Keywords

1 Basics of Nature Writing

In his survey publication Natur im Sinn, Ludwig Fischer discusses thirty-three theses on the “perception of nature and literature” (Fischer 2019). His illustrated book is divided into these thirty-three thesis statements, which are scrutinized in analytical essays, as well as in literary spiritual exercises. It lays the foundation for nature writing and also puts it into practice. For Fischer, the fact that natural objects affect writers distinguishes nature writing from other literary treatments of nature: “It is an umbrella term for works that render an exact exploration of nature and landscape in literarily sophisticated ways; often this encompasses a reflection on the exploring subject and the relation between human being and nature” (Fischer 2019, 45). Repeatedly, Fischer asks for an authentic experience of nature to be at the center, and believes that nature should not be a vehicle that merely serves “as a system of references for a poetic construct” (ibid., 203). He states that it is possible for poetry to be part of nature writing but adds critically with regard to the overarching category of nature poetry: “Nature has always been an echo chamber and symbolic space of subjective moods and existential feelings; rarely were material, really explored spaces and phenomena of nature called upon” (ibid., 214). Fischer points out that “romanticizing and idyllizing nature experiences” is a genuine problem in German nature poetry, and he highlights that nature poetry often carries the notion of being conservative, apolitical, especially after 1945 (ibid., 213, 215). By contrast, Heinrich Detering’s article “Lyrische Dichtung im Horizont des Ecocriticism” [Lyrical Poetry in the Horizon of Ecocriticism] covers a large selection of diverse authors and epochs, for “all nature poetry can, as a historical document, become relevant for ecologically oriented studies” (Detering 2015, 206). According to Fischer, non-genre-specific nature writing has different exigencies; it should be centered on the “specific places and spaces in nature that the writer directly experiences and explores” (Fischer 2019, 214).

In what follows, I will explore nature writing in the German context by focusing on Gertrud Kolmar’s poems, especially the cycle Buch der Rose. Ein Beet Sonette [Book of Roses: A Flower Bed of Sonnets], and on the notebooks and diaries of Ilse Langner. Kolmar (1894–1943) and Langner (1899–1987) belong to the same generation; both tried to gain a literary reputation before 1933; subsequently their lives took very different turns. Jewish writer Gertrud Kolmar died in Auschwitz in 1943, Ilse Langner survived the Third Reich in Germany and tried to resume her literary career after 1945.Footnote 1 Despite the honors she received late in life, Langner, who considered herself to be primarily a playwright, is almost entirely neglected in scholarship (Schulte 1999). Kolmar’s life and works, however, have repeatedly received attention in recent years (Kambas, Brandt 2012; Nagelschmidt et al. 2013; Gleichauf 2023). The literary estates of both writers are owned by the German Literature Archive (DLA) in Marbach. In the case of Langner, the estate includes unpublished notebooks and diaries, in which she documents her observations of the plants in her garden. These documents have not yet received scholarly attention. One of the goals of this chapter is to discuss them within the framework of nature writing.

2 Roses and the Garden in Gertrud Kolmar’s Writings

In her article “Schönheit vergeht, Tugend besteht?” [Beauty vanishes, virtue stays on?], Katrin Endres summarizes the development of and discourse on the cultivation of roses during the nineteenth century. Her focus is on Hedwig Kiesekamp’s children’s fairy tale “Eine Rosengeschichte” [A Rose Tale, 1875], which juxtaposes bush roses with tea roses. This text could have been known to Kolmar. Contextualizing the tale, Endres writes: “The horticultural discourse on cultivation often reminds one of a desperate wooing for love, where the beauty of the tea rose is equated with its capricious being” (Endres 2018, 17).

Kolmar used the Rose Catalog compiled by W. Kordes & Sons (1926) as a central reference for her cycle of sonnets (Nörtemann 2010b, 342f.). W. Kordes & Sons, a rose-breeding company, was founded in 1887, the peak of rose cultivation in the nineteenth century, and still exists. In a book on roses we read: “In Germany, the Kordes family was so influential in the cultivation of roses that one even talks of a Rosa kordesii” (Starosta, Cruse 1998, 13). It is very likely that Kolmar used such a catalog as source material for her “flower bed of sonnets” because of the specific names of the rose breeds in her sonnets and the fact that some of these rose types had only been introduced in the 1920s (e.g., 1923, 1925). As can be seen in Regina Nörtemann’s commentary on the poems, all of these plants are hybrid tea roses and a result of the then-fashionable competition for larger, fuller, more fragrant flowers. The flower Wilhelm Kordes is depicted in the catalog as follows: “This is the most beautiful rose that has been put on sale so far … The flower is filled, most noble in form and posture and rests on pretty and stiff stems; it is capuchin brown-red on glistening golden ground” (catalog, quoted in Nörtemann 2010a, 207f.) One of the consequences of these competitions for the most beautiful rose was, however, a sorting process in which roses that fell short of expectations were discontinued. For example, the rose breed Hadley, which Kolmar addresses in the poem “Rose in der Nacht” [Rose in the Night], is described as follows in the issue of Der Blumen- und Pflanzenbau [The Cultivation of Flowers and Plants]:

Year by year in all countries that occupy themselves with cultivating roses, they produce novelties that are a sign of floral development … In my opinion, Hadley should be eradicated, for it is not only prone to mildew, the color of the flower blues easily, and this breed also does not last very long in greenhouses. (Bauer-Sacrau 1937, 378)

The term “eradicate” (German: “ausmerzen”) is uncanny here because, in Nazi terms, it creates a belated link between the Hadley rose and Kolmar. According to this journal, another rose breed, Etoile d’Hollande, has already been “surpassed” (ibid.). Kolmar’s cycle of poems thus preserves a diversity of breeds that changed within the course of a few years because criteria such as sensitivity, growth, and appearance have resulted in some rose types being discontinued and replaced by more robust new breeds.Footnote 2 The selection the article recommends foreshadows in the field of botany what will subsequently become National Socialist racializing policy.

In 1923, Kolmar moves to Finkenkrug, a part of Falkensee on the outskirts of Berlin. In 1939 she must abandon the area because of forced resettlement. It is safe to assume that Kolmar faced the question of which plants should be grown in her parental garden. Her Book of Roses: A Flower Bed of Sonnets, written around 1927, is dedicated to the fragile, highly cultivated tea hybrids, which she renders in different rhyme schemes.Footnote 3 The fact that she does not write a wreath of sonnets, that she does not weave a garland, matches the lack of flexibility of these tea hybrids. Lined up in the flower bed, one next to the other, the connection to the neighboring rose is one of similarity in kind and contiguity. The sonnet, which was used as the basic pattern, with a variation introduced for each rose, corresponds to the order in the flower bed. The chiastic title, which combines nature and literature twice, insists on the entwinement between the sonnets collected in the book and the roses planted in the flower bed. The cycle of sonnets evolves between the botanical and the lyrical rose.

In what follows I will analyze Kolmar’s cycle of poems within the framework of nature writing and in doing so focus on her botanical approach to various kinds of roses. Fischer insists that authenticity, autobiography, and literariness are mandatory for nature writing (Fischer 2019, 45f.). Only from the poems themselves is it possible to speculate as to which roses Kolmar may have experienced directly in her own garden and which ones she only knew from the catalog. There is no inventory of the roses that grew in the garden of the villa in Finkenkrug. Some descriptions, however, as I will argue, testify to a more profound knowledge of certain types and suggest that Kolmar had studied these breeds extensively. In this I differ widely from earlier readings of the Book of Roses, which focus on the rose as symbol and metaphor and analyze the dense interplay of verbal images, without considering how the poems are anchored in a very specific type of rose and, along with this, the specific discourse on rose cultivation (cf. Nowak 2007; Yamaguchi 1994). It is the literary quality of the poems that allows for both kinds of readings, but this is no criterion, so I argue, by which to exclude them from an analysis of nature writing—conceding that Fischer’s binary with respect to nature poetry does not hold sway.

Before introducing specific rose breeds, Kolmar presents roses that are not exclusively tea hybrids. The first poem addresses various types of roses—the garden rose, the bush rose, and the water lily: Footnote 4

Verse

Verse The pretty wonders from the seven kingdoms One moment Brimstone butterflies, long in their stalks Then tiny flamingos that fell into bushes Then shells from magically quiet ponds (Kolmar 2010, 323)Footnote

“Die schönen Wunder aus den sieben Reichen / Die bald Zitronenfalter, groß an Stielen / Bald Zwergflamingos, die in Büsche fielen /Bald Muscheln sind aus zauberstillen Teichen” (Kolmar 2010, 323).

Kolmar takes the metaphors from the animal kingdom, but the plants are still anthropomorphized as the second quartet closes with the appeal: “Sing while you carry yourselves to the grave, sweet corpses!” (ibid). The articulated I refuses the alternative, to prolong the life of the rose in a vase, in the first tercet: “I do not want to separate you from your dear branch.”Footnote 6 In the second tercet, the verses, following a CDE rhyme scheme, provide a reflection on the consequences of this decision: “not separating” leads to “burning,” not “dilating artificially” prevents “a yearning during a long, stale life.” For the articulated I, the fact that rose blossoms are transitory marks their quality, no matter what type of rose, while rose cultivators face this challenge directly. It is a recurring observation in the poems that sunlight damages blossoms that are not protected by green leaves and that petals tend to lose color. The rose, cut off and protected from the sun, could therefore have an extended period of blooming. Yet this “dilated” life would be “stale” and “boring.”

The poem “Tanz der Rose” [Dance of the Rose] (Kolmar 2010, 324–325) in four stanzas of eight verses each differs clearly from the form of the sonnet and follows the eponymous dance. Alternating between trimeters and pentameters, this poem transforms the rose’s dance into rhythm. Despite the juxtaposition of “you” with the dancer, a “she,” the poem talks only about the rose, which is simultaneously dancer and dress, as well as stem and blossom, which are exposed not only to the sun but also to morning dew. Here, too, the text subject embraces the ephemerality of the flower: “look, you don’t want old age.” Silk, atlas, gold, silver, and glitter form the texture of the rose and determine the interaction with its natural surroundings. Talking to the rose, the poem depicts its metamorphosis: from the flower in the morning dew to the flower in the sun that receives butterflies but loses its petals thereupon. “An ashblond curl /the cherry oriole weaves it into its nest” are the closing verses of the poem. The faded petal remains within nature since the oriole uses it to build its nest. Even though Kolmar lays out a tight web of metaphors around the rose, the process itself remains visible when she alters lexical fields: from the visual glitter in the second stanza to the auditory humming in the third—under the blue summer sky, thus in the middle of the day—up to its exhausted nature at the end of the day.

In her third sonnet, “Mulattenrose” [ Mulatto Rose], Kolmar repeats the rhyme structure of the first sonnet. Its title and the question “Does your blood still think / of painted gods, of molded weapons?” (Kolmar 2010, 326) highlight the tea rose’s origin in a distant land. But its distinguishing mark is: “You do not protect your face from the heat / with green hands.” In contrast to the bush rose, which is more protected by leaves, the tea hybrid stands free. It receives the “sun’s draft,” which is responsible for its fading and wilting, as was already pointed out in the first poem. As a hybrid tea, brought to Europe during the nineteenth century, it is, in a metaphorical sense, a “mulatress,” if this word is used to denote an intermixture. Throughout the first three poems, Kolmar thus narrows her topic, moving from roses to tea roses, which she will then distinguish by type and origin.

Following these three poems, Kolmar presents seventeen more poems, each of which carries the name of a rose and a title. While the contents and lexical fields of the poems correspond to the title, the reference to a specific rose in its singular shape is maintained in the reference to its name. In its effort to depict the flower, each poem emphasizes specific details. Using the specific name of each rose, these poems do not reduce the roses into mere symbols. Instead the imagery is laid out in such a way that each poem grasps the roses as real components of the natural world, albeit to varying degrees.

“Traumsee. Captain Harvey-Cant” [Dreamlake] (Kolmar 2010, 327) is Kolmar’s first poem that refers directly to a specific type of rose breed and it is interesting to note that the last poem, “Liebe” [Love], also takes its impulse from this hybrid tea created in 1923. Both quartets are in enclosed rhyme, as are all the other previously discussed sonnets. The tercets build an alternate rhyme that spans both tercets. The admiring exclamation of the first verse, “Oh quiet. Oh this silence, this: I blossom,” culminates in the condensed apostrophe: “You scent. You never to be named. You: rose.” The rose, which is self-sufficient in its silence and blossoming, can only be grasped through laudatory repetition. This also marks the powerlessness expressed by the text subject in the last line of the poem. All that remains is “rose,” the flower’s generic name. This explains why Kolmar mentions the specific name of a rose breed as part of the title of each poem: Even though the essence of a rose cannot be grasped in words, listing the rose’s breed-specific name allows for categorization. Yet despite the stuttering address at the end of the poem, in the course of it the rose is compared and observed in its interaction with its surroundings: “Your face is bathed by dew of creation’s morning,” and like a child, the rose is freed of “power and effort.” The flower is “the cloud’s morning mirror,” “melody” and “shimmer,” “dreamlake for a colibri,” and in general Kolmar simply depicts a close relationship between birds and roses. But the first quartet also addresses the question of the rose’s origin: “Did rosy red wind from the shepherd angel’s flute / blow you around his cow, / the milky-white golden-horned cows?”Footnote 7 This unexpected reflection situates the origin of the flower in the realm of the extraordinary. This reflection, at the same time, suggests that Kolmar is in the process of finding a language that allows her to adequately describe the shape of the pink rose blossom with its pointed petals. Stressing the self-sufficiency of the rose creates the allure of something that cannot be fathomed in words. This stands in stark contrast to some of the later poems where Kolmar describes specific rose types in great detail. Instead of rendering the rose Captain Harvey-Cant tangible through its description, the poem depicts it through the overwhelming feelings it evokes in the text subject.

At the end, Kolmar returns to the rose Captain Harvey-Cant in her poem “Love” (Kolmar 2010, 343). There she addresses a wilting flower. The flower is bending over and has been bleached by the sun.

The falling petals are boats that glide toward death:

Verse

Verse without any flickering you vanish, light without a cry for help you sink, barque I hear your silence: I don’t hear your wailing

The gradual fading of the flower is captured through the metaphors “barque” and “light.” Just as in the first poem on this rose, the numinous is evoked in the first quartet as follows: “It’s you I want to serve, my lord and glory, / to you present the sacrifices, wine, sweet bread.” If this veneration applies to the flower, it appears (intentionally?) absurd. The cited gesture of veneration turns toward the most ephemeral, that which cannot be “lord,” and thus renders the discrepancy visible. To observe the silent wilting fascinates the articulated I. In this poem, however, the recognition of the rose as a living being does not make it anthropomorphic. While Brand argues that “in each poem a woman and her love are symbolized through a type of rose” (Brandt 1993, 27), this does not hold true for the poems “Traumsee” and “Liebe.” Framing the sonnets by these poems on the rose Captain Harvey-Cant, Kolmar puts all the following poems in the context of blooming and wilting and emphasizes in both the flower’s aloofness, its distance from human beings. Kolmar’s reference to the celebration of Passover in the fourth line of the sonnet would then allow for the interpretation that God is also adored in the most transient plant, that there is a structural connection between the distance of God and the distance of the rose.

Once we acknowledge the difficulty of grasping the rose through words, all of Kolmar’s rose poems can be seen as attempts to capture the essence of the rose through various forms of approximation. In “Rose in der Nacht. Hadley” [Rose in the Night] (Kolmar 2010, 329), Kolmar writes a poem on this delicate rose and addresses the rose’s early wilting. “It glows,” then it “starts to incline in fragrant desire,” it opens its blossom to the fullest and then, in the evening, becomes “a face with painted cheeks.” The first tercet introduces the “death owl,” which, as a night bird, is present at the rose’s bloom. When, during the night, it is a full bloom, it catches “a man’s dream in its flight” and thereby evokes the flight of the owl. In the end, the last tercet observes:

Verse

Verse And will already sink tomorrow, at the bush, in the jug And stood as a rose in the night The dark red rose in the night.

Kolmar sets up the two tercets with coupled rhymes across both tercets and, through repetition, emphasizes that the rose culminates in perfection during the night. Even though the metaphors Kolmar chooses are feminine—“the mature woman,” the “womb”, the “face with painted cheeks”—all of them can also be read as metaphors that venture to capture the rose’s character.

In a similar vein, the sonnet “Schauspielerin. Madame Edouard Herriot” [Actress] (Kolmar 2010, 341) mentions a woman in the first quartet in order to prepare the rose’s entrance: “She plays: abandons and spoils herself.” The poem does not address a gradual blossoming, but rather the blooming in the burning heat of the sun, which bleaches the petals—transforming them from “the coral’s coat” to the “feverish red of shrimp”—and eventually leaves them “scorched.”

Kolmar continues this botanical observation of different stages in a flower’s life in the poems “Kirschrose” [Cherry Rose], “Bürgerrose” [Bourgeois Rose], and “Uneingestandene Liebe” [Unacknowledged Love]. The pink-colored, filled rose of the poem “Bürgerrose. Madame Caroline Testout” (Kolmar 2010, 377), which was introduced as a new breed in 1890, had already occupied its place among the tried and tested types of roses in the 1920s. It remains available to this day and is described as “strong and enduring” (David Austin n.d.). It is exactly these characteristics that Kolmar’s poem tries to convey:

Verse

Verse She is the heavy, saturated burgeress The voluptuous mature one … As unhesitatingly as victory swelling up by earth’s sap, being filled In humid freshness she stands radiantly.Footnote

Sie ist die schwere, satte Bürgersfrau, / Die üppig reife … / So unbedenklich kraftvoll wie ein Sieg /Vom Erdensafte schwellend und erfüllt, / In feuchter Frische steht sie, läßt sich strahlen.

In contrast to all other roses, Madame Caroline Testout is “unhesitating,” “swelling,” and fresh; it does not wither within a single day like all the other roses. In the final tercet, Kolmar alludes to the painting “Susanna im Bade” (1636/39). The rose is named Helene Fourment after the painter’s wife, who is “waiting for her Rubens to paint her.” While other roses blossom and fade, this rose has time to await its painter. “Kirschrose. Ulrich Brunner” describes once more the fading rose that loses its petals. Its fragrance is “more fragrant than mirabelle and peach … more intoxicating than wine” (Kolmar 2010, 355), it lives on, even when the rose has wilted.

These sonnets all point to a knowledge of the corresponding roses that goes beyond a typical description in a catalog and is informed by personal observations. The changing colors of petals while wilting and the rapid life cycle of a rose such as Hadley are most likely not the kind of information a catalog would provide; such entries are mainly concerned with addressing the color of the bloom and its resistance to common diseases.

An entirely different way of approaching the rose can be found in the poem “Kanarienrose” [Canary Rose] (Kolmar 2010, 328). Nörtemann quotes the following cataloge entry in her commentary on the poems: “Rose of the future, egg-shaped bloom, pointed, large, sufficiently filled, sturdy, golden yellow, without any interfering shades, a stunning, pleasing, radiant color. The bud is very sturdy, resting on erect long stems” (Nörtemann 2010a, 206). In the German text, adjectives describing the rose use alliteration, “sturdy” is mentioned twice; these are devices that aim at stressing how the rose meets certain criteria for quality. The name of the rose, Ville de Paris, is changed by Kolmar to Canary Rose, a compound that alludes to the similarity of color of the bird and the flower. In this poem, bird and flower blend into each other, and even the boundary between the observer, a girl, and the bird and flower becomes blurred: “The girl’s pigeon hands cooed gently / made of bright lemon color and green silk.” She magically transforms the bird into the flower:

Verse

Verse … for whom she magically dreamt the rose Out of a soft dress of feathers. Blooming jewelry. A scent, like wine so yellow, sweet as cream Sang from the caging glass, blue goblet With delicate tunes, expired downward tremblingly …Footnote

Dem zaubernd sie aus weichem Fiederkleide / Die Rose träumte. Blühendes Geschmeide. /Ein Duft, wie Wein so gilbend, süß wie Rahm, / Sang aus dem Käfigglase, blauem Becher, / Mit feinem Tönen, hauchte zitternd nieder …

The bird transforms into the rose, but the song and the “caging glass” refer to both bird and flower; only after all petals have been shed does the flower mutate back into the bird. Fragrance, textures, color, ephemerality, and volatility are qualities stressed by this poem. The distance of the rose, which Kolmar thematizes in “Love,” is shifting here and turns into the distant origin of the bird “that came from islands.” Kolmar combines both tercets through a CDE rhyme scheme and thus relates both tercets to one another; this, too, follows the logic of entanglement that the poem pursues.

Not every poem on specific types of roses aims at describing the rose further. As Nörtemann points out, the poem “Die Rose des Kondors. Wilhelm Kordes” [The Rose of the Condor] (Kolmar 2010, 332) does not give specifications about this rose whose cultivation was praised highly. Instead, Kolmar focuses her attention on depicting the condor, an image that is present in Kolmar’s poetry at the time. In many instances, however, the poems deal with the characteristics of specific rose types; they are revealed when the poem is compared to the cultivator’s description. Thus, Kolmar’s rose bed adheres to a specific experiential order of crossing flower and poem. Since the types of rose that are bred and promoted change over time due to fashion trends and quality enhancements, Kolmar’s cycle of rose poems constitutes a form of floral cultural memory.Footnote 10

In her cycle of poems Das Wort der Stummen [The Word of the Silent], the poet again turns to the image of the flower. These flowers, however, are now embedded in poems dealing with the political reality of 1933, with anti-Semitic discrimination and violence in the newly erected labor camps. As can be expected, there are stark differences between these flower poems and those in Book of Roses. “Garten” [Garden] (Kolmar 2010, 355) describes an evening scene of decay. Birch trees lose their foliage, bergamots fall from branches, “The berry bushes spread rampantly, rot / pallid and formless in the West.” Dying becomes audible in the shortening of each of the last lines in each stanza to a two-stress dactyl with masculine cadence, it is as if the poem is running out of breath. “Blueness roars and my garden is sinking, / island, into the sea.” In the context of the other poems and literary tradition, the plenitude of asyndetic impressions of the autumnal evening garden can only be read as a premonition of death.

In this cycle the chronologically first poem is “Die gelbe Rose” [The Yellow Rose] (Kolmar 2010, 360), dated August 18, 1933. In this poem, composed of four stanzas, an abrupt shift in focus occurs starting with the third stanza. The first ten lines focus on a yellow rose, whose fragrance “envelops” the articulated I and “does not consider who I am, / where from my red blood has sprung under dark hair.” In light of the National Socialist seizure of power and the accompanying racial doctrine, this affection of the rose is significant. This rose “has, maybe, fallen out of the wreath of eternal death.” Death becomes the subject of the following lines, with the “I” in the last line no longer the articulated I of the beginning but instead death itself. Death does not make distinctions: “Equally quiet I await all with the same shovel full of dirt.” From a post-Holocaust perspective, the yellow rose in The Word of the Silent today can also easily be read as a signifier of the history of discrimination against Jews; thus, it seems to foreshadow the yellow star, introduced by the Nazis in 1941, that Jews in Germany were forced to wear. Both the fading garden and the fragrant rose enter a horizon of violence when they are put side by side with testimonies of violence and maltreatment in The Word of the Silent; this gloomy horizon is not yet a part of Book of Roses. There, the yellow rose remains a “canary rose.” In Book of Roses, death is presented as a natural part of a rose’s life. In The Word of the Silent, however, it is a result of violence.

Ludwig Fischer writes on German nature poetry: “Since the currents of literary modernism left German nature poetry untouched, the latter was increasingly associated with aesthetic and political-social conservatism” (Fischer 2019, 215). In my opinion, Kolmar’s poems escape Fischer’s accusation. In “Yellow Rose” she combines political criticism with botanical observation, whereas in a poem such as “Bourgeois Rose” the image of a saturated bourgeoisie is conjured without using the flower as a symbol. Instead, Kolmar tries to grasp the “Ever unnamable” (Dreamlake) in words, by looking for botanically exact descriptions of roses and, most often, for descriptions of the specific rose breed.

3 Ilse Langner’s Garden on the Island of Ibiza

In contrast to the wilting garden in Kolmar’s poem, we find the blossoming garden in Langner’s notebooks and pocket diaries. In 1968 she acquires a cottage on the island of Ibiza, and up to her death (1987) she usually spends about four weeks at a time on the island in spring, early summer, or fall. For years Langner takes daily notes in small diaries and writes in other notebooks. In the latter she keeps more or less well-formulated ideas as well as drafts for essays and for different genres of texts. In the 1970s, one of the topics she writes about is her garden. Her notes include specific observations about a given day, like, for example, her entry for March 9, 1974: “Little tree in full bloom, freesia blossom.” On March 27, 1974, she writes: “Marg[arita] is planting four climbing roses at the young fig tree” (Langner 1974a).Footnote 11 The notes she takes during her stay in March and April 1974 suggest that she pays attention to how her garden is created. Her entries from 1975 include similar observations; on May 31 she notes: “1st small blossom in the oleander tree, carnations, white roses” (Langner 1975).

In her white notebook (Langner 1974b), by contrast, she divides the entry on her observations about fig trees into six points. The entries start on September 17, 1975, and continue up to September 20, yet Langner does not list each of the four days separately:

Gray sky, humid, soft air—quiet. In bed, weak, flu. In bowls dried figs thick leathery skin, the charm of those alive pouring out sweetness is gone, nonetheless at home in warm milk—

1: But on the tree: in front of my writing window the brightly yellow greenish fruits, in between large green leaves, sometimes a gray rotten branch—cracking so brightly when snapped and in the fireplace—

2: And the heavy blue ones behind the large green leaves just like pear-shaped breasts [notation between the lines: on the tree above the bench that can no longer be seen], they are the earliest, by end of July already, and the most succulent sweet ones. The juvenile stems of the old fig tree rise high and are widely branched out, and over the staircase to the roof they meet the tip of the mimosas [.]

3: The young fig shoot planted by Bartolo behind the house with the necessary distance to the pines. Fruit still hard, green, the last tree to ripen [,] Bartolo says: ripe at Christmas!

4: Just as in the front part [on top: otra parte] the tree most in front, hanging down with heavy branches, no branch, no twig to be seen, only dark green large leaves—covering the nudity!—and in there, from there the hard, firm green figs, ripe in late fall—then broken up they look like red stigmata out of the green, regarding you: This is our blood!—And they really taste definitely, almost aggressively good.

5: The large tree in front of the latter turned toward me, mighty, large, high below still otra parte overburdened with figs, they spring open: Green skin, white thicker skin. Red grainy interior, not grainy, but it gets stuck between the teeth—

6: and the greenish yellow fruitful one in the driveway—the other side of the round rose bed—where the roses generously start their 2nd bloom. Today 9/20. 1st pink rose cut off and beside the bed in a light green glass goblet— (Langner 1974b, 146–149)Footnote 12

With regard to nature writing, Langner’s way of describing the fig trees opens up new perspectives. She focuses on individual trees and their fruit, distinguishes between them by noting their age, size, and location in the garden, and she also contemplates the relationship between branches, leaves, and the tree’s fruit. She groups the figs according to their ripening season and texture. Size and color as well as taste are part of her description, and she pays attention to the fruit’s structure by depicting its three different layers. She approaches the tree and its fruit through visual examination and by consuming some figs, which, as she concludes, taste “definitely, almost aggressively good.”

Special attention is paid to drying and, thus, conserving the figs beyond their regular season. The dried figs have “thick leathery skin”; the process of harvesting and drying them takes several weeks. On October 5, 1975, she writes: “I am drying the figs in the sun, they look shriveled, not tasty” (Langner 1975), and in an earlier entry dated September 6, 1975, we learn from her how figs are dried:

Still Sunday morning. Sun, but there are clouds. Without sun figs cannot dry. Sliced in half, with the red-grainy pulp turned outside, figs dry more easily. Margarita showed this to me yesterday [,] she sliced the figs carefully—those taken by Bartolo from the top of the tree—turning the red inner part to the outside [,] I cut—my finger—Margarita polite, quietly chuckled—glance inside the patio, glance at green mimosas, long feathery panicles—I will return in January when they will be in bloom – – (Langner 1975, 145)

There are several entries on this process of drying the figs, on this transformation that stops the decay of the fruit.

As is common with entries in notebooks, matter-of-fact sentences and sentence fragments can be found side by side with more elaborate phrases marked by alliteration and repetition—“hellgelbe” (bright yellow) figs next to “hellknackenden” (brightly cracking) rotten branches. She calls one of the fig trees “der grünlich gelb Früchtige” (“the greenish yellow fruitful one”). And she also includes biblical references, when, in section four, she remarks that the large dark green leaves cover nudity and then compares figs to “red stigmata.”

Even though Langner does not include an essay on Ibiza in her series on islands (Langner 1977), these entries may have been notes for such an essay. Independent of that frame, the numbering in the manuscript suggests that Langner structured her notes in such a way that they could become the starting point for an essay. This argument is supported by the fact that the diary entries at the time do not deal with figs but rather focus on her personal health. We can thus assume that she separates notes on different topics by recording them in different notebooks, structuring them as dated entries.

When Langner arrives at Ibiza in 1976, she finds part of her garden in a state of devastation because a neighbor’s herbicide has spilled onto her land. The devastation goes along with the sale of her property in the front of the house, a sale that delights her, but she is also dismayed by the changes that the sale brings about:

1 Oct 76 9h

Why am I not merry? At least content? After trying for ten years, I am now selling the front part of the property through Morand, not very well, but well enough, the trees, the wonderful old fig trees, the tall old olive tree [,] the finger of God, the two crippled olive trees at the street—they all will be cut down—and I even placed a claim on the wood—yesterday a lorry came and tore down the stone wall, age old, too—Pepe’s malice to burn bushes of my hedge with sulfate greatly troubles me—(Langner 1974c)

This sadness and mourning for the loss of her plants crops up repeatedly in her entries when a tree dies, when plants are damaged, when trees are cut down. The entries show that she is living with her plants, that her relationship to her house in Ibiza is really a relationship to the flora surrounding it. Never does she write about the house itself once it has been furnished. Entries that do not deal with plants focus on her literary works. Consequently, she writes:

Wednesday, October 13, 1976

Every time one is leaving, something remains behind that tinges the departure with melancholy; rose buds that I will not see blossom, plants that I will not see grow tall—under the fig tree—so cozy, surrounded by leaves, leaning against the gnarled trunk under the knotty gnarled branches of the old tree [,] the branches of the young tree are smooth like a young person. On ripe figs a drop of sweetness seeps through— (Langner 1974c)

Here, too, Langner pays attention to details: the “drop of sweetness” of the ripe figs, the difference between the texture of the twigs and branches of the old and young trees. Neither orthography nor punctuation matters for such observations.

Even though agaves and mimosas also figure in her notes, it is the fig trees that she describes time and again. Langner’s depiction of fig trees differs from her description of roses:

Verse

Verse Roses Roses Pink, red, white like lit candles— Tiny snails that gobble the leaves behind my back. (Langner 1974b, 156)

Instead of distinguishing between different types of roses, Langner focuses on their plenitude and highlights their many colors—and she even pays attention to the snails that do not figure at all in Kolmar’s poetry. We learn nothing, however, about the types of roses Langner cultivates. Her entries create the impression that her haptic exploration primarily centers on figs.

Langner’s notes capture a multisensory experience of figs; they do not aim at achieving any form of metaphorical elevation. This can be illustrated in a brief comparison with Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sixth Duino elegy:

Verse

Verse Fig-tree, for such a long time now, there has been meaning for me, in the way you almost wholly omit to flower and urge your pure secret, unheralded, into the early, resolute fruit. Like the jet of a fountain, your arched bough drives the sap downward, then up: and it leaps from its sleep barely waking, into the bliss of its sweetest achievement. (Rilke 2015)

Rilke here in fact starts from botanical detail: the shape of the branch, the rapid change between bloom and fruit. Because of his travels to Italy, we can assume that Rilke was familiar with fig trees. He dedicates the poem’s entry to the fig tree in order to juxtapose it with human beings in “… we though linger,/ ah our pride is in flowering” (Rilke 2015). In this poem, the metaphor of a blooming flower on the way to full bloom counts. It is interesting to note that Rilke, like Langner in an early entry in 1969, pays special attention to the shape of branches and that both writers attribute special importance to this characteristic. For Rilke the branches are significant as the sap’s “jet.” Langner remarks with astonishment in her diary on January 1, 1969, the year after the acquisition of the compound: “I notice that fig trees [drawing of a bent line] first grow downward, then rise upward with a slight bend with the bud—” (Langner 1969). Later on, only dead branches catch her eye, all others are covered by leaves.

Langner keeps her notes about the surrounding flora with her private documents. There we find the short diary entries next to the longer entries in notebooks in which she keeps her observations and feelings but that are also a reservoir for drafts. Recurring entries—especially when she visits Ibiza—show her keen interest in the vegetation on her property. Her observations also function as counterpoint to her own fragile physical state: “The gerania, red and outrageously pink, escape from the shadow of the mimosa tree into the light and break out in bloom—from my bed I see green, and the yellow pathway to the patio and the round red flower bed of gerania, grandmother’s balcony flowers in Stern street, Wroclaw … It seems like I am having a fever—” (Langner 1974b, 126–128). The gerania do not serve as a metaphor; rather, they remind her of gerania elsewhere—at her grandmother’s and her mother’s places and in her own apartment in Darmstadt. They are part of Langner’s episodic memory.

In her essay on the occasion of Langner’s 80th birthday, her friend Ingeborg Drewitz writes: “Langner’s extended stays in Asia left a mark on her. This also affects how she perceives her environment: the tree in front of her balcony, a birch tree with a large scarred bark wound, the whirring swallows above the courtyard” (Drewitz 1979, 62). Drewitz does not elaborate how exactly Langner “perceives her environment.” It is significant, however, that Drewitz shares this observation at all. It so fittingly corresponds with what we can sense when reading the notes Langner recorded in her diaries and notebooks.

4 Displacements of Regard

Kolmar’s Book of Roses shows what a book on roses can be: not a guidebook on how to cultivate and care for roses but instead a highly subjective engagement with many different types of roses whose character she reveals through poetry. In Kolmar’s poems, the rose does not serve as a metaphor. Instead, the imagery evoked in her rose poems marks an ongoing search for metaphors that can adequately capture the essence of a rose.

Langner’s diary entries, by contrast, show that botanical observations can also happen on the sidelines of an author’s published literary works. Entering daily notes constitutes an ideal method of recording day-to-day changes in one’s natural environment. Such notes can serve as a starting point for writing a nature essay. Simone Schröder identifies three levels as constitutive for the nature essay: “description, introspection, and reflections,” (Schröder 2018, 352). In Langner’s notes we see these three levels; the level of description dominates.

Langner’s notes on the one hand and Kolmar’s rose poems on the other suggest that research on German nature writing would benefit from recalibrating its focus in order to make room for new insights and alternative perspectives. Documents such as notebooks and diaries could yield new source material. Their analysis could provide an alternative to the more common focus on finished works. Perusing them, we could search for traces of everyday life instead of seeing them merely as early drafts of finished works. It could also be rewarding to reframe how we approach nature poetry. We could transfer Schröder’s categories of the nature essay and consider nature poetry as description, reflection, and introspection of the botanical or animal other and not only as a “cue for metaphors” (Judith Schalansky in Schröder 2020, 332).