Introduction: Dirty Nature: Grit, Grime, and Genre in the Anthropocene

Introduction: Dirty Nature: Grit, Grime, and Genre in the

Anthropocene

CAROLINE SCHAUMANN/HEATHER I. SULLIVAN

«Dirty» nature expands the traditional and usually aesthetic vision of green landscapes or blue seascapes into much broader horizons by including ag-ricultural parcels and industrial farmland, brown swamps and marshes, and the gray grit of contemporary cityscapes. It alters the scope to include our physical bodies as small-scale ecosystems as well as those of the plants and animals we consume and that live in, on, and with us. Yet dirty nature also re-thinks nature along the lines of Timothy Morton’s quest to speak of «Ecology without nature,» that is, without the artificial dichotomies that falsely divide the cultural from the natural as if human beings were independent from the physical world and used it only as a «resource» at their convenience. Expand-ing on what Heather I. Sullivan has defined as «dirt theory,» we seek to rein-fuse nature with the agentic processes occurring all around and in us rather than delineating it as isolatable places that we can leave, neglect, or destroy at whim. Dirty nature locates us in the thick of things, in the elements, and the ongoing cycles of energy and matter. Indeed, in the current debates about defining «nature» in our age of the «Anthropocene,» when all surface matter and all bodies in the biosphere contain some particulates from anthropogenic industrial processes, thinking dirty nature makes sense. Dirty nature includes natural and built environments, and it most specifically postulates that «na-ture» is a composite of material interactions on many scales including the ac-tivities of bodies, species, and energy politics in which we human beings are full participants along with our fellow species on the planet.

This special edition of Colloquia Germanica explores a wide spectrum of dirty nature’s fundamental implications for environmental questions and challenges, from literary explorations of genre to the material engagement of specific authors and naturalists and the aesthetics of dirt, from metaphori-cal and metaphysical dirt to tropes of extraction and pollution, to the very (im)possibility of expressing such radically fluid and inflected landscapes and processes. In this introduction, we first define «dirty» – addressing questions of the aesthetics of ugliness and filth – with the aim of then reapproaching the loaded term «nature» safely guarded from excessively idealistic and dualis-tic perspectives and with the insights of the recently labeled Anthropocene.

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106 Caroline Schaumann/Heather I. Sullivan

Above all, these essays address with differing answers and approaches three questions: First, how can we conceive, evaluate culturally, and thus talk and write about the contested term «nature» today? Second, which genres and styles engage most insightfully dirty nature’s elements, pollution, and mani-fold agencies? And, third, how does thinking dirt alter our understanding of the interactions between human and nature?

Historically, what is considered ugly or dirty has been indirectly but neatly defined by an age-old taxonomy of beauty. Ancient Greek philosophy (Pla-to, Aristotle) and architecture heralded symmetry, unity, and proportion as a measure for humans, human artifacts, and the non-human life alike. This definition, based on harmony, rational order, and definiteness, largely deter-mined Western aesthetics from the Renaissance to this day, with some notable exceptions. In eighteenth-century British philosophy (Addison, Burke), defi-nitions of the sublime as something not necessarily pleasurable but infinitely greater and unlimited transcended the classical understanding of beauty and consequently influenced European Romantic art. In the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth century, on the other hand, Modernist art began consciously to reject the established norms of beauty to focus instead on the unsightly challenges of an increasingly industrialized, impoverished, and dirty Western world.

In contrast to abundant treatises on beauty, the ugly was hardly mentioned, unless by measure of exclusion as something impaired or faulty (Aquinas) or form- and shapeless (Plotinus). There are exceptions, however, such as the German Hegel students Christian Hermann Weiße, and, in particular, Karl Rosenkranz, who in his 1853 Aesthetik des Häßlichen, developed a system-atic treatment of the hitherto neglected category of ugliness. Not surprisingly, Rosenkranz built on established characteristics of the ugly – formlessness, imperfection, disfiguration – to discuss its manifestations in nature, art, and human life. Likening beauty to health, and ugliness to illness, Rosenkranz furthermore opposed purity (of purpose, form, or even feeling) and dirt (as manifested in infection, contagion, and disease). As Sander Gilman points out, this underlying medical analogy linked ugliness to anything deviating from the healthy norm (aging, deformation, malfunction) and simultaneously equated the «unhealthy» body (of humans, animals, or even landscapes) with unhappiness.

If beauty, purity, ugliness, and dirt are distinctly man-made concepts, so, too, is nature a product of our cultural imagination. While the Latin word «natura» points to «innate disposition,» meaning that plants, animals, and geologic features develop on their own accord, «nature» in the modern world has come to denote plants, animals, and wilderness, i.e., environments be-


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lieved to be unaltered by human intervention. In our age of the Anthropo-cene, however, with its deforestation, pollution, nonnative introduced spe-cies, planetwide spread of industrial particulates, and mass extinctions, it has become impossible to distinguish altered from nonaltered environments, making nature a construct of human fantasy and projection rather than an ac-tual site or place. By entitling our collection «dirty nature,» we would like to draw attention to this construct: rather than pure nature, i.e., an environment without contaminants or adulteration, we pose that nature is invariably dirty, i.e., fraught with remnants of human intervention. Yet we also make a broader point: not only is all of nature infused by or altered by human activity in some form, but human beings are also, and always have been, part of nature’s on-going physical processes and cycles. In other words, we seek to dismantle this dichotomy from both sides. There is no pure nature, nor pure culture/humanity. They are both dirty, as in mixed and blended. Dirt can hence be positive; it is certainly quite grounded and pragmatic.

However, upon closer inspection, dirt tends to be a similarly fraught yet multivalent concept like beauty or purity. While «dirt» in the English lan-guage refers to dust, filth, and grime, it also denotes soil as the fragile layers of organic and inorganic matter covering the bedrock of the earth. In this way, «dirt» paradoxically embodies both what is imagined as a threat to human life and the very sustenance of it. The German language, on the other hand, reserves different terms for «dirt» (Dreck) and «soil» (Erde or Boden) even though the latter term has acquired a nationalistic and bigoted flavor in the wake of the Nazi ideology of «Blut und Boden.» For this reason, «dirty na-ture» seeks a «post-soil» approach in order to avoid such racist and disturb-ing ideas of «purity.» Being post-soil means that we fully acknowledge the grit and hybridity of nature in the Anthropocene while also seeking to bring awareness to the devastating impact of current industrial and energy practices on the physical world.

The scope of essays covered in this collection includes nineteenth- to twenty-first-century texts, as well as an array of genres including a drama, novellas, novels, nature writing, scientific travel writing, and poetry. Sullivan begins with an expanded exploration of dirty nature in terms of cultural prac-tices, soil science, and literature. Building on dirt as both an embodiment and product of bodily and cultural exchanges, she then studies various «narra-tives of extraction» documenting mining and contemporary energy practices such as solar energy in works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, E.T.A. Hoff-mann, Jules Verne, and Andreas Eschbach. Caroline Schaumann examines Alexander von Humboldt’s gritty engagement with his environment in con-junction with Karl Rosenkranz’s treatise on the ugly. Whereas Rosenkranz


108 Caroline Schaumann/Heather I. Sullivan

judges an illustration from Humboldt’s Vues des Cordillères (1810–13) as an example of filthy and revolting nature, Schaumann contends that Humboldt does not distinguish between disgusting and delightful nature. Still there re-mains a clear rift between his descriptions in the diaries that record the un-pleasant and quite bodily details of his American journey and the published account, which tends to embed the latter in a larger narrative conforming to nineteenth-century ideals of aesthetics and visual consumption. Sean Ire-ton expands the focus on the nineteenth century by contrasting the works of Adalbert Stifter, in particular Der Hochwald (1842/44) and two texts of the short story collection Bunte Steine (1853), with first-person nature ac-counts by John Muir and Henry David Thoreau. Through this cross-cultural and transnational comparison, Ireton locates Stifter in the tradition of envi-ronmental writing while providing important insights into the differences between American «nature writing» emphasizing «wilderness» and Euro-pean studies of humanly inflected «landscapes.» Continuing the emphasis on Austrian writers but moving into the twentieth century, Gundolf Graml offers a close reading of Hans Lebert’s Die Wolfshaut (1960) as one of the first Austrian texts to address the Nazi past, war crimes, and a soldier’s self-critical reflection. Using Wolfgang Iser’s concept of «literary anthropology,» Graml reads the text’s abundant examples of dirty nature as metaphorical and metaphysical manifestations of human reality. Graml asserts that the text’s references to nature not only visualize blind spots of the Nazi past and give cues to repressed memories, but also, in the vein of Hubert Zapf’s «cultural ecology,» function as an ethical counterpoint to ideological appropriations of nature.

The final two essays look at the challenges that dirty nature, or more specif-ically pollution and decomposition, poses to traditional conventions of genre and form. Sabine Wilke’s reading of Wilhelm Raabe Pfisters Mühle (1884) not only provides the first ecocritical reading of the text in the context of Law-rence Buell’s toxic discourse but also suggests that Raabe’s experimentation with genre, discourse, and rhetorical figures transcends nineteenth-century realist fiction. Wilke contends that in the face of an all-pervasive pollution, each of Raabe’s protagonists resorts to a different register of speech. Through this discursive competition, toxic discourse emerges as a poetic practice that productively begins to shape a modernist fiction. Charlotte Melin, finally, dis-cerns a new mode of narrating nature in twenty-first century Naturlyrik. In particular, she looks at two exemplary poems by Hendrik Rost and Christian Lehnert that illustrate the temporal and physical process of decomposition. In this way, Melin suggests, contemporary nature poetry recovers the missing ecological element of decay, acknowledges the effects of human intervention


Dirty Nature: Grit, Grime, and Genre in the Anthropocene 109

such as pollution, and seeks to depict a dynamic and changing environment that is in reciprocal interaction with humans.

This wide range of essays reconsiders a plethora of possible meanings of «nature» in the Anthropocene and offers sustenance for further engagement. If our daily contact with the environment has become «post-natural» in the sense that it is a complex hybrid of natural and cultural processes shaped by the interaction between humans and nonhuman forces and characterized by organic and inorganic pollution, this also provides us with the opportunity to rethink the established categories that define nature, culture, aesthetics, and dirt alike. The question of genre addresses a significant cultural problem to-day: the need to find textual forms, vocabulary, and the discourses adequate to address in a meaningful way for a broad audience the vast anthropogenic changes to the world’s physical environments.

Works Cited

Gilman, Sander L. Health and Illness: Images of Difference. London: Reaktion Books, 1995. 52–54.

Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007.

Sullivan, Heather I. «Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticsm.» ISLE 19.3 (Summer 2012): 515–31.

Zapf, Hubert. «Literature as Cultural Ecology: Notes Towards a Functional Theory of Imaginative Texts, with Examples from American Literature.» REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 17 (2001): 85–100.


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Dirty Nature: Ecocriticism and Tales of Extraction – Mining and Solar Power –

in Goethe, Hoffmann, Verne, and Eschbach

HEATHER I. SULLIVAN

TRINITY UNIVERSITY

While the overloaded concept of «nature» suffers from dualistic and idealized connotations, «dirty nature,» in contrast, offers something for everyone.1 Dirty nature conveys the physical world on a mundane, human scale where our body and other bodies and matter around us are the most concretely «local» environment, and yet it also takes into account our imbrication in broader material exchanges at the regional and global level. The concept of dirty nature encompasses the bodily processes of consumption and repro-duction carried out by all living things, but also their interactions with indus-trial products that now cover the Earth. Since all of the matter on the Earth’s surface has been imbued with anthropogenic substances or industrially pro-cessed elements, scientists have recently labeled our era the «Anthropocene,» or the geological age of human impact on the Earth’s surface and systems most clearly traceable since the Industrial Revolution.2 As a result, many eco-critics label the physical world «nature-culture» or «natureculture,» meaning inseparable spheres of emergence and construction, while others speak of the «radical pastoral,» «ecology without nature,» or the «end of nature.»3 In this essay, I focus on «dirty nature» in order to shift away from the question of places, whether natural, cultural, or natural-cultural, and emphasize instead nature as the ongoing bodily processes of all living things using and exchang-ing matter and energy.4 Specifically, I explore dirty nature in terms of the dirty processes of modern energy extraction upon which our bodies and most cul-tures depend today.

Dirty nature evokes the material processes of extraction and consumption enabling the survival of all living things but also those fueling technology and the economy. During the Anthropocene, human beings have increased the extraction rates of energy and resources to an unprecedented level, and at the same time, have expanded technology to equally unprecedented levels. These two factors have led to an increasing blindness towards the impact of extrac-tion, and even to the paradoxical claim that we have ever more independence from all environmental limits even as we access and deplete ever more natural resources. In expanding our technological abilities, we must also extract an


112 Heather I. Sullivan

increasing amount of energy. Spurious claims to «limitlessness» reveal a cul-tural blindness to the obvious parameters of the biosphere – and to the laws of thermodynamics. As the environmental philosopher Val Plumwood writes: the dominant forms of economic, political, and scientific reason are «subject to a systematic pattern of distortions and illusions in which they are histori-cally embedded and which they are unable to see or reflect upon» (Plumwood 16). In fact, Plumwood notes that these «blind spots» form as the emphasis on power (she means cultural, but the implications pertain also to the physical power of energy sources) leads people to «misunderstand their own enabling conditions – the body, ecology and non-human nature» (Plumwood 17). In this essay, I utilize the framework of dirty nature as an effort to render visible the blind spots, particularly in terms of the dirty extractive processes produc-ing both cultural and material power.

This essay thus begins with a framework of dirt; that is, it is grounded on cross-disciplinary understandings from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences regarding dirt’s biological and cultural meanings. It then ex-amines several literary portrayals of the dirty processes of extracting matter and energy from the environment. These narratives of extraction include the mining in Goethe’s Faust II (1832), E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Die Bergwerke zu Falun (1819), and Jules Verne’s The Begum’s Millions (1879); and the captur-ing of solar power in the best-selling science fiction author Andreas Esch-bach’s space thriller, Solar Station (1999). Although it is a significant leap from mining into solar energy, I use this juxtaposition here to demonstrate how the cultural role of extractive processes, however radically different in form, still share very significant characteristics as producers of power, pollution, and potential weapons. Throughout the age of the Anthropocene, industrialized nations maintain a dependence upon extensive mining even as they produce many stories about our unlimited capacity to create new (clean) technologies that will save us from our own follies. Hence a study of «traditional» mining stories juxtaposed with a futuristic tale of harnessing solar power replicates the actual status of most industrialized nations today: still digging for coal and minerals (and even more radically with such techniques as mountain-top mining that blasts away entire mountain tops) and drilling for oil and gas, while also imagining and developing other energy sources with the belief that access to unlimited clean and easy energy will – finally – have no costs. These stories reveal that some form of blindness to the costs of accessing and releas-ing massive energy remains constant, regardless of the energy form, and re-gardless of the era. They also exemplify the tendency to overwrite large-scale dirty enterprises into glamorous personal adventures documenting signifi-cant cultural achievements.


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First, then, is the matter of dirt itself as both material and discursive: dirty nature embraces the materiality of dirt while cautiously avoiding the troubled connotations of soil discourse. Indeed, I strive to be «postsoil» since «soil» is often associated with nationalistic sentiments regarding land ownership that exclude «Others» in a typically idealized and often racist view of agrar-ian settings reminiscent of «Blut und Boden.» In contrast, the framework of dirty nature provides a more all-embracing, non-nationalistic, postcolonial, and potentially less anthropocentric sense of enmeshment in our gritty and globalized material surroundings.5 We cannot entirely eliminate «soil» from this formula, however, just as erasing «nature» from environmental discourse is likely impossible despite Timothy Morton’s best efforts.6 For example, the geomorphologist David Montgomery and the soil scientist Chris Maser as-sert that soil, as the basis for agriculture, is concretely the basis of all «civiliza-tion.» In his essay on forests, Maser even idealizes soil as the very «placenta» for life:

Soil is the placenta that nurtures all life – the rocky materials that form the soil in part, and the living components of the system that break down the rocky material and allow it to be used. The soil is the stage upon which the entire human drama is enacted. And if we eliminated the tools of war and had total world peace but destroyed the soil with air-borne pollution, we would still face extinction, because nothing grows without healthy soil. (Maser 14)

While Maser refers to soil as «life’s placenta» and so reminds us not to lose sight of the solid materiality of the life-supporting stuff, we shall nevertheless use the broader term of «dirt» here so as to include pollution and in order to avoid the troublingly racist associations with «pure» soil. We are, after all, in the Anthropocene when all dirt is dirty, so to speak, and not just because it is associated with bodily exchanges.

Moreover, dirt itself is not an entirely unsullied concept; it is often perme-ated by gendered, racist, and culturally determined meanings. Mary Douglas, for example, asserts in her 1966 anthropological study of purity and pollution that «our ideas of dirt also express symbolic systems» (47). Dirt, she says, is a cultural designation for disorder:

As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder. If we shun absolute dirt, it is not because of craven fear, still less dread or holy terror. Nor do our ideas about disease account for the range of our behavior in cleaning or avoiding dirt. Dirt offends against order. Elimi-nating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organize the environ-ment. (12)

Dirt disturbs order; hence dirt is that which is, however one determines it, «out of place.» Similarly, according to Greg Garrard’s second edition of



Ecocriticism (2012), the term pollution denotes a cultural norm describ-ing something out of place: pollution «does not name a substance or class of substances, but rather represents an implicit normative claim that too much of something is present in the environment, usually in the wrong place» (6). Studies of dirty nature must therefore relate to both the symbolic meanings attributed to dirt and to the actual materiality of soil, pollution, etc. Cultur-ally determined notions of «things out of place» are now, though, rendered rather quaint in terms of the industrial pollution that has already permeated virtually all the living bodies in the biosphere and covered the earth in a geo-logically traceable layer of anthropogenic substances and human alterations. We citizens in the age of the Anthropocene measure amounts of toxins in our body – and the earth’s surfaces – rather than their presence or absence. Dirty nature’s vital exchanges enabling the biosphere and modern industrial perme-ations of toxins have become inseparable categories. How can we therefore respond to this understanding of pollution and dirt as that which is «out of place» when there is no place or body without traces of such inescapable mat-ter? Here I study how narratives of extraction address the literal «displace-ment» of matter and energy for our human benefit. While all living things seek to maximize their extraction of necessary matter and energy, the mod-ern, technologically enhanced efforts of human beings to access any and all energy resources produce cultures whose very base is earthmoving «displace-ments.» These displacements readily allow blind spots towards long-term, wide-spread impacts.

Unlike recent environmental novels such as Ann Pancake’s 2007 Strange as This Weather Has Been that tells of the Appalachian communities buried under the waste and runoff from mountaintop removal coal mining, many older literary narratives of extraction share with current media stories the tendency to overwrite mining’s problems and disasters with glorious tales of heroic extraction and individual accomplishments leading to technologi-cal productions and economic might. The benefits derived from resource ex-traction are visible in the spaces of power and economic clout but the dirty waste of such practices as mining, drilling, fracking, and even the production of solar cells are not. This standard cultural norm of erasure works all the more disturbingly when the industrial dirt and toxic waste that infiltrates our systems cannot be easily seen by human eyes, nor their risks assessed without expert knowledge and advanced technology.7 The literary texts re-lating to extractive processes are typical of this erasure and the illusions that emerge in lieu of damage assessment. Even so, they also portray creative means of negotiating with the dreck of extraction in ways that shed light on these illusions. As Ellen Stroud quips in «Does Nature Always Matter? Fol-


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lowing Dirt through History»: «Our primary question is this: where is the dirt?» (80).

Mining narratives offer much in the way of dirt. Goethe and Hoffmann document the dawn of the Anthropocene when mining’s expanding influence aided by improved metallurgy provided greater access to (and use of) pre-cious metals and, especially, coal, and thus allowed a literal re-shaping of the world by fueling the Industrial Revolution. Verne’s novel stands midway be-tween the early Anthropocene and the twenty-first century and thus provides an important bridge to Eschbach and contemporary society. Specifically, Verne offers an irreconcilably split vision with, on the one side, an early cri-tique of how modern extractive processes are both devastating to landscapes and wed to power and military conquests and, on the other, a utopian vision of a balanced, modernized, and very green city apparently free from mining waste even as it relishes access to mineral resources. This unacknowledged dissonance continues full force today. Eschbach’s novel, finally, presents the «dusk» of what he calls «the age of fossil fuels,» engaging contemporary de-bates about «clean» solar energy. As Eschbach perhaps inadvertently reveals in his thriller, however, all power sources, even the sun, have their dark side. Solar power is much more environmentally friendly in terms of extraction, though the power cells require toxic materials; at the same time, all energy sources induce various forms of blindness to inadvertent and often long-term impacts. The accelerated extractions and displacements of energy that fuel our world can produce unexpected effects that are often conveniently ignored. If «pollution» is that which is «out of place» in Douglas’s and Garrard’s terms, then our entire modern culture is built on top of «polluted,» and displaced, or extracted, matter. The physical displacements empower ideological dis-placements so that illusions of endless, clean power appear part of mun-dane reality whereas dirty, desolate industrial sites seem the stuff of science fiction.

In Goethe’s Faust II, the mining and dike construction make overt such illusions.8 These illusions divert attention from what is in fact quite visible: the lack of actual gold undergirding the Kaiser’s new paper economy and the putrid swamp left after building the dike. In both cases, Goethe exposes not only how capitalism relies on exploitative greed funded, as Mephistopheles notes, by «war, trade, and piracy» (Faust 11187), but also more broadly on the will of power playing out across the land creating and reinforcing communal-ly accepted illusions.9 Power in Faust II appears most blatantly as the illusory control over extracted resources like gold, water, land, and the ocean’s energy. Hence Act I quickly turns to the lurid potential of extraction once Faust rous-es himself from dreams and despair after losing Gretchen. Mephistopheles



and Faust arrive at the court and propose digging for gold as an answer to the Kaiser’s financial woes. With the mining of gold, or even just plowing around here or there in case it is randomly buried, the Kaiser has a quick and dirty path to wealth. Mephistopheles assures him that where there is a need, there is an answer: some gold might be buried and need only rediscovery, and some waits in the depths of the earth.

Wo fehlts nicht irgendwo auf dieser Welt?Dem dies, dem das, hier aber fehlt das Geld.Vom Estrich zwar ist es nicht aufzuraffen;Doch Weisheit weiß das Tiefste herzuschaffen.In Bergesadern, MauergründenIst Gold gemünzt und ungemünzt zu finden,Und fragt ihr mich wer es zu Tage schafft:Begabten Mann’s Natur- und Geisteskraft. (Faust 4889–94)

With wisdom and talent, one can access the gold and bring it to daylight; one must only enter the depths to find it. And even better, one need not even actu-ally mine: one can just assume there is somewhere gold to be extracted which means that future extraction offers as much heft as actual unearthing. In ef-fect, Mephistopheles suggests that the Kaiser and the «Schatzmeister» base the empire’s financial system on the (illusory) potential to find the gold that might be underground. Already in the early nineteenth century, extractive practices hold such power in German-speaking areas that their mere possibil-ity stimulates dramatic yet ungrounded economic wealth.

Goethe is, of course, skeptical here, and his emphasis on illusion is not merely theatrical. He famously condemned the economic shift into paper money, which is the next step after Mephistopheles proposes to claim min-ing rights without necessarily utilizing them. The actual process of mining in Faust II is depicted as very distant from the dirty realities of the labor; this may well be ironic considering Goethe’s struggles with the Ilmenau silver mine that failed due to flooding and lack of rich veins. In his Amtliche Schrif-ten documenting his work for the «Bergwerkskommission» from 1777–1800, there are innumerable references to the battle against water in reopening the mine and the long-term debates regarding the hoped-for economic benefits long before any mining began. Whereas Goethe contended for years with the practical problems of discerning mine ownership, the direction of profits, and the never-ending troubles with water containment, Mephistopheles promises the Kaiser that he already owns the land and so any potential gold need only be assumed and then later dug up at his convenience. «Das alles liegt im Boden still begraben. / Der Boden ist des Kaisers, der soll’s haben» (Faust 4937–38). Sounding already much like current proclamations regarding access to fossil


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fuels, Faust claims that the land is not lacking gold but rather the imagination necessary to extract it:

Das Übermaß der Schätze, das, erstarrt,In Deinen Landen tief im Boden harrt,Liegt ungenutzt. Der weiteste GedankeIst solches Reichtums kümmerliche Schranke,Die Phantasie, in ihrem höchsten Flug,Sie strengt sich an und tut sich nie genug. Doch fassen Geister, würdig tief zu schauen,Zum Grenzenlosen grenzenlos Vertrauen. (Faust 6111–18)

The mere possibility that something might be extractable can stand in for the actual obtainment of minerals and matter, as Goethe rather presciently portrays. Commodities as illusory power rather than material stuff troubled Goethe. The play clearly links these economic debates about extraction and currency with illusion. In fact, the economic conversations are twice inter-rupted by theatrical performances that overtly play with illusions within il-lusions. Thus Mephistopheles’s mining proposal is first interrupted by the «Mummenschanz,» and then the continuing conversation regarding the use of paper money to replace the gold that has not (yet) been mined is inter-rupted by the magic lantern scene in which Faust conjures Helen. This cre-ation of illusion has such vibrant «realism» that he believes it himself and thus tries to grab her image from within the illusion, thereby destroying it. In other words, illusions, the extractive process of mining, and the concomitant wealth are repeatedly linked in the play. Mining for minerals in Faust II is as much about spreading illusions of power as it is about extracting and displac-ing matter at whim.

While there may be no actual digging in the first act of Faust II, there is plenty in the final act, at least in the background. This digging relates to an-other process of modern technological accomplishment: the building of the dike and the ensuing need to dig channels for drainage. The problem of wa-ter containment thus links Goethe’s experience with mining and the trage-dy’s dike. The dirty labor of building a dike, later documented in Theodor Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter, is kept in the background in Faust II and carried out by magical «Lemuren.» Tellingly, this process is also enabled by illusions (though, again, digging channels was the bane of Goethe’s mine commission work). Besides the lemurs, there is also the watery illusion supplied by the sprites when Mephistopheles’s devilish helpers fail to conquer the «other Kai-ser’s» armies. Faust needs this victory to fund his plans for the dike. He thus celebrates the astonishing power of cascading yet imaginary water that brings triumph:



Den Wasserfräulein müssen unsre RabenRecht aus dem Grund geschmeichelt haben,Dort fängt es schon zu rieseln an.An mancher trocknen, kahlen FelsenstelleEntwickelt sich die volle rasche Quelle,Um jenen Sieg ist es getan. (Faust 10717–22)

Mephistopheles sneers at the foolish human beings who believe the illusion of «watery lies» with such conviction that they fear they are drowning while on dry soil:

Ich sehe nichts von diesen Wasserlügen,Nur Menschen-Augen lassen sich betrügenUnd mich ergötzt der wunderliche Fall.Sie stürzen fort zu ganzen hellen Haufen,Die Narren wähnen zu ersaufen, Indem sie frei auf festem Lande schnaufen,Und lächerlich mit Schwimmgebärden laufen. (Faust 10734–40)

This illusion of flooding overwhelms the «enemy,» bringing the conquest that Faust and Mephistopheles sought for the Kaiser. In response, the Kaiser helps finance Faust’s new dream to capture the ocean’s energy with a dike. With money wrought from illusion, they receive land from the Archbishop who approves it (despite the obvious deal with the devil) but requires that they pay a certain percentage of profit to the church. In the end, Faust has his dike, but he is literally blind and thus cannot see the putrid swamp that stands where he hoped for «free land.» The meaning of this scene is hotly contested: scholars such as R.H. Stephenson, Krzysztof Lipinski, and Géza von Molnár inter-pret it as an indication that Faust is the ultimate «land developer» leading us productively into economic modernity.10 Kate Rigby’s ecocritical work, in contrast, stresses the relevance of Faust’s blindness in this scene as a failure to see the swamp, not to mention the murders that enabled it.11 Faust’s concrete situation lends credence to Rigby’s reading: as a dying man whom «Sorge» has blinded, he yet again believes his own illusions (this time of «free land» for the «benefit of others» yet enabled by murders, piracy, and war). I concur with Rigby, noting that the association of blindness with land control and ex-traction in Goethe’s tragedy reveals how modernity all too often «sees» only its own power and profit; it is befallen by blind spots, as Plumwood asserts.

While Goethe’s Faust II decisively documents blindness to dirty swamps, it still overlooks the dirt produced by large-scale earth shaping projects. In contrast, Hoffmann’s romantic tale, Die Bergwerke zu Falun, depicts with startlingly detailed «realism» the concrete impact of mining on landscapes. His protagonist, Elis Fröbom, nevertheless follows standard romantic tra-


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jectories and thus finally succumbs to the beautiful illusions evoked by the mine.12 Hoffmann’s tale smoothly moves between hallucinatory romantic fervor and disturbingly accurate descriptions of mines in one of the few lit-erary examples we find during this era portraying, at least briefly, an actu-al rather than idealized mine. Indeed, the concrete devastation wrought by large-scale mining and the resulting heaps of slag shock Elis when he first arrives in Falun:

Bekanntlich ist die große Tagesöffnung der Erzgrube zu Falun an zwölfhundert Fuß lang, sechshundert Fuß breit und einhundertundachtzig Fuß tief. Die schwarz-braunen Seitenwände gehen anfangs größtenteils senkrecht nieder; dann verflächen sie sich aber gegen die mittlere Tiefe durch ungeheuern Schutt und Trümmerhal-den. In diesen und an den Seitenwänden blickt hin und wieder die Zimmerung al-ter Schächte hervor, […]. Kein Baum, kein Grashalm sproßt in dem kahlen zer-bröckelten Steingeklüft und in wunderlichen Gebilden, manchmal riesenhaften versteinerten Tieren, manchmal menschlichen Kolossen ähnlich, ragen die zacki-gen Felsenmassen ringsumher empor. Im Abgrunde liegen in wilder Zerstörung durcheinander Steine, Schlacken – ausgebranntes Erz, und ein ewig betäubender Schwefeldunst steigt aus der Tiefe, als würde unten der Höllensud gekocht, dessen Dämpfe alle grüne Lust der Natur vergiften. (Hoffmann 180–81)

The detailed imagery of a hellish landscape rather ironically lends a sense of weighty realism to this dark and dreamy tale that conjures two seemingly in-compatible but actually fully interwoven visions: first, the typical solipsistic fantasies about the alluring depths of the earth as the stand-in for individual subjectivity that is found so frequently in Romanticism (and discussed at length by Hartmut Böhme), and, second, the sensible profiteering provid-ed by a middle-class marriage and career in mine ownership. The apparent conflict between these two paths distracts us from the heaps of slag; indeed, it does not take long for young Elis to be overcome with love for the head miner’s daughter Ulla, whose hand would allow him the opportunity to enter the comfortable middle class, and so to embrace a Faustian blindness to the devastated landscape. This attraction successfully leads him to forget his ini-tial horror and enables him to become a dedicated and industrious miner. Yet Elis remains true to Hoffmannesque fates, for he is equally quickly overcome by the vision of a mineral queen who appears to him in a sexual dream from deep within the earth, as a kind of fantasy earth mother promising unbeliev-able riches and insights. Significantly, the dramatic tension arising from Elis’s apparent choice between the economic stability offered by Ulla and the erotic fantasies offered by the mineral queen not only depicts his splintered subjec-tivity, as always in Hoffmann’s tales, but, even more so, works as a distraction from Elis’s other choices in the story. In the face of the dramatic love triangle,



the more fundamental dichotomy in the text slips away despite its prevalence in the first part of the tale: the sheer horror of mining landscapes as well as the troubles Elis expresses regarding his earlier career choice as a trader on a com-mercial ship sailing to the East carrying goods and resources extracted from elsewhere. Though scholars most typically read Hoffmann as a schizophrenic visionary torn between two worlds, I assert that Ulla and the mineral queen are not so much oppositions as they are part of interwoven inevitability – two sides of a coin, as it were – emerging from the opportunities and challenges of middle-class economic developments.13

Elis thus neatly enacts capitalistic illusions based on the belief that he can have it all with no perceivable costs: he can marry Ulla, run the mine, and ob-tain the magical gems provided by the mineral queen. The illusion of choice between two female figures overrides, or perhaps determines, Elis’s battle to find his way through a world where the slag heaps become invisible in the face of both hallucinatory and real wealth waiting under the depths of the earth. On his wedding day, Elis strives for the ultimate merging of what is already linked: he scurries off to the mine to see his beloved «mineral queen» and to obtain for his human bride an astonishing cherry-red garnet. He states to Ulla with a quivering voice:

Mir ist in dieser Nacht alles entdeckt worden. Unten in der Teufe liegt in Chlorit und Glimmer eingeschlossen der kirschrot funkelnde Almandin, auf den unsere Lebenstafel eingegraben, den mußt du von mir empfangen als Hochzeitsgabe. Er ist schöner als der herrlichste blutrote Karfunkel, und wenn wir, in treuer Liebe ver-bunden hineinblicken in sein strahlendes Licht, können wir es deutlich er schauen, wie unser Inneres verwachsen ist mit dem wunderbaren Gezweige, das aus dem Herzen der Königin im Mittelpunkt der Erde emporkeimt. (Hoffmann 194)

Elis lives the middle-class dream all too briefly. Indeed, the economics of mining for gems (Die Bergwerke), marrying for money and position (Der goldene Topf), creating gold with alchemy (Der Sandmann), and shaping beautiful jewelry and murdering to retrieve it (Das Fräulein von Scuderi), are common themes in Hoffmann’s works. As always, the character is distracted from the bounties of bourgeois life and leaps instead into death and madness in the belief that he will somehow find solutions for his divided subjectivity in embracing personal delusions instead of broadly shared societal illusions. The urge to praise Romanticism’s perverse preference for individual madness rather than shared illusions is dampened by the grisly deaths of Hoffmann’s characters; either choice is decidedly disturbing. Significantly, Die Bergwerke zu Falun may appear to erase the dirt of mining but it actually closes with a literal return of the body to dust. Having been trapped on his wedding day in a mine collapse and killed, Elis’s corpse is finally uncovered fifty years later


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in the novella’s final scene. As the miners unearth it, they believe it is fossil-ized yet with just one touch, it crumbles away into dust. «Man bemerkte, daß der Körper des Unglücklichen, der fälscherweise für versteinert gehalten, in Staub zu zerfallen begann» (Hoffmann 196). Hoffmann’s dichotomy of soci-etal versus individual illusions fades behind this final image of bodily materi-ality that foregrounds dirty nature.

Hoffmann’s and Goethe’s narratives of extraction demonstrate the inter-woven celebrations and fears surrounding mining in the early nineteenth century. One can embrace Faustian blindness and Hoffmannesque madness alongside financial success or one can dangerously seek to expose the mass-cultural illusions built on the unsteady ground of displacement. Certainly, the power of displacement projects like extractive processes and building dikes cannot be underestimated. Mining for coal and minerals during the burgeon-ing industrial revolution in Europe, during which Hoffmann and Goethe wrote, helped fuel the vast conquest of lands and peoples by the Europeans on virtually every continent. In the German-speaking areas, mining played a significant role even though the relatively few narratives depicting mines directly tend to ignore the filthy coal dust coating the cities like London and emphasize instead the provocative promise of discovering silver and gems un-derground. This exciting prospect meant that mining was extremely popular during this era in German areas, so much so that many tourists traveled ex-pressly to explore the deep mines.14 Scientists of the era also celebrated the mines as sites where God’s book of nature – in the form of the stratigraphic history of the earth – is revealed in its full glory to human eyes, as found in Henrich Steffens’s and Novalis’s work, for example, both of whom studied at the famous Freiberg mining academy. The knowledge gained in geology during this period concretely rewrote the biblical account of the planet’s quick creation and caused a revolution in thinking when geologists like James Hutton and eventually Charles Lyell asserted the tremendous antiquity of the earth based on material evidence and layers of rocks. This was a time of intense fascination for rocks, stones, minerals, mines, and mountains, all of which provided the necessary materials for spatial conquest of the globe with colonization as well as a temporal conquest of the earth’s history with evi-dence for geological history.15 Rarely, though, do the many romantic texts documenting this enthrallment with earthly excavations evoke the ensuing dirt and damage done by mining.16 The broad-ranging implications of «dirt,» relevant for dirty nature, are typically overlooked or overwritten in these texts by aesthetic revelry in the beautiful minerals and sublime mountains or else by the mysterious inner journeys into mines and caves carried out by poetic young male protagonists like Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen and



Ludwig Tieck’s Christian in Der Runenberg.17 Mining narratives in the age of Goethe exhibit conflicting impulses in terms of depicting or shrouding the inevitable fact that we are fully a part of the «dirty,» that is, material, processes from which we derive the matter and energy necessary for life. The culturally determined and problematic demarcation between humanity, as the «extrac-tors,» and the natural world, as «extractable resources,» emerges in narra-tives of extraction. Goethe and Hoffmann write mining as the site where the concrete (environmental) results of digging are overwritten by the desire for gold, jewels, and modern economic power. Yet the dirt finally reappears in both cases: as putrid swamp and body crumbling to dust.

Verne’s novel, The Begum’s Millions, written midway between the early Anthropocene and today, even more concretely presents the dualistic stance of modern extractive and economic practices: the devastation of mining on the one side, and on the other, the utopian dreams of endless energy, which are initially presented as two separate cultures. Verne closes his novel, however, with a simplistic reconciliation enabled by military success. The sheer horror of mining portrayed early in the novel is simply replaced by a happy mar-riage story at the end (as if rewriting Hoffmann with a wedding). Whereas Goethe and Hoffmann address the illusions related to mining and the large-scale economic profits, Verne’s tale from 1879 reflecting France’s defeat by the Germans in 1870 initially depicts a seemingly irreconcilable dichotomy between two countries rather than a problem inherent to the extractive pro-cesses of modern capitalism itself.18 This dualistic vision is expressed by the extreme contrasts between the idealized, green, and environmentally friendly «France-Ville» and the grim industrial and mining moonscape of the German «Stahlstadt.» This story was originally written by Paschal Grousset as The Langevol Inheritance, and then revised and recreated by Verne at the behest of his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, in order to make it marketable; in both versions, the sympathetic French doctor Dr. Sarrasin shares a vast inheritance from India with his German nemesis, the Faustian scientist Herr Schultze, who works only to eradicate forever what he perceives to be weak «French sensibilities.»19

Verne’s young hero, Marcel Bruckmann, «bridges» in name and practice the two rival communities built with the «Begum’s millions»: he works for the protoecotopia of France-Ville founded – as so many ecotopias are – in the Pacific Northwest (Southern Oregon) by infiltrating and spying on the dystopian city of Stahlstadt where Herr Schultze strips the land with mines in order to fuel his Metropolis-like industrial site of oppressive military produc-tion. As a long-time family friend and helper of Sarrasin’s lazy son, Octave, and young lover of their daughter, Jeanne, Marcel dedicates his impressive in-


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tellect and skills to become part of the mechanistic German hierarchy. Indeed, Verne dedicates much more space to the intricate clockwork of the mining community, portraying with elaborate detail the machinery, scheduling, and, with much sentimentality, the suffering lives of the hardworking, exploit-ed men, women, and children there. France-Ville, in contrast, is lovely, but equally regulated. Its location is «on the balmy Pacific coast» where it fulfills what we today might describe as middle-class eco dreams filled with green parks and waterways everywhere, individual houses for each family, and an emphasis on clean construction and aesthetics: «Every house will be separate on a lot planted with trees, lawn, and flowers» (Verne 121). The houses can be no more than three stories high in order to share the air and light, and must all have a flower garden in front; the practical needs for water and waste are integral to construction: «Houses will be built over an open basement, with openings on all sides and thus providing under the ground-floor a subsoil of aeration as well as a kind of hall. The water pipes and drains will be exposed, installed against a central pillar in such a way that their state can be easily veri-fied» (Verne 123). Above all, hygiene is the ultimate goal:

The layout of the interior rooms is left to the individual’s desires. But those two dangerous sources of disease – veritable hotbeds of miasma and poison – are abso-lutely forbidden: carpets and wallpaper. The floors, artistically constructed of pre-cious woods assembled as mosaics by gifted cabinetmakers, would be a total waste if they were to be buried under wool fabrics of dubious cleanliness. (Verne 123)

The smoke from fireplaces cannot be allowed to rise into the air, but rather it is «carried through subterranean conduits which suck it into special burners, supplied at the city’s expense to the rear of the houses […]. There, the smoke is stripped of its carbon particles and is then discharged in a colorless state into the atmosphere at a height of thirty-five meters above ground» (Verne 124). All these details about clean air as well as public buildings, free enter-prise, children’s exercise, and water flow are documented – with implied ob-jectivity – by a German newspaper in the novel, as if Verne himself could not quite bring himself to detail the ecotopia directly.

Verne’s vision of Stahlstadt, on the other hand, is portrayed directly by the narrator and at length. Its descriptions reveal dismay at the dingy landscapes colored only by shiny slag:

Black macadamized roads, surfaced with cinders and coke, wind along the moun-tains’ flanks. Under clumps of yellowish vegetation, one can see little piles of slag, dappled with all the colors of the prism, gleaming like the eyes of a basilisk. Here and there, an abandoned mine shaft, worn by the rains, overrun by briars, opens its gaping mouth, a bottomless abyss, like some crater of an extinct volcano. The air is heavy with smoke; it hangs like a somber cloak upon the earth. No birds fly



through this area; even the insects appear to avoid it; and, within the memory of man, not a single butterfly has ever been seen. (Verne 49)

This grim landscape reflects the harsh lives of its inhabitants. Marcel bravely enters this dark world in order to preserve the beauty of France-Ville. In the city of steel, he faces challenges but rises to the occasion and even flourishes, thanks to his clever abilities and dedication. He, like Hoffmann’s Elis, rapidly rises all the way to the top of the local hierarchy. As the new aide and guide to Schultze, Marcel achieves his goal of uncovering the evil German plan to build an enormous cannon that will destroy the French. The cannon can send a projectile many leagues away, and upon arrival, all its small pieces break apart and explode individually to release a poison gas that kills all life in the vicinity instantly. Herr Schultze proudly exclaims:

‹It is made to go only two leagues,› replied Herr Schultze, smiling. ‹But,› he added, pointing to another shell, ‹there’s a cast projectile. It’s loaded, that one, and contains thirty little cannons arranged symmetrically, cast one inside the other like the tubes in a telescope, and which, after being shot off like projectiles, become cannons in their turn, to spit out, one after another, little shells loaded with incendiary ma-terials. It’s like a battery that I can throw into space and which can carry fire and death to a whole city by overpowering it with a shower of inextinguishable flames!› (Verne 100)

The cannon is already armed and aimed at France-Ville, thus young Marcel must quickly escape the prisonlike city and warn the French. He succeeds thanks to heroic efforts in the nick of time, along with the fact that Schultze makes an error in his mathematical calculations of the speed and power of the projectile – it ends up spinning harmlessly around the earth like a satel-lite instead of destroying France-Ville. Hence the French victory provides the modern dream: France-Ville keeps its green harmony while taking over the industrial Stahlstadt from afar, allowing them to live with the best of both worlds. Marcel will ascend to rule Stahlstadt with France-Ville sensibilities, and he gets the girl, too. The novel ends with their happy marriage, the ar-rival of a baby, and the prospect of future rule of the mining city. Verne leaves completely unexplored how Marcel will transform Stahlstadt from its cur-rently devastating and exploitative practices. The absolutely irreconcilable differences between the ecotopia and the need for mineral extraction in min-ing are left unresolved. As a «Bruckmann,» Marcel metaphorically suggests a bridging, but the novel closes before actually presenting how this transfor-mation will come to be. From Goethe’s association of illusions and blind-ness to modern technological extractions and Hoffmann’s portrayal of how there seems to be no sane prospects for navigating the conflicts between wide-spread cultural illusions of the middle class and individual illusions of desire,


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Verne leaves the readers with a miraculous bridge supported, as pro forma for a late nineteenth-century novel, with a marriage of love. Or rather, he leaves the illusion intact. Environmentally speaking, the «progress» that we see here in moving from the Age of Goethe to Verne’s late-nineteenth century tech-nological speculations is a concretization of the illusions. However, this may well reveal Verne’s growing skepticism regarding modern technology rather than a blindness to its impact, which may explain why this novel, in stark con-trast to his world-famous journeys into the earth, under the sea, and around the world, remains relatively unknown much like his equally ignored dark novel of a «futuristic» and dystopian technological Paris in 1960, Paris in the Twentieth Century.20

Tracing mining tales from Goethe and Hoffmann to Verne, in other words, reveals an almost schizophrenic recognition and erasure of the damage caused by extraction. Despite the leap in time and technological development, the move from Verne’s novel to Eschbach’s at the end of the twentieth century continues this trend, and, in fact, demonstrates a further solidification of the split. Eschbach’s Solar Station portrays the quest to capture solar energy as a technological possibility that should be pursued at all costs in order to over-come the dirty impact of traditional extractive processes like mining that are contributing to climate change. The hard-edged critique with specific refer-ence to environmental damage exists alongside a sentimental technophile cel-ebration of solar energy as an answer to all of our problems. Thus the Vernian structure of critique/simple solution is upheld, but with technology as the answer rather than French culture. Eschbach’s support of solar energy as the most reasonable alternative to fossil fuels is the underlying theme for what turns out to be a standard action thriller in space.

Solar energy, however, is a topic of much significance for environmental thinking, as Eschbach wholeheartedly asserts in the novel and in his non-fic-tion text in which he takes his own fiction as pathbreaking futuristic predic-tion, Das Buch der Zukunft. Eschbach’s book of future predictions declares energy itself to be our fate, «Energie: Unser Schicksal,» and he describes our era as «das Ende des Ölzeitalters» and the beginning of «das solare Zeit alter.» He notes, with a techno-optimism undergirded by an acknowledgement of environmental costs, the concrete reality that our entire culture depends upon technological extraction of energy. «Alle Entwicklungsrichtungen, die wir bis jetzt besprochen haben, sind hohe, rasch treibende Äste an einem sehr großen und sehr alten Baum, der ‹technische Zivilisation› heißt. Dieser Baum wurzelt in – Energie» (Eschbach, Buch 101). In this assertion, Eschbach is absolutely right. He then speculates that wind and water energy will not be enough for the future, nor is nuclear energy the answer due to the waste problem. In-



stead, he states that we need to turn to the sun, which is an endless source of unlimited energy, «wirklich unbegrenzt.» Eschbach enthusiastically notes that:

Die einzige Energiequelle, die nach menschlichen Maßstäben wirklich unbegrenzt ist, ist die Sonnenenergie. Die Energiemenge, die unsere Sonne fortwährend ins All ausstrahlt, übersteigt jede Vorstellungskraft, und selbst der winzige Teil davon, den die Erde abbekommt, ist noch zehntausendmal mehr als alles, was wir selber so ab-funzeln in unseren Kraftwerken und Triebwerken. (Eschbach, Buch, 114–15)

Not unexpectedly for a technophile, he addresses the fascinating challeng-es of capturing solar energy, but fails to discuss what impact an endless and unlimited source of energy would have on our environment. This is a gap typical of the sorts of cultural assumptions and illusions explored by Goethe and Hoffmann, and exposed and then erased in Verne. It is a gap that we can hardly overlook today, considering the massive impact that the large quantity, yet still limited amount of fossil fuels have had on the planet’s surface and the biosphere broadly. Imagine what we could do and produce – including wastes – with unlimited access to energy! In other words, it is not just access and wastes that create environmental problems, but the potential of energy itself for transforming the environment.

Eschbach continues in Buch der Zukunft with an array of practical ap-proaches for possibly capturing solar energy, and explores the likely techno-logical difficulties, as in his novel. In Solar Station, the heroic Leonard Carr, an American scientist working as a mere «Hausmeister» on a Japanese solar station dedicated to capturing solar energy and relaying it to earth as an in-tense ray, must solve a mysterious murder that occurs in space. The USA has lost its premier role in space in the novel’s world, and Germany/Europe pro-vides only one of the antagonists, whereas the countries and peoples of Asia dominate the plot. Carr cleverly uses his lowly position among the Japanese to pursue the murderer without interference, and he eventually discovers that it was carried out by Al-Qaida terrorists who have infiltrated the station with one of their own. These terrorists soon arrive in person at the station, which they conquer, pirate style. Their goal is to use the concentrated solar power as a massive weapon, even larger than Herr Schultze’s cannon, in order to annihilate Mecca and then take it over themselves as if divinely inspired by the heavens (rather literally, here, since the power comes from the sun).21 Carr luckily overcomes the threat in a series of heroic escapades in zero gravity.

Eschbach’s hopes for solar energy are directly expressed by the commander of the space station as he encourages his fellow astronauts to save the station from the pirates. He highlights the need, the benefits for the environment, the


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promise of space travel it would allow, and the terrible environmental damage if we do not pursue solar power immediately.

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 intensiven Energiequellen mehr zur Verfügung außer der Atomenergie, und dann? Welche Zukunft können unsere Kinder dann noch wählen? Eine Zukunft, in der atomarer Abfall für Hunderttausende von Jahren aufbewahrt werden muss, in der es Reaktorunfälle gibt und in der riesige Landstri-che verstrahlt sein werden […]. Oder eine Zukunft, in der es nur noch die Energie von Wind, Wasser und Feuerholz gibt, eine Zivilisation der Ochsengespanne und Dampfmaschinen, der Spinnräder und erbärmlichen Ernten? Was immer sie wäh-len, ihre Zukunft wird nichts sein können als ein trostloses Dahinvegetieren, ein Abwarten, während die menschliche Art langsam verlischt. Wenn wir nicht auf-brechen in den Weltraum, haben wir keine Zukunft […]. (Eschbach, Solarstation 139–40)

Solar energy is the only hope for a society that will otherwise fall backwards into steam engines and ox-driven farming, miserably vegetating, or else suc-cumbing to the inevitable spread of nuclear power’s radioactive waste. Either way, the novel claims, we need to head to space and obtain direct access to solar power. Unfortunately, the cleanest energy source becomes that which the other energy sources so tragically also become: a potential weapon of mass destruction. Eschbach raises the problem of solar weaponry with the goal of providing a thrilling ride for the reader, but also diverting the nar-rative away from such questions as on-the-ground costs of building a solar station, or what the daily impact of endless energy might be. In short, he ne-glects to address the fact that the more energy we have, the more things and waste we produce, all of which has an environmental impact. Eschbach leaves the question of dirty nature open: energy extraction is the burning issue, but he optimistically allows the impossible dream of «harmless extraction» en-dangered only by one radical group of terrorists who can be overcome by individual heroics. Not unexpectedly for a thriller, Carr’s heroic man-to-man space battle finally overwhelms the extraction issues, and so the conflict be-tween the promise and challenges of solar power are left unresolved after Carr single-handedly saves the day (and gets the girl). On the other hand, Esch-bach most notably makes solar energy into a heroic conquest.

Extraction narratives exemplify the translation of direct engagements and exchanges with dirty nature into individual stories about personal power, freedom, and transformation. They reveal to varying degrees the cultural il-lusions and blindness associated with dirty nature in its broad array and the illusions that overwrite its grimy relevance. Faust, for example, appears to conquer the entire Western sphere through three thousand years of history


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and completes his epic story with apparent transcendence when his earthly remains ascend heavenwards, yet the play’s emphasis on illusion and blind-ness also rather radically reveal – rather than merely replicate – modernity’s blind spots with regard to how we brutally fund and utilize «natural resourc-es.» Hoffmann’s Elis overcomes his initial shock at the horrific devastation of mining and embraces both the earth’s interior and his future career as mine owner only to die in a mine collapse occurring when he joyfully descends to locate just one more magical gem. The juxtaposition of these two moments of horror and embrace presents more than merely the typical romantic interior-ity transforming itself into cosmic subjectivity. In Hoffmann’s world, bour-geois marriage is not so much opposed to mad immersion into a solipsistic embrace of personal subjectivity, but rather these apparent oppositions are actually wed in contrast to the coldly precise description of the Falun mine with its sulfurous vapors, bare ground devoid of plants, and gaping maw. Readers follow Elis into the initial devastation as well as the distraction by the two versions of feminine wiles, but unlike Elis, we witness the final mo-ment where his body returns to dust – Hoffmann keeps our eye on the dirt of materiality, in other words. Verne’s two communities happily enabled by a surprise inheritance avoid altogether the messy Goethean question of fund-ing based on illusory promises. These communities reveal how intimate the seemingly diametrically opposed realms of France-Ville and Stahlstadt ac-tually are, particularly at the end when they are literally wed. The idealized integration of modern technology, energy use, and green parks on the one hand, and, on the other, the devastating deployment of mining, military, and industry are easily combined at the end of the novel, which only serves to highlight the artificiality of their opposition. Verne’s novel raises the specter of destructive extractive processes only to transform it in utopian dreams of harmony, so long as the right man is at the helm. Nevertheless, this gesture of reconciliation for what was already linked might well be partially ironic on Verne’s part, considering his growing skepticism and other darkly cynical texts that remained relatively unknown in contrast to his happily technophil-ic best sellers. Finally, Eschbach’s Carr elaborates the possibilities for «clean» solar energy while also highlighting its inevitable potential, as with all energy sources, to be the ultimate weapon. This narrative idealizes the heroic quest for alternative energies and it links them, as does Verne’s novel, to troublingly militaristic quests for energy and power. On the other hand, Solar Station also seamlessly maintains the illusion of heroic technophile activities that will save us all. Whether it is solar energy, coal power, access to valuable minerals, or the creation of «new land,» the process of extraction and harnessing energy is documented by narratives that both reveal and perpetuate the illusions im-


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plying that extracting energy frees us from its basis. Each of these stories ex-poses different aspects of the illusions and succumbs in different ways to their power. These strategies and/or lapses help us to trace the dark grime (and vi-brant exchanges) of dirty nature undergirding all of our energy and power quests. And on the bright side, vast cultural illusions underpinning entire eco-nomic and political systems based on blindness to displacement and denial of our dependence on earthly systems make for fascinatingly dirty tales.

Notes

1 For the term «dirty nature» credit goes to John Bruni, Grand Valley State University, who coined it as the title for our 2009 Association for the Study of Literature and Envi-ronment conference panel.

2 See Nixon’s discussion of the «Anthropocene» first described as such by Nobel Laureate and atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000 (Slow Violence 12).

3 Regarding «nature-culture» or «natureculture» as inseparable see Iovino and Opper-mann; for the «radical pastoral» see Garrard; for «ecology without nature» see Morton; and for the «end of nature» see Heise’s Nach der Natur.

4 Cf. Alaimo’s concept of «trans-corporeality» in Bodily Natures for a thorough discus-sion of how these processes reveal our bodily immersion in the material surroundings.

5 I explore this at greater length in the essay on «Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticism.»6 In his book Ecology without Nature.7 Cf. Heise’s Sense of Place on our «risk society» regarding the inability to assess environ-

mental risks without consulting with experts and technology beyond the ken of most people.

8 The Faustian use of illusion is well-documented; cf. especially Brown, and Schmidt 283–84.

9 For discussion of capitalism and modern economics in «the German cultural imagina-tion» see Gray.

10 As per Lipinski: «Erstaunlicherweise enthalten Mephistos Pläne einen gesunden Kern – die Nutzung der natürlichen Ressourcen, der Bodenschätze und der Landwirtschaft […] als mögliche Quellen des Reichtums. Hinter diesen Gedanken verbirgt sich das ökono-mische Wissen des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts und Faust als Autor des Projekts» (168).

11 Cf. Rigby’s two essays on Faust. 12 Böhme also reads Die Bergwerke in terms of mining and ecology, but sees Elis as return-

ing to «mother earth» at the end, overwhelmed by the «Unheimlichkeiten bürgerlicher Sexualität» (122).

13 For the more typical reading of Hoffmann’s split desires, see Daemmrich. 14 Cf. Ziolkowski’s chapter on «The Mine: Image of the Soul» in German Romanticism

and its Institutions.15 Cf. Rupke for discussion of romanticism and the earth sciences.16 Alexander von Humboldt is a notable exception; he even developed a respirator for min-

ers to avoid breathing the endless dust and grime in mines.17 Cf. Arnd’s discussion of mines and the sublime in Tieck.18 Cf. Unwin’s discussion of how Verne «negotiates change in the 19th century.»


130 Heather I. Sullivan19 See Schulman’s introduction to this English edition.20 Verne’s rediscovered novel from 1863, Paris in the Twentieth Century, is a dark urban

dystopia of a technological future.21 There is a similar plot in which terrorists use a solar station built for energy capture and

transfer to earth as a weapon of mass destruction in the 2012 novel by Lerner: Energized.

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Böhme, Hartmut. Natur und Subjekt. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1988.Brown, Jane. Faust: Theater of the World. New York: Twayne, 1992.Daemmrich Horst S. The Shattered Self: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Tragic Vision. Detroit:

Wayne State UP, 1973.Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo.

Middlesex, Eng.: Penguin, 1966.Eschbach, Andreas. Das Buch der Zukunft. 5th ed. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2012. –. Solarstation. Cologne: Bastei Lübbe, 1999. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2012.Goethe, Wolfgang. Amtliche Schriften I. Ed. Reinhard Kluge. Frankfurt a.M.: Deut-

scher Klassiker Verlag, 1998.–. Faust. Texte. Ed. Albrecht Schöne. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag,

1994.Gray, Richard T. Money Matters: Economics and the German Cultural Imagination,

1770–1850. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2008.Heise, Ursula. Nach der Natur. Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur. Berlin:

Suhrkamp, 2010. –. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global.

New York: Oxford UP, 2008.Hoffmann, E.T.A. «Die Bergwerke zu Falun.» Die Serapions-Brüder. Ed. Wulf Sege-

brecht. Munich: Winkler, 1993. 171–97.Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Oppermann. «Theorizing material Ecocriticism: A Dip-

tych.» Interdisciplinary Studies in Literatur and Environment 19.3 (2012): 448–475.Lerner, Edward M. Energized. New York: Tor, 2012. Lipinski, Krzysztof. «‹Denn dies Metall lässt sich in alles wandeln …› Gold und Se-

xualität als Instrumente des Bösen in Goethes ‹Faust›.» Resonanzen. Ed. Sabine Doering, et al. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2000. 159–69.

Maser, Chris. «Living with the Forest: Ecology, Community, Economy.» The Idea of the Forest: German and American Perspectives on the Culture and Politics of Trees. Ed. Karla L. Schultz and Kenneth S. Calhoon. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. 11–30.

von Molnár, Géza. «Hidden in Plain View: Another Look at Goethe’s Faust.» Goethe Yearbook 11 (2002): 33–76.


Dirty Nature 131

Montgomery, David R. Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. Berkeley: U of California P, 2007.

Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009.Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard UP, 2011.Pancake, Ann. Strange as this Weather Has Been. Berkeley: Shoemaker & Hoard,

2007.Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London:

Routledge, 2006.Rigby, Kate. «Freeing the Phenomena: Goethean Science and the Blindness of Faust.»

Interdisciplinary Studies in the Environment and Literature 7.2 (2000): 25–41.–. «Prometheus Redeemed? From Autoconstruction to Ecopoetics.» Ecospirit: Reli-

gions and Philosophies for the Earth. Ed. Laurel Kearns and Catherine Keller. New York: Fordham UP, 2007. 233–51.

Rupke, Nicholas A. «Caves, Fossils, and the History of the Earth.» Romanticism and the Sciences. Ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Schmidt, Jochen. Goethes Faust: Erster und Zweiter Teil: Grundlagen – Werk – Wir-kung. Munich: Beck, 1999.

Schulman, Peter. Introduction. The Begum’s Millions. By Jules Verne. Trans. Stanford L. Luce. Ed. Arthur B. Evans. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2005. xiii–xxxix.

Stephenson, R.H. «The Diachronic Solidity of Goethe’s Faust.» A Companion to Goethe’s «Faust»: Parts I and II. Ed. Paul Bishop. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006. 243–70.

Stroud, Ellen. «Does Nature Always Matter? Following Dirt through History.» His-tory and Theory 42 (2003): 75–81.

Sullivan, Heather I. «Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticism.» Interdisciplinary Stud-ies in Literature and the Environment 19.3 (2012): 515–31.

Unwin, Timothy. «Jules Verne: Negotiating Change in the Nineteenth Century.» Sci-ence Fiction Studies 32.1 (2005): 5–17.

Verne, Jules. The Begum’s Millions. Trans. Stanford L. Luce. Ed. Arthur B. Evans. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2005.

Ziolkowski, Theodore. German Romanticism and its Institutions. Princeton: Prince-ton UP, 1990.


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Humboldt’s Dirty Nature

CAROLINE SCHAUMANN

EMORY UNIVERSITY

For Alexander von Humboldt «dirty» nature seems like a contradiction of terms since Humboldt never separated clean from unclean matter. Whether soiled, filthy, dusty, or grimy, Humboldt approached any environment with unceasing curiosity and open-mindedness rather than predetermined values or bias. Wholly dissimilar from geographers and other natural historians of the day, Humboldt focused on the dynamic and changing elements in a par-ticular landscape. More than in any particular location, he was interested in geologic processes, plant communities, and human societies. In this way, any place, as his famous altitude diagrams show, was connected to a host of factors including temperature, composition of the air, refraction, and plant distribu-tion, among others. Though Humboldt demanded attention to local condi-tions, he was ultimately more interested in geographic or ecological compara-tive scales revealing what he repeatedly called the «physiognomy of nature.» If Anne Marie Claire Godlewska concludes «Humboldtian location was a concept far more complex and rich than location in the traditional geographic sense» (244), this concept was far too complex to be described as either dirty or clean. At the basis of his pioneering work in ecology he laid the unterstanding of the interconnectedness and interaction between landscapes, plants, animals, and humans, a belief that does not privilege human agency over natural pro-cesses and remains largely independent of established aesthetic categories.

His audiences, however, at the time and up until the present, have often been more discriminating, concentrating on Humboldt’s exalted depictions of grand spectacles and heroic feats rather than his matter-of-fact descriptions of mundane, annoying, or exasperating interactions with his environment, which equally fill the pages of his copious texts. In this essay, I focus on the latter in order to lay bare what I believe to be a false division of celebrated and revolting nature. By examining more closely Humboldt’s material en-tanglement in his surroundings that can also be called «dirty nature,» I hope to illuminate the tensions between a visual consumption and representation of nature that characterizes nineteenth-century Western cultural approaches and Humboldt’s reciprocal interaction with his environment that rises above a mere description of nature.

In an early, more radical and unusual example, Karl Rosenkranz used Humboldt’s writings to illustrate what he, among the first philosophers,


134 Caroline Schaumann

delineated as the «ugly.» Distinct from the already established aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime, in his Aesthetik des Häßlichen (1853) Rosen-kranz defined the ugly and the experience of disgust as a systematic category of its own, distinguishing among «Naturhäßliches,» «Geisthäßliches,» and «Kunst häßliches» by providing examples from nature, art, and everyday life. While Rosenkranz operates within a nineteenth-century framework that seeks to solidify established categories of the sublime and the beautiful while outlining a strategy to overcome the ugly through humor, he nevertheless de-votes his explicit attention to hitherto neglected categories, foreshadowing the modernist project of depicting an increasingly unsightly world (Marx, Adorno). As indicated in the title of his essay, Rosenkranz defends the ugly as part of aesthetics, claiming «allein das Häßliche ist vom Begriff des Schönen untrennbar» (5), even as he continues to privilege the beautiful as the absolute measure of aesthetics.

With respect to nature, Rosenkranz regards flora and most fauna as gen-erally beautiful but concedes that both embody the potential for ugliness since living beings are subject to aging, deformation, and disease. Going fur-ther, Rosenkranz keenly locates disgust in decaying and decomposing mat-ter, «Der Schein des Lebens im an sich Todten ist das unendlich Widrige im Ekelhaften» (313), using as example the illustration «Air Volcano of Turbaco» from Alexander von Humboldt’s Vues des Cordillères:

Das Ekelhafte als ein Produkt der Natur, Schweiß, Schleim, Koth, Geschwüre, u. dgl., ist ein Todtes, was der Organismus von sich ausscheidet und damit der Ver-wesung übergibt. Auch die unorganische Natur kann relativ ekelhaft werden, aber nur relativ, nämlich in Analogie oder in Verbindung mit der organischen. An sich selbst aber lässt sich der Begriff der Verwesung auf sie nicht anwenden, und aus diesem Grunde kann man Steine, Metalle, Erden, Salze, Wasser, Wolken, Gase, Far-ben durchaus nicht ekelhaft nennen. Nur relativ, in Beziehung auf unsere Geruchs- und Geschmacksorgane, kann man sie so nennen. Ein Schlammvulcan, das gerade Gegentheil des majestätischen Schauspiels eines feuerspeienden Berges, wird für uns widrig, weil das Ausströmen trüber Effluvien analogisch uns an das Wasser er-innert und hier statt seiner eine flüssige, undurchsichtige, etwa noch mit todten, verwesenden Fischen untermischte Erdauflösung, eine gleichsam verwesende Erde sich darbietet. Man sehe die Darstellung eines solchen Schlammausbruches in A. v. Humboldts Vues des Cordillères. (Rosenkranz 313–14) (Fig. 1)

While Rosenkranz neatly separates disgusting from delightful nature and or-ganic from inorganic matter, Humboldt, of course, draws no such distinc-tions. His illustration «Air Volcano of Turbaco» does not stand out from the other illustrations of mountains, rivers, and cultural artifacts in Vues des Cor-dillères as a particularly revolting example. In fact, it now crowns the cover of the most recent English translation of the volume, Views of the Cordilleras


Humboldt’s Dirty Nature 135

and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2012. Even if the small cones with their steam-ing fumaroles do not strike the viewer as a sublime scene, the otherworldly formations, along with the large-leafed ferns and palm trees, the thick for-est in the background, and the naked Indian accompanying one of the fully clothed explorers all contribute to the exotic and mysterious appeal of the depicted scene. Humboldt’s accompanying essay supports this interpreta-tion: Humboldt situates the volcanitos amidst a «majestic forest» and trees «of colossal size,» (Views of the Cordilleras 281) and his description of the cones remains free of aesthetic judgment:

At the heart of a vast plain bordered by Bromelia Karatas rise eighteen to twenty small cones with a height of only seven to eight meters. These cones are of blackish-gray clay, and at their tips is a water-filled aperture. As one comes closer to these small craters, one hears an intermittent sound, dull yet quite loud, which occurs 15 to 18 seconds before a large quantity of air is released. […] I counted about five explosions over two minutes. This phenomenon is often accompanied by a mud-

Fig. 1: Volcans d’air de Turbaco, colored aquatint engraving by Pierre Antoine Marchais and Michel Bouquet, after a sketch by Louis de Rieux. In: Vues des Cordillères et monuments des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique. Paris: Chez F. Schoell, 1810–13; © Bereichsbibliothek Biologie im Botanischen Museum der Freien Universität Berlin.



dy ejection. […] Through analyses conducted with the help of nitrous gas and of phosphorous, I found that the air released does not contain even half a percent of oxygen. It is a nitrogen gas that is purer than what we generally prepare in our labo-ratories. (284)

If Humboldt depicts and describes the volcanitos with precision and, by ad-miring the purity of its gases, some undeniable fascination, Rosenkranz por-trays what he calls the «mud volcano» in direct opposition to «fire-spitting volcanoes,» interpreting its ejections as filthy decaying matter, and even adding some dead fish supplied by his vivid imagination. Thus, Rosenkranz upholds a systematic yet false division between dead and living substances, mud and fire, grime and water, in short, the ugly and the beautiful. In this decidedly gendered reading, «dirty nature» emerges as the formless, the fluid, and the sick, barely concealing his fear of «Erdauflösung.» His anxiety about «Verwesung der Erde» not only misses the point that the earth is decaying matter but also indicates his failure to understand the fundamentals of biol-ogy as dynamic processes altogether. Nevertheless, Rosenkranz’s treati se of-fers a provocative approach to Humboldt’s works, dismantling what has been constructed as heights of sublimity into piles of mud, worms, and decay. In this way, Rosenkranz’s thoughts serve as a point of departure in that this es-say is not concerned with what usually occupies the Humboldt scholar, be it his daring river journeys, famed mountain ascents, or salient cross-cultural encounters. Instead, I focus on the grittier details that all too easily evade scholarship, from the intimate witnessing of predation on prey to the barrage of insects he battles in the tropical wetlands and the physical afflictions that befall him at altitude. In contrast to overarching assertions and allegations, these details reveal Humboldt’s daily immersion in his surroundings, as well as the non-dualistic beliefs emanating from it.

In the aforementioned pictorial atlas Vues des Cordillères (1810–13) con-taining the bone of contention for Rosenkranz, Humboldt included images and essays of both natural scenes and human artifacts intended «to represent a few of the grand scenes which nature presents in the lofty chain of the Andes, and at the same time to throw some light on the ancient civilization of the Americas.»1 It is remarkable that Humboldt does not separate nature from its inhabitants but seeks to convey both scientific detail and artistic impression. As a naturalist who viewed his science as art and his art as science, Humboldt provides information about his journey from multiple points of view, elabo-rating on his understanding of nature as spatial, dynamic, and fluid. Thus, the awe-inspiring illustrations of the «lofty chain of the Andes» and the mud vol-cano complement each other, yet as Rosenkranz’s uneasiness indicates, con-tribute to the multiplicity and contingent tangibility of Humboldt’s œuvre.



Further discrepancies arise in the written accounts of his travels when Hum-boldt celebrates the views of mountains, the force of rivers, the mystique of the indigenous in the highest sublime terms on the one hand, but on the other bemoans the obstacles and inconveniences of his river journeys and moun-tain ascents, the unfamiliar food, the ferociousness of mosquitoes and ants, the inhospitability of the terrain, and the perceived timidity and laziness of the Indians. These incongruities are even more pronounced if one considers Humboldt’s travel diaries, written in German and French (and not translated into English to this day), which Humboldt initially withheld from publica-tion and only toward the end of his life made accessible to other natural scien-tists at the Berlin Observatory. In these texts, sublime adulation and detached observation, whining, whimpering, and wittiness, remain in an unresolved contrast yet add to the overall richness, unpredictability, and unevenness of Humboldt’s work.

Right from his arrival in Cumaná, Venezuela, Humboldt was utterly taken with what he perceived as a bountiful, grand, and mysterious New World. In his much anticipated published report of the first part of his American journey, Relation historique, translated as Die Forschungsreise in den Tropen Amerikas, he recalled his first impressions of the American continent: «Der Glanz des Tages, die Kraft der Farben und Gewächse, die Form der Pflanzen, das bunte Gefieder der Vögel, alles verkündete den großen Charakter der Natur in den Äquinoktialgegenden» (Die Forschungsreise 1: 170). As Nancy Stepan has suggested, Humboldt’s texts were highly influential in coding the tropics as a place of superabundance, vegetative excess, and magnitude, creat-ing effective and lasting tropes of representation not only of the tropics but also of temperate Europe: «Tropical nature was, in this sense, part of the for-mation of Europe’s identity as a place of temperateness, control, hard work and thriftiness as opposed to the humidity, heat, extravagance and superfluity of the Torrid Zone» (36). Indeed, Humboldt’s vision of the tropics did not emerge with his arrival in the New World but was born in his imagination much earlier, when the adolescent yearned of faraway riches that would en-able an escape from his restrictive upbringing in Prussia: «Ich hatte seit meiner ersten Jugend den glühenden Wunsch nach einer Reise in entfernte und von den Europäern wenig besuchte Länder» (Die Forschungsreise 1: 20). «Tropi-cal nature» thus became an assemblage of qualities that his own time and place seemed to lack, first and foremost sublime, fertile, and essentially uncontrol-lable nature, a primeval terrain in distinct contrast to Western civilization, as Marie Louise Pratt (and also Susanne Zantop) has claimed. «Alexander von Humboldt reinvented South America first and foremost as nature. Not the accessible, collectible, recognizable, categorizable nature of the Linneans,



however, but a dramatic, extraordinary nature, a spectacle capable of over-whelming human knowledge and understanding» (118). While Pratt, Zantop, and Stepan have precisely delineated Humboldt’s conception of tropical na-ture to offer a forceful postcolonial critique of Humboldt’s voyage and its overall impact, the peculiar contradictions and complexities of Humboldt’s understanding of and confrontation with nature remain to be explored. It may be true that Humboldt operates within a well-established framework that pits Western culture against so-called wild nature, and moreover (dis)regards native populations as part of the latter. At the same time, Humboldt’s peculiar, material, and unprejudiced engagement with his environment seems to transcend such a framework.

Like any other European explorer of his time, Humboldt approached the New World with a firm belief in Western superiority, heralding European achievements in the arts and sciences as universally relevant and impervi-ous. He also benefited from and furthered colonialist power structures, both voluntary and involuntary. At the same time, however, Humboldt fully im-mersed himself in his new environment, had sharp words about colonialism and slavery, and committed himself to be formed and changed by his sur-roundings. Therefore Humboldt’s uneven and at times contradictory œuvre cannot be easily lumped into simplified theoretical constructs such as the di-chotomy of nature and culture or Europe and the New World. In order to sit-uate Humboldt as a part of his material surroundings and further delineate his particular engagement with it, it is helpful to consult recent works on material ecocriticism that offer a deeper look into the forceful and reciprocal interac-tions that characterize our relationship with what we call nature.

Rejecting binary models of humans and nature, material ecocriticism fo-cuses on the interplay of humans and their environment. Serenella Iovino re-minds us that «humans share this horizon with countless other actors, whose agency – regardless of being endowed with degrees of intentionality – forms the fabric of events and causal chains» (451). In a similar vein, Manuel de Lan-da puts it, «rocks and winds, germs and words, are all different manifesta-tions of this dynamic material reality, or, in other words, they all represent the different ways in which this single matter-energy expresses itself» (21). What is heralded as sublime or decried as filth has thus the same agentic capacity that sets into motion complex natural as well as cultural processes, for which Humboldt’s depictions serve as an apt example. Attacking what Heather I. Sullivan calls the dichotomy of «pure and clean nature and dirty human sphere» (515), material ecocriticism has focused first and foremost on dirt and debris, pollution and toxins, nonhuman organisms and animate matter. Humboldt’s texts, with their nondiscriminatory attitude toward unfamiliar



cultures, organisms, and environments, offer much fodder for such interpre-tations. If his pioneering work in ecology and his belief in the interconnected-ness of landscapes, plants, animals, and humans proves highly agentic, these processes to Humboldt are most visible in the New World:

Kaum wird man beim Überblick an dieser ausgedehnten Landschaft bedauern, dass keine Bilder vergangener Zeiten die Einsamkeit der Neuen Welt verschönern. Überall, wo in der heißen Zone eine gewächsreiche, mit Bergen besetzte Land-schaft ihre ursprüngliche Gestalt beibehielt, erscheint der Mensch nicht mehr als Mittelpunkt der Schöpfung. Weit entfernt, die Elemente zu beherrschen, geht sein Bestreben nur dahin, sich ihrer Gewalt zu entziehen. Was die Wilden seit Jahrhun-derten auf der Erdoberfläche veränderten, verschwindet neben den Umwälzungen, die durch unterirdisches Feuer, Überschwemmungen großer Flüsse und heftige Stürme bewirkt wurden. Der Kampf der Elemente unter sich ist es, der das Schau-spiel der Natur im Neuen Kontinent auszeichnet. (Die Forschungsreise 1: 430–31)

Questioning the basic assumptions of the creation myth and (human) history, Humboldt concedes that humans play only a minor part in the history of the earth yet remain utterly dependent on its natural powers. At the same time, he acknowledges native populations and their profound influence on the en-vironment. This interaction of natural and cultural processes restructures the hierarchy of mind over material and matter. Humboldt’s ruminations, rather, correspond to Karen Barad’s framework of «agential realism,» which «pro-vides an understanding of the role of human and nonhuman, material and discursive, and natural and cultural factors in scientific and other social-ma-terial practices, thereby moving such considerations beyond the well-worn debates that pit constructivism against realism, agency against structure, and idealism against materialism» (26). What Barad, in her book, investigates on the micro level of quantum physics, Humboldt insinuates on a macro level, namely the rethinking of notions of causality, agency, power, and identity. In fact, the very document that Humboldt handed to the Prime Minister of Spain, Mariano de Urquijo, which outlined the goals of his expedition in the hopes of attaining a royal permit to visit the Spanish colonies, alludes to such a diverse mix of agents:

Von dem heißen Wunsch beseelt, eine andere Weltgegend zu sehen, und zwar unter Beziehung auf die allgemeine Naturkunde, nicht nur die Arten und ihre Charakte-ristika zu studieren (ein Studium, dem man sich bis heute zu ausschließlich gewid-met hat), sondern den Einfluss der Atmosphäre und der chemischen Zusammenset-zung auf die Lebewesen, den Bau des Erdballs, die Übereinstimmung der Schichten in den voneinander entferntesten Ländern, endlich die großen Harmonien in der Natur, äußerte ich den Wunsch, den Dienst des Königs für einige Jahre zu verlassen und einen Teil meines kleinen Vermögens dem Fortschritt der Wissenschaften zu opfern. («Mein Lebenslauf 1769–1799,» 27–28)



For all its progressive and radical thinking, however, Humboldt’s works re-main transfixed in a Eurocentrism that precisely idealizes a New World as solitary, expansive, and pristine. The previous quote from the Relation his-torique provides plenty of evidence for such an interpretation: Humboldt not only logs the customary register of the sublime (i.e., the fierce power of fire, water, and storms) but also, in the deeply established visual tradition of Western culture, watches what he calls a «Schauspiel» with «Überblick,» de-scribing the scene as a «Bild.» In addition to his recognition of a dynamic, agentic, and interactive nature, Humboldt thus remains a detached scientist who, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, unceasingly observes, measures, and records his experiences. This is also the Humboldt who emerges in Daniel Kehlmann’s bestselling novel Die Vermessung der Welt (2005), a scientist the author characterizes as an «uniformierten, unverwüstlichen, ständig be-geisterten und an jeder Kopflaus, jedem Stein und jedem Erdloch interes-sierten Preußen [im] Dschungel» (37). And indeed many examples from Humboldt’s works support such an interpretation, from letters when Hum-boldt examines the head lice of Creole women under the microscope in Cu-maná, «Jeder will den Mond und die Sonne sehen, vor allem aber Läuse unter dem Mikroskop» (Briefe aus Amerika 65), to the essay «Jagd und Kampf der electrischen Aale mit Pferden» (1807) detailing an incident when he ordered Indians to drive wild horses into a stream filled with electric eels, and watched the horses’ demise before collecting the exhausted eels for research purposes.

Ich hätte gewünscht, dass ein geschickter Mahler den Augenblick hätte auffassen können, als die Scene am belebtesten war. Die Gruppen der Indianer, welche den Sumpf umringten, die Pferde mit zu Berge stehender Mähne, Schrecken und Schmerz im Auge, welche dem Ungewitter, das sie überfällt, entfliehen wollen; die gelblichen und schlüpfrigen Aale, welche großen Wasserschlangen ähnlich an der Oberfläche schwimmen, und ihre Feinde verfolgen: alles das gab ein höchst mahlerisches Gan-zes. […] In weniger als fünf Minuten waren zwei Pferde ertrunken. Die Aale, deren mehrere über 5 Fuß Länge hatten, schlüpften den Pferden und Mauleseln unter den Bauch, und gaben dann Entladungen ihres ganzen electrischen Organs. Diese Schlä-ge treffen zugleich das Herz, die Eingeweide und besonders das Nervengeflecht des Magens. (69)

While Rosenkranz would confidently have assessed this scene as ugly nature and even contemporary readers – especially those sensitive to animal welfare – may not be able to withhold their disgust, Humboldt remains undeniably fascinated by the cruel and frightening spectacle. Kehlmann could surely have captured the unintended irony of a spellbound Humboldt pointing to the «mahlerische» quality of this incident, even calling, in yet another nod to Western ocular tradition, for a «Mahler» to capture it while remaining wholly



oblivious to the not-so-fine distinction between the picturesque and the re-pulsive of that same tradition. What is more, however, is the fact that Hum-boldt is not witnessing a natural phenomenon but carefully arranged the crass experiment or massacre and continues to observe it from a safe dista nce. This curious mix of a prearranged uncanny spectacle and European consumption, animal agency, and Indian bystanders, highlights some of the contradictions and conflicts in Humboldt’s œuvre.

While aesthetic philosophy, postcolonial criticism, and fictional invention have all delivered examples of Humboldt encountering ugly, uncontrollable, or cruel nature, suggesting that Humboldt is going much beyond the scope of an Old World perceived as controlled, orderly, and clean, I would like to draw attention to the gritty, material, and corporeal details in his texts that tend to get lost when viewing Humboldt in either sublime adulation or enlightened calculation. Expanding on the concepts of material ecocriticism and Sullivan’s notion of «dirt theory,» I propose a slightly different «dirty nature» in Hum-boldt. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary (2013), «dirt» has two main connotations, which are 1) excrement (filthy substances, worthless mat-ter, or a contemptible person) and 2) earth. Humboldt’s native German does not possess these two divergent meanings of «dirt,» using instead entirely different words, and even in English there have recently been efforts to reclaim the word «dirt», freeing «soil» from the misleading negative implications of «dirt.» The documentary The Real Dirt on Farmer John (2005) traces the history of the ec-centric Midwestern farmer John Petersen, while Dirt! The Movie (2009), a film that «will make you want to get dirty» «tells the story of the glorious and un-appreciated material beneath our feet.»2 In a most liberal definition that leans on Sullivan’s ground work, I take «dirt» to encompass our immediate, material surroundings with which we engage, from the soil that nourishes our food to the dust (and toxins) we breathe, from the bacteria that sustain and deplete hu-man life to the millions of insects that inhabit and share our life. Dirty nature, in this case, comprises less of a particular location but more generally one’s envi-ronment and thus accompanies both scientific practice and aesthetic awareness.

Rather than delving deeper into aesthetic categories or gruesome skir-mishes, I devote the remainder of this essay to Humboldt’s material exploits when he is truly engaged in his surroundings. Aside from grand vistas and sordid anecdotes, Humboldt delineates many more daily and mundane en-counters with nature that have not received ample scholarly attention. In this vein, his works are replete with ants, spiders, and mosquitoes, with smoke and dust, with fever and nausea. For instance, on his travels along the riv-ers Orinoco, Casiquiare, and Rio Negro, Humboldt becomes obsessed with mosquitoes. He not only mentions them daily in his diary entries but goes



on to distinguish different species and even compares the strength of their bites at different river locations. Even in the temporal distance of the Relation historique that Humboldt completed a decade after his journey, mosquitoes recurrently disrupt the flow of his aesthetic marvel or scientific measurement, though Humboldt also describes their impact more sarcastically: «Es war ein prachtvoller Anblick, dessen ruhiger Genuß jedoch eine von Insekten be freite Atmosphäre erfordert hätte» (Die Forschungsreise 3: 60). But Humboldt’s preoccupation with the mosquito does not end here. In 1822, he published an essay «Beiträge zur Naturgeschichte der Mosquitos,» in which he collected knowledge about the pesky insects and describes his self-experiments:

Denn wenn ich dem Culex cyanopterus ruhig die Rückseite meiner Hand hinhielt, so war der Schmerz sehr heftig und verringerte sich in dem Maaße, als das Insekt fortfuhr zu saugen. Auch stellte ich den Versuch an, daß ich mich mit einer Nadel in die Hand stach, und die Wunde mit zerquetschten Mustikos einrieb, dennoch blieb ich von aller Geschwulst befreit. (150)

Different from the previous scientific detachment in the case of the eels, here Humboldt fully and literally interacts with his dirty environment by will-ingly exchanging bodily fluids with the insect. This type of scientific practice has been described by Stacy Alaimo as «trans-corporeality» that reveals new and unpredictable interchanges and interconnections across bodies (2), and by Andrew Pickering as a «mangle» in which the boundaries of human and nonhuman agency are intertwined as the scientist becomes both an active re-searcher and object or part of the experiment altogether (21–22). Iovino takes the claim a bit further:

Against the fracture of representationalism, this new onto-epistemological debate brings matter into the body of discursive practices, and vice versa, thus showing the corporeal dimension, the «being embodied» of discursive practices, including scientific knowledge. If knowledge is an embodied practice, the knower and the known are mutually transformed in the process of knowing, and new levels of real-ity emerge. (455)

While this, perhaps, sounds a tad too optimistic, it nevertheless accurately characterizes Humboldt’s engagement with his environment, including the many scientific experiments he conducted on himself.

In the remainder of this essay I would like to return to mountains in or-der to probe further the reciprocal relationship that dirty nature elicits. In contrast to his forays along rivers and through forests, Humboldt’s mountain ascents have been depicted as advances into a purer, clean, and elevated world. Indeed, Humboldt himself initially approached and conceptualized the new environment in such a mindset. In his diary of June 19, 1799, the day before he set foot on the island of Tenerife, the explorer’s first stopover, Humboldt re-



corded his sight of Pico de Teide, the highest mountain of the Canary Islands once thought to be the highest mountain in the world, in distinctly sublime terms:

Der Morgen war feucht und trübe. Die Sonnenscheibe war für uns noch nicht sicht-bar, als plötzlich das dicke Gewölk, welches westlich über der Stadt nach der Lagu-ne hin an dem Gebirge hin[g], zerriß. Durch diese Öffnung erschien der Himmel in lieblicher Bläue und mitten in dieser Bläue, als gehörte er nicht der Erde zu, als wäre die Aussicht in eine fremde Welt eröffnet, der Pic von Teide in seiner ganzen Majestät. […] So freundlich und schön aber auch dieser Anblick ist, […], so giebt ihm das, was unsere Einbildungskraft hinzufügt, etwas ernstes und schreckliches. Die Insel scheint so klein gegen den Koloß, dem sie zur Basis dient. […] Der Wind tobte in den Wolken, die den hohen Kegel einschlossen, sie drängten sich näher zusammen, und der Vorhang war ebenso schnell geschlossen, als er sich unerwartet für uns eröffnet. (Reise durch Venezuela 81)

Both imposing and elusive, the mountain presents itself framed by a curtain of clouds opening and closing, granting onlookers only temporary sights into the spectacles of nature. Once again entrenched in visuality, Humboldt de-scribes his glimpse into a «fremde Welt» from a distance, like a painting. His description, characteristically, bears the classic markers of the sublime, where grandness, suddenness, and formidableness all converge to overwhelm the senses, instigating an intense inner experience.

But as soon as Humboldt engages with his environment, he leaves behind the realm of sight along with its established aesthetic register. Instead, the physical challenges of the climbing experience divert his mind away from an aesthetic, visual experience and upset a completely harmonious interpreta-tion. Humboldt first mentioned the ascent of Teide in a letter to his brother, dated June 20 to 25, 1799: «Den 23. Juni, Abends. Gestern Nacht kam ich vom Pik zurück. Welch ein Anblick! Welch ein Genuß! Wir waren bis tief im Krater; vielleicht weiter als irgend ein Naturforscher» (Briefe 36). Visibly overwhelmed and speechless by the climb, Humboldt resorts to repeated exclamation marks to characterize the intensity of his experience. This brief description in the letter establishes a number of themes that will return in the description of his other mountain climbs: superlative exclamations denoting amazement and speechlessness, the sight of or view from the mountain, and the pride in having advanced further, farther, deeper, or higher than anyone before. At the same time, Humboldt refers to the results of his measurements «Ich habe hier sehr wichtige mineralogische Beobachtungen gemacht» (36), and emphasizes the physical dimension of his experience.

Der Sturm fing an heftig um den Gipfel zu brausen; wir mußten uns fest an den Kranz des Kraters anklammern. Donnerähnlich tobte die Luft in den Klüften, und



eine Wolkenhülle schied uns von der belebten Welt. Wir klommen den Kegel hinab, einsam über den Dünsten wie ein Schif auf dem Meere. (36)

These material encounters – wind, cold, and thunder, and the resulting physi-cal fatigue, anxiety, and loneliness – form an increasingly important subtext in Humboldt’s accounts of volcanic ascents. Admittedly, neither ascent nor descent turn out to be enjoyable experiences. The climb is arduous, and the party endures a cold night bivouacked on the rocks, without tents or blan-kets. In the Relation historique, even the indefatigable Humboldt repeats the words «wir litten» (Die Forschungsreise 1: 88, 89) to characterize the difficul-ties caused by the exertion, cold, wind, and smoke. On the summit, when the clouds lift, they are able to sporadically discern the ocean, coast, and inhab-ited villages of Tenerife, but they wait «vergebens» (101) for a rewarding view of the entire archipelago. On the descent, they find themselves unwillingly rolling down the loose ash slope. These unexpected difficulties disrupt scien-tific measurement and aesthetic awe.

In Humboldt’s representations of his ascent of Silla de Caracas just six months later on January 1 and 2, 1800, this multifaceted, shifting, and of-ten inconsistent discourse becomes even more evident. In the pictorial atlas Views of the Cordilleras, Humboldt included a picturesque drawing, «View of the Silla de Caracas,» of an explorer sitting in a meadow below a towering, heavily vegetated, steep mountain, while the extremely brief elaboration (five sentences) leaves out more than it reveals: «This granitic mountain, which is very difficult to scale because its slope is covered in a thick turf, has an abso-lute height of over thirteen hundred fifty toises» (Views of the Cordilleras 368). Once again, however, in stark contrast to the sublime sight, Humboldt’s lengthy and detailed diary entry of the mountain’s ascent is overshadowed by physical difficulties and displeasure. At 8,622 ft., Silla de Caracas was a lower summit but nevertheless foreshadowed the challenges and inconve-niences of high-altitude mountaineering in the tropics for the first time, and Humboldt’s description bursts with negative superlatives and petty accusa-tions: «Seit 11 Jahren habe ich durch ganz Europa Berge erklimmt – aber nie habe ich so gelitten, bloß der schlechten Zurüstungen wegen und der falschen Nachricht von [der] Entfernung des Gipfels, des Harrens wegen auf ande-re» (Reise durch Venezuela 181). Already in the morning, Humboldt feels «Unmuth über [die] verlorene, schlaflose Nacht» (177); he rejects the food as «Schweinefraß» (178), and grumbles about fearful porters, thirst, and sore feet. There is no grand depiction of the summit experience, only a short note about the elusive view and a sentence about the practical (and imperialist) value of his ascent: «Meine Höhenmessung kann für [den] Mexikan[ischen] Meerbusen dienen, daß Schiffe danach durch Höhenwinkel ihre Entfernung


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von der Küste bestimmen, denn [die] Silla [ist] wegen [der] Sattelform weit im Meer erkennbar» (180). Humboldt’s joy seems limited to the successful mea-surement and prospect of leaving the summit, the latter of which turns into an equally painful and toilsome descent, completed, in part, barefoot: «Freudig über die Beobachtungen und den Zweck erreicht zu haben, faßten wir Muth, noch denselben Abend herabzusteigen. […] Wir stiegen herab mehr auf Hin-tern und Händen als auf Füßen» (180–81). In the description of the ascent, there is no overarching, crafted narrative arc, but fragmentary impressions prevail, often interrupted by physical suffering: «Mit Besinnung und Ener-gie übersteht man alles. Aber die Füße schmerzten sehr und seit 1.5 Uhr bis 10 Uhr waren wir ohne einen Tropfen Wasser oder Weins» (181).

The Relation historique, however, offers a thoroughly reworked narrative of the climb. The description is extensive (some twenty-five pages), focusing on measurements by thermometer, barometer, electrometer, and cyanometer (to measure the color intensity of the sky), declinometer and hygrometer,3 and highlighting sights and views. Even though Humboldt includes some of his difficulties, such as the uncooperative guides and companions, missing provisions, and the particular steepness of the climb, his physical suffering has been entirely omitted from the text, and the narrative emphasizes instead pleasant scenery («Es gibt nichts Malerischeres,» [Die Forschungsreise 1: 419]), an exceptional view from the summit («Eine sehr ausgedehnte Fern-sicht beschäftigte unseren Blick» [428]), and skilled climbing («Gefährlich ist dieser Teil des Wegs keineswegs, wenn man nur vorsichtig die Festigkeit der Felsblöcke prüft, auf die man den Fuß setzt» [428]). The description of the summit alone comprises some six pages, with Humboldt being «vergnügt über den glücklichen Erfolg unserer Reise» (434), and concludes in sublime awe with the descent at night: «Das Geräusch der Wasserfälle gab dieser Nacht szene einen erhabenen und wilden Charakter» (435).

As this shifting and contradictory discourse exemplifies, the more imme-diately Humboldt becomes involved in his environment up close, the less he relies on predetermined, Old-World notions of visual consumption and aes-thetics. During every subsequent major ascent, Humboldt’s descriptions of his climbs in the Andes record fatigue, shortness of breath, bleeding, thirst, and coldness; and filth, failure, fantasy, along with an awareness of his physi-cal limitations permeate his texts. Nauseated by the sulfur stench, knee-deep in volcanic ash, and sliding along steep ice, Humboldt is overcome by fear, and subject to fantastical visions and thoughts.

Karen Barad has suggested the term «intra-action» to «signif[y] the mutual constitution of entangled agencies» (33). Her concept deliberately rewrites the traditional concept of two separate entities that via the laws of causality



become associated through interaction, posing instead that nature and cul-ture are already mutually entangled and that agency emerges through this intra-action. When in the field, surrounded by dirty nature, Humboldt seems to acknowledge and even yield to such agency, documenting his bodily en-meshment or immersion. From a distance, especially in light of revising the material for publication, however, he returns to depicting his experiences in established models of a visual experience or detached scientist, while re-maining frustrated with the incompatibility between material confrontation and human representation. Humboldt’s never-ceasing quest for new modes of representation and his experimentation with text, landscape painting, maps, graphs, diagrams, and even photography prove that the established categories of representation are not sufficient to adequately illustrate his experience.

Notes

1 Personal Narrative xvii. Since this part is not included in Beck’s German translation, Die Forschungsreise in den Tropen Amerikas, which I used for all other quotes from the Relation historique, I refer here to the English translation.

2 Promotional website, http://www.thedirtmovie.org/, accessed July 2013.3 Lubrich has provided illustrations of the various measuring instruments in «Vom Guck-

kasten zum Erlebnisraum: Alexander von Humboldt und die Medien des Reisens» 51.

Works Cited

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloom-ington: U of Indiana P, 2010.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entangle-ment of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.

de Landa, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books, 1997.

Dirt! The Movie. Dir. Bill Bienenson and Gene Rosow. Common Ground Media, 2009. <http://www.thedirtmovie.org/>.

Godlewska, Anne Marie Claire. Geography Unbound: French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.

Humboldt, Alexander von. Briefe aus Amerika 1799–1804. Ed. Ulrike Moheit. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993.

–. «Beiträge zur Naturgeschichte der Mosquitos.» Notizen aus dem Gebiete der Na-tur- und Heilkunde 3.7 (1822): 97–103. Quoted in: Alexander von Humboldt. Das große Lesebuch. Ed. Oliver Lubrich. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2009. 139–50.

–. Die Forschungsreise in den Tropen Amerikas. 3 vols. Ed. Hanno Beck. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008.



–. «Jagd und Kampf der electrischen Aale mit Pferden.» Annalen der Physik 25.1 (1807): 34–42. Quoted in: Alexander von Humboldt. Das große Lesebuch. Ed. Oli-ver Lubrich. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2009. 66–72.

–.«Mein Lebenslauf 1769–1799.» Aus meinem Leben. Autobiographische Bekennt-nisse. Ed. Kurt-R. Biermann. Munich: Beck, 1989. 24–30.

–. Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Years 1799–1804. Trans. Thomasina Ross. Vol. 1. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1852.

–. Reise durch Venezuela. Auswahl aus den amerikanischen Reisetagebüchern. Ed. Margot Faak. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000.

–. Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas: A Critical Edition. Ed. Vera M. Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette. Trans. J. Ryan Poynter. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012.

Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Oppermann. «Theorizing Material Ecocriticism: A Dip-tych.» Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.3 (2012): 448–75.

Kehlmann, Daniel. Diese sehr ernsten Scherze. Poetik Vorlesungen. Göttingen: Wall-stein, 2007.

Lubrich, Oliver. «Vom Guckkasten zum Erlebnisraum: Alexander von Humboldt und die Medien des Reisens.» figurationen 2 (2007): 47–66.

Pickering, Andrew. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Rosenkranz, Karl. Aesthetik des Häßlichen. Königsberg: Bornträger, 1853.Stepan, Nancy Leys. Picturing Tropical Nature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001.Sullivan, Heather I. «Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticism.» Interdisciplinary Stud-

ies in Literature and Environment 19.3 (2012): 515–31.The Real Dirt on Farmer John. Dir. Taggart Siegel. CAVU Pictures, 2005.



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Between Dirty and Disruptive Nature: Adalbert Stifter in the Context of Nineteenth-Century American Environmental Literature

SEAN IRETON

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI

In the historical context of ecocriticism, nineteenth-century nature devotees such as Adalbert Stifter, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir represent a crucial transition from Anglo-European romanticism to an empirically fil-tered realism. Their totalized views of nature display a curious blend of pan-theistic rapture and scientific inquiry, or, in terms coined by Laura Dassow Walls, of «rational holism» and «empirical holism.» As Walls elaborates in Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (1995), rational holism posits the totality of nature as a divine or oth-erwise transcendent unity that can best be comprehended through reason or reflection. Walls points to Schelling, Coleridge, Emerson, and the early Tho-reau – the young, idealistic author of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) – as prime representatives of this tradition. From the standpoint of empirical holism, on the other hand, the whole can only be understood by closely examining its constituent parts and their interconnections. Here there is no assumption of, and often no allowance for, a transcendent agency. Ac-cording to Walls, empirical naturalists include Humboldt, Darwin, and the Thoreau of the later Journal. His 1854 classic Walden, she claims, neatly com-bines both attitudes and thus occupies a middle ground in this schematic. As a consequence of this increasingly empirical mindset during the course of the nineteenth century, nature begins to lose its idealized status and idyllic ve-neer such that its everyday reality and crude materiality have to be acknowl-edged – and represented.

This shift in perceptions of nature has been voiced by a number of modern environmental writers including Gary Snyder, who asserts the importance of such natural (read: normal) truths as violence, pollution, and putrefaction. As Snyder argues in The Practice of the Wild and an essay entitled «Ecology, Lit-erature, and the New World Disorder,» literary studies can no longer ignore or repress the so-called «dark side» of nature. «Life in the wild,» after all «is not just eating berries in the sunlight.» What about, he suggests, «the ball of crunched bones in a scat, the feathers in the snow, the tales of insatiable ap-petite»? Or, to consider a more provocative and demythologized image, one


150 Sean Ireton

that alludes to the archetypal Eurydice: «the sight of your beloved in the un-derworld, dripping with maggots» (Practice of the Wild 118–19)? Another prominent North American author, Joyce Carol Oates, criticizes nature writ-ers, especially the iconic Thoreau, for their «painfully limited set of respons-es» to the environment. In her essay «Against Nature» (1986), she conveys these responses in upper case so as to underscore their metaphysical loftiness: «REVERENCE, AWE, PIETY, MYSTICAL ONENESS» (67). In his eco-critical – if not ecocriticism-critical – study, The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (2003), Dana Phillips expands on Oates’s critique as follows: «Reverence, awe, piety, and mystical oneness are antisep-tic responses to nature; one might even say that they are unnatural responses, in that they are incompatible with what we know about the earthy flavor, by which I mean to suggest not only the randiness, but the rawness and rankness as well, of most biological processes» (209). Phillips and Heather I. Sullivan have recently issued additional responses to our «painfully limited» sensibili-ties toward nature, coediting a special volume of the journal Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (19.3 [2012]) that expands on the in-terpretive approach of «material ecocriticism» advanced by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann.1 As Phillips and Sullivan state in their introduction: «all kinds of matter must fall within the purview of the environmental, the ecological, and the ecocritical» (447). Such matter includes dirt, waste, bodies, and food. In their respective individually authored articles, Sullivan’s notion of «dirt theory» and Phillips’s new materialist reconsideration of Walden fur-ther guide my present effort to reflect on the status of dirty nature in Stifter.

Using Muir and Thoreau as points of departure and as useful gauges of materially inflected nature writing (as remains to be seen, they both physi-cally engage with their respective environments to an extreme degree), I will probe the extent to which Stifter confronts the «unclean» side of natural phe-nomena and processes.2 My approach is admittedly rather literal if not liter-alist: grounded more in literary and biographical practice than in ecocritical theory, it seeks to unearth and fruitfully explore chthonic elements in select writings by all three authors. As such, it may seem to suffer from an «under-theorization» (Easterlin 3) that has long typified – some would say plagued – ecocritical discourse, but as Oppermann has painstakingly shown (see «Ec-ocriticism’s Theoretical Discontents»), the issue of theory in this relatively new field is complicated and moreover fraught with controversy; at the very least, it merits a more lengthy and nuanced deliberation as well as execution than can possibly be undertaken here. On the upside, however, the various texts that I scrutinize in a more immanent manner provide concrete exam-ples of Sullivan’s «dirt theory» and what Iovino more explicitly categorizes


Between Dirty and Disruptive Nature 151

as «‹messy matter›» («Theorizing Material Ecocritism» 451). Stated in more direct terms, I intend to probe the extent to which Muir, Thoreau, and Stifter «give dirt its due» (Lioi 17).

Yet even on this conceded level of methodological immanence, one might object to the dissimilarities in literary genre, namely that Muir and Thoreau wrote in a nonfictional mode whereas Stifter crafted fictional tales that oscil-late between romantic sentimentality and realist mimesis. Strictly speaking, Stifter cannot be considered a nature writer in the North American mold since the tradition of environmental writing does not exist in German-speaking lit-erature. This deficit may have something to do with fundamental cultural dif-ferences in perceptions of nature, for instance with the much-debated issue of American wilderness versus European landscape. Nevertheless, though not a Naturschreiber, Stifter is perhaps the most celebrated Naturbeschreiber in German letters. His descriptions of the natural environment – above all of his native Bohemian Forest and the nearby Upper Austrian Alps – are both copious and meticulous, and they often represent, or at least approximate, nonfictional narrative tracts within the broader fictional expanse of his tales. These many evocations of forest and mountain sceneries, of flora and fauna, of geological formations and meteorological conditions have earned him a reputation for concentrating on the «beautiful» and «harmonious» aspects of nature while glossing over its more telluric qualities of dirt, decay, and dis-order. But this is a somewhat simplified view, for highly graphic and deeply sensitive depictions of nature’s materiality – and even brutality – can be found throughout his texts, mainly in the form of elemental storms involving rain, snow, ice, and hail. Geological erosion along with its attendant byproducts of dust, sand, and soil also pervade his oeuvre. Though he may not fully embrace the dirtiness – let alone the randiness, rawness, and rankness – of nature, he nonetheless possesses a fine-tuned sense of its disruptive climatic potential. Temporary disruption rather than long-term pollution ultimately carries the day. Those works of his that thematize such natural disturbances and their resultant effluences can furthermore serve as test cases for material ecocriti-cal studies concerned with the mid-nineteenth century, which was after all a transitional period in Western conceptions of nature. One need only mention a single pivotal name and year: Darwin, 1859.

Although Muir’s writings tend to exhibit a pronounced romantic and more specifically transcendentalist veneration of nature, they are at the same time firmly rooted in materiality – just as Muir himself was constantly immersed in the physical terrain of the North American wilderness. During a visit to Yosemite in 1871, Emerson in fact declined an invitation by Muir to join him on a backcountry camping trip in the High Sierra lest he, the elder nature phi-


152 Sean Ireton

losopher, catch cold in the chilly mountain air. This anecdote aptly sums up the difference between transcendentalist «indoor philosophy» (Our National Parks, VI, 145) and a more somatic orientation toward the environment, as practiced by the philosophizing outdoorsman Muir.3 From his first published book The Mountains of California (1894) to his final collection entitled Steep Trails (1918), his texts are replete with firsthand portrayals of rock, ice, snow, water, plants, trees, and other matter. And he never ceases to «intra-act» (a term I borrow from material ecocritical discourse) with these natural phe-nomena, presenting in-depth accounts of his hiking, climbing, surveying, and botanizing activities in the wild. The material landscape thereby becomes a «site of narrativity,» as Iovino and Oppermann («Material Ecocriticism» 83; «Theorizing Material Ecocriticism» 451) describe the narrative potential of agentic matter in literary texts. From a more literal «dirt-theoretical» perspec-tive, an episode from «A Perilous Night on Shasta’s Summit» (chapter four of Steep Trails) proves more illuminating. After climbing the 14,162 ft. Califor-nian volcano in the spring of 1875, he and his partner are overtaken by a storm that unleashes a fury of snow, hail, thunder, and lightning just as they begin their descent. They are forced to seek some semblance of shelter in the fuma-roles or so-called «Hot Springs» just below the summit, where they can «lie in this mud and steam and sludge, warm at least on one side» (VIII, 74). Hun-kered there for hours until the tempest finally breaks, they find themselves in the precarious position of succumbing to the elements in three different ways: freezing to death, being scalded by the volcanic steam, and/or inhaling the toxic vapors that issue from the cavity’s vents. Muir sums up this literally and figuratively messy predicament as follows:

When the heat became unendurable, on some spot where the steam was escaping through the sludge, we tried to stop it with snow and mud, or shifted a little at a time by shoving with our heels; for to stand in blank exposure to the fearful wind in our frozen-and-broiled condition seemed certain death. The acrid incrustations sublimed from the escaping gases frequently gave way, opening new vents to scald us; and, fearing that if at any time the wind should fall, carbonic acid, which often formed a considerable portion of the gaseous exhalations of volcanoes, might col-lect in sufficient quantities to cause sleep and death. (VIII, 76)4

In A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916), a posthumously published book that recounts his journey «by the wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way I could find» (I, 247) from the Indiana-Kentucky border to the Gulf of Mexico in 1867–68, Muir passes through a part of the country that is char-acterized by a wholly different topography than that of the West.5 (His ulti-mate goal was to reach the Gulf Coast, then sail to South America and follow in the footsteps of Humboldt by exploring the Orinoco and Amazon River



basins.) For those used to his animated and at times rapturous descriptions of the pure air, clean granite, and firm sandy soil of the High Sierra, his nar-rated trek through the backwoods of the South makes for a gripping, and in some ways unsettling, reading experience. He himself often feels alienated from his surroundings – something that never occurs during the course of his travels in California. Here, south of the Mason-Dixon Line, water crossings pose a constant challenge, rattlesnakes and alligators haunt his imagination, and in the swamps of Florida he struggles just to find dry stretches of land upon which to walk and sleep. When, on one occasion, he gets lost in an ev-erglade forest, the physical toil of «wading and wallowing» (I, 341) for miles through the marshy morass seems far more extreme than any of his moun-taineering exploits in the West. As one scholar observes, «his own sense of bodily control and ease of physical movement were constrained by swamps and brambles» (Holmes 171). Throughout the text Muir not only invokes but also ruminates on the dust, soil, and mire that he encounters during his wan-derings from Louisville to Cedar Keys. This narrative of dirt is framed by his first journal entry, in which he «[e]scaped from the dust and squalor of my garret bedroom to the glorious forest» (I, 248) and a concluding philosophical meditation on the intimate connection between Homo sapiens and «the dust of the earth» (I, 357). In patently romantic-pantheistic fashion, Muir even extends this analogy to the entire spectrum of creation. All matter, whether organic or inorganic, is composed of cosmic-divine dust. In this vein, he also speaks in defense of long-demonized creatures such as serpents and alligators, which are, after all, «part of God’s family, unfallen, undepraved, and cared for with the same species of tenderness and love as is bestowed on angels in heaven or saints on earth» (I, 324). On a more quotidian level, Muir remains preoccupied, more so than in his other writings, with the ground upon which he treads for some one thousand miles. Outside of Augusta, Georgia, he re-flects on the fluctuating sand-clay composition of the soil (see I, 290–91), while in Savannah he searches the dunes, «sinking ankle-deep in the sand» (I, 304), for a safe place to bed down. Generally speaking, Muir revels in the dirtiness of nature; he readily sleeps outdoors, despite the mosquitos, beetles, and whatever «cold-blooded creature […]; whether a snake or simply a frog or toad» (I, 308) may visit him during the night.

Muir’s main problem is not with dirty nature but with dirty civilization. In-deed, his narrative reads like a running commentary on the toxicity of human habitation. In Tennessee, for instance, Jamestown is dismissed as «rickety» and «dreary» (I, 262), Montgomery as «shabby» (I, 270), and Philadelphia as «a very filthy village in a beautiful situation» (I, 272), which is to say that only its natural environs are aesthetically pleasing.6 The inhabitants of these towns,


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whether white or black, are also largely lacking in hygiene. As for Muir, it is telling that the small knapsack he carries during his five-month ramble con-tains nothing but books and toiletries, including a change of underwear, a bar of soap, a towel, a comb, and a brush. As the most recent Muir biographer, Donald Worster, comments: «Maintaining a high standard of cleanliness was important wherever he was heading» (A Passion for Nature 120). A crucial filth-fraught confrontation on the outskirts of Gainesville, Florida, is particu-larly revealing. His following reflection, which I cite at length, abounds with dirt, ranging from the individual-phenomenal to the universal-metaphysical:

Came to a hut about noon, and, being weary and hungry, asked if I could have din-ner. After serious consultation I was told to wait, that dinner would soon be ready. I saw only the man and his wife. If they had children they may have been hidden in the weeds on account of nakedness. Both were suffering from malarial fever, and were very dirty. But they did not appear to have any realizing sense of discomfort from either the one or the other of these misfortunes. The dirt which encircled the countenances of these people did not, like the common dirt of the North, stick on the skin in bold union like plaster or paint, but appeared to stand out a little on contact like a hazy, misty, half-aerial mud envelope, the most diseased and incurable dirt that I ever saw, evidently desperately chronic and hereditary. It seems impossible that children from such parents could ever be clean. Dirt and disease are dreadful enough when separate, but combined are inconceivably hor-rible. The neat cottage with a fragrant circumference of thyme and honeysuckle is almost unknown here. I have seen dirt on garments regularly stratified, the various strata no doubt indicating different periods of life. Some of them, perhaps, were an-nual layers, furnishing, like those of trees, a means of determining the age. Man and other civilized animals are the only creatures that ever become dirty. (I, 332–33)

A number of interesting points emerge from this extended excerpt, the most important of which is that Muir seems far more riveted by the external sub-stance of dirt than by the individual human beings it encases. In fact, there is no clear indication of race anywhere in this passage, only of socioeconomic status. Muir, in effect, passes general anthropological judgment on those dis-enfranchised souls who are sullied by their own squalid existence rather than by the hostile forces of nature.

This focus on unsanitary man reappears during Muir’s first sojourn in Yosemite only one year after the completion of his thousand-mile walk at the opposite end of the country. As related in My First Summer in the Sierra (published in 1911, but based on his journals from 1869), Muir is repelled by human uncleanliness, whether of Caucasians or Native Americans. Regard-less of race, most people are a noxious presence in the sublime High Sierra that he is just beginning to discover for himself and that will eventually be-come «his totem place on earth» (Worster, A Passion for Nature 339). His



portrait of the white shepherd Billy, whose greasy overalls accumulate dust, dirt, and forest debris such as pine needles, moth wings, and even whole in-sects, is comically repulsive. As Muir mordantly notes, Billy is so covered in plant, animal, and mineral specimens that he embodies a kind of «microcosm» of nature. Or at least his trousers do: «These precious overalls are never taken off, and nobody knows how old they are, though one may guess by their thickness and concentric structure. Instead of wearing thin they wear thick, and in their stratification have no small geological significance» (II, 130). His observations regarding Indians, however, are devoid of mirth yet all the more rife with reproach. A native hunter’s visit to the sheep camp prompts the fol-lowing generalization: «A strangely dirty and irregular life these dark-eyed, dark-haired, half-happy savages lead in this clean wilderness […]. Two things they have that civilized toilers might well envy them – pure air and pure wa-ter. These go far to cover and cure the grossness of their lives» (II, 206). Later, on a hike across Mono Pass, Muir finds his mountain euphoria interrupted by a band of Indians that abruptly appear on the trail before him, begging for whiskey and tobacco. Taken aback by the contrast between their bedraggled looks and the pristine images of his alpine surroundings, he is most struck by the following detail (note the similarities in phrasing to the image of Billy above): «The dirt on some of the faces seemed almost old enough and thick enough to have a geological significance; some were strangely blurred and divided into sections by seams and wrinkles that looked like cleavage joints, and had a worn abraded look as if they had lain exposed to the weather for ages» (II, 219). While there are various reasons why the visages of American Indians, especially those like the Mono tribe that inhabit a high-desert re-gion, might be caked in dirt (for example, as protection against sun and wind), Muir fails to recognize or otherwise relativize this phenomenon. He remains, rather, fixated on banal issues of sanitation and on lofty ideals of nature – both of which are intimately linked in his mind. For as he later remarks: «[M]ost Indians I have seen are not a whit more natural in their lives than we civilized whites. Perhaps if I knew them better I should like them better. The worst thing about them is their uncleanliness. Nothing truly wild is unclean» (II, 226). For Muir, in sum, there is no such thing as «dirty nature» – only dirty people.7

In true transcendental fashion, Thoreau elevates the chthonic to a whole new conceptual level. Like his mentor Emerson, he deifies «Nature» (always writ large in both authors) as a higher province beyond the empirical reali-ty perceived by our senses. That is, he strives for the spiritual – and perhaps «antiseptic» – experiences of reverence, awe, piety, and mystical oneness that Oates and Phillips decry. Yet transcendentalism for Thoreau, unlike for Emer-


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son, works in two directions: the latter’s famous «mysterious ladder» (Emer-son 281), by which one scales from the immanent to the transcendent, allows Thoreau to climb back down as well. Walden is full of tropes illustrating this dual realistic-idealistic relationship toward nature/Nature. Images of upward and downward movement are particularly prevalent. Fishing, for instance, is a transcendental activity for Thoreau, since the flaxen line that he casts into the lake connects him to the natural phenomena of fish and, by extension, to a more transcendent attunement with greater Nature. «It seemed,» he writes, «as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fish as it were with one hook» (175). There are moments in Walden, and more often in the Jour-nal, when Thoreau does not just delve into the depths of nature by engaging in such physical activities as fishing, plumbing the pond, and probing for under-ground water with a divining rod. He also gets, so to speak, «down to earth» by digging in the dirt, burrowing in the soil, even wallowing in the muck. As various scholars have noted, he had a «life-long fascination with wading in bog-holes» (West 128), would stand in «‹the muddy batter midleg deep,›» or «brush through dense blueberry swamps and through ‹extensive birch forests all covered with green lice›» (Worster, Nature’s Economy 79, partially citing from the Journal). As Thoreau also writes in his Journal, the naturalist must think like a muskrat (much as Aldo Leopold urges us to think like a mountain) in order to fathom nature fully: «‹You wander indefinitely in a beaded coat, wet to the skin of your legs, sit on moss-clad rocks and stumps, and hear the lisping of migrating sparrows flitting amid the shrub oaks, […] more at home for being abroad, more comfortable for being wet, sinking at each step deep into the thawing earth›» (qtd. in Worster, Nature’s Economy 78–79). And lest there be any doubt that this primal urge is mere empty talk or some kind of an-imalistic fantasy (he invokes, if not identifies with, this species often enough in the Journal and Worster goes so far as to dub him «a muskrat-naturalist» [Na-ture’s Economy 78]), the following episode deserves mention. In May of 1857, during the annual spring floods, Thoreau wades barefoot through one of the many pools of water that collect on the local fields. Suddenly, around his legs, there appear «a hundred toads […], copulating or preparing to.» As they swim and leap atop one another, their trill reverberating through the air and making the earth beneath his feet tremble, Thoreau declares that «I […] am thrilled to my very spine, it is so terrene a sound.» Indeed, he himself «vibrate[s] to it» feeling at one with all this teeming amphibious swamplife (Journal, vol. 9: 354–55; also qtd. in Worster, Nature’s Economy 80).

Thoreau’s most sustained deliberation on dirt, more expressly on mud and clay, is found in the penultimate chapter of Walden. Simply entitled «Spring,»



this chapter deals more with the incipience of the season than with the later phase often celebrated in literature.8 In other words, Thoreau dwells on the sloppy month of March as opposed to the more verdant stages of late April and May (at least according to the seasonal trend in New England). Over the course of some twenty pages (299–319), he describes the melting snow and resultant slush and sludge, expanding his observations beyond portrayals of nature to deeper meditations on language, metaphysics, and cosmic creation. The core of this section, however, concerns an embankment and its soil muta-tions during the meteorological variations of spring. This sandbank is not, in strict terms, natural but rather anthropogenic, the result of land removal for the construction of a railway that runs on the opposite side of Walden Pond from Thoreau’s cabin. Nevertheless, for Thoreau «this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature» (308). As such, it represents the inextricable «nature-culture» or «natureculture» amalgam that some ecocrit-ics (for example Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway) have posited and for-mulaically proposed. Still covered by snow in early spring, the cut bank grad-ually sheds this winter layer to reveal its muddy slopes. Thoreau scrupulously notes the diverse configurations as well as colorations formed by the melting sand and clay, which refreeze at night and then manifest different patterns during the daytime thaw. These patterns resemble numerous other aspects of nature such as leaves, vines, lichens, coral, leopards’ paws, birds’ feet – even internal organs and other secretions like «brains or lungs or bowels, and ex-crements of all kinds» (305). All such intricate and variegated designs carved into the loam function as a «hieroglyphic» that he strives to «decipher» (308) as part of his greater project to comprehend the inner workings of nature. In his own words:

This phenomenon is more exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and fertility of vineyards. True, it is somewhat excrementitious in its character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver lights and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side outward; but this suggests at least that Nature has some bowels, and there again is mother of humanity. This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is Spring [upper case]. It precedes the green and flowery spring [lower case], as mythology precedes regular poetry. (308)

This display of what one might call Nature’s «underbelly» (my term, not Thoreau’s) leads him to conclude that «[t]here is nothing inorganic» (308), not even our own human existence, for «What is man but a mass of thawing clay?» (307). This rhetorical question is not just another timeworn literary allusion to the creation of Adam as a composite of «man» and «earth.» As evidenced by his reflections that ascend from the excremental to the transcen-dental, or what Lawrence Buell labels his «pantheistic excrescences» (249),


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Thoreau graphically emphasizes that we humans are part and parcel of tel-luric nature. To defer again to Buell: «Walden breathes life into the biblical formula of humankind’s earthy origins» (170). One is further reminded of an episode in Muir’s A Thousand-Mile Walk in which he stumbles upon an African-American couple gathered around a fire in the pinewoods of central Florida, whereupon a humanlike form – which turns out to be their son – un-expectedly rises «from the earth naked as to the earth he came.» As the deeply religious Muir then draws the inevitable connection: «Had he emerged from the black muck of a marsh, we might easily have believed that the Lord had manufactured him like Adam direct from the earth» (I, 330–31). But where-as Muir’s remark remains a passing reference, Thoreau develops a far more sophisticated associative complex. He bolsters his creationist message with systematic analogies between human anatomical features, the manifold struc-tures found in nature (whether in soil, water, or vegetation), and the linguistic utterances (e.g., lobe, globe, lap, lip, flap, lapse, leaf) that articulate the coin-cident correlations between these two variants of creation. Thus the finger is a congealed drop, the hand a spreading palm leaf (word play on «palm»), the ear a patch of lichen, the nose a stalactite, etc. – all lobular-globular protru-sions whose basic forms are etymologically rooted in the consonant cluster LB or the related LV/LF. Though one could pursue these musings in further detail,9 Thoreau’s point is clear enough: all organic life issues from the same primordial ooze. Moreover, his metaphysics of mud suggests that even ad-vanced human faculties and endeavors originate from this «excrementitious» source: «Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe [by which he means «glob» of earthen matter] continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit» (Walden 306–07). Herein lies the essence of transcendentalism as the transformation from lower to higher tiers of experience and existence. As noted above, however, Thoreau’s brand of transcendentalism is not charac-terized by a one-way vector pointing upward but rather by a constant oscilla-tion between romantic-idealistic spheres of Nature worship and the realistic ground of dirt, mud, and clay – in a word, humus – from which humans and other life forms arise and to which they inevitably return.10

Given the pantheistic gusto – and at times reckless abandon – with which Muir and Thoreau expose themselves to the full brunt of nature, often by corporeal immersion in its mucky materiality, Stifter’s narrative engagement with the environment seems to pale by comparison. A sense of order, indeed orderliness, runs through his texts, which in a dirt-theoretical context means that they lack the grittiness found, at least to some degree, in North American environmental writing. As mentioned earlier, this may be due to divergent



cultural conceptions of nature; that is, to the long-standing debate concerning American wilderness versus European landscape. In Germany, nature tends to be conceived in terms of a vernacular landscape, a notion that encompass-es the natural history of a region along with the ethnic past of its denizens, including their dialect, their customs, even the architecture of their homes. In the United States, on the other hand, the operative concept is «wilderness preservation.» Over the course of American history, wilderness has come to acquire a number of variable meanings and resonances, but it generally de-notes a natural space that humans do not inhabit, appropriate, or exploit. (It is of course a cruel historical irony that Native Americans remain excluded from this idealized human-free realm.) Such areas tend to be located in remote and «sublime» terrains, as these are the last remnants of an ecologically intact environment and constitute precisely the type of scenery that the American wilderness ethic and aesthetic have promoted over the past couple centuries, in large measure through the nature advocacy of John Muir. As Muir and oth-ers have pointed out, America lacks many of the cultural splendors found in Europe (ancient ruins, medieval cathedrals, baroque palaces, etc.), but it pos-sesses all the more physical wonders: Yosemite Valley, the Grand Canyon, old-growth forests, unique wildlife – to name but a few. One could, in sum, say that the American wilderness ideal separates nature from culture while the German vernacular landscape combines these two spheres into the inclu-sive natural and human idyll known as Heimat.

An argument from this angle, however, carries only so much weight, for a number of factors – only a couple of which I mention here – speak against it. First of all, the environs of Walden Pond during Thoreau’s lifetime had been heavily logged and «were at an historic low point of forest coverage» (Sattelmeyer 241). In fact, thanks to its status as a state protected reserve, the woods of Walden are far more intact today than when Thoreau carried out his famed back-to-nature experiment in living. Furthermore, most of Muir’s thousand-mile walk led him through an anthropogenically altered terrain, mainly along dusty roads through farmed fields and logged woodlands. His sole contact with old-growth forests occurred while crossing the Cumber-land Mountains in Tennessee and North Carolina. Even in the boggy back-country of Florida he mainly trekked along a man-made railroad bank, which was the only reliable corridor of dry land that traversed the peninsula. These North American geographies are thus no more «wild» than Stifter’s native-narrative terrain of the Bohemian Forest, which also underwent its most se-vere period of deforestation during the mid-nineteenth century (see Brande 62–63). Of course nature is a relative rather than absolute concept and, in the end, perhaps nothing more than a human construct. As Gary Snyder for in-


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stance insists, «nature» and environment» are «bland terms,» while «ecology» and «wild» at least connote dynamic processes («Ecology, Literature, and the New World Disorder» 8/30). And as he reminds us elsewhere, our notions of «nature,» «wild,» and «wilderness» are by no means isomorphic (see Practice of the Wild 3–26). Still, the nagging question remains: How far does Stifter go in depicting not just the raw materiality but also what one might call the biotic fecality of nature?

A concrete example might help shed some preliminary light on this ques-tion. One of Stifter’s most famous descriptions of nature, namely his narrative survey of the Bohemian Forest on the opening pages of Der Hochwald (Jour-nalfassung 1842; Studienfassung 1844), is as detailed as it is comprehensive. It is, moreover, crafted in a prose that seems as dense and animate as the forest itself. As the perspective gradually shifts from a bird’s eye view of the entire region – the Dreiländereck where Austria, Bavaria, and Bohemia converge – to a more localized focus within the wooded interior, the narration briefly lingers on the ground, indeed soil.

Dichte Waldbestände der eintönigen Fichte und Föhre führen stundenlang vorerst aus dem Moldauthale empor, dann folgt, dem Seebache sacht entgegensteigend, of-fenes Land; – aber es ist eine wilde Lagerung zerrissener Gründe, aus nichts be-stehend, als tief schwarzer Erde, dem dunklen Todtenbette tausendjähriger Vege-tation, worauf viele einzelne Granitkugeln liegen, wie bleiche Schädel von ihrer Unterlage sich abhebend, da sie vom Regen bloßgelegt, gewaschen und rund ge-rieben sind. – Ferner liegt noch da und dort das weiße Gerippe eines gestürzten Baumes und angeschwemmte Klötze. Der Seebach führt braunes Eisenwasser, aber so klar, daß im Sonnenscheine der weiße Grundsand glitzert, wie lauter röthlich heraufflimmernde Goldkörner. Keine Spur von Menschenhand, jungfräuliches Schweigen. (1,4: 212–13)11

This passage is characterized by a fusion, perhaps more a confusion, of real-ism and romanticism. On the one hand, Stifter strives to represent, through an objective and semiscientific lens, a scene from nature that is true to life. On the other, he employs poetic tropes and anthropomorphic symbolism, which, from a literary-strategic standpoint, foreshadow the tragic events that transpire later in the tale: the deaths of Ronald and Herr von Wittinghausen, the destruction of the latter’s castle, the decline of his family, etc. Neverthe-less, despite such a pronounced Todessymbolik («Todtenbett[-],» «Schädel,» «Gerippe»), Stifter neglects to capitalize on organic metaphors of decay, which would not only have made for a more empirico-realistic reproduction of the forest biota but would also have helped underscore the death imag-ery that plays an important role on the fictional level of the text. And both strategies would furthermore conform to Gary Snyder’s appeal for a more



sincere confrontation with literary decomposition and putrefaction. Stifter in general, and Der Hochwald in particular, eschew such images but alter-natively embrace scenes and metaphors of sowing, planting, and harvesting. Der Hoch wald ends with precisely such a symbolic episode, as one of its few surviving characters, the veteran woodsman Gregor (Stifter’s Old World ver-sion of James Fenimore Cooper’s frontiersman Natty Bumppo), performs an act of forest renewal:

Westlich liegen und schweigen die unermeßlichen Wälder, lieblich wild wie ehe-dem. Gregor hatte das Waldhaus angezündet, und Waldsamen auf die Stelle ge-streut; die Ahornen, die Buchen, die Fichten und andere, die auf der Waldwiese standen, hatten zahlreiche Nachkommenschaft und überwuchsen die ganze Stelle, so daß wieder die tiefe jungfräuliche Wildnis entstand, wie sonst, und wie sie noch heute ist. (1,4: 318)

The upshot of Stifter’s concluding message is that forests may degenerate through the adverse effects of civilization; left to themselves, however (or here even abetted by ecologically sensitive stewards like Gregor), they flour-ish yet oddly never seem to decay. Had he only taken a cue from his contem-porary Thoreau: «Decayed literature makes the richest of all soils» (Journal, vol. 3: 353; also qtd. in Snyder, «Ecology, Literature, and the New World Dis-order» 9/31).

Although deep organic processes such as decomposition are noticeably absent from Stifter’s oeuvre, natural elements and particles permeate his texts and further take on an essential thematic or symbolic function. A by no means exhaustive list includes: dust (Der Hagestolz), sand (Abdias), slush (Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters), rain (Kalkstein), hail (Katzensilber), snow (Bergkristall and Aus dem bairischen Walde), and ice (Die Mappe meines Ur-großvaters). Most of these come in the form of sudden, violent storms. More-over, other material realities such as drought (Das Heidedorf) and flooding (Kalkstein) figure prominently. While all of these natural occurrences bring about a period of chaos and pollution, they do not result in lasting environ-mental damage. Ultimately, they remain more disruptive than destructive – passing phenomena that fail to upset the ecological, historical, and ethical order of things. In fact, the more powerful the storm or disturbance, the more intense and profuse is nature’s post-calamitous regeneration. This tripartite schematic of order – disruption – reinstated order runs throughout his work and is reminiscent of conceptual and narrative patterns found in the late eigh-teenth and early nineteenth centuries. (With respect to the specific question of nature, Hölderlin and Schelling come to mind, as they both tend to think in terms of a prelapsarian state of man-nature harmony; our modern alienation from the natural world; and the future recovery of this primordial bond.)


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Stifter himself not only incorporates this basic model into his fictional tales; he also once attempted to ground it in theory. His well-known and oft-in-voked preface to Bunte Steine (1853), in which he makes a formal case for his regulative principle of das sanfte Gesetz, is an artistic manifesto that can also serve as a theoretical blueprint for interpreting his texts, above all those fea-tured in this collection of «many-colored stones»: Granit, Kalkstein, Turma-lin, Bergkristall, Katzensilber, and Bergmilch. Yet many of his earlier stories – including some that he originally published in journals and later revised for Bunte Steine – also revolve around a disruptive natural event and the gradual, «gentle» restoration of order. This restoration is also a Restauration in the po-litical sense of the term; that is, a corrective of the tension and at times turmoil that reigned in the German lands during the nineteenth century, especially in the wake of the 1848 revolts. The violence of these upheavals unnerved Stifter and prompted him to reinforce his «restauratives Ethos» (Prutti 51) in almost all subsequent writings, often by devising thinly veiled analogies between human existence and the natural world. A comparison of Die Pechbrenner (1849) and Granit (1853) offers perfect testimony of this practice, in this case an auto-corrective one, as Stifter amended the pessimism of the original story in the reconceived version for Bunte Steine, creating a fairy-tale-like happy end in the internal plotline of the plague.12 Throughout this middle period of his writing career, Stifter, it would seem, imposes a normative narrative order on the pure ontological givenness of nature. (Within the stories them-selves, he often shows how humans can «improve» the functionality of nature through such practices as resoiling, crop husbandry, and selective logging.) As Christian Begemann formulates this problem: «Eruptive Naturvorgänge können zwar nicht in ihrer Existenz, wohl aber in ihrer Bedeutung geleugnet werden. Sie sind nur punktuell und transitorisch, sie finden statt, aber dan-ach geht alles seinen üblichen sanften und stetigen Gang weiter, der das ist, was an der Natur als ‹wesentlich› gelten soll» (311). In the following, I will examine two texts that narrate eruptive and pollutive events: Granit and Kat-zensilber.

Granit may not depict dirty or messy nature per se, but as the first story of Bunte Steine it prototypically exemplifies Stifter’s operative model of or-der – disruption – restored order, here in the more explicit mode of childhood purity – pollution – purgation.13 The central disastrous event is not the kind of Naturereignis found in his other tales (droughts, floods, and storms of all varieties) or enumerated in the preface of Bunte Steine (thunderstorms, light-ning, gales, volcanoes, and earthquakes). It is, rather, the plague, which can be considered to have its origins in nature – specifically in fleas carried by ro-dents – even if it chiefly affects humans. Fichte, for instance, includes diseases



(Krankheiten) and epidemics (Seuchen) in his list of natural threats to human-ity, a list that otherwise bears a striking resemblance to Stifter’s own: floods, hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes (see Fichte 267). In the text of Granit itself, all that is said about the provenance of the infection is the following: «Man weiß nicht, wie sie gekommen ist: haben sie die Menschen gebracht, ist sie in der milden Frühlingsluft gekommen, oder haben sie Winde und Regen-wolken daher getragen: genug sie ist gekommen [...]» (2,2: 37). If pestilence, whether transmitted by the forces of nature or the incursions of man, remains the central cataclysm of the story, a seemingly innocuous human-provoked incident is its catalyst. The young narrator of this semiautobiographical tale relates how he becomes the victim of a prank committed by the local Wagen-schmierfuhrmann Andreas, who daubed the youth’s bare feet with pitch, the material of his trade. When the nameless narrator enters his parents’ house and «den schönen Boden […] besudel[t]» (2,2: 31), he is punished by his mother, who whips his feet and thereby produces an even greater mess as the wagon grease splatters all over the hallway. Rhetoric of contamination domi-nates this segment of the narrative. Though the grandfather cleanses the boy’s feet – one of several biblical allusions (cf. John 13:5–15) that fortify the themes of sin and absolution as well as the motif of defilement – and the maids scrub the stains from the floor, the lasting impression here at the beginning of the story is one of dirtiness. As the grandfather recaps the events:

«Nun sage mir doch auch einmal, wie es denn geschehen ist, daß du mit so vieler Wagenschmiere zusammen geraten bist, daß nicht nur deine ganzen Höschen voll Pech sind, daß deine Füsse voll waren, daß ein Pechfleck in dem Vorhause ist, mit Pech besudelte Ruthen herum liegen, sondern daß auch im ganzen Hause, wo man nur immer hin kömmt, Flecken von Wagenschmiere anzutreffen sind.» (2,2: 30)

In order to rectify all this «Unordnung» (2,2: 31), the grandfather takes the narrator on a long trek through the region (once again, the Bohemian For-est), instructing him in both its human and natural history. As often in Stifter, whom one is tempted to call «ordnungssüchtig[-]» (Prutti 58), nature is pre-sented as an organized realm where everything has a name and place. In the course of their walk through forest and field, all the native trees, woodlands, mountains, and farmsteads are identified, whether in terms of their species (Tannen, Fichten, Erlen, Ahorne, Buchen, etc.) or their anthropomorphic designations (die Machtbuche, die Drillingsföhre, der Sesselwald, der Philipp-georgsberg, die Pranghöfe, etc.).14 The grandfather further gives an account of the plague that decimated the area several generations ago. As it soon be-comes apparent, this subnarrative symbolically parallels the main action. The alliterative Pech and Pest, with their common associative color of black (cf. «the black death»), are both toxic agencies that upset the established order,


164 Sean Ireton

albeit on vastly different levels. Furthermore, as the history lesson unfolds, it is revealed that the cart grease purveyor from the beginning of the text is a descendent of the handful of pitchmakers that survived the epidemic. Stifter thus not only ties the two narrative strands together through the correlation of black contagions but further creates an historical as well as storytelling arc of closure through this final familial disclosure.15 Indeed, as Martin and Erika Swales have observed, the story as a whole comes full circle as grandfather and grandson return home from their lengthy Rundgang (147). A further cor-respondence between the two storylines concerns the healing role of nature. The pedagogical hike through the Bohemian countryside is also a curative one: it serves to distance the besmirched youth from the scene of his trans-gression and metaphorically purge him of his sins. Analogously, the boy and girl – simply referred to as «der Knabe» and «das Mädchen» – that outlive the plague as chronicled by the grandfather are only able to do so because they find sanctuary in the mountain forests that lie beyond the pale of human set-tlement. The boy in fact nurses and nourishes the girl back to health not only in the midst of, but also by means of, nature. He constructs a bed of leaves, grass, and branches, covers her with medicinal herbs, and feeds her berries and hazelnuts. Upon her recovery they are able to find their way back down to what is left of civilization thanks to his familiarity with the diverse botanic zones. In a continuation of the fairy-tale mode, now that «die Gesundheit wieder in unsern Gegenden [war]» (2,2: 57), they later marry and establish a family from which Andreas, the prankster that set the entire narrative into motion, stems. In the end, the nearly all-day «ramble» of the main plotline – both the physical ramble that grandson and grandfather take together and the latter’s rambling, or at least perambulatory, discourse – functions as a form of purification. After they arrive back home and the wearied narrator lies in bed, the mother blesses her half-sleeping child, who «erkannte, daß alles verzie-hen sei, und schlief nun plötzlich mit Versöhnungsfreuden, ich kann sagen, beseligt ein» (2,2:60). This religious symbolism of forgiveness is further ac-centuated on the next day, when «alles [war] rein frisch und klar» (2,2: 60) and the youth attends mass, thereby becoming absolved of his literally dirty deed. The story thus ends with «die Restauration einer gestörten Ordnung» (Ketelsen 318). In sum, much like in Muir, nature in Stifter’s Granit is not just predicatively clean and pure; it is transitively cleansing and purifying. In accordance with pastoral literary tradition, nature remains immune from in-fection, impervious to toxicity, and furthermore provides a cure to the ills afflicting civilization.

It is worth exploring one more text by Stifter in order to uncover more po-tential, and perhaps more productive, dirt. In Katzensilber, the key cataclys-


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mic event is a fierce hailstorm that causes only minor human injury yet major environmental destruction. Unlike in Granit, where grime is restricted to the household and remains conspicuously absent from nature (except in its meta-phorical association with the plague), it exhibits a distinct material presence in Katzensilber, as the storm spoils the landscape. As to be expected in a tale by Stifter, especially one belonging to the corpus of Bunte Steine, nature under-goes a period of disarray before returning to its original wholesome condi-tion. In the opening descriptive exposition of Katzensilber’s setting, which appears to be a subalpine locale somewhere between the Bohemian Forest and the Austrian Alps, Stifter paints a tableau that blends the natural and cul-tural landscape. This arcadian backdrop seems remarkably tidy and well-or-dered, even by Stifterian standards. The rugged natural features of the terrain have been modified and mollified by the hand of man. The «stattlich[e] Hof» (2,2: 243), in which the main characters – an extended family of three gen-erations – dwell, contains gardens and orchards beyond which lie expansive forests. The nearby mountainside is accessible by a footpath equipped with railings and a few benches so that «man da sitzen, und die Dinge mit Ruhe betrachten kann» (2,2: 244). This well-kept sandy path leads deeper into the mountainous interior, where a mixed topography of woods, meadows, and rocky outcroppings harbors an abundance of plant and animal life as well as minerals such as the titular muscovite or common mica (Muskovit or Katzen-silber). Over the course of several pages (see 2,2: 246–58) Stifter catalogues these multitudinous natural phenomena and further describes how the three children practically frolic in the midst of such bounty. In its naive simplic-ity, this segment of the narrative walks a fine line between hyperrealism and quasi-kitsch, between a kind of textbook ecological survey and a children’s storybook idyll. Yet the folksy or fairy-tale discourse only informs Stifter’s deconstructive plan of a «gradual ‹Entromantisierung› of Nature» (Mason 128).16 The hailstorm that strikes out of nowhere puts an abrupt end to this idealized scene, transforming what might be called a verklärte Idylle into a schmutzige Urlandschaft. Indeed, this latter quality is suggested twice, once in connection with «dem Schmuze der Erde» (2,2: 268) and once as an adjec-tive describing the pollution of a mountain brook. Note, in the following ex-cerpt, the transition from a romantic fairy-tale idiom to a more sober realistic prose:

Als sie zu dem Bächlein gekommen waren, war kein Bächlein da, in welchem die grauen Fischlein schwimmen, und um welches die Wasserjungfern flattern, son-dern es war ein großes schmuziges [my emphasis] Wasser, auf welchem Hölzer und viele viele grüne Blätter und Gräser schwammen, die von dem Hagel zerschlagen worden waren. (2,2: 267)


166 Sean Ireton

Whereas Stifter previously indexed nature’s phenomenality in a deft and deli-cate – for modern tastes even dainty – style, he now delivers a laconic and paratactic enumeration of the damage, so to speak, après le déluge: «Das Laub wurde herab geschlagen, die Zweige wurden herab geschlagen, die Äste wur-den abgebrochen, der Rasen wurde gefurcht, als wären eiserne Eggenzähne über ihn gegangen» (2,2: 264). The following lines are even more stripped down of grammar and syntax, their staccato cadence intimating a sense of ag-gression: «Es schlug auf das Laub, es schlug gegen das Holz, es schlug gegen die Erde […]» (2,2: 264). As the Swales have pointed out, this passage illus-trates the basic tension between two conflicting aesthetics as condensed in the pronoun es: the «Romantic personification principle» of nature embodied by «das braune Mädchen» and the impersonal pronoun behind which lurks the inscrutable agency of natural laws (see Swales/Swales 188). As the pair of critics further notes, this fundamental duality turns the text into «a concep-tual, and hence stylistic, battlefield: pitted against the poeticizing aim there is a powerful realistic strand» (187–88). Though this claim may be overstated, it cannot be denied that the post-storm scenery has been converted into a veri-table battlefield. The widespread devastation is evoked by repeated references to the «schwarze Erde» (2,2: 265, 266, 267) that lies battered and denuded of vegetation. Even the surrounding rocks, though of course not damaged by the falling hail, appear «schwarz» (2,2: 267) in the ensuing rain, and the overall mixture of dark earth and collected rainwater turns the soil into a «Brei» (2,2: 253). Hailstones still litter the blackened and gouged ground, everything is «zermalt,» «zerschmettert,» «zerstampft[-],» and «getötet» (2,2: 266). Over-all, the picturesque wonderland that prevailed in the first part of the narrative now resembles an apocalyptic landscape. Back at home everything also lies in shambles and «[d]as erste, was der Vater am Morgen vornehmen ließ, war, daß er das Innere der Glashäuser reinigen ließ» (2,2: 278). Both natural and man-made «Abfälle» (2,2: 278) – leftover hailstones, plants, branches as well as pottery shards and other household debris – are carted off for disposal. This sanitation of the domestic domain goes hand in hand with the restora-tion taking place in the broader realm of nature. The local stream, murky from all the «Schlamm» (2,2: 279) along its banks and befouled by masses of dead fish, gradually clears, though the thrashed countryside remains barren until the following spring. As in Thoreau’s take on this transitional season, telluric anarchy is but a prelude to life, and Stifter’s own chaotic Urscape soon under-goes a springtime rebirth. By the time summer arrives, the leaves on the trees are grander and deeper in color than ever before, while hazelnuts abound on the few intact branches that now bear the physical and moral regenerative load – Stifter refers to their «Pflicht» (2,2: 289) – of their counterparts elimi-



nated by the storm. There is, in sum, «nichts mehr von dem Unglüke des Ha-gels zu erbliken» (2,2: 295), and the Stifterian laws of nature have returned to ethical normalcy.

While the various moments of dirty, or at least disruptive, nature found in Stifter inform a broader aesthetic-ideological program, they also have their own realistic-mimetic valence; that is, their own validity as artistic attempts to capture the intrinsic «reality» of nature. This reality may lack the kind of material fundament that modern readers have come to expect from environ-mental literature or other texts that purport to represent, or presume to re-produce, the natural world. Even Muir and Thoreau, who remain far more immersed in dirt, mud, and related matter than does Stifter, display strong attachments to romantic pantheism and espouse a scientifically enlightened physicotheological view of transcendent Nature as a divine and perfect order. Muir in fact continues to do so as late as the turn of the century. Of course in the end, all three authors cannot but offer their own historically limited set of responses to the brute and ineffable materiality that we, for lack of a better term, call «nature.» This is particularly true in the case of Stifter, who wavers between a romantic fascination with nature’s darker, destructive powers and an aesthetic-ethical urge to transfigure these forces and keep them in check. In the end, this latter corrective impulse almost always prevails. Muir and Thoreau, on the other hand, present remarkably gritty responses given their respective eras. Their intense intra-actions with the material landscape an-ticipate the exploits if not antics of contemporary wilderness enthusiasts and radicals like Gary Snyder, Edward Abbey, Doug Peacock, and Dave Fore-man. As such, they embody Snyder’s deeper existential ideal of nature writing and ecocritical research, as expressed in the following remark: «Our work as writers and scholars is not just ‹about› the environment, not just ‹speaking for› nature, but manifesting in ourselves […] the integrity of the wild» («Ecol-ogy, Literature, and the New World Disorder» 10/32).

Notes

1 For some representative material ecocritical reflections by Iovino and Oppermann, see Works Cited.

2 Though I have previously explored ecocritical connections between Stifter and Thoreau (see Ireton), virtually all of the observations presented here are new. I merely reiterate some of my earlier points on pp. 149/155–56 and 10–11 of this article.

3 Though most of Muir’s books were published in the early part of the twentieth century, some of them posthumously (he died in 1914), they are almost exclusively based on his travels during the latter half of the nineteenth. Moreover, many of these books derive


168 Sean Ireton

from his early journals while their individual chapters are often reworked versions of articles that he published in periodicals before 1900. He can thus be considered more a nineteenth-century author than a twentieth, even if, in terms of his biography, he strad-dles both eras. On a further philological note, I cite throughout from the ten-volume The Writings of John Muir, Sierra edition, according to work title, volume, and page number.

4 For an alternative account of this adventure, see his essay «Snow-Storm on Mount Shas-ta,» which was originally published in Harper’s Monthly in September 1877.

5 Throughout my discussion of A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, I cite from the pub-lished version rather than from Muir’s diaries, which have received a fair amount of scholarly scrutiny over the last several years.

6 A later remark by Muir concerning the city streets of San Francisco is worth considering in this context of dirty civilization: «The streets here are barren & beeless & ineffably mud[d]y & mean looking. How people can keep hold of the conceptions of New Jeru-salem & immortality of souls with so much mud & gutter, is to me admirably strange. A eucalyptus bush on every other corner, standing tied to a painted stick, & a geranium sprout in a pot on every tenth window sill may help heavenward a little, but how little amid so muckle downdragging mud.» This excerpt from a letter dated 28 January 1879 is cited in Worster, A Passion for Nature 222.

7 The question of race, more specifically of racial bias on the part of Muir, is a compli-cated one and lies beyond my focus. Generally speaking, during his thousand-mile walk he remains sympathetic toward blacks and reserves harsher judgment for whites (espe-cially the privileged upper class) in the immediate postbellum South. In further fairness to Muir, it should be noted that his views regarding Native Americans evolved over the course of his life and travels, from his early negative attitudes toward the Winnebago or Ho-Chunk nation in his home state of Wisconsin to his more positive interactions with the various populations in Alaska, particularly the Tlingit people. For an informative survey of this issue, see Fleck. For a discussion of Muir’s «Victorian» attitudes toward American Indians (in the context of Darwin’s own critical views), see Cohen 185–90.

8 The scholarly literature on this key chapter of Walden is vast and I have no intentions or pretensions of doing it justice but merely seek to bring out some fruitful dirt-theoretical connections to Muir and Stifter. For an overview of secondary studies dealing with the chapter, especially with the symbolic function of the sandbank, see the annotated biblio-graphical essay in Boudreau 117–34.

9 For a more thorough discussion of Thoreau’s attempt to ground his sandbank observa-tions in linguistic natural correspondence theory, see West and Boudreau 105–14. While Boudreau offers an instructive close reading of the section, West explores some poten-tial influences on Thoreau’s ideas, especially Walter Whiter’s Etymologicon Magnum or Universal Etymological Dictionary from 1800. In this work Whiter traces numerous words back to radicals denoting «earth» and its vast varieties of «dirt.» For example, some four hundred pages of the lexicon cover the radical BC from which are derived Bog, Peat, Puddle, Pit, and Bottom. Moreover, as West summarizes, the «final one hun-dred and forty pages are, in effect, an extended mediation on ‹the MATTER of MUD›» (125); that is, they feature entries such as MC (e.g., MUCK) and MD (e.g., MUD). One can only imagine the pleasure with which Thoreau might have plundered this source mate-rial.

10 My brief discussion of Thoreau not only expands on Dana Phillips’s new materialist scrutiny of «food and farming» in Walden, but would also seem to refute it. Though



Phillips speaks of «Thoreau’s reluctance to broach the topics of the excremental and the excretory – of shit and piss» (536), he is mainly referring to the chapter «Higher Laws» and is furthermore strategically setting up his argument within parameters already laid out by David Gessner in Sick of Nature (2004) and Timothy Morton in Ecology without Nature (2007). As I have demonstrated above, the chapter «Spring» teems with excre-ment – or is, so to speak, full of shit. However, as Phillips rightly points out, brute nature is inevitably overcome in the transcendentalist-Calvinist-Romantic mindset of Thoreau. In this sense, he (Thoreau, not Phillips!) is perhaps figuratively full of shit: dirt will soon enough be elevated to a higher plane anyway, so why make such a big deal about its ma-teriality in the first place?

11 All citations from Stifter are from Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtaus-gabe and are parenthetically indicated according to volume and page number.

12 See for instance the article by Lachinger, the partial title of which, «Von der Gewalt zur Sanftheit,» concisely sums up this shift from the sway of brute nature to the triumph of regulative order.

13 For a rich discussion of Granit along with its earlier Journal version Die Pechbrenner, see Prutti. This article also provides an overview of previous scholarship on the two texts and hence serves as an excellent orientation for those interested in their diverse thematic and structural aspects, only some of which I touch on here.

14 As Koschorke argues, this presentation of the natural topography resembles a «buchsta-biertes Panorama» more than a mimetic landscape description or a subjective-romantic conceptualization of nature. Thus, paradoxically, the child narrator remains removed from the very formative experience that the grandfather is trying to impress upon him: «An die Stelle der erlebten Perspektive tritt die Simulation eines kartographischen Blicks» (5).

15 The structure and motif complex of the story are far more sophisticated than I am able to present here within the restricted thematic parameters of my analysis. For a more instructive discussion, see Bender.

16 For a recent study that expands on Mason and explores aspects of folklore, history, and national identity within the tale, see Howards. This article further offers a useful assess-ment of the extant scholarship on Katzensilber.

Works Cited

Begemann, Christian. Die Welt der Zeichen: Stifter-Lektüren. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995.Bender, Wolfgang F. «Adalbert Stifters Erzählung Granit: Strukturen und Symbole.»

In Search of the Poetic Real: Essays in Honor of Clifford Albrecht Bernd on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday. Ed. John F. Fetzer, et al. Stuttgart: Heinz Akade-mischer Verlag, 1989. 33–44.

Boudreau, Gordon V. The Roots of Walden and the Tree of Life. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1990.

Brande, Arthur. «Stifters Hochwald am Plöckenstein: Eine vegetationskundliche und waldgeschichtliche Analyse.» Waldbilder: Beiträge zum interdisziplinären Kollo-quium «Da ist Wald und Wald und Wald (Adalbert Stifter), Göttingen, 19. und 20. März 1999. Ed. Walter Hettche and Hubert Merkel. Munich: iudicum, 2000. 47–67.

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995.


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Cohen Michael, P. The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1984.

Easterlin, Nancy. «‹Loving Ourselves Best of All›: Ecocriticism and the Adapted Mind.» Mosaic 37.3 (2004): 1–18.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. «Circles.» The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Brooks Atkinson. New York: The Modern Library, 1950. 279–91.

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Die Bestimmung des Menschen. Fichtes Werke. Ed. Imma-nuel Hermann Fichte. Vol. 2. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971. 165–319.

Fleck, Richard F. «John Muir’s Evolving Attitudes toward Native American Cul-tures.» American Indian Quarterly 4.1 (1978): 19–31.

Holmes, Steven J. The Young John Muir: An Environmental Biography. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1999.

Howards, Alyssa Lonner. «Telling a Realist Folktale: Folklore and Cultural Preserva-tion in Adalbert Stifter’s ‹Katzensilber›.» Modern Austrian Literature 43.4 (2010): 1–21.

Iovino, Serenella. «Material Ecocriticsm: Materiality, Agency, and Models of Nar-rativity.» Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 3 (2012): 75–91.

Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann. «Theorizing Material Ecocriticism: A Dip-tych.» Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.3 (2012): 448–75.

Ireton, Sean. «Walden in the Bohemian Forest: Adalbert Stifter’s Transcendental Eco-centrism in Der Hochwald.» Modern Austrian Literature 43.3 (2010): 1–18.

Ketelsen, Uwe-K. «Geschichtliches Bewußtsein als literarische Struktur: Zu Stifters Erzählung aus der Revolutionszeit Granit.» Euphorion 64 (1970): 306–25.

Koschorke, Albrecht. «Das buchstabierte Panorama: Zu einer Passage in Stifters Gra-nit.» Vierteljahresschrift des Adalbert-Stifter-Instituts des Landes Oberösterreich 38 (1989): 3–11.

Lachinger, Johann. «Adalbert Stifter – Die Pechbrenner und Granit – Von der Gewalt zur Sanftheit.» Jahrbuch des Adalbert-Stifter-Instituts des Landes Oberösterreich 7/8 (2000/2001): 53–60.

Lioi, Anthony. «Of Swamp Dragons: Mud, Megalopolis, and a Future for Ecocriti-cism.» Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice. Ed. Annie Merrill Ingram, Ian Marshall, Daniel J. Philippon and Adam W. Sweeting. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2007. 17–38.

Mason, Eve. «Stifter’s ‹Katzensilber› and the Fairy Tale Mode.» The Modern Lan-guage Review 77 (1982): 114–29.

Muir, John. The Writings of John Muir. Sierra edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916–24.

–. «Snow-Storm on Mount Shasta.» Nature Writings. Ed. William Cronon. New York: Library of America, 1997. 634–48.

Oates, Joyce Carol. «Against Nature.» (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities. New York: Dutton, 1988. 66–76.

Oppermann, Serpil. «Ecocriticism’s Theoretical Discontents.» Mosaic 44.2 (2011): 153–69.

Phillips, Dana. «‹Slimy Beastly Life›: Thoreau on Food and Farming.» Interdisciplin-ary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.3 (2012): 532–47.

–. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 2003.



Phillips, Dana, and Heather I. Sullivan. «Material Ecocriticism: Dirt, Waste, Bodies, Food, and Other Matter.» Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.3 (2012): 445–47.

Prutti, Brigitte. «Zwischen Ansteckung und Auslöschung: Zur Seuchenerzählung bei Stifter – Die Pechbrenner versus Granit.» Oxford German Studies 37.1 (2008): 49–73.

Sattelmeyer, Robert. «Depopulation, Deforestation, and the Actual Walden Pond.» Thoreau’s Sense of Place: Essays in American Environmental Writing. Ed. Richard J. Schneider. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2000. 235–43.

Snyder, Gary. «Ecology, Literature, and the New World Disorder.» Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 11.1 (2004): 1–13. Reprinted in: Back on the Fire: Essays. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007. 21–35.

–. The Practice of the Wild. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1990.Stifter, Adalbert. Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Ed. Alfred

Doppler, Wolfgang Frühwald and Hartmut Laufhütte. 10 vols. to date. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1978– .

Sullivan, Heather I. «Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticism.» Interdisciplinary Stud-ies in Literature and Environment 19.3 (2012): 515–31.

Swales, Martin and Erika. Adalbert Stifter: A Critical Study. Cambridge, MA: Cam-bridge UP, 1984.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Journal of Henry David Thoreau. Ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen. 14 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906.

–. Walden. Ed. J. Lyndon Shanley. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004.Walls, Laura Dassow. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-

Century Natural Science. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1995.West, Michael. «Walden’s Dirty Language: Thoreau and Walter Whiter’s Geocentric

Etymological Theories.» Harvard Library Bulletin 22.2 (1974): 117–28.Worster, Donald. Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. 2nd ed. Cambridge,

MA: Cambridge UP, 1994.–. A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.



JETZT BESTELLEN!

Joseph P. Strelka

Dante – Shakespeare – Goetheund die Traditionskette abendländischer Autoren

Edition Patmos, Vol. 182014, XIV, 275 Seiten,€[D] 19,99/SFr 28,00ISBN 978-3-7720-8530-7

In der platonischen Akademie von Florenz wurde im 15. Jahrhundert entdeckt, dass sich durch die ganze abendländische Geistesgeschichte eine synkretis-tische Traditionskette zieht, die Ideen von Hermes Trismegistos, Plato, Pythagoras, Seneca, Plotin und des Neuplatonismus vereinigt. Strelkas ideenge-schichtliche Untersuchung zeigt in faszinierender Weise durch eine Art literarischer Gipfelwanderung, wie sich diese Traditionskette kontinuierlich weiter bis ins späte 19. Jahrhundert zieht, vom Rosen-roman über Dante, Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare und Goethe bis zu Emerson. Es kommt orts- und zeitbedingt zu kleinen Variationsformen, doch die platonische Grundidee bleibt unverändert gleich. Sie stellt eine Art Brücke bedeutender Geistigkeit dar, vom Altertum über das Mittelalter hinweg zum Gipfel der amerikanischen Renaissance. Eine Ideenkette, welche die abendländische Kultur verbindet und be-gründet.


«Und daß man von Natur aus mehr als eine Null ist»: Nature, Memory, and Ethics in Hans

Lebert’s Die Wolfshaut (1960)

GUNDOLF GRAML

AGNES SCOTT COLLEGE

Hans Lebert’s first novel, Die Wolfshaut (1960), tells the story of a war crime: In 1945, shortly before the end of World War II, the paramilitary Ortswacht in the Styrian village of Schweigen murdered six Zwangsarbeiter in an old brick factory. The murderers covered up the traces of their crime and struck a vow of silence. Seven years later, one of the perpetrators is found dead at the same brick factory and the wall of silence begins to crumble. Against strong resistance, village outsider Johann Unfreund, a former sailor who returned to his father’s house after the war, pushes forward with the investigation. Un-freund discovers that his father had participated in the execution and that the father’s subsequent suicide was a result of his inability to live with this guilt. As the plot unfolds, the executioners, wary of being uncovered, either kill each other or die under strange circumstances. The Matrose, as Unfreund is called, uncovers the entire plot and finds the remnants of the murdered forced laborers. But before he can deliver hunter Habergeier, the former leader of the Ortswacht, to the police, the latter assumes the position of Landrat in the regional government, thereby gaining immunity from criminal prosecution. The frustrated sailor eventually departs, leaving behind the village and its in-habitants with a crime that goes unpunished.

Set in the late fall and winter months from November 1951 through Feb-ruary 1952, the novel’s almost six hundred pages quite overtly connect de-scriptions of Austria’s dirty nature with the country’s then largely ignored National Socialist past. Muddy fields, foul-smelling dung heaps and manure pools, and a seemingly unceasing rain frame the violent plot with a fittingly depressing environment. Descriptions of an anthropomorphized nature in-dicate fascism’s continuing hold on the village: «Die Bäume längs der Fahr-bahn standen Spalier und hoben grüßend ihre Hände hoch; in weißen Stutzen marschierten die Prellsteine auf; die Windstöße knatterten wie Standarten und Fahnen» (Wolfshaut 185–86). For readers familiar with Austrian postwar literary history, these polemical descriptions of Austria’s natural landscape will likely evoke associations with writers such as Thomas Bernhard, Ger-hard Roth, and Elfriede Jelinek. Indeed, these writers, and quite a few more


174 Gundolf Graml

whose critique of post-1945 Austrian politics and society targeted the coun-try’s much-touted tourism imagery, directly or indirectly refer to Lebert as a decisive influence for their own writing.1

Despite these parallels, Lebert’s Die Wolfshaut did not spark anything like the heated debates generated by the performances of Thomas Bernhard’s play Heldenplatz or of Jelinek’s dramatic works performed at the Viennese Burg-theater. In 1960 – a time when the Austrian process of memory was dominat-ed by the view that the country was Hitler Germany’s first victim – Lebert’s novel indeed was a «book too soon» (Bushell).2 Another likely cause for the reading public’s muted reaction in 1960, and for the still cautious critical treatment after the novel’s republication in 1990, has been the text’s mixture of nature descriptions with metaphysical ruminations about the absence of god, which for many critics put the text in suspiciously close proximity to the blood-and-soil imagery of National Socialism.

In this article I will show that Die Wolfshaut’s treatment of dirty nature has meaning beyond being a metaphor for Austria’s «dirty» history. Applying Wolfgang Iser’s concept of «literary anthropology,» I first discuss the literary representation of nature in its metaphorical and metaphysical form as a mani-festation of a broader human experience of reality. This perspective allows me to study literary appearances of nature as a repository for the memory of traumatic events in Austria’s past. Second, I move beyond the analysis of nature in the text to studying the text as an element of nature, or, to be more precise, to probing Die Wolfshaut’s role in what Hubert Zapf calls «cultural ecology.» In this regard I discuss to what extent Lebert’s novel reappropriates the realm of the natural from its reactionary National Socialist embrace and offers an ethical challenge to the latter based on reenvisioning the embedded-ness of humans in the larger natural «mesh» (Morton).

«CSI Schweigen:» Nature and the Locating/Avenging of a Crime

In Die Wolfshaut, descriptions of dirty nature and unpleasant landscapes un-derscore nature’s role as memory keeper and avenger. The place of the origi-nal murder of the forced laborers, the dilapidating brick factory, is marked by a crippled oak tree and a non-fertile strip of grass, the «fahle Streifen» (26). In contrast to the conventional images of Heimatliteratur and tourism, in which a fertile, growing nature is evidence for the healthy condition of the related Austrian community, nature in its deformed and non-fertile state in Die Wolfs haut becomes a constant reminder of the repressed. Even if the community initially feigns ignorance about the cause of this barren strip of grass – «Wir haben keine Ahnung, was es mit ihm für eine Bewandtnis hat»


«Und daß man von Natur aus mehr als eine Null ist» 175

(26) – the sailor’s subsequent discovery of the rotting bones of the murdered forced laborers in the soil under the brick factory confirms the suspicion that the «fahle Streifen» is the visible manifestation of a «buried» negative event. At one point, the pale strip turns into a mud slide and almost buries the police commissioner, seemingly punishing his pursuit of rumors about an exhibi-tionist instead of investigating the war crime.

The environment takes an even more active role in bringing «justice» to the former executioners. Two former members of the Ortswacht die in close proximity to the ruins of the brick factory. While the first incident generates anxiety due to the fact that the deceased is a fairly young man whose death, for lack of other evidence, is ruled a heart attack, the second death clearly bears all the signs of an assassination: The old saw mill operator Schrecken-schlager, another participant in the murder of the forced laborers, is found with his head split open between the brick factory and the crippled oak tree. Schrecken schlager, as the reader will learn later, was killed by forester Rotschädel, another member of the execution commando, in order to prevent further revelations about the war crime. Rotschädel eventually meets his fate in the woods, when he becomes impaled on a broken tree branch after appar-ently running from an unknown threat. The narrator’s description of the loca-tion evokes images of a tribal hunting scene: The branches function as «Fan-garme[.],» holding the forester’s torn clothes like «Speere[.].» Rotschädel’s jacket is ripped apart, «zerfetzt wie von Krallen und Zähnen,» and his body is found kneeling against a tree: «Und der Stumpf eines Astes ragte ihm rot aus dem Rücken» (Wolfs haut 458–59).

The Roman historian Tacitus had already noted somewhat admiringly that, for the «Barbarians,» the forest was the most important natural «ingredient» of German identity construction and seemed to function as ultimate judicial authority, because «traitors and deserters are hanged from trees» (Schama 86). Tacitus’s Germania offers, in the words of Schama, the basis for a theory of so-cial geography, whose much-distorted and misinterpreted version reappears in the twentieth century, when National Socialist concepts of social engineer-ing concentrate on alleged parallels between sustainable forest management and eugenics. As Michael Imort writes, the National Socialists embraced the concept of the «Dauerwald» – the precursor of what is today often called eco-forestry – not because they were closeted environmentalists; rather, the idea of cutting down weaker and thinner trees to provide more space and light for stronger trees resonated with the Social Darwinistic visions of an eternal Ger-man Volk (52–53; 55).

As forester Rotschädel’s death indicates, the forest around Schweigen is no «Dauerwald,» for the woods do not spare those who count themselves among


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the strong and who cling to National Socialist ideology. Moreover, as the er-ratic growth patterns of the grass around the brick factory suggest, the natural environment seems to reject any «collaboration» in the crime. What initially appears as dirty and cruel nature can be read as Lebert’s attempt to extend the National Socialist blood-and-soil ideology to its extreme by showing that the perpetrators, who justified their murders by referring to nature’s «selection process,» are in the end at the mercy of these very same forces.

There is, however, much resistance in the secondary literature to focusing on nature’s role as agent. Repeatedly, critics argue that the depiction of na-ture in Die Wolfshaut is embedded in a problematic intellectual framework based on German composer Richard Wagner’s transformation of Germanic mythology into a foundation for the German sense of cultural and national superiority. Indeed, Hans Lebert, who was a well-known Wagner tenor be-fore and even during the early years of World War II, frequently and liberally references Wagner’s work, especially the monumental opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen.3 In addition to the novel’s title, Die Wolfshaut, the epigraph also refers to Siegmund’s futile quest to find his (god)father Odin/Wotan: «Eines Wolfes Fell nur / traf ich im Forst; / leer lag das vor mir: / Den Vater / fand ich nicht.» The Wagnerian version of Siegmund’s search for god/father Odin/Wotan forms the template for sailor Johann Unfreund’s attempt to find out what role his father played in the execution of the forced laborers. The sailor’s realization that his father is a murderer and that he, therefore, lacks a father in the sense of a comforting role model is linked to a general question-ing of the existence of god as a moral authority throughout the novel. Other references to Wagner can be found in the depictions of photographer Karl Maletta, a traumatized ex-soldier, and teacher Ilse Jakobi, a former leader in the National Socialist Bund deutscher Mädel. These two characters are to some extent modeled on the Wagnerian characters of Siegfried and Brunhilde, whereby Maletta’s inability to break through Jakobi/Brunhilde’s ring of fire makes him an impotent Siegfried whose self-hatred eventually turns against the entire village.

Lebert’s own interpretation of Die Wolfshaut as an example of «Transpa-rentismus,» a self-designed style that attempts to realize metaphysical forces and phenomena through aesthetic configurations,4 further encouraged some scholars to ignore references to the materiality of nature and read Die Wolfs-haut (and some of his earlier texts) as grand literary treatments of justice and repentance «in the great Jewish-Christian tradition» (Caputo-Mayr 80).5 Jür-gen Egyptien embraces Lebert’s concept of «transparentism» without hesita-tion and reads Die Wolfshaut as a narrative about the absent god («deus ab-sconditus»), and, ultimately, as a literary parable about good and evil in which



National Socialism is merely a helpful example: «In letzter Instanz ist selbst in der Wolfshaut der Nationalsozialismus als historische Materialisation des Bösen eitel, eine austauschbare Emanation. Es ist nur ein, wenngleich auch das vielleicht böseste Stück, das auf der Bühne der Geschichte bislang gespielt wurde» (180).

For those critics who read Die Wolfshaut as a historical novel, the com-plex and sometimes indeed confusing «Wagner-Recycling»6 interfered with the text’s anti-fascist message. As literary historian Norbert Frei writes, Die Wolfshaut exemplifies the failed attempts to tap the «Traditionsfundus der Metaphernsprache» by a group of postwar Austrian writers, who exhibit a «naives Vertrauen in die Abbildfähigkeit gehabter Kunstformen» and overes-timate their capacity to use these literary devices in a way that is «spielerisch-intellektuell» (212). Even critics who otherwise view Lebert’s work in a more positive light, emphasize that «das Thema NS-Verbrechen und dessen Aufdeckung und Vergeltung […] in einer so magisch wie vagen Atmosphäre finsterer Vergeltungsmächte [verlorengeht]» (Fliedl and Wagner 312–13).

Interestingly, both camps find evidence for their contrasting interpreta-tions in the same plot elements of Die Wolfshaut, namely in Karl Maletta’s imagined transformation into a wolf. The traumatized ex-soldier struggles with life in what he perceives to be a backward and crude community, which views him as an easy scapegoat and mocks him at will. Alienated from the vil-lagers, Maletta develops an increasing sensitivity towards nature. His body reacts to changing weather patterns; elements of the surrounding nature, such as trees, mountains, and clouds, appear to him as animate beings. The pace of this gradual change quickens when the village teacher loans Maletta a book titled «Curieuse und nutzbare ANMERKUNGEN von Natur- und Kunstgeschichten zusammengestellt von KANOLD 1728,» which describes, among other things, the «lycanthropos,» a process whereby humans turn into wolves (95). Maletta immediately recognizes these symptoms in himself, as his hateful attitude towards the villagers morphs into visions of violence: «Er dachte: ‹Irgendein Kerl geht in den Wald, irgendeiner von der Bande da; er meint, im Wald und auf der Heide sei gut sein – und jetzt – jetzt hetz ihn! […] Jetzt reiß ihn in Stücke!!! […] Hetz ihn zu Tode, mein Wolf!›» (198–99).

For Egyptien, this subplot is evidence for Die Wolfshaut’s larger religio-philosophical message: «Die faschistoide Gewalttätigkeit der Landschaft ist bloß ihre aktuale [sic] Imprägnierung. Die Natur fungiert als Organon eines transzendenten Kraftfeldes […],» and the «Gestalt rätselhafter Naturphä-nomene» are only the visualization of evil (130). Egyptien claims that the representation of nature in the artistic realm of literature cancels out any con-nections to historical reality and that Die Wolfshaut explodes «die Gattung


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des historischen Romans und ist nur oberflächlich betrachtet ein literarischer Beitrag zur ‹Vergangenheitsbewältigung› in Österreich» (179).

By contrast, literary scholar J.J. Long, who interprets Die Wolfshaut as an important text addressing a crucial historical episode in Austrian history, reads this entire subplot as a quasi-didactic passage about the political func-tions of myths. Long points out that, practically simultaneously to Maletta’s imagined transformation into a wolf, hunter Habergeier sparks a rumor about an actual wolf threatening the village, which helps him to rally the villagers around a perceived «real» danger and to frustrate the sailor’s inquiry into the war crime. Focusing on the retrospective questioning of the validity of some of Maletta’s experiences by the narrator, Long concludes that the mythologi-cal references enable Lebert «to show how, in the hands of an unreliable nar-rator and the village community he represents, a metaphor can take on a life of its own and come to function as an explanatory model for events that appear to have no direct physical cause» (92).

Long reads the violent events described in the novel as a repetition of the original violent act, the murder of the forced laborers, and as generated by the inability of the villagers (and by extension of the Austrians) to face their criminal past.7 Sailor Johann Unfreund functions as a detective and, after un-covering the murders, also comes close to assuming the role of «therapist» for the traumatized village, whose name – Schweigen – does indeed point to a problematic silencing of the past (Long 88). However, Die Wolfshaut fore-closes a therapeutic solution when the last remaining culprit, hunter Haber-geier, acquires immunity from prosecution via his political position and Un-freund accepts the futility of his efforts at confronting the villagers with their past crimes and leaves the village.

As convincing as Long’s reading is, he, too, builds his argument on an as-sumed split between a rational and an irrational perspective on nature, where-by the latter is explained and thereby contained by references to an external heuristic system drawn from psychoanalytic theory.8 As a consequence, the potential of nature descriptions, allegories, and metaphors in a broader dis-cussion of the connection between memory processes and nature remains largely untapped. By explaining Maletta’s experience of turning into a wolf as based on an unreliable narrator, Long implicitly discredits Maletta’s reflec-tions on a nature-based ethics and thereby ignores a crucial aspect of the dis-course of memory in Die Wolfshaut. By drawing on Wolfgang Iser’s concept of «literary anthropology,» I will investigate what happens when the imagi-nary and metaphysical references to nature are viewed not as the opposite of a rational construction of reality but as an example of literature’s capacity to double and expand human experience.



Dangerous Reflections: Nature as Reverse Mirror of Human Experience

One day before the apparent heart attack of young Hans Höller – the first of the deaths that disturb life in Schweigen – Karl Maletta experiences a strange phenomenon on the road next to the brick factory. He feels as if something touched him, and as he looks around and up the hill to sailor Unfreund’s house, he perceives what looks like a person hanging from an apple tree, swinging in the wind. This apparition results in Maletta’s changed self-per-ception:

Und plötzlich hatte er das Gefühl, in ein Kreuz verwandelt zu sein, in ein Kreuz aus tausend Fäden, die leise vibrierten und sich unsichtbar spannten von Schweigen zur Bahnstation Kahldorf, vom Schweigen des Waldes zum Schweigen der Einschicht-höfe und von der Töpferhütte [the sailor’s house] zur Ziegelei. Er selber aber war der Mittelpunkt, […] wo sich all diese Fäden kreuzten, wo sie leise erbebend einan-der berührten und ein Geräusch erzeugten, ähnlich dem rasselnden Flügelschlag einer Libelle. (Wolfs haut 28)

At first glance, this experience can be read as initial indication of the trau-matized veteran’s deteriorating mental condition. After all, he climbs up the hill to the sailor’s house only to discover that what he thought to be a hanged person is in fact the tree trunk that houses the water fountain. However, as the novel progresses, it becomes apparent that Maletta’s vision constitutes a precise map of the war crime around which the entire plot revolves.

In order to make sense of the tension between Maletta’s imagined experi-ence of nature and the role this experience plays in revealing actual (not imag-ined) war crimes, it is helpful to draw on Wolfgang Iser’s concept of «liter-ary anthropology,» which rethinks literature’s connecting of the fictional, the imaginary, and the real within an anthropological paradigm. As Iser ar-gues, literature’s value with regard to «anthropological» insights lies in the interplay between «the fictional and the imaginary» (228). The fictional, so Iser, should not be read in opposition to reality but, rather, as a «means of overstepping the given, which is bound to cause a transformation of what is» (214). The reason for this feedback loop of the fictional onto the «given» real-ity lies, paradoxically, in the impossibility to disprove fiction through reason-ing: Whereas any experimental setup in historical reality can be questioned by hypothesizing, fiction can always escape evaluative scrutiny by pointing to its status outside the given reality. And yet, it is from this position outside the grasp of the usual laws of reality, which we accept as the foundation of our given world, that fiction «offers a standpoint from which to investigate the anthropological makeup of man» (215).

Instead of viewing the fictional in opposition to the real, Iser encourages its understanding as «an instrument […] that taps our imaginary resources» and


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helps us to see the world from a new perspective (218). The imaginary is, thus, not the same as the fictional. Rather, the fictional is «the medium» through which the imaginary «assume[s] a tangible gestalt» (222). As «medium,» the fictional enables the manifestation of the imaginary, but this does not mean that the imaginary event is fully dominated by the fictional «perspective im-posed by the medium. [The imaginary] manifests itself, rather, as a difference that cannot be deduced from the medium itself. This difference spotlights the imaginary as resistance to conceptualization» (224). So, instead of looking at the imaginary, which becomes manifest through the fictional, as an element that transcends reality, we should think of the imaginary as an extension, a «doubling» of reality, which reveals the blind spots of our cultural reality bet-ter than other conceptual frameworks:

It must be stressed again that literature does not reflect that reality, but mirrors its reverse side, which would otherwise remain hidden by the cultural context itself, and it is the mirroring that conditions literature’s formation of cultural reality. By throwing into relief the uncharted regions of the prevailing culture, it changes the map, which is overlaid by the imagery of what remains cognitively unfathomable. (228)

Die Wolfshaut’s narrative structure clearly encourages a reading of the de-scriptions of nature as an expansion of human reality and as a visualization of the «uncharted regions of the prevailing culture» (Iser 228) by emphasiz-ing the blind spots of conventional Cartesian mappings of nature. «Ja. Aber werfen wir erst einen Blick auf die Karte,» the narrator invites the reader al-ready on the novel’s opening page (Wolfshaut 7). The subsequent description of the map shows the villages of Schweigen and Kahldorf, their combined train station, and the single-track railroad that ends a couple of stations later. The map also displays the mountain range of the Ebergebirge, hugged by the road between Kahldorf and Schweigen, which passes by the «verdächtige[n] Ziegelofen» (7). The overall underwhelming atmosphere of this «gottverlas-sene Gegend» is summarized in the paragraph’s conclusion: «Und sonst…? Das hier sind Äcker, das hier ist der Wald; die Punkte da bezeichnen einsame Höfe, und die Striche: Wege, die sich im Walde verlaufen» (7).

About twenty pages later, shortly before Karl Maletta has his strange expe-rience near the brick factory, the narrator once again invites the reader to take a look at the place:

Betrachten wir den Ort in aller Ruhe: […] Rechts an dem lehmigen Absturz, der mit niederem Buschwerk bedeckt ist, hockt, dem höher beginnenden Walde be-nachbart, das Haus des Matrosen und lauert mit winzigen Fenster-Augen herab. Ihm gegenüber, auf einem unbebauten Stück Land (wo niemals etwas recht gedei-hen wollte) ragen die halbzerstürzten Mauern der Ziegelei […]. An dem zugewach-



senen Fahrweg, der hier von der Straße abzweigt und durch Unkraut und gelbliches Steppengras zur Ziegelei hinüberführt, steht eine alte, total verkrüppelte Eiche. […] Dort, bei dieser Eiche – etwa hundert Schritte vom Ziegelofen entfernt –, beginnt der sogenannte ‹fahle Streifen.› Wir haben keine Ahnung, was es mit ihm für eine Bewandtnis hat. Er kriecht wie eine Schlange durch das Brachland und jenseits der Straße den Abhang des Berges hinan. Er ist nicht immer sichtbar. Er kommt wieder und verschwindet wieder. (Wolfshaut 26)

The two-dimensional, Cartesian representation of nature and landscape through dots and symbols in the first quote falls short of conveying a sense of place. Instead of providing orientation, the map produces disorientation: The phrase «Wege, die sich im Walde verlaufen» alludes to the proverbial «Holzweg,» a popular German phrase for being on the wrong path.9 While both passages begin with an invitation to the reader, the different quality of the second description becomes apparent in the replacement of the colloquial «Werfen wir […] einen Blick […] auf die Karte» with «Betrachten wir den Ort in aller Ruhe.» A concentrated, perhaps even contemplative – quiet – fo-cus substitutes for a casual glance. Moreover, the map as scientific abstraction and indirect mediator of place from nature has disappeared in favor of a sup-posedly unmediated gaze at place in nature. Where the first quote offers a list of general categories through nouns such as «Äcker,» «Wald,» «Höfe,» the second mapping of what is arguably the novel’s most significant location uses a series of adjectives, verbs, and nouns.

It is important to note that the second quote is not simply an emphasis on the materiality of dirty nature, but a more nuanced description indicative of the relationships between the elements of natural and manmade landscape: The «lehmige […] Absturz» is covered with «niederem Buschwerk;» the sail-or’s house «hockt» up on the hill and «lauert mit winzigen Fenster-Augen herab;» the walls of the brick factory are «halb-zerstürzt» and the driveway is «zugewachsen.» Most importantly, when the description addresses the pale strip of infertile grass it allows for nature to become active so that «Er kriecht wie eine Schlange» and «Er kommt wieder und verschwindet wieder.» The realism offered by the animated appearance of nature is the very «reality mirrored in reverse» that Iser views as central to literature’s anthropological function.

The novel’s almost self-conscious correction of the mapping of the crime scene functions like a manual for the subsequent descriptions of nature and their links to memory. Over the course of the novel different degrees of awareness natural processes seperate those who try to repress the memory of the crime and those who try to uncover it. As hunters, saw mill operators, foresters, and farmers, most of the villagers view the natural environment as


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an exploitable resource and as realm in need of constant disciplining and orga-nizing.10 Early on, the novel presents this economic perspective on nature in a negative light: «[E]s war das Jahrhundert der Baumfäller, das Jahrhundert des sinkenden Grundwasserspiegels; das Leben war auf dem Rückzug; die Wüste rückte vor» (67). Ignorant of this process, the murderers celebrate their al-legedly timeless connection to nature as the core aspect of their identity in a telling Stammtisch scene:

«Wir bleiben wir!» sagte Rotschädel, wie es schien, unter unwiderstehlichem Zwang, dem Jäger nachzusprechen. «Wir bleiben die alten!» bekräftigte dieser. «Die alten!» sagte Rotschädel. «Was auch immer kommen mag.» «Aber», sagte Ha-bergeier und hob den Finger, «man muß Anschluß finden, man muß mit der Zeit gehen.» […] «Ja, mein Lieber! Die Zeit geht weiter! Man muß vergessen können.» (Wolfshaut 31; emphasis added)

In this scene, a supposedly timeless peasant attitude – a stock element of Hei-matliteratur and Heimatfilme – shows its opportunistic flip side: Regardless of how immovable one’s identity is perceived, the passing of time creates new contexts that also shape this identity process. For the locals of Schweigen, this translates into the need to forget. Not surprisingly, the village council of Schwei gen decides to cut down the trees along the road next to the brick fac-tory in order to modernize the village for tourism at the same time that sailor Johann Unfreund digs out the remains of the murdered forced laborers bur-ied in the ruins of the brick factory (Wolfshaut 542–44).

The villagers’ implicit understanding of the connection between time and nature – as it manifests itself in their allegedly natural identity – is very differ-ent from how the two protagonists Johann Unfreund and Karl Maletta view that same connection. Johann Unfreund’s sensitivity towards nature is indi-cated by an awareness of the long cycles of nature and evolution. Imagining what the surrounding alpine landscape looked like when it was still an ocean floor, «Matrose» Unfreund sees in the clay he uses for his pottery – «einmal emporgetaucht aus dem Weltozean» – the «Zeichen der Vorzeit bewahrt (Schalen, Muscheln und Stachelflossen, Versteinerungen einer versunkenen Welt)» (Wolfshaut 69). In its description of prehistoric fossils as meaningful signs of life’s watery origins, this passage connects the organic cycles of na-ture, the processes of petrification, with the processes of history and memory. The fossils in the clay foreshadow the skeletal remains of the murdered forced laborers that the sailor will eventually dig out of the soil in the brick factory.

The ex-soldier Karl Maletta shares a similar awareness of natural process-es and of the dangerous exploitation of nature by humans: «Sie [human be-ings] haben einen unwahrscheinlichen Verstand, aber die Reife und Weisheit von Halbwüchsigen. Sie werden uns die Welt zur Hölle machen; sie werden



uns die Erde betonieren und die Luft vergiften» (Wolfshaut 391). While Un-freund’s repeated memory of «das blaue Lied,» a nostalgic flashback to his first love, enables him to keep a somewhat positive, if cynical, outlook on life, his alter-ego Maletta perceives mostly the decaying and rotting element of nature:

Er wischte sich den Schweiß. Dabei beschmierte er sich mit dem Lehm, der ihm zäh an den Fingern klebte. Er zog sein Taschentuch heraus und wollte sich sauberma-chen. Da ward auch dieses voller Lehm; und Lehm war in der Hosentasche! Überall die fahle Schmiere! […] Er war mit Kot gezeichnet. (Wolfshaut 104–05)

Maletta’s particular experience of nature illustrates Iser’s literary «doubling» effect, which allows us to «see ourselves in that within which we are entan-gled» (228). Not only is Maletta the first character in the novel who senses the overall configuration of the village’s criminal secret, but the temporary and imaginary appearance of the hanged person on the apple tree triggers Maletta’s own process of remembering: «Es gab in seiner Vergangenheit einen Gehängten, nämlich irgendeine Schweinerei, von ihm als peinlich aus dem Bewußtsein verdrängt, die aber nun bei manchem Anlaß in dieser oder jener Maske aus seinem Untergrund emporstieg, um ihn zu erschrecken» (28). The «Gehängte» in Maletta’s past is a reference to his own participation in a war crime, namely in the execution of an entire village by his Wehrmacht unit. The character’s connection of the temporary imagination of a changed nature and landscape with the repressed memory of a past event underscores that the imaginary’s usual manifestation as momentary, sudden occurrence often covers up its actual function: «[The imaginary] precedes what is, even if it can only show itself through what is» (Iser 221).

Maletta the «wolf,» who turns against his fellow humans, is the retroactive visualization of Maletta the war criminal and exemplifies the working of the imaginary in the sense that «whatever has been left behind is dragged along in the wake of the individual acts and remains a potential presence» (Iser 222). Similar to the novel’s didactic use of two different maps, which model the meaningful reading of nature and landscape descriptions with regard to the location of the crime, the use of Kanold’s treatise on the «lycanthropos» by Maletta points to the role of literature as the reverse mirror of human real-ity. During a close reading of Kanold’s text, an already delirious Maletta con-cludes that he is not actually turning into a wolf, but that he dreams about acts of violence that are instead committed by the «evil master» while he himself is asleep and, ultimately, innocent of any crime: «[D]aß sie in tiefem Schlaf und Traum das Vieh zu beschädigen sich bedünken lassen, indessen aber nicht von ihrer Schlafstelle kommen, sondern ihr Meister dasjenige statt ihrer verrich-tet, was ihre Phantasie ihnen vorstellt und zueignet» (Wolfshaut 524).


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Instead of framing this bizarre subplot as an illustration of a political myth that stands in the way of the sailor’s rational investigation of the crime (see my previous discussion of Long’s approach), I look at it as an example of lit-erature’s «reverse cultural mirroring» through images of nature. As Wolfgang Iser writes, «[t]he fictionality of literature is not identical to the result it cre-ates, but is rather a modus operandi» that produces something new through a series of «intratextual» and «extratextual» «boundary-crossings» (Iser 216). Maletta’s imagined transformation into a projected element of nature – a wolf – with decidedly negative connotations can be read as the actualization of his earlier wolf-like behavior during the execution of innocent women and chil-dren, where it was he himself, and not an «evil master,» who committed a criminal act: «[E]rst Jahre später […] ist mir diese Heldentat zu Kopf gestie-gen. Seither spüre ich ein heftiges Verlangen, nachzuholen, was ich damals unterlassen habe: mich umzudrehen und in die andere Richtung zu schießen […]» (Wolfshaut 389).

The figure of the wolf is an example of the complex boundary crossings of the literary process. Intratextually, the wolf picks up the motif of the novel’s title and epitaph, substituting the war criminal Maletta as fill-in for the absent father figure, thereby also reaffirming the sailor’s shock at having to abandon the positive image of his father due to the latter’s involvement in the execution of the forced laborers. Extratextually, the novel’s time of production and first publication is close enough to the end of World War II to allow for an associa-tion of the wolf in connection to the Werwolf resistance, a much-hyped but barely realized attempt to form Nazi guerilla squads that would continue to combat the Allied forces. Significantly, this is not the reading the novel sup-ports. Rather, Maletta’s plan is to turn around and shoot in the direction of the former National Socialists, and, importantly, in the direction of himself: Be-fore he can enact any revenge fantasies, he dies at the hand of the sailor, who, riled up by the rumors of an actual wolf threatening the village, mistakes the approaching Maletta in the middle of the night for the dangerous animal and fatally shoots him.

What is new in Lebert’s novel and remarkable for its timing is the inclu-sion of an Austrian soldier’s reflection about his participation in the murder of civilians during his service in the National Socialist Wehrmacht. As histo-rian Heidemarie Uhl details, the official and mainstream interpretations of the role of Austrian soldiers in the German Wehrmacht changed significantly in the decade before the publication of Die Wolfshaut. Their representation as victims of a murderous German system that forced them to participate in an unwanted war was replaced by their being celebrated as heroic and dutiful soldiers (Uhl 4). Against this trend, Die Wolfshaut in 1960 presents an Austri-



an protagonist who not only admits to having participated in a war crime, but who underscores that possessing actual courage would have meant disobey-ing the order: «Ich hab’ gewußt: was da befohlen wird, ist ein Verbrechen. Und trotzdem hab’ ich gehorcht und habe geschossen» (Wolfshaut 389).

While Maletta’s role as war criminal is mentioned in passing by a few crit-ics, the significance of his admission for the process of memory remains un-explored in the critical literature. The underlying structure of the detective novel invites readers to focus instead on the process of how the allegedly un-tainted outsider Johann Unfreund’s attempts to uncover a crime and bring the perpetrators to justice. Compared to Maletta’s experiences of metaphysi-cal and supernatural phenomena, the sailor’s largely reason-based inquiries into the crime offer an easier access route for a critical reading. However, by focusing on how an outsider’s enlightened investigation into a war crime is frustrated by the rural community’s continuing embrace of National Socialist ideology, Die Wolfshaut’s historical significance as a text about the complex processes of remembering and the ambivalence of human actions is reduced.

«Wir bleiben wir»: Nature, Ecology, and Ethics

Die Wolfshaut’s imaginative use of the natural environment as a means to render visible a then largely ignored aspect of Austria’s participation in the National Socialist war of aggression also illustrates the role of literature as an element of cultural ecology. Developed by Hubert Zapf, the concept de-scribes the development of cultural narratives and discourses as not identical with, but analogous to, the system of natural evolution.11 As Zapf emphasiz-es, «[r]ather than genetic laws, information and communication have become major driving forces of cultural evolution» («Ecocriticism» 137). Literature functions as an ecological agent in the sense that it «breaks up ossified social structures and ideologies,» «symbolically empowers the marginalized,» and «reconnects what is culturally separated» («Ecocriticism» 138).

The concept of literature (and art in general) as a kind of cultural ecosystem has important ramifications for the discussion of ethics. Stories not only offer an opportunity to engage with ethical questions on a specific rather than an ab-stract level, but they also open up room for the «enactment of the dialogical in-terdependence between self and other, and beyond that of the irreducible dif-ference and alterity of the other which is central to ethics» («Literary Ecology» 853).12 This link between narrative and ethics appears to be most productive in texts where «the boundary of the culture-nature relationship [functions] […] as the textual site where ecological concerns and the ethical self-reflection of the human species are brought together» («Literary Ecology» 860).


186 Gundolf Graml

When Karl Maletta tells the sailor about his participation in the murder of innocent people, he offers an example of Die Wolfshaut’s retroactive affirma-tion of an ethical standpoint through a reflection on the relationship between self and other based on the link between culture and nature. After detailing how the soldiers could have easily turned against their officer but chose to obey his order to kill, Maletta concludes: «‹[I]ch war genau die gleiche Null wie alle andern […]. Seither weiß ich, daß ich damals auf mich selbst geschos-sen habe […]. Und daß man von Natur aus mehr als eine Null ist, und daß es an Selbstmord grenzt, sich als Null zu verhalten›» (Wolfshaut 559; emphasis in the original).

Maletta realizes that empathy with one’s fellow human beings is the pre-requisite for calling oneself a human and that the failure to do so is unnatural. This must be read against the villagers’ earlier emphasis of a «natural» and unchanging identity position, expressed in the statement that «‹[w]ir bleiben wir! […] Egal was auch kommen mag.›» Their claim rings hollow in the con-text of their behavior during and after the war. This repudiation of a circular and self-referential definition of the ontological positionality of humans un-derscores Die Wolfshaut’s role as a cultural ecological agent that attacks the blind spots of a community’s identity narrative. The text «symbolically em-powers the marginalized» by enabling two characters, Maletta and Unfreund, to express highly unpopular views for the time, and it «reconnects what is culturally separated» by liberating the concept of nature from its stifling em-brace by reactionary ideological discourses («Ecocriticism» 138).

An even more poignant example for the novel’s use of the «culture-nature relationship» as basis for the discussion of ethics is Die Wolfshaut’s subplot revolving around a fugitive prisoner: At around the time when the villagers are riled up by hunter Habergeier’s rumor that a wolf threatens the village, the chief of police Habicht receives a report about an escaped prisoner who might hide in the woods between Kahldorf and Schweigen. While the villagers fan out through the forest to hunt down the fugitive, the latter seeks refuge in the house of the sailor: «Und dann gewahrte [der Matrose] das Zebra. Es stand re-glos zwischen den vordersten Stämmen, schon halb von der Dämmerung aus-gewischt, und sah ihn aus schreckgeweiteten Tieraugen an» (Wolfshaut 188).

While the identification of the fugitive as zebra is initially based on the pris-oner’s striped overall, the symbolic blurring of the boundary between culture and nature transforms the fugitive into a symbol of the above mentioned ethi-cal stance of respect for the «alterity of the other» («Literary Ecology» 853). At first, the «Matrose» attempts to maintain his cynical attitude by claiming that his assistance to the fugitive is simply the result of boredom (Wolfshaut 191). Soon however, the zebra’s description of his experiences in prison and



the desire to gain freedom touch upon the sailor’s own longing to recover a lost sense of freedom and peace, symbolized by his attempt to hear again «das blaue Lied.» In the zebra’s account of his escape, the perception of nature from a supposedly non-human viewpoint plays an important role: «‹Schuld daran, daß ich so dastehe, ist der Geruch des verfaulten Laubes.› […] ‹Ich weiß, Sie verstehen mich nicht. Weil Sie noch ein Mensch sind. Menschen ha-ben ein großes Gehirn, aber ihre Nasen sind verkümmert›» (Wolfshaut 192). In the zebra’s description, the separation of human existence from nature is symbolized by the priority of rational over sensory perception, which dimin-ishes the substance of humanity.13 Becoming an animal is a way to reconnect with nature, is a way to remain human at a time when humans have turned into machines:

Nein, Sie irren sich. Ich rede nicht. Wie könnte ich Worte reden? Ich bin ja kein Mensch mehr. Und ich denke auch nicht. Was Sie hören sind keine Gedanken. Was Sie hören, ist mein Atem und mein Herzschlag. […] Ich hatte Durst und Hunger wie jedes Geschöpf; sobald ich erschaffen war, wollte ich essen und trinken. Aber die Mühle treten, das wollte ich nicht. Nein! Von allem fort! […] Lieber ein Tier sein als ein Rad oder sonst ein Bestandteil dieser Maschine. (200)

The zebra’s account reminds the sailor of his own entrapment, but also brings him closer again to the «blaue[s] Lied,» the song that symbolizes a lost sense of freedom and humanness (202). Forced to flee the house of the sailor before the advancing police force, the fugitive prisoner eventually turns himself in by showing up in the empty village square as «eine Kugel, ungefähr in den Farben der traurigen Erde» (337).

By describing the fugitive as transformed into a miniature version of the earth – a round ball covered in mud and leaves – the novel offers a direct chal-lenge to the «alienating forces of a purely economic form of globalization […] indifferent to the concrete ecosystems of particular places and regions» («Literary Ecology» 860). In Die Wolfshaut these forces are manifest in the attitudes of Schweigen’s woodcutters, foresters, and hunters, all of whom are also Nazis and perpetrators who try to keep buried the inconvenient truths of the past. When they finally find the fugitive, they first torture him until he (falsely) confesses to having killed the saw mill operator Schreckenschlager; they then shoot and kill him during an attempted escape.

The killing of the zebra is a stark reminder of the fate of escaped concentra-tion camp inmates who were often hunted down by the local population,14 but it also casts an uncomfortably bright spotlight onto the small-minded and moralistic attitudes that facilitate the emergence of ideologies such as fascism and National Socialism in the first place. Aside from a few petty thefts, the fugitive’s real «crime» was the attempt to live outside the rules and norms of a


188 Gundolf Graml

society for which the term value has meaning only in the context of trade and profit. Instead of recognizing and respecting the zebra’s views as a valid ethi-cal challenge to their worldview, the villagers can only perceive it as a viola-tion of their self-righteous and moralistic attitudes and, consequently, silence the zebra’s voice.15 By killing the zebra, the villagers not only maintain their view of nature as a force that needs to be disciplined, but they also fail the ethical litmus test in the face of a true challenge by an «other.»

The representation of the fugitive as zebra is a radical expansion of the ethi-cal challenge in Maletta’s statement, which describes empathy towards the other and resistance against power as the essence of humanity. By describ-ing these obligations as the defining quality of human beings’ qua nature, the statement implies that humans must try to recognize and respect in even the most extreme appearances of otherness manifestations of their own human condition.16 The failure to do so, and the resulting destruction of the other, is, in its final consequence, an act of self-destruction. One has to realize, as Maletta has, «daß es an Selbstmord grenzt, sich als eine Null zu verhalten» (559).

However, it is important to keep in mind that literary fictionality is «not identical to the result it creates» and that the underlying acts of «selection,» «combination,» and «self-disclosure» are beyond an author’s full control (Iser 216). In other words, it becomes necessary to apply the critical frameworks derived from «literary anthropology» and «cultural ecology» also to those ele-ments of the text that are presented as least fictional. In Lebert’s Die Wolfs-haut, this becomes important with regard to the problematic gendering of or-ganic natural processes. In the previously quoted passage in which the narrator characterizes the place of the crime with terms such as Unkraut and Schlan ge, the narrator invokes a religious image reservoir that anticipates the misogy-nist connection of dirty and unpleasant elements of nature with images of a dangerously seductive and simultaneously contaminating female sexuality.17 Throughout the novel, Maletta, and to a lesser degree Unfreund, repeatedly refer to women’s smelly armpits and the perceived «Bocksgeruch» of sexual arousal to express disgust (Wolfshaut 286).18 Active sexual behavior by women is connected to a fascist body cult, as Maletta’s repeated reference to the sol-dierly appearance of the village teacher, Ilse Jakobi, a former functionary in the Bund Deutscher Mädel, demonstrates. Her «Juchtengeruch» reminds him of «Marschkolonnen» and even her shoes, lined up orderly in her room, evoke somewhat titillating images of fascist submission (Wolfshaut 153).

In addition to functioning as a «cultural-critical metadiscourse» in its imaginative and critical retelling of Austrian soldiers’ criminal actions dur-ing World War II, Die Wolfshaut uncritically communicates the long shadow



of a soldierly masculine identity construction via its «extratextual» (Iser 216) references to the misogynist «male fantasies» (Theweleit) of post-World War I soldiers.19 These disturbing attitudes do not cancel out the ethical challenge posed by Die Wolfshaut’s literary remembering of Austrian soldiers as war criminals. Rather, they are yet another element of the «uncharted regions of the prevailing culture» (Iser) and of what Zapf describes as the «complexity of those inner landscapes of the mind» («Ecocriticism» 138) that become visible through literature.

Re-reading Die Wolfshaut in an ecocritical context offers several new per-spectives on the novel and the discourse of Austrian postwar memory. First, as I demonstrated in my analysis of nature through Iser’s concept of «liter-ary anthropology,» Die Wolfshaut recovers the imaginative force of the natu-ral and the organic from its appropriation by reactionary ideologies. While Lebert’s novel does not let go completely of the opportunity to portray the peasant lifestyle in the rural region of southern Styria as a manifestation of what Adorno called the «Brutalität des Rustikalen,» nature and its underly-ing processes ultimately become forces of resistance against the ideological manipulation of memory by the former perpetrators.20 This is an important shift in perspective compared to traditional literary history, which predomi-nantly analyzed literary representations of rural villages as depictions of an-ti-enlightened communities (Kummer 9).21 As a consequence, nature, in its functions as marker of a specific place and as synonym for the larger ecologi-cal system, appears freed from the discursive corset that identified the natural and the organic solely as suspicious leftovers of the National Socialist blood-and-soil ideology (Goodbody, Kindle Loc. 1599).

Second, the novel’s re-appropriation of the natural for a critique of reac-tionary ideologies mirrors the literary text’s own role as «ecological agent» in the larger context of cultural ecology, of which cultural memory is an im-portant element. It is an affirmation of humanity’s connection to nature and forms the basis for the ethical vision offered in the reflection of the veteran Karl Maletta. In all analyses of Die Wolfshaut that I am aware of, Maletta’s war crime and his later reflection on it fall by the wayside. The easily recog-nizable structure of the detective novel, centered around the sailor Johann Unfreund’s attempts to solve the crime and arrest the criminals, entices critics to focus on the comparison between an obstinate village community’s refusal to accept responsibility for their crimes and postwar Austrian society’s long-standing culture of forgetting. Since the criminals remain unpunished and the hero, sailor Unfreund, eventually leaves the village in a somewhat compro-mised fashion, Die Wolfshaut seems to offer a highly resignative view of his-tory and also of the discourses of memory.


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Maletta’s self-critical evaluation of his failure to be truly human at a crucial moment in his life offers a hopeful counterpoint insofar as it connects human-ity with nature in a decisively non-Social Darwinistic – and also anti-fascist – reading. As I show here, Maletta’s act of remembering is closely connected to an affective, emotional, and imaginative perception of nature. By high-lighting this sort of nature perception in opposition to the exploitative and technocratic view of nature by the other villagers, especially the perpetrators, Die Wolfshaut emphasizes the more-than-symbolic link between the ecologi-cal principles of nature and the function of literature as ecological agent with the potential to restore the richness, diversity, and complexity of those in-ner landscapes of the mind, which make up the cultural ecosystems of mod-ern humans, but are threatened by impoverishment by an increasingly over economized, standardized, and depersonalized contemporary world» (Zapf, «Cultural Ecology» 138).

My focus on the story of the traumatized ex-soldier Maletta’s crime as key to a renewed look at the process of memory in Die Wolfshaut must not be un-derstood as a total rejection of those readings of the novel that view the events in the village of Schweigen as a literary critique of the repression of memory in postwar Austrian society. Rather, my hope is that the different perspec-tive on the supposedly irrational and metaphysical perceptions of nature by one of the novel’s protagonists can provide a model for a broader and more nuanced discussion of the contradictory and complex processes of memory beyond an anthropocentric focus on human psychoanalytic processes.

Notes

I would like to thank Barbara Drescher for several helpful discussions that shaped my argument in decisive ways. I am also indebted to the editors of this special issue of Col-loquia Germanica, Caroline Schaumann and Heather Sullivan, whose critical questions and productive comments on earlier versions of this text have helped me to sharpen the argument.

1 For brief but informative references about Lebert’s influence on Elfriede Jelinek’s Kinder der Toten and Christoph Ransmayr’s Morbus Kitahara see Barrière. Karl Wagner offers a discussion of how Ransmayr’s Morbus Kitahara takes up and further develops Lebert’s nature metaphors («Das Gespenstische» 101). For a discussion of Lebert’s polemical na-ture descriptions as commentary on postwar Austrian politics see Reichmann.

2 Ignored by Austrian publishing houses, Lebert finally found a publisher in the Ham-burg-based Claassen Verlag, where Die Wolfshaut appeared in a small edition in 1960. Only 30 years later did the novel find an Austrian publisher when it was republished by the Europa Verlag (Bushell 95).

3 Lebert escaped service in the Wehrmacht by feigning mental illness. He retreated to a remote alpine village, where he lived for most of the war; he left his retreat for only a



few appearances on the stage (Egytpien 26–28). For more biographical information see chapter one of Egyptien.

4 In the words of Jürgen Egyptien: «Hans Leberts Methode des Transparentismus zielt […] auf die ästhetische Konstellierung der Transzendenz im Diesseits, deren Phänome-nalität das sinnliche Einzelne durchsichtig macht für die in ihm und durch es wirkenden Kräfte» (273).

5 Literary historian Karl Müller views the novel as a reflection of Lebert’s occupation with Gnosticism («‹Neuer Gegenstand›»).

6 How problematic Lebert’s use of Wagner motifs was for some critics is noticeable in the biting irony of their criticism: «Die Methode von Leberts Wagner-Recycling ist of-fenkundig folgende: Man gehe ins Nibelungenring-Depot und hole sich die Requisiten und Helden, die man braucht, und dichte sie weiter» (Aigner 144–45).

7 Other scholars who read Lebert’s text as comment on historico-political events and not as philosophical or religious treatment of evil are Barrière, Bushell, Strigl, and Wagner.

8 It is against such external points of reference that Wolfgang Iser argues in his search for literature’s unique contribution to anthropological knowledge (Iser 211).

9 Coincidentally, «Holzwege» is also the title of a collection of essays by Martin Heideg-ger. While there is no direct reference to Heidegger in Lebert’s novel or in his biographi-cal notes, my interpretation of this passage in Lebert’s novel as illustrative of a rejection of the reductive appropriation of nature by reactionary ideologies finds affirmation in this associative reference to Heidegger’s text.

10 For instance, the names of the hunter, Habergeier, and the saw mill operator, Schrecken-schlager, are not just ironic references to their professions but carry a negative connota-tion. For more on the multilayered meanings of last names in the novel see Long 88; Caputo-Mayr 84; Fliedl and Wagner 310.

11 Zapf draws on Gregory Bateson’s process-based understanding of the mind as well as on Peter Finke’s systems theory to develop his notion of «cultural ecology.» For the most detailed version of his ideas, see Zapf’s Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie. For this article I used English-language publications by Zapf, especially the essays «Literary Ecology and the Ethics of Texts» and «Ecocriticism, Cultural Ecology, and Literary Studies.» For the connection between Iser’s concept of literary anthropology and cultural ecology see Müller, «From Literary Anthropology to Cultural Ecology.»

12 As Zapf summarizes: «The awareness and recognition of the alterity of the other can be seen as an essential characteristic of the recent discourse of ethics, and narrative seems to be a form in which this discourse can find a specifically instructive, because complex, medium of (self-exploration)» («Literary Ecology» 854).

13 In this context it is interesting to consider Immanuel Kant’s discussion of smell as an «organic sensation» that might provide «pleasure of enjoyment» but constitutes an inferior method of perceiving one’s surroundings compared to a «rationalizing contem-plation» (Kant 175–76). I am indebted to Heather Sullivan for pointing out this connec-tion.

14 As Henry Friedlander writes, «zebra uniforms [gestreifte Kleider]» were used for con-centration camp prisoners designated in «killing centers» (149). Historian Daniel Blat-man describes how during the death marches at the end of World War II, German youths shouted from the windows «Wir gehen auf Jagd, um die Zebras abzuschießen» (313).

15 Daniela Strigl highlights that the «Individualismus des Anarchisten» appears to be Lebert’s main force of resistance against the totalitarian ideology of National Socialism (141).


192 Gundolf Graml16 Zapf draws on Derrida to make the point that philosophy is at a disadvantage compared

to literature here, «because the latter offers the possibility of opening the text to the per-spective of ‹the animal› while remaining aware of its incommensurability» («Literary Ecology» 855). See also Jacques Derrida, «The Animal That Therefore I am (More to Follow),» trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28.2 (2002): 372; quoted in Zapf, «Literary Ecology» 855.

17 This connection of female sexuality with fascism and dirty nature appears in even more disturbing ways in Lebert’s second novel, Der Feuerkreis (1971). For a discussion of im-ages of non-fertile and deserted nature and their connection to the bible, see Nash 13. I thank Caroline Schaumann for pointing me to this connection.

18 References to the smell of women’s armpits range from ironic depiction – «dort, wo selbst große Drogisten und Chemiker scheitern» (Wolfshaut 86) – to biting caricature, for instance when Erna Eder, a would-be filmstar, enters the restaurant: «Dann klappte eine Tür, und ein scharfer Geruch nach Zwiebeln durchzog das Lokal» (197).

19 Karl Müller refers to Kurt Arrer’s dissertation «Hans Lebert und der problematisierte Regionalroman» (1975) as the only scholarly work that has drawn attention to the fact «daß der Autor [Lebert] selbst nicht frei von rassistischen Tendenzen [sei]. Es handelt sich um eine nicht reflektierte Affinität» (Arrer 116; quoted in Müller, «‹Neuer Ge-genstand›» 58). Problematic is Egyptien’s discussion of this point: While acknowled-ing Lebert’s obsession with the allegedly dirty sexuality of the female body, Egyptien nonetheless writes of Lebert’s deep «penetration» of female sexuality – «Lebert dringt tief ins Geheimnis weiblicher Sexualität [ein]» (Egyptien 142) – without reflecting on the gendered implications of Lebert’s perspective nor on the phallic connotations of his own use of language.

20 Adorno, Theodor. Eingriffe. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963. 46; quoted in Rossbacher 13.21 For more on Die Wolfshaut in the Kontext of the Heimatroman genre see Kummer and

Rossbacher.

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Pollution as Poetic Practice: Glimpses of Modernism in Wilhelm Raabe’s Pfisters Mühle

SABINE WILKE

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

Wilhelm Raabe’s 1884 novel Pfisters Mühle tells the story of how a small fam-ily business, a mill and adjacent beer garden, is being destroyed by polluted wastewater run-off from a nearby sugar factory that dumps industrial chemi-cals into the stream. The pollution causes the growth of filamentous proteo-bacteria which, in turn, gives rise to a terrible stench. In the frame of the novel, the high school Latin and Greek teacher, Dr. Eberhard (Ebert) Pfister, returns to his ancestral home with his newly married wife, the nineteen year-old Em-my, to spend a summer month reminiscing about the past. The mill is about to be sold and subsequently demolished to make room for a new industrial dry cleaning plant. Triggered by the return to his ancestral home Ebert fills a series of altogether twenty-three loose sheets («Blätter») on which he reconstructs the story of Pfister’s mill over the course of that summer month. Many of the episodes that he recollects derive from daydreams during which his mind drifts off into the past and envisions people and reconstructs conversations. At the end of each day, Ebert reads what he noted on these sheets to his wife who shows moderate interest, at times even falling asleep while listening to his prose. In reading these sheets we learn about Ebert’s childhood growing up in Pfister’s mill: we meet his father, the miller and owner of the country tavern, the caretaker, Christine, his Latin tutor, Adam Asche, the poet Felix Lippoldes and his daughter, Albertine. We also learn the story of the slow, but doomed downturn of the father’s business due to the incredible stench from the foul creek that keeps his customers away and ruins the mill. Ebert’s father had the creek water analyzed scientifically, then traced the problems to their source, the sugar factory, and enlisted the services of a lawyer who successfully won the case against the polluters who were ordered by the courts to stop polluting the nearby waters or pay a daily penalty of 100 Marks. Despite this win, the miller’s soul and lifestyle are permanently damaged. He dies not long after the verdict is pronounced and passes the inheritance with all its obligations down to his son, who is not trained to take over the business and hence unable to maintain it. Ebert Pfister ends up selling the property to his friend and former tutor, Adam Asche, a chemist and successful businessman who is erecting a large-scale dry cleaning factory on the property where the mill once stood.


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From Ebert’s sheets documenting the story, the main elements of the mod-ern discourse on environmental destruction emerge. This essay reconstructs the literary dimension of a type of discourse that Lawrence Buell has described as «toxic» and links it to nineteenth-century realist fiction. Buell defines toxic rhetoric as «an interlocked set of topoi whose force derives partly from the exigencies of an anxiously industrializing culture, partly from deeper-rooted Western attitudes» (639). He locates the beginning of contemporary toxic dis-course in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), the book that introduced the key discursive motifs of «retelling narratives of rude awakening from simple pastoral to complex» (Buell 647) and «the moral passion of a battle between David and Goliath» (Buell 651) among others. I show how late-nineteenth- century realist fiction struggles with finding an adequate literary configura-tion for narrating pollution by experimenting with different genres, discours-es, and rhetorical figures to describe the changes in modern technological practices that result in pollution. Raabe populates his novel with a variety of literary figures who evoke different registers – realist, mytho-poetic speech, scientific and technocratic rhetoric, and toxic discourse – when faced with the problem of narrating pollution. Each of these figures seeks his/her own strategies of coming to terms with their modified environment and navigating the scene of pollution. Toxic discourse emerges from this discursive competi-tion as the precursor of modernism. Toxic discourse strings the chemical phe-nomena that make up pollution into a metonymic chain forming rich webs of interconnected figurations poetically performing the tropical principles of pollution. Pollution as poetic practice shapes the modern discourse of envi-ronmental degradation derived from this constructive difference between the genre conventions of realist fiction and modernist poetics.

Pfisters Mühle was composed between April 1883 and May 1884 while Raabe was attentively following the trial of a sugar refinery in Rautheim near Braunschweig. In fact, he carefully studied the trial documents to which he had access, thanks to his friend Heinrich Beckurts, a professor of pharmaceu-tics and applied chemistry at the Technische Hochschule Braunschweig and who served as expert witness in the case («Heinrich Beckurts»). However, Raabe made only very selective use of this material as Jeffrey Sammons has shown convincingly: «Raabe had begun to compose the novel while the law-suit was still unfolding, and he was still receiving documentation from Beck-urts in the course of his writing,» yet, «despite the materials he lifted directly out of the documents, such as the biological jargon, he is no more immediate-ly mimetic here than he was accustomed to be otherwise» (Raabe 50–51). As evidence, Sammons discusses three major deviations from the official records: Pfister’s mill doubles as a country tavern, the actual indemnity awarded is sig-


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nificantly reduced (from 1000 Marks a day in the historical case to 100 Marks a day in the novel), and the erasure of the figure of Raabe’s informant, Heinrich Beckurts, the emerging scholar in pharmaceutics and applied chemistry and Raabe’s co-fellow in one of Braunschweig’s social clubs (Sammons, Raabe 35–36). Since the novel focuses on contemporaneous events having to do with a case of actual environmental degradation, it has received attention in Raabe scholarship as a literary discussion of the process of wastewater treatment (Thienemann), the fictionalization of the trial (Popp), and as a characteriza-tion of the mythological ties to Western civilization (Kaiser). Pfisters Mühle has been called the first ecological novel of German literature (Detering 10) and its author a leader in sustainability (Kodjio). Sammons, in contrast, ar-gues against this body of scholarship that situates the novel in the context of environmental questions by pointing to the fact that the emerging capital-ist figure – Asche – is not painted as a distinctly negative figure; that father Pfister does not have an ecological outlook; and that pollution is portrayed not as «an isolated evil but part of a dilemma of competing values» (Raabe 62). Sammons states that «the environmental problems have their origin not in capitalism but in modernization and industrialization,» noting that Raabe «was not about to set his face against modernization and industrialization» and that «in Pfisters Mühle he was attempting to grapple with experiences that could no longer be contained with the conventions of the realism that had be-come traditional in German letters» (Raabe 69). These arguments set up the final section of Sammon’s book which deals with Raabe’s path to naturalism.1 My reading of Raabe’s text shows that it treats the thematic of environmen-tal degradation in an entirely new fashion as a configuration of scenes from memory while grappling with the boundaries of fiction and the recognition of the all-pervasive nature of the phenomenon it is describing, i.e., pollution. Pollution knows no borders. It spreads opportunistically wherever the right conditions prevail; it spreads fast and indiscriminately in all directions. It con-forms to a principle of interpenetration that affects all environments. I agree with Sammons that the novel, on a meta-poetic level, is seeking formal solu-tions to problems that could no longer be addressed within the framework of realist fiction.2 What emerges from the scenes of memory, however, are not the outlines of naturalism but glimpses of modernism and the outlines of a toxic discourse capable of turning the principles of pollution into rhetorical figures and an interrelated set of topoi.

In his 1998 essay on toxic discourse, Lawrence Buell defines toxic rhetoric as «an interlocked set of topoi whose force derives partly from the exigencies of an anxiously industrializing culture, partly from deeper-rooted Western attitudes» (639). In a departure from earlier models of ecocriticism that em-


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phasize the imbrications of physical environments and de-emphasize aspects of social, cultural, and discursive construction when it comes to analyzing humans and their relationship to the non-human world, the concept of tox-ic discourse emphatically «insists on the interdependence of ecocentric and anthropocentric values» (639). While Buell points to the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as the effective start of contemporary toxic dis-course, he makes occasional reference to examples from older American liter-ature such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tale «Rappacini’s Daughter» or Henry Thoreau’s Walden, effectively creating an archive of certain attitudes toward narrating nature that anticipate contemporary rhetoric. Buell argues that «it comes as no surprise, therefore, to find contemporary toxic discourse retell-ing narratives of rude awakening from simple pastoral to complex» (647). German novels such as Pfisters Mühle belong to this archive; Raabe’s novel prominently features the literary and formal negotiations that accompany the emergence of a modern form of toxic discourse.

Contemporary toxic discourse is shaped by a number of key discursive motifs beginning with its innate literariness – after all the title for Rachel Car-son’s book Silent Spring was inspired by a poem by John Keats, «La Belle Dame sans Merci,» which contains the lines «The sedge is wither’d from the lake/And no birds sing.» In her opening chapter, «A Fable for Tomorrow,» Carson asks her readers to imagine a «town in the heart of America» that awakens to a birdless, budless spring, thus giving her essayistic prose a decid-edly literary dimension:

There was once a town in the heart of American where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted about the green fields. In autumn, oak and marble and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings. (1)

Literature is the place where imagined realms are formed and, as literature, toxic discourse engages the conventions of genre and literary traditions. One such tradition is what Buell characterizes as the mythography of betrayed Eden, a framework through which narratives of rude awakening from the simple pastoral are told and retold (647). Speakers of toxic discourse voice their shock about polluted surroundings and they refuse to accept the all-per-vasiveness of conditions of toxicity in modern life. Buell here evokes Carson again who starts out her chapter on «The Elixirs of Death» by claiming that «for the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now sub-jected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception



until death» (16). In contemporary conditions, there is no space outside of toxicity, no refuge that one could flee to and get away from this condition: «In the less than two decades of their use, the synthetic pesticides have been so thoroughly distributed throughout the animate and inanimate world that they occur virtually everywhere» (16). Just like the conditions of modernity that penetrate every fiber of today’s world, toxicity is a property that per-vades the historical logic of modern civilization.3 All spaces of nature and cul-ture are defined by the condition of toxic interpenetration. The speakers of toxic discourse convey their outrage over this condition by resorting to the moral passion of the battle between David and Goliath, with the courts as one of the preferred locations for this battle, more often than not enlisting the lan-guage of Gothic literature paired with the assistance of scientific authorities (Buell 651–55). Addressing this legacy of toxic discourse head on brings us to the core issue that Ebert Pfister faces when writing down these scenes from memory, i.e. the realization that

«the modern nature that toxic discourse recognizes as the physical environment humans actually inhabit is not holistic spiritual or biotic economy but a network or networks within which, on the one hand, humans are biotically imbricated (like it or not) and, on the other hand, nature figures as modified (like it or not) by techne» (Buell 657).

The main speakers in Pfisters Mühle (as re-envisioned in Ebert’s scenic prose) embody aspects of toxic discourse as they try to come to terms with the inex-tricable imbrication of the simple pastoral with the metropolis, each in their own way and with their own imaginings (or lack thereof) of the meaning of their lives in the context of an environment that is modified. I analyze how each character negotiates the confines of this all-pervasive condition of toxic-ity and which discursive strategies they employ in this negotiation. Mapping these strategies over the course of the novel highlights the range of interrela-tions between humans and nature and is a first step in understanding toxic discourse «as a possible prototype of environmental imagining» (Buell 657), as a hybrid genre that performs the inextricable imbrication of outback with metropolis that it reflects on thematically as poetic practice.

The open-ended and unstructured nature of the text is alluded to in the nov-el’s subtitle: «Ein Sommerferienheft,» referring to a collection of loose sheets that the author, Ebert Pfister, fills with writing during the summer month that he and his wife spend at Pfister’s mill, sheets that the wind blows away and rearranges, leaving some of them grimy with dirt – ironically the only lasting material remnant from Ebert’s ancestral home. Ebert refuses to rework his collection of loose sheets into a polished narrative that is organized according to the realist genre conventions operative at the time. What we get instead are


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glimpses into a future mode of configuration. Back in Berlin after his visit to Pfister’s mill and sitting in his home office grading student papers he insists: «Ich werde auch jetzt nur Bilder, die einst Leben, Licht, Form und Farbe hat-ten, mir im Nachträumen solange als möglich festhalten!» (164). These sheets contain fleeting after-images, «Nachbilder,» that are formed in Ebert’s visions according to the logic of memory. No coherent narrative form emerges from these vignettes even though Ebert starts out with an ambitious goal in setting up his project, i.e., his goal is to reconstruct a world that no longer exists, a «Vorwelt» full of miracles, a «Wundergeschichte» but not one that plays in the Orient: «Wir verlegen keine Wundergeschichte mehr in den Orient» (7). Toxic discourse is a decidedly contemporary and local discourse with global implications that disrupt the conventional genres based on the idea of clo-sure such as the fairy tale, the pastoral, or the idyll. Toxic discourse insists on the interdependencies of the rural and the metropolis. Even Ebert’s early memories of Pfister’s mill include «qualmende Fabrikschornsteine,» «Dunst-wolken,» and «Türme der Stadt» (11), indeed the road to the nearby town as well as the tavern itself function as locations where the pastoral and modern urbanity interconnect making the spatial configurations of this text an ideal example for the imbrications of pastoral settings Buell addresses in his essay on toxic rhetoric (647–49). Barbara Thums has shown how Ebert’s construct of the idyll is tied to his nostalgic longing for original unity and purity as a response to – and a reflection of – modern experiences of alienation and how the novel connects these longings to nineteenth-century knowledge preoccu-pied with economy, hygiene, Darwinism, and genealogy: «Dieses Wissen von Ökonomie, Darwinismus, Genealogie und Hygiene ist grundlegend für die ökopoetische Diagnose vom Sündenfall der Moderne» (15).4 Thums reminds us that the poetics of purity («Reinheit») tied to the poet’s recitations make way for a project of purification («Reinigung») in which everyone who is left at the end of the story is invested. The language of the novel highlights these connections between «Reinheit» and «Reinigung» that the scientific perspec-tive obscures because it is so heavily invested in progress and economic suc-cess and fails to see irony in the name for the chemical process of dry cleaning («Reinigung») and its reliance on toxins. Thums argues that in its refusal to integrate the ugly face of modernity aesthetically, realist fiction makes an im-portant poetic intervention in the project of modernization on an ethical level by pointing to that which gets lost and abandoned on the path to progress:

So gehört fortan zum kulturellen Abfall erstens die Vorstellung einer paradiesisch-reinen Natur im Zeichen der Idylle, zweitens die Ästhetik des schönen Reinen aus dem 18. Jahrhundert und drittens ein poetischer Realismus, der nicht bereit ist, die Hässlichkeiten der Moderne ästhetisch zu integrieren. Im Erzählen von Reini-



gungsprozessen und somit vom Sündenfall der Moderne generiert der Roman also ein in ethischer Hinsicht relevantes Wissen um die Modernisierungsverluste sowie um die Ausschließungspraktiken einer darwinistischen Ökonomisierung der Äs-thetik. (18)

Toxic discourse emerges from what is discarded in the modernization pro-cess, like the notion of pure nature or idyllic spaces, and shoved to the side by Darwinian economics as the ultimate configuration of modernity.

There is an important environmental angle to the quintessential scene of modernism as Walter Benjamin envisioned it with his figure of the angel of history at the center, the Angelus Novus, who sees piles of garbage where we see history. Where we perceive a chain of events, the angel of history sees a single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to make whole what has been smashed, but a storm is blowing from Paradise and blows against his wings with such force that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward:

Der Engel der Geschichte [...] hat das Antlitz der Vergangenheit zugewendet. Wo eine Kette von Begebenheiten vor uns erscheint, da sieht er eine einzige Ka-tastrophe, die unablässig Trümmer auf Trümmer häuft und sie ihm vor die Füße schleudert. Er möchte wohl verweilen, die Toten wecken und das Zerschlagene zu-sammenfügen. Aber ein Sturm weht vom Paradiese her, der sich in seinen Flügeln verfangen hat und so stark ist, daß der Engel sie nicht mehr schließen kann. Dieser Sturm treibt ihn unaufhaltsam in die Zukunft, der er den Rücken kehrt, während der Trümmerhaufen vor ihm zum Himmel wächst. Das, was wir den Fortschritt nennen, ist dieser Sturm. (Benjamin)

As Catriona Sandilands notes: «In capitalism, then, history is garbage. And nature is garbage. But garbage is also garbage, and, for Benjamin, it is in the careful examination of the detritus of ‹progress› that the historical material-ist might find the past beyond its apparent assumption of the present» (31). The angel of history performs some of the elements of toxic discourse: «By violently wrenching salvaged objects out of their comfortable places in the mythic history of commodity, by gleaning them from their place in the trash can of bourgeois utility,» the angel seeks to juxtapose these pieces of garbage, destroy their assumed habitual place, and arrest the object beyond the his-torical logic of commodity fetishism (Sandilands 31). An environmental read-ing of this key scene of modernism ties the poetic configuration of the image to the phenomena it theorizes. That is what the concept of toxic discourse does as well. Toxic discourse is organized in such a way that it represents its content and finds a poetic configuration for it that reflects the principles that


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make up this content. Toxic discourse insists on the fact that in modernity the natural world has become part of the phantasmagoria of bourgeois commod-ity fetishism. In her reading of Benjamin, Sandilands reminds us that «this incorporation of the natural world into the bourgeois narrative of progress via green technologies and nature documentaries serves only to continue the barbarism of the present» (37). Toxic discourse pursues an environmental agenda in its insistence on the all-pervasiveness of toxicity in modern civiliza-tion. Proclaiming the continued possibility of a nature outside commodity relations would be tantamount to continuing to hide this condition.

Raabe’s characters struggle with the all-pervasiveness of toxicity, each in their unique ways. Ebert does so by daring to evoke a remembered idyllic «Vorwelt» that turns out to be contaminated even in his earliest memories. Even if we grant the fact that there may have been a different, more benign at-tribution of cultural values to smoke in the nineteenth century as the histori-cal research on the public perception of smoke in Victorian Manchester seems to suggest – factory chimneys and, for that matter, even domestic chimneys belching out black smoke symbolized wealth and well-being rather than pol-lution and ill health, at least for the working class (Mosley 163) – Raabe still includes smokestacks in Ebert’s early childhood memories and later reintro-duces them in the narrative of the sugar faculty. With these mimetic references to scenes of environmental pollution, he lays the ground for toxic discourse to emerge. Toxic discourse enters the novel through olfactory perception, through the nose, so to speak, that father Pfister orders his son to stick into the books. He legitimizes his decision not to train his son as a miller and in-stead prepares him for a career in teaching by claiming: «Ist’s nicht, als ob ich’s vorausgerochen hätte, lieber Junge, als ich dich von der Gänseweide holte und mit der Nase ins Buch steckte?» (20). On sheet number four entitled «Wie es anfing übel zu riechen,» father Pfister comes storming into Ebert’s room who has just put his nose into the classics to study for his high school finals, cursing the bad air inside the house in which Ebert lives, and at the same time urging Ebert to keep the windows shut since nothing better could possibly come in than would leave the room: «das Fenster laß nur zu; es kommt nichts Besseres herein, als hinausgeht» (47). Father Pfister finally bursts into allegations and accusations about his situation at home: «Ich halte es nicht länger aus, mich, ohne mich dagegen zu rühren, zu Tode stänkern und stinken zu lassen [...] und wenn es eine Wissenschaft und Gerechtigkeit gibt, so soll sie jetzt für uns zwei – Pfisters Mühle und mich – eintreten, oder wir schließen beide das Geschäft» (47). Smell is the only sense that cannot be avoided at will because of our need to breathe. It took the assault of his and his customer’s noses and the very real consequence of economic decline for a classic rendition of toxic



discourse to emerge in realist fiction. In this instance, the foul stench is no longer symbolically tied to economic prosperity as in the public perception of the working smokestacks in Victorian Manchester, neither is it tied to waste and inefficiency in a frugal middle-class mindset; it rather becomes a deadly assault on the father’s body and his business. Toxic discourse aligns itself with science. It defers to the culture of expertise («Wissenschaft») and speaks the language of ethics («Gerechtigkeit»): «wenn der Mensch sich gar nicht mehr zu helfen weiß, dann geht er zum Doktor» (50) – a point also made by Stacy Alaimo in her chapter on «Deviant Agents.» Dr. Asche, Ebert’s first Latin tu-tor and now freshly minted Ph.D. in chemistry, is asked to analyze the water and find out, «was das Wasser verschimpfiert und schändiert» (50). Equipped with this knowledge father Pfister plans to enlist the services of a lawyer in order to take whomever and whatever causes this stench to court. In an un-usually violent tone, father Pfister envisions: «den infamen Halunken, der uns dieses antut und mir mein Väter Erbe und ewig Anwesen und Leben so verleidet, den bringe ich mit Freuden an den Galgen» (50). It is the threat to a way of life that provides the context for toxic discourse to emerge.

Ebert assists his father’s plans by locating Dr. Asche and later finding the right lawyer to represent him in court. When he and Asche return to Pfister’s mill for the holidays to check out the source of the stench, he struggles to con-vert the violent allegations of his father’s openly accusing toxic discourse into a more contained language that can abide by the conventions of realist fiction. Faced with writing down his memories of his first encounter with the pol-luted stream, Ebert resorts to descriptive adjectives, synesthesia, metaphors, aesthetic judgments, and anthropomorphism. This is what toxic discourse sounds like when reconfigured in terms of realist fiction:

Aus dem lebendigen, klaren Fluß, der wie der Inbegriff alles Frischen und Rein-lichen durch meine Kinder- und ersten Jugendjahre rauschte und murmelte, war ein träg schleichendes, schleimiges, weißbläuliches Etwas geworden, das wahrhaf-tig niemand mehr als Bild des Lebens und des Reinen dienen konnte. Schleimige Fäden hingen um die von der Flut erreichbaren Stämme des Ufergebüsches und an den zu dem Wasserspiegel herabreichenden Weiden. Das Schilf war vor allem übel anzusehen. [...] [Die Enten] standen angeekelt um ihn [den Vater] herum, blickten melancholisch von ihm auf das Mühlwasser und schienen leise gackelnd wie er zu seufzen. (53)

Something («Etwas») broke into the tradition of describing nature scenes, but the narrator is still trying to contain this something with the genre conven-tions operating at the time. The fibers are qualified as slimy but, like the ripe fruit in nature poetry, they are hanging from bushes. Slime is covering up a pastoral that never was a pure idyll in the first place. Ebert resorts to mytho-


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poetic speech that upholds the phantasmagoria of pure idyllic spaces and cov-ers up the signs of all-pervasive toxicity. Father Pfister’s overtly accusatory toxic discourse meets Ebert Pfister’s realistic configuration of the scene of pollution into a poetic nature scene covering up the very principles that ex-plode this scene in the end.

Rather than enlisting ethics (as father Pfister does) or poetics (as Ebert does) to describe the polluted scene, Asche resorts to the tools of contempo-rary scientific jargon in his diagnosis of what is happening with the water sup-ply of Pfister’s mill. A simple visual inspection produces a seemingly neutral statement of facts: «Augenblicklich erkenne ich in der Tat eine beträchtliche Ablagerung niederer, pflanzlicher Gebilde, worüber das Weitere im Verlaufe der Festtage das Vergrößerungsglas ergeben wird» (89). Scientific discourse poses as allegedly neutral description of «facts,» covering up the conditions of its production and failing to reflect on its limitations. Asche’s diagnosis of what is going on with the polluted stream identifies the biological agents that cause this condition, evokes their Latin classifications, and then translates the chemical processes into the language of local family relations:

Wie ich es mir gedacht habe, was das interessante Geschlecht der Algen anbetrifft, meistens kieselschalige Diatomeen. Gattungen Melosira, Encyonema, Ravicula und Plaurosigma. Hier auch eine Zyguemacee. Nicht wahr, Meister, die Namen al-lein genügen schon, um ein Mühlrad anzuhalten! […] Haben die Familien Schulze, Meier und so weiter den Verkehr in Pfisters Mühle eingestellt, so haben sie dafür die Familien der Schizomyceten und Saprolignaceen in fröhlicher Menge, sämtlich mit der löblichen Fähigkeit, statt Kaffee in Pfisters Mühle zu kochen, aus den in Pfisters Mühlwasser vorkommenden schwefelsauren Salzen in kürzester Zeit den angenehmsten Schwefelwasserstoff zu brauen. (90)

The foul stench that penetrates the area around Pfister’s mill is diagnosed as the product of an interaction (brewing) of bacterial agents with the alkaline condition of the water resulting in sulfurous fumes. The scientific discourse is searching (unsuccessfully) for an adequate tropical configuration for the pro-cesses it is describing. It resorts to metaphoric speech with rich associations to the conventions of realist fiction, thus representing a meta-poetic moment where the text reflects on the poetic practice it performs.

From the polluted scene we move to the scene of the crime, the sugar fac-tory Krikerode, where Ebert Pfister, the poet Lippoldes, and Adam Asche go in order to investigate the source of the problem. Ebert, in his realist poetic speech, enlists descriptive attributes, anthropomorphic similes, even language that recalls scenes of sublime nature, yet in the end is only able to resort to the language of purity:



Da erhob sie sich, Krikerode, die große industrielle Errungenschaft der Neuzeit, im wehenden Nebel, grau in grau, schwarze Rauchwolken, weiße Dämpfe auskeu-chend, in voller «Kampagne» auch an einem zweiten Weihnachtstag, Krikerode! [...] den dunkeln Strahl heißer, schmutziggelber Flüssigkeit, der erst den Bach zum Dampfen brachte und dann sich mit demselben über die weite Fläche verbreitete, die meine nächsten Vorfahren nur als Wiese gekannt hatten. (99)

Raabe is reintroducing the working smokestacks from Ebert’s earliest memo-ries, now symbolically linking them to modernization with irony and dis-approval. The fact that the smokestacks are running even on the day after Christmas disrupts Ebert’s idyllic memories almost as much as the sight of the steaming creek itself or the polluted meadow. Ebert enlists ethics, a move which leads Asche to counter with a scientific description that avoids all liter-ary and cultural allusions:

Das, was ihr in Pfisters Mühle dann, laienhaft erbost, eine Sünde und Schande, eine Satansbrühe, eine ganz infame Suppe aus des Teufels oder seiner Großmutter Kü-che bezeichnet, nenne ich ruhig und wissenschaftlich das Produkt der reproduzie-renden Wirkung der organischen Stoffe auf das gegebene Quantum schwefelsauren Salzes. (100)

The polluted scene is the product of a chemical reaction that needs to be un-derstood properly in terms of its working principles in order to be managed properly, a process that requires a different form of language and poetics.

It might be productive to look at the chemical principles defining the scene of pollution in terms of poetic practice. When chemicals are introduced into the environment, unexpected reactions occur which is what happened in the case of the biological agents that were dumped into the creek feeding Pfister’s mill. The history of specific chemicals has had a profound impact on the way in which ecological and health effects are perceived. A recent confer-ence on «Hazardous Agents: Agents of Risk and Change (1800–2000)» at the Deutsches Museum in Munich was a first attempt at uncovering the history of chemical agents through biographical approaches tracing the entire life his-tory of certain hazardous substances from production to use, problems, risk assessment, management strategies, and disposal (Erker/Vaupel). While this initiative was a first attempt at a systematic historical approach to understand-ing hazardous chemicals, the question of how literary and cultural documents relate to these principles has yet to be asked. In Pfister’s Mill we encounter different attempts at narrating a scene of chemical pollution: the poetic realist approach (Ebert), the scientific approach (Asche), and toxic discourse (father Pfister).5 Raabe links these different approaches through metonymic devices such as the smokestacks into a chain of objects and events that prefigure mod-ernist techniques. If we look at which objects and events the text brings up


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but then excludes from the master plot, we see the garbage that is piling up before the angel of history. Toxic discourse yanks these elements from their assumed habitat and reconfigures them into scenes of modernism.

Female speech constitutes one such example of discarded wreckage that is piling up before the angel of history. There are numerous female figures in the novel: Emmy, the young wife of the narrator, Albertine, the wife of Dr. Asche, and Christine who moves in with Dr. Pfister and Emmy to take care of their Berlin household. But Ebert’s memory scenes hardly include them. Ebert’s mother passed away when he was very young. We never learn about Asche’s mother, the poet’s wife and Albertine’s mother, or Emmy’s mother for that matter. Ebert’s daydreaming does not generate recollections of fe-males and contains practically no female speech. Toxic discourse seems to be spoken by men and among men. Christine certainly whines about having to leave the place where she spent her entire life. But Emmy is quite content to have seen it and, at the end of summer, is ready to move on.

Another motif that is dropped in the novel is the practice of dyeing. Dr. Asche’s father – a figure who passed away before the action of the novel be-gins, about whom we hear good things from father Pfister and not so good things from his son – was a «Schönfärber,» a practitioner of an age-old craft that was changing rapidly as new synthetic dyes were introduced in the nine-teenth century. All the novel does with this figure is focus on the metaphorical aspect of the name of the profession, i.e., his ability to paint things in a posi-tive light, a quality that everyone ascribes to Asche and his son. That is only half the story. In the history of dyeing fabric, there are a number of distinctly different traditions, including the «Schwarzfärber,» the «Tuchfärber,» the «Seidenfärber,» and the «Rauchfärber.» These variations depend on which dyes were used, which fabrics were treated, and how the dye was applied. «Schönfärber» refers to a later version of dyeing that includes imported dyes that were applied to exquisite fabrics («Färben»; Andersen 185–86). If we fol-low the metonymic chain of associations from «Schönfärberei» to its history we get to a string of meanings that gesture to faraway places such as Bagdad or Babylon in the mythical Orient where Ebert did not want to locate his «Wun-dergeschichte.» On the plot level, the novel bans any reference to a place outside of its triangulated geography consisting of Pfister’s mill, the nearby small town, and Berlin. We never learn where Adam Asche goes on his long absences from Berlin. But if we string Ebert’s mythical Orient as the location for stories about miracles, father Asche’s foreign dyes and fabrics, and Adam Asche’s travels to faraway places into one metonymic row, we uncover a very different level of the text in which the entanglement of modern European life and its dependency on trade and commerce based on the exploitation of re-



sources extracted from the non-European world is highlighted. Ebert paints an idyllic picture of a «Vorwelt» which systematically bans all references to that economic and political interdependence, an idyllic space cleansed of all references to global imbrications, a poetic location in a world of phantasma-goria where all knowledge of its production is suppressed. With his secrecy about his travels into foreign territory and his return to Pfister’s mill as the ideal location for his new factory, Asche plays into this fantasy even though he is keenly aware of the global nature of his project that stands in contrast to the image of the idyllic green German Empire as he calls Ebert’s phantasma-goria in the passage quoted below. When he tells Ebert that he suspects the sugar factory to be the source of the problem he is quite open about his collu-sion with that other world in which science and industry cooperate in knowl-edge transfer and in seeking out profitable applications for scientific research. Mimicking Ebert’s poetic language, Asche affirms:

Ein Mensch wie ich, der die beste Absicht hat, selber einen sprudelnden Quell, ei-nen Kristallbach, einen majestätischen Fluß, kurz, irgendeinen Wasserlauf im idyl-lischen grünen deutschen Reich sobald als möglich und so infam als möglich zu verunreinigen, kann nicht mehr sagen, als dass er sein Herzblut hingeben würde, um dem guten alten Manne dort seinen Mühlbach rein zu halten. (67)

In the end, Pfister’s mill is worth a certain price and Ebert invests his new capital in Asche’s dry cleaning business, an important detail that is mentioned only once in conversation with the architect who is building the new factory (125).

Rather than reading the novel for mimetic references, metaphorical con-tent, and symbolic meaning, I highlight the principles of proliferation that bacteria promote and discuss them in terms of poetic practice. Asche’s diag-nosis of what is causing the foul stench focuses on identifying Beggiatoa alba as the main culprit. Beggiatoa alba is a bacterium that belongs to the order Thiotrichales and is named after an Italian botanist (Ljungdahl et al. 128–38). Its main property is the capacity to utilize inorganic compounds as a source of energy for its own metabolism. The organism lives in sulfur-rich environ-ments where it oxidizes hydrogen sulfide as an energy source forming intra-cellular sulfur droplets. The bacteria in this group are usually found in marine or freshwater environments such as sulfur springs, sewage-contaminated wa-ter, and the mud layers of lakes or swamps. They grow by oxidizing organic compounds to carbon dioxide where oxygen is present and chaining together cells with thread-like structures with filaments. These filaments can hook on-to each other and form entire carpets, white carpets, for example, that cover the ocean floors. Other filaments can form dense mats on sediments, like a


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whitish layer in environments that have been subject to pollution («Beggia-toa»). The cells are disk-shaped and can move in a gliding action. Some bacte-ria in this group can form rosettas, others move thanks to feet-like filaments, some can even slide back and forth without any of these features.

The important point, from an ecological perspective, is that these bacteria produce energy through oxidation with inorganic compounds and that they settle in aquatic habitats rich in sulfur or thiosulfate such as ponds, wastewa-ter, sulfur springs, or even at the bottom of the ocean. Since these filaments flourish in marine environments that have been subject to pollution and they prefer areas rich in water that has been contaminated with sewage, they are considered an indicator species: «Die schwefeloxidierenden Thiotrichales be-siedeln aquatische Habitate die reich an Schwefelwasserstoff oder Thiosulfat sind, wie Schlammschichten in Seen und Teichen, Abwasser, Schwefelquellen oder auch Meeresböden» («Thiotrichales»). In other words, the pollution that Ebert and Asche observe on their reconnaissance mission upstream is caused by a reaction of these bacteria with the sulfurous wastewater run-off from the sugar factory.

From a literary perspective, these chemical processes have an agentic na-ture and they represent a mode of proliferation that performs according to the core economic principles of capitalism, the principle of accumulation and the principle of exchange. These bacteria grow using local hosts, they displace other organic substances, they generate energy, invade and take over entire habitats; in other words, they effectively colonize other environments given the right environmental conditions. They feed off other organisms like para-sites, they connect to each other with hooks, they form mats, and they move from site to site just like the proliferation principles that inform the flow of money in capitalist economies. The Orient that Ebert wants to displace at the beginning of the novel by locating his «Wundergeschichte» in a local pasto-ral realm comes back to haunt that very space via bacterial colonization, re-minding him that there is no outside to modernization, industrialization, and toxicity. Pollution as poetic practice invades and colonizes the language of realist fiction that, in the end, implodes in the encounter with environmental degradation. The literary representation of pollution in realist fiction shares with the narration of other modern scenes of environmental degradation such as scenes of waste, mess, and clutter, but also dirt (Sullivan «Dirt Theory» and «Dirty Nature») the association with and acknowledgement of contingency, a core principle of capitalism. However, as opposed to waste, which David Trotter defines as «the measure of an organism’s ability to renew itself by ex-cluding whatever it does not require for its own immediate purposes» (20), mess and clutter are events that highlight formlessness and the contingent self



at the center of modernity (31). Dirt, on the other hand, is a bodily engage-ment with the sheer physicality of our environmental engagement as process, rather than fixed location, which remaps (aesthetic or polluted) places into a more fluid, post-human sensibility of dirty integration (Sullivan, «Dirty Na-ture»). The bacteria that grow at the scene of chemical pollution in Raabe per-form the principle of all-pervasive toxic proliferation as a modernist project.

The lawyer asks Ebert why he didn’t become one of the co-founders of Krikerode (117). The question is left unanswered in the novel. At this point, Ebert still thinks in terms of assisting his father through the trial phase, but shortly thereafter one of the main turning points in the novel occurs: Ebert vis-its Asche’s newly founded company in Berlin, Schmurky & Ko., that promis-es «Fleckenreinigung,» a purification project par excellence and a project that embodies the ambiguities of the new era in terms of promising absolute clean-liness – with the help of toxins – and by doing so produces chemical waste polluting the nearby water. Thums situates the purification theme in Raabe’s novel in the context of nineteenth-century discourses of hygiene and charac-terizes Asche as the new Adam, «der das Unheil einer darwinistischen Reini-gungspraktik der Selektion verkörpert» (15). At the moment when Ebert encounters this new Adam at work in the new dry-cleaning company, his po-etic language falls apart at the seams and transforms itself into the language of modernism, replacing the poetic practice of mimesis, metaphor, and sym-bolic meanings with abstraction, metonymy, and parataxis in a Kafkaesque scene in which Ebert is passed from one gatekeeper to the next through the factory, passing all the machinery with its horrendous noise and unbear-able stench until he finally gets to the core of the plant where he finds Asche working on refining his project in the middle of all this noise and foul odor:

Betäubt schon durch die sonstigen Erlebnisse meines ersten Tages in der Haupt-stadt, wurde ich willenlos, vom Türhüter aus, sozusagen von Hand zu Hand wei-tergegeben, und zwar durch den größten Tumult und die übelsten Gerüche, die je-mals menschliche Sinne überwältigt hatten. Über Höfe und durch Säle – wie selber erfaßt und fortgewirbelt von dem großen Motor, dem Dampfe, der um mich her die Maschinen – Zentrifugaden, Appreturzylinder, Rollpressen, Kalander, Imprä-gnier-, Kräusel-, Heft-, Näh- und Plisseemaschinen in Bewegung setzte, taumelte ich – durch Wohldüfte, gegen welche meines Vaters Bach in seinen schlimmen Ta-gen, gegen welche die Waschküchen und sonstigen Ausdünstungen der Schlehen-gasse im Ödfelde gar nichts bedeuteten, mußte ich; – und in einem von dem ärgsten Getöse nur durch eine dünne Wand geschiedenen Raum fand ich den Freund [...]. (126–27)

Ebert still relies on descriptive adjectives and irony to narrate this scene. But when he eventually finds his friend, the language of realist fiction breaks


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down in face of this overwhelmingly disorienting encounter at the «Urszene» of toxicity. Ebert’s old-world defense mechanisms are simply inadequate to deal with this new reality just like his father’s way of life has to make room for the forces of modernization. While the victims of modernization perish, something new is born in the encounter with toxicity: toxic discourse emerg-es as a core feature of modernist poetics.

Where do all the paintings remain, Ebert asks his wife on the occasion of a visit to a Berlin art gallery? This question becomes one of the leitmotifs in this text. The German term «Bilder» also refers to the more general sense of the word for «images.» Where do all the images remain after we have moved on with our lives and stored them somewhere inside ourselves? This is Ebert’s summer project: recreating the scenes from his childhood and youth at his father’s mill, writing them down on individual sheets, scene by scene, read-ing them to his wife, reenacting them in the form of lively dialogues, and, upon return to Berlin, shoving them into the drawer without ordering them neatly in a binder, refusing to provide a coherent narrative. These scenes draft different responses to environmental degradation, different in terms of atti-tude, but also in terms of narrative figuration. The language of poetic realism operates within a pastoral mindset, the language of science exhibits its elec-tive affinity with technology transfer, and glimpses of modernist discourse emerge in the face of the most unsettling experiences with scenes of environ-mental degradation. Is this an early articulation of Ulrich Beck’s thesis about the function of risk and risk assessment in a modernization process that has become self-reflexive (85ff.)? This is hardly the case since modernization and industrialization are still in the growing phase at the end of the nineteenth century and we have not even seen the destructive powers of full-swing envi-ronmental degradation that we are accustomed to seeing today. Narrating and depicting pollution in late nineteenth-century fiction is still a matter of a ne-gotiation between these different scripts and styles. We have the proponents of the way of the past, those who articulate their outrage about environmental degradation on moral grounds, those who use the system to fight it, and those who willfully participate in and benefit from new production processes, even if they prove environmentally hazardous. In some cases these are the same people. The novel performs what Karen Thornber has identified as funda-mental ecoambiguity that characterizes our modern attitude toward environ-mental degradation, an attitude she defines as «the complex, contradictory interaction between people and environments with a significantly nonhuman presence» (1). All characters are accomplices in the destructive patterns of modernization: Ebert Pfister invests in the new dry cleaning business, father Pfister hangs a sugar ornament on his Christmas tree, Adam Asche conducts



the chemical analysis of the polluting substance for the courts while at the same time his expert opinion strengthens his credentials as innovative chemi-cal engineer, the lawyer takes on the case in order to promote himself and ap-pear in the news, father Pfister depends on pharmaceuticals at the end of his life, and so on and so forth. Everyone is imbricated and involved in promot-ing the forces of (global) modernization within a context of all-pervasive tox-icity. It is to Raabe’s credit that he shows us a world where there is no inside and outside of society, where humans and nature are shown as interdepen-dent. Only a reading strategy that addresses this interdependence does justice to the aesthetic and formal problems presented in this novel. Raabe grapples with, and shapes, a literary response to the scene of environmental degrada-tion that is thematized in this story. The elements of toxic discourse emerge as centerpiece of a new language that speaks to a modernist poetics.

To conclude, it is interesting to compare this novel to Raabe’s 1885 novel Unruhige Gäste in which Raabe dealt with a different, but related phenom-enon of modern society, i.e., strategies of «othering» in medical discourses. Natalie Binczek provides a fascinating account of Raabe’s intervention in the formation of a discursive constellation around strategies of creating a bacte-riological typology for infectious diseases. She shows how Raabe shifts the focus of the discussion by locating the infected individual inside a close-knit remote rural village in order to counter traditional strategies of exclusion that identify the source of the problem as coming from the outside, thus effec-tively exploding the linear chain of cause and effect and introducing an in-nately modern principle (61). The bacteria that cause infections are infinitely reproducible provided they find a host, which makes their principle of prolif-eration even more aggressive than chemical reactions that still depend on the quantum and the mixture of elements. In Unruhige Gäste, Anna Fuchs, the wife of the village’s outcast, falls ill and dies of typhus. Phöbe Hahnemeyer, the pastor’s sister, who attends to her without fear, does not get infected, but Baron Veit von Bielow, the person who accompanies Phöbe Hahnemeyer to the scene in order to persuade Volkmar Fuchs to give his wife’s body a proper burial in the town’s cemetery, falls ill. The village doctor warns the pastor: «Das Ding hat seine Haken, Sporen, wie man das jetzt so nennt, und einer davon genügt hier und da, solchen Liebhaber tragischer Touristenerlebnisse scharf bergab zu ziehen, auch aus der besten, liebenswürdigsten und respek-tabelsten Gesellschaft heraus!» (Unruhige Gäste 531). There is no connection between infection and social class, although access to better care can make a difference in the rate of recovery. Veit survives in the nearby town’s make-shift hospital thanks to the committed care of Phöbe and an older nurse. In narrating the moral and the medical aspects of this story, the text questions


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the perceived connection between lifestyle and the likelihood of infection (Binczek 65). This important point helps us rethink the connection between discursive figuration, narrative strategy, and chemical pollution in Pfisters Mühle. By textually performing a radical disconnect between the content of the story – an incident of chemical pollution – and the realist conventions of narrating and depicting nature scenes in the face of environmental degra-dation, Raabe highlights the problems of a modernization that has not yet arrived at a point of reflexivity where the world as we know it has come to an end and new solutions to environmental problems need to be envisioned. The solutions to Raabe’s «Wundergeschichte» may still be found in Bagdad or Babylon. We, however, have to seek the solutions to our problems at home, in the midst of the rubble of progress.

Notes

1 Sammons is responding to generations of critics who have interpreted Raabe’s work within the framework of capitalist critique. See, for example, Helmers 51.

2 For an analysis of Raabe’s narrative technique see Oppermann 15ff.; Pascal 340ff.; Bul-livant 265ff.; for the relationship between environmental theme and narrative technique see Denkler 293ff. and Sammons, «The Mill on the Sewer» 18ff.

3 See Jameson 352: «Pollution, although it’s horrifying and dangerous, is maybe simp-ly a spin-off of this new relationship to nature, the industrialization of agriculture and the transf ormation of peasants or farmers into agricultural workers.» Buell explains that «for Jameson the reductive ‹simply› reflects the belief that ecological politics are never-theless still bourgeois politics» (641, FN 3).

4 See also Wanning 200.5 For more background on the role individual stories play in understanding our lives as

part of community, see Allen 187 and Alaimo 128f.

Works Cited

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloom-ington: Indiana UP, 2010.

Allen, Barbara L. « Narrating the Toxic Landscape in ‹Cancer Alley,› Louisiana.» Technologies of Landscape: From Reaping to Recycling. Ed. David E. Nye. Am-herst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 1999. 187–203.

Andersen, Arne. «Pollution and the Chemical Industry: The Case of the German Dye Industry.» The Chemical Industry in Europe 1850–1914: Industrial Growth, Pollu-tion, and Professionalization. Ed. Ernst Homburg, Anthony S. Travid, and Harm G. Schröter. Dordrecht: Kluver, 1998. 183–202.

Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Trans. Mark Ritter. Sage: Lon-don, 1992.



«Beggiatoa.» MicrobeWiki. <http://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Beggiatoa>.Benjamin. Walter. «Über den Begriff der Geschichte.» <http://www.mxks.de/files/

phil/Benjamin.GeschichtsThesen.html>.Binczek, Natalie. «‹Das Ding hat seine Haken, Sporen›: Unwägbarkeit der Ansteckung

in Wilhelm Raabes Unruhige Gäste.» Wilhelm Raabe. Ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold. Munich: Boorberg, 2006. Text & Kritik 172. 61–88.

Buell, Lawrence. «Toxic Discourse.» Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 639–65.Bullivant, Keith. «Wilhelm Raabe and the European Novel.» Orbis Litterarum 31

(1976): 263–81.Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.Chaouli, Michel. Das Laboratorium der Poesie: Chemie und Poetik bei Friedrich

Schle gel. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004.Denkler, Horst. «Wilhelm Raabe: Zur Aktualität eines alten Themas und vom Nutzen

offener Strukturen.» Romane und Erzählungen des Bürgerlichen Realismus: Neue Interpretationen. Ed. Horst Denkler. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1980. 293–309.

Detering, Heinrich. «Ökologische Krise und ästhetische Innovation im Werk Wil-helm Raabes.» Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft (1992): 1–27.

Erker, Paul and Elisabeth Vaupel, conveners. «Hazardous Chemicals: Agents of Risk and Change (1800–2000).» Conference at the Deutsches Museum, Munich, 27–29 April 2012. <www.carsoncenter.uni-muenchen.de>.

«Färben.» Wikipedia. <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A4rben>.«Heinrich Beckurts.» Wikipedia. <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Beckurts>.Helmers, Hermann. Wilhelm Raabe. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1968.Jameson, Fredric. Interview by Paik Nak-Chung. Global/Local: Cultural Production

and the Transnational Imaginary. Ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake. Dur-ham: Duke UP, 1996. 352–69.

Kaiser, Gerhard. «Der Totenfluss als Industriekloake: Über den Zusammenhang von Ökologie, Ökonomie und Phantasie in ‹Pfisters Mühle› von Wilhem Raabe». Mut-ter Natur und die Dampfmaschine: Ein literarischer Mythos in Rückbezug auf An-tike und Christentum. Freiburg: Rombach, 1991. 81–107.

Kodijio Nenguié, Pierre. «Wilhelm Raabes Reflexionen über nachhaltige Entwick-lungsprozesse in Pfisters Mühle.» Anglogermanica (2004). <www.uv.es/angloger-manica/2003-2004/Kodjio.htm. 15 July 2012>.

Ljungdahl, Lars G., et al. Biochemistry and Physiology of Anaerobic Bacteria. New York: Springer, 2003.

Mosley, Stephen. «Public Perceptions of Smoke: Pollution in Victorian Manchester.» Technologies of Landscape: From Reaping to Recycling. Ed. David E. Nye. Am-herst: U of Massachusetts P, 1999. 161–86.

Oppermann, Hans. Wilhelm Raabe. Rowohlt: Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1970.Pascal, Roy. «The Reminiscence-Technique in Raabe.» Modern Language Review 49

(1954): 339–48.Popp, Ludwig. «‹Pfisters Mühle›: Schlüsselroman zu einem Abwasserprozeß.»

Städte hygiene: Organ für die gesamte Ortshygiene in Stadt und Land 10 (1959): 21–25.

Raabe, Wilhelm. Pfisters Mühle. Vol. 16 of Sämtliche Werke. Braunschweiger Aus-gabe. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1961. 209–407.

–. Unruhige Gäste. Vol. 16 of Sämtliche Werke. Braunschweiger Ausgabe. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1961. 409–592.


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Sammons, Jeffrey L. «The Mill on the Sewer: Wilhelm Raabe’s Pfister’s Mill and the Present Relevance of Past Literature.» Orbis Litterarum 40 (1985): 16–32.

–. Raabe: Pfisters Mühle. London: Grant & Cutler Ltd., 1988.Sandilands, Catriona. «Green Things in the Garbage: Ecocritical Gleaning in Walter

Benjamin’s Arcades.» Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches. Ed. Axel Goodbody and Kate Ribgy. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2011. 31–42.

«Silent Spring.» Wikipedia. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_spring>.Sullivan, Heather. «Dirty Nature: Ecocriticism and Tales of Extraction – Mining and

Solar Power – in Goethe, Hoffmann, Verne, and Eschbach.» Colloquia Germanica 44.2 (2011): 111–31.

–. «Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticism.» ISLE 19 (2012): 515–31.Thienemann, August. «Wilhelm Raabe und die Abwasserbiologie.» Mitteilungen für

die Freunde Wilhelm Raabes (1925): 124–31.«Thiotrichales.» Wikipedia. <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiotrichales>.Thornber, Karen. Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures.

Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2012.Thums, Barbara. «Stadt – Land – Fluß: Öko-Poetik bei Charles Dickens und Wilhelm

Raabe.» Kunst, Erkenntnis, Wissenschaft. Formen des Wissens von der Antike bis heute. Ed. Marion Hiller. Heidelberg: Winter, 2014. Forthcoming. 18 ms. pp.

Trotter, David. Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-Century Art and Fiction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.

Wanning, Barbeli. «Wenn Hechte an Stubenfenster klopfen: Beschädigte Idylle in Wilhelm Raabes ‹Pfisters Mühle.›» Natur – Kultur – Text: Beiträge zu Ökologie und Literaturwissenschaft. Heidelberg: Winter, 2005. 193–205.


«Morgens riecht der Fluß aseptisch»: Decomposing Nature in the Anthology

Laute Verse

CHARLOTTE MELIN

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

In his afterword to the anthology Laute Verse (2009), Thomas Geiger bold-ly repositions nature as a central feature of contemporary German poetry. Citing a definition of poetry articulated by the Yugoslavian-born American poet Charles Simic, Geiger tells readers that «the poem» is the space where irreconcilable elements meet.1 He then asserts, «Himmel und Erde, Na-tur und Geschichte, Götter und Teufel, alles hat seinen Ort im Gedicht und natürlich spiegeln sich in ihm auch politische Vorgänge, verknüpfen sich Bio-grafisches mit Religiösem oder Mythologischem. Und schließlich verbindet das Gedicht, wird es vorgetragen, auch das Sprachliche mit dem Köperlichen, dem Sinnlichen» (351). Pivotal to this claim is the term nature, which in itself evokes a wide range of possible meanings, from «untouched,» non-human environment to the nature-culture dialectic and our imaginings of a post-an-thropocene world. What is ultimately at stake in the display of definitional choices raised by Geiger’s use of this word is the fate of Naturlyrik and the lyric genre, for here we see poetry pushing against the boundaries of tradi-tion. My interest in the present essay therefore lies in exploring the kind of Naturlyrik that might now be emerging, a project I will pursue with reference to Gernot Böhme’s seminal essay «Die Natur im Zeitalter ihrer technischen Reproduzierbarkeit» and close readings of two exemplary poems from Gei-ger’s anthology in which processes of decomposition in nature become in-trinsic to the creation of poetic knowledge pertaining to the environment. Here decomposition vividly reveals the temporal and physical dimensions of the ecological systems the poems describe. It also links the very process of poiesis (or poetry making) to decomposition in the natural world, making visible the fact that the lyric genre operates through a dynamic interaction of creative and destructive energies.

To establish the assumptions about Naturlyrik at play in the anthology Laute Verse, let us return first to Geiger’s text. The assertion that «Natur und Geschichte» belong in contemporary poetry engages his programmatic state-ment with an extended discussion of nature as a cultural project (cf., for exam-ple, Adorno; Böhme; Goodbody, Nature, Technology and Cultural Change


216 Charlotte Melin

255–79). The afterword builds to this crescendo gradually. Opening with the claim that «Die deutsche Literatur hat in den letzten Jahren Terrain zurück-gewonnen» (Geiger 348), a claim which metaphorically describes literature in terms of landscape, Geiger points to the accomplishments of younger con-temporary writers, especially two in whose work human and natural history are mutually entwined. Geiger specifically mentions Die Vermessung der Welt (2005) by Daniel Kehlmann and Nach der Natur (1988) by W.G. Sebald. Words like Nischen and Zwitter add organic elements to the afterword’s met-aphorical register, further evidence that the ineluctable presence of the natural in our physical environment plays an important role in Geiger’s vision for the anthology. By noticing these details, we sense something similarly dynamic in nature and works of art, a quality that Böhme reminds us is intrinsic to the au-ra (or ineffable specialness) on which both depend, and which in the modern world is endangered. «Verfall der Aura: das hieß Aufhebung der Achtung ge-bietenden Distanz, das hieß tendenzielle Vernichtung Einmaligkeit,» Böhme writes as he explains his conceptual indebtedness to Walter Benjamin in using this term, continuing with «Das kann für die Natur heißen: die Aufhebung jeder Anerkennung des Gegebenen, der Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben; es kann die Vernichtung der Individualität bedeuten, und ganz sicher die radikale Vernutzung der Natur als Ware» (109). Thus while the dyad Natur/Geschich-te signals on one level the mutual interactions of nature and culture through which mankind shapes the environment, on another level the coupling inserts important ontological considerations that raise a frightening specter in the contemporary world because the human footprint can yield deadly results. As Böhme observes, «Technische Reproduzierbarkeit der Natur: Man scheut sich, auch nur davon zu sprechen» (109).

While Geiger is perhaps less overtly concerned with the technical repro-duction of nature (the manufacture of the artificial per se), he is deeply inter-ested in the creation of new forms of poetry, particularly effects that depend on the physicality of language and bodily production of poems. Conceptual-izing the collection he edited in terms of its title, Geiger points first to the performative quality of much poetry today. Clearly he has in mind the dif-ferences between «stage» poetry (such as poetry slams, typically in large city venues like Berlin and Hamburg) and its «page» counterparts (poetry that circulates in small edition books, intended to be read in private or more inti-mate settings). The adjective laut (loud) accordingly foregrounds the role that the manipulation of language, acoustic effects, and «stage» presence plays in defining the genre as a conspicuously urban art form that functions different-ly from reticent «page» texts. Geiger explains, «Der Titel dieser Anthologie schließlich ist doppeldeutig. Man kann das ‹Laute› adjektivisch oder substan-


«Morgens riecht der Fluß aseptisch» 217

tivisch lesen, dann bezieht es sich auf den Bauplan von Gedichten. Sie beste-hen: aus Lauten, Wörtern, Versen, Strophen […]» (351). The term Laute, thus, alerts us to the ways in which overt destabilization of the relationship between reader and text (which in traditional poetry tends to be tranquil) can occur through the jarring sensory input produced by physical performance. It reminds the reader that in the lyric genre sharp contrasts exist between ur-ban and pastoral modes – typically poets are known for work in only one of these styles. Surprisingly, Geiger then equates the second term, Verse (verses), with content, and, fundamentally, with nature.

This iteration, which defines poetry through references to multiple natural elements (heaven, earth, and nature itself), points to a crucial problem for the contemporary lyric genre, namely the difficulty of conceiving of poetry as a vital form when nature, which has for so long been fundamental to it, can no longer be taken for granted. Through it we realize that the idealized subject of pastoral verse has in some profound way become unavailable, for despite the fact that decay is a natural process, the pastoral aesthetic strives to exclude it. Decomposition in the many forms encountered in contemporary works re-covers this missing ecological element by acknowledging the presence of or-ganic breakdown and the effects of less than benign human influences – habi-tat disturbance, noxious pollution, or fragmented landscapes, for instance. This circumstance creates dilemmas that are bound up with the changing status of the lyric genre and an evolving appreciation of representation. To a striking extent, these problems are intertwined with the postwar literary en-vironment in German-speaking countries, which has shaped this understand-ing of nature and Naturlyrik in profound ways. Interpreting Böhme’s essay «Die Natur im Zeitalter ihrer technischen Reproduzierbarkeit» against this background, I want to establish a context for my reading of two poems from Laute Verse by Hendrik Rost and Christian Lehnert that I see as indicative of the problematic of contemporary Naturlyrik. Through these examples, we can discern the emergence of a potentially new poetic mode that reflects important changes within the lyric genre, in part by emphasizing its capac-ity for presenting the world dynamically – an environment that is always in interaction with humans, as well as constantly changing and decomposing. Such materiality has become the subject of recent material ecocriticism. As Serenella Iovino explains, material ecocriticism «heeds the materiality as the constitutive element of ecological relationships, exploring the entanglements between material configurations and the emergence of meanings» (56). Thus, I will ultimately contend that the expansion of the category «nature» to in-clude the physical manifestations proposed by material ecocriticism and «dirt theory» (Sullivan) can provide grounding for the interpretation of contempo-


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rary poetic texts by drawing attention to elements that complicate our con-ceptions of art and nature and move us beyond conceiving of them as pristine abstractions.

Nature, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues in a trenchant essay about the foundational materials of poetry, has been one of the primary sources for the lyric genre since antiquity and throughout the Western literary tradition (71). The emergence of the lyrical poem in European and Anglo-American literary traditions, where it was anchored in natural tropes, paralleled the rise of the European nation state (Ferry; Häntzschel). Moreover, its cultural sta-tus was reinforced by a powerful synergy of aesthetic and social forces that has continued to shape perceptions of the lyric genre today (Ferry; Jackson; Felstiner). Poetry anthologies played an important role in this process; in fact, the word anthology, as we remember, derives from the Greek term for «flower gathering,» and emphasizes the role of nature poetry in canon forma-tion («Anthology»). Anne Ferry in Tradition and the Individual Poem (2001) demonstrates that as the paradigm for the lyrical poem arose in anthologies, they in turn promoted specific traits – visual patterns suitable to book print-ing, short works that were memorable, and especially «pastoral balance» that exercised «special force in the conscious art of putting the complex into the simple» (119). This conception of what poetry should be – aestheticized, con-centrated, and associated with a bucolic culture of leisure – has been taken as the essence of nature poetry and evokes a sense of timelessness. Yet poetry itself, of course, and our perception of nature dramatically change over time.

David Gilcrest proposes in Greening the Lyre (2002) that the «scenic or ornamental» role that nature once occupied in poetic texts has been gradually replaced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with more complex envi-ronmental perspectives (2).2 To be sure, Gilcrest is aware of the many poems about dynamic and dark nature (in the German tradition, texts by Goethe, Novalis, and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff come to mind). The point he makes, however, is that it is no longer the specular view of nature that oc-cupies the poem, but rather perceptions of systems dynamics, in other words, webs of relationships connecting the animate and inanimate. Gilcrest’s defini-tion of such work provides a useful starting point for examining the ways in which the lyric genre has been transformed.3 He writes:

The idea of nature as subject […] corresponds with the development of what may loosely be called an environmental perspective: the view that all beings, including humans, exist in complex relationship to their surroundings and are implicated in comprehensive physical and physiological processes. An environmental poetry is consequently distinguished from other types of «nature poetry» (especially Roman-tic nature poetry) to the extent that it reinforces and extends this perspective. (3)



Although numerous ecocritics have found it productive to explore Romantic nature poetry as environmental literature (Rigby; Morton; Bate), Gilcrest’s perspective is particularly useful in describing a recent conceptual shift in how we imagine the role nature and the environment play in the contempo-rary lyric genre. Applying these insights to contemporary German poetry en-ables a reading of it as environmental. We thus gain an interpretive framework that reclaims Naturlyrik from the state of neglect it has fallen into since the mid-twentieth century – one that begins to take into account such matters as complex aesthetic representation, post-human perspective, and contempo-rary ethical dimensions. Recognizing decomposition as a troping of ecologi-cal consciousness and central to poiesis (the making of poetry) itself, we draw attention to the ephemerality and physical decay that ultimately will consume both nature and art.

Nature poetry in the German literary context has long been considered the repository for descriptions of the beautiful, contemplation of the sub-lime, and expressions of patriotic sentiment (Heukenkamp; Rigby; Good-body, Nature, Technology and Cultural Change). The accompanying pres-tige and ostensible accessibility, however, contributed both to its popularity and trivialization. The tensions between low and high cultural regard have taken on special significance in the postwar period (the epoch under consid-eration here). Immediately after 1945, nature poetry proliferated rampantly in Germany for historically specific reasons (Korte; Melin, Poetic Maneu-vers 35–55). The retreat into Schonraum Natur seemed inescapable after the war, leading Hermann Korte to conclude, «Wie kein anderes Genre hat das Naturgedicht die Lyrik der fünfziger Jahre beherrscht» (30).

Explaining this history in a provocatively titled 1963 essay, «In Search of the Lost Language,» Hans Magnus Enzensberger takes pains to distinguish what he calls «the pastoral babble of the nature-lyric school» from poets like Günter Eich and Karl Krolow, whom he praises as gifted («In Search of the Lost Language» 47). Intellectual discourses of the time also reinforced this sense of a break with the past by deploying the forestry term Kahlschlag (clear-cut) as synonymous with the notion of the «zero hour» or Stunde Null (a word from the military register) represented by the events of 1945.4 The aesthetics of this period continue to influence German poetry today, as can be seen by comparing Geiger’s characterization of poetry with an earlier one by Enzensberger. Relying on Simic, Geiger follows the lead of the postwar generation of poets who turned to international models, especially Ameri-can poets, and employs a discourse about poetry that resonates with Enzens-berger. Where Geiger declares, «alles hat seinen Ort im Gedicht» (351), En-zensberger in describing his own work and that of Günter Grass and Peter


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Rühmkorf finds that «The safety-pin and the Rapacki Plan, the juke-box and the cough-drop appear in verse with the same right and the same naturalness as the moon, the sea, and the rose» («In Search of the Lost Language» 49). This location of nature in disparate elements has modern cachet; it eventually translates into the fragmented postmodern «paratactic landscape» that Jür-gen Egyptien discerns in the work of Peter Waterhouse (64), which he finds in some ways problematical, due to the precarious, porous relationship this style establishes between nature and Technik.

Though Enzensberger’s characterization of the state of German poetry (like that of other authors, critics, and scholars of the time) tends to downplay the initial postwar importance of Naturlyrik, by the 1960s Naturlyrik was a shrinking part of a literary landscape dominated by hermetic verse and con-crete poetry. It waned noticeably throughout the sixties and seventies first in the face of Agitprop and then with the rise of New Subjectivity (Schnell; Rior-dan; Wiesmüller). While the tradition of nature poetry continued in the hands of individual poets, its stature diminished. Meanwhile, its subject matter be-gan to be transformed, as Egyptien convincingly demonstrates, by a sense of ecological crisis. Particularly in the GDR, where many important writers made nature poetry a vehicle for the critique of environmental degradation, a revived nature poetry began to flourish (Volckmann; Goodbody, «Deutsche Ökolyrik»). Works from this phase of Ökolyrik were, however, often preoc-cupied with addressing the effects of pollution and the vanishing natural land-scape through issue-oriented content (cf. for example the poetry of Heinz Czechowski, Wulf Kirsten, and Thomas Rosenlöcher) and not invested in an aesthetic transformation of Naturlyrik. At the start of the new millennium, a more expansive interest in nature poetry was renewed through publications such as the anthologies Feuer, Wasser, Luft & Erde (Leitner), Der magische Weg (Heukenkamp) and Deutsche Naturlyrik (Bode) and an issue of the liter-ary journal Eiswasser devoted to Naturlyrik (Dasenbrock and Sagurna).

Charting the thematic terrain of contemporary German poetry represent-ed in the influential 2003 anthology Lyrik von Jetzt, Erk Grimm notices the reemergence of poetry about nature (in the most general sense) and percep-tively connects its resurgence to urbanized sensibilities. Instead of the familiar dichotomy of restorative Naturlyrik versus alienated Großstadtlyrik, Grimm found that works from this anthology exercise a postmodern consciousness of environmental factors that is reflected linguistically (for example, through sound experiments that mimic city surroundings) and in terms of liminal content (i.e., settings like borderlands, coasts, gardens, and parks). His prime examples from Lyrik von Jetzt are largely experimental works, with poets Ulrike Draesner, Enno Stahl, and Ron Winkler playing a central role in the



analysis. As a result, his explanation casts the trend in terms of a break with traditional Naturlyrik, similar to the sharp avant-garde/conservative divide that can be discerned between poetry that experiments with language such as that which can be found in the works of Elke Erb or Friederike Mayröcker and traditional narrative verse. By implication, his reading suggests that the traditional domain of nature poetry stands faint hope of being revived – cer-tainly an important consideration. Yet experimental poetry has not been the only locus for the Naturlyrik revival.

Looking more broadly at contemporary works, such as the sample of po-ems in Laute Verse, we see many poets revisiting the traditional genre of na-ture poetry – employing non-urban settings, natural observation, and inher-ited poetic forms. Grimm’s interpretive categories aptly apply to a number of the works in Laute Verse, from Nico Bleutge’s evocative «Später Herbst,» which contemplates a waterside landscape populated with onlookers and motor sounds, to Sabine Scho’s «hot magenta,» which stunningly reveals the ways in which material consumption detaches the color salmon from its bio-logical origins. But in other poems, such as the two poems to which I will turn shortly, the fragile aura of nature that occupies Böhme in his essay «Die Natur im Zeitalter ihrer technischen Reproduzierbarkeit» is clearly at stake, and with it the possibility of another kind of Naturlyrik.

Evoking Walter Benjamin’s famous essay «Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,» Böhme points out that nature, like art, no longer enjoys an autonomous, existence that establishes its unique val-ue, for, as he explains, «Natur ist uns überhaupt nicht mehr das Ge gebene. Na-tur ist das im Prinzip durch Herstellung Mögliche» (115). The consequence of such reproduction, Böhme cautions, is seen when nature is no longer de-fined through contrast with technology, culture, and civilization; it is then re-duced to being «sozial konstituierte Natur,» and ultimately politicized (123). Indeed, some twenty years after Böhme’s publication, ecocriticism acknowl-edges the reality of Böhme’s assertion, as do many literary works. Some of the Naturlyrik written by Christian Lehnert and Hendrik Rost demonstrate these effects. The poems problematize the very longing for the special aura of nature, that quality that seems to elevate it to the sublime and picturesque. They incorporate dissonant elements of decomposition (e.g., leaves already withered away and aseptic stench) into inherited traditions of the lyric genre in ways that draw attention to the constructedness of our perceptions and aesthetic representations of nature. Böhme reminds us that, «Die technische Reproduzierbarkeit von Natur stellt uns in unserem eigenen Selbstverstän-dnis in Frage» (109). Contemporary poets like Lehnert and Rost seek to ex-plore this problematical self-awareness by reintroducing nature to poetry.


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The two poems I have selected as examples of such poetic exploration are both fourteen-lines-long, rhymed sonnets (or sonnet-like) texts, written by authors born in 1969, thus of the generation that came of age during the Wende.5 «Herbstzeitlose» by Christian Lehnert contemplates an autumn crocus, while «Nachmärz» by Hendrik Rost describes a polluted waterfront in the region between the Ruhrgebiet and Emsland. Both involve decomposi-tion: in Lehnert’s case, it is at the end phase of a botanical cycle, in Rost’s the odor of what seems to be related to the decay of organic matter, caused we might suspect by chemical fertilizers. The more established of the two po-ets, Lehnert, studied religion, theology, and Orientalistik, and resides near Dresden (in Mügliztal).6 His publications include the poetry collections Der gefesselte Sänger (1997), Der Augen Aufgang (2000, which includes a sonnet cycle), Finisterre (2002), Ich werde sehen, schweigen und hören (2004), Auf Moränen (2008), and Aufkommender Atem (2011). He has also collaborated with Hans Werner Henze on the opera Phaedra (2007). For his part, Rost studied Germanistik, resided in Hamburg, and now works as a translator in Lübeck. Allusions in Rost’s works to American poets such as William Car-los Williams, John Ashberry, and others, point to the fact that he spent time in the U.S. and embraces poetic sensibilities that reflect this experience. His publications include Vorläufige Gegenwart (1995), Aerobic und Gegenliebe (2001), Im Atemweg des Passagiers (2006), and Der Pilot in der Libelle (2010). Both poets are deeply engaged with the problems of contemporary nature poetry as voiced in Gilcrest’s notion of environmental poetry and Böhme’s observations about reproduced nature; both poets attempt an expansion of Naturlyrik and the lyric genre.

Christian Lehnert’s poem «Herbstzeitlose,» from Auf Moränen (2008), portrays an unusual flower:

Herbstzeitlose

Ein hoher Becher, zart, aus lila GlasGeblasen? Flacher Atemzug der Auen?Wo sich die Nebel früh am Morgen stauenund die Demenz herankriecht wie ein Gas?

Ist sie ein Anfang? Ende? Dergestaltund ohne Blätter? Ein vergangnes Lebendas blühend hier versucht den Kopf zu heben,und sich mit letzter Kraft ins Erdreich krallt?

Schenkt sie dem Augenblick die Illusion,es sei ein Gleichgewicht, das alles trüge?Daß Zeit verblaßte schnell wie ein Ion



Im Nordlich glüht? Kein Herbst? Kein Tod? Kein Regen?Nur eine Form, die sich in ihre fügte,um jetzt im kühlen Wind sich zu bewegen? (Geiger 166)

The first two stanzas depict the flower’s connate shape in vaguely anthropo-morphic terms. Resembling a Becher from a man-made substance (Glas), it appears where «die Demenz herankriecht wie ein Gas.» This is an uncanny lo-cation reminiscent of Droste-Hülshoff’s milieu, as in her poem «Die Mergel-grube,» in which her blending of a keen naturalist’s view and a poet’s affective response to the external world reinforces a sense of the uncanny. Lehnert’s poem speculates that the bloom is «Ein vergangnes Leben, / das blühend hier versucht den Kopf zu heben, / und sich mit letzter Kraft ins Erdreich krallt.» Unsettling though the description seems, it corresponds precisely to the «un-natural» life cycle of the Herbstzeitlose (colchicum) – an autumn crocus that leafs in spring, dies back in summer, and blooms leafless in the fall.

The precision of Lehnert’s text rests in part on his repertoire of poetic tools. «Herbstzeitlose» triangulates variable perspectives to achieve its descrip-tion, using «die trigonometrischen Punkte» adumbrated in his poem «West-wärts…» (Finisterre 20). This is a phrase that references both Günter Eich’s poem «Der große Lübbe-See» (37) and Enzensberger’s tribute to Eich in the poem «Trigonometrischer Punkt» (Blindenschrift 80–81). Its concentration on the observational moment participates in the technique of photographic-like Momentaufnahmen, to which his earlier work explicitly refers ( Finisterre 40), an aesthetic dating back to the beginnings of photography that with the inspiration of international models became one of the hallmarks of progres-sive German poetry after 1945 (Melin, Poetic Maneuvers 11–12). Even the term Atem (in Atemzug) evokes Rainer Marie Rilke’s line, «Atmen, du un-sichtbares Gedicht!» («Duineser Elegien, Die Sonette an Orpheus» 71), the pivotal concept of Atemwende in the work of Paul Celan («Der Meridian»), and the resonance of that concept for Hilde Domin (Melin, With or With-out). Meanwhile, the cochicum’s temporal qualities, captured so aptly in its German name, remind us of Celan’s poem «Die Silbe Schmerz» where it binds Columbus’s discovery of the Americas in October (when the flower blooms) to both the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust (Celan, «Die Silbe Schmerz»; Zorach and Melin). With a brief allusion, Celan addresses the fraught history of the expulsion of Jews from Spain, which coincided with the departure of Columbus on his initial voyage of exploration. Compressing this troubling past into a mere trace, Celan mentions only a sharp-eyed Colum-bus and the colchicum, which flowers seemingly out of nothing at precisely the time of year when he landed in the New World. In Lehnert’s text, these temporal/historical dimensions are elided. The focus remains on the literal as-


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sociation of the flower’s name with timelessness, while Gleichgewicht echoes a pivotal passage in Rilke’s Sonette an Orpheus (Rilke, «Duineser Elegien, Die Sonette an Orpheus»; Ryan).

In a 2011 interview with Lehnert, fellow poet Nico Bleutge asks him about his preoccupation with Zwischenzonen, «wo man Land und Luft nicht un-terscheiden lassen.» Lehnert reponds that «Mich interessieren Momente, in denen Erscheinungen entstehen»; more precisely, Lehnert continues by stat-ing that it is the openness of phenomena and the emergence of form that con-cerns him (Bleutge). The reader notices this openness when encountering the first lines of the poem, in which Lehnert describes the Herbstzeitlose in rid-dle-like fashion. The riddle aspect is sustained by the interrogative punctua-tion, which continues throughout the poem, creating a tension that suspends the resolution that a declarative sentence could provide. This conception of poetry as creating this experience is similarly adumbrated in his artist’s state-ment from Laute Verse, where he calls the Augenblick des Gedichts, «nur eine Form,» and yet a medium that «versucht, etwas einzugrenzen. Dazu wird es gebraucht. Dass Leere, umgeben von Worten, zur Offenheit wird» (Geiger 157). The questions encountered in «Herbstzeitlose» surround the form that we sense constitutes the essence of the poem.

Lehnert’s project, though phrased in the more abstract terms of Offenheit and Erscheinung, hinges on a sense that poetics are connected with the envi-ronment, something articulated in similar ways in the writings of American author Gary Snyder:

Human subjectivity and language are possible only on the basis of deeper structure of signification and communication that have nothing exclusively human about them . […] The natural world is full of indicators, signs and communications, as-sociated with diverse and (to us) mostly opaque modes of intentionality and refer-ence. Why should the peculiarities of human consciousness be the narrow standard by which other creatures are judged? (qtd. in Clark 53–54)

Much of Lehnert’s poetry revolves around a biosemiotic attempt to read na-ture’s signs in more profound ways – by noticing not only visible elements (the color of the flower, for example) but nearly invisible traces, like the Atemzug der Auen. Lehnert acknowledges the root of his works in mysti-cism and the very immediate experience of environmental disturbance with the flooding of the Elbe River in 2002 (Bussmann; Hollenbach; Lehmkuhl). Indeed, Michael Braun applauds Lehnert’s craft in incorporating such «Ure-lemente der Natur» and admires the spiritual depth of his work (281).

Deeply invested in capturing ineffable perceptions, which he elsewhere terms «Sprache ohne Sprache,» Lehnert creates poems where the tension between precision and openness hinges on the constructedness of text (Ich



werde sehen, schweigen und hören 18). In «Herbzeitlose,» small-scale de-scriptions in the first quatrains are juxtaposed against the large temporal and spatial dimensions evoked in the closing tercets. The final two lines («Nur eine Form, die sich in ihre fügte, / um jetzt im kühlen Wind sich zu bewegen») stage contemplation of form (of both the Herbstzeitlose and the poem), and ultimately of the balance between nature and culture. The organic form of the colchicum belongs to nature and is as important as the poetic form of the son-net, both of which have just emerged before the eyes of the reader, and while we know that balance is a problematical concept in current ecology and eco-criticism, Lehnert’s interest in constructing this balance has much to do with the aesthetic the poem advances.

Leere and then Offenheit arise through the contrast between the opaque image of the crocus and the uncertain position of the subjective observer, who punctuates each thought with a question mark. The sharp focus on the pal-pable image of the crocus brings its natural Umwelt momentarily into focus, but at the cost of literary or symbolic perspective. An underlying dynamic (the tension between proximity and distance in its many forms) is revealed through gesture. A series of poetic moves occurs – the appearance of the term Gleichgewicht, which reminds us of the fragile balance of ecological systems, the phrase «das alles trüge,» which captures the precariousness of art’s illu-sion by echoing Rilke’s famous sonnet «Archaischer Torso Apollos,» and ul-timately the cool wind. That breeze stirs in the final line and leads to a last question mark, a tentative closure at the poem’s ending. Concentration on linguistic representation in which the echoes of Rilke, the literal meaning of Herbstzeitlose, and the sustained interrogatives themselves can be heard, thus, underscores the uncertainty of human perceptions and representation.

In «Nachmärz» by Henrik Rost, from Im Atemweg des Passagiers (2006), we encounter a less overtly aesthetic response nature. The first line confronts the reader with an off-putting whiff of literally decomposing nature («Mor-gens riecht der Fluß aseptisch»). This emphatic gesture establishes the text as a counter-version to the traditional nature poem:

Nachmärz

Morgens riecht der Fluß aseptisch,Schaumkissen driften, beim Aquarellierengeht es um Übergänge. Skeptischegrünfüßige Verwandte der Kranichebalzen, fliehen vor mir, duellierensich ins nackte Unterholz. Nischeist eine Verniedlichung des Gewährten.Ich verachte Vorgärten,


hsulliva

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die Gräbern gleichen; Thuja,Immergrünes. Dem Genre nach Frühjahr,sind es Abweichungen, die rühren:Kontamination braucht keine Quelle anzuführen.Die Gegend reinzuzeichnen, ich kann irren,ist unnötig. Sie läßt sich fotokopieren. (Geiger 210)

The conception of space – the contrast of proximity versus distance – shapes the two halves of the text. A viewer must be relatively close to smell the river, see the green feet of the «Verwandte der Kraniche,» and observe the ecologi-cal relations of the Unterholz. The presence of the cranes’ relatives inevitably reminds the reader of Schiller’s poem «Die Kraniche des Ibykus» and their metaphorical association with poetry (Schiller 111–15). Intriguingly, however, Rost avoids a specific definition of these birds. Although the poem associates them with the magnificent cranes (a migratory species), they are merely their kin, possibly the more common Teichhuhn, whose scientific name Gallinula chloropus denotes its green feet (Sibley 151). Moreover, it is also possible that this odd tinge should be interpreted as resulting from an overgrowth of algae caused by polluting chemicals. The parallelism of aseptisch with Skeptische, a word that aptly describes the opinionated attitude of these birds, foreshadows the skepticism of the poet that gradually emerges in subsequent lines. Things seem to have gone awry to produce such quantities of Schaumkissen where the birds wade, yet in other contexts outside this poem, foaming itself can also be the result of natural fermentation, hence productive decomposition.

Though nothing in this landscape seems particularly remarkable, its loca-tion makes palpable the meaning of Nische. Within an ecosystem, niche rep-resents successful adaptation to Umwelt and the stability of homeostasis. However, adaptation can be fatal when conditions change since no system is forever in balance. For the poet, the Nische becomes «eine Verniedlichung des Gewährten.» While an ecological niche generally benefits its inhabitants, what exists here is perversely diminished, and the poet’s anthropocentric per-spective intensifies at this juncture in the poem. The received niche, innocu-ous as it may seem, becomes a limiting factor against which he strives. Loss of free will is implied by its mention, since niche is not a matter of choice. In re-sponse to that constraint, the poet reacts negatively, declaring, «Ich verachte Vorgärten.» This statement marks the tension between the scene observed up close at the outset and the spatial detachment of the second half. Percep-tions of genre and widespread contamination depend on distance. We cannot fully read a poem as a sonnet until we grasp its total Gestalt; likewise, wheth-er Schaumkissen are actually the product of pollution would ultimately be determined by mapping systems relations. Reinforcing the conceptual shift,



Rost connects the two parts of the poem using enjambment and inserts the word Thuja in the opening line of the next stanza. Linguistically, the insertion of the word Thuja (a botanical species) underscores a cognitive shift as well. Thuja is a coniferous tree in the cypress family frequently used in cultivated gardens whose Latin name arborvitae means «tree of life,» again, something the poet rejects. While such negativity seems paradoxical for a poet who lav-ishes attention on the details of natural description, we are reminded here of the problematical aspects involved in thinking about environment. As Tim-othy Morton soberly observes, «Ecology equals living minus Nature, plus consciousness» (19). Indeed, Rost respects ecology’s complexity (and dark side) by exploring the meaning of decomposition through the aseptisch and contaminated elements he incorporates.

This interplay of the closed systems (niches) and edge effects (the gener-ative productivity of the ecotone), combined with a keen awareness of the limitations of human perception, mark the recurrent theme of boundaries in Rost’s work. In the ecotone where edge effects occur, disparate ecological communities overlap and exhibit hyper-fertile conditions, much in the way the riverbank with its aseptic smell clashing with the Vorgärten seem to gen-erate the poem itself. Elsewhere in this collection, Rost shows an interest in other confluences, such as the muddy Neuland created by surging water in the poem «Randmeer» where earth is constantly built up and then dissolved by the forces of water (Im Atemweg des Passagiers 14). Likewise in «Naturge-setze,» Rost experiments with the notion that there are generative borderlines between mechanical production and the creation of reality. A photograph creates a poem and creates reality, or as he writes, «Wenn ich Fotos sage, wie ich / es sehe, entsteht ein Gedicht […] Wie ich es sehe, lassen / sich Details aus allem stanzen. / Ich kann auf Fotos total tanzen» (Der Pilot in der Libelle 54). Photographs capture visual details to a degree that exceeds the capacity of poetry, hence the delight and revelry of the poet, who will presumably use these images as the raw, manipulable materials for fresh creations, once they are fixed by the mechanical, chemical, or electronic processes of photography.

Explaining in Laute Verse that the title «Nachmärz» is intended to evoke the atmosphere of a post-revolutionary period, Rost adds that, «In diesem Gedicht gut versteckt liegt meine größte literarische Prägung der ersten Jahre als Autor und damit das Eingeständnis, dass es tatsächlich zuallererst und immer wie-der um Variationen geht, Abweichungen des ewigen Themas: Wo kommen wir her, wo gehen wir hin, wo biegen wir ab?» (Geiger 212). On what terms does he negotiate these questions? The two parts of the poem offer distinctly differ-ent ways for relating to Umwelt and conceiving of art. The first stanza traces proximate observations of nature. This initial response registers awareness of


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the wider implications of niche and validates fluid perceptions, represented by the impressionistic term Aquarellieren. Experiential knowledge is foreground-ed. The second part, by contrast, concentrates on formally constituted knowl-edge and distance. Moreover, the term reinzuzeichnen in the penultimate line teases the reader with different meanings – one literal and the other spatial. Not unlike the conclusion of Eduard Mörike’s poem «Auf eine Lampe,» where the final line, «Was aber schön ist, selig scheint es in ihm selbst,» offers such divergent possibilities of interpretation that it provoked debate between Emil Staiger and Martin Heidegger (Bennett), Rost works to suspend meaning here in a way that reinforces the dilemmas raised by variable modes of perception. On the one hand, the poem suggests that the poet dismisses cultivated gardens and the scientific procedures for tracing contamination back to its source, hence the responsibility of «cleaning things up» (literal reinzeichnen). On the other, it marks a profound refusal on the part of the poet to immerse himself in experience of the fragile material world, to «write his way into» what he sees, that is to make nature an object of contemplation for his poem. The final word in the poem, fotokopieren reduces experience to mechanical reproduction. Photocopying ensures accurate versions, but it lacks the human action of wa-tercolor and fails to capture the messiness of nature. As a process, it introduces the prospect of the posthuman, for the poet becomes incidental to the flecks of ink copying the landscape (cf. the discussion of the posthuman in Hayles 2–3). Rather than settling on one perspective, the poem vividly contrasts the modes of perception available to poetry: the intuitive (associated with niche, vibrant Umwelt, and ecotone) and the precise (derived from mechanical detachment and abstraction). Ultimately, of course, perception relates to representation and the possibility of developing ways to write environmental poetry.

Gleichgewicht and Nische, the pivotal terms in these poems, call our atten-tion to the blending of scientific and aesthetic discourses in contemporary po-etic language, and the ways in which the postmodern register is transforming the lyric genre. More fundamentally, they alert us that what is described is not merely a «paratactic landscape» that jumbles nature and man-made artifacts together, and yet keeps them physically compartmentalized (Egyptien 64). Both terms embody a sense of systems dynamics, hence an awareness of the deep connection of all earthly things, living and inanimate. With this connec-tion, the infiltration of decomposing nature into texts like Lehnert’s «Herbst-zeitlose» (where the colchicum appears in its last phase) and Rost’s «Nach-märz» (where unspecified pollution colors the scene with the aesthetic of the Schaumkissen) becomes an element that constitutes resistance to abstraction, because the concrete, textual details depend on the unflinching perceptions of the poet. The aversion they call forth helps turn «nature» from an object of



serene contemplation into a problematical environmental subject (Gilcrest). Awareness of such connection thus mediates a different knowledge about our world, for as Heather Sullivan observes,

Within the biospheric processes constantly reshaping all matter, there can be no long-term stability for the boundaries we declare between clean and unclean, sani-tary and unsanitary, or the pure and the dirty. […] With dirt theory, we see that most of these boundaries are actually porous membranes participating in often disturb-ing exchanges of energy and matter. (528)

Returning now to the questions initially raised with regard to Böhme’s dis-cussion of the problem of representing nature in the contemporary world and the loss of aura, we recognize the difficulty of poetic representation that con-fronts the two poets, Lehnert and Rost. The texts examined here have obvi-ous roots in the category of Naturlyrik, yet they challenge familiar modes of relating to nature. The purely aesthetic pleasure of the pastoral, the specu-lar apprehension of the sublime, and even the experience of the uncanny are present in the register of the poems, though clearly as echoes of the past. Both poets eschew the self-contained isolation of art – the attitude epitomized by Stefan George’s poem «Komm in den totgesagten park und schau.» With their commitment to an aesthetic of openness and suspended meaning, Lehnert and Rost nevertheless succeed in creating poems that instantiate Aura. Both poems function as works that turn attention to an experience of Umwelt – as an ecopoetical site for reconnecting nature with poetry, perhaps not identical with that which Böhme describes, but a place where aura provisionally exists in the new Naturlyrik.

While it is not possible to predict the future of Naturlyrik in the twenty-first century, the poems examined here argue for its enduring vitality. The de-composing nature that permeates them becomes a constitutive element in po-etic composition. This material quality, which I have proposed as indicative of an environmental perspective, is found across contemporary Naturlyrik and utilizes poetic practices that ultima tely strive to recover aura. By estrang-ing us from nature, decomposition invites us to reflect on our assumptions about poetry’s capacity to create. True poets, we would consequently hope, are always concerned with poiesis and nature, as, indeed, Lehnert and Rost prove to be in their work to renew the lyric genre.

Notes

1 Simic has been well received in Germany through the tran slation of his work by Thomas Poiss, the poets Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Karin Kiwus, and others. See in parti-cular Simic’s Ein Buch von Göttern und Teufeln: Gedichte, translated by Hans Magnus Enzensberger.


230 Charlotte Melin2 Gilcrest builds on the work of Lawrence Buell.3 Scott Slovic similarly observes that ecopoetics is not restricted to insights derived from

«nature poetry,» but seeks instead to interpret how language involves patterns, pro-cesses, and «living entanglement with the world» that require new modes of interpretati-on. See Scott Slovic, «Editor’s Note.»

4 It is interesting to note, as current discussions of the anthropocene acknowledge, that this period also coincided with the dramatic rise in CO2 levels, with a concatenate impact on climate change that continues to the present.

5 Although both authors have won critical acclaim and received literary awards, neither has yet been the subject of sustained scholarly attention.

6 For more information about Lehnert’s work see «Christian Lehnert.»

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Introduction: Dirty Nature: Grit, Grime, and Genre in the Anthropocene

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