Otago German Studies (E-Journal)
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It\u27s Not Easy Being Green: Integrating Refugees in German Environmentalist Culture
No full textThe solidarity crisis has prompted many initiatives for refugees in Germany, among them quite a few local and state-funded environmental education programs. Many of these initiatives are framed as measures of cultural integration and issue bold statements such as “recycling has become a cultural value in Germany.” Media depictions of these programs therefore inadvertently detail the cultural specificity of “environmentalism made in Germany” and reveal institutionalized idiosyncrasies of a long-standing green leader. The news coverage as well as the online self-presentations of these initiatives seem to embody the ideals of Willkommenskultur with glossy images of people of color among their blond neighbors and with captions that feature moments of mutual learning. Yet despite ample evidence of good intentions driving the programs, their feel-good depictions are problematic for many reasons: they are invariably dominated by German voices and specifically German environmental concerns, rendering the (homogenized) refugees and the global dimension of climate change secondary yet somehow responsible. Many of the articles begin with the imagery of trash surrounding refugee housing, seemingly not realizing that these portrayals suggest a linkage between refuse and refuge – between discarded objects and displaced human beings. Largely ignoring pressing issues of asylum housing and employment, it is not always clear whose problems these programs set out to solve, and the more tone-deaf reporting about them brings to light many difficult notions, such as conceiving of German environmentalism as thepath to integration (a problematic concept to begin with) and as a universal good despite its apparent localism. This article analyzes available media representations of a set of environmentalist initiatives for refugees, which tell us as much, if not more, about German perceptions of cultural values and related conversations in the publics sphere as about refugees and the environment.Keywordssolidarity crisis, refugees, German environmental culture, environmental education, recycling, Wil
Echoes of Ecocriticism: An Introduction
Get PDFStarting with the analysis of a contemporary NZ artwork that is read through the lens of material ecocriticism, Cecilia Novero unpacks some of the new tendencies and theories in this interdisciplinary field, and focuses on the ways in which these have been appropriated, morphed and newly developed in German-speaking cultures. The essay highlights both the challenges and the new inspiring visions that have emerged in this ‘open’ research field in which the long-standing question of “mediation” — between text and world, narrative and matter—returns, albeit from a radically different, indeed “capsized”, perspective. This is the perspective of a world that stories, while it is storied, through material narrative processes of entanglement, where writing and reading, producing and consuming are inextricably linked acts. This introduction frames the following contributions within the larger framework of material ecocriticism. At the same time it retraces their particular debt to and impact on the German-speaking traditions of environmentalist critique
Gewaltbereitschaft und Sprachverzicht: Die filmische Verhandlung der Nahrungsmittelproduktion in Nikolaus Geyrhalters Unser täglich Brot
Get PDFThis article explores the aesthetic and rhetorical strategies in the Austrian food documentary Unser täglich Brot (Our Daily Bread, 2005) by Nikolaus Geyrhalter, which effectively call into question a system of violence against non-human living things manifest in monoculture and factory farming. While most contemporary food documentaries heavily rely on both a voice-over and interview segments–in other words, linguistic tools–in order to put forward their particular rhetorical agenda, Unser täglich Brot exhibits a striking absence of both the spoken word and written language (such as intertitles and subtitles), resulting in a state of speechlessness that allows the film to position itself against a “monological system” (Val Plumwood) responsible for the profound and encompassing ecological crisis we are now experiencing. While Geyrhalter avoids the linguistic mode of representation altogether, he brings forward what food producers strive to hide from the consumer’s eye: the alien ways of a mechanical, industrialized food production that relies heavily on herbicides and insecticides, as well as the optimized mass slaughter of animals that leaves behind hung-up carcasses the ornamental quality of which Geyrhalter’s camera aims to capture as well. While the question of human guilt is evoked by the film’s title, a line from the Lord’s Prayer, which fully reads “Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins,” Unser täglich Brot refuses to make an outspoken judgment–a rhetorical decision that makes the film’s aesthetic strategies even more effective. Keywords: film, German, Geyrhalter, food production
Material Ecocriticism and Peter Handke\u27s Versuch über den Pilznarren
Get PDFDespite Peter Handke’s frequent focus on landscape and nature, his writing has rarely been considered by ecocritics as environmental. His recent fictional work, Versuch über den Pilznarren (Essay about the Mushroom Fool), details one man’s increasingly intense fascination with mushrooms, his eventual disappearance, and ultimate transformation into a “mushroom fool.” This essay examines the role of the mushrooms in Handke’s 2013 work as commentary on the reciprocal relationship between humans and nonhumans that warrants serious consideration, rather than theme or metaphor. In this article, I employ the lens of material ecocriticism to explore the dynamic material interplays and shared agencies between the mushroom, mushroom hunter, and the space of mushroom collecting. The analysis focuses in particular on border regions—of the human body and the forest in particular—to trace the mushroom’s role in the narrative and meaning in making. Key words: mushrooms, material ecocriticism, trans-corporeality, Peter Handke, Austrian studie
Geological Uncertainty and Poetic Creativity: The Material Agency of Findlinge for Droste-Hülshoff and Goethe
Get PDFThis essay isolates the geological phenomenon of Findlinge (erratic rocks) in literary works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff in order to examine these authors’ shared recognition of the agency of the material world. Rather than depicting anthropocentric poetic subjects that idealistically project their inner visions onto the natural world, these authors read the earth as endowed with a creative force and portray the poetic subject as but one component among many entangled in natural historical processes. This essay relies on the insights of material ecocriticism to demonstrate that Droste-Hülshoff and Goethe take a unique literary approach by reading geological phenomena, such as the yet unexplained movement of Findlinge across the earth, as processes that can be scientifically examined and which contain their own potential, rather than as mere objects of nature poetry. Close readings of Droste-Hülshoff’s poem “Die Mergelgrube” (“The Marl Pit”) and an excerpt from Goethe’s Faust II reveal the two authors’ related approaches. Both depict human characters uncertain about how their existence relates to non-human matter and vast environmental process, but both also reflect on the overlapping potential of natural processes and poetic creativity. The present analysis also considers the cultural and historical context of the two authors’ works, offering insight into contemporary theories on natural history, each author’s personal scientific pursuits in this field, the tension these developments created with prevalent religious views, and the role of women in natural science in the nineteenth century.Keywords: materialism, ecocriticism, literary criticism, agency, geology, natural history
Animal Encounters and Ecological Anxiety in W. G. Sebald
Get PDFW. G. Sebald’s works engage deeply with the environment as the catalyst for historical meditation, as affectively laden places, as embodiment of his vision of the archive, as contested territory, and as projection screen for a variety of anxieties. However, his texts also deal with the environment itself, sometimes in the context of human dominance over ‘nature’ and sometimes on its own terms. In these situations, his unnamed first-person narrators collide with the material environment in ways that highlight the porousness of the boundary between nature and culture and between the human body and the supposedly external environment. These encounters with non-human matter and agency take the form of struggles against resistant plant matter, post-industrial toxic landscapes, global inorganic threats like storms and erosion, and encounters with animal life and death.The most famous examples of animal life in Sebald’s works are found in Die Ringe des Saturn, where the narrator muses at length over the herring fishing industry in Suffolk and the cultivation and killing of silkworms. However, many of his other works also feature encounters with animals both alive and dead. My essay, which is situated at the intersection of material ecocriticism and animal studies, and draws from theories in both of those fields, will interrogate the above as well as animals in captivity in Austerlitz and Die Ringe des Saturn, non-domesticated animals both dead and alive in Nach der Natur, and the taxidermied bodies of animals across his works.By studying these non-human bodies and agencies, I will demonstrate that the suffering and killing of animals by humans in Sebald are not just ciphers for the killing of humans, as some have argued. Instead, encounters with animals both alive and dead represent despair for the damage done to the environment by humans. Moreover, these encounters ultimately convey a nostalgia for a lost, perhaps imagined nature and the ability to interact with it. John Berger’s theory of the animal gaze, Rachel Poliquin’s study of taxidermy and ecological nostalgia, Donna Haraway’s theories of companion species, Jane Bennett’s vital materialism, and Timothy Morton’s theory of hyperobjects inform my approach to Sebald’s animal encounters. I also intend to interrogate the role of animal studies in Anthropocene studies and material ecocriticism. This is of particular interest in the field of German studies, where ecocriticism too often takes for granted the nature-culture divide and the existence of the wild. I hope to provoke a debate about the validity of those approaches to environmental humanities in the Anthropocene.Keywords: W. G. Sebald Ecocriticism Animals, Ecolog
Reflections on Loss: Family Memory and the Natural Environment in 21st-Century German Novels
Get PDFMy study examines the way 21th century German authors juxtapose discussions of memory (familial and historical) with reflections on the relationship between humans and non-human nature, such as animals, plants and natural ecosystems. My examples are drawn from the following thee recent novels: Tanja Dückers’ Der längste Tag des Jahres (2006), Jenny Erpenbeck’s Heimsuchung (2008) and Judith Schalansky’s Der Hals der Giraffe (2011). These novels thematize memory of historical events or time periods while emphasizing human domination, manipulation and/or destruction of animals, plants and ecosystems for human gain and enjoyment. While the setting varies, from a wooded parcel of land in former East Germany, to miniature desert terrariums in Southern Germany to a desert landscape in the American Southwest, the way the authors portray the complex relationship between humans, animals and plants is surprisingly similar in each work.In particular, my contribution bridges an analysis of memory and an examination of the treatment of the environment in these novels by outlining the generational differences the authors present in the characters’ relationship with the environment. While one generation in a family focuses on governance of ecosystems, whether in miniature terrariums, meticulously designed garden landscapes, or fruitless agricultural experiments, the next generation reflects on the agency of natural matter as well as human destruction and greed. These different conceptions of nature juxtapose human exploitation and subjugation of natural resources with human appreciation of the power of plants and animals. In these reflections, the narrators often blur the line between what is human and what is animal.Moreover, the aesthetic quality of nature and its function as an object of human observation is present in each novel and directly linked to memories. It is nature in its many varied forms (domesticated animals, Northern European landscapes, desert terrains, the human body etc.) that enables characters to “remember” and reflect on personal experiences, historical events, and the relationship between humans and nature. Keywords: Ecocriticism, family, memory, German novel
Negative Dialectics of Nature: From Nature\u27s Death to New Materialisms
Get PDFOur notions of nature have been severely unsettled in the wake of the environmental crisis of the 1960s. From Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring over the constructivist phase of the 1980s and the recent turn to a new materialism, the ecocritical discourse that has unfolded over the past decades has been shifting between emphasizing material and immaterial aspects of the nonhuman. During the first early wave of the 1960s and 1970s, concrete material considerations dominated, such as the effect of DDT on birds or the limits of ecosystems to adapt to changes. Particularly in the 1980s, this led to a focus on the social constructedness of ‘nature.’ More recently, the ecocritical discourse has been swinging back again, turning against constructivist critiques to recover the materiality of nature against its deconstruction. Relying on Theodor Adorno’s model of negative dialectics, this paper offers to read this shift as a dialectical movement upon the discourse’s object of inquiry. Following the movement then the essay traces a concept of nature, that does not have to reduce its object to either corporeality or incorporeality, but detects it rather as the tension between the two. By keeping the dialectic from coalescing into a synthesis, and by merely unfolding it through confronting the assessments of nature with each other, it becomes possible to keep open the understanding of nature as process. Rather than as a solid entity, such an approach describes nature as a continuous dialectical movement that alternates spontaneously between instances of material manifestation and presence, and immaterial aspects of productivity and change. Thus, a critical concept of nature that hopes to resist human claims of appropriation is recovered for the environmental humanities.Key words: Adorno, Negative Dialectics, ecocriticism, materiality, nature, epistemology, constructivism
