmental responsibility as a global norm. Because global environmental problems require comprehensive answers, this responsibility cannot be limited to individuals or be understood merely as a liability, but rather involves a collective effort oriented by a moral norm identified as a cosmopolitan ideal. One may argue that this is an ideal, not a fact. However, this is precisely the point of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. For Kant, cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment are not yet facts, but ideals. Current facts show humans affecting the Earth in ways that lead to the emergence of a new geological era while not taking responsibility for their actions. Thus, the cosmopolitan ideal is not a description of facts, but a necessary aspiration. An environmental cosmopolitanism in the context of the Anthropocene can update the two points we retrieved from Kant’s philosophy and project them as causes worth pursuing. First, natural events may prompt the humanity in us and 77 See Attfield, Environmental Ethics, 6; Nascimento, Building Cosmopolitan Communities, 219–23; Caney, “Cosmopolitan Justice, Responsibility, and Global Climate Change,” 747–52. 78 See Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology, 167–9.

Idea of Environmental Cosmopolitanism  191 move us to gestures of solidarity in ways that we would not normally act. Second, as we promote actions toward the environment we can also recognize the connections between human and environmental issues because, again as Kant says, “The greater or lesser social interactions among the nations of the earth, which have been constantly increasing everywhere, have now spread so far that a violation of rights in one part of the earth is felt everywhere.”79

Environmental Cosmopolitanism as the Normative Dimension of the Anthropocene

Scientific discourses on the Anthropocene have had a descriptive character, denoting a new geological period distinct from the Holocene. However, through the articulation of an emerging zone of inquiries defined as environmental humanities, the relationship of humanity to natural processes has become urgent, and issues of environmental perception and precautionary action have entered the agenda. This shift in discourse demands that we turn our attention to at least two philosophical implications of this concept. The first is anthropological and concerns the implicit relationship between the history of the Earth and human development: humanity can be understood as a global force, but it cannot be reduced to purely empirical terms, since we need to consider free agency. The second is cosmopolitan and related to the duty to be ethically sensible and morally responsible to natural processes on a global level. The scientific evidence collected about the impacts of global anthropogenic climate change tells a compelling story. The problem is that scientific discourses remain bound to a sober description, fail to include the normative dimension, and thus fail to motivate action. Many natural scientists argue for the need to move from knowledge to action. In a recent article, Zalasiewicz, Williams, Steffen, and Crutzen conclude, “The Anthropocene might be used as encouragement to slow carbon emissions and biodiversity loss, for instance; perhaps as evidence in legislation on conservation measures … or, in the assessment of compensation claims for environmental damage.”80 This statement expresses the challenge of the Anthropocene and the need for environmental cosmopolitanism. The environmental humanities emerge as an interdisciplinary endeavor that can help us articulate various discourses on global climate change that have often been neglected. The focus on biological, physical, and chemical factors has offered important descriptions of 79 Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace; Zum ewigen Frieden, 8:360. 80 Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Will Steffen, and Paul Crutzen, “The New World of the Anthropocene,” Environmental Science and Technology 44 (2010): 2228–31, 2231.

192  Readings in the Anthropocene ongoing systemic issues, but one of the most pressing challenges is precisely to include the historical, social, political, legal, and above all ethical dimensions of human action on a global level. As a group of scholars concluded in an assessment of this field: Recent interest in the environmental humanities, as a field and a label, is a result of something more than the growth of work within a range of distinct disciplinary areas. Rather, the emergence of the environmental humanities indicates a renewed emphasis on bringing various approaches to environmental scholarship into conversation with each other in numerous and diverse ways.81 Environmental cosmopolitanism is of the utmost relevance for the environmental humanities and the analysis of the Anthropocene. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant is central to this endeavor. He helps us realize that empirical descriptions need to be accompanied by normative and cultural discussions that motivate human action in view of environmental challenges. I hope to have provided some entry points for a continuous dialogue on this topic.

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Nine Adalbert Stifter and the Gentle Anthropocene

Sean Ireton

Adalbert Stifter’s sanftes Gesetz or gentle law, as elaborated in the preface to Bunte Steine (Many-Colored Stones, 1853), is a universal ethical principle predicated on a correspondence between the equilibrium of nature and the moral status quo of humanity. Stifter consistently integrates this normative notion of cosmic order into the narrative fabric and thematic framework of his texts, above all those (re)written after the 1848 uprisings. He employs terms such as sanft (“gentle”), Sanftheit (“gentleness”), sanftmütig (“meek”), Sanftmut (“meekness”) in leitmotif-like fashion in order to underscore the ubiquity of this law in everyday reality; creates characters that exemplify this ethos of restraint; and constructs plot scenarios that illustrate the inevitable sway of this natural-political ideal. But Stifter’s gentle law governs not only the workings of nature and the ethical conduct of humanity as parallel operations in two distinct yet analogous ontological realms; it can also be understood, less statically, as an ongoing interaction between humans and their environment. In other words, it can be interpreted as a pragmatic environmental ethic that helps illuminate and hopes to regulate our modern anthropocenic condition. Many of Stifter’s works, after all, bear witness to the profound anthropogenic transformations taking place in his native Bavarian/Bohemian Forest, especially deforestation in the wake of human settlement and agricultural land appropriation. Due to the geographical isolation and rugged topography of this region, its forests remained largely intact until the 1700s, long after the so-called “great age of forest clearance” that occurred throughout much of Central Europe between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.1 Writing in the mid-1800s but often setting his 1 On the problem of European deforestation during the medieval and early modern eras, see the classic study by Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian

196  Readings in the Anthropocene stories generations earlier, Stifter thus documents the state of human and natural affairs at the incipience of the Anthropocene, thereby affording present-day readers first-hand testimony of environmental degradation at this pivotal moment of geohistory. Stifter does more than just record calamitous events; he strives to relativize and regularize them within a meaningful metaphysical ordo. In the following, I will probe his corrective of the Anthropocene, focusing on examples of humankind’s “gentle” manipulation of nature as depicted in select narratives, including Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters (My Great-Grandfather’s Papers, 1847) and Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer, 1857). On account of the latter’s extreme length and thematic complexity, I can only touch on it here and will do so by way of conclusion, treating the voluminous novel more as a capstone than an essential building block of my present inquiry.2 As for the foundation of my argument, I will discuss Stifter’s gentle law as articulated in the foreword to Bunte Steine and then comment on a representative story from this collection. Furthermore, I will augment my reading of Stifter through intertextual nods to George Perkins Marsh’s environmental classic from 1864, Man and Nature: Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. This colossal book, published toward the end of Stifter’s lifetime and replete with case studies of diverse “modified” landscapes from around the world, examines the ecological tension between human endeavor and the natural environment that consti tutes the core of Stifter’s oeuvre. Indeed, Marsh is one of the first to posit global anthropocenic change, making the bold yet prophetic claim that “human action … rank[s] among geological influences.”3 Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), esp. 318–41. As indicated in its subtitle, Glacken’s tome closes around 1800 and thus principally covers pre-Anthropocene conceptions and modifications of the natural environment. Nevertheless, aside from its intrinsic merit as an epic work of scholarship, it shows that the cultural-historical roots of the Anthropocene run deep. 2 My book manuscript on conceptions of nature in German literature and philosophy devotes far more attention to the “gentle Anthropocene” in Der Nachsommer. The abbreviated version presented here thus portends a lengthier analysis to be published in the near future. 3 George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature, ed. David Lowenthal (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 464. For an excellent biography of Marsh and instructive discussion of Man and Nature, both the work itself and its impact on twentieth-century environmental discourse, see David Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000). Even more ahead of his time in anticipating the idea of the Anthropocene was Count Buffon (Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon), whose Les Époques de la Nature from 1778 outlines an entire geological period of human influence

Adalbert Stifter and the Gentle Anthropocene  197 Though there is no evidence that Marsh and Stifter had ever heard of one another let alone read each other’s work, they were transnational contemporaries (Marsh 1801–82; Stifter 1805–68) that independently diagnosed––albeit in different narrative or discursive modes–– ecological perturbations such as deforestation and the resultant processes of erosion, inundation, and desertification; the extirpation of floral and faunal species; and even climate change. In the end, I aim to situate Stifter, a canonical nineteenth-century Austrian author who has long remained an unknown literary and environmental voice in the Anglophone world, within broader cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary debates surrounding the Anthropocene. George Perkins Marsh, the polymath American diplomat who resided in Europe for over two decades and whose Man and Nature can be said to have launched the modern conservation movement in the United States, offers the perfect example, if not foil, for this multi-perspectival approach.

Bunte Steine

Stifter’s preface to Bunte Steine has been the subject of considerable scholarly debate, much of which revolves around the question of whether it sheds adequate, or even accurate, light on the six stories that it precedes and purports to lend some kind of theoretical superstructure. Five of these stories were previously published in different versions and venues, but Stifter reworked if not outright reconceived them for the structurally and thematically cohesive two-volume corpus of tales. The most obvious change concerns the individual titles, which were altered to reinforce the geological symbolism and motif-complex underlying this polished assortment of “many-colored stones.” Each novella thus bears the name of a specific rock or mineral: Granit (Granite), Kalkstein (Limestone), Turmalin (Tourmaline), Bergkristall (Rock Crystal or Quartz), Katzensilber (Muscovite or Common Mica), and Bergmilch (Moonmilk, a precipitate of limestone). As one scholar has argued, Bunte Steine is a “‘rock-conglomerate-collection’” of stories (Geschichten) whose petrological-mineralogical titles and stratified arrangement reflect some of the varied geological layers (Schichten) that make up our planet.4 Stifter, that is, attempts to ground his narratives upon the operations of nature. For a convenient discussion of Buffon’s theories within an anthropocenic context, see Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, 655–705; and most recently, Noah Heringman, “Deep Time at the Dawn of the Anthropocene,” Representations 129 (2015): 56–85. 4 See Lori Wagner, “Schick, Schichten, Geschichte: Geological Theory in Stifter’s Bunte Steine,” Jahrbuch des Adalbert Stifter-Instituts des Landes Oberösterreich 2 (1995): 17–41. Compare also the more general observations on the geological symbolism of Bunte Steine in Martin Selge, Adalbert Stifter: Poesie aus dem Geist der Naturwissenschaft (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1976), 49–64.

198  Readings in the Anthropocene in the very bedrock of nature, in the material reality of deep time, and it is no coincidence that the opening tale invokes the rock composite of granite, long considered to be the substratum of all geological formations. The text simulates the structural principle of stratification, analogizing geohistory and human histories. Stifter in effect presents a grand-scale vision of something akin to earth science and geological time, thereby offering an initial, if only heuristic, point of departure for placing him within a planetary periodization such as the Anthropocene. More important for a proper understanding of Stifter’s gentle law is that each novella in Bunte Steine revolves around a cataclysmic event: not necessarily a geological one such as an earthquake or volcanic eruption but nonetheless a catastrophe stemming from the inscrutable forces of nature, whether an epidemiological outbreak (the plague in Granit) or violent meteorological disturbances (a thunderstorm in Kalkstein, a snowstorm in Bergkristall, and a hailstorm in Katzensilber). While these events inaugurate an interval of chaos, they do not result in long-term environmental damage and rarely in human loss.5 Ultimately, they remain more disruptive than destructive, passing phenomena that fail to upset the natural, historical, and ethical order of things. Indeed, the more extreme the upheaval, the more intense and profuse is the post-catastrophic recovery; the farther the pendulum swings in one direction, the farther it oscillates back in the other so that the cosmic balance informing Stifter’s worldview is restored. This tripartite scheme of natural order–disruption–restored order runs throughout his oeuvre and is reminiscent of conceptual and narrative patterns found in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Hölderlin and Schelling especially come to mind, as they both tend to think along the following dialectic lines: (1) a prelapsarian state of human–nature harmony; (2) our modern alienation from the natural world; and (3) the future renewal of this primordial bond. Again, Stifter not only incorporates this basic model into his fiction (like Hölderlin in Hyperion), but also tries to ground it in theory (like Schelling in the introduction to Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature)). His regulative principle of the gentle law reverses the traditional fascination with nature’s grandiose manifestations and calls for 5 An obvious exception to this narrative pattern is the plague, which, though devastating to humanity, does not kill off the core constellation of characters in Granit. Also, contra overgeneralization, Bergmilch does not gloss over human casualties during the Napoleonic invasion of the German lands; and the main character of Turmalin dies as a belated consequence of domestic upheaval, namely adultery. With regard to Katzensilber, Stifter included a second calamity (a house fire presumably caused by lightning) in this previously unpublished tale, as if to drive home––in uncharacteristically forced and anticlimactic fashion––his theory of the gentle law.

Adalbert Stifter and the Gentle Anthropocene  199 a deeper appreciation of its quotidian processes, including the restoration of ecological stability after a major perturbation. This restoration is also a Restauration in the political sense of the term: that is, a countermeasure to the turmoil that prevailed in the German lands during the first half of the nineteenth century, especially following the Napoleonic invasions and the 1848 revolts. The bloodshed that resulted from these conflicts deeply unnerved Stifter and prompted him to reaffirm his humanistic-bourgeois views in almost all subsequent writings, often by devising thinly veiled analogies between humanity and nature. Throughout this middle period of his writing career, Stifter imposes a normative narrative order on the brute ontological givenness of nature. Alternatively put, he creates a Naturbild that cannot but conform to his Weltbild. Philosophy, indeed theory of any kind, was not Stifter’s forte; he was, rather, a consummate literary practitioner. As several critics have pointed out, his argument in the preface to Bunte Steine is riddled with problems, whether logical fallacies, pseudo-scientific claims, or ideological presuppositions.6 Other scholars have objected to this paratext as an appropriate literary-interpretive vehicle, faulting it for its lack of coherent connections to the stories or for its argumentative effectiveness in elucidating them.7 Furthermore, many of the ideas and examples set forth in the preface are hardly unprecedented as Stifter drew liberally from the writings of Herder, Kant, Goethe, Schiller, and others.8 These caveats notwithstanding, the following excerpt offers 6 See for instance, in chronological order, Eric Downing, “Common Ground: Conditions of Realism in Stifter’s ‘Vorrede,’” Colloquia Germanica 28 (1995): 35–53; Hans P. Gabriel, “Prescribing Reality: The Preface as a Device of Literary Realism in Auerbach, Keller, and Stifter,” Colloquia Germanica 32 (1999): 325–44; Eric Downing, Double Exposures: Repetition and Realism in Nineteenth-Century German Fiction (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 24–40; and Hartmut Laufhütte, “Das sanfte Gesetz und der Abgrund: Zu den Grundlagen der Stifterschen Dichtung ‘aus dem Geiste der Naturwissenschaft,’” in Walter Hettche, Johannes John, and Sibylle von Steinsdorff (eds), Stifter-Studien: Ein Festgeschenk für Wolfgang Frühwald zum 65. Geburtstag (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), 61–74. 7 Eugen Thurnher, for instance, contends that the preface is more applicable to Der Nachsommer than to the stories contained in Bunte Steine, while Frederick Stopp suggests that the stories help illuminate the preface more than vice versa. See Eugen Thurnher, “Stifters Sanftes Gesetz,” in Klaus Lazarowicz and Wolfgang Kron (eds), Unterscheidung und Bewahrung: Festschrift für Hermann Kunisch zum 60. Geburtstag, 27. Oktober 1961 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1961), 396; and Frederick Stopp, “Die Symbolik in Stifters ‘Bunten Steinen,’” Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 28 (1954): 165. 8 For detailed accounts of these cross-connections, see Sepp Domandl, “Die philo­ sophische Tradition von Adalbert Stifters ‘Sanftem Gesetz,’” Vierteljahresschrift

200  Readings in the Anthropocene several interpretive pointers with respect to his notion of the gentle law: And because I have begun here to speak of the great and the small, I wish to explain my views, which may well diverge from those of others. The waft of air, the trickle of water, the growing of grain, the surge of the sea, the greening of the earth, the luster of the sky, the shimmering of the stars I consider great. The thunderstorm moving about majestically, the lightning bolt that shatters houses, the storm that drives the surf, the fire-spewing mountain, the earthquake that buries lands I do not regard as being greater than the aforementioned phenomena: I regard them in fact as smaller because they are only singular manifestations of much higher natural laws. They occur sporadically and are the results of singular causes. The force that makes the milk well up in the little pot of a poor woman and then spill over is the very same force that causes the lava of the fire-spewing mountain to surge upward and then to glide down the mountains to the plains. The latter phenomena are merely more visible and attract the notice of the novice or of the nonobservant individual, whereas the acuity of the researcher is directed primarily toward the whole and the general, enabling him to conceive only therein the grandeur because it is that force which preserves the world. Single phenomena are ephemeral and their effects are hardly noticeable after a while.9 des Adalbert Stifter-Instituts des Landes Oberösterreich 21.3/4 (1972): 79–103; and Walter Hettche, “Kommentar,” in Adalbert Stifter, Bunte Steine: Ein Festgeschenk, Apparat/Kommentar, in Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Alfred Doppler and Wolfgang Frühwald, Vol. 2.3 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1982), 80–120. Martin and Erika Swales more specifically stress the influence of Herder, asserting that the preface “reads like a shorthand version” of his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas on the Philosophy of Human History, 1791). See Martin Swales and Erika Swales, Adalbert Stifter: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 30–2. Unless otherwise noted, all further references to Stifter are based on the historical-critical edition of his collected works and will be cited parenthetically according to volume and page number. Also, unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 9 “Weil wir aber schon einmal von dem Großen und Kleinen reden, so will ich meine Ansichten darlegen, die wahrscheinlich von denen vieler anderer Menschen abweichen. Das Wehen der Luft das Rieseln des Wassers das Wachsen der Getreide das Wogen des Meeres das Grünen der Erde das Glänzen des Himmels das Schimmern der Gestirne halte ich für groß: das prächtig einherziehende Gewitter, den Bliz, welcher Häuser spaltet, den Sturm, der die Brandung treibt, den feuerspeienden Berg, das Erdbeben, welches Länder verschüttet, halte ich nicht für größer als obige Erscheinungen, ja ich halte sie

Adalbert Stifter and the Gentle Anthropocene  201 Here, and throughout the preface, Stifter problematizes the categories of great (groß) and small (klein), inverting their traditional significations and applications. His point is uncannily echoed by George Perkins Marsh at the conclusion of Man and Nature: “But in the vocabulary of nature, little and great are terms of comparison only; she knows no trifles, and her laws are as inflexible in dealing with an atom as with a continent or a planet.”10 From a modern ecological standpoint, Stifter’s argument seems logical enough. Singular and momentous disturbances are just that: isolated, transitory happenstances that do not lead to permanent environmental ruin. Despite whatever immediate damage is done––whether through forest fires, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, and so on––a given ecosystem will return to some semblance of stability. This is not to say that it will reach its same pre-disturbance state, but it will readjust and regenerate, whether over the course of decades or millennia.11 Stifter’s observations about “great” versus “small” thus appear to anticipate twentieth-century ecological theories such as forest succession, resilience, regeneration, and dynamic equilibrium. Granted, his mode of discourse may come across as naïve and non-scientific by today’s standards, but in his own literary parlance he manages to convey some notable proto-ecological insights. In this sense, he resembles his transatlantic contemporary Thoreau, whose inchoate ideas regarding “succession and other properties of living communities pointed straight toward the modern science of ecology.”12 Stifter’s list of revalued “great” phenomena is, on the one hand, beholden to tradition insofar as it draws on three of the four classical elements (earth, air, and water); on the other hand, it corresponds to für kleiner, weil sie nur Wirkungen viel höherer Geseze sind. Sie kommen auf einzelnen Stellen vor, und sind die Ergebnisse einseitiger Ursachen. Die Kraft, welche die Milch im Töpfchen der armen Frau empor schwellen und übergehen macht, ist es auch, die die Lava in dem feuerspeienden Berge empor treibt, und auf den Flächen der Berge hinabgleiten läßt. Nur augenfälliger sind diese Erscheinungen, und reißen den Blik des Unkundigen und Unaufmerksamen mehr an sich, während der Geisteszug des Forschers vorzüglich auf das Ganze und Allgemeine geht, und nur in ihm allein Großartigkeit zu erkennen vermag, weil es allein das Welterhaltende ist. Die Einzelheiten gehen vorüber, und ihre Wirkungen sind nach Kurzem kaum noch erkennbar” (2.2:10). Translated (here slightly modified) by G. H. Hertling, “Adalbert Stifter’s ‘Forewords’ to Bunte Steine in English: His Poetics, Aesthetics, and Weltanschauung,” Modern Austrian Literature 32.1 (1999): 3–4. 10 Marsh, Man and Nature, 464. 11 On this note, even if anthropogenic/anthropocenic interference continues to escalate and trigger irreversible climate change, our planet will no doubt adapt to the new climatic conditions and get along just fine with or without humankind’s toxic waste and noxious presence. 12 Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York: Vintage, 2002), xix.

202  Readings in the Anthropocene our modern concept of the “ecosphere,” including all four constituent realms and even extending beyond to the stars: the biosphere (grain), the hydrosphere (water, the sea), the geosphere (earth), and the atmosphere (air, the sky). Furthermore, the German grammatical practice of coupling these elemental substances with articular infinitives (partially captured in English by the gerund) stresses the ongoing processual aspects of nature: “The waft of air, the trickle of water, the growing of grain, the surge of the sea, the greening of the earth, the luster of the sky, the shimmering of the stars” (das Wehen der Luft das Rieseln des Wassers das Wachsen der Getreide das Wogen des Meeres das Grünen der Erde das Glänzen des Himmels das Schimmern der Gestirne). Stifter’s idiosyncratic practice of dispensing with serial commas further accentuates the organic flow of nature. The paucity of pauses on the printed page reflects the idea that nature does not operate in interruptions and partitions but rather in fluidity and continuity. In sum, all of these natural processes are to be deemed “great” because they persist and perdure, or in Stifter’s own words, “the general laws work quietly and constantly in nature” (die allgemeinen Geseze [wirken] still und unaufhörlich).13 Isolated irruptions such as thunderstorms, lightning strikes, hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes should be considered “small” since their net ecological impact remains minimal. These latter examples attest to an inversion of the aesthetic sublime as elaborated by philosophers and theoreticians such as Burke, Kant, Schiller, and Fichte. Stifter even includes in his reclassified list of “small” natural phenomena most of the standard “great” and “awe-inspiring” spectacles enumerated by these authors, for example, thunderstorms, volcanoes, and hurricanes. Two of his omissions—menacing mountains and raging waterfalls (see section 28 of Kant’s third Critique)14—are however noteworthy, for as an avid highland rambler Stifter embraced both of these topographical features, celebrating them in his writings and paintings.15 Indeed, two of the tales in Bunte Steine, Kalkstein and Bergkristall, take place in the Austrian Alps and aestheticize their crags and glaciers. A final note on the excerpt above concerns his curious, if not dubious, comparison between volcanic activity and “a poor woman’s pot of milk.” One wonders whether Stifter is alluding to the Grimm fairy tale “Der süße Brei” (“The Sweet Porridge”) or discoursing on geophysics. What precise “force” is it that controls both the flow of 13 Hertling, “Adalbert Stifter’s ‘Forewords’ to Bunte Steine in English,” 8; 2.2:14. 14 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith, ed. Nicholas Walter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 91. 15 Cf. Domandl, “Die philosophische Tradition von Adalbert Stifters ‘Sanftem Gesetz,’” 88. Domandl points to the Traunfall cataract as one of Stifter’s favorite natural settings in the Upper Austrian landscape.

Adalbert Stifter and the Gentle Anthropocene  203 lava and the overspill of milk? Put more provocatively, does Stifter truly believe in a direct correlation between the geothermal dynamics of, say, Mount Etna and the daily labors of a Sicilian milkmaid living in its eruptive shadow? His basic message, though muddled, presages his more lucid line of reasoning in the second half of the preface with respect to the dual domains of nature and humanity. The following programmatic statement makes it clear that the gentle law presides over human as well as natural grandeur: “Just as it is in external nature, it is also in the innermost nature of the human race. An entire life full of justice, simplicity, self-restraint, rationality, efficacy in one’s own circle, admiration for beauty together with a cheerful, tranquil death––all this I consider great.” 16 Though Stifter himself never mentions this etymological connection, it is worth pointing out that sanft derives from Old Germanic sampiaand in turn from an Indo-European root (sem-) that means “one” or “together in one.” Other New High German words share this root: for example, the preposition samt (“along/together with”), the verb sammeln (“to collect”), and the adverb/prefix zusammen (“together”). Stifter’s operative adjective sanft thus harbors, deep down in its origins, the ideas of unity and totality. This linguistic linkage to the notion of “togetherness” thus underlines his faith in the intimate bond between nature and culture.17 He stresses this kinship often enough throughout the preface, insisting that the spheres of human affairs and natural phenomena both function as homeostatic systems in which every constituent part, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, has its rightful place and intrinsic worth. In the words of one scholar, Stifter espouses “an ethics of coequality [Gleichrangigkeit] and equilibrium [Gleichgewicht],”18 which serves as a reminder of his ecological sensibility and aligns him with modern environmental-ethical movements like “deep ecology.”19 More specifically, the gentle law prefigures recent 16 Hertling, “Adalbert Stifter’s ‘Forewords’ to Bunte Steine in English,” 5; “So wie es in der äußeren Natur ist, so ist es auch in der inneren, in der des menschlichen Geschlechtes. Ein ganzes Leben voll Gerechtigkeit Einfachheit Bezwingung seiner selbst Verstandesgemäßheit Wirksamkeit in seinem Kreise Bewunderung des Schönen verbunden mit einem heiteren gelassenen Sterben halte ich für groß” (2.2:12). 17 I expand here on a linguistic cue provided by Domandl, “Die philosophische Tradition von Adalbert Stifters ‘Sanftem Gesetz,’” 99. 18 Wolfgang Matz, Adalbert Stifter, oder Diese fürchterliche Wendung der Dinge: Biographie (Munich: Hanser, 1995), 303. Compare also Matz’s more detailed remarks along these same ecological lines on pp. 304–8. 19 In my book manuscript, I make a more detailed case for Stifter as a deep ecologist. For the present, it suffices to note that his fundamental biocentric worldview affiliates him with deep ecology, which was initiated or at least christened by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss in the early 1970s. For

204  Readings in the Anthropocene theories like biocentric egalitarianism (Paul Taylor) and the natural contract (Michel Serres). While Serres promotes a list of post-anthropocentric virtues that seems lifted right from the preface––“admiring attention, reciprocity, contemplation, and respect”20––the title of Taylor’s landmark book from 1986 encapsulates, in three simple words, Stifter’s fundamental ethos: Respect for Nature. The main difference is that Taylor, Serres, and other contemporary environmental ethicists explicitly champion human–nature symbiosis, whereas Stifter only hints at such interaction, delineating two domains that seem more parallel than reciprocal––at least in the limited pages of the preface. In other nonfictional writings he comes closer to articulating a modern brand of biocentrism, albeit with residues of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pantheism, panpsychism, and physico-theology. In an autobiographical sketch from 1866, for instance, he affirms the affinity between human existence and all organic life, citing such examples as moss, plants, trees, and animals.21 His 1843 preface to the first edition of Studien, which is shorter and less meditative than its Bunte Steine counterpart, goes so far as to extol the most minute kernel of grain (das kleinste Körnchen) as an integral component of nature, indeed as the foundation of all eternity (see 1.4:12). Nevertheless, it is his fictional narratives that best reveal the fellowship between humans and the environment. In Bunte Steine, this interactive rapport is exhibited in Granit, Kalkstein, Bergkristall, and Katzensilber (the other two stories, Turmalin and Bergmilch, are set in domestic rather than natural milieus). With respect to the greater question of the Anthropocene, Kalkstein remains the most illuminating text for discussion, if only a preliminary and anticipatory one. Kalkstein tells the tale of a priest who dwells in the midst of barren limestone mountains, somewhere in the Salzkammergut of Austria. His austere existence is not only analogous to, but also consonant with this stark environment insofar as he coexists with it. He has an intimate knowledge of its geological folds and recesses, even its meteorological fluctuations, and displays a blend of aesthetic appreciation and pious reverence for this bleak, inhospitable landscape. The symbiotic relation that obtains between his Christ-like existence and his desert-like environs is bolstered by the linguistic complex of Kar. This morpheme convenient overviews of the movement and sample texts from its main proponents, see Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City, UT: Gibbs Smith, 1985); and Alan Drengson and Yuichi Inoue (eds), The Deep Ecology Movement: An Introductory Anthology (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1995). 20 Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 38. 21 See Adalbert Stifter, Gesammelte Werke in vierzehn Bänden, ed. Konrad Steffen, Vol. 14: Vermischte Schriften (Basel and Stuttgart: Birkhäuser, 1972), 117.

Adalbert Stifter and the Gentle Anthropocene  205 permeates the text, often embedded in compound nouns, and carries geological as well as religious connotations. On the one hand, Kar designates alpine topography formed by glaciers that have left behind major depressions, as in the term Karlandschaft or the proper noun Karwendel, a sub-range of the eastern Alps (Kar here being BavarianAustrian dialect for a “pan,” “pot,” or “vessel”). On the other hand, it implies suffering as in the German expressions for the week and day of the Passion: Karwoche and Karfreitag (this Kar variant being derived from Old High German chara = “lamentation”). As stated often enough in the text, the simple, humble, docile––in a word, gentle––priest lives “im Kar,” which means that he physically inhabits this limestone space of geomorphological indentations and that his inward life resembles an imitatio Christi, serving as an ethical example for all humanity. The thematic realms of the natural and the human thus become affiliated through a single linguistic-symbolic technique. Similarly, Stifter punctuates the text with the key word sanft with its etymological implications of unity, even if these go unmentioned in the preface. In Kalkstein, he employs the term with greater stylistic attentiveness, mainly as an adjective modifying, and mollifying, the otherwise harsh terrain. The incline of a rocky slope and the shimmer of sunlight on the limestone cliffs, for example, are described as “gentle” (sanft).22 And at a climactic juncture of the narrative, sanft appears in connection with the clergyman’s death: “Finally, he fell gently asleep and it was over” (Endlich schlief er sanft ein, und es war vorüber).23 Here Stifter enacts in fiction what he outlines in theory, namely the “cheerful, tranquil death” that consummates the ideal life, one that is conducted in accord with the gentle law and, to recall, is distinguished by “justice, simplicity, self-restraint, rationality, efficacy in one’s own circle, admiration for beauty.” The priest can be said to possess all of the above qualities, but the notion of “efficacy in one’s own circle” remains the most telling in light of his gentle coexistence with nature. The central catastrophic event in this story is an intense thunderstorm, which brings about flooding. This storm portends further downpours along with regular inundations that endanger the welfare of local children who have to cross the river every day on their way to school. A more indiscernible hazard arises when the river spills over onto the surrounding land, which is so geologically furrowed and fissured that even a minor flood would not preclude a child from plunging into some concealed cavity. The 22 See Adalbert Stifter, Limestone, in Brigitta, with Abdias, Limestone, and The Forest Path, trans. Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (London: Angel Books, 1990), 206, 241; 2.2:75, 123. 23 Stifter, Limestone, 243 (translation modified); 2.2:126.

206  Readings in the Anthropocene priest demonstrates that he can be effective in his sphere of influence, namely within his remote mountain parish, by lending support in a number of ways. He tracks down hazardous “ditches, holes and hollows” (Gräben Gruben und Vertiefungen)24 so that they can be filled in or leveled out by the landowners; he studies the weather all the more carefully so that he can better predict storms and warn of ensuing floods; and, most often, he patrols the submerged meadows, guiding errant children to safer ground. As disclosed in his testament, he has put aside money to finance the construction of a new school, one that is located well beyond any high-water danger zone. Though his paltry savings are insufficient for this venture, his selfless gesture moves wealthy members of society to underwrite a sum that will help carry out his final request. More important than these plot details are the overarching anthropocenic questions raised by the priest’s plan. The most basic conclusion to be drawn is that the environment remains less modified by humans than by nature itself. There is no effort on the part of the community, for example, to dam or divert the river, two common practices in human-environmental history.25 The decision to relocate the schoolhouse suggests, on a deeper eco-philosophical level, that humans have opted to bend to nature and accept its fluxes (i.e., floods) rather than impose their will upon something that cannot be controlled anyway. Thanks to the precedent set by the priest, the natural landscape of these limestone Alps thus undergoes only a marginal degree of anthropogenic alteration. As the narrator observes toward the end of the tale, “Everything was unchanged, as though this region had added the characteristic of immutability to that of simplicity” (Es war alles unverändert, als ob diese Gegend zu ihrem Merkmale der Einfachheit auch das der Unveränderlichkeit erhalten hätte).26

Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters

The desolate and infertile limestone environment depicted in Kalkstein offers only limited potential for anthropogenic conversion, but the Bavarian/Bohemian Forest is the site of major environmental change in much of Stifter’s work. With a mixture of historical accuracy and bioregional sensibility, he chronicles the advance of civilization into one of the last pockets of wilderness in central Europe. Specific practices such as the clearing of woods and the draining of marshes figure prominently in such texts as Der Hochwald (The Mountain Forest, 1842/4), Der beschriebene Tännling (The Inscribed Fir Tree, 24 Stifter, Limestone, 245; 2.2:129. 25 Weirs, for instance, were widespread flood-control measures in nineteenthcentury Europe, particularly in remote areas like the Alps. 26 Stifter, Limestone, 246; 2.2:130.

Adalbert Stifter and the Gentle Anthropocene  207 1846/50), and Nachkommenschaften (Offspring, 1864). His lifelong project Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters, which exists in four different versions, remains however his most definitive account of the transformations that occurred during the early Anthropocene. Stifter’s life coincided with the most severe period of deforestation in this insular corner of Bavaria and Bohemia,27 and even though he was a nature enthusiast of the highest degree––by no means just an armchair one––he never seems to bemoan or condemn the loss of woodlands in the wake of, and ultimately for the sake of, human habitation. Granted, his narratives often evince a sense of nostalgia for the days when old-growth forests blanketed the region and land cultivation was restricted to the lowland river plains (i.e., the Vltava/Moldau basin). This sentiment is most apparent in Der Hochwald, which juxtaposes the nineteenth- with the seventeenth-century condition of the landscape. In the Mappe, set in the early eighteenth century and thus at the dawn of the Anthropocene, Stifter records in neutral and dutiful fashion the encroachment of human settlement onto untouched terrain and the subsequent process of agricultural colonization. At the same time, he shows that modification of nature is not tantamount to the exploitation of its resources. He presents, rather, models of ethical stewardship and ecological sustainability that inform what I prefer to call––in a combination of his own literary-anthropomorphic discourse and geoscientific terminology––his ideal of “the gentle Anthropocene.”28 Lest there be any doubt about the symbolic role of a principal 27 See for instance Arthur Brande, “‘Den Wald zu reinerer Anmut führen’: Die Aktualität Stifters aus landschaftsökologischer Sicht,” Jahrbuch des AdalbertStifter-Instituts des Landes Oberösterreich 1 (1994): esp. 144–5. For a historical overview of the human impact on the environment in this region, see JohannBernhard Haversath, Kleine Geschichte des Bayerischen Waldes (Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2015). 28 My analysis focuses on the standard version of the Mappe, published in 1847 as volume three of Stifter’s Studien series, but also considers some unique passages and episodes from the later drafts. The reasoning behind this choice is manifold but mainly has to do with the fact that the so-called Studien-Mappe is the most structurally cohesive and artistically sound iteration of the greater project. The original story from 1841/2 is somewhat disjointed and suffers from Stifter’s early subjective-romantic style; it also has surprisingly little to say about forests and our cultural-anthropological relation to them. The later versions from the 1860s remain not only unpublished, but also unpolished fragments of novel-length enterprises, partly composed in Stifter’s perfunctory and perplexing Altersstil (as notoriously manifested in Witiko). At over 200 pages, the completed and published Studien-Mappe, in contrast, stands as a fullfledged novel in its own right. For the record, I regard it as the supreme artistic achievement in Stifter’s entire oeuvre.

208  Readings in the Anthropocene character in the Studien-Mappe, a former colonel and reformed libertine, Stifter consistently refers to him as “der sanftmütige Obrist.” The compound adjective sanftmütig best translates as “meek” or “humble”— as in the third beatitude, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth”––but more literally as “gentle in disposition.” The narrator, a young doctor who is prone to emotional outbursts and hence has much to learn about the workings of the gentle law, admires the colonel as “the gentlest person” (der sanfteste Mensch) he has ever met (1.5:40) and matures under his influence. As in the preface to Bunte Steine and in Kalkstein, the modifier sanft connects humans and nature such that not only the colonel but also diverse natural phenomena––for example, meadows, valleys, foliage, even the muggy air before a thunderstorm––are characterized as “gentle.” A former soldier of wanton ways, the now mellowed colonel has retired to the Bavarian/Bohemian Forest, establishing a farmstead in the woods. The plot takes place around 1700, when much of the territory was still in a relatively primeval sylvan state. Stifter narrates, in scrupulous detail, a vast range of anthropogenic patterns, including not only the initial procedures of forest clearance and wetland drainage, but also the ensuing activities of soil tillage, livestock pasturage, property expansion, and the conversion of footpaths into graded roads. Stifter, in sum, describes the historical process of Rodung, which transpired across central Europe from the Late Middle Ages onward, albeit much earlier in southern Europe and around the Mediterranean.29 So-called Rodungsnamen throughout the German lands attest to this development whereby humans have put their imprint on the environment in both name and practice. Examples from diverse regions and dialects include Rodern in Alsace; Wernigerode in Saxony-Anhalt; Friedrichroda in Thuringia; Rath and Ratingen along the Lower Rhine near Düsseldorf; Reutlingen in Swabia; Bayreuth in Bavaria; and Reutte in Tirol. The text of the Mappe is replete with the verb reuten, the southern German-Austrian linguistic variant of roden, and even features its own topographical focal point, the Reutbühl or “cleared hill.” It should be noted that roden, reuten, and other dialectical equivalents are related to ausrotten (“to extirpate” (cf. Latin ex + stirps = a stem)), which makes perfect sense given the act of “rooting out” trees and underbrush in order to create arable land. At one point in the narrative Stifter offers an abridged account of this entire agricultural progression: “There he [the colonel] cleared the woods around the hut, added a pasture from which 29 See, for example, the historical-silvicultural study by J. V. Thirgood, Man and the Mediterranean Forest: A History of Resource Depletion (London: Academic Press, 1981). Throughout Man and Nature, Marsh also details the rampant environmental degradation in the greater Mediterranean region.

Adalbert Stifter and the Gentle Anthropocene  209 to raise a couple heads of cattle, let his goats and sheep forage in the woods, and also made for himself a field and small garden to tend.”30 Now that the colonel and, following his example on a nearby plot of land, the doctor have carved out a rudimentary agrarian existence, they set about expanding their respective domestic and territorial domains. They upgrade their primitive cabins to multi-room houses, acquire more land and livestock, and are eventually able to enjoy the fruits of their labors, which means, in more literal terms, that they can at last exult in the bountiful yield of their crops. In a pivotal moment, one that reflects the greater civilizing process from agriculture to culture, crates of books arrive at the colonel’s house and are organized into a library by none other than the envious narrator himself. It is precisely at this point, when they have both made transformative inroads into the tangled depths of the forest and managed to secure a comfortable modicum of subsistence (including intellectual sustenance), that they curb their intrusions upon nature and begin to explore more sustainable modes of coexistence with their anthropogenically shaped environment. The newly built homes of both the colonel and the doctor give a preliminary indication of their environmental sensitivity. Whereas the former paints his house in “a gentle color” (einer sanften Farbe; 1.5:149), the latter opts not to whitewash his garden wall so that it will better blend with the surrounding greenery (1.5:198). In either case, whether by embellishing human-made constructions with an unspecified yet coalescent hue––recall the etymology of sanft––or by refusing to enhance them at all, the two neighbors seek to minimize the boundaries between humanity and nature. They also realize the necessity of preserving the human–natural balance of the very environment they have long toiled over and transformed. This nature–culture synthesis is encapsulated in the following poetic-pastoral evocation of the land: “The spring finally turned into summer. The tree of the forest, the shrub of the hedgerow, the fruit of the gardens, the grass of the meadows, and the crop of the fields, everything stood in great beauty.”31 An example of their efforts to maintain this bucolic simplicity and attain ecological sustainability involves the cultivation of an area known locally as the “stone walls” (Steingewände), which is not a vertical row 30 “Dort lichtete er den Wald um die Hütte, legte sich eine Wiese an, davon er ein paar Rinder nährte, ließ seine Ziegen und Lämmer in das Gesträuche des Waldes gehen, und machte sich wohl auch ein Feld und ein Gärtchen, das er bearbeitete” (1.5:79). 31 “Aus dem Frühling war endlich der Sommer geworden. Der Baum des Waldes, der Strauch des Hages, das Obst der Gärten, das Gras der Wiesen, und die Frucht der Felder, alles stand recht schön” (1.5:167).

210  Readings in the Anthropocene of cliffs, as its name implies, but rather a fissured bed of rock in the middle of the forest. Their intricate project is referred to as “the pine plantation” (die Föhrenpflanzung) and can be summarized as follows (1.5:165–6): an ancient rock bed has become so eroded over time that it now resembles a talus field. The colonel intends to fertilize this barren terrain by widening the gaps between the fractured rocks and introducing the proper mix of soil and seeds into the expanded cracks and crevices. The text goes into detail about this vital blend of hardy seeds and productive soil. The former are gathered from pine trees located on higher and craggier ground, where conditions are even less conducive to germination; the latter is also an improved variety taken from elsewhere, but not rich enough in mineral content to promote unduly rapid growth since the seedlings need time to adjust once their root filaments expand beyond their protective pocket of dirt and encounter solid rock. The colonel expects that a healthy forest will arise from this engineered site and reach maturity when the surrounding woodlands will have likely disappeared due to resource consumption by increased human settlement in the region. Later generations, so he predicts, will be able to harvest the pines for timber and continue to live off the land. His long-term vision is that––“in a thousand years … perhaps” (in tausend Jahren … vielleicht, 1.5:166)––the pine stand will be converted into arable land, since the soil will have become fecund after so many centuries of growth and decay. The colonel, in sum, has conceived an elaborate ecological as well as economic scheme, one that ensures the future prosperity of both the environment and the humans that utilize it. The third and fourth drafts of the Mappe contain less agronomic specifics with regard to this forestation project but all the more commentary on it as a master plan of sustainable development. The following passage from the fourth version testifies to the colonel’s––and by extension, Stifter’s––prescient awareness of an issue that occupies us today: When the people learned that we [the colonel and the narratordoctor] were planting forest trees, they wondered and said that the forest was being cleared everywhere else, that we have gained a milder countryside and arable tracts of land, and now these two men are establishing once again a forest, making the weather get worse and colder. The colonel responded to them by saying that he had already cleared the forest in other spots and would clear even more, thereby equalizing [ausgleichen] things. The talus hill [Geröllbühel], he said, would never be of any use if it remained in its current state and would be an even greater eyesore if the land around it continued to be cultivated and improved. Rooting out [das Ausreuten] the forest, he added, was fine up until now,

Adalbert Stifter and the Gentle Anthropocene  211 and would continue to be fine up to a certain point. But there would come a time when the stands of forest between the fields would be considered valuable property; then the talus hill would be a very practical pine forest and also be beautiful. It makes no difference if the person now establishing it would long be resting in the earth. At least for now he would get to see it grow and flourish.32 Here the plantation site bears a topographical designation––“der Geröllbühel” (the talus hill) in the fourth draft, “der Griesbühel” (the gray hill) in the third––that links it with two prominent landscape features that appear in most of the textual variants: the Reutbühl and the Steinbühel. As mentioned earlier, the former hillock derives its name from the fact that it has been cleared of trees and undergrowth, presumably for the creation of pastureland. The latter knoll has undergone a more nuanced anthropogenic modification: its rocky crest has been blasted and excavated by the landowner in order to create a cellar for the cooled storage of food and drink served during the various folk festivals held upon its summit plateau. The colonel’s project can be considered a corrective––like Stifter’s own greater rectification of anthropocenic forces––of these two less-than-gentle alterations of the natural environment, particularly in view of the linguistic nexus insinuated by the compound element Büh(e)l. In a broader historical-silvicultural context, the pine plantation can further be interpreted as a corrective of certain forestry practices carried out during the middle of the nineteenth century, precisely when Stifter was writing, and rewriting, the Mappe. Stifter proposes, in effect, a more sustainable alternative to the mass planting of spruce trees, which

32 “Als die Leute erfuhren, daß wir Waldbäume pflanzen, wunderten sie sich und sagten, es werde sonst der Wald gereutet, daß wir ein milderes Land und urbare Streken bekommen, und diese zwei Männer gründen wieder einen Wald, und verschlimmern und erkälten das Wetter. Darauf sagte ihnen der Obrist, an anderen Stellen habe er schon Wald gereutet, und werde noch mehr reuten, und sohin die Sache mehr als ausgleichen. Der Geröllbühel würde, wenn er so bliebe, nie von einem Gebrauche sein, und würde die Gegend desto mehr verunzieren, je mehr sie rings umher gepflegt, und verschönert würde. Das Ausreuten des Waldes sei bis jezt gut, und werde gut sein bis zu einem gewissen Maße; dann aber werde eine Zeit kommen, in welcher die Waldstellen zwischen den Feldern als kostbares Besiztum da stehen werden, und dann wird der Geröllbühel ein sehr zwekmäßiger Föhrenwald sein, und er wird auch schön sein. Es thue zu der Sache nichts, wenn dann der, der ihn jezt gründe, schon lange in der Erde ruhen werde. Jezt sehe er ihn wenigstens wachsen und gedeihen” (6.2:198–9; cf. the nearly identical wording in 6.1:220).

212  Readings in the Anthropocene was an expedient reforestation measure implemented not only in the Bavarian/Bohemian Forest but throughout the German Mittelgebirge.33 Many of the above problems and solutions presented by Stifter in the Mappe have been addressed by George Perkins Marsh, who postulates a correlation between deforestation and soil erosion, landslides, floods, even temperature change. The geologic-anthropocenic magnitude of what initially seems but a sylvan-surface modification should not, in Marsh’s view, be underestimated: “We know that the clearing of the woods has, in some cases, produced within two or three generations, effects as blasting as those generally ascribed to geological convulsions, and has laid waste the face of the earth more hopelessly than if it had been buried by a current of lava or a shower of volcanic sand.”34 Marsh argues in more specific terms that the removal of forests, and, consequently, of the vegetable mold and soil that nurture their growth, wreaks subterranean havoc owing to the percolation of moisture and the infiltration of cold––at least in northern climes characterized by wet summers and severe winters. As the rocks become more exposed to the elements due to the lack of topsoil, they expand and contract to the point of geological instability. Forest clearing would thus seem 33 The spruce now constitutes approximately 70 percent of the arboreal population in Stifter’s home territory, a dramatic increase from the estimated 25 percent during the beginning of the Subatlantic era 2,500 years ago. See Haversath, Kleine Geschichte des Bayerischen Waldes, 34. Haversath breaks these statistics down into altitudinal zones as follows: 90 percent (current) versus 40 percent (previous) in montane heights; 58 percent versus 20 percent in intermediate elevations; and 10 percent versus 83 percent in the lowland valleys. Stifter’s oeuvre has been scrutinized for its silvicultural aspects by both literary scholars and professional foresters. For a multi-discursive compilation of analyses, one that brings the humanities and the sciences into at least some semblance of dialogue, see Walter Hettche and Hubert Merkel (eds), Waldbilder: Beiträge zum interdisziplinären Kolloquium “Da ist Wald und Wald und Wald” (Adalbert Stifter), Göttingen, 19. und 20. März 1999 (Munich: iudicium, 2000). With respect to the Mappe, see esp. the essay by Herwig Gottwald, “Natur und Kultur: Wildnis, Wald und Park in Stifters Mappe-Dichtungen,” in Hettche and Merkel, 90–106. For a selection of articles on Stifter published in forestry journals, see Helmuth Schrötter, “Adalbert Stifters Naturauffassung,” Allgemeine Forst- und Jagdzeitung 156 (1985): 133–5; Helmuth Schrötter, “Stifters Lehre vom Wald,” Centralblatt für das gesamte Forstwesen 103 (1986): 170–81; Helmuth Schrötter, “Landschaft und Landnutzung bei Adalbert Stifter,” Beiträge für Forstwirtschaft und Landschaftsökologie 28 (1994): 136–8; and Helmuth Schrötter, “Stifters ökologische Naturschau,” Forst und Holz 53 (1998): 705–8. A more productive dialogue between Stifter and the science of forestry would no doubt be gained by a consideration of Hans Carl von Carlowitz, the author of Sylvicultura oeconomica (1713) and the first proponent of sustainable forest mangement, now broadly subsumed under the rubric of sustainability or Nachhaltigkeit. 34 Marsh, Man and Nature, 226.

Adalbert Stifter and the Gentle Anthropocene  213 to have literally earth-shaking consequences. The colonel’s reforestation project, it should be recalled, occurs at a location where the geological stratum is already laid bare and perhaps therefore remains less susceptible to these more deep-seated upheavals. Even more intriguing is Marsh’s commentary on sylvicultural practices that mirror the methods adopted by the colonel with respect to his pine plantation. In northern Africa, for instance, locals break up the thin strata of rock in order to access the fertile ground underneath, while in other corners of the Mediterranean, as well as in central Germany and distant China, they “cover … large extents of denuded rock with earth, and plant upon them a forest growth.”35 Two of his major theories concerning the environmental impact of deforestation are also reflected in Stifter, namely flooding and climatic change. While the most famous episode of the Mappe undoubtedly remains the destructive ice storm, the even more devastating floods that ensue from the extreme wintertime precipitation, compounded by the diluvial springtime thaw, tend to receive far less attention.36 Marsh, for his part, does not overlook the inundations that tend to occur in deforested terrain, whether from spring rainfall, snowmelt, or the general inability of the rootless soil to absorb moisture. His observations about so-called “freshets” in the northern United States equally synopsize Stifter’s epic account of the ice storm and its aftermath: It frequently happens that a powerful thaw sets in after a long period of frost, and the snow which had been months in accumulating is dissolved and carried off in a few hours … The consequence is that the face of the country is suddenly flooded with a quantity of melted snow and rain equivalent to a fall of six or eight inches of the latter, or even worse. This runs unobstructed to rivers often still bound with thick ice, and thus inundations of a fearfully devastating character are produced.37 While there is no clear indication in the Mappe that the post-storm deluge is attributable to forest clearage, the meteorological chaos of snow, rain, and ice transpires precisely at that point in the narrative when the forestland has been converted to farmland and the protagonists can 35 See Marsh, Man and Nature, 44, 454–5. 36 Interestingly, the ice storm is absent from the first and fourth versions. For a notable exception to the interpretive trend of glossing over the post-storm spring floods, see Sabine Frost, Whiteout: Schneefälle und Weißeinbrüche in der Literatur ab 1800 (Bielefeld: transcript, 2011), 125–59. Frost insists on the complementarity of water and ice as manifested in the chaotic cycle of liquid and freezing rain in the Studien-Mappe. 37 Marsh, Man and Nature, 196–7.

214  Readings in the Anthropocene at last relent in their efforts to subdue the wilderness. Environmental calamity, whether human-abetted or not, thus strikes at the moment of anthropic calm. Nevertheless, the issue of variable weather in the Mappe ultimately remains vague. Stifter seems to accept the common folk perception that forests contribute to harsher climatic conditions.38 Marsh, in contrast, repeatedly insists––and gives empirical evidence to back his claim––that forests help regulate the temperature of the environment and that their wholesale elimination leads to colder winters and hotter, drier summers.39 Regardless of their divergent opinions (as we know today, Marsh is right), these two intimate observers of nature can at least agree upon the following: “With the disappearance of the forest, all is changed.”40 In the third and fourth drafts of the Mappe, Stifter sketches a unique solution to the problem of deforestation and overall environmental degradation.41 The “Fürstengarten” or “Prince’s Garden” blurs the borders between nature and culture to such a degree that the narrator’s casual stroll through a well-tended park soon turns into a protracted trek through dense woods and mountainous terrain. The “Fürstengarten” is an extreme version of the English landscape garden.42 It, too, is a “work of art” (Kunstwerk) (6.1:238) designed to create a feeling of intimacy between––as the title of Marsh’s book plainly states––man and nature. But Stifter radicalizes this aesthetic-horticultural ideal, expanding its parameters to encompass a vast tract of land and a variety of topographies that range from lowland flower gardens to montane forests. Indeed, the “Fürstengarten” is not a garden per se, at least not based on the etymological origin of the term (cf. Proto-Germanic gardaz = a “fenced enclosure”) or on its historical-cultural function as a buffer

38 Compare, for example, 1.5:80 and the remark from the passage cited earlier (6.2:198–9; 6.1:220): “And now these two men are establishing once again a forest, making the weather get worse and colder” (und diese zwei Männer gründen wieder einen Wald, und verschlimmern und erkälten das Wetter). 39 See esp. Marsh, Man and Nature, 125–86. 40 Ibid., 186. 41 In my abbreviated discussion of the “Fürstengarten” I cite from Stifter’s third draft, in which this episode is slightly more fleshed out. 42 Though Fürst Hermann von Pückler-Muskau (1785–1871) was perhaps the most famous architect of English gardens in the German lands during the nineteenth century, Stifter most likely modeled his “Fürstengarten” on that of the Rothenhof summer palace, property of the princes of Schwarzenberg and located near the Bohemian town of Krummau/Český Krumlov. For further details of this episode as depicted in the fourth draft, see Horst Hömke, “Der Landschaftsgarten in der letzten Fassung von Adalbert Stifters ‘Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters,’” Die pädagogische Provinz: Unterricht und Erziehung: Deutsch, Geschichte, Sozialkunde, Philosophie 21 (1967): 536–7.

Adalbert Stifter and the Gentle Anthropocene  215 between human living space and the wilderness.43 In these later versions of the Mappe, there is no such middle ground; the human and natural realms are fluid and interconnected. As one scholar notes, the “Fürstengarten” is “a synthesis of wild nature, agriculturally utilized land and pleasure ground, thus a synthesis of nature and culture, outside and inside, in which the individual spheres are no longer distinguishable.”44 As the narrator himself observes from his vantage on the mountaintop, more specifically from the overgrown ruins of a summit tower, which yet again crystallizes the fusion of natural processes and human endeavor, “I couldn’t see a boundary to the garden anywhere, not a wall, nor latticework, not even a fence” (Eine Begrenzung des Gartens, wie etwa eine Mauer ein Gitterwerk oder auch nur ein Zaun ist, konnte ich nirgends erbliken; 6.1:236). A later remark to the prince underscores the sense of unity that underlies this extensive yet integrative landscape project: “It … seemed to me as if everything were One, no matter how large in scope” (war es mir … als sei das alles Eines, so groß es ist; 6.1:240). This totalizing effect does not merely stem from the lack of physical demarcations or other visible appurtenances such as signposts and trail markers, all of which have been barred from the “garden” as man-made contrivances that reduce nature to a chartable space or systematic grid. On a deeper level, the “Fürstengarten” functions as an all-encompassing province of both human activity and ecological integrity. One is always already within its ambit, or, as the narrator learns from a fieldworker upon inquiring into its precise location, “You’re already in it” (Ihr seid ja schon drinnen; 6.1:232). The “Fürstengarten” approximates a fully functioning ecosystem, one that includes the participation of humans. Stifter, never one to eschew detail when it comes to landscape description, copiously catalogs human traces upon the environment, for example, flower gardens and wildflower patches; apple, pear, and cherry orchards; wheat, cabbage, and strawberry fields. He also invokes every conceivable species of endemic tree: maples, oaks, elms, alders, lindens, beeches, birches, aspens, spruces, firs, and pines. In terms of geographical terrain, the “Fürstengarten” incorporates cultivated acreage, forested slopes, granitic outcroppings, and a mountain highpoint that affords panoramic vistas of the greater bioregion, including outlying expanses of forests 43 See Hansjörg Küster, Geschichte des Waldes: Von der Urzeit bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1998), 170–1. 44 “Ein[e] Synthese von freier Natur, agrikulturell genutztem Land und eigentlicher Parkanlage, einer Synthese also von Natur und Kultur, Draußen und Drinnen, in der die einzelnen Sphären nicht mehr unterscheidbar sind.” Christian Begemann, Die Welt der Zeichen: Stifter-Lektüren (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995), 352.

216  Readings in the Anthropocene interspersed with homesteads and hamlets. Stifter devotes descriptive attention to human settlements within this larger bioregional realm. Farmers and foresters, along with their respective families, inhabit the prince’s “garden” and act as its stewards. Moreover, the modifier sanft links the multifarious qualities of this utopian environment in which human–nature reciprocity reigns supreme. It is applied, either adjectivally or adverbially, to the following heterogeneous phenomena: the color of roses, a grove of maples, glistening meadows, forested hills, a mountain gap, the undulation of agricultural fields; and, finally, to the “gentle deep feelings” (sanfte tiefe Gefühle) that overwhelm the narrator when he finds himself in the midst of nature (6.1:232–48). As the fourth draft additionally reveals, many of the workers that helped create the “Fürstengarten” are now employed by the colonel, which only reinforces the connection between this radical royal landscape garden and the latter’s innovative plantation project (6.2:101). Stifter could hardly have imagined a more seamless space of human– nature symbiosis. His visionary model of a bioregion that extends across cultural (Bavarian/Bohemian–German/Czech) and topographical (the Danube/Vltava–Mediterranean/Atlantic watershed) boundaries anticipates, in its own literary-imaginative way, a later managerial enterprise of ecological totality. The “Fürstengarten” points ahead to the two (trans-)national parks that today preserve the very environment he incessantly writes about, whether in the four versions of the Mappe or in numerous other works. The Nationalpark Bayerischer Wald, founded in 1970 as (West) Germany’s first national park, and Národní Park Šumava in the Czech Republic, established in 1991 after the fall of communism, together comprise the largest forested biosphere in central Europe. They offer varying degrees of woodland protection and harbor a sizeable population of endangered species such as the lynx, peregrine falcon, and Eurasian otter. Unlike most federally administered land in the United States, European national parks tend not to prohibit permanent human habitation. Granted, these twin German-Czech parks are divided into diverse zones of environmental protection and resource use,45 but they do not resemble the kinds of human-free (and aboriginal-purged) “ecological ghettos” for which American national parks and wilderness areas have been criticized.46 45 For further details regarding these zones, see Haversath, Kleine Geschichte des Bayerischen Waldes, 31–3. 46 See, for example, Thomas E. Birch, “The Incarceration of Wilderness: Wilderness Areas as Prisons,” Environmental Ethics 12 (Spring 1990): 3–26; and William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in William Cronon (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton: 1995), 69–90. Both texts are reprinted in

Adalbert Stifter and the Gentle Anthropocene  217 Much like the non-compartmentalized “Fürstengarten,” with its utter lack of man-made enclosures, the Bavarian/Bohemian Forest is a vast ecosystem that transcends national (read: human-erected) frontiers.47

Concluding Remarks: Der Nachsommer and Beyond

If the “Fürstengarten” is an extreme version of the English landscape garden, then Risach’s Upper Austrian estate as depicted in Der Nachsommer can be considered a radicalized “Fürstengarten.” The Asperhof, with its diverse orchards, parks, gardens, and woodlands, is a consummate fusion of humanity and nature. As such, it resembles a kind of “gentle Anthropocene farm”––environmentally sustainable, ecologically intact, and humanly enriching. Here nature is not so much modified as moderated by man, all in accordance with the gentle law. Indeed, the preface to Bunte Steine seems to shed more light on Der Nachsommer, whose genesis it after all coincides with, than on the six stories it precedes and professes to explicate.48 “Large has become small to me, and small is now large” (Großes ist mir klein, Kleines ist mir groß; 4.1:217),49 the narrator reveals to Risach after becoming acquainted with the complex yet gentle operations of the Asperhof. Some notable examples of this human–nature complexity deserve at least passing mention. Flooding is regulated by small dams built along the brook that flows through Risach’s property, while a woodland lake has undergone minor improvements to prevent swampy areas from forming on its shores and floods from occurring at its outlet. Thanks to these unobtrusive adjustments, the lake water is so clear that one can see––here an obvious intertextual/intra-authorial allusion––“all the brightly colored stones [bunte Steine] lying on the bottom” (in ziemlicher Tiefe noch alle die bunten Steine; 4.2:67).50 The estate’s rosebushes and fruit trees are a more complicated matter, requiring constant care––and not just the standard horticultural procedures of trimming and pruning. They receive additional hygienic maintenance every spring whereby their stems or

47

48 49 50

J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson (eds), The Great New Wilderness Debate (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 443–70; 471–99. Even when this region was divided by more rigid political frontiers, including physical and spatial partitions like the fortified fences and restricted zones (Sperrgebiete) of the so-called Iron Curtain, the environment was paradoxically protected through decades of prohibited human access, such that the woodlands and wildlife were better able to recover from long-term anthropic abuse. See, as indicated earlier in note 7, Thurnher, “Stifters Sanftes Gesetz,” esp. 396. Adalbert Stifter, Indian Summer, trans. Wendell Frye (New York: Peter Lang, 1985), 127. Ibid., 211.

218  Readings in the Anthropocene trunks are cleansed by human hands. Additional care for damaged or otherwise ailing specimens is provided by the “Baumschule” (nursery; literally, tree school) and the “Rosenhospital” (rose hospital), two institutions that blend the natural with the anthropic. Risach’s solution to the problem of insect infestation remains, however, the most elaborate of all his stewardship stratagems. Among these, his basic methodological tactic of maximizing the built-in checks and balances of ecology, specifically the insectivore niche-function of birds, to resolve the issue harkens back yet again to Marsh. The latter speculates that the deterioration of American forests is attributable to the proliferation of insects, which in turn is due to the slaughter of bird populations in the wake of European colonization: Insects increase whenever the birds which feed upon them disappear. Hence, in the wanton destruction of the robin and other insectivorous birds, the bipus implumis, the featherless biped, man, is not only exchanging the vocal orchestra which greets the rising sun for the drowsy beetle’s evening drone, and depriving his groves and his fields of their fairest ornament, but he is waging a treacherous warfare on his natural allies.51 As for Risach, a featherless biped who has perfected a system of feeding and fostering a wide range of ornithological species, his environmentally sustainable estate seeks to correct the same ecological imbalance, only on Austrian terrain. His summary statement serves as a fitting response to Marsh: “The birds here are our remedy against caterpillars and other harmful insects. It’s they who cleanse the trees, bushes, little plants, and, naturally, the roses too, far better than human hands can, whatever means might be applied.”52 The revised second and third editions of Marsh’s Man and Nature, published in 1875 and 1884 respectively, were retitled The Earth as Modified by Human Action. In deference to Marsh and in cognizance of our degraded planetary predicament at the close of the twentieth century, an international symposium was held and a voluminous 51 Marsh, Man and Nature, 34. 52 Stifter, Indian Summer, 90. “Die Vögel sind in diesem Garten unser Mittel gegen Raupen und schädliches Ungeziefer. Diese sind es, welche die Bäume Gesträuche die kleinen Pflanzen und natürlich auch die Rosen weit besser reinigen, als die Menschenhände oder was immer für Mittel zu bewerkstelligen im Stande wären” (4.1:152). For a deeper, deconstructive reading of Risach’s ostensibly sound ecological methods, especially his strategy involving birds as a regulative measure against insect infiltration, see Begemann, Die Welt der Zeichen, 343–50. I will also offer my own deeper, deconstructive reading of Der Nachsommer in a lengthier forthcoming analysis.

Adalbert Stifter and the Gentle Anthropocene  219 collection of follow-up essays was published, the title of which sums up the recently minted concept of the Anthropocene: The Earth as Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past 300 Years.53 This titular shift from modification to transformation attests to the accelerated degree of change with respect to lasting human traces upon the earth. As stated more specifically by the volume’s main editor, the purpose of the “Earth Transformed” project is threefold: “(1) to document these changes over the past 300 years at a global scale; (2) to contrast the global patterns of change to those experienced at the regional level; and (3) to explore the major human forces that have driven these changes.”54 In his own non-global yet duteous bioregional way, Stifter records a variety of environmental transformations resulting from humankind’s tenure upon the Earth. In keeping with my running commentary of nineteenth-century American discourse, his ideal of a gentle biocentric ethic may best be compared to Thoreau’s entreaty for “a certain tender relation to Nature”55—that is, a non-intrusive comportment toward a biosphere that has endured enough anthropocenic use and abuse over the course of recent, all-toorecent geological time.

Bibliography

Begemann, Christian. Die Welt der Zeichen: Stifter-Lektüren. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995. Birch, Thomas E. “The Incarceration of Wilderness: Wilderness Areas as Prisons.” Environmental Ethics 12 (Spring 1990): 3–26. Reprinted in J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson (eds), The Great New Wilderness Debate, 443–70. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. Brande, Arthur. “‘Den Wald zu reinerer Anmut führen’: Die Aktualität Stifters aus landschaftsökologischer Sicht.” Jahrbuch des Adalbert-Stifter-Instituts des Landes Oberösterreich 1 (1994): 143–50. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1995. Callicott, J. Baird and Michael P. Nelson, eds. The Great New Wilderness Debate. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” In William Cronon (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, 69–90. New York: W. W. Norton: 1995. Reprinted in J. Baird

53 See B. L. Turner II et al. (eds), The Earth as Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past 300 Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 54 Ibid., xi–xii. 55 Henry David Thoreau, The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen, Vol. 10 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), 252. For a brief elaboration on this quote, see Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1995), 209.

220  Readings in the Anthropocene Callicott and Michael P. Nelson (eds), The Great New Wilderness Debate, 471–99. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. Devall, Bill and George Sessions. Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered. Salt Lake City, UT: Gibbs Smith, 1985. Domandl, Sepp. “Die philosophische Tradition von Adalbert Stifters ‘Sanftem Gesetz.’” Vierteljahresschrift des Adalbert-Stifter-Instituts des Landes Oberösterreich 21.3/4 (1972): 79–103. Downing, Eric. “Common Ground: Conditions of Realism in Stifter’s ‘Vorrede.’” Colloquia Germanica: Internationale Zeitschrift für Germanistik 28 (1995): 35–53. Downing, Eric. Double Exposures: Repetition and Realism in Nineteenth-Century German Fiction. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Drengson, Alan and Yuichi Inoue. The Deep Ecology Movement: An Introductory Anthology. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1995. Frost, Sabine. Whiteout: Schneefälle und Weißeinbrüche in der Literatur ab 1800. Bielefeld: transcript, 2011. Gabriel, Hans P. “Prescribing Reality: The Preface as a Device of Literary Realism in Auerbach, Keller, and Stifter.” Colloquia Germanica: Internationale Zeitschrift für Gemanistik 32 (1999): 325–44. Glacken, Clarence J. Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Gottwald, Herwig. “Natur und Kultur: Wildnis, Wald und Park in Stifters MappeDichtungen.” In Walter Hettche and Hubert Merkel (eds), Waldbilder: Beiträge zum interdisziplinären Kolloquium “Da ist Wald und Wald und Wald” (Adalbert Stifter), Göttingen, 19. und 20. März 1999, 90–106. Munich: iudicium, 2000. Haversath, Johann-Bernhard. Kleine Geschichte des Bayerischen Waldes. Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2015. Heringman, Noah. “Deep Time at the Dawn of the Anthropocene.” Representations 129 (2015): 56–85. Hertling, Gunter H. “Adalbert Stifter’s ‘Forewords’ to Bunte Steine in English: His Poetics, Aesthetics, and Weltanschauung.” Modern Austrian Literature 32.1 (1999): 1–21. Hettche, Walter and Hubert Merkel, eds. Waldbilder: Beiträge zum interdisziplinären Kolloquium “Da ist Wald und Wald und Wald” (Adalbert Stifter), Göttingen, 19. und 20. März 1999. Munich: iudicium, 2000. Hömke, Horst. “Der Landschaftsgarten in der letzten Fassung von Adalbert Stifters ‘Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters.’” Die pädagogische Provinz: Unterricht und Erziehung: Deutsch, Geschichte, Sozialkunde, Philosophie 21 (1967): 536–57. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Translated by James Creed Meredith. Edited by Nicholas Walter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Küster, Hansjörg. Geschichte des Waldes: Von der Urzeit bis zur Gegenwart. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1998. Laufhütte, Hartmut. “Das sanfte Gesetz und der Abgrund: Zu den Grundlagen der Stifterschen Dichtung ‘aus dem Geiste der Naturwissenschaft.’” In Walter Hettche, Johannes John, and Sibylle von Steinsdorff (eds), Stifter-Studien: Ein Festgeschenk für Wolfgang Frühwald zum 65. Geburtstag, 61–74. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000. Lowenthal, David. George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000.

Adalbert Stifter and the Gentle Anthropocene  221 Marsh, George Perkins. Man and Nature. Edited by David Lowenthal. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. Matz, Wolfgang. Adalbert Stifter, oder Diese fürchterliche Wendung der Dinge: Biographie. Munich: Hanser, 1995. Schrötter, Helmuth. “Adalbert Stifters Naturauffassung.” Allgemeine Forst- und Jagdzeitung 156 (1985): 133–5. Schrötter, Helmuth. “Stifters Lehre vom Wald.” Centralblatt für das gesamte Forstwesen 103 (1986): 170–81. Schrötter, Helmuth. “Landschaft und Landnutzung bei Adalbert Stifter.” Beiträge für Forstwirtschaft und Landschaftsökologie 28 (1994): 136–8. Schrötter, Helmuth. “Stifters ökologische Naturschau.” Forst und Holz 53 (1998): 705–8. Selge, Martin. Adalbert Stifter: Poesie aus dem Geist der Naturwissenschaft. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1976. Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract. Translated by Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Stifter, Adalbert. Gesammelte Werke in vierzehn Bänden. Edited by Konrad Steffen. Basel and Stuttgart: Birkhäuser, 1962–72. Stifter, Adalbert. Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Edited by Alfred Doppler, Wolfgang Frühwald, and Hartmut Laufhütte. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1978–. Stifter, Adalbert. Indian Summer. Translated by Wendell Frye. New York: Peter Lang, 1985. Stifter, Adalbert. Brigitta, with Abdias, Limestone, and The Forest Path. Translated by Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly. London: Angel Books, 1990. Stopp, Frederick. “Die Symbolik in Stifters ‘Bunten Steinen.’” Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 28 (1954): 165–93. Swales, Martin and Erika Swales. Adalbert Stifter: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Thirgood, J. W. Man and the Mediterranean Forest: A History of Resource Depletion. London: Academic Press, 1981. Thoreau, Henry David. The Journal of Henry David Thoreau. Edited by Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen. 14 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906. Thurnher, Eugen. “Stifters Sanftes Gesetz.” In Klaus Lazarowicz and Wolfgang Kron (eds), Unterscheidung und Bewahrung: Festschrift für Hermann Kunisch zum 60. Geburtstag 27. Oktober 1961, 381–97. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1961. Turner, B. L., W. C. Clark, R. W. Kates, J. F. Richards, J. T. Matthews, and W. B. Meyer, eds. The Earth as Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past 300 Years. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Wagner, Lori. “Schick, Schichten, Geschichte: Geological Theory in Stifter’s Bunte Steine.” Jahrbuch des Adalbert Stifter-Institutes des Landes Oberösterreich 2 (1995): 17–41. Wilson, Edward O. The Future of Life. New York: Vintage, 2002.

Ten Engineering the Anthropocene: Technology, Ambition, and Enlightenment in Theodor Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter

Katie Ritson

In the Anthropocene, reading and writing about landscape has become a political act. The “sense of place” that can be embedded in such texts is increasingly loaded with environmental concerns now that place as a category is under threat. A surge of recent literary texts that engage with the landscape of the North Sea lowland coasts is a manifestation of this, given that these low-lying and heavily engineered regions are set to be lost to the sea in the coming years. These works—novels, short stories, poetry, nature writing in a range of languages—suggest that these fragile coastlines are serving as something of a cultural bellwether for broaching the crisis of the Anthropocene.1 The lowlands, which stretch around the edges of the North Sea basin, incorporating parts of eastern England, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark, share a common culture and history, as has been argued by

1 In the past decade alone, notable literary works have included the novels De verdronkene by Margriet de Moor (2005), What I Was by Meg Rosoff (2007), Mandø by Kjersti Vik (2014), Vogelweide by Uwe Timm (2014), Sommernovelle by Christiane Neudecker (2015), the short story “The Netherlands Lives with Water” by Jim Shepard and the collection This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You by Jon McGregor (both 2012), the poetry collection Shingle Street by Blake Morrison (2015), and prose fiction works such as This Luminous Coast by Jules Pretty (2011) and “Silt” by Robert MacFarlane (2012). This is in addition to many works of popular fiction, in particular crime fiction, associated with this landscape by writers such as Ann Cleeve in the UK and Elke Bergsma and Klaus-Peter Wolf in Germany.

Engineering the Anthropocene  223 the historian Greg Bankoff.2 Sculpted by humans and the power of the tides alike, they are both a product and a victim of our Age of Humans. With this in mind, rereading older literary works that deal with this landscape is of particular interest. How has humanity’s role on the wet and stormy northern littorals been perceived? Was the modernday crisis in the relationship between humans and their environment reflected in nineteenth-century understandings of place? What has really shifted in our understanding of place in the Anthropocene? Theodor Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter (translated variously as The Dykemaster and The Rider on the White Horse),3 first published shortly before the author’s death in 1888, is a classic text of German poetic realism and one of the best known literary works concerned with the processes of land reclamation on the North Sea coasts during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Storm spent most of his life on the German North Sea coast, and this novella has at its heart both the human drama in a close-knit coastal society and the processes of dike management and land reclamation in the eighteenth century. This historical novel was written more than a century after the events it describes and follows the protagonist Hauke Haien’s efforts to introduce new dikes with less steep seaward sides4 in North Frisia and to reclaim and secure new land for his community. Much Storm scholarship has concentrated on the novella within the context of nineteenth-century German literary developments, in particular with regard to its stance on religion and employment of the uncanny as a text concerned with rationalism, but the text has only rarely been explored in a broader context of research into the history of technology and environmental awareness.5 2 Greg Bankoff, “The ‘English Lowlands’ and the North Sea Basin System: A History of Shared Risk,” Environment and History 19.1 (2013): 3–37. 3 English translations in this chapter are taken from The Rider on the White Horse and Selected Stories by Theodor Storm (New York: Signet, 1964), translated by James Wright. 4 The idea that medieval dikes were steep and that the sloping dikes were introduced later after catastrophic storm floods has in fact been shown to be more complicated. See Franz Mauelshagen, “Disaster and Political Culture in Germany Since 1500,” in Christof Mauch and Christian Pfister (eds), Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses: A World History (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 51–2; and the entry on “Die Technik des modernen Deichbaus,” in Gerd Eversberg (ed.), Der Schimmelreiter: Novelle von Theodor Storm. Historischkritische Edition (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2014), 429–32. 5 This is perhaps starting to change, with recent work by Heather Sullivan and Kate Rigby placing Storm’s novella in a much broader, environmental context. See Heather I. Sullivan’s essay “Dirt Theory and Material Criticism,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.3 (2012): 515–31, esp. 525–6; and the chapter “Breaking Waves” in Kate Rigby, Dancing with Disaster:

224  Readings in the Anthropocene The novella’s exploration of landscape engineering overlaps with the beginnings of the Anthropocene. The start date of the Anthropocene is still currently under discussion. Crutzen and Stoermer suggest the Industrial Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century as a starting point,6 when the invention of the steam engine triggered a widespread dependence on fossil fuels to meet new energy needs, although they allow that other starting dates are possible.7 The methods of hydraulic engineering shared around the coasts of the North Sea Basin that have dried and shrunk the peaty soil and attempted to tame the tides behind high dikes are arguably a figuration of the human dominion over and management of nature that has given rise to our contemporary environmental crisis. In this chapter, I will examine the representation of technology in Der Schimmelreiter as a means of improving the lives of Storm’s inhabitants of the North Frisian coast, and how this might reflect, in retrospect, the beginnings of the Anthropocene. Thematic and formal elements of the novella undermine the narrative of technological and Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 84–111. There has been some research on Storm’s own understanding of contemporary dike technology; see the accompanying essays in Gerd Eversberg (ed.), Der Schimmelreiter: Novelle von Theodor Storm. Historisch-kritische Edition (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2014), and Paul Barz, Der wahre Schimmelreiter: Die Geschichte einer Landschaft und ihres Dichters Theodor Storm (Hamburg: Convent, 2000). 6 Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” IGBP Newsletter 41 (May 2000): 17. “We choose this date because, during the past two centuries, the global effects of human activities have become clearly noticeable. This is the period when data retrieved from glacial ice cores show the beginning of a growth in the atmospheric concentrations of several ‘greenhouse gases’ … Such a starting date also coincides with James Watt’s invention of the steam engine in 1784.” 7 The Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy’s Working Group on the Anthropocene writes on its website that “The beginning of the ‘Anthropocene’ is most generally considered to be at c. 1800 ce, around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Europe (Crutzen’s original suggestion); other potential candidates for time boundaries have been suggested, at both earlier dates (within or even before the Holocene) or later (e.g. at the start of the nuclear age). A formal ‘Anthropocene’ might be defined either with reference to a particular point within a stratal section, that is, a Global Stratigraphic Section and Point (GSSP), colloquially known as a ‘golden spike’; or, by a designated time boundary (a Global Standard Stratigraphic Age),” http://quaternary. stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/anthropocene/ (accessed March 17, 2016). Will Steffen lists the year 1950 as the other leading candidate for the starting date. See Will Steffen, “Commentary: Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, ‘The Anthropocene,’” in Libby Robin, Sverker Sörlin, and Paul Warde (eds), The Future of Nature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 486–90, esp. 490.

Engineering the Anthropocene  225 intellectual progression that forms the basis of the Enlightenment; it does this in a complex engineered landscape, in which the relationship between humanity and the natural world is brought into focus. The chapter will also examine the way in which nature is represented in the novella and will compare it briefly with the contemporary short story “The Netherlands Lives with Water” by the US-American writer Jim Shepard, which explores a similar geographic and thematic territory but shows a very different conception of nature. In the concluding section, I will situate the text’s representation of the Enlightenment ideal of progress within discussions about the beginnings of the new geological era of the Anthropocene. The rereading of this text against the backdrop of the shift from the late Holocene to the Anthropocene reveals the muddy and fraught relationship between human progress and ecological disaster. It might also point us toward the problems arising from overreliance on technological solutions in the future.

Managing Nature

The events of this novella are embedded in the broader narrative of the eighteenth century in which it is set—what historian Franz Mauelshagen has called the “master narrative” of the transition from pre-modern to modern times, which he describes thus: The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, preceded by the Scientific Revolution, challenged the monopoly of religious interpretations of nature and established scientific rationality, thus displacing religious explanations of natural phenomena with scientific theories and introducing the idea that humans could control nature by means of technology.8 Hauke Haien is a complex figure, but he is aligned with the incoming values of rationality and belief in technical progress.9 The narrative starts with him as a young child questioning his father’s measuring and reckoning. His father sends him to fetch an edition of Euclid from the attic so that his son can learn something for himself. The edition, when Hauke reappears with it, is a Dutch one, and he needs a Dutch grammar book in order to even attempt to understand the language at 8 Mauelshagen, “Disaster and Political Culture,” 58. 9 Wolfgang Frühwald asserts that even the name Hauke Haien is aligned with intellect and understanding, as Hauke is the Frisian form of the given name Hugo, derived from the Middle High German term for mind and meaning. See Wolfgang Frühwald, “Hauke Haien, der Rechner: Mythos und Technikglaube in Theodor Storms Novelle ‘Der Schimmelreiter,’” in Jürgen Brummack (ed.), Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte: Festschrift für Richard Brinkmann (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1981), 442.

226  Readings in the Anthropocene first and then the content, but we learn that he is successful in reading and absorbing a large part of the book by the time the winter is over. This brief scene at the beginning positions Hauke Haien firmly in the humanistic tradition of erudition. The knowledge he wants to possess is in a book, and thus breaks with the oral tradition that provided for much of the cultural continuity in pre-modern times. Moreover, the book is a classical text by a Greek mathematician, an important cornerstone of the rationalism that underpins Enlightenment thought. The fact that the book is written in Dutch is not coincidental either—apart from testing Hauke Haien’s great thirst for knowledge, it is a reminder that new dike technology in northern Germany was primarily introduced from the Netherlands during the period in question.10 Hauke Haien is not just a “geborener Rechner” (a born mathematician)11 but is also shown to be a natural empiricist, spending hours outdoors watching the waves strike the sea defenses: And when the floods rose higher in the autumn and the work often had to be stopped, he did not return home with the others, but stayed there … on the seaward side of the dike for hours at a time, gazing at the North Sea waves as they beat always higher against the grassy seams of the dike … After staring downward thus for a long time, he nodded his head slowly; or else, without looking up, he raised his hand and drew a faint line in the air, as though he wanted thereby to give the dike a gentler slope.12 He looks both to the formal rules of geometry and mathematics and to nature in order to understand the world around him. Hauke Haien is shown to be fearless of natural phenomena he cannot explain, such as the wraiths that appear on the mudflats in certain winter weathers. These take the form of thin, capering, human-like forms, and Hauke Haien wonders if they are, as hearsay would have it, the souls of the drowned or the terrible Norwegian sea-ghosts, who have a handful of seaweed instead of a countenance. He refuses to allow himself to 10 See David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany (London: Pimlico, 2007), 28–9. 11 Frühwald, “Hauke Haien, der Rechner,” 446. 12 Storm, The Rider on the White Horse, 189; “Und wenn im Herbst die Fluthen höher stiegen und manch ein Mal die Arbeit eingestellt werden musste, dann ging er nicht mit den andern nach Haus, sondern blieb … an der abfallenden Seite des Deiches sitzen und sah stundenlang zu, wie die trüben Nordseewellen immer höher an die Grasnarbe des Deiches hinaufschlugen … Nach langem Hinstarren nickte er wohl langsam mit dem Köpfe oder zeichnete, ohne aufzusehen, mit der Hand eine weiche Linie in die Luft.” Der Schimmelreiter (Berlin: Verlag der Gebrüder Paetel, 1888), 14.

Engineering the Anthropocene  227 believe this however and calls out to them “I’m going to stand my ground!” (Ihr sollt mich nicht vertreiben!) and fights the impulse to run away from them, even though he imagines hearing a “rustle of wings and an echoing cry” (Flügelrauschen und hallendes Geschrei) at his heels.13 Much later in the novella we hear Hauke Haien explain to his daughter that these wraiths are merely herons and crows that look much bigger in the fog, searching for fish through cracks in the ice. Hauke Haien’s empiricism pays off over the course of his life, and he is able to explain little understood phenomena in natural terms. Besides his autodidactic empirical knowledge, Hauke Haien is marked as an odd man out, someone who is beyond the normal bounds of the small coastal society in which he lives. He is always alone, whether studying Euclid or just sitting on the dike. Cultural knowledge or folklore that is kept and passed on within the community has no place in Hauke Haien’s trajectory of scientific enlightenment. The community itself is shown to be religious and also divided, with some members attending the nonconformist conventicle rather than the church—“The dissenting movement was in great fashion at that particular time, even among the Frisians”14—and others still holding to “heathen” practices and superstitious beliefs.15 Irmgard Roebling, in her recent study of Storm’s work,16 emphasizes the strongly gendered elements of this dichotomy between folklore and new learning, arguing that the “male birth” (Männergeburt)17 of Hauke Haien—his mother is never mentioned—aligns rationality, science, and progress with masculinity, whereas both superstitious storytelling and dangerously untamed nature are seen to be the preserve of women. What initially looks like a simple confrontation between modern rationality on the one hand and pre-modern superstition on the other soon starts to become more complex. Hauke Haien’s story first becomes entangled with the superstitious narratives that permeate his society when he kills the beloved angora cat of an elderly widow, Trin’ Jans, in a fit of rage. This moment of great irrationality, out of keeping with Hauke Haien’s usual demeanor, causes Trin’ Jans to wish him ill: “You’ll be cursed!” (Du sollst verflucht sein!).18 This curse sets up 13 Storm, Rider on the White Horse, 193; Storm, Schimmelreiter, 21. 14 Storm, Rider on the White Horse, 250; “Das damals stark im Schwange gehende separatistische Koventikelwesen hatte auch unter den Friesen seine Blüten getrieben.” Storm, Schimmelreiter, 150. 15 “That’s enough of your heathen trash!” Storm, Rider on the White Horse, 256; “Schweig du mit deinen Heidenlehren!” Storm, Schimmelreiter, 162. 16 Irmgard Roebling, Theodor Storms ästhetische Heimat: Studien zur Lyrik und zum Erzählwerk Storms (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012). 17 Ibid., 343. 18 Storm, Rider on the White Horse, 195; Storm, Schimmelreiter, 108.

228  Readings in the Anthropocene a possible counter-narrative, in which Hauke Haien is not a force of empiricism, but a hapless pawn in a game in which supernatural forces have the upper hand. The supernatural and rational possibilities for interpretation are in competition with each other. Hauke Haien’s curse is not the only sign of his exclusion from the community. He is resented for his success and good fortune in marrying the daughter of the local dikemaster, Elke, through whom he inherits both land and the title of dikemaster. His ambitious plans for a new dike are met with suspicion. Elke tells him, “Ever since childhood I’ve been told that the watercourse out there couldn’t be tampered with.”19 But Hauke Haien, rejecting such folk (and feminine) knowledge, considers this nothing more than an excuse to sanction laziness. Elke continues, When I was little, I heard the hired men talking about it. They said there was only one way to build a dam out there: to bury something alive in it while it was being built. They said that, about a hundred years ago when the dike was being built on the other side, the people bought a gypsy child from its mother at a high price and buried the child alive in the dam. But today there isn’t any woman hereabout who would sell her child.20 Hauke Haien of course rejects this superstitious idea and proceeds with the plans for the new dike. But he continues to be implicated in the scaremongering and supernatural stories of the local population. He purchases a horse from a mysterious and unpleasant vagabond; meanwhile, the skeleton of a horse that has long been visible on Jevershallig, an uninhabited sandbank out at sea, suddenly disappears. The rumors quickly spread that Hauke Haien has entered a pact with the devil and is riding the devil’s horse. Moreover, it seems that Hauke Haien is not just rejecting local folklore, but is also on the verge of rejecting the Almighty. When his wife Elke is delirious with puerperal fever and close to death, Hauke is overheard in prayer, “O Lord, O God … I know You can’t always do just 19 Storm, Rider on the White Horse, 232. “Couldn’t” here is a mistranslation. “Shouldn’t” would be a better rendering of the German: “… von Kindesbeinen an hab’ ich gehört, der Priel sei nicht zu stopfen, und darum dürfe nicht daran gerührt werden.” Storm, Schimmelreiter, 108. 20 Storm, Rider on the White Horse, 232; “Als ich Kind war … hörte ich einmal die Knechte darüber reden; sie meinten, wenn ein Damm dort halten solle, müsse was Lebigs da hineingeworfen und mit verdämmt werden; bei einem Deichbau auf der anderen Seite, vor wohl hundert Jahren, sei ein Zigeunerkind verdämmet worden, das sie um schweres Geld der Mutter abgehandelt hätten; jetzt aber würde wohl keine ihr Kind verkaufen!” Storm, Schimmelreiter, 108.

Engineering the Anthropocene  229 what You want to do—not even You can do that. You know everything. Well, Lord, speak to me, speak to me! Just a breath!”21 The rejection of God’s omnipotence is added to the other rumors surrounding Hauke Haien, and he is branded an “outright atheist” (Gottesleugner), one who denies God.22 Hauke Haien rejects, or at least questions, all forms of power and authority that are not part of his rational worldview and thus isolates himself more and more from his community. Hauke Haien’s grand plans are well meant. He sees his new dike as enriching the community and the new, more gently inclined seaward sides of the dike as providing greater security from storm surges. But his refusal to compromise his own beliefs or accept the views of others means that his plans find little support, and he is forced to use his authority as dikemaster to initiate work on the dike. Construction proceeds slowly, but the dike is eventually finished. Shortly before the fatal storm that ends the novella, Trin’ Jans dies. Her parting words, addressed to her long-dead husband, are a warning of what is to come: “Help me! Help me! You’re above the water now … God have mercy on all others!” (Hölp mi! Hölp mi! Du bist ja båwen Wåter … Gott gnåd de annern!).23 Hauke Haien is unsettled despite himself. “What did the old witch have in mind? Were dying people able to prophesy?” (Was wollte die alte Hexe? Sind denn die Sterbenden Propheten?).24 Trin’ Jans, who cursed Hauke Haien as a boy, offers a vision of disaster at the end of her life. And indeed disaster soon follows. During the storm that drives the seawater up against the dikes, Hauke Haien finds a group of men about to cut through his new dike and sacrifice the reclaimed land in order to relieve pressure on the old dike, which has been neglected. He stops them, and the old dike breaks, flooding the polder. Hauke Haien sees his wife and daughter swept away by the floods and throws himself and his horse into the waves, his last words echoing the dying words of Trin’ Jans, “Here, God, take me; but let the others alone!”(Herr Gott, nimm mich; verschon die andern!).25 In this, the moment of his death, Hauke Haien seems at last to capitulate to the powers of both heaven and nature. It is hard not to conclude that the novella is at least ambivalent about the power of rational action to bring about change. The land Hauke Haien has reclaimed is still there a hundred years later, as the narrator 21 Storm, Rider on the White Horse, 250; “Herr, mein Gott … Ich weiß ja wohl, Du kannst nicht allezeit, wie Du willst, auch du nicht; Du bist allweise; du mußt nach Deiner Weisheit thun—o, Herr, sprich nur durch einen Hauch zu mir!” Storm, Schimmelreiter, 149. 22 Storm, Rider on the White Horse, 251; Storm, Schimmelreiter, 151. 23 Storm, Rider on the White Horse, 272; Storm, Schimmelreiter, 197. 24 Storm, Rider on the White Horse, 273; Storm, Schimmelreiter, 198. 25 Storm, Rider on the White Horse, 282; Storm, Schimmelreiter, 218.

230  Readings in the Anthropocene tells us in the final lines of the novel: “Next morning, in the golden sunlight that was shining over a landscape of widespread devastation, I rode my horse down to the city by way of the Hauke Haien Dike.”26 But in terms of Hauke Haien’s personal career, given that the flood swept away the old polder and his wife and child, his rational project seems to have failed. The text’s ambivalence regarding the forces of human intellect versus the power of the supernatural is the subject of many scholarly works on Storm. Christian Demandt writes, “That one doesn’t have to understand the story of Hauke Haien as a ghost story … is not the issue. But at the same time, the text resists a simple rational explanation of the supernatural elements.”27 Heather I. Sullivan, in her exploration of the novella’s materialist implications, sees Hauke Haien’s rationalism that he employs to tie down and control the superstitious beliefs of the local inhabitants as “grounding” the uncanny narrative “with precise numbers of dirt-cartloads and rationalist explanations by the schoolteacher narrator.”28 The reader is forced to engage with both the project of modernity and the obstacles that hinder its progress. It seems that a rational approach to overcoming the hazards of the natural environment and furthering human prosperity is problematic and brings new threats with it. Mauelshagen warns us against making a simple dichotomy out of the opposition between superstition and ideas of technical progress: The coexistence of religious and scientific ideas, of piety and the quest for technological mastery within particular societies—or even within a particular person—can’t be understood if their relationship is reduced to opposition and contradiction. This is true for present as well as past societies.29 26 Storm, Rider on the White Horse, 284; “Am anderen Morgen, beim goldensten Sonnenlichte, das über einer weiten Verwüstung aufgegangen war, ritt ich über den Hauke-Haien-Deich zur Stadt hinunter.” Storm, Schimmelreiter, 222. 27 “Dass man ‘die Geschichte von Hauke Haien’ nicht als Gespenstergeschichte begreifen muss … soll gar nicht bestritten werden. Zugleich aber sträubt sich der Text gegen eine einfach rationalistische Auflösung der Spuk-Elemente.” Christian Demandt, Religion und Religionskritik bei Theodor Storm (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2010), 198 (translation my own). 28 Sullivan, “Dirt Theory and Material Criticism,” 526. 29 Mauelshagen, “Disaster and Political Culture,” 61. On the religious interpretation of extreme events, see also Bernd Rieken, Nordsee ist Mordsee: Sturmfluten und ihre Bedeutung für die Mentalitätsgeschichte der Friesen (Münster: Waxmann, 2005), 286: “Because the religious interpretation of the flooding events, whether as divine punishment or as magical powers, are both an expression of the same mindset … it would be completely ludicrous to suggest that, as a result of the Enlightenment, rational explanations of the storm surges had become

Engineering the Anthropocene  231 This is the problem at the heart of the Schimmelreiter novella. Hauke Haien’s inability to assimilate the religious worldview and superstitious beliefs of his fellow men (and women) into his own narrative of technical progress and land reclamation on the Frisian coasts is what allows him to become so isolated and, ultimately, the driven individual who, almost until the end, is convinced that he and he alone is in possession of true knowledge. His monolithic vision has blind spots: for example, he misses the danger of the breach in the old dike and thus brings about the downfall of his family and himself. This reading of the Schimmelreiter could certainly draw on parallels between this story and later colonial and neo-colonial engineering projects, in which the knowledge and belief systems of local communities were willfully ignored in the name of progress, and which subsequently failed dramatically.30 Storm’s work is, from this perspective, a parable against the dominance of narratives of technical progress and scientific rationality, which always have their blind spots. New technical knowledge can make progress in one area (the new dike profile, the new polder), but through unintended consequences can cause damage elsewhere (the breach in the old dike and loss of life and land). In recent decades, much has happened to dent faith in technology and engineering as the means to overcome natural hazards and meet human needs. In the light of climate change and a growing awareness of the dynamism of natural processes, coastal engineering around the North Sea has moved from being largely a story of expansion (land reclamation) to one of land preservation, and latterly even to the concept of “managed retreat” and rewilding, in which dikes are moved further inland and previously arable fields and human settlements are

mainstream as early as the end of the eighteenth century” (Weil die religiöse Deutung des Flutgeschehens als Strafe Gottes sowie magische Vorstellungen Ausdruck ein und derselben Geisteshaltung sind … ist es völlig abwegig zu behaupten, dass sich im Gefolge der Aufklärung rationale Erklärungen der Sturmfluten auf breiter Basis bereits bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts durchgesetzt hätten; translation my own). 30 We might remember also the 2005 flooding of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, in which tried-and-tested methods of living with the danger of floods—local evacuation points, raised housing—were forgotten in favour of high concrete levees, with devastating results. Craig Colten, “Forgetting the Unforgettable: Losing Resilience in New Orleans,” in Christof Mauch and Sylvia Mayer (eds), American Environments: Climate–Culture–Catastrophe (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012) 159–76. See ecocritic Kate Rigby’s take on the same event in her Dancing with Disaster, 88. For another twentiethcentury engineering project gone wrong, see Stefan Esselborn, “Environment, Memory, and the Groundnut Scheme: Britain’s Largest Colonial Agricultural Development Project and its Global Legacy,” Global Environment 11 (2013): 58–93.

232  Readings in the Anthropocene allowed to revert to saltmarshes and floodplains.31 Theodor Storm’s novella undermines the ability of technology to overcome human weakness and natural forces and does not accord the Enlightenment belief in knowledge and progress the power to truly transform the precarious nature of human settlements in the North Sea lowlands.

The Breached Dike

On a thematic level, Storm is ambivalent about the role of technical progress. But he also questions the idea of linearity on a structural level, and this subtly further undermines the idea of humanity’s striving for technical solutions to old problems. Der Schimmelreiter is structured as a chronological narrative of Hauke Haien’s life from a small boy to his death on the dikes in a storm, but despite this it also evades simple linearity. The story starts not with Hauke Haien but with the first-person narrator, who recalls a story he read sitting at his grandmother’s knee as a child. This first narrator’s words open the novel in the first person with his story of reading about a man travelling along the dike in high winds, who sees the mysterious apparition of the “Schimmelreiter”—the rider on the white horse. This traveler who encounters the ghost of Hauke Haien is the second narrator. In a nearby tavern, he tells us, he hears the story of the Schimmelreiter from the old schoolmaster. The schoolmaster, who is the third narrator, often completely recedes as a character, as the story of Hauke Haien unfolds as a simple third-person account. But at key moments, the narrator interrupts to sip his drink or move location, reminding the reader of the frame and breaking with the impression of an omniscient, watertight, disembodied narrator. In narratological terms, the schoolmaster is a hybrid, both intradiegetic to the story told by the second narrator (and thus also by the first), and extradiegetic to the story of Hauke Haien. The second narrator has the same function—he is intradiegetic in terms of the book remembered by the first narrator, but himself only functions to record the story of Hauke Haien as it is told to him. These nesting frames have a temporal function too. The first narrator is speaking to us from a position of immediacy, from the time, we assume, of the novel’s publication in the late nineteenth century; but his memories of reading are set back “a good half century” (vor reichlich einem halben Jahrhundert) from his account itself.32 The second narrator opens with the following: 31 On managed retreat see, for example, “Should Coastal Britain Surrender to the Tides?,” Guardian, February 7, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/ environment/2014/feb/07/should-coastal-britain-surrender-to-tide (accessed March 17, 2016). 32 Storm, Rider on the White Horse, 184; Storm, Schimmelreiter, 1.

Engineering the Anthropocene  233 It was in the third decade of our century, on an October afternoon (so the account in the magazine began), and I was riding along a dike in Northern Friesland during extremely foul weather. For more than an hour I had seen, on my left, the desolate marsh, already empty of livestock, and on my right, uncomfortably near, the shoals of the North Sea.33 This tells us clearly that the second narrator is also remembering back to a different time, whilst himself writing from a period in time (the 1820s) almost seventy years earlier than the first narrator. While the first narrator is connected to the past through his grandmother, who is over 80, the second narrator is told the story of Hauke Haien by an ancient schoolmaster, who opens his own tale with the words, “In the middle of the last century, or a little earlier or later, to be exact, there lived in this place a dikemaster …” (In der Mitte des vorigen Jahrhunderts, oder vielmehr, um genauer zu bestimmen, vor und nach derselben, gab es hier einen Deichgrafen …).34 So each of the narrators represents a perspective that allows us to look further back in time; the framing narratives present us with a line of succession from Hauke Haien to the first narrator (who sounds like he might be Theodor Storm himself). Each of these narratives is folded into the ones before, like the rings of encircling dikes on the Frisian coast. But then, the second narrator breaks back in, reminding us of the constructed nature of the narrative and its multiple framing devices and completing the analogy with the dikes of the story, which are also not impermeable. The second narrator—the traveler in the storm—returns at the end of the text, but the very first, authorial narrator, remembering where he first read this story, does not. The circle is not whole; there is the final, unmendable breach in the dike. Neither the linear trajectory of human progress nor the encircling protection of the dike is complete; both are entangled with the human nature that called them into being. The incomplete frames of Storm’s novella underline the tension between the rationality that calls for technical progress and a linear narrative on the one hand and the blind spots, memories, and imaginings that make up human knowledge on the other.

33 Storm, Rider on the White Horse, 184; “Es war im dritten Jahrzehnt unseres Jahrhunderts, an einem Oktober-Nachmittag—so begann der damalige Erzähler—als ich bei starkem Unwetter auf einem nordfriesischen Deich entlang ritt. Zur Linken hatte ich jetzt schon seit über einer Stunde die öde, bereits von allem Vieh geleerte Marsch, zur Rechten, und zwar in unbehaglicher Nähe, das Wattenmeer der Nordsee …” Storm, Schimmelreiter, 2. 34 Storm, Rider on the White Horse, 188; Storm, Schimmelreiter, 10.

234  Readings in the Anthropocene

The Power of Nature

Storm’s Schimmelreiter is set on a part of the coast that has a historic relationship with the hazards of sudden floods and with human attempts to manage the landscape. The human inhabitants of the coastline are relatively few and clustered in largely rural settlements. The wide, flat spaces of land and sea and mudflat put the natural environment on show. Storm employs a broad, distanced perspective, as in landscape paintings (a feature that echoes his use of narrative frames); the human inhabitants serve to give a sense of scale, and perhaps awe: The next afternoon, a dark mass of people milled around the wide pasture that ran along the land side of the dike toward the east. The onlookers stood still; then, after a wooden ball flew twice out of the crowd and skimmed over the earth that now lay free of frost in the sunlight, they moved slowly forward from the long, low houses that lay behind them … The whole crowd moved across one frozen ditch after another, and the pale noon sun glittered among the sharp points of the reeds. The weather was rapidly freezing.35 The Frisian lowlands are a central aesthetic element of the novella with its depiction of wide landscape canvases and terrible storms that incorporate aspects of the sublime: “Dark brown clouds blew past, and shadows alternated with dim light over the fields” (dunkelbraune Wolken jagten überhin, und Schatten und trübes Licht flogen auf der Erde durcheinander).36 Frühwald sees the landscape as the site of the epic battle between humans and the natural world: “… the sea, as the destructive force of nature, and the dike, the bulwark erected by the human spirit to protect human life.”37 The landscape of North Frisia, 35 Storm, Rider on the White Horse, 211; “Auf der weiten Weidefläche, die sich zu Osten an der Landseite des Deiches entlangzog, sah man am Nachmittag darauf eine dunkle Menschenmasse bald unbeweglich still stehen, bald, nachdem zweimal eine hölzerne Kugel aus derselben über den durch die Tagessonne jetzt von Reif befreiten Boden hingeflogen war, abwärts von den hinter ihr liegenden langen und niedrigen Häusern allmälig weiterrücken … Aus den gefrorenen Gräben, welche allmälig überschritten wurden, funkelte durch die scharfen Schilfspitzen der bleiche Schein der Nachmittagssonne, es fror mächtig.” Storm, Schimmelreiter, 59. 36 Storm, Rider on the White Horse, 274; Storm, Schimmelreiter, 201. Compare this with, for example, Johan Christian Dahl’s 1832 painting of a shipwreck off the Norwegian coast, or J. M. Turner’s various stormy seas. 37 “… das Meer, als die zerstörende Gewalt der Natur, und der Deich, als das vom menschlichen Geist erdachte Bauwerk zum Schutz des Lebens.” Frühwald, “Hauke Haien, der Rechner,” 443 (translation my own).

Engineering the Anthropocene  235 where Der Schimmelreiter takes place, has been discussed in several recent studies of Storm’s work and is also a model region in a current literary mapping project.38 In her post in the online literary atlas, Kathrin Winkler argues that Storm’s natural places also have agency. Nature is a protagonist: The coexistence of land and water provokes a confrontation between humans and nature; the line of the coast would appear to mark the border between the two areas, but this border is hotly contested. Humans wrestle land from the sea, the sea takes it back: Hauke Haien’s newly diked lands will, at the end of the day, be “reclaimed” by the water.39 Despite this tension between land and sea, the landscape in Storm’s text remains fairly static. We do occasionally catch a glimpse of a landscape that is changing over time: North of the dikemaster’s farm, one could see, a few thousand feet out into the shallows and somewhat farther from the opposite bank, a small island called “Jeverssand” or “Jevershallig.” It had once been covered with grass and used as a sheep pasture. But the practice had been given up, because the low island had been flooded several times by the sea, particularly in the middle of summer, and the grass damaged and rendered unfit for the sheep.40 38 See, for example, Barz, Der wahre Schimmelreiter; also the commentary section in Eversberg, Der Schimmelreiter: Novelle von Theodor Storm; and the entries on Theodor Storm’s Schimmelreiter in the digital Literary Atlas of Europe, http://www.literaturatlas.eu/en/2012/02/16/northern-frisia-space-as-actor/ (accessed March 17, 2016). 39 “Das Nebeneinander von Land und Wasser provoziert eine Konfrontation von Mensch und Natur; der Küstenverlauf schreibt zwar vermeintlich den Grenzverlauf der Bereiche fest, doch diese Grenze ist hart umkämpft. Der Mensch ringt dem Meer Land ab, das Meer nimmt es sich zurück: Der von Hauke Haien eingedeichte Koog wird schlussendlich vom Wasser ‘zurückerobert.’” Kathrin Winkler, “Nordfriesland: Der Raum als Akteur,” http://www. literaturatlas.eu/2012/02/16/northern-frisia-space-as-actor/ (accessed March 17, 2016), translation my own. 40 Storm, Rider on the White Horse, 235; “Von der Hofstelle des Deichgrafen … sah man derzeit … eine kleine Hallig, die sie ‘Jeversand’ auch ‘Jevershallig’ nannten. Von den derzeitigen Großvätern war sie noch zur Schafweide benutzt worden, denn Gras war damals noch darauf gewachsen; aber auch das hatte aufgehört, weil die niedrige Hallig ein paar Mal, und just im Hochsommer, unter Seewasser gekommen und der Graswuchs dadurch verkümmert und auch zur Schafweide unnutzbar geworden war.” Storm, Schimmelreiter, 113.

236  Readings in the Anthropocene But these moments are scanty. The changes are small disruptive incidents, the result of extreme weather conditions. There is no sense that the landscape is, and always has been, in dynamic flux. The only major change in the landscape that takes place during the course of the novella is the building of the new dike and the reclamation of the Hauke-Haien-Koog, which we know exists generations after Hauke Haien’s death in the storm. The Enlightenment trajectory of human progress allows for human agency and change in a largely static, if not actually passive, natural environment. The storm does, as Winkler notes above, have an almost human potency and willpower, exacting a kind of cruel justice in the story of Hauke Haien. But seeing nature as an actor in a human story still ultimately subordinates it as a part of human imagination. Nature is not, here, a greater force than the human imaginative effort to contain it. If nature seems to be cruel, or cunning, then it is perhaps acting out the remnants of the magical nature it was imbued with by pre-Enlightenment humanity rather than an autonomous agency that might render it distant or unknowable from the perspective of humans. The agency (or not) of the non-human environment has long been a matter of interest to ecocritics. There is, nevertheless, a difference between the way nature and its agency are seen in Der Schimmelreiter and more contemporary representations of nature: for example, the flood menace that unseats the protagonists in Jim Shepard’s short story about a hydraulic engineer in modern-day Rotterdam.41 The representation of the natural world in his “The Netherlands Lives with Water” (2011) provides a contrast to Der Schimmelreiter in many ways. Shepard’s future Rotterdam is the opposite of Storm’s rural and sparsely populated North Frisia: the landscape has been replaced by a modern cityscape, full of human inhabitants and the trappings of a modern, technological coastal society—offices, cranes, dredgers, muddy sidewalks. Nature has retreated into human-made channels and reservoirs, largely out of sight; the narrator has to travel out of town to check the dikes. The threat of water has become almost invisible, apart from the constant rain. The water from the sea is held back by the Delta Works while the Rhine is contained by high dikes with signs forbidding civilian access: “Pedestrians are banned from many of the sea-facing dikes in the far west even on calm days. At the entrance to the Harlingvlietdam they’ve erected an immense yellow caution sign that shows two tiny stick figures with their arms raised in alarm at a black wave three times their size that’s curling over them.”42 41 Jim Shepard, “The Netherlands Lives with Water,” in You Think That’s Bad: Stories (New York: A. A. Knopf, 2011), 38–66. 42 Ibid., 57.

Engineering the Anthropocene  237 The underwater reservoirs are full to bursting, but the increasingly dire measurements of the hydrological engineers are the only clear signs of the impending cataclysm. The environment here is not characterized by stasis, but by extreme mutability. Landscape instability is not a new phenomenon. The narrator takes pains to give examples of the way that the natural world has changed over the longue durée. The narrator reports, “Five hundred thousand years ago it was possible to walk from where I live to England. At that point the Thames was a tributary of the Rhine.”43 The enormity of this change is obvious to anyone familiar with the map of Europe. In other passages, the narrator tells us of settlements destroyed by the sea and of entire regions of the country swept away. The Netherlands was formed not by natural land borders—the subsiding land is too unstable for that—but by a cultural response to a hazardous and changeable landscape, and the title “The Netherlands Lives with Water,” borrowed from a current public education initiative,44 is an ironic commentary on the transience of nations against the timescale of planetary change. The question of nature having agency would seem more pertinent here than in Storm’s 1888. The nature that drives events in Rotterdam no longer seems to have any of the magical or malevolent potency that brought about the end of Hauke Haien and the old dike. In Shepard’s text, nature is vast, uncaring, unknowable—a force that is far beyond being ascribed any human-like characteristics. This perhaps indicates the shift that has taken place in the human understanding of nature since Storm wrote Der Schimmelreiter. If nature has agency, it is on a scale that is beyond human ken. Storm’s novella marks not only the beginnings of the new order, but also the end of the old one.

Enlightenment in the Age of Humans

The Anthropocene has been brought about by a human belief in progress, driven by the exploitation of technology, in particular fossil fuel technology, to power global prosperity and trade. The conventional narrative has humans as the driving force in this process, hence the name “Anthropocene,” the age of humans. Neo-materialists, however, hold that humanity has never been the architect of its material world, and that the Enlightenment ideal of progress and dominion was a fallacy. In his essay “Against the Anthropocene: A Neo-Materialist Perspective,” Tim LeCain argues against the term Anthropocene for its 43 Ibid., 60. 44 Aleksandra Kazmierczak and Jeremy Carter, “The Netherlands Live with Water: Public Awareness Raising Campaign,” in Adaptation to Climate Change Using Green and Blue Infrastructure: A Database of Case Studies (Manchester, University of Manchester Press, 2010), 19–25 (eScholarID:128518).

238  Readings in the Anthropocene centering of humanity in what he sees as a more potent combination of material processes and flows: Humans have obviously become quite powerful—powerful enough to populate nearly every habitable niche on the planet and alter its fundamental biogeochemical cycles. But rather than crediting humans alone, neo-materialism suggests that they accomplished these things only at the price of throwing their lot in with a lot of other things, like coal and oil, whose powers they only vaguely understood and certainly did not really control. Likewise, once these partnerships were made, these powerful things began to shape humans and their cultures in all sorts of unexpected ways, many of them not necessarily for the better.45 The human agency implied by the term Anthropocene, he argues, allows for the possibility of “the good Anthropocene”—of technical fixes to the heedless exploitation and overconsumption of modern-day human societies. The good Anthropocene, rather like Hauke Haien’s plans for the new dike, suggests that no fundamental allowances need to be made for natural agency, only that ever more sophisticated human engineering projects must be devised to protect our modern way of life. Just as Hauke Haien’s fanatical belief in the new dike creates a blind spot vis-à-vis the old one, a contemporary belief in the power of technology alone to avert global crisis loses sight of the fact that nature can behave in unpredictable and unmanageable ways. If Hauke Haien’s dike-building project is, as Irmgard Roebling has suggested, a project of masculinity, which conflicts with the feminine knowledge represented by Trin’ Jans and Elke, then the potential of the Anthropocene identified by Tim LeCain—that it allows for the engineering of a good Anthropocene—could also be represented as a project of masculinity, with nature as an irrational (feminine) counterpart to be subjugated. Gender studies have shown the need to complicate such binary structures and aim for a more holistic understanding of humanity. The challenges of the Anthropocene also call for a holistic, multi-layered approach. The cautionary tale of Hauke Haien is a prescient example of what happens when this kind of thinking is absent. The engineering of a climate-proof new world cannot be enough to immure us against the threats inherent in our new global age. In his influential “Four Theses,” Dipesh Chakrabarty asks, “Has the period from 1750 until now been one of freedom or that of the Anthropocene? Is the Anthropocene a critique of the narratives of 45 Timothy James LeCain, “Against the Anthropocene: A Neo-Materialist Perspective,” International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 3.1 (2015): 4.

Engineering the Anthropocene  239 freedom?”46 Chakrabarty’s concept of freedom is closely linked to the Enlightenment idea of reason; it is the emancipation of (Western) human life from scarcity, misery, and subordination to prosperity, equality, and comfort—a narrative of progress. Timothy Clark suggests that, Environmentalist thinkers disassociate themselves from unqualified endorsement of another defining aspect of the enlightenment tradition. They must divorce the project of human liberation from that of the exploitative conquest of nature that has mainstream conceptions of “progress” and “modernisation.” Can the two strands of enlightenment heritage be coherently separated?47 Those concerned with the environment, with the natural world in the broadest sense, are thus charged with asking Chakrabarty’s question and identifying the tensions that exist both now and historically between human progress and the degradation of the natural world. While fossil fuel energy and urbanization are dominant strands in this historical narrative, the reclamation and securing of land from the sea are also important parts of it. The advent of reason that drives Hauke Haien to build new dikes is married with the advances in technology in other areas and results in the kind of technologized, urbanized settlement that we find in Harwich, Rotterdam, or Esbjerg in the twenty-first century—well-populated towns beset by sinking land and rising water levels, ever more dependent on technical features to warn of and prevent their inundation. One canonical work of literary fiction can only give a limited perspective on the perceptions of these processes of technologization and risk management in the lowlands of the North Sea coasts. But dealing as it does with a protagonist who is directly implicated in the engineering of these flood-prone environments, it can shed light on the tension ascribed by Chakrabarty to the struggle between progress (freedom) on the one hand and the costs of the Anthropocene on the other. “Shedding light on” something is of course linked semantically and metaphorically to the idea of the Enlightenment: the idea of light as truth and darkness as ignorance. In Storm’s Schimmelreiter, light seems to have a hard time breaking through the fog and darkness; the lack of light at the beginning of the novella makes it hard for the narrator to discern his surroundings: 46 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (Winter 2009): 210. 47 Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 102–3.

240  Readings in the Anthropocene I should have been able to look out from the dike and see small sandbars and islands; but in fact I saw nothing but yellowishgray waves … Behind the waste of twilight I could not tell the earth from the sky, for even the half-moon, now at its height, was almost covered by driving, cloudy darkness.48 The obscured view of the landscape that sets the scene for the Schimmelreiter is a recurring theme. Hauke Haien has a clear sight of the land in the “golden sunlight of September” (goldene Septembersonne) when he first has the idea of constructing the new dike and reclaiming a thousand acres of land.49 On the day of the great storm tide, however, when dark clouds chase each other across the sky, Hauke Haien sees clearly only in brief moments when the moon breaks through the clouds of “the terrible twilight” (der furchtbaren Dämmerung).50 Roebling sees nature as a force working against the human intellect: “The images of darkness, aligned with nature’s savagery, seem almost an elementary opposing force to Enlightenment-guided [human] perception.”51 As Hauke Haien rides to his death towards the breached dike, the solitary beam of light comes from his home, safe on the high mound, the warft: the light of truth shining bleakly out of a house devoid of people into the surrounding darkness. Storm, writing in 1880, but looking back in time to the eighteenth century, gives an ambiguous portrait of the early years of the ambitious new projects to reclaim land on the Frisian coasts. By aligning his fallible protagonist, Hauke Haien, with the humanist values of empiricism, science, and progress, Storm problematizes these values, and shows the difficulty, but also the importance, of uniting them with a worldview rooted in spiritual and superstitious beliefs. The new dike survives at the expense of the old one; new technology comes at the expense of old certainties. There is not, in Storm’s text, an explicit exploration of a longer-term problem with the engineering of the natural world for human needs. But the narrative structure of nesting stories, in which the opening narrator never returns to “close” the novella fully, suggests an anti-linear subversion of the optimistic trajectory of human 48 Storm, Rider on the White Horse, 184; “Zwar sollte man vom Deiche aus auch Halligen und Inseln sehen können; aber ich sah nichts als die gelbgrauen Wellen … dahinter wüste Dämmerung, die Himmel und Erde nicht unterschieden ließ; denn auch der halbe Mond, der jetzt in der Höhe stand, war meist von treibendem Wolkendunkel überzogen.” Storm, Schimmelreiter, 2. 49 Storm, Rider on the White Horse, 231; Storm, Schimmelreiter, 104. 50 Storm, Rider on the White Horse, 277; Storm, Schimmelreiter, 208. 51 “Die mit der wilden Natur verbundenen Dunkelheitsbilder erscheinen beinahe wie die Verbildlichung einer elementaren Gegenkraft zur aufklärungsgeleiteten Wahrnehmung.” Roebling, Storms ästhetische Heimat, 321 (translation my own).

Engineering the Anthropocene  241 progress, and thus lays the foundation for an understanding of the early Anthropocene as a rupture in the relationship between humans and the natural world. Storm’s novella depicts the beginnings of the Anthropocene on the edge of the North Sea. On thematic, structural, and symbolic levels, it shows the tension between Enlightenment ideas of progress for humanity and the costs that such progress can incur. The low-lying terrain of the North Sea coast, both in Storm’s portrayal and in later literary texts, can be a crucible in which the relationship between human and non-human forces is explored in spatial and temporal terms. The story of the Schimmelreiter captures a place and a moment in which the dilemma of the Anthropocene began to unfold.

Bibliography

Arndt, Christiane. “Theodor Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter: Schauerrealismus or Gothic Realism in the Family Periodical.” In Charlotte Woodford and Benedict Schofield (eds), The German Bestseller in the Late Nineteenth Century, 144–62. New York: Camden House, 2012. Bankoff, Greg. “The ‘English Lowlands’ and the North Sea Basin System: A History of Shared Risk.” Environment and History 19.1 (2013): 3–37. Barkham, Patrick. “Should Coastal Britain Surrender to the Tides?” Guardian, February 7, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/07/ should-coastal-britain-surrender-to-tide (accessed March 17, 2016). Barz, Paul. Der wahre Schimmelreiter: Die Geschichte einer Landschaft und ihres Dichters Theodor Storm. Hamburg: Convent, 2000. Blackbourn, David. The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany. London: Pimlico, 2007. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (Winter 2009): 197–222. Clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Colten, Craig. “Forgetting the Unforgettable: Losing Resilience in New Orleans.” In Christof Mauch and Sylvia Mayer (eds), American Environments: Climate– Culture–Catastrophe, 159–76. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012. Crutzen, Paul J. and Eugene F. Stoermer. “The Anthropocene.” IGBP Newsletter 41 (May 2000): 17–18. Demandt, Christian. Religion und Religionskritik bei Theodor Storm. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2010. Esselborn, Stefan. “Environment, Memory, and the Groundnut Scheme: Britain’s Largest Colonial Agricultural Development Project and its Global Legacy.” Global Environment 11 (2013): 58–93. Eversberg, Gerd, ed. Der Schimmelreiter: Novelle von Theodor Storm. Historischkritische Edition. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2014. Frühwald, Wolfgang. “Hauke Haien, der Rechner: Mythos und Technikglaube in Theodor Storms Novelle ‘Der Schimmelreiter.’” In Jürgen Brummack (ed.), Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte: Festschrift für Richard Brinkmann, 438–57. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1981. Kazmierczak, Aleksandra and Jeremy Carter. “The Netherlands Live with Water:

242  Readings in the Anthropocene Public Awareness Raising Campaign.” In Adaptation to Climate Change Using Green and Blue Infrastructure: A Database of Case Studies, 19–25. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2010 (eScholarID:128518). LeCain, Timothy James. “Against the Anthropocene: A Neo-Materialist Perspective.” International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 3.1 (2015): 1–28. Mauelshagen, Franz. “Flood Disasters and Political Culture at the German North Sea Coast: A Long-Term Historical Perspective.” Historical Social Research 32.3 (2007): 133–44. Mauelshagen, Franz. “Disaster and Political Culture in Germany Since 1500.” In Christof Mauch and Christian Pfister (eds), Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses: A World History, 41–75. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. Mullen, Inga E. German Realism in the United States: The American Reception of Meyer, Storm, Raabe, Keller, and Fontane. New York: Peter Lang, 1988. Reimann, Birgit. “Zwischen Harmoniebedürfnis und Trennungserfahrung: Das menschliche Naturverhältnis in Theodor Storms Werk. Zur dichterischen Gestaltung von Natur und Landschaft in Lyrik und Novellistik.” PhD thesis, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, 1995. Rieken, Bernd. Nordsee ist Mordsee: Sturmfluten und ihre Bedeutung für die Mentalitätsgeschichte der Friesen. Münster: Waxmann, 2005. Rigby, Kate. Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Roebling, Irmgard. Theodor Storms ästhetische Heimat: Studien zur Lyrik und zum Erzählwerk Storms. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012. Schwarz, Anette. “Social Subjects and Tragic Legacies: The Uncanny in Theodor Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter.” Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 73.3 (1998): 251–66. Shepard, Jim. “The Netherlands Lives with Water.” In You Think That’s Bad: Stories, 38–66. New York: A. A. Knopf, 2011. Steffen, Will. “Commentary: Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, ‘The Anthropocene.’” In Libby Robin, Sverker Sörlin, and Paul Warde (eds), The Future of Nature, 486–90. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Storm, Theodor. Der Schimmelreiter. Berlin: Verlag der Gebrüder Paetel, 1888. Sullivan, Heather I. “Dirt Theory and Material Criticism.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.3 (2012): 515–31. Trischler, Helmuth, ed. “Anthropocene: Envisioning the Future of the Age of Humans.” RCC Perspectives 3 (2013). Winkler, Kathrin. “Nordfriesland: Der Raum als Akteur,” February 16, 2012, http://www.literaturatlas.eu/2012/02/16/northern-frisia-space-as-actor/ (accessed March 17, 2016).

Part IV Diffusion, the Lithic, and a Planetary Praxis

244 

Eleven Petrifiction: Reimagining the Mine in German Romanticism

Jason Groves

From Petrofiction to Petrifiction

Literature emerges not only in response to philosophical crises, as Jean-Luc Nancy argues in The Literary Absolute, but also in response to turning points in the natural history of the species. The genre of petrofiction is one such example.1 The far-reaching transformation that the extraction and consumption of oil has had on Earth systems also pervades forms of cultural production to the extent that petrofiction has been construed not just as a genre but as a periodizing gesture of a “petromodernity.” Yet it would hamper both the imagination and the root of petrofiction and petromodernity to restrict the range of this term to the encounter with fossil fuels within a carbon imaginary.2 Within the periodizing approach of the Anthropocene, in which humanity’s self-understanding takes place on a geological scale, petrofiction can be productively extended to characterize fictional encounters with virtually any stratum in the lithosphere. I instead propose petrifiction as a term to take into account the full range of petric encounters in literature. Oil may pervade cultures across the globe, yet other deposits—molten or crystallized, solidifying or liquefying, Carboniferous or otherwise—have also served as protagonists in fiction. Such petricultures cannot always be distinguished from oil cultures, particularly in the shared motifs of exuberance and catastrophe that for

1

The term was first elaborated in 1992 by Amitav Ghosh to refer to Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt and other writing explicitly confronting the oil encounter between the Americas and the Middle East. See Amitav Ghosh, “Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel,” New Republic 206.2 (1992): 29–34. 2 Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (London: Oxford University Press, 2014), 67.

246  Readings in the Anthropocene Frederick Buell characterize depictions of the latter.3 As the damaging effects of centuries of intensive hydrocarbon mining escalate, it also becomes increasingly urgent to observe and elaborate relations to the geologic mediated by objects other than fossil fuels. If the geologic is widely considered, in the words of Kathryn Yusoff, the “defining strata of contemporary subjectivity,” then German romanticism may be regarded as a defining stratum.4 Among the multiple petrimodernities in play this case study will examine what could be called German Petromanticism, a lit(h)erary period on the saddle of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which overlaps with a period of intensive interest in forms of mining, particularly those that fall outside of the extraction of fossil fuels.5 This overlap is so pronounced that a visit in 1793 by Ludwig Tieck and Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder to “The Gift of God” (Die Gabe Gottes) and other iron ore mines in Upper Franconia is widely known as signaling the beginning of the romantic movement in Germany.6 Wackenroder’s letter from this Whitsuntide excursion, of which the visit to the mines formed the high point, arguably figures as the earliest document of this movement. In addition to literary movements, mines are increasingly seen as the crucibles for new media and new geological epochs alike. Just as Jussi Parikka in Anthrobscene (2014) and A Geology of Media (2015) proposes to consider “the depths of mines as essential places for the emergence of technical media culture,”7 a 2015 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences determines colonial mining and metallurgy in Peru and Bolivia (particularly in the rapid expansion of silver mining in Potosí after 1450) to have produced “a widespread anthropogenic signal” that becomes legible in ice core records of the fifteenth century.8 The discovery of this “widespread anthropogenic signal” leads the authors to suggest 3 4 5

6 7 8

Frederick Buell, “A Short History of Oil Cultures: Or, the Marriage of Catastrophe and Exuberance,” Journal of American Studies 46.2 (2012): 273–93. Kathryn Yusoff, “Geologic Life: Prehistory, Climate, Futures in the Anthropocene,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31.5 (2013): 780. As Theodore Ziolkowski points out in “The Mine,” the first decade of nineteenth-century coal production in Germany “was almost too trivial to be recorded” at 0.3 million tons, as compared to England’s 11 million tons. Theodore Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and Its Institutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 25. The Ruhr coal deposits that would drive Germany’s rapid industrialization would not be discovered for nearly half a century. Instead, from the medieval ages through the mid-nineteenth century, Germany served as the primary European source of precious metals for Europe, and most fictionalized accounts are of such mines. Ziolkowski, “The Mine,” 21. Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 6. Chiara Uglietti et al., “Widespread Pollution of the South American Atmosphere

Petrifiction: Reimagining the Mine in German Romanticism  247 revising the Anthropocene thesis on two accounts. Instead of locating this proposed new geological epoch in the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at the start of the Industrial Revolution, this study introduces the possibility of a pre-industrial Anthropocene, and moreover one whose material signature would be elevated by heavy metal concentrations.9 The fact that German romanticism emerges coterminous with the appearance of a “new machine” for pumping water out of the mine, which Wackenroder describes at the close of his account,10 also implicates it in the emergence of the Anthropocene, posited as starting “in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane.”11 Crutzen selects this date to coincide with James Watt’s design of the steam engine in 1784, one of the driving forces behind the growing concentrations of these gases. And it is quite likely that Wackenroder encountered such a “new machine” in the mine known as “The Gift of God.” It is a machine that also figures prominently in Gaia theorist James Lovelock’s 2014 account of the Anthropocene. In reference to the Newcomen Engine and “the pressing need of mine owners with flooded mines,” Lovelock argues that this need “set the start of the Anthropocene with the steam engine in 1712.”12 What Wackenroder, Tieck, Novalis, Heine, and other romantics inadvertently observe in the mine—besides the noise of these engines—is the emergence of a new geological epoch. The descent into the mine allegorizes a descent into human history, morality, and sexuality as well as the ascent into the Anthropocene. When Novalis in Heinrich von Ofterdingen describes how “tremendous births are making a stir in the depths of the earth, distended by the inner fire of the dark womb to gigantic and immense shapes” (dass unerhörte Geburten in den Predates the Industrial Revolution by 240 y,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112.8 (2015): 2349. 9 This has been advocated for some time by Jason Moore, who proposes a revision of the Age of Man (the Anthropocene) as the Age of Capital (Capitalocene), and whose emergence would be pegged to the sixteenth century and the rise of mining. Jason W. Moore, “The Capitalocene. Part 1: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis,” jasonwmoore.com/uploads/The_Capitalocene__ Part_I__June_2014.pdf (accessed March 17, 2016). 10 “An manchen Orten waren die Gänge unten und an den Wänden etwas naß; auch sahen wir ein Paar Pumpen, das Wasser heraufzuschaffen, und eine große Art von Schacht, Radstube genannt, für eine neue Maschine zu dieser Absicht.” Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Werke und Briefe (Heidelberg: L. Schneider, 1967), 167. 11 I am quoting Paul Crutzen here, who was one of the earliest theorists of the Anthropocene. Paul Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind: The Anthropocene,” Nature 415 (2002): 23. 12 James Lovelock, A Rough Ride to the Future (London: Penguin, 2014), 18.

248  Readings in the Anthropocene Festen der Erde ihr Wesen trieben, die das innere Feuer des dunklen Schoßes zu riesenmäßigen und geistesgewaltigen Gestalten auftriebe), he is also describing the monstrous natality of humanity’s geologic agency.13 It is undeniable that the mines explored in German romanticism differ significantly from those, like Potosí, whose traces—whether of metal, methane, or hydrocarbon—are registered globally; in fact, the success of Potosí has been linked to the exhaustion of silver mines in Saxony and Bohemia. While Tieck and Wackenroder’s subterranean encounters with the Earth’s history stand at the outset of our ecstatic investment in the Carboniferous, they also figure as something of a Sonderweg (special trajectory)—since their interest lies in metals rather than, as was the case in contemporary England, coal and other fossil fuels—in the imagination of geologic relations. As Anthropocene thinker Kathryn Yusoff forcefully argues, in order to turn away from the “gifts” of fossil fuels and thus against the geopolitical subject that is the product of the Carboniferous, it is necessary to “redirect, reimagine, and aestheticize the forces of geopower in equally sensible ways.”14 What we need, Yusoff writes, is “something more generous that acknowledges what they have opened up in social practices and in life forms.”15 Contemporary calls to “leave it in the ground” and other disavowals of our geological inheritance disregard the deep underpinnings of our petrophilia as well as the immense legacy of current energetic investments. What this chapter proposes is a contribution to Yusoff’s call for “the formation of new collective subjectivities and material forms of life that examine and then move on from the geopolitical inheritance of the Anthropocene.”16 I want to showcase the human–mineral relations of German romanticism in the case of Tieck’s tale of Der Runenberg (Rune Mountain), but in doing so I hope to emphasize how the agency of the non-human world in this literature severely challenges the anthropocentrism and anthroponarcissism inherent in dominant Anthropocene narratives, thus pointing the way toward a critical revision of both those narratives.

Metal Imaginaries

Theodore Ziolkowski’s chapter on mines (“The Mine: Image of the Soul”) in German Romanticism and Its Institutions remains their most thorough and insightful treatment. My impulse to re-examine what I am calling the “mineral imaginary” of German romanticism stems only from a dissatisfaction with Ziolkowski’s consideration of the mine 13 Novalis, Schriften I (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1977), 253. 14 Yusoff, “Geologic Life,” 791. 15 Ibid., 792. 16 Ibid.

Petrifiction: Reimagining the Mine in German Romanticism  249 strictly as “a mine of the soul, not a technological site.”17 By “mineral imaginary” I intend to explore not only the way that the mineral realm has been imagined in literature and art, but also, to make a materialist turn, how the romantic imaginary is from the mine, as the medieval Latin minerale (“something mined”) indicates. Perhaps more site-specifically we can speak of a metal imaginary, recalling along with Valerie Allen that “metal” derives from the Greek to metallon, “mine” or “quarry,” which indicates the relationship between metal and the act of mining.18 The prominence of the image in the poetics of romanticism has been extensively elaborated. Despite, or perhaps because of, this elaboration, the image can figure prominently in the title of Ziolkowski’s study of the mine without ever undergoing a critical interrogation. From the image of the mineral woman that haunts Christian in Tieck’s Der Runenberg (1802) to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Die Bergwerke zu Falun (Mines of Falun, 1818) and all the other narratives of over-imaginative young men being lured away from the flatlands to the mountains, the mine functions as a source of images for romantic visions. Yet the image of the mine also exposes a tension in romanticism that goes largely unexplored in Ziolkowski’s study and, for that matter, also in the work of Paul de Man. One of the more prominent theorists of the romantic imagination, de Man, addresses the proliferation of natural objects in romanticism and cites as an example Hölderlin’s lines from “Brod und Wein”: “nun aber nennt er sein Liebstes / Nun, nun müssen dafür Worte, wie Blumen, entstehen” (“Now however he names what he most loves / Now, now words for it must originate like flowers”).19 For de Man, these lines indicate the desire of poetic language “to draw closer and closer to the ontological status of the object.”20 Moreover, he continues, “Its growth and development are determined by this inclination” to originate like flowers.21 While de Man does in fact consider how the substitution of “stones” for “flowers” would have “thoroughly modified” the effect of the line, he concludes that the relevance of the comparison “would have remained intact as long as human language was being compared to a natural thing.”22 But in the romantic descents into the mine, stones are not exactly natural things. In the case of the image of the mine, this inclination toward the object remains intact, yet the objects are inorganic 17 Ziolkowski, “The Mine,” 28. 18 Valerie Allen, “Mineral Virtue,” in J. J. Cohen (ed.), Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt, 2012), 123–52, 128. 19 Quoted in Paul de Man, “The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” in Harold Bloom (ed.), Romanticism and Consciousness (New York: Norton, 1970), 65–77, 66. Translation mine. 20 Ibid., 70. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 69.

250  Readings in the Anthropocene and, to a certain extent, unnatural. The mine’s precious stones are at once natural and technological objects—and the same could be said of the resulting romantic images. For every line of poetry that fantasizes about having emerged organically, like a flower, there is a line of prose that seeks to accord for itself the inorganic character of the mineral. As a space bereft of biology, the mine thus marks the possibility that de Man considers only at the close of his essay, “a possibility for consciousness to exist entirely by and for itself, independently of all relationship with the outside world.”23 The romantic imagination that produces such anthropocentric and, at some adumbrative level, Anthropocenic images might be more familiar than we think. That the mine from Tieck to Novalis to Hoffmann is extensively figured in literature as an image of the human condition does not exclude it from also serving as a technological site for literature. Indeed, Jussi Parikka’s recent revamp of media studies through the proposal to consider mines as sites of the emergence of technical media culture can be productively extended to encompass literary media, a prospect which Parikka proposes but does not consider at length.24 While the iron ore mines of Upper Franconia cannot be said to enable nineteenth-century German literature to the extent that copper and tantalum mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo materially enable contemporary digital media culture, I argue that this is a difference of degree rather than kind. Romantic imaginaries are underpinned by material acts of extraction and they are generated in what Lewis Mumford calls the “manufactured environment” of the mine.25 Literary texts might be likened to an incidental mining by-product rather than the recovered ores, but this does not discount the crystallization of the romantic movement out of an early phase of modern mining technology. It emerges out of encounters that take place within those depths and in this way it is also materially of those depths. Insofar as the soul is figured as possessing depth—an image often associated with the romantic movement—it has as its substrate the technological achievement of mining. A glance at Wackenroder’s letter of June 3, 1793, in which he describes his descent into the Kemlas mine, invites a reconsideration of the claim that the mine is not a technological site. If this letter and the corresponding descent of May 22 into the mine are seen as a starting point of German romanticism—and in any case this document records the initial mine descent of the period by figures associated with the 23 Ibid., 76. 24 Parikka, Anthrobscene, 6. 25 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 70.

Petrifiction: Reimagining the Mine in German Romanticism  251 movement—the detailed description of Wackenroder’s survey makes a convincing case that the mine presents more than an image of the soul. As commentators have pointed out, the factual nature of the letter can be attributed to its intended recipients: namely, his parents, who financed the journey and who expected concrete results. Nonetheless, the fact of the matter is that the mine, as it appears in Wackenroder, is nothing if not an industrial and technological site. Like several of the other sites visited on the journey there are “romantic” descriptions, as of the “rolling hills, gloomy, black woodlands” (Anhöhen, finstere, schwarze Waldungen) surrounding the Kemlas mine, but the account does not retouch the region’s industrialization.26 At the outset of his account of the mine, Wackenroder notes the “extraordinary amount of iron hammers and mills as well as a marble cutting mill for Bayreuth’s marble factory” (Die Selbitz treibt eine außerordent­ liche Menge Eisenhämmer und Mühlen, auch eine Marmorschneidemühle für die Marmorfabrik Bayreuth) and that “one hears the noise of the iron hammers everywhere” (Das Geräusch von Eisenhämmern hört man überall).27 This is followed by a breathless inventory of the different forms of iron and stone encountered in the mine: yellow iron earth (Eisenerde), rough iron ore (yellow and brown varieties), glossy iron ore, iron ore occurring in globules as well as clusters, columnar iron, a variety of aragonite known as Eisenblüte (flos ferri), bloodstone, Glaskopf (a mineral aggregate with a glassy surface), stalactites, and so on.28 There are observations on the working conditions and compensation of the miners: the supervisor receives 2½ guilders per week, plus board and wood for heating; the precise depth of the mine: 173 feet and 4 inches; as well as observations of the mine’s architecture.29 The dream-like aspect of the mine, which will become the hallmark of the descents in both Tieck’s Der Runenberg and Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, both published in 1802, is already present when the narrow passageways prompt Wackenroder to relate a dream from childhood.30 But in the entire account, one stretching over several pages, this reference to a dream is the only time in which the mine becomes a projection of a subjective interiority. In the case of Tieck and Wackenroder, then, it is perhaps less a matter of placing the mine in a human context—as a mine of the soul—and more a matter of placing the human in what Elizabeth Grosz, in the 26 Wackenroder, Werke und Briefe, 166. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 167. 30 Ibid.

252  Readings in the Anthropocene context of Darwin’s studies, calls “its properly inhuman context.”31 In the passageway, Wackenroder notes, one is reduced to moving on all fours: “one can hardly walk upright in there” (man [kann] kaum aufrecht darin gehen).32 The descent is thus figured not only as a descent into history but also as a post-Enlightenment descent to an inhuman state. A rereading of the descent that inaugurates German romanticism makes it possible to reimagine the mine in German romanticism as an auspicious site both for the recontextualization of the human in the inhuman context of the Anthropocene and for the recalibration of the Anthropocene away from the anthroponarcissism implicit in this term.

Return to Rune Mountain

Instead of beginning with “our powers and capabilities” (a typical starting point for discussions of the “geology of mankind”), an increasingly vocal contingent of Anthropocene theorists, including geographer Nigel Clark for example, set out “from the position of our susceptibility to the earth’s eventfulness, from our all-too-human exposure to forces that exceed our capacity to control or even make full sense of them.”33 This shift in perspective takes place in Der Runenberg, whose morethan-human story of exposure offers an allegory of the Anthropocene as envisioned by Clark. Though ostensibly a story about the protagonist Christian becoming captivated by precious stones and metals, it is also about a landform that serves less as a passive backdrop and more as a captivating antagonist. Well before the advent of Anthropocene discourse, Tieck scholarship demonstrated the liveliness of the inorganic world in the romantic imagination. As Alice Kuzinar shrewdly observes, the typical reading of Der Runenberg that focuses on Christian’s inwardness and narcissistic projection “fails to take into account how Christian’s imaginings assume a life of their own.”34 Kuzinar’s turn of phrase is a theoretically interesting one, particularly with one qualification: not only Christian’s imaginings but also the minerals and mineral waters that feed those imaginings begin to take on a life. Indeed, by drawing on a Lacanian framework that discloses the externality of the gaze, Kuzinar 31 Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 20. 32 Wackenroder, Werke und Briefe, 166. 33 Nigel Clark, Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (London: Sage, 2011), xiv. 34 Alice Kuzinar, “Stones That Stare, or, the Gorgon’s Gaze in Ludwig Tieck’s Der Runenberg,” in Jeffrey Adamy and Eric Williams (eds), Mimetic Desire: Essays on Narcissism in German Literature from Romanticism to Post Modernism (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995), 50–64, 54.

Petrifiction: Reimagining the Mine in German Romanticism  253 shows how “inanimate nature is possessed with a vitality surpassing human life and reducing it by comparison to irrelevance.”35 In this way Tieck and Kuzinar anticipate the vital materialism of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, especially in the chapter “A Life of Metal,” which explores the “incipient tendencies and propensities” of inanimate things.36 As Bennett elaborates, drawing on Deleuze’s 1995 essay “Pure Immanence: A Life,” a life indicates something indefinite, incorporeal, both impersonal and singular, a virtual life that is actualized in encounters and events and that can be productively extended to encompass inorganic objects. The ape-man Rotpeter, who delivers his vita in Kafka’s “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie” (“A Report for an Academy”), forms the starting point for Bennett’s remarks, but Tieck’s stories also furnish examples of the vitality of the non-human. While cultural anxieties in the Age of Goethe around the categorization of organic and inorganic nature have as their subtext conflicting “ideas about the particularity of the human body” and its minerality, as Heather Sullivan shows in an exemplary reading of Der Runenberg, an alternative reading could start from its concern with the vitality of inanimate nature.37 This tale could serve as a primary text for the “new humanities” that Grosz gestures towards in Becoming Undone, a humanities that looks at the human in its properly inhuman context and that offers insights into the Earth not typically accessible to cultural studies, a humanities where the question of how to rearticulate bodies without recourse to the distinction of organic and inorganic opens out into the question of how to reorganize disciplines beyond the divisions of Earth, life, and human sciences.38 Beyond the animal and plant varieties of life that Grosz’s Darwin-inspired new humanities articulates, a humanities informed by the German romantics also offers 35 Ibid., 55. 36 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 56. 37 Heather Sullivan, “Organic and Inorganic Bodies in the Age of Goethe: An Ecocritical Reading of Ludwig Tieck’s ‘Rune Mountain’ and the Earth Sciences,” ISLE 10.2 (2003): 21–46, 33–4. 38 Notable here is the recent work of anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli around the topic of geontology. As Povinelli says in conversation with Mat Coleman and Kathryn Yusoff, “I am beginning to think that the territoriality of the biopolitical is not life, or life in and of itself, but the division of life and nonlife. Biopolitics is not something that governs life but something that maintains the division between life and nonlife as necessary essential and formative for difference and markets. Geontology rises up as a refusal of this division—as a placeholder for something like the subjugated knowledge of a positive geontopower,” http://societyandspace.com/material/interviews/interviewwith-elizabeth-povinelli-by-mat-coleman-and-kathryn-yusoff/#comments (accessed March 17, 2016).

254  Readings in the Anthropocene insights, no matter how provisional and apprehensive, into geological varieties of life. Already some of the works associated with this new humanities of the Anthropocene return at crucial moments to the German romantics: at the center of Nigel Clark’s Inhuman Nature he turns to the post-Enlightenment legacy of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake;39 in Vibrant Matter Jane Bennett turns to Kafka’s tales—inheritors of the romantic Kunstmärchen (artistic fairy tale)—to present the case for a vital materialism;40 and Jussi Parikka turns to Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen to articulate an alternative deep time of the media.41 From the outset, Der Runenberg is attuned to the incipience of inanimate matter. The waves of the murmuring brook’s “alternating melody” (wechselnde Melodie) that open the story seem to speak “a thousand things in unintelligible words” (in unverständlichen Worten tausend Dinge). They have been read strictly with reference to Christian’s “erratic imaginings” (irre Vorstellungen).42 However, the predominance of noise in the story—highlighted by “the rush of waters” (das Rauschen des Wassers) in the opening line—demonstrates the tale’s commitment to exploring Christian’s exposure to the inhuman forces that constitute the imaginative pressure of the Anthropocene.43 As Kuzinar observes, though secondary characters in Tieck’s tales often seem to be presented as a primary character’s delusions, “They nonetheless seem more selfassured and anchored in the world than the main protagonist.”44 While the noise of rushing waters is hardly of Earth magnitude, Rüdiger Campe shows how the term Rauschen (noise and its French equivalent bruit) functions discursively as a “limit of perception” from Leibniz to Herder to Rousseau to Wackenroder to Kafka.45 Tieck can be inserted into this series, though he remains in some regards an outlier. Attending to noise in Der Runenberg entails more than attending to aural hallucinations: it entails attending to the limits of literature, the limits of human perception, and—this may be the tale’s novel contribution—it entails attending, through a series of liminal figures and liminal spaces, to the physicality of the Earth as it operates beyond organic perception. The excessiveness of the Earth is represented in paradoxical figures: the

39 Clark, Inhuman Nature, 81–106. 40 Bennet, Vibrant Matter, 7–8. 41 Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 32. 42 Ludwig Tieck, Der Runenberg, in Phantasus (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker, 1985), 186, 191. 43 Ibid., 186. 44 Kuzinar, “Stones that Stare,” 54. 45 Rüdiger Campe, “The Rauschen of the Waves: On the Margins of Literature,” SubStance 61 (1990): 23.

Petrifiction: Reimagining the Mine in German Romanticism  255 Earth-bound Christian, inorganic life, animate matter, speaking stones, the rune/mountain, the articulated but illiterate brook. Things, in the tale, are more than what we make of them. Overhearing his father, a gardener, talk one day “of the underground mines and the miners” (von den unterirdischen Bergwerken und ihren Arbeitern), the brooding young protagonist Christian quickly develops a fascination that escalates into a resolution to leave his parents’ home in the flatlands.46 Having “read in a book of the nearest big mountain” (in einem Buche Nachrichten vom nächsten großen Gebirge gefunden) and having “seen illustrations of some mountainous regions” (Abbildungen einiger Gegenden), he one day makes his way to the highland and becomes a huntsman, the activity that defines him in the opening lines.47 Yet all of this is unsatisfactory, for his life does not correlate to what he had imagined it would be like. His dejection at things not measuring up, however, quickly flips into a state of captivation by things becoming much more than he could have imagined. The Earth announces itself after Christian, now a hunter, one day absentmindedly uproots a mandrake root (Alraunwurzel)—the relation of the “Alrunenwurzel,” as Tieck spells it, an orthographic mutation of the Alraunwurzel, to the Runenberg of the title suggests more of a metonymic logic than a natural one—suddenly setting in motion “a soft whimper in the ground, which travelled underground in waves of lament, and diminished wistfully only in the far distance” (ein dumpfes Winseln im Boden, das sich unterirdisch in klagenden Tönen fortzog, und erst in der Ferne wehmütig verscholl).48 A stranger appears at this juncture, who then escorts Christian into a mountain, and to a mineral woman, beyond his wildest imaginings. The rest of the story is straightforward, even when its readings are disputed: his return to the flatlands and his commitment to his family turns out to be a temporary interval in his love of metals and minerals, to which he ultimately dedicates his life. Whether or not his attraction is read as one of inspiration or avarice, whether the tale’s moral can be identified with the pieties of Christian’s plant-loving (and mineral-averse) father, might be beside the point. Heather Sullivan’s insight into the “inability of the figures to discern where one realm ends and the other begins” concerns not only the contested boundary between organic and inorganic in Early Modern geology but also how this boundary can be effaced by human activity, particularly in the form of mining and other anthropo-geomorphologies.49 46 Tieck, Der Runenberg, 187. 47 Ibid., 188. 48 Ibid., 186. 49 Sullivan, “Organic and Inorganic,” 36.

256  Readings in the Anthropocene For Christian, the Earth does not organize itself into organic and inorganic objects but rather material flows that partake of both; it does not organize itself into song but rather an intermingling of nauseating noise and subterranean sound. Instead of the conventional trope of the song of the Earth, Der Runenberg offers us a mutant melody at the outset of the Anthropocene that could be called the song of the Eaarth, after environmentalist Bill McKibben’s designation for the planet formerly known as Earth: The world hasn’t ended but the world as we know it has—even if we don’t quite know it yet. We imagine that we still live back on that old planet, that the disturbances we see around us are the old random and freakish kind. But they’re not. It’s a different place. A different planet. It needs a new name. Eaarth. Or Monnde, or Tierrre, Errde, оккучивать.”50 Der Runenberg presents the becoming-aberrant of the Earth: though not yet subject to the damage and transformations associated with the Anthropocene, the capacity of the Earth to take Christian by surprise demonstrates that the tale’s true concern is an Earth that operates of its own accord, an Earth that responds non-linearly to human forcings (the Earth screams merely because a plant was uprooted); it is a tale both of the Earth’s vulnerability to our libidinal attraction to its crystalline figures and our vulnerability to the catastrophic consequences of that attraction. Der Runenberg might be less about coming to terms with an overactive imagination than it is about coming to terms with the vitality of the inorganic. The close of the tale demonstrates the extent to which romanticism is willing to immerse itself into the noise of the Eaarth, a noise that does not resolve itself into signal, a sound that does not resolve itself into song, a planet that does not resolve itself into the Earth. In his final appearance, Christian is estranged from his family to the extent that he, all but faceless, is announced only as an it. “It was a man in a totally tattered coat, barefoot, his face burnt dark by the sun and disfigured by a long disheveled beard” (Es war ein Mann in einem ganz zerrissenen Rocke, barfüßig, sein Gesicht schwarzbraun von der Sonne verbrannt, von einem langen struppigen Bart noch mehr entstellt).51 His attempt to share his collection of “the most precious treasures” (die kostbarsten Schätze) with his audience fails miserably: Hereupon he opened the sack and spilled out its contents; it was full of pebbles, as well as big hunks of quartz and other stones. 50 Bill McKibben, Eaarth (New York: Times Books, 2010), 2–3. 51 Tieck, Der Runenberg, 208.

Petrifiction: Reimagining the Mine in German Romanticism  257 “It’s just  that these jewels haven’t yet been polished and filed down,” he added, “that’s why their look is lacking; the outward fire is still buried in their hearts, but all you’ve got to do is beat it out of them, scare them such that their dissemblance is of no avail, then you’ll see what stuff they’re made of.” With these words he took a hard stone and hit it against another until red sparks emerged. “They’re all fire and flicker inside lightening the darkness with their laughter, but they won’t yet do it willingly.” He painstakingly swept everything back into his sack and tied its cord tightly.52 What these common stones are missing is “fire and flicker” (Auge und Blick), literally, “eye and gaze.” Lacking the eyes that appear upon polishing, they fail to return the gaze of this “wanderer,” but in doing so they demonstrate how decentered the human has become. The extent of Christian’s being beholden to the stones finally becomes apparent in the closing line: “Since then the unlucky one was never seen again” (Der Unglückliche ward aber seitdem nicht wieder gesehen).53 Upon recognizing that his stones lack Auge und Blick, he promptly vanishes, never to be seen again. In addition to noise, the vitality of the mineral emerges, in the images and imagings that are facilitated by a mineral gaze in Der Runenberg, a gaze that Kuzinar reads as Tieck’s response to Fichte and the belief in the creativity of the romantic imagination.54 To speak of the mineral imaginary of Der Runenberg, then, is to speak both of the imagination’s material underpinning in the mine and of the fearsome capacity of the mineral to generate images. As important as the acoustic sphere is for the tale, the textual code of visuality is supreme. Throughout the story we encounter stones with eyes. “How beautiful and alluring the old stone gazes down on us” (wie schön und anlockend das alte Gestein zu 52 “Er öffnete hierauf seinen Sack und schüttete ihn aus; dieser war voller Kiesel, unter denen große Stücke Quarz, nebst andern Steinen lagen. ‘Es ist nur,’ fuhr er fort, ‘daß diese Juwelen noch nicht poliert und geschliffen sind, darum fehlt es ihnen noch an Auge und Blick; das äußerliche Feuer mit seinem Glanze ist noch zu sehr in ihren inwendigen Herzen begraben, aber man muß es nur herausschlagen, daß sie sich fürchten, daß keine Verstellung ihnen mehr nützt, so sieht man wohl, wes Geistes Kind sie sind.’—Er nahm mit diesen Worten einen harten Stein und schlug ihn heftig gegen einen andern, so daß die roten Funken heraussprangen. ‘Habt ihr den Glanz gesehen?’ rief er aus; ‘so sind sie ganz Feuer und Licht, sie erhellen das Dunkel mit ihrem Lachen, aber noch tun sie es nicht freiwillig.’ Er packte hierauf alles wieder sorgfältig in seinen Sack, welchen er fest zusammenschnürte.” Tieck, Der Runenberg, 207. 53 Tieck, Der Runenberg, 208. 54 Kuzinar, “Stones that Stare,” 51.

258  Readings in the Anthropocene uns herblickt), exclaims a stranger at the outset, beckoning to the distant mountain that will spell Christian’s downfall, while calling attention to the possibility of an inanimate world endowed with vision.55 The progression of the tale entails the degeneration of Christian’s moral vision and the proliferation of stones that see: streams ogle him, stone looks deep into his heart, and on confusing gold with the sun, he exclaims, “How it winks at me” (wie es mir zublinzelt).56 It is not only the case that objects in the landscape possess a gaze; as Kuzinar observes, the object “embodies the fearsome possibility of representing to the subject more about itself than the subject ever thought imaginable.”57 The mineral imaginary of German romanticism exposes the uncanniness of what is mine: an image of the mine that is not mine, the image of my soul that does not belong to me, my imaginings that take on a life, though not necessarily of my own.58 The auspiciousness of Der Runenberg lies in its discovery of the technologization of human perception as much as it lies in, as is traditionally held, the discovery of the unconscious. Parikka’s observation that the depths of mines serve as essential places for the emergence of technical media culture has an ironic accuracy in light of the glimmering “tablet” (Tafel), inlaid with precious stones and metals, that the mineral woman hands to Christian atop the mountain. Prefiguring a touchscreen tablet device, or rather showing how a tablet imaginary exists within German romanticism, Tieck writes that the “tablet seemed to form a marvelous if unfathomable image with its various colors and lines” (Die Tafel schien eine wunderliche unverständliche Figur mit ihren unterschiedlichen Farben und Linien zu bilden).59 The phantasmagoric experience of the tablet belies its materiality—“In his mind’s eye shined an abyss of forms and sounds, of longing and desire, while hordes of winged notes of melancholy and joyful melodies coursed through his senses” (In seinem Innern hatte sich ein Abgrund von Gestalten und Wohllaut, von Sehnsucht und Wollust aufgetan, Scharen von beflügelten Tönen und wehmütigen und freudigen Melodien zogen durch sein Gemüt)— much in the same way that tablets in contemporary media culture are often not seen as the geological extracts that they are.60 While the stone tablet blinds Christian, screening him off from his environment, it remains the case that the tale emphasizes how most 55 Tieck, Der Runenberg, 189. 56 Ibid., 200. 57 Kuzinar, “Stones that Stare,” 53. 58 Laurence A. Rickels, “Mine,” http://vv.arts.ucla.edu/terminals/rickles/ rickles.html (accessed March 17, 2016). 59 Tieck, Der Runenberg, 192. 60 Ibid.

Petrifiction: Reimagining the Mine in German Romanticism  259 mineral objects encountered on the mountain are endowed with a gaze. This is not an anomaly. In “Die frühromantische Theorie der Naturerkenntnis” (“The Early Romantic Theory of the Knowledge of Nature”) from Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism), Walter Benjamin elaborates Novalis’s argument that, in the medium of reflection, the thing and the knowing subject merge into one another on the basis of “the dependence of any knowledge of an object on the self-knowledge of that object.”61 Reception, in Benjamin’s reading of Novalis, cannot be thought of as a one-sided affair; rather, it entails a reciprocal determination in which our awareness of a thing (or work of art) is dependent on that thing’s own capacity for reflection and self-awareness. To illustrate his point, Benjamin cites a line by Novalis that could also be immensely fruitful for thinking through Tieck’s investment in the mine: “In all predicates in which we see the fossil, it sees us.”62 This structure of reciprocity for Novalis can theoretically encompass millions of years, and for Tieck it extends to a variety of mineral objects, not only fossils. What takes place on Rune Mountain is what Novalis would call an intensification or romanticization of reflection: the incorporation of other centers of reflection into its own self-knowledge, thereby staging not only an encounter but a being-encountered by another. The romantic vision of mines involves the vision of mines. Among other consequences, this encounter unsettles thinking that equates the inorganic realm with lifelessness. This equation is disrupted on two fronts: first, as Ziolkowski points out, the romantics inherited the assumption, stretching from classical antiquity up through the eighteenth century, that stones and metals grew like organic matter. Ziolkowski cites the Aristotelian theory of celestial influences, which was accepted by most scholastics of the Middle Ages, as well as Agricola’s theory of “lapidifying juices” that were used to account for mysterious phenomena ranging from the apparent narrowing of abandoned mine shafts to the increasing density of leaden roof tiles.63 The capacity for minerals to grow was also fundamental for alchemy’s theories of sublimation. If the Freiberg school of mining no longer regarded these influences and juices as active, its students and adherents, including Alexander von Humboldt and the Naturphilosoph 61 Walter Benjamin, Selected Works, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1996), 145; “die Bedingtheit jeder Objekterkenntnis in einer Selbsterkenntnis des Objekts,” Gesammelte Schriften I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 55. 62 Benjamin, Selected Works, Vol. 1, 145; “In allen Prädikaten, in denen wir das Fossil sehen, sieht es uns,” Gesammelte Schriften I, 55. 63 Ziolkowski, “The Mine,” 29.

260  Readings in the Anthropocene Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, nevertheless continued to blur the boundary between organic and inorganic. As Schubert writes in Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Views from the Dark Side of Natural Science), “The entire kingdom of metals seems to have emerged where two worlds meet; out of the decline and decay of the anorganic, it seems to bear within itself the seeds of the new organic age” (Das ganze Reich der Metalle scheint an den Gränzen der beiden Welten aus dem Untergang und einer der Verwesung ähnlichen Vernichtung des Anorganischen entstanden und in sich den Keim der neuen, organischen Zeit zu tragen).64 If the romantic vision of the mines furnishes an image of the human condition that has contemporary appeal, it is that of the mineralogical dimension of life. The geological turn taken by various contemporary schools of thought—from Jane Bennet’s vital materialism to Jussi Parikka’s deep media theory—forces us to rethink equating the inorganic realm with lifelessness from the perspective of the present afforded by the Anthropocene thesis. The conception of the Earth as “a hurtling hunk of rock that feels,” in Rob Nixon’s words, would not be entirely unfamiliar to Tieck’s Der Runenberg with its shrieking Earth, nor to Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen with its “monstrous births” deep in the Earth, nor to Hoffmann’s Mines of Falun, with its closing image of a wizened fiancée embracing her vitrified groom, unearthed after a cave-in some 50 years prior.65 Though the Earth is aberrant, the tale is itself not an aberration. As Ziolkowski rightly observes, Tieck wrote this tale as though he were trying, at all costs, to pack in every Romantic association with mining: the mine as the locus of struggle for the pious (Christian) soul, the fatal lure of precious metals, the sexuality of the mineral realm, the lore of speaking stones, the descent into the mine as the embrace of the beloved.66 In celebrating the vibrancy of the Earth, the romantics are not so much evoking the imaginative legacy of medieval thought as they are articulating life in a way that does not sharply distinguish between organic and inorganic matter. In each of these cases, the images of mineralizing humans and animated minerals are mediated by mining and its 64 Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Eschborn: Dietmar Klotz, 1992), 200–1. 65 Rob Nixon, “The Anthropocene: Promise and Pitfalls of an Epochal Idea,” http://edgeeffects.net/anthropocene-promise-and-pitfalls/ (accessed March 17, 2016). 66 Ziolkowski, “The Mine,” 53.

Petrifiction: Reimagining the Mine in German Romanticism  261 material and affective effects. These transformations may not yet be Earth-magnitude, but we can recognize in them the germinal phase of the Anthropocene.

Bibliography

Allen, Valerie. “Mineral Virtue.” In J. J. Cohen (ed.), Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, 123–52. Washington, DC: Oliphaunt, 2012. Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften I. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974. Benjamin, Walter. Selected Works. Vol. 1. Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1996. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Buell, Frederick. “A Short History of Oil Cultures: Or, the Marriage of Catastrophe and Exuberance.” Journal of American Studies 46.2 (2012): 273–93. Campe, Rüdiger. “The Rauschen of the Waves: On the Margins of Literature,” SubStance 61 (1990): 21–38. Clark, Nigel. Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet. London: Sage, 2011. Crutzen, Paul J. “Geology of Mankind: The Anthropocene.” Nature 415 (2002): 23. de Man, Paul. “The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image.” In Harold Bloom (ed.), Romanticism and Consciousness, 65–77. New York: W. W. Norton, 1970. Ghosh, Amitav. “Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel.” New Republic 206.2 (1992): 29–34. Grosz, Elizabeth. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Kuzinar, Alice. “Stones That Stare, or, the Gorgon’s Gaze in Ludwig Tieck’s Der Runenberg.” In Jeffrey Adamy and Eric Williams (eds), Mimetic Desire: Essays on Narcissism in German Literature from Romanticism to Post Modernism, 50–64. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995. LeMenager, Stephanie. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. London: Oxford University Press, 2014. Lovelock, James. A Rough Ride to the Future. London: Penguin, 2014. McKibben, Bill. Eaarth. New York: Times Books, 2010. Moore, Jason W. “The Capitalocene. Part 1: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis,” jasonwmoore.com/uploads/The_Capitalocene__Part_I__ June_2014.pdf (accessed March 17, 2016). Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Nixon, Rob. “The Anthropocene: Promise and Pitfalls of an Epochal Idea,” http:// edgeeffects.net/anthropocene-promise-and-pitfalls/ (accessed March 17, 2016). Novalis. Schriften I. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1977. Parikka, Jussi. The Anthrobscene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Rickels, Laurence A. “Mine,” http://vv.arts.ucla.edu/terminals/rickles/rickles. html (accessed March 17, 2016). Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich. Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft. Dresden: Arnoldische Buchhandlung, 1808; Eschborn: Dietmar Klotz, 1992.

262  Readings in the Anthropocene Sullivan, Heather. “Organic and Inorganic Bodies in the Age of Goethe: An Ecocritical Reading of Ludwig Tieck’s ‘Rune Mountain’ and the Earth Sciences,” ISLE 10.2 (2003): 21–46. Tieck, Ludwig. Der Runenberg. In Manfred Frank (ed.), Phantasus, 184–209. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker, 1985. Uglietti, Chiara, et al. “Widespread Pollution of the South American Atmosphere Predates the Industrial Revolution by 240 y.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112.8 (2015): 2349–54. Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich. Werke und Briefe. Edited by F. von der Leyen. Heidelberg: L. Schneider, 1967. Yusoff, Kathryn. “Geologic Life: Prehistory, Climate, Futures in the Anthropocene.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31.5 (2013): 779–95. Ziolkowski, Theodore. German Romanticism and Its Institutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Twelve The Anthroposcene of Literature: Diffuse Dwelling in Graham Swift and W. G. Sebald1

Bernhard Malkmus

What Is, and to What End Do We Study the Anthropocene?

Friedrich Schiller’s celebrated inaugural address as professor of history in Jena in the momentous year of 1789 is entitled “What Is, and to What End Do We Study Universal History?” (Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte?). Schiller explored some of the intellectual ramifications of the epochal shift by calling upon historians to engage in the idealist enterprise of turning history into universal history and of turning historians into philosophers of history. His aim was to wrest history from rhetoric and establish an academic discipline committed to rigor and reasoning that would allow historians to contribute to an enlightened reflection of the human condition. This liberation, he contended, would ultimately facilitate an understanding of human behavior not affected by the vicissitudes of specific conditions and sharpen our sense for the anthropological universals embedded in history.2 In particular, he developed two central arguments that are challenged in today’s context of a global environmental crisis: 1 This chapter was written during a fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich. I am very grateful for the inspiration and friendship I experienced there. Special thanks go to Christof Mauch, Katie Ritson, and Kirsten Wehner for being such attentive and mindful interlocutors, not to forget the tawny owl in the English Garden. 2 Friedrich Schiller, “Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte?,” in Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, Vol. 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2000), 411–31, 430.

264  Readings in the Anthropocene 1. World history begins with language; in fact, it does not begin until written language records it; 2. Universal history is the interdisciplinary approach to a philosophy of history that is able to reconstruct the history of civilization as a progressive history of reason.3 As I will show, the Anthropocene concept deals with the inner and outer limitations of this very episteme and thus marks the end of a philosophy of history that Schiller and others inaugurated in the wake of the French Revolution. Schiller outlines an epistemic constellation whose explanatory validity has been challenged by critiques of modernity and has come under renewed attack in the wake of the Anthropocene debate— at a time when scientists decipher anthropogenic carbon dioxide inscriptions in bogs and ice shells and thus call into question both the linguistic and the rational foundation of human history. Schiller’s call for a “universal history” and its critique of the limitations of private existence, however, can still be fruitful. The universal challenge today is not only how to conceive of the self-liberating individual, an idea emerging during the eighteenth century, within broader social contexts; it also includes rethinking human history within evolutionary and geological histories and the potential implications of such a contextualization for an affirmative concept of the self-liberating individual. Schiller’s concurrently developed anthropologically inflected aesthetics, partly rooted in his medical training at the Karlsschule military academy in Stuttgart, revolves around notions of moderation in ways that address the physiological-intellectual or sensual-rational duality of human beings.4 They show an awareness of humans’ natural historical embeddedness, even though Schiller did not bring these insights to bear on his philosophy of history. In this chapter, I will explore some of the ramifications of the Anthropocene concept for our understanding of the human in history, and will then adumbrate some of the implications of this debate for literary scholarship as preparation for the two close readings of Graham Swift and W. G. Sebald, respectively, which illustrate my theoretical claims. Global climate change “has brought into sharp focus the capability of contemporary human civilization to influence the environment at the scale of the Earth as a single, evolving planetary system.”5 While the concept of the Anthropocene distilled from these deliberations 3 Ibid., 412–16. 4 Schiller worked for years on a law of mixed nature that delegates the problematic aspects of his history of reason to the aesthetic realm, beginning as early as in his dissertation “Versuch über den Zusammenhang der tierischen Natur des Menschen mit seiner Geistigen” from 1780 and culminating in his major works of 1795, Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung and Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen. 5 Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen, and John McNeill, “The

The Anthroposcene of Literature 265 forms a geological threshold that is currently being formalized,6 it also serves as a catchphrase for the epistemic ramifications of a global ecological crisis as well as its political and social implications. In the context of the humanities, it has become shorthand for the fact that disciplines such as literary and cultural studies, which tended to neglect the challenge of ecology, are beginning to question some of their anthropocentric axioms. Whatever we ultimately make of the Anthropocene concept and its suitability for capturing the far-reaching transformations underway, it has already proven valuable as a heuristic tool for conceptualizing the global dimension of the crisis, that is, the ecological limits to human civilization in general and the ecological limits of the modern Western episteme in particular. Empirical research on global warming, subjective awareness of weather changes, fears about the impact of rising water levels, and the systemic effect of melting polar icecaps on the saline composition of oceans has catapulted anthropogenic climate change to the forefront of the general public’s perception of the Anthropocene debate. Geologists and chemists, however, look at anthropogenic changes in much broader terms. As Waters and others have formulated, “The driving forces responsible for many of the anthropogenic signatures are a product of the three linked force multipliers: accelerated technological development, rapid growth of the human population, and increased consumption of resources.”7 Central anthropogenic markers include manufactured materials in sediments (aluminum, plastics, and concrete), radionuclides and particulates from fossil fuel combustion, and changes in the three central chemical cycles of the Earth (the carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycles). Another central aspect pertains to biotic changes: the extinction rate of animals is estimated at more than 1,000 times higher than the so-called background rate of naturally occurring extinction and species invasion. This has led to a drastic homogenization of biodiversity across the globe affecting flora and fauna alike.8 All these changes will leave a fossil record. Accordingly, the Anthropocene also marks a paradigm shift in an eminently historical science, namely Earth history. A geology of the Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369 (2011): 842–67, 842. 6 See http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/press/press-releases/2016/august/medianote-anthropocene-working-group-awg (accessed March 17, 2016). 7 Colin Waters et al., “The Anthropocene is Functionally and Stratigraphically Distinct from the Holocene,” Science 351, aad2622 (2016), DOI: 10.1126/ science.266, 2. 8 Ibid., 3–8. For more details see S. L. Pimm et al., “The Biodiversity of Species and Their Rates of Extinction, Distribution, and Protection,” Science 344, 1246752 (2014), DOI: 10.1126/science.1246752, 1–5.

266  Readings in the Anthropocene Anthropocene, however, is not only and not predominantly about a fossil record that has been left; it is about a fossil record that humans will have left at some point in the future. Geologists extrapolate future fossil records on the basis of current human behavior. Anthropocene geology is written both in the past tense and in the future perfect. While intellectual histories of European modernities follow the exfoliation of decisive political, social, economic, and cultural transformations during the late eighteenth century, the Anthropocene concept frames this era by instead looking at the traces humans have left in the book of deep time, for example, in the ice strata of Antarctica. Equating modernity with the age of fossil fuel reconfigures significant aspects of the modern episteme, in particular its notion of individualistic freedom and the way the West has exported that concept of freedom to other regions of the globe. Peter Sloterdijk coined the term “kinetic expressionism” to highlight that our increasingly aestheticized notion of individualistic freedom has its material base in the systematic extraction of resources: “Since fossil fuels have virtually become available to everyone, we lead a kind of life as if Prometheus had stolen the fire [from the Gods] a second time.”9 In his four theses on “The Climate of History,” Dipesh Chakrabarty elaborates a number of points germane to Sloterdijk’s argument. Not only does global climate change call into question the epistemological architecture of modernity, but it also challenges modernity’s time regime and its concept of history, namely, the predication of subjectivity on the idea of an inexhaustible future that serves as a projection screen for boundless expectations and the idea of neverending collective progress that is, in turn, predicated on the notion of inexhaustible natural resources. Since the Western notion of freedom is deeply embedded in this epistemological and temporal structure and in an ignorance or denial of ecological limits, Chakrabarty asserts, we need to better understand the genealogy and predicaments of this particular notion of freedom. After all, “The mansion of modern freedom stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use.”10 The so-called Great Acceleration since the 1950s and an awareness of its inherent ecological limits has forced humans to develop two different, at times even conflicting, skill-sets: on the one hand, an increasing 9 Peter Sloterdijk, “Wie groß ist ‘groß’?,” in Paul Crutzen et al. (eds), Das Raumschiff Erde hat keinen Notausgang. Energie und Politik im Anthropozän (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2011), 93–110. Translations are my own unless noted otherwise. 10 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 197–222, 208; see also Timothy Mitchell, “Carbon Democracy,” Economy and Society 38.3 (2009): 399–432.

The Anthroposcene of Literature 267 ability to navigate cultural differences and understand past and present hegemonies, and on the other hand, a relatively new capacity for selfreflection as a collective agent imbricated in the history of ecological degradation. The traces humankind has left in an infinitesimally short time span will become records in deep time; this makes it necessary to conceive of humankind, despite myriad histories of injustice, as a “negative universal.”11 By that Chakrabarty means a universal that is unable to provide a positive sense of identification for a collective that is “already always constituted as one, as members perhaps of one species that through its simultaneous co-existence on the planet and its shared, though uneven, search for the good life, has degraded its own biosphere.”12 The equating of the Anthropocene with a sociologically observable shift in human awareness of our environmental impact demarcates a distinct epoch of a Bewusstseinsgeschichte (history of consciousness) that casts humans as ecological creatures. It thus marks a break from a modernity defined by socio-economic developments to a modernity defined by an increasing pressure to reflect on the genealogy of its epistemic framework within the web of life. The reason for this mounting pressure is the increased and the increasingly diffuse or decentralized sense of risk. To use the late Ulrich Beck’s terms, “Risk awareness [today] is not based on ‘second-hand experience,’ but on ‘second-hand non-experience.’”13 In other words, we are ever more dependent on a technocratic bureaucracy of risk management that is increasingly incommensurate with human experiences or sensory intuitions. Beck and others therefore introduced the term “reflexive modernization” to capture a paradigm shift that, albeit in a different theoretical register, anticipates defining aspects of the Anthropocene imaginary. Let us call the autonomous, undesired and unseen, transition from industrial to risk society reflexivity (to differentiate it from and contrast it with reflection). Then “reflexive modernization” means self-confrontation with the effects of risk society that cannot be dealt with and assimilated in the system of industrial society.14 11 Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 221. 12 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Humanism in a Global World,” in Jörn Rüsen and Henner Laass (eds), Humanism in Intercultural Perspective (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009), 23–36. 13 Ulrich Beck, Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 96. 14 Ulrich Beck, “The Reinvention of Politics: Towards a Theory of Reflexive Modernization,” in Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash (eds), Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), 1–55, 6.

268  Readings in the Anthropocene Central in the context of this “self-confrontation” is the ongoing homogenization of human lifeworlds that challenges certain epistemic tenets of modernity like dialectics, evolution, or growth. Parallel to these processes of homogenization, humans are frequently faced with the social challenges and ecological damage brought about by global mobility. In spite of “self-confrontations with the effects of risk society,” the homogenization of and mobility between societies potentially exacerbate the systemic proneness and exposure to risk on a global scale—due to the discrepancy between the growth paradigm in human socio-economic systems and the inherent ecological limits of the Earth. If we look at the Anthropocene as a frame of reference that forces humans into a reflexive mode and prompts them to think about their ecological impact, it also has implications for how we conceive of the human imagination. This shifts the debate into the terrain of literary scholarship. In classical antiquity, philosophers drew a basic ontic distinction between physis and thesei.15 Physis (etymologically deriving from phyein, “to grow”) is that which exists and regenerates itself through its own resources, and thesei is that whose existence is conditioned by an external agent.16 In other words, thesei is set by convention and is often referred to in connection to cultural practices (for example, Aristotle’s techne)17 or social and legal conventions (for example, nomos in pre-Socratic thinking). This basic distinction has been complicated today: physis in contemporary culture predominantly features as a stockpile of raw material that is partly transformed into thesei, be it through domestication, intensive industrial agricultures, monocultures, or the destruction of habitat for the benefit or cultivation of other species. Conversely, living today means facing a paradox that forms a major challenge to human imagination: as our technological emancipation from ecological networks expands, we are confronted with the necessity of becoming radically ecological. We begin to understand that the life of future human generations, as well as the systemic continuity of natural habitats and biodiversity, are things that, in an ever more precarious and anthropomorphized state of the planet, humans have to safeguard themselves. This also implies that the epistemological role of imagination is changing and will continue to change. If we look at the history of modern literature from romanticism to today, the concept of the imagination has always been an unstable one. However, there has been a certain tendency to define imagination as 15 See Plato, Cratylos, §383a–384e. 16 See Hartmut Böhme, “Kulturgeschichte der Natur,” in Hartmut Böhme, Peter Matussek, and Lothar Müller (eds), Orientierung Kulturwissenschaft: Was sie kann, was sie will (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2000), 118–31, 118–19. 17 See Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1025b, 19–25; 1032a, 16–18.

The Anthroposcene of Literature 269 the condition of possibility for human subjectivity. Even Kant, in his first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, defines imagination as one of the prime sources of knowledge. In the second edition, he obfuscates this argument by subordinating imagination to reason.18 Against this implicit equation of human imagination and a subjectivity defined by cognitive difference, Hartmut Böhme stresses the human body as inextricably intertwined with human imagination. The body, for him, encompasses two decisive aspects that render ambiguous the attempt to identify imagination with subjectivity: 1. The body constitutes a physiological memory that is formed by and reflects the shaping influence of natural environments on humans—both in terms of evolutionary history and individual biography; 2. The body is a medium of communication that partakes in the collective body of language through neural mapping. The individual body, accordingly, is defined both by its ability to give individual expression to the collective body of a specific language and by the impression that specific environmental conditions have made on it (in the form of neural facilitation and aesthetics). As a consequence of this corporeal supplementation of the subjectivist definition of imagination, Böhme proposes a literary anthropology: We must realize that literature is an irreplaceable archive of stored experience … in which the historical physiognomies of human beings are conserved … If today, the importance of human beings seems to be in decline along with the formative force of history … literary studies are called to remind us of the images of the human that are fading out both in their beauty and in their horror.19 Literature thus fulfills a dual purpose. It forms an archive that allows us to re-envisage what used to be human and it offers an aesthetic sensibility that allows us to imagine a physiological and linguistic embeddedness of humans as a reflection on the future of “the human.” To use Hans Blumenberg’s terminology, literature is a mode of imagining the human Umwelt as an epistemic frame that is marked by the increasing experiential divergence between a biographical sense of time (Lebenszeit) and deep time (Weltzeit).20 The continuous erosion of bodily and sensual frames of human experience is one of 18 For a detailed analysis, see Gernot Böhme and Hartmut Böhme, Das Andere der Vernunft: Zur Entwicklung von Rationalitätsstrukturen am Beispiel Kants (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 233–45. 19 Hartmut Böhme, “Literaturwissenschaft in der Herausforderung der technischen und ökologischen Welt,” in Ludwig Jäger and Bernd Switalla (eds), Germanistik in der Mediengesellschaft (Munich: Fink, 1994), 63–79, 74–5. 20 Hans Blumenberg, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001), 47–9.

270  Readings in the Anthropocene the prime challenges for the Anthropocene literary imagination. In an age that defines nature as the freely malleable cement of the human will, imagination means something quite different from back when matter posed significantly more resistance to the human will. We are called upon to rethink physis as the “producing” principle of life (natura naturans) rather than as a “produced” form (natura naturata) or thesei. Turning now to literary case studies, I am interested in the way two major texts about the east English marshlands, the Fenlands, tackle the issue of an imagination that negotiates the human in an environment of increasingly global ecological and social imaginaries. My hypothesis is that Graham Swift’s Waterland from 1983 and W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn from 1995 articulate an awareness of the Anthropocene avant la lettre through their dramatization of what we may call with Böhme “bodily imagination.” Both readings will elaborate on the dual nature of place—both as a form of dwelling and as a scene for human self-reflection.

“[A] liquid form of Nothing”: Graham Swift’s Fenlands and the Siltation of Culture21

Graham Swift’s novel Waterland is a palimpsest of stories and histories about the Fenlands, a marshy landscape in eastern England in the region roughly demarcated by the prehistoric estuary of the River Rhine. The plot comprises the natural and cultural histories of the Fenlands; the narrative is unified by the sagas of two local families— the Atkinsons and the Cricks—and underpinned by the narrator Tom Crick’s reluctant confession about his traumatic teenage experiences in the Fenlands. Crick is a history teacher who grew up in the region, yet spent all his professional life in Greenwich, close to the zero meridian. When the history program at his school is discontinued, he is sent into early retirement and returns to the Fenlands. There he is confronted with his past again. History in the novel features both as an academic enterprise intimately tied up with modernizing processes (or, indeed, compensating for them) and as a mythological narrative. However, Swift borrows the central metaphor for history and the structural leitmotif for the entire novel from nature, namely, siltation processes, thus mapping history onto geology and linear time onto space:22 21 Graham Swift, Waterland (London: Picador, 1984), 13. 22 Hanne Tange reads this as a shift from history to geography and compares it to regionalist discourses in Britain in response to Thatcherite nationalism, in particular Cairn Craig’s “out of history” paradigm and its emphasis on the social role of geology in the formation of a regionalist Scottish identity. See

The Anthroposcene of Literature 271 For the chief fact about the Fens is that they are reclaimed land, land that was once water, and which, even today, is not quite solid … The Fens were formed by silt. Silt: a word which when you utter it, letting the air slip thinly between your teeth, invokes a slow, sly, insinuating agency. Silt: which shapes and undermines continents; which demolishes as it builds; which is simultaneous accretion and erosion; neither progress nor decay.23 Wherever imagination takes the narrative, it is firmly embedded in the bodily impression of sensual perceptions (“accretion and erosion”) and in the bodily expression of language (“a slow, sly, insinuating agency”). Siltation here is directly related to physiological memory and to bodily expression in the way Böhme envisages a literary anthropology. Whatever and whoever lives in this habitat is ecologically embedded in the workings of silt, the “builder and destroyer of land”:24 the growth and decay of enormous forests, the fertile peat soil that supports potato and beetroot plantations today, the fates of those people who have tied their lives to the borderland between an aquatic and a terrestrial existence. The sagas of humans emerge from these slippery soils alongside the natural histories of prehistoric rain forests and contemporary eels. Silt enables and disables culture. It facilitates and destroys the creation of artificial environments. In the novel, it functions as the archetypal framework for the fragility of human artifices. Even the history teacher Tom Crick, who had left the Fenlands as a student, still used to move through London as if he was treading on peat or marshland. After all, his ancestors had been hunters and gatherers in an ever changing aquatic-terrestrial borderland and, during the seventeenth century, reluctantly turned into builders and repairers of dikes and canals or lock workers. Within this geo-botanic framework, a fish serves as the inextricable connection between nature and culture in Swift’s novel: the enigmatic eel, the iconic animal of the Fenlands. Its migrations from its birthplace in the Sargasso Sea to North American and European fresh water sources, its sense of orientation on this journey (often considerably longer than 500 kilometers), and its mating ethology still force scientists into the humbling exercise of speculation. It is one of the great globetrotters of the animal kingdom and, at the same time, the epitome of a species perfectly adjusted to a specialist habitat, due to its ability to survive for longer periods of time on land and penetrate peat and bog soil. Hanne Tange, “Regional Redemption: Graham Swift’s Waterland and the End of History,” Orbis Litterarum 59 (2004): 75–89, 75, 79. 23 Swift, Waterland, 8–9. 24 Ibid., 390.

272  Readings in the Anthropocene According to Swift, natural history should be imagined as an eel crossing the Atlantic unperturbed by the destinies of Erik the Red, the Pilgrim Fathers, or the submarine warriors of World War II.25 Natural history has nothing to do with biology lessons, Swift insists; nor does it lead anywhere—neither back to a Golden Age nor into a future catastrophe. It always returns to where it originally came from, like the eel and its long journey back to the Sargasso Sea where it spawns offspring and dies. Swift’s underlying assumption is that humans are part of natural history; but he also goes beyond the commonplace understanding of that connection: Natural history, human nature. Those weird and wonderful commodities, those unsolved mysteries of mysteries. Because just supposing … this natural stuff is always getting the better of the artificial stuff. Just supposing—but don’t whisper it too much abroad—this unfathomable stuff we’re made from, this stuff we’re always coming back to—our love of life, children, our love of life—is more anarchic, more seditious than any Tennis-Court Oath ever was. That’s why these revolutions always have a whiff of the death-wish about them. That’s why there is always a Terror waiting round the corner.26 The historian and the archeologist, as archetypes of humankind, play an ambivalent role in this novel. On the one hand, they represent a cultural program that is rooted in evolutionary mechanisms; after all, their intellectual tools are portrayed as just another device developed by evolution. On the other hand, these archetypes represent a quality of curiosity that constitutes an ontological difference between humans and other sentient beings: it provides the unique ability to reflect on the past and project into the future, the ability to construct history and narrate histories and follow the anarchic “love of life, children, love of life,” all of which seems connected to Böhme’s idea of bodily imagination. In Swift’s terms, this imagination “takes us back, either via catastrophe and confusion or in our heart’s desire, to where we were.”27 At the core of Swift’s anthropology lies the human ability to engage with the world in ways that are not primarily reactive but creative. Nor can this manner of engagement always be controlled entirely. We might understand this ability as the ability to dream and project utopian ideas. This idea has an affinity with a school of 25 Ibid., 196–205. 26 Ibid., 205–6. 27 Ibid., 137.

The Anthroposcene of Literature 273 thought that emerged in the 1920s in Germany and is often labeled “philosophical anthropology”—an attempt to wed continental philosophy to new biological theories, including the nascent field of Umweltwissenschaften (environmental studies). The US-American philosopher of biology Marjorie Grene refers to this tradition in the following terms: We have to make ourselves, and our making is also an unmaking. We are, like other things, physico-chemical systems; we live, like other animals, bodily lives dependent on bodily needs and functions, but we exist as human beings on the edge between nature and art, reality and its denial. That is both our peril and our opportunity.28 In Swift’s poetics this idea appears in somewhat different language but essentially refers to the same specific duality in humans that current cultural theory is so eager to dismantle: “Curiosity begets love. It weds us to the world. It’s part of our perverse, madcap love for this impossible planet we inhabit.”29 This “madcap love” that ties us to an “impossible planet” makes us aware of the fact that we “exist as human beings on the edge between nature and art.” Swift spells out an anthropological difference, a form of curiosity directly related to storytelling, as Ronald McKinney emphasizes: “Crick knows that curiosity not only ‘bogs’ us down in stories which are inadequate to our experiences, but it also leads us to an experience of the Here and Now which can lead to the creation of ever more adequate fictions.”30 Damon Marcel DeCoste moves beyond this emphasis on narrative and notes that Swift does not simply endorse a critique of “historiographical metafiction”31 common throughout the early 1980s, as epitomized by Hayden White and Jean-François Lyotard, who ascribe a redemptive role to narrative as a petit récit; rather he stresses Swift’s concurrent exploration of the insufficiency of narratives, since they— like metanarratives—“tend likewise to assertive finality,” or as Tom Crick ruminates, “So there’s no escaping it: even if we miss the grand repertoire of history, we yet imitate it in miniature and endorse, in miniature, its longing for presence, for feature, for purpose, for 28 Marjorie Grene, “People and other Animals,” in The Understanding of Nature: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974), 346–60, 360. 29 Swift, Waterland, 206. 30 Ronald H. McKinney, “The Greening of Postmodernism: Graham Swift’s Waterland,” New Literary History 28.4 (1997): 821–32, 830. 31 See Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), 53–7.

274  Readings in the Anthropocene content.”32 Accordingly, Waterland gauges the tension between “historia as narrative and historia as inquiry,”33 that is, it facilitates a negotiation of the past that perpetuates inquiry, curiosity, “the incessant question Whywhywhy.”34 Tom Crick’s self-conscious and halting inquiry of history, his assemblage of stories, never does add up to a linear plot, but rather runs into circular structures, reiterating the workings of siltation on cultural, social, and psychological levels. His circular mode of narrating contrasts with other narrating forces in the story, for example, the maniacal Ernest Atkinson and his plan to rewrite history by begetting a “Savior of the World” with his daughter.35 Dick Atkinson, the child fathered in this incestuous act of violence—a “potato-head. Not a hope for the future. A numbskull with the dull, vacant stare of a fish,”36 whose very body is intimately related to the workings of siltation around him—is also, the reader begins to understand, Tom Crick’s half-brother (they have the same mother, Helen Atkinson). Dick dies in an accident, for which Tom is partly responsible—a traumatic experience he is simultaneously repressing and obsessively besieging in his narrative imagination.37 Swift establishes historia as a mode of inquiry within a specific historical framework shaped by two decisive shifts in human selfreflection: the global imaginary associated with the first images of the planet Earth from space (and an ensuing sense of planetary fragility in the cosmos) and the catastrophic imaginary related to the H-bomb. These new sources of imagination modify the conceptualization of man as a product of evolution and simultaneous designer of utopias. Consider the ways in which the dismissed history teacher Crick relates a classroom experience to the principal: “Seriously. Do you know what my—what our, your—students dream about?” “I hardly think”— “It came up, a while ago, in my ‘A’ level group. Nine out of sixteen said they’ve dreamt of a nuclear war. In several cases a recurring nightmare. They dream about the end of the world.”38 32 Swift, Waterland, 41. 33 Damon Marcel DeCoste, “Question and Apocalypse: The Endlessness of Historia in Graham Swift’s Waterland,” Contemporary Literature 43.2 (2002): 377–99, 379. 34 Swift, Waterland, 107. 35 Ibid., 220, 355. 36 Ibid., 242. 37 See Richard Rankin Russell, “Embod(y)ments of History and Delayed Confessions: Graham Swift’s Waterland as Trauma Fiction,” Papers in Language and Literature 45.2 (2009): 115–49. 38 Swift, Waterland, 153.

The Anthroposcene of Literature 275 This motif undergirds the entire text and characterizes its historical imaginary in ways germane to the Anthropocene debate. The psychological reverberations of the Anthropocene concept are inconceivable without that prehistory and, indeed, the latest attempts to define and date it suggest 1945 as a time marker.39 The German-Jewish philosopher Günther Anders captures this prehistory poignantly in his writings on “Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen,” the outdatedness or obsolescence of the human species. With impressions of the Holocaust, the H-bomb, and the nuclear arms race during the Cold War fresh in his mind, Anders developed his notion of a “Promethean difference” (prometheisches Gefälle) between man and machine—a difference that, he claims, increasingly turns into “Promethean shame.”40 What are we ashamed of?, Anders asks, and gives a chilling answer that cuts to the psychological core of the Anthropocene debate: we were born and not manufactured.41 It is important to remind ourselves that prior to talk of the Anthropocene, the first two stages of conceptualizing the human as both a biological species and a global agent were in the context of (a) the possibility of human self-annihilation during the 1950s, and (b) the awareness of the drastic alteration of the biosphere on a global scale through human impact during the 1960s. And it is important that we do not lose sight of these aspects when discussing the human species as a geological agent, as the Anthropocene concept is often understood to suggest. The Anthropocene is about the biosphere, not the lithosphere. The primordial confidence in the positive utopian potential of the human mind, which was shared by the generation who liberated Europe from Nazism and survived the war, was lost very quickly. This utopian potential, according to Anders, turned into a nightmare. The awareness that humankind could wipe itself out led to an existential paradox: Swift’s ability to be curious, to tell stories, and to design utopias is possibly the anthropological root of the human ability to destroy itself; at the same time, it is precisely these qualities that form the most important instruments in the attempt to secure survival in today’s world. Toward the end of the novel, Swift, in an aside that plays with the persona of the author, proposes an ethical maxim related to the 39 See Jan Zalasiewicz, “Die Einstiegsfrage: Wann hat das Anthropozän begonnen?,” in Jürgen Renn and Bernd Scherer (eds), Das Anthropozän: Zum Stand der Dinge (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2015), 160–80. 40 See Günther Anders, Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution, Vol. 1 of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (Munich: Beck, 1956), 14–20, 21–95. 41 See Günther Anders, Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution, Vol. 2 of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (Munich: Beck, 1980), 15–33, 59–78.

276  Readings in the Anthropocene cultural practice of land reclamation.42 In a time of accelerated resource depletion and biological homogenization, Swift’s narrator muses, we are entering a protracted end of the world without end—an endless phasing out that may well exceed human temporal imagination: But then the end of the world came back again, not as an idea or a belief but as something the world had fashioned for itself all the time it was growing up … There’s this thing called progress. But it doesn’t progress, it doesn’t go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away. It’s progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress is the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-endingly retrieving what is lost. A dogged, vigilant business. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business. But you shouldn’t go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires.43 As an alternative to the paralysis of depression (that looms in the background of the novel), Swift embraces a form of place-making here that I call “diffuse dwelling”—diffuse in contradistinction to the modern paradigm of penetrating a space that characterized the tradition of “building empires.” Diffuse dwelling thus offers an implicit critique of the colonial mindset that shaped much of European modernity and endorses the “dull yet valuable business” of engaging with specific biographical, in Tom Crick’s case traumatic, entanglements with specific locations in human lives. It entails an acceptance of the importance of place—a category systematically marginalized throughout modernity, as Edward S. Casey emphasizes: “By late modern times, this world had become increasingly placeless, a matter of mere sites instead of lived places, of sudden displacements rather than of perduring implacements.”44 Tom Crick’s reclamation of land attempts such an implacement as an exercise in diffuse dwelling. It is diffuse in the sense that Crick does not claim to occupy the land, for example, by imposing a ready-made historiographical theory upon the process or by bringing its narratives to a conclusion. Crick’s reclamation also deals with the diffuseness of place as an ontological and epistemological category of human existence in the dual sense of diffuse as “spread out, pervasive” and “unclear, hard to grasp.” What is both pervasive and hard to grasp about the Fenlands is, however, not only the traumatic imbrication of Tom Crick’s 42 See McKinney, “The Greening of Postmodernism,” 832. 43 Swift, Waterland, 336. 44 Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), xv.

The Anthroposcene of Literature 277 biography with the land, but also the geological and ecological embeddedness of its cultural history. Diffused by the peregrinations of the eel and the machinations of silt, the Fenlands become the stage on which the anthropos in the Anthropocene can be negotiated—the anthropos as humanity suspended between Menschenzeit and Weltzeit, between historia and deep time—an agent only diffusely aware of its quasi-geological agency and global impact on the biosphere. Diffuse dwelling thus facilitates a renewed awareness of what Timothy Clark describes as terrestriality: that “normal” prereflective sense of scale inherent to embodied life on the Earth’s surface, forms a kind of transcendental, one that both underlies and exceeds any view that it is merely our social context that determines our understanding of ourselves. Our being-of-the-earth may be something unvordenklich (“un-prethinkable”) in H.-G. Gadamer’s sense, that is that outside of whose terms one cannot think.45 Clark argues in favor of the a priori category of place (as opposed to space) in the context of his observations on scale. He regards the Anthropocene concept as an epistemic threshold that forces humans to reconsider their anthropological imaginaries within far broader spatial and temporal parameters than were previously customary. Exploring the anthropological implications of the Anthropocene scale, he pits these manifestations of planetary scales in terrestriality against the modern episteme and its speed-dominated individualism. Clark urges that we should not “continue to write criticism and history as if it were a matter of human agency alone. It would [be] like trying to understand the cuckoo without making reference to other birds.”46 The way Swift dramatizes the work of reclaiming land in dialogue, for example, with the history of the eel and the processes of siltation, certainly makes “reference to other birds.” It offers a scene for the anthropos in the Anthropocene—a scene at odds with many of modernity’s unspoken assumptions about history, nature, and subjectivity. Thus, the novel also poses a challenge to the humanities and—as Clark asserts—their often hackneyed complicity with many of these assumptions, failing to realize that “as progress progresses the world can slip away.”

45 Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 33. 46 Ibid., 116–17.

278  Readings in the Anthropocene

“Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create”: W. G. Sebald’s East Anglia and the Illumination of Nature 47

The cyclical structure of Waterland is not only rendered in the motif of flooding but equally in the juxtaposition of pseudo- or a-historical repetitions that form a palimpsest of modern European history. DeCoste traces Swift’s crosscut of history as it unearths the story of French revolutionaries who resorted “to piety and the absolute rule of an emperor in place of a king,” enabling the “civilizing forces of Christianity [to] revisit on Europe the most antique barbarity” with Hitler following Napoleon into military demise.48 Swift’s dramatization of the history of modernity may have been one of the inspirations for W. G. Sebald’s concept of “Naturgeschichte der Zerstörung” (the natural history of destruction), most notably in Die Ringe des Saturn (1995).49 The concept relates to his critique of Alfred Döblin’s “Mythus der Zerstörung,”50 and also owes a fair deal to British literature of the 1980s during the nascent stage of his literary career, including the works of Bruce Chatwin. More importantly, however, the concept is rooted in his engagement with the dialectics of “Naturbeherrschung” (domination of nature) and “Naturverfallenheit” (enslavement to nature) developed in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.51 Besides that, Sebald proves 47 W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1998), 170; the original reads, “Verbrennung ist das innerste Prinzip eines jeden von uns hergestellten Gegenstandes.” W. G. Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995), 202. 48 DeCoste, “Question and Apocalypse,” 387. Quotes from Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, refer to pages 137 and 139, 135, and 180, respectively. 49 The term is principally associated with the Allied aerial bombings of German cities during World War II, for example, in Sebald’s essay “Zwischen Geschichte und Naturgeschichte: Über die literarische Beschreibung totaler Zerstörung,” Orbis Litterarum 37.4 (1982): 345–66, and in Luftkrieg und Literatur (Munich: Hanser, 1999), e.g., 38. The English translation of the latter is On the Natural History of Destruction, apparently suggested by Sebald himself. He wanted to acknowledge the fact that Lord Solly Zuckerman, scientific advisor to the Royal Air Force on matters of aerial bombings during World War II and environmental scientist at the University of East Anglia between 1969 and 1974 (the institution where Sebald was appointed lecturer in 1970), had planned to write a book on the air raids called “A Natural History of Destruction,” but felt he was not capable of doing it. The concept, however, is not limited to this historical term and the debate it triggered; it permeates Sebald’s entire work. 50 W. G. Sebald, Der Mythus der Zerstörung im Werk Döblins (Stuttgart: Klett, 1980). 51 See Theodor W. Adorno und Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1988 [1947]), 10, 20; and Max Horkheimer, Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991 [1947]). For an in-depth exploration of Sebald’s reception of critical theory, see Ben Hutchinson, Die dialektische Imagination (Berlin: de Gruyter,

The Anthroposcene of Literature 279 to be an avid disciple of Walter Benjamin’s, who exchanged ideas on the topic with Adorno in the early 1930s.52 According to Benjamin’s philosophy of history, as developed, for example, in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels from 1928 and inflected throughout the 1930s, humans encounter the radical otherness of nature only in the form of a ruin. At the point where humans lose the ability to furnish a piece of human history with unambiguous meaning, they encounter the recalcitrant and material nature of nature, according to Benjamin. If a ruin prompts us to make sense of it by using the symbolic codes of our culture but ultimately frustrates that attempt as anachronistic, then we are forced to adopt a viewpoint that also reflects on that failure; and reflecting on that failure also means reflecting on the relation between our cognitive abilities and our creatureliness. Being forced to adopt that viewpoint, however, means experiencing oneself as part of what Sebald, taking his cue from Benjamin, calls “Naturgeschichte.” The use of this term is, of course, unconventional. Natural history for Benjamin and Sebald is, in Eric Santner’s words, “the breakdown and reification of the normative structures of human life and mindedness. It refers, that is, not to the fact that nature also has a history but to the fact that the artifacts of human history tend to acquire an aspect of mute, natural being at the point where they begin to lose their place in a viable form of life.”53 In other words, natural history is uncanny in a dual sense: it is material life that survives beyond symbolic form; and it is also the ruin of symbolic form that survives the transitoriness of matter. Sebald’s travelogue is a series of encounters with ruins that force readers to look at nature as a scene for human self-reflection in an age when the distinction between natural and cultural history has become increasingly difficult. Yet, it is not only the palimpsest character of human history emerging from the deep time of a specific landscape’s geological and evolutionary history, or even the inherently destructive tendencies in human history, that connect Waterland and Die Ringe des Saturn. Both texts also enact an ecological reflexivity that foreshadows tenets of the Anthropocene concept. In Sebald’s case, this relationship comes to the fore in his depiction of (a) the depletion of species and its cultural 2009). Alfred Döblin, whom Sebald attacked so harshly in his dissertation Der Mythus der Zerstörung and whose critique of Western civilization affected Sebald’s later writings, concurrently developed a similar literary imaginary of instrumental reason and imperialism bringing about a history of (self-) destruction that culminates in fascism in the trilogy Amazonas (1937–8). 52 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Die Idee der Naturgeschichte,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 345–65. 53 Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 16.

280  Readings in the Anthropocene ramifications, (b) the depletion of forests and its cultural ramifications, and (c) the simultaneous illumination of the night and darkening of the world due to the accelerated replacement of the biosphere through the technosphere. Set in East Anglia, the cultural landscape east of the historical Fenlands, Die Ringe des Saturn is also set on a silt foundation. The ten chapters of this unusual piece of travel writing follow a circular and labyrinthine structure; its narrator is both a traveler and a genealogist of modernity: he digs up sediment after sediment in this cultural landscape, in which the boundaries between natural and cultural histories blur, and presents us with a disturbing meditation on the natural history of destruction he sees at work in modernity. The third chapter, for example, begins with the description of local fishing customs in the vicinity of the former seaside resort Lowestoft on the English east coast. The fishermen, waiting for promising signs from the sea, are compared to a nomadic people at the outermost part of the world.54 Today, however, they barely ever embark on fishing excursions; they have become patient observers of their profession’s decline and of the relentless ecological disaster around them. The fish stock is nearly depleted and the pollution of the North Sea with toxic industrial waste has led to mass deaths of marine fauna and grotesque excrescences: In some of the rarer varieties of plaice, crucian or bream, the females, in a bizarre mutation, are increasingly developing male sexual organs and the ritual patterns of courtship are now more than a dance of death, the exact opposite of the notion of the wondrous increase and perpetuation of life with which we grew up.55 While biology lessons during the postwar period and conventional natural histories such as didactic biology textbooks used to represent, as the narrator remembers, the idea of an inexhaustible plenitude of life, this assumption cannot be maintained in the light of the ongoing industrialization of both agriculture and wild fisheries. Human history is placed within the broader context of the history of life and the 54 See Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 51–2; Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 68. 55 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 53; Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 60–70: “Einige der selteneren Schollenarten, Karauschen und Brassen, bei denen mehr und mehr der weiblichen Fische in bizarrer Mutation männliche Geschlechtsorgane ausbilden, vollführen ihre mit der Fortpflanzung verbundenen Rituale nur noch als einen Totentanz, der die Kehrseite ist der Vorstellung von der staunenswerten Selbstvermehrung und Vervielfältigung des organischen Lebens, mit der wir noch aufgewachsen sind.”

The Anthroposcene of Literature 281 complex interdependencies of the biosphere.56 The contextualization of human life in a narrative of ecological degradation culminates in a historical photograph of a “morning catch of herring, Lowestoft,” showing fishermen proudly displaying a huge pile of caught herring on the ground (Fig. 12.1). This image is just one of many interspersed throughout the novel, part of Sebald’s intermedial mode of writing. This context extends to an educational film about the herring, produced in 1936 but still shown to pupils in the classroom in postwar Germany. This educational film perpetuates the idea of nature’s inexhaustible abundance and regeneration.57 The disturbing vacuum created by World War II and the Holocaust is then filled seven pages later by a two-page photographic spread that shows dead bodies in a small forest (see Fig. 12.2). As the reader can infer from the related textual digression, this is a document from the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In terms of composition, these two images correspond to one another in a most disturbing manner: the fishermen in the herring photograph morph into the tree trunks in the Bergen-Belsen forest, and the pile of herrings resembles the corpses amid the trees in the readers’ perception. The elegantly woven stream of consciousness of the narration that prepares this shift is perforated by an unbridgeable and inexplicable gap. Needless to say, mapping the Nazi genocide iconographically onto the industrial exploitation of the herring and rooting both in a genealogy of modernity is a calculated provocation, even though it is informed 56 See Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 51–9; Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 68–75. 57 Sebald’s library, which can be studied at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (German Literature Archive) in Marbach today, contains a small Reclam-sized treatise by a certain Dr. Rolf Erickson. It was published by the Reichsstelle für den Unterrichtsfilm (Imperial Office for Educational Films) in 1938 and designed as a didactic supplement to the actual film about the herring. Sebald apparently used this short commentary extensively to develop his sequence on North Sea fisheries. Erickson mentions Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth as particularly productive fishing grounds and expresses his surprise that the population of the herring has remained stable in spite of a yearly harvest of 1.2 to 1.5 million tons. Referring to other species of fish, he concludes, however, that the sea is not inexhaustible: “Unerschöpflich ist auch das Meer nicht” (Rolf Erickson, Heringsfischerei, Reichsstelle für den Unterrichtsfilm, Berlin: Kohlhammer, 1938, 10). Sebald especially marked the description of the film’s final take—a strangely phrased passage that resonates with Sebald’s own intermedial critique of industrial reasoning and takes on an unsettling ambiguity from a post-World War II perspective: “Then the cargo trains gathered up the restless seafarer and took him to those places where he would fulfill his destiny in this world” (“Dann nahmen die Güterwagen der Eisenbahn den ruhelosen Wanderer des Meeres auf, um ihn zu den Stätten zu bringen, wo sich sein Schicksal auf dieser Welt endgültig erfüllen soll,” Erickson, Heringsfischerei, take 42).

282  Readings in the Anthropocene by theories of fascism such as, for example, the ones developed by the Frankfurt School and Zygmunt Bauman.58 The readers’ imagination is forced to confront certain assumptions ingrained in the episteme of modernity about life as a disposable asset—an issue Sebald returns to over and over again. Sebald’s intermedia technique, which plays with both dialogue and epistemic rupture between text and image, enforces a human self-reflection that is concerned with the natural history of destruction in the wake of the technological explosion during the late eighteenth century. In this view, the barbarism of twentieth-century totalitarianism and the current predicaments of technocracy are the outcome of the same epistemic matrix—a matrix that Sebald obsessively explores from many angles.59 The second leitmotif that feeds into the Anthropocenic imaginary of Die Ringe des Saturn is deforestation and desertification. In preparation of the deforestation elegy at the beginning of Chapter VII, Sebald emphasizes its global dimension and its imbrication with a colonialist mindset: In Brazil, to this day, whole provinces die down like fires when the land is exhausted by overcropping and new areas to the west are opened up. In North America, too, countless settlements of various kinds, complete with gas stations, motels and shopping malls, move west along the turnpikes, and along the axis affluence and squalor are unfailingly polarized.60 Embedded in ruminations on the rise and fall of the medieval city of Dunwich, the following meditation on the role of deforestation in the history of civilization takes up the notion of the westward expansion of a global conflagration. It begins with “the steady and advancing destruction, over a period of many centuries and indeed millenia, of the dense forests that extended over the entire British Isles after the last Ice Age” (der über viele Jahrhunderte, ja über Millennien fortschreitenden Zurückdrängung und Zerstörung der dichten Wälder, die nach der 58 Adorno und Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, chapters 1 and 2; Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity, 1989). 59 For a critique of Sebald’s treatment of this topic, see Patrick Baumgärtel, Mythos und Utopie: Zum Begriff der ‘Naturgeschichte der Zerstörung’ im Werk W. G. Sebalds (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2010). 60 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 159; Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 191: “In Brasilien erlöschen bis heute halbe Provinzen wie Feuersbrünste, wenn das Land durch Raubbau erschöpft ist und weiter im Westen neuer Raum aufgetan wird. Auch in Nordamerika wandern zahllose diffuse Ansiedlungen mit ihren Tankstellen, Motels und Einkaufszentren westwärts die Turnpikes entlang, und unfehlbar polarisieren sich auf dieser Achse Wohlstand und Elend.”

The Anthroposcene of Literature 283

Figure 12.1  W. G. Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, with a historic postcard featuring a herring catch at Lowestoft.

284  Readings in the Anthropocene

Figure 12.2 W. G. Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn. A photograph presumably taken during the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. letzten Eiszeit sich ausgebreitet haben über das gesamte Gebiet der britischen Inseln).61 The ancient slash and burn techniques are then directly related to the present-day large-scale transformation of forests into “fields of ash and cinder” (Aschenfelder): If today one flies over the Amazon basin or over Borneo and sees the mountainous palls of smoking, hanging, seemingly motionless, over the forest canopy, which from above resembles a mere patch of moss, then perhaps one can imagine what those 61 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 169; Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 201.

The Anthroposcene of Literature 285 fires, which sometimes burned on for months, would leave in their wake.62 What follows then is arguably one of the most focused and harrowing literary visions of the Anthropocene to date: Our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. From the first smouldering taper to the elegant lanterns whose light reverberated around eighteenth-century courtyards and from the mild radiance of these lanterns to the unearthly glow of the sodium lamps that line the Belgian motorways, it has all been combustion. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create … Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.63 While the leitmotif of burning, combustion, or incineration is inflected on numerous levels of this text—examples are the “smouldering” effects of Thatcherite capitalism,64 the self-incineration of the narrator’s neighbor,65 the “Eiswunder” of St. Sebaldus66—and is buttressed by the 62 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 169–70; Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 202: “Wenn man heute mit dem Flugzeug über Amazonien oder Borneo fliegt und die riesigen, scheinbar unbeweglichen Rauchgebirge sieht über dem von oben einem sanften Moosgrund gleichenden Dach des Dschungels, dann bekommt man am ehesten eine Vorstellung von den möglichen Auswirkungen solcher manchmal monatelang andauernden Brände.” 63 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 170; Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 202–3: “Die Verkohlung der höheren Pflanzenarten, die unaufhörliche Verbrennung aller brennbaren Substanz ist der Antrieb für unsere Verbreitung über die Erde. Vom ersten Windlicht bis zu den Reverberen des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts und vom Schein der Reverberen bis zum fahlen Glanz der Bogenlampen über den belgischen Autobahnen ist alles Verbrennung, und Verbrennung ist das innerste Prinzip eines jeden von uns hergestellten Gegenstandes. Die von uns ersonnenen Maschinen haben wie unsere Körper und wie unsere Sehnsucht ein langsam zerglühendes Herz. Die ganze Menschheitszivilisation war von Anfang an nichts als ein von Stunde zu Stunde intensiver werdendes Glosen, von dem man nicht weiß, bis auf welchen Grad es zunehmen und wann es allmählich ersterben wird.” 64 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 56. 65 Ibid., 64. 66 Ibid., 107.

286  Readings in the Anthropocene analogous motifs of desertification, siltation, and sanding up,67 these examples of anthropogenic ecological degradation are only part of the overarching narrative of the gradual replacement of the biosphere by the technosphere. The entire introductory passage of Die Ringe des Saturn is an extended meditation on this transformation and sketches out features that coincide with similar topics in recent Anthropocene debates. Paralyzed by a horror that takes possession of him when he is “confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past” (weit in die Vergangenheit zurückgehenden Spuren der Zerstörung),68 the narrator experiences how reality contracts to a grid pattern attached to the hospital window.69 In an attempt to reconnect with the outside world, he pulls himself up to the window-sill, comparing his helplessness to Kafka’s Gregor Samsa and his psychosomatic dissociation from the world. What he sees from the eighth floor of the hospital tower, however, is as much a reflection of this disconnect as it is an extension of the natural history of destruction, which he witnessed during his “English pilgrimage” into a future bereft of humans: I could not believe that anything might still be alive in that maze of buildings down there; rather, it was as if I were looking down from a cliff upon a sea of stone or a field of rubble, from which the tenebrous masses of multi-storey carparks rose up like immense boulders [Findlingsblock, geol. “erratic bloc”].70 Afflicted by this realization, the narrator experiences the present as a climax of the westward global conflagration that will ultimately have burnt the biosphere to ashes and will have left the “rocky sea” and “erratic blocks” of human geological agency behind. The ensuing ekphrasis of Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicolaes Tulp (1632) is framed by a paradigmatic opposition (Fig. 12.3). In a speculative move, the narrator muses about the possibility that not only Thomas Browne (with whom he identifies) but also René Descartes may have been present at the anatomy theater to witness Tulp’s lesson. The Foucauldian interpretation woven into this ekphrasis takes its momentum from the fact that “Dr. Tulp’s 67 See, for example, Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 16–17, 165–6. 68 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 3; Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 11. 69 See Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 4; Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 12–13. 70 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 5; Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 13–14: “Ich konnte mir nicht denken, daß in dem ineinanderverschobenen Gemäuer dort unten noch irgend etwas sich regte, sondern glaubte, von einer Klippe aus hinabzublicken auf ein steinernes Meer oder ein Schotterfeld, aus dem wie riesige Findlingsblöcke die finsteren Massen der Parkhäuser herausragten.”

The Anthroposcene of Literature 287

Figure 12.3  W. G. Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, with an excerpt from Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicolaes Tulp.

288  Readings in the Anthropocene colleagues,” possibly including Browne and Descartes, “are not looking at Kindt’s body, that their gaze is directed just past it to focus on the open anatomical atlas in which the appalling physical facts are reduced to a diagram” (die Blicke der Kollegen des Doktor Tulp nicht auf diesen Körper als solchen gerichtet [sind], sondern sie gehen, freilich haarscharf, an ihm vorbei auf den aufgeklappten anatomischen Atlas, in dem die entsetzliche Körperlichkeit reduziert ist auf ein Diagramm).71 The painting, according to this reading, thus dramatizes both the alleged Cartesian propensity to “disregard the flesh, which is beyond our comprehension, and tend to the machine within” (daß man absehen muß von dem unbegreiflichen Fleisch und hin auf die in uns bereits angelegte Maschine) and the painter’s subtle opposition to this concept by drawing attention to the violence inflicted on the body.72 This opposition is amplified by the melancholic figures in this context, most notably Thomas Browne, the narrator himself, and his academic colleague Janine Dakyns, who is explicitly compared to the “angel in Dürer’s Melancholia, steadfast among the instruments of destruction” (bewegungslos unter den Werkzeugen der Zerstörung verharrenden Engel der Dürerschen Melancholie).73 We might draw from Hartmut Böhme’s claim that melancholy was stigmatized as the arch enemy of God, man, and society in mainstream Enlightenment thinking,74 in order to better understand how Janine Dakyns moves into the position of a direct opponent of Descartes in this recasting of a Urszene (originary scene) of modernity. Dürer’s etching shows a brooding angel surrounded by seemingly random objects, all of which are related to measurement, geometry, arithmetic, and technological practices. In all likelihood, Dürer also rendered in this image his own frustration with trying to “construe the secret of beauty by means of rationality, mathematics, and metric art.”75 This dialectic dramaturgy connects Janine 71 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 13; Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 23. 72 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 13; Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 26–7. As far as I know, Sebald scholarship has so far ignored the Christian iconography in the painting. The cross-shaped dramaturgy of the entire scene (suggesting the motif of the descent from the cross), the similarity of Kindt’s body and Christ’s body in other Rembrandt paintings, the analogy of Dr. Tulp’s inspection of the tendons of Kindt’s left arm and the Roman soldier piercing the side—iconographically always associated with the left side—of Jesus Christ (John 19.34) offer a complex and perplexing typology that resonates with the broader framework of pilgrimage and the various tropes of (failed) redemption throughout the book. 73 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 9; Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 18–19. 74 Hartmut Böhme, “Kritik der Melancholie und Melancholie der Kritik,” in Natur und Subjekt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 256–73, 261–4. 75 Ibid., 270–1. Dürer’s experience is also related to a paradigmatic shift in the conceptualization of space and place. As Casey emphasizes, in the wake of the Renaissance existence came to be understood as being in space, “where

The Anthroposcene of Literature 289 Dakyns with both Rembrandt and the narrator. Böhme further extends his conclusions about melancholy into the anthropological arena. He regards the disenchantment ensuing from the Enlightenment attempt to map life in its entirety as a serious cultural disadvantage: The historical dynamism of rationality, in which we have trusted for centuries, seems exhausted … Nature’s losses exceed the advantages of exploiting it … The social and ecological problems exceed our ability to solve problems … we lose the connectivity [Zusammenhang] with the cosmos that is unconsciously rooted in us and with nature that sustains us.76 While Böhme’s diction in this 1988 essay is indebted to the German political ecology of the 1980s (which arguably informed Sebald’s poetic triptych Nach der Natur (1988) and is still palpable throughout Die Ringe des Saturn), his essay also speaks to issues caught up in the Anthropocene debates of the twenty-first century, including the ecological limits of rationalism, utilitarianism, and human individualism; the rootedness of the current global ecological crisis in the modern episteme and specific socio-economic conditions; the psychological deprivation inherent in ecological degradation (melancholia as depression); and the potential of art as a form of resistance to destruction or, at least, remembrance of the destroyed (melancholia as furor poeticus). In Sebald’s Die Ringe des Saturn, Thomas Browne turns into the model of a melancholy outsider, whose perspective is marked by the ability to frame experiences through variable scales and to understand the multiple embedding of specific histories: “It is as if one were looking through a reversed opera glass and through a microscope at the same time” (Es ist als schaute man zugleich durch ein umgekehrtes Fernrohr und durch ein Mikroskop).77 In spite of this ability, Browne is characterized as mindful of his own biological embeddedness as a mortal being. He notes that we have to write our philosophies “using the shorthand and contracted forms of transient Nature” (in den Kürzeln und Stenogrammen der vergänglichen Natur).78 For Sebald, Browne serves as a counterweight to Descartes: he represents a mode of thinking that operates with analogies rather than with dualities, ‘space’ means something nonlocal and non-particular, something having little to do with close containment and everything to do with an outright infinity.” Casey, Getting Back into Place, 354. 76 Böhme, “Kritik der Melancholie und Melancholie der Kritik,” 271. 77 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 19; Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 30. 78 Ibid.

290  Readings in the Anthropocene that regards the human body as a source of intuitive knowledge about both matter and mind, and that offers at least a glimpse of alternative conceptualizations of reality that have been marginalized in the course of Western intellectual history. What follows the ekphrasis of the Rembrandt painting is an inventory of biotic and abiotic forms that, according to Browne, display the so-called quincunx pattern (a blend of rectangle and rhombus). The inventory poetically favors analogies over imposing patterns and thus creates a list that appears random but suggests its own logic, a re-enchantment of res extensa. The list of forms illustrates Böhme’s idea that literature can provide a physiological memory about the lost interconnections between the human sphere and the biosphere, while, at the same time, celebrating poetic expression as a way of partaking in the diversity of life as physis. Here is the inventory: Browne identifies this stucture everywhere, in animate and inanimate matter: in certain crystalline forms, in starfish and sea urchins, in the vertebrae of mammals and the backbones of birds and fish, in the skins of various species of snake, in the crosswise prints left by quadrupeds, in the physical shapes of caterpillars, butterflies, silkworms and moths, in the root of the water fern, in the seed husks of the sunflower and the Caledonian pine, within young oak shoots or the stem of the horsetail; and in the creations of mankind, in the pyramids of Egypt and the mausoleum of Augustus as in the garden of King Solomon, which was planted with mathematical precision with pomegranate trees and white lilies.79 This synopsis of geological, evolutionary, and cultural histories in a meditation on the emergence of form itself is designed as a poetics against the natural history of destruction. It is pitted against the cultural ignorance of what Grene calls the “existence of the primary 79 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 20–1; Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 32: “Überall an der lebendigen und toten Materie entdeckt Browne diese Struktur, in gewissen kristallinischen Formen, an Seesternen und Seeigeln, an den Wirbelknochen der Säugetiere, am Rückgrat der Vögel und Fische, auf der Haut mehrerer Arten von Schlangen, in den Spuren der über Kreuz sich fortbewegenden Vierfüßler, in den Konfigurationen der Körper der Raupen, Schmetterlinge, Seidenspinner und Nachtfalter, in den Wurzeln des Wasserfarns, den Samenhülsen der Sonnenblumen und Schirmpinien, im Innern der jungen Triebe der Eichen oder der Stengel des Schachtelhalms und in den Kunstwerken der Menschen, in den ägyptischen Pyramiden und im Mausoleum des Augustus ebenso wie in dem mit Granatapfelbäumen und weißen Lilien nach der Richtschnur bestückten Garten des Königs Salomon.”

The Anthroposcene of Literature 291 life world”80—an ignorance that, in Die Ringe des Saturn, is probably captured best by the decline of Somerleyton, the Victorian estate invested in replacing nature by artificial means to create “an immense brightness that pulsated like the current of life that runs through the earth” (ein gleichsam mit dem Lebensstrom unserer Erde pulsierendes, ungeheuer helles Licht).81 Sebald engages in an enterprise that Clark considers of vital importance for the literary imagination of the Anthropocene, namely, the ability to rethink received cultural histories and their epistemic premises in the light of the ecological limits of the Earth.82 These limits are inflected as problems of scale in the Anthropocene: “Progressive arguments designed to affirm individual rights and help disseminate Western levels of prosperity may even resemble, on another scale, an insane plan to destroy the biosphere.”83 Die Ringe des Saturn shifts between these levels, using both Browne’s “telescope” and “microscope” to zoom in onto the continuities of destruction that subtend narratives of progress. It traces the ambiguities of contemporary habitual modes of thought constituted by a scale framing of individualistic liberties and the righteousness of a lifestyle disconnected from its material and biological bases. Diffuse dwelling in Sebald is thus also a reclaiming of practices and modes of thought that allow an experience of place to be liberated from metric space in a time otherwise marked by, as Casey writes, “a loss of concrete particularity of place as well as the august absoluteness of infinite space.”84 Sebald’s places are places that have been turned into occupied spaces in multiple histories of violence. Living in modernity for Sebald means living in such Enlightened spaces—in illuminated nature, to speak with the text’s own imagery— and reinhabiting them. For him, that is only possible by unearthing the histories of penetration and returning them to the diffuseness inherent in place: a locale that allows for participation as well as for shared historicity, that invites path-making but resists absorption into the transitory space of absolute mobility, that fosters commitment and resists territorialization. 80 In Approaches to a Philosophical Biology, Grene writes, “As we acquire our cultural heritage, we come to dwell in it also. We assimilate it to our persons and identify it on the one hand with our primary world and on the other with reality itself. So nature comes to mean to us Galilean nature, and the existence of the primary life world is ignored.” Marjorie Grene, Approaches to a Philosophical Biology (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 12–13. 81 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 34; Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 47. 82 See Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, 66. 83 Ibid., 73. 84 Casey, Getting Back into Place, 362.

292  Readings in the Anthropocene

Conclusion

The narrative dramaturgy of diffuse dwelling in Swift and Sebald forces us to confront, in Hartmut Böhme’s terms, the bodily or creaturely basis of our lives. The anthropocenic self-reflection, as rendered in both, is marked by the shock that the human is not something that can be overcome but something that relies on the “scene” or the “stage” of multiple environs. Swift’s and Sebald’s Anthropocene is accordingly “anthropo-scenic”: they trace human history in a particular landscape and through the historical sediments of that scenery. The very notion of reclamation is thus where Sebald and Swift meet: one as the archeologist of the sediments of human history in the natural history of East Anglia, the other as preserver of these histories in the silt of the Fenlands. Sebald participates in the “dogged, vigilant business” that Swift calls for: both are invested in reclaiming land for future generations by turning (geo)metric space into inhabitable places, and both exercise a literary imagination that seeks to restore inhabitability to a space predominantly defined by utilitarian and colonialist ascriptions, calling instead for an engagement with space that endorses the receptivity of our bodies to non-human agencies. The land, Swift and Sebald suggest, will only become or remain inhabitable if the transformation of nature into human habitat is performed in a spirit of resistance that reflects the transitoriness of human life and not in the tradition of building empires, as Swift writes. Living in the Anthropocene requires a form of dwelling in which human life is regarded as part of natural history and which, at the same time, celebrates a specifically human curiosity that engenders tangential forms and shapes that are not an integral part of that history. The Fenlands and marshy East Anglia become “anthroposcenic” in the sense that they form a stage upon which the humans of the future will be able to strut and fret their hour, poor players enfranchised by their poverty.

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Thirteen Planetary Praxis in the Anthropocene: An Ethics and Poetics for a New Geological Age1

Sabine Wilke

Most of us who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s grew up in a culture of protest (against the Vietnam War, continued remnants of fascism in German culture and society, patriarchy, Cold War politics, etc.). We were hungry for critical analyses of society, politics, and culture that might show us the root causes of these injustices and give us the tools to imagine a different future. The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School was one such system of thought and it provided a firm grounding in Western Marxism while also focusing on cultural issues. The question I want to raise in this chapter is what happens to the project of social analysis and critique that shaped much of nineteenth and twentieth-century thought in the new geological age of the Anthropocene in which the human impact on the Earth has become an influential force? What happens to the “old” narratives of 1 The research for this chapter was made possible by generous funding from the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at the LMU Munich. See also Sabine Wilke, “Anthropocenic Poetics: Ethics and Aesthetics in a New Geological Age,” Rachel Carson Center Perspectives 3 (2013): 67–74; special issue on The Anthropocene: Envisioning the Future in the Age of Humans, ed. Helmuth Trischler, http://www.carsoncenter.uni-muenchen.de/publications/ perspectives_mainpage/2013_perspectives/index.html (accessed March 17, 2016). Extremely valuable suggestions for the revision of this chapter were received from Russell Berman, Ninad R. Bondre, Greg Garrard, Gary Handwerk, Tom Lekan, and the participants at the conference on “Culture and the Anthropocene” at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich in June 2013 where this paper was first presented.

Planetary Praxis in the Anthropocene  297 industrialism and late capitalism in the face of the enormous problems and planetary challenges that lie ahead for us, especially in this age of global interconnectedness?2 The critique of the late-Holocene (the age preceding the Anthropocene) demands a revaluation and reshaping that does not entirely abandon the critical impulses of that period. This revision is a necessity as long as political and social actions in the Anthropocene continue to be influenced by concrete socio-political actions and practices grounded in regimes of power, self-interest, and a global culture of capitalism, which together produce economic, political, and environmental inequalities. These practices shape the kind of human interactions with other humans and non-humans that have led to the current crisis. “Our interaction with our environment is shaped intrinsically by our mode of production … exploitation of the environment is mediated at a fundamental level by intra-human exploitation … our built environment is one in which we can no longer recognize ourselves as builders and which moreover now threatens our survival, along with that of the planet’s other life forms,” as the reviewer of a recent collection of essays on the Frankfurt School and contemporary environmental crises summarizes.3 While this is undoubtedly true, it is also true that there is no method of production that can support current and projected world populations in humane conditions without massive environmental damage. In recognition of that paradox, how do we weigh economic inequalities (and the critique thereof), massive environmental degradation, and the need for justice? This chapter argues for a critical praxis in the Anthropocene that sees itself as truly global in scope, complex in its strategies, informed by historical knowledge and aesthetic values, and grounded in interpretation. By linking scientific Anthropocene research to a framework guided by environmental ethics and a more refined understanding of the aesthetic and poetological concepts of nature, this approach provides a critical understanding of an age that, for some, like science writer Derrick Jenson, is really just a misnomer for the “Age of the Sociopath.”4 If we can avoid the pessimism of early Frankfurt School doomsday scenarios that paint a portrait of rational and scientific methods that 2 See Ursula Heise, “Encounters with the Thing Formerly Known as Nature,” http://www.publicbooks.org (accessed March 17, 2016). 3 Adrian Wilding, review of Critical Ecologies: The Frankfurt School and Contemporary Environmental Crises, ed. Andrew Biro, Marx & Philosophy: Review of Books (April 2, 2012), 3, http://www.marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/ reviews/2012/513 (accessed March 17, 2016). 4 See Derrick Jenson, “Age of the Sociopath,” Earth Island Journal 28.1 (2013), special issue on “Manmade,” http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index. php/eij/article/anthropocene (accessed March 17, 2016).

298  Readings in the Anthropocene have turned into instrumentalizing practices and where the culture industry has wiped out all creativity and individuality, we might be able to enlist the cooperation of scientists in moving forward and begin the difficult process of imagining a planetary praxis.5 In short, if we come to understand reason “as goal-oriented and co-operative and not merely self-interested, not instrumental,”6 we might be able to suggest the outlines of a critical praxis for the Anthropocene that is truly planetary and global in appeal. To outline such a praxis, I revisit Kant’s conception of a human-world correlate, which privileges the categories of the human mind over the non-human. I articulate the need for an alternative conception of world–body relations that pays homage to entanglements and different, non-domineering human–nature relations and that argues for the recovery of the Lebenswelt as Umwelt. Such a concept needs a critical framework that is capable of addressing social inequalities and environmental problems as cultural issues focusing on their aesthetic dimension. At issue is the global “we” of popular and scientific Anthropocene narratives that hide the human and environmental costs of technological developments, expressed in exemplary fashion in the short movie Welcome to the Anthropocene that inaugurated the Rio Conference on Sustainable Development in 2013.7 A planetary praxis of the Anthropocene embraces both an ethical horizon of the future in a technological age as well as an aesthetics of hybridity. These aspects negotiate new pathways between the modernist models of restraint foregrounded by the early thinkers of the Frankfurt School and the exuberant characteristics of postmodern poetry and artistic practice in the age of the Great Acceleration.

Human-World Correlates

The idea of a new geological age, in which the human influence on Earth’s atmosphere has significantly increased in shape, scale, and complexity, represents a challenge to the basic axioms of Western metaphysics and the rationalist tradition. Kant distinguished between that which we humans can know and what he called the “thing 5 See Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 6 Wilding, review of Critical Ecologies, 3. 7 These costs are highlighted by Alf Hornborg in his analysis of fetishism and the cultural foundations of capitalism. See Alf Hornborg, “Submitting to Objects: Fetishism, Dissociation, and the Cultural Foundation of Capitalism,” in Graham Harvey (ed.), Handbook of Animism (Amsterdam: E. J. Brill, 2012), 245. The International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme, Welcome to the Anthropocene: A Planet Transformed by Humanity, http://www.igbp.net/multimedia/multimedia/welcometotheanthropocenefilmandstillimages.5.1081640c 135c7c04eb480001217.html (accessed March 17, 2016).

Planetary Praxis in the Anthropocene  299 in itself.” The thing in itself lies before and outside of thought and perception and thus cannot really be known by us. For Kant, human perception is limited to phenomena that become the object of our sensual perception. In the Critique of Pure Reason (first edition 1781), Kant summarizes his thoughts about the doctrine of transcendental idealism as follows: I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not things in themselves, and accordingly that time and space are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves.8 This philosophical position, pronounced and developed by Kant in response to Hume’s skepticism, had an enormous influence on conceptualizing the relation between humans and the non-human world in terms of privileging human existence and the mind over the existence of non-humans and matter. In the wake of this idea, post-Kantian philosophy articulated a position that may be best described as a form of transcendental anthropocentrism, where objects are said to conform (at least for our human perceptions and purposes) to the mind of the subject, and then and only then have the ability to become products of human cognition, as suggested by Kant in the following passage of the first Critique: Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge.9 Swedish ecologist Alf Hornborg reconstructs a similar narrative of the way humans relate to material objects in modernity through the systematic denial of relatedness in a Cartesian worldview, which he identifies as the root of the current ecological crisis. In a paper that reconstructs the concept of animism in a modern worldview he asks, 8

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn (2003), A 369, Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4280 (accessed March 17, 2016). 9 Ibid., B xvi.

300  Readings in the Anthropocene referring to Bruno Latour, “Would modernity be impossible in a world where living things are consistently recognized as subjects? … It is only by severing or submerging our capacity for relatedness that we are set free to impose our modernist designs on the world.”10 The concept of a modernist human-world correlates to a metaphysics that submerges our capacity for relatedness and is radically called into question by the idea of the Anthropocene, especially when “anthropos” is taken as a reference to concrete historical, social, and economic forces that shape human interactions with other humans and with the non-human.11 If we apply the scientific concept of the Anthropocene to culture and society, the philosophical idea that objects must conform to the human mind in order to become products of human cognition needs to be redefined to acknowledge how humans shape the world of objects, but also that all relations between humans and non-humans distort their relata. Hence the concept of the Anthropocene incites new critical readings of one of the major strands in Western philosophy, and urges us to take seriously a critique of conceptual thinking rooted in the recovery of material phenomenology, a line of argument that extends from the tradition of the Cartesian meditations to Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. It sharpens interventions by critics such as Val Plumwood, who points to the need for revisionist re-readings of Western philosophy from a feminist perspective.12 This is also the project of the new philosophical movement of object-oriented ontology, in which objects are said to exist independently of human perception and on equal footing with one another. Founded on the writings of Husserl and Heidegger, object-oriented ontology rejects the metaphysical privileging of humans over non-human nature. The asymmetry expressed in transcendental idealism that puts human cognition above objective experience in effect reduces the realm of philosophical investigation to human-world relations, as if objects were mere props and had nothing to contribute to world-building on their own.13 In the Anthropocene, where the interconnectivity of every part with everything else is an important feature of all relations, a perspective that emphasizes object relations and especially one that foregrounds the idea of equality 10 Hornborg, “Submitting to Objects,” 248. 11 For a notion of a more reflexive concept of the Anthropocene based on Kant’s earlier writings on physical geography and anthropology, see Amos Nascimento, Building Cosmopolitan Communities: A Critical and Multidimensional Approach (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 173ff. 12 See Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (New York: Rutledge, 1993), 15ff. 13 See Levi Bryant, “Onticology—A Manifesto for Object-Oriented Ontology, Part I,” in Larval Subjects, http://www.larvalsubjects.wordpress.com (accessed March 17, 2016).

Planetary Praxis in the Anthropocene  301 among objects is an important step towards a reconceptualization of the relationship between humans and their non-human environments, even though the cultural foundations of fetishized relations between people and objects still need to be accounted for.14 What this phenomenologically inspired new philosophy of object relations does not produce, however, is a reflexive concept of anthropocenic entanglement that can explain and differentiate between levels of scale and complexity and that addresses them in terms of an ensemble of social relations. In fact, object-relations theory seems rather arbitrary in terms of making distinctions among different relations and cannot account for the power hierarchies and hegemonies that govern, for example, social relations. How can we enjoy more complexity at a greater scale and at the same time build institutions that regulate social and cultural practices in the Anthropocene as well as deal with inequalities?15 In a post-Marxist, post-Holocene world, is there an anthropocenic form of critical praxis that can reconceptualize the old notion of critical involvement inherited from the age of industrialism that is constituted “as much by the environment in which it is embedded as it is by the biological body that is its substrate”?16 If the way humans relate to material objects in the process of consumption is determined by culture via fetishization, as Marx argues, then we need to find a way of analyzing precisely these relations to the extent that they mask the suppression of relationality and foreground instead “the long immersion in the concrete and experiential specifics of place that yields conditions conducive to relatedness.”17 Marx conceptualizes nature as “man’s inorganic body … and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die.”18 In industrial capitalism, this condition linking (hu)man and nature first appears in an alienated form as estranged labor. To address this issue, phenomenological thinkers have focused on the relationship between humans and places in terms of process, 14 See also Karen Barad, Agentieller Realismus: Über die Bedeutung materiell-diskursiver Praktiken, trans. Jürgen Schröder (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2012), 14–15. 15 A provocative essay that encourages us to rethink this issue is Jens Kersten’s “The Enjoyment of Complexity: A New Political Anthropology for the Anthropocene?,” Rachel Carson Center Perspectives 3 (2013): 39–56, special issue on The Anthropocene: Envisioning the Future in the Age of Humans, ed. Helmuth Trischler, http://www.carsoncenter.uni-muenchen.de/publications/perspectives_mainpage/2013_perspectives/index.html (accessed March 17, 2016). 16 Ben Dibley, “‘Nature is Us’: The Anthropocene and Species-Being,” Transformations 21 (2012): 1–22, special issue on Rethinking the Seasons: New Approaches to Nature. 17 Hornborg, “Submitting to Objects,” 249. 18 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, cited in Dibley, “‘Nature is Us,’” 5.

302  Readings in the Anthropocene or, what Marcel Merleau-Ponty calls “environmental embodiment.”19 Merleau-Ponty explores various ways in which the human body lives in the world in terms of perception and movement. In its pre-reflective state, the perceptual body engages with the world thanks to a certain corporeal awareness, through which it transforms the environment.20 The body as condition of experience is what Merleau-Ponty calls “corporeity,” a condition which establishes the primacy of perception in the flesh determined by the border between humans and the non-human world. If we extend that property to non-human bodies, we can understand the pursuit of relationalities as a worldly engagement in environmental terms, as Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine propose.21 Such an eco-phenomenological entanglement of the human body with the environment is situated in a space that is neither purely objective—because it is reciprocally constituted by a diversity of lived experiences motivating the movements of countless organisms—nor purely subjective—because it is nonetheless a field of material relationships between bodies. The concept of environmental embodiment requires that we rethink the culture of visualization that prioritizes vision as the primary mode of human perception. Is looking necessarily a mode that results in domination, or could it be reframed as the gaze of passivity or that of the witness? Are there alternative ways of relating to nature that foreground the foggy nature of the (romantic) visual gaze that Caspar David Friedrich’s wanderer above the sea of fog so prominently and passionately enacts? Friedrich’s 1818 oil painting depicts a lone wanderer standing on a rock with his back to the viewer, his gaze directed towards a hilly landscape covered with fog, where other rocky formations can be seen in the middle ground and a few mountain tops can be perceived in the background. Is there a response to the encounter between humans and landscape that is not framed through the visual paradigm of man as master of nature? Even if visual appropriation is dominant in some strands of the Western tradition, the initial physical and material response to landscape can still be acknowledged and may even have the ability to complicate the visual paradigm. Entanglements in the Anthropocene not only call for new 19 Marcel Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, The Philosophy of Art, and Politics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 3ff. 20 See David Seamon, “Merleau-Ponty, Perception, and Environmental Embodiment: Implications for Architectural and Environmental Studies,” in Rachel McCann and Patricia M. Locke (eds), Carnal Echoes: Merleau-Ponty and the Flesh of Architecture (forthcoming), 1ff. (in manuscript). 21 See Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine (eds), Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003), 12ff.

Planetary Praxis in the Anthropocene  303 and different approaches to relations between humans and objects, but also human–nature relations that require new core values.

Human–Nature Relations in the Anthropocene

In the context of a critique of these Cartesian values, we humans as a species have to radically take charge of transforming our beliefs and behaviors, guided by an ethics of responsibility in order to shape a sustainable future for a globally networked nature-society. The global and enlightened consciousness needed to embrace a responsible role for humankind in the Anthropocene derives from the complicated relationship that the Enlightenment has had with two centuries of European discovery, imperialism, and the exploitation of nature and peoples.22 To understand the connection between Enlightenment values and the concept of the Anthropocene, Timothy Morton suggests that we draw a connection between the presumed beginning or first phase of the Anthropocene (the moment when humans began releasing carbon into the air and depositing a thin layer of it in Earth’s crust) and the rise of transcendental idealism: At the very moment at which it could not have been clearer—at least with 20/20 hindsight—that there was a nonhuman real that was physically affected by human action, the very humans responsible for the depositing of carbon in Earth’s crust also produced philosophies that denied that the humanities could talk about the nonhuman real due to the limitations of the human perspective … Humans blindly penetrated Earth while insisting that no (human) consciousness could know the thing in itself.23 But it was not “humanity” at large that engaged in the discovery and conquest that resulted in colonization and modern industrialized societies. It was European civilization that drove this process, a process fueled by a need for the natural resources that could support expansion. Likewise, it was not “humanity” that began releasing carbon into the air in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but European civilization in the age of discovery and colonization of Africa, parts of Asia, and the Pacific. European thinkers, not humanity, developed the philosophical framework of metaphysics which anchored the nature– culture divide in transcendental philosophy. European civilization also developed the forms of growth-based economy and consumerism that 22 See Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley (eds), Postcolonial Ecology: Literatures of the Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 20. 23 Timothy Morton, “The Oedipal Logic of Ecological Awareness,” Environmental Humanities 1 (2012): 8.

304  Readings in the Anthropocene have brought us to the point at which we currently find ourselves. The values, economic behaviors, and consumption patterns of that small but powerful part of the world now, however, make up the dominant framework of the Anthropocene, a point that is not lost in discussions among scholars and advocates from threshold countries.24 What is absent from the scientific conceptions of the Anthropocene that rely on the idea of a common humanity is a perspective that highlights the fact that we are not talking about abstract social, economic, and cultural structures and belief systems. Instead we are describing very specific political, economic, cultural, and discursive regimes of power and hegemonies that determined and continue to determine world history. The continued existence of these regimes of power in the Anthropocene necessitates a critique of their basic ideological underpinnings and belief systems, which is the reason why bringing back a refined Marxist framework in a post-Marxist world might be useful at least for a better understanding of how power works in a globalized world. Since these inequities within the global distribution of resources will most likely grow in the future, we need a critical framework from which we can address them, including the imbalance created by economic growth in the developing world and its devastating impact on the environment. Here is where Alf Hornborg’s work is so crucial. He develops a critique of the cultural foundations of capitalism based on an understanding of modern technology as an index of accumulation that occurs at the expense of (human) time and (natural) space elsewhere in the world. He thus dethrones Europe and the West “as intrinsically generative of economic growth” and points to the fact that these phenomena “must in themselves be recognized as contingent on specific global constellations of asymmetric resource flows and power relations.”25 A critique of power structures in the Anthropocene needs to develop a framework that takes into account postcolonial, environmental, and environmental justice perspectives for a global planet wherein people, nature, and the environment are co-conceived as agentic forces. Such a framework would counterbalance the anthropocentrism of humancentered notions of transcendental idealism, Enlightenment values, and their dialectical critique.26 Particular individuals are entangled in 24 See Dipesh Chakrabarty, “History on an Expanded Canvas: The Anthropocene’s Invitation,” keynote address at the Anthropocene-Project of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, January 10, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=svgqLPFpaOg (accessed March 17, 2016). 25 Hornborg, “Submitting to Objects,” 244–6. 26 See Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 141ff.

Planetary Praxis in the Anthropocene  305 concrete historical and cultural situations and are guided by political and economic forces to exploit other people and the environment. A framework anchored in such particular critiques of power relations within networks might account for the entanglements of this new geological age.

Planetary Praxis

Hans Jonas’s 1979 book, The Imperative of Responsibility, envisions a planetary praxis in a universe with overlapping ecological and economic concerns that is counterbalanced by a widely shared notion of environmental responsibility. Jonas further reformulates Kant’s categorical imperative for an ecological age as an “ecological imperative” that encompasses a “horizon of the future.”27 None of the other critical models of rethinking the human impact upon the environment discussed above include such a horizon. Within such a horizon, we are asked to imagine the impossible, namely, to act in such a way that the effects of our actions are compatible with the idea of the real permanence of life on Earth, including a mandate to address environmental justice within a framework of sustainability and a concept of nature’s agency—perhaps an unimaginable vision given the extent of environmental degradation that has already occurred, but nevertheless an important impulse for further thinking. Jonas’s ideas about human actions in an increasingly technological world where future generations and far-away populations always have to be included in our thoughts and actions could serve as the starting point for developing improved and enhanced concepts of sustainability that include environmental justice more decidedly— not a world where resource consumption drives development but a world in which the equity factor is no longer seen as an impediment to reducing consumption as different modes of enjoyment replace material consumption. Human actions will still play a special role in a world in which “[i]ntimacy with coexisting strangers compels us to assume responsibility for global warming, a direct cause of the ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction Event,” as Timothy Morton reminds us in reference to the ongoing extinction of species mainly due to human activity.28 A planetary praxis rooted within such an ecological imperative would address the need for global environmental justice without leveling historical, social, economic, political, and cultural 27 See Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search for an Ethics for a Technological Age, trans. Hans Jonas with collaboration of David Herr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 108ff. 28 Timothy Morton, “Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology,” Oxford Literary Review 23.1 (2010): 10.

306  Readings in the Anthropocene differences (in a false narrative of a global “we”), reminding us about the continued unequal use of and access to natural resources in global capitalism and, at the same time, what it means to mobilize affect and desire in productive ways. A planetary praxis also needs aesthetics because all ethical imperatives, critical engagements, and artistic practices are mediated through an expressive tradition. Kant’s conceptual thinking articulated in the Critique of Reason was complemented with ethical reflections from the Critique of Practical Reason and considerations of teleological and aesthetic reasoning in the Critique of Judgment. An Anthropocene aesthetics responds to the status of the beautiful and the sublime in an age of networks and imbrications of human and nature beyond fixed notions of time and space. It clarifies what it means poetically to leave behind a framework of transcendental dualism and move towards a more phenomenological understanding of global networks and interconnected human-world relations. The first issue of Environmental Humanities (2012) included two papers that touch on this basic question of aesthetics and poetics in the Anthropocene. One was a paper by Laurel Peacock on affect and the question of how literary texts, specifically the poems of California poet Brenda Hillman, have the ability to model an affective interrelation between humans and the environment. Literature, she argues, helps us understand how human emotions in the Anthropocene can be attributed to the environment and vice versa. Hillman’s poems find poetic figurations for environmental relations between humans and nature. In poetry, Peacock argues, these relations are modeled as poetic practice and she discusses how, faced with climate change and other daunting problems, fictional literary characters, speakers of poems, and the environment alike are suffering from “SAD” (Seasonal Affective Disorder). Her paper, “SAD in the Anthropocene,” examines how poems portray this disorder in terms of performing the poetic practice they thematize. Rather than staging a lyric subject reading a landscape, Hillman’s poems “create a confusion of subject/object and foreground/background relations in which the origins of affects are impossible to determine and harms circulate.”29 The framework of “SAD” provides a poetic model for thinking about human and nature relations in the Anthropocene that goes beyond understanding literary texts simply in terms of their environmental themes. Anahid Nersessian calls this model “calamity form”—“a poetic practice that shapes the uncertain experience of anticipating, living through, and remembering ecological catastrophe,” a practice that originates in romantic poetry, perhaps the first literary 29 Laurel Peacock, “SAD in the Anthropocene: Brenda Hillman’s Ecopoetics of Affect,” Environmental Humanities 1 (2012): 85.

Planetary Praxis in the Anthropocene  307 period that reflected on the fact that humans have become agents of change.30 SAD and calamity form suggest the need for new pathways between a modernist poetic practice of restraint and a postmodern celebration of exuberance and excess. The other paper in the first issue of Environmental Humanities that helps us think through the poetic and aesthetic aspects of the Anthropocene is Timothy Morton’s essay on “The Oedipal Logic of Ecological Awareness.” Morton makes a case for a critique of “a certain specific form of management and aesthetics, the one associated with agriculture” that in his scheme “paved the way for the Anthropocene by opening up a fantasy space, a fantasy space that coincided with actually existing life forms such as grass, trees, and herding animals.”31 A post-agricultural, truly ecological age beyond metaphysics no longer “turns reality into domination-ready chunks of parceled out space waiting to be filled and ploughed by humans.”32 A post-agricultural vision for such an ecological age frames the interrelatedness of humans and other life forms in fundamentally new and different ways, a radically deconstructive approach that Morton explores more fully in his papers on “Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology” (2010) and “Ecology without the Present” (2012). “Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology” argues that life forms cannot be said to differ in fundamental ways from texts.33 Morton concludes from this thought-provoking idea that ecology and deconstruction should start conversing with each other more seriously. The basic idea behind this suggestion is that signs are always interdependent and coexist with other signs. In other words, texts are made up of signs, and their environments are also made up of signs: “No textuality can rigorously distinguish between inside and outside, because that is precisely what textuality both broaches and breeches.”34 Morton alleges that the outside reality is just as textual as the texts themselves. He bases his claims on insights from science that suggest that human and non-human life forms all follow a logical order of algorithms:

30 Anahid Nersessian, “Two Gardens: An Experiment in Calamity Form,” MLQ 74 (2013): 312. 31 Morton, “The Oedipal Logic of Ecological Awareness,” 10. 32 Ibid., 16. 33 It should be noted, however, that a critical review of Morton’s essay explains that he is basically wrong in his claim about the sameness of life forms, or at least the claim is not careful enough and conflates different levels of reality. See Greg Garrard, “Ecocriticism,” The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 20 (2010): 240. 34 Morton, “Ecology as Text,” 3.

308  Readings in the Anthropocene Forests appear “natural,” yet they follow the quite logical order of algorithms programmed by tree genomes. An algorithm is a script—a text—that automates a function, or functions, and in this case the script is encoded directly into matter … If an algorithm can produce a rose by plotting a set of equations, surely the thing itself is a map of its genome, a “plot” of an algorithm’s unfolding.35 If a tree or a flower is a map of its genome, constantly unfolding and changing as we look at it, life forms can be seen as textual: “Likewise, texts consist of other texts: there is no text as such—textuality is shot through with otherness—and every text, at the very same time, is utterly unique, a unicity that transcends independent singular isolation.”36 In Morton’s radically deconstructive scheme there is no such thing as an isolated text or an isolated organism; both exist in a condition of interrelatedness with other texts/organisms, and he makes a huge conceptual leap from the analogy between texts and organisms to eliminating their difference. With this in mind, however, a planetary poetic practice can be understood as eminently ecological, and ecology as eminently poetic: “All life forms are the mesh, and so are all the dead ones, as are their habitats, which are also made up of living and nonliving beings … We drive around using crushed dinosaur parts. Iron is mostly a by-product of bacterial metabolism. So is oxygen. Mountains can be made of shells and fossilized bacteria.”37 In other words, Morton’s argument suggests a planetary praxis in the Anthropocene that is radically deconstructive, encouraging us to think critically, historically, aesthetically, and ethically and to seek out the hidden exclusions, self-evident myths, ideological beliefs, and disguised costs that otherwise remain unreflected.38 Though we may not agree with all the aspects of Morton’s radical analysis, his work nevertheless urges us to rethink the aesthetic and poetological dimension of artistic practice in the Anthropocene. One of the self-evident myths of the Anthropocene is the idea that all people are equally affected by the consequences of environmental degradation. But people and nature in developing and threshold countries are affected on a much larger scale than Europeans and North Americans, even though they did not participate in the causes 35 Ibid., 4–5. 36 Ibid., 7. 37 Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 11ff. Greg Garrard critiques Morton’s claims in Garrard, “Ecocriticism,” 239. 38 See Timothy Clark, “Editorial,” Oxford Literary Review 34.2 (2012): vi.

Planetary Praxis in the Anthropocene  309 of the environmental crisis to the same extent as people in developed countries. A historically inflected notion of the Anthropocene as an era in which the inequalities of late-capitalist societies are widening and intensifying can be a radical tool in the critique of the grand narrative of progress that informs some visions of the technological solutions to tomorrow’s social and environmental problems. Such a concept also puts its finger into the wounds of human destructiveness that have come to shape the Earth’s future. Kate Soper has suggested that we look towards Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment for strategies of advancing “to a more assertively human and ecologically benign form of nature” and move the agenda of responsibility forward in an anthropocenic world.39 Without endorsing the pessimism of a post-World War II outlook, Soper nevertheless believes that the ideas developed in their book have some relevance for current forms of “green” critiques of instrumental rationality: “The utopian program that might rescue us from the continued cycle of social exploitation and ecological decline lies not in a return to a ‘nature’ but in a new and unprecedented form of transcendence of it.”40 Soper does not provide specifics for such a new and unprecedented form of transcendence but suggests rethinking the pleasures of consumerism that could be “actualized through compelling projections of the pleasures to be had in converting to an alternative mode of consumption”—perhaps therein lies the key to reconceptualizing the connection between sustainability and equity.41 Soper ends her reflections on green versions of late-capitalist critiques with the thought that “Our future ecological viability depends on a potential consciously to adjust to the consequences of our environmental impact, and to develop new modes of human experience and satisfaction in the light of it, of a kind denied to other beings.”42 The future ecological viability of Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s concepts on social exploitation and ecological degradation lies in their insistence that our actions, including our interactions with nature and the environment, are fundamentally shaped by our mode of production that is always historically specific and culturally mediated.43 A planetary aesthetic and poetic praxis articulates a framework for such a philosophical perspective by replacing the form of the coherent 39 Kate Soper, “The Politics of Nature: Reflections on Hedonism, Progress, and Ecology,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 10.2 (1999): 64. 40 Ibid., 65. 41 Ibid., 70. 42 Ibid. 43 See Andrew Biro, “Ecological Crisis and the Culture Industry Thesis,” in Andrew Biro (ed.), Critical Ecologies: The Frankfurt School and Contemporary Environmental Crises (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 231.

310  Readings in the Anthropocene grand narrative and its austere modernist vision with a multitude of hybrid poetic practices deriving from the core artistic forms of the times: not the essay, aphoristic prose, or the fragment that informed the early Frankfurt School’s universe of aesthetic modernism culminating in the metaphor of the Flaschenpost (the message in a bottle) that summed up their failure to achieve radical and effective socio-economic transformation, but hybrid genres that populate and configure “the mesh”44 that might be more effective in shaping a poetics of coexistence, cohabitation, and interconnectivity in the Anthropocene. These new genres and artistic forms negotiate a new pathway between the old modernist poetics of restraint and more recent postmodern practices of exuberance and excess. Some recent literary developments, such as picaresque Anglophone climate fiction (McEwan, Solar) or German novels that feature Anthropocene topics (Grass, Die Rättin; Darth, Die Abschaffung der Arten), foreground alternative, even comical and satiric forms of narrating apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic scenarios.45 Still, more traditional elegiac models that return to a conventional and allegorical narration of destruction and crisis are surfacing as well, even as they cultivate a certain polyphony (Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn; Trojanow, EisTau). The picaresque alternative models that shape an anthropocenic planetary poetic practice narrate the post-human condition through the perspective of the absurd, the comical, and the invention and creation of new eco-futures, whereas the elegiac models explore the sadness of the destruction of the Earth and its psychological effect on humans. They both lend aesthetic form to a planetary poetics of interdependence and coexistence that is the hallmark of the Anthropocene.

Bibliography

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Barad, Karen. Agentieller Realismus: Über die Bedeutung materiell-diskursiver Praktiken. Translated by Jürgen Schröder. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2012. Biro, Andrew. “Ecological Crisis and the Culture Industry Thesis.” In Andrew Biro (ed.), Critical Ecologies: The Frankfurt School and Contemporary Environmental Crises, 229–52. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Biro, Andrew, ed. Critical Ecologies: The Frankfurt School and Contemporary Environmental Crises. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Brown, Charles and Ted Toadvine, eds. Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003. Bryant, Levi. “Onticology—A Manifesto for Object-Oriented Ontology, Part I,” http://www.larvalsubjects.wordpress.com (accessed March 17, 2016). 44 Morton, The Ecological Thought, 28ff. 45 See Ursula K. Heise, Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010), 10ff.

Planetary Praxis in the Anthropocene  311 Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 197–222. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “History on an Expanded Canvas: The Anthropocene’s Invitation.” Keynote address at the Anthropocene-Project of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, January 10, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=svgqLPFpaOg (accessed March 17, 2016). Clark, Timothy. “Editorial. ” Oxford Literary Review 34.2 (2012): v–vi. Darth, Dietmar. Die Abschaffung der Arten. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth and George B. Handley, eds. Postcolonial Ecology: Literatures of the Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Dibley, Ben. “‘Nature is Us’: The Anthropocene and Species-Being.” Transformations 21 (2012): 1–22. Special issue on Rethinking the Seasons: New Approaches to Nature. Garrard, Greg. “Ecocriticism.” The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 20 (2013): 200–43. Grass, Günter. Die Rättin. Göttingen: Steidl, 1997. Harmann, Graham. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Peru, IL: Open Court, 2002. Heise, Ursula K. Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010. Heise, Ursula K. “Encounters with the Thing Formerly Known as Nature,” http:// www.publicbooks.org (accessed March 17, 2016). Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by Edmund P. Jephcott. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Hornborg, Alf. “Submitting to Objects: Fetishism, Dissociation, and the Cultural Foundation of Capitalism.” In Graham Harvey (ed.), Handbook of Animism, 244–59. Amsterdam: Brill, 2012. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973. International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme. Welcome to the Anthropocene: A Planet Transformed by Humanity, http://www.igbp.net/multimedia/ multimedia/welcometotheanthropocenefilmandstillimages.5.1081640c135c7 c04eb480001217.html (accessed March 17, 2016). Jenson, Derrick. “Age of the Sociopath.” Earth Island Journal 28.1 (2013). Special issue on Manmade, http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/ anthropocene (accessed March 17, 2016). Jonas, Hans. The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search for an Ethics for a Technological Age. Translated by Hans Jonas with the collaboration of David Herr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4280 (accessed March 17, 2016). Kersten, Jens. “The Enjoyment of Complexity: A New Political Anthropology for the Anthropocene?” Rachel Carson Center Perspectives 3 (2013): 39–56. Special issue on The Anthropocene: Envisioning the Future in the Age of Humans. Edited by Helmuth Trischler, http://www.carsoncenter.uni-muenchen.de/publications/ perspectives_mainpage/2013_perspectives/index.html (accessed March 17, 2016). Marx. Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Moscow: Progress, 1959. McEwan, Ian. Solar. New York: Random House, 2010. Merleau-Ponty, Marcel. The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on

312  Readings in the Anthropocene Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, and Politics. Translated by Arleen B. Dallery. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Morton, Timothy. “Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology.” Oxford Literary Review 23.1 (2010): 1–17. Morton, Timothy. “Ecology without the Present.” Oxford Literary Review 34.2 (2012): 229–38. Morton, Timothy. “The Oedipal Logic of Ecological Awareness.” Environmental Humanities 1 (2012): 7–21. Nascimento, Amos. Building Cosmopolitan Communities: A Critical and Multidimensional Approach. New York: Palgrave, 2013. Nersessian, Anahid. “Two Gardens: An Experiment in Calamity Form.” MLQ 74 (2013): 307–29. Peacock, Laurel. “SAD in the Anthropocene: Brenda Hillman’s Ecopoetics of Affect.” Environmental Humanities 1 (2012): 85–102. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. New York: Rutledge, 1993. Seamon, David. “Merleau-Ponty, Perception, and Environmental Embodiment: Implications for Architectural and Environmental Studies.” In Rachel McCann and Patricia M. Locke (eds), Carnal Echoes: Merleau-Ponty and the Flesh of Architecture. Forthcoming (in manuscript). Sebald, W. G. Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt. Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 1995. Soper, Kate. “The Politics of Nature: Reflections on Hedonism, Progress, and Ecology.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 10.2 (1999): 47–70. Trojanow, Ilija. EisTau. Hamburg: Hanser, 2011. Wilding, Adrian. Review of Critical Ecologies: The Frankfurt School and Contemporary Environmental Crises. Edited by Andrew Biro. Marx and Philosophy, April 2, 2012, 1–4, http://www.marxandphilosophy.org.uk/review of books/ reviews/2012/513 (accessed March 17, 2016). Wilke, Sabine. “Anthropocenic Poetics: Ethics and Aesthetics in a New Geological Age.” Rachel Carson Center Perspectives 3 (2013): 67–74. Special issue on The Anthropocene: Envisioning the Future in the Age of Humans. Edited by Helmuth Trischler, http://www.carsoncenter.uni-muenchen.de/publications/ perspectives_mainpage/2013_perspectives/index.html (accessed March 17, 2016).

Epilogue: The Anthropocene in German Perspective Axel Goodbody

The essays collected in this volume address two questions. The first is what German thought and culture have contributed and have to offer in the future to what Lawrence Buell has called the “environmental imagination.” The second, to which I will return, is how literature can help meet the challenges which the Anthropocene presents. In his landmark study of “Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture” (1996), Buell diagnosed a crisis of the imagination as a root cause of the modern environmental crisis and wrote of the need to find new ways to understand nature and humanity’s relation to it. To this end, he sought to contribute to the history of Western environmental perception by critically reviewing literary representations of (and reflections on) nature in American nonfiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For German ecocritics seeking to contribute to the dual aim of enhancing critical awareness of environmental discourse and imagining more ecocentric ways of being, Goethe, the romantics, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Adorno have so far been key focuses of attention. The continuing relevance of Goethe’s holistic conception of nature and “gentle” scientific empiricism has been conveyed to a wider ecocritical audience by the recent number of the Goethe Yearbook on “Goethe and Environmentalism” (ed. Dalia Nassar and Luke Fischer), and in a series of articles by Heather Sullivan. Kate Rigby has discussed the romantics’ ideas of nature as a language accessible to artistic intuition and of the poet’s task as its articulation in human speech (Topographies of the Sacred, 2004). These ideas fed into nineteenth-century Monism and twentieth-century phenomenology and continue to inform debates on inhabitation of place as a factor in sensitivity to environmental change. Others have examined German critiques of modernity at the turn of the twentieth

314  Readings in the Anthropocene century and explored the relevance of Nietzsche’s conception of nature and naturalness, interpreting his notion of the Dionysian artwork as a creative force which valorizes matter, the body, and the interrelatedness of non-human life with human existence (see, for instance, Hubert Zapf, Literature as Cultural Ecology, 2016). Jakob von Uexküll’s conception of animals’ perceptual environments (Umwelten) has played a foundational role in biosemiotics. Heidegger has exercised considerable influence over contemporary ecocritical thinking through his critique of technology and his concept of poetic dwelling, despite his fascist politics and his essential anthropocentrism (see Garrard 2010). Andrew Biro’s collection of essays on the Frankfurt School of critical theory, Critical Ecologies (2011), is but one recent publication that explores the prescient thinking on nature in the writing of Adorno, Horkheimer, Bloch, Marcuse, and Jonas. Whereas the historian Anna Bramwell foregrounded the troubling proximity of German thinking on nature with fascism in the first half of the twentieth century in Ecology in the Twentieth Century (1989), subsequent publications have demonstrated how much more there is to German thinking, writing, and art. Colin Riordan’s edited volume Green Thought in German Culture (1997) already included essays on Gustav Landauer’s ecosocialism, catastrophic warning scenarios in the West German novel, Irmtraud Morgner’s East German ecofeminism, New Age religiosity, the eco-aesthetics of Joseph Beuys, the Green Bildungsroman, and the films of Werner Herzog. While ecocriticism was slow to emerge in Germany, it started, as Benjamin Bühler notes in his recent monograph, Ecocriticism: Grundlagen—Theorien—Interpretationen (2016), independently of AngloAmerican theories with, for example, Hartmut Böhme’s contributions to a cultural history of nature in Germany in the volume Natur und Subjekt (1988) and his programmatic calls to revisit eighteenth-century theories of the aesthetics of nature and art, and to develop the notion that it is the task of the writer and artist to enhance our perception of nature and our susceptibility to its beauty and intrinsic value. In the 1990s Jost Hermand did pioneering work on the development of German environmentalist thinking since the eighteenth century in a history of ideas which embraces key elements of literary history. Now informed by an international range of theories and debates German ecocriticism has come of age in both English and German with edited volumes by Gersdorf and Mayer (2005), Ermisch, Kruse, and Stobbe (2010), Dürbeck and Stobbe (2015), and a special number of New German Critique on “The Challenge of Ecology to the Humanities” edited by Heather Sullivan and Bernhard Malkmus in 2016. It has acquired a distinctive profile through major contributions in the fields of literary anthropology (Hubert Zapf’s theory of cultural ecology),

Epilogue: The Anthropocene in German Perspective  315 systems theory (Stefan Hofer and Hannes Bergthaller), genre theory and narratology, as well as through work on the theorization of place and dwelling, and the analysis of representations of disasters and risk perception. One of the most recent studies, Sabine Wilke’s German Culture and the Modern Environmental Imagination (2015), identifies the sublime as the principal contribution of German thinking and culture to the formation of the modern environmental imagination. For Kant—according to Wilke the foundational figure in German nature aesthetics—the sublime is an interactive dynamic in which human subjects are not crushed by the magnitude of nature, but reflect on their relation to it, understand their ability to reason, and experience the moment as ennobling. Wilke interprets this open-ended, awe-inspiring human interaction with the environment as an ecocentric principle. Starting with Kant, she traces its influence in affording agency to nature and relativizing human dominion, in a tradition extending via the romantic painters to contemporary German film. She writes of the relationship between spirit and matter in the nature philosophy of Schelling and Hegel, Nietzsche’s nature aesthetics, Heidegger’s critique of technology, and nature in the critical theory of Adorno and Marcuse, demonstrating the contribution of German philosophy to understanding humanity’s framing of nature. Arguing that others have looked at poetry and fiction, she then focuses on the nature writers and visual artists Georg Wilhelm Forster, Alexander von Humboldt, Caspar David Friedrich, Albert Bierstadt, Leni Riefenstahl, and Werner Herzog, and depicts their oeuvres as milestones in the development of the aesthetic dimension of the German environmental imagination. The essays in this volume add new insights into this German tradition in literature, philosophy, and the visual arts, with studies of Lichtenberg, Tieck, Hegel, Stifter, Storm, Haushofer, Sebald, Hilbig, and contemporary novelists, and excursus on Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, Ernst Haeckel’s nature prints, and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cartoons. However, they are also united in addressing a second question, namely, how literature and ecocriticism can help meet the challenge of the Anthropocene. Readers who have arrived at these closing remarks will not need reminding that this proposed era succeeding the Holocene, in which human activities have assumed proportions which are leaving traces in the Earth’s geology, confronts humanity as a collective with responsibility for maintaining environmental conditions on the planet such that they enable human and other life to flourish. Since the introduction of the concept by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and the ecologist Eugene Stoermer in 2000, a lively debate has arisen around its epistemic ramifications, and this has given new impetus to ecocritical work, anchoring it in

316  Readings in the Anthropocene broader projects of the environmental humanities, in which literary critics are working alongside historians, anthropologists, ethnographers, social scientists, and experts in religious studies and the visual arts, on subjects ranging from energy and climate change to biodiversity loss and human–animal relations. Dipesh Chakrabarty has been frequently cited as the first to explore the implications of the Anthropocene for humanities scholars, addressing in particular postcolonial historians and literary critics (2009, 2012). In 2015, no fewer than four book-length studies followed: Timothy Clark’s Ecocriticism on the Edge asked searching questions about its consequences for literary production and evaluation; Adam Trexler provided a first overview and categorization of climate change novels in his book Anthropocene Fictions; Kate Rigby presented case studies of “environmental histories, narratives and ethics for perilous times” under the title Dancing with Disaster; and Tom Bristow reflected on poetry as an emotional form of subject formation and place-making in The Anthropocene Lyric. Numerous essays on literature in the Anthropocene have recently been published in ecocritical journals as well as in handbooks and introductions to ecocriticism. There are also several forthcoming publications that will address the topic, including a special number of C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writing, studies of American novels and the literature of the North Sea, and an edited volume on German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene edited by Caroline Schaumann and Heather Sullivan. The notion of the Anthropocene is not entirely new, and it could be said that Anthropocene discourse is merely facilitating continued discussion of issues hitherto approached through the lenses of deep ecology, sustainability, eco-postcolonialism, new materialism, and posthumanism. However, with its emphasis on the global dimension of anthropogenic environmental change and the material-ecological limits to economic and population growth, and its erosion of the distinction between natural history and human history, the Anthropocene concept has made us think again about our values, and the consequences of seemingly innocuous actions in individuals’ daily lives when scaled up into the millions. Bridging the gaps between Earth, life, and human sciences, the Anthropocene calls for a different way of living, and therefore an altered consciousness. It reveals modernity’s dependence on unsustainable consumption levels of concentrated energy. It also challenges modernity’s denial of ecological limits, its temporality, and its definition of subjectivity, forcing us to rethink such fundamental things as individuals’ right to freedom of action and even the limits of democracy. Literature has an important task to perform in this rethinking process because it participates in the organization of our social reality through what Bühler calls “regulative fictions.” These metaphorical concepts

Epilogue: The Anthropocene in German Perspective  317 define and constitute classes of objects and identities, imagined futures, and how problems are framed. By interpreting the past, dramatizing the situations and decisions of the present, and imagining futures, whether by means of narratives depicting the disastrous consequences of continuing current trends or in images of better alternatives, stories told about environmental change have a key role to play. We may not be able to step outside our anthropocentrism, but we can become more aware of it. Stories are media for debate and forms of collective sensemaking. They can motivate and mobilize readers by investing abstract and seemingly remote issues with affect, and they can arouse empathy with human and non-human others, thereby helping us to see the world from new perspectives. Literature and art extend the semiotic horizon. They make more things matter to us, widen our sense of identity to embrace natural others, and foster a sense of care. The essays collected here engage with three distinct dimensions of the Anthropocene discourse. First, they explore its genealogy, by considering earlier concepts which anticipated aspects of the Anthropocene. Second, they discuss literary and visual representations in a variety of media and genres. And finally, they consider the implications of the Anthropocene for aesthetics and poetology. They demonstrate that German thinkers have made significant contributions on all three fronts, participating in the prehistory of the idea in philosophy, its intuitive prefiguring in older literary works, and more direct engagement with it by contemporary authors. Ideas for poetics in the Anthropocene are identified in the work of writers both past and present. Writing in the Anthropocene can foreground the impact of human activities on the planet, illustrating for instance how oil has shaped not only the economy and the layout of our cities, determining our everyday lives, but also how it has entered our very bodies and pervades our aspirations and thinking. Such writing can reflect on the inconstancy of climatic circumstances, stress the fleeting appearance of humanity in the Earth’s history, and seek to overcome our blindness to our own materiality. It works with a variety of approaches and techniques, depending on whether it aims to convey lifeworld experiences or subject traditional ways of thought to critical scrutiny. Exact observation of nature and empathetic interaction with the local environment, developing a sense of place-based personhood, is one possibility. Another attempts to alleviate the cognitive dissonance and non-identity which characterize life in the Anthropocene by making the scientific facts normally conveyed in statistics and abstract arguments more accessible to the senses, and grounding them emotionally. This can involve personification of natural phenomena, but it must do so without falling back into animism. Identification of the subject with nature must similarly avoid regressing into a romantic projection of subjective feelings onto

318  Readings in the Anthropocene the landscape. The four elements (wind, water, earth, air) can serve as subjects that foreground the agency of the non-human and its role in shaping our lives. A further traditional trope which may be adapted and made serviceable is (as Wilke has argued) the sublime. Anthropocene narratives can exemplify not only the limits to human agency and the agency of the non-human, but also hybrid agencies, and the porosity of the boundaries between humans, animals, and the wider material world. A “metabolic” poetics of the Anthropocene might, for instance, report on what the author has ingested, as an example of the energy flows between humans, other animals, and organic and inorganic nature. More experimental writing can seek to open up a redemptive perspective of post-human interaction by means of analogies between human and non-human histories. Some Anthropocene art adopts a sympoietic approach, mimicking natural rhythms and patterns of articulation. Such co-production with the material world might take the form of fragmentary texts, collages consisting of multiple drafts and versions. It may be characterized by rhetorical techniques involving repetition, accretion, and accumulation. Examples of innovative thinking on Anthropocene aesthetics are presented in the essays in this volume on Lichtenberg and Sebald, and in comments on the aesthetic theory of Hartmut and Gernot Böhme. Lichtenberg’s ironic statement that, in view of the dwindling forests and shortage of wood, we should burn books to keep warm is interpreted by Markus Wilczek as recognition of the necessity for cultural production to be cognizant of its material foundations. Lichtenberg’s style, which is characterized by obsessive stock-taking, is described by Wilczek as a “poetics of sustainability.” On the one hand, this echoes Ursula Heise’s advocacy of a “database aesthetic” (Heise 2016). On the other hand, the list or inventory, a form enabling us to get a phenomenon into scale and manage it, is equally present in Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’s poem “Landschaft,” published in 1975 in the volume Westwärts 1 & 2, alongside photos of wasteland strewn with refuse. Brinkmann recalls being sent here to collect caddisfly larvae in a school biology lesson, but what he finds now is an unidentifiable, half-dead tree, an abandoned wrecked car, broken glass, old shoes, a bicycle frame, and a rotting sofa strewn among the leafless vegetation. Lichtenberg anticipated this mode of representation, which has come into its own in the Anthropocene. Another form of writing worthy of the Anthropocene is identified by Bernhard Malkmus in his chapter on W. G. Sebald. This time it is a narrative structure that combines elements of autobiography, travelogue, nature writing, cultural history, and essayistic reflection. In his “history of natural destruction,” Sebald succeeds in resisting facile conceptions of loss-free progress, remembering its human and

Epilogue: The Anthropocene in German Perspective  319 non-human victims, and modeling an alternative way of living based on attentiveness to material objects and ethical sensibility. The Rings of Saturn can be regarded as exemplifying Hartmut Böhme’s idea of literature embodying the physiological memory of lost interconnections between humans and the biosphere, while simultaneously celebrating poetic expression as a partaking in nature as physis. This underlines the prefiguring of key aspects of Anthropocene poetics in Gernot and Hartmut Böhme’s project, which sought to integrate culture and nature. As in Anthropocene discourse, their point of departure is the erosion of bodily/sensual frames of experience in everyday life and the need to reinstate them. Their conception of literature is as an archive of alternative imaginations of what it means to be human and as a model of an aesthetic sensibility that allows us to experience physiological and linguistic embeddedness in nature. These and other creative forms strive to meet the challenge of living in the Anthropocene and help us to reimagine our relationship with nature in such a way as to be mindful of our responsibility for the planet. In doing so they necessarily challenge the human–non-human binary and reflect a new sense of selfhood in which the human subject is no longer solidly bounded, but instead, as Karen Barad has argued, co-constituted through “intra-action” with the other of nature. However, it is not easy for literature to engage with this expanded sense of the human subject. For it cannot altogether cease to privilege the human if the writer is not to be deprived of their single most powerful tool for engaging with readers: the focus on the human figures in all their fallibility and on their often complex emotions and actions (see Kerridge 2014). This is, as Timothy Clark points out in Ecocriticism on the Edge, the ultimate conundrum for the novelist in the Anthropocene. While the essays in this book show German writers and thinkers grappling with the problems associated with decentering the human, it is important that work on the subject does not end here.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor W. ii, 278–9, 282 n.58, 292, 298 n.5, 309, 311, 313–15 aesthetics ii, viii–ix, 2 n.2, 12–13, 34, 42, 63, 75, 79–80, 99 n.43, 105, 181, 183, 187–8, 190, 201 n.9, 220, 264, 267, 269, 271, 293, 298, 306–7, 312, 315, 317–18 agency 1–2, 3 n.5, 13, 39 n.1, 43, 61, 71, 78, 86, 111, 170 n.7, 174, 180, 191, 193, 235–8, 271, 279, 286, 305, 315, 318 Anders, Günther 275, 292 animal viii, 4, 8, 22, 23 n.21, 37, 43, 45–9, 58, 62–72, 74, 81–2, 85–6, 94, 96, 99–100, 103, 130, 139–40, 144–5, 159, 161, 204, 249 n.18, 253, 261, 265, 271, 273, 293, 307, 314, 316, 318 Anthropocene v–ix, 1–14, 17–18, 20, 37–40, 42–3, 45–6, 50, 60–4, 74, 86, 110–12, 115, 121, 125, 135, 151, 162, 169–73, 175, 183–4, 186, 188–99, 204, 207, 217, 219, 223–5, 237–9, 241–2, 247–50, 252, 256, 260–2, 263, 264–8, 270, 275, 277, 279, 285–6, 293–7, 289, 291–2, 293, 295–8, 301, 303–13, 316–20 anthropocentrism vii, 66–8, 80, 187–8, 248, 299, 304, 314, 317

apocalypse 50 n.25, 161, 163, 274 n.33, 278 n.48, 293 archaeology ix, 19, 171 n.14, 194 Arndt, Ernst Moritz 131, 241 Avenarius, Ferdinand 135–6, 146 Beck, Ulrich 173 n.23, 192, 267, 293 Benjamin, Walter 259, 261, 279, 294 biocentrism vii, 67, 80, 204 biosphere 38, 55, 65, 171, 202, 218–19, 221, 267 n.11, 275 n.40, 277, 281, 286, 290–1, 298, 311, 319 Bitterfelder Weg 149 Blumenberg, Hans 74 n.32, 87, 107 n.3, 108, 121, 269, 293 Böhme, Hartmut 268 n.16, 269–72, 288–93, 314, 319 Browne, Thomas 288, 289–91 Buell, Lawrence 10, 38 n.1, 60, 151, 158, 161 n.71, 162 n.75, 164, 219, 313, 320 capitalism 3, 43, 65, 110–11, 285, 297–8, 301 n.18, 304, 306, 309, 311–12 caricature v, 9–10, 124–5, 127–32, 134, 138–41, 143–6 catastrophe 21, 63, 65, 79–80, 82, 160, 162, 177–8, 182, 184–6, 198, 231 n.30, 241, 245, 246 n.3, 261, 272, 306

322 Index Chakrabarty, Dipesh 3, 13, 171, 192, 238–9, 241 cityscape 8, 39, 41–2, 46, 236 Clark, Nigel 184–5, 187–8, 192 climate 8, 54, 101, 111, 163 n.77, 165, 170, 238, 246 n.4, 262, 310 climate change vii, 1, 50, 60–1, 98, 104, 150, 162, 170–4, 186, 189, 190 n.77, 191–3, 197, 201 n.11, 231, 242, 264–6, 306, 316, 320 consumption 43, 100, 210, 238, 245, 265, 301, 304–5, 309, 316 cosmic 11, 83, 195, 198 cosmopolitanism vi, viii, 10–11, 169, 171–7, 179, 183–4, 186, 188–94 critical theory viii, 12, 173 n.24, 278 n.51, 296, 314–15 cultural critique v, 10, 147 cultural studies ix, 1, 5, 7, 10, 124, 253, 265 deep history 3–4 deforestation 9, 98, 107, 110–12, 115, 121, 132, 195, 197, 207, 212–14, 282 degradation 40, 149, 164, 196, 208 n.29, 214, 239, 267, 281, 286, 289, 297, 305, 308–9 Descartes 288–9 destabilization 150, 164 Detjens, Friedrich 132–3 diffusion vi, 12, 48, 243 disaster 11, 21, 26, 54, 64–5, 79–80, 82–3, 127, 177, 185, 187, 189–90, 223 nn.4–5, 225, 229, 230 n.29, 231 n.30, 242, 280, 315–16, 320 Döblin, Alfred 278, 279 n.51, 294 Droste–Hülshoff, Annette von 12 Dückers, Tanja 39–40, 46–9, 60 Dürer, Albrecht 288 dwelling vi, 12, 263, 270, 276–7, 291–2, 314–15

Earth vii, 1–2, 4, 10, 12, 17–19, 21, 24, 38, 48, 50, 52, 55–7, 60, 63, 74, 83, 86, 98–9, 101, 103, 111 n.19, 123–4, 126–7, 151, 153, 159, 162–5, 170, 174–9, 180 n.47, 182, 185–6, 189–91, 193–4, 198, 200–2, 208, 211–13, 218–19, 221, 234, 240, 245, 247–8, 251–6, 260–2, 264–5, 268, 274, 277, 285, 291, 293, 296, 298, 302 n.21, 303, 305, 309, 310–11, 315–18 earth systems 170, 245 earthquake 187–8, 194, 198, 200, 202, 254 ecocentrism 187, 189 ecocriticism viii, 4 n.13, 5–6, 7 n.21, 13–14, 17, 38–9, 46 n.15, 54 n.28, 61, 125 n.2, 131 n.17, 279 n.45, 293 n.82, 295, 310 n.33, 311 n.37, 314, 318–20, 323–4 material 39, 46, 61 ecological system 9, 58, 94, 98, 100, 102, 104, 111 ecology ix, 7 n.21, 34, 50 n.25, 60, 67 n.14, 68 n.18, 74 n.33, 80 n.40, 87, 103, 107, 201, 203, 204 n.19, 218, 220, 253 n.36, 261, 265, 289, 303, 305 n.28, 307–8, 309 n.39, 311–12, 314, 316, 319, 320 ecosystem 60, 118, 131, 187, 201, 215, 217 eco-thriller 8, 39–40, 50–1, 54 n.28 Eichendorff, Joseph von 6 n.15, 13, 133, 147 energy 46, 50–1, 53, 54 n.28, 56–60, 157, 224, 239, 316, 318 solar 53, 56–9 Enlightenment vi, 3, 4 n.11, 10–11, 14, 169, 171, 175, 180, 184, 187–8, 190, 222, 225–7, 230 n.29, 232, 236–7, 239–41, 252,

Index 323 254, 278, 288–9, 298 n.5, 303–4, 309, 311 entanglement v, 7, 12, 298, 301–2, 305, 319 environment viii, 2 n.2, 6–8, 11, 20, 33, 38–9, 40–61, 64, 73–4, 78–80, 98–101, 108, 109 n.9, 110–12, 115, 118, 123–4, 141, 144, 146, 150, 158, 170, 172, 175, 188, 190–2, 194–6, 204, 206, 207 n.27, 208–11, 214–16, 217 n.47, 224, 231, 232 n.30, 235, 237–8, 240, 242, 246 n.4, 250, 258, 262, 263 n.1, 264, 269–71, 296 n.1, 297, 301–2, 304–6, 310–11, 312–20 engineered 11, 210, 222, 225 hybrid v, 8, 38–42, 45–6, 49–52, 54–6, 60, 232, 298, 310, 318 industrial 8, 38–42, 48, 51, 53, 64, 140, 150, 157–8, 160, 162–3, 175, 224, 267, 301, 303 urban 8, 38–43, 46, 49, 61, 79–80, 130, 140, 144, 146, 158, 172, 239 environmental crisis 50, 110, 112, 189, 224, 263, 309, 313, 319 environmental ethics 187–90, 192, 203, 216 n.46, 219, 297, 316 environmental history 3, 7, 128 n.9, 150, 157, 165, 196, 206, 223, 316, 320 environmental humanities viii, 4–6, 13–14, 130 n.17, 169, 171, 183, 188, 191–2, 306–7, 312, 316 environmental imagination 18 n.5, 37, 39 n.2, 61, 80, 161, 164, 219, 269, 313, 315, 320 Eschbach, Andreas 39–40, 50–61 ethics of care 11 excess 4, 7–10, 20, 35, 89, 104, 119, 130, 139, 150–1, 154–6, 161–2, 164, 254, 307, 310 extinction 1, 4, 55, 56, 64–5, 74–5,

81–2, 86, 103, 185, 265, 294, 305, 320 extraction 12, 162, 245–6, 250, 266 fiction v, 8, 38, 50, 60–1, 64, 87, 199, 220, 273 n.31, 274 n.37, 293–4, 316, 320 fin de siècle v, 9, 124 Fliegende Blätter 127, 132–3, 141–2 flood 20–2, 217, 242 forest v, 8–9, 30–2, 35, 62–85, 98, 101–4, 107–19, 121–3, 125–6, 130–4, 136, 144–6, 197, 201, 205 n.22, 206–18, 221, 271, 280–2, 284, 308, 318 forestry 9, 30, 101–2, 109, 111 n.20, 112–16, 122–3, 132, 146, 211–12 fossil 3–4, 10, 23, 27, 38, 51–4, 56–7, 59–60, 151, 161–2, 172, 224, 237, 239, 245–6, 248, 259, 265–6, 308 Frankfurt School 12, 282, 296–8, 309–10, 312, 314, 319 geography 11, 169, 175, 177, 179–80, 184, 188, 193–4, 196, 270 n.22, 300, 319 geological age vi, 1–4, 12, 22, 31, 38, 74, 150–1, 170, 175–6, 198, 225, 245–8, 277, 279, 296, 298, 305, 312 geology 2, 3 n.8, 14, 124 n.1, 146, 175, 177, 184, 246, 247 n.11, 252, 254 n.41, 255, 261, 265–6, 270, 315 German Democratic Republic (GDR) 10, 28, 31, 40–1, 149–50, 152, 157 German Studies 4, 6, 14 global 4, 12, 17–18, 37, 39, 50 n.25, 54, 61, 91, 104–5, 109 n.9, 111 n.19, 123, 162, 170, 172–4, 177, 179, 185–7, 189–94, 196,

324 Index 219, 221, 224 nn.6–7, 231 n.30, 237–8, 241, 247–8, 263–6, 267 n.12, 270, 274–5, 277, 282, 286, 289, 293, 297–8, 303–6, 316 globalization vii, 39, 171 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 12, 112 n.23, 122, 199, 253, 282, 313, 320 Gothic 131, 151, 153, 158, 161, 241 Great Acceleration 4, 266, 298 Haeckel, Ernst vii, 20, 28, 31–4, 36–7, 315 Haushofer, Marlen 8, 62–88, 315 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich v, ix, 8–9, 91–106, 315 Heidegger, Martin vii, 300, 311, 313–15, 320 Heine, Heinrich 12, 247 Heine, Thomas Theodor 138–41 Hilbig, Wolfgang vi, 10, 148–65, 315 homogenization 265, 268, 276 humanity v, 2, 3 n.8, 8, 10–11, 13, 17–19, 24, 26–7, 35, 54, 57, 59, 62–8, 72–6, 78–86, 97, 104, 126, 130, 163 n.77, 165, 171, 173, 177, 179, 180–3, 185, 187–91, 194–5, 198–9, 203, 205, 209, 217, 223, 225, 232, 236–8, 241, 245, 248, 277, 298, 303–4, 311, 314–15, 317 Industrial Revolution 38, 42, 124 n.1, 169, 171, 172 nn.16, 18, 175, 193, 224, 247, 262

landscape v, 8–11, 19, 24, 30, 38–40, 46–7, 50, 60, 63, 76–7, 79–80, 124–7, 130, 133, 135, 138–41, 147, 149–50, 153, 158 n.57, 163, 196, 202, 204, 206–7, 211, 214–17, 222–6, 230, 234–7, 240–1, 260, 270, 279–80, 292, 302, 306, 318 preservation of 128 n.9, 140, 147 transformation of 10, 77, 124, 292 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph v, 9, 107–23, 315, 318 literary history v, 1, 7, 13, 314 magazine v, 9–10, 79–80, 124–5, 127, 129, 134, 140, 233 Man, Paul de 67, 87, 250, 261 Marsh, George Perkins 196–7, 201, 208, 212–14, 218, 220–1 media history 131 media studies 128, 250 Melville, Herman 7, 18, 20, 21 n.13, 23–5, 27–8, 32, 37 Meyer, Clemens 39–42, 34 nn.6–8, 44 nn.9–11, 45 nn.12–13, 46 n.14, 60–1 mining 12, 125 n.3, 163, 246, 247 n.9, 249–50, 255, 259–60 modernity viii, 3, 12, 34, 158, 159 n.59, 160, 165, 171, 230, 238 n.45, 242, 245, 264, 266–8, 276, 278, 280–2, 288, 291–3, 295, 299–300, 313, 316 moral 3, 11, 54, 71–2, 141, 171, 173, 175, 177–80, 181 n.52, 183–92, 195, 255, 258

Jugendstil 138 Kafka, Franz 253–4, 286 Kant, Immanuel vi, 10–11, 93 n.16, 95 n.28, 98, 106, 111, 169, 174–94, 199, 202, 220, 269, 293, 298–300, 305–6, 311, 315

narrative 3–4, 9, 12, 14, 20, 31, 35–6, 39, 41, 49, 60, 80, 83, 85, 115, 127, 135, 150, 195–9, 204–8, 213, 224–5, 227–8, 230–4, 237–40, 242, 248–9, 270–1, 273–4, 276, 281, 286,

Index 325 291–2, 296, 298–9, 306, 309–10, 316–18, 320 natural history 7, 12, 19, 176, 180, 185, 245, 264, 271–2, 278–80, 282, 286, 290, 292, 316, 318 nature philosophy vii, ix, 315 Nietzsche, Friedrich 163, 165, 313–15 non-human 1, 5, 7–8, 39, 43, 50, 66, 68, 71, 75, 82, 84–6, 189, 236, 241, 248, 253, 292, 297–303, 307, 314, 317–19 norms 145, 180–1, 184, 187, 189 North Sea 52, 59, 222–4, 231–3, 239, 241–2, 280–1, 316 Novalis 6, 12–13, 247–8, 250–1, 254, 259–61 novel 7–8, 11, 18–21, 23, 26, 28, 34–5, 39, 41, 46, 50–1, 53–5, 57–8, 61–4, 74–7, 79–86, 127, 155, 196–8, 207 n.28, 222–5, 227, 229–37, 239–42, 245, 254, 261, 270–2, 275–7, 281, 294–5, 310, 314–16, 319–20 paper 81, 118–20, 122, 157 pastoral 8, 40, 209 periodization vi, 7, 10, 167, 198 petrifiction vi, 12, 245 phenomenology ix, 300, 302, 310–11, 313 philosophy v, vii–ix, 2, 4, 8–9, 11, 14, 91, 92 n.3, 93 n.10, 95, 96 n.34, 99, 102, 105–6, 111–12, 169, 173–4, 175 nn.32, 33, 177, 180–1, 185, 187, 189–90, 192–4, 196, 198–200, 264, 273, 279, 293, 297 n.3, 299–303, 312, 315, 317 practical v, 8, 91, 112, 195 n.32, 180 n.48, 185 n.64 of right 9, 91, 95 n.30, 99, 102, 106 planetary vi, 7, 12, 18, 20, 60, 198,

218, 237, 243, 264, 274, 277, 296–8, 305–6, 308–10 poetics v–vi, 9, 12, 107, 113, 116, 118, 201, 220, 249, 273, 290, 293, 306, 310, 312, 317–20 pollution 3, 10, 26, 40, 41 n.4, 104, 140, 157–8, 163–4, 172, 246 n.8, 262, 280 Pölsler, Julian 8, 62–4, 75–6, 79–80, 83–7 post-humanism ix, 7, 316, 320 postmodernity 12 practice v, 1, 5–6, 10, 18–19, 27, 43, 58, 99, 107, 112, 116, 145–6, 151, 154, 157, 188, 202, 206, 211, 213, 227, 235, 248, 268, 276, 288, 291, 297–8, 301, 306–8, 310 praxis vi, 12, 243, 296–8, 301, 305–6, 308–9 Rembrandt 34, 286–7, 288 n.72, 289–90 renewable 51, 53, 59 resilience 8, 39, 41, 43, 45, 52, 60, 201, 231 n.30, 241 Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich 131 Robinsonade 64–5, 79, 82–3, 88 romanticism 5–6, 12, 42, 172 n.18, 193, 245–50, 252, 256, 258–9, 261–2, 320 Rudorff, Ernst 126–7, 138–41, 143, 147 satire 127–30, 144, 147 satirical magazine v, 9, 124, 127, 129 scale vi, 2, 4, 8, 10, 17, 20, 30, 58–60, 154, 167, 187, 189, 198, 219, 234, 245, 264, 268, 275, 277, 284, 289, 291, 298, 301, 308, 318 Schalansky, Judith 7, 17 n.1, 19–20, 28, 19 n.35, 32 n.42, 33–7

326 Index Schiller, Friedrich 141, 199, 202, 263–4, 294 Schultze-Namburg, Paul 125–7, 130–1, 136, 147 science v, 1, 2 n.2, 5, 7, 8–9, 11, 18–19, 21, 24, 27–9, 31, 34–5, 52, 56, 102 n.57, 105, 107, 112–16, 122–3, 127, 169, 172, 175, 177, 180, 187, 198, 201, 212 n.33, 227, 240, 253, 260, 265, 297, 307, 310, 316 science fiction 8, 50, 60–1, 64, 87 Sebald, W. G. vi, 12, 263–4, 270, 278–92, 294, 310, 312, 315, 318 short story 40, 43, 48, 54, 127, 222, 225, 238 Simplicissimus 127, 129, 130 n.17, 131–2, 137–9, 147 social critique 12, 296, 309 social justice 12, 103, 267, 296–7 Stifter, Adalbert vi–vii, 11, 64 n.4, 65 n.10, 75 n.35, 86–7, 195–21, 315 Storm, Theodor vi, 11, 222–37, 239–42, 315 Sugimoto, Hiroshi 7, 18, 24–7, 36–7 sustainability v, ix, 7–9, 89, 91–2, 98, 100–5, 107, 112–13, 116, 118, 121–3, 207, 209, 212 n.33, 305, 309, 316, 318 Swift, Graham vi, 12, 263–4, 270–8, 292–5 Talbot, William Henry Fox 27, 37 technology vi, 11, 27, 53, 55, 75, 100, 222–6, 232, 237–40, 250, 304, 314–15 nuclear 25–6, 38, 58–9, 171, 224 n.7, 274–5

Tieck, Ludwig 12, 246–62, 315 toxic 10, 59, 150–1, 156–8, 162, 164, 201 n.11, 280 transdisciplinary 4–5 universal history 263–4 utopia 8, 21, 26, 50 n.25, 53, 62, 64–5, 69, 75–6, 78, 80, 82–7, 216, 272, 274–5, 309 vision 6–9, 13, 19, 24, 26, 31–2, 34, 62, 64, 129, 173, 192, 198, 210, 216, 229, 231, 242, 249 visual culture 5, 7, 302 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich 12, 246–8, 250–2, 254, 262 wasteland 8, 39, 60, 318 water 4, 6, 9, 20–3, 25, 32–4, 44, 58–9, 74, 94, 98, 101, 104, 114–15, 118 nn.47, 50, 122–3, 125 n.3, 126, 138, 141, 143, 148–9, 152–5, 161, 163, 200–2, 206, 213 n.36, 217, 222 n.1, 225, 226 n.10, 229, 235–7, 239, 241–2, 247, 252, 254, 265, 271, 274, 290, 318 Weisman, Alan 7, 26–7, 37, 164 n.84, 165 Western Marxism 296 wilderness 8, 38, 206, 214–16, 217 n.46, 219–20 world citizenship 169, 174, 180, 186, 193 world without people 7, 23–4, 26–7, 37 world without us v, 7–8, 17–21, 24, 26–8, 35–7, 163–5