Keywords

The category of “nature writing” is beginning to gain a foothold in the current German-speaking literary scene.Footnote 1 With the topic attracting growing interest in the public sphere, individual publishing houses are taking up nature themes. First and foremost is the Verlagsgesellschaft Matthes & Seitz Berlin with its voluminous, richly illustrated series Naturkunden, founded in 2013 and edited by the writer and book designer Judith Schalansky. The series, comprising more than 100 volumes at present, aims to publicize the genre of nature writing in German-speaking countries. In 2017, Matthes & Seitz and the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation launched the German Prize for Nature Writing, which has been awarded annually. The first prize winner was the well-known writer Marion Poschmann, and one of the two 2020 prize winners is one of the contributors to this volume, writer and literary scholar Ulrike Draesner. Based on this new trend in the literary scene, the contributors of this volume analyze whether and to what extent the category of (new) nature writing can be made productive as a perspective on contemporary German-language literature as well as on literary historiography.

The category of new nature writing originates in the British literary world, which has been experiencing a renaissance of nature writing since the mid-2000s. While American nature writing saw its heyday in the 1990s, its boundaries soon expanded, and it was subsumed as a genre under the broader category of environmental literature. The new wave of (British) new nature writing is different, as writers grapple with recurrent accusations of nostalgic and elitist escapism, embrace ethnic minority voices, reflect on the global climate crisis, and explore new representations of “wilderness” including urban places and postindustrial wastelands (cf. Macfarlane 2015). This strong expansion in British and Irish literature is also reflected in the genre’s formal definition, according to which new nature writing is not limited to nonfiction literature but has multiple forms and genres (see also Chap. 3).

This volume brings together contributions on German-speaking authors from Brockes, Novalis, Hölderlin, Alexander von Humboldt, Stifter, and Fontane to Gertrud Kolmar, Ilse Langner, Franz Kafka, Wilhelm Lehmann, and Ernst Jünger to Peter Handke, Peter Wohlleben, Esther Kinsky, and Ulrike Draesner. Some of the contributions explicitly highlight the relationship of these writers with former nature writers and issues of genre. In doing so, they illuminate the references of German-speaking texts not only to the Anglophone tradition but also to other literary interrelations and intellectual contexts, such as natural history and Linnaean taxonomy, idealistic natural philosophy, and phenomenology. Other chapters take the opposite approach, focusing on the relationship between humans and nature or the nonhuman environment, situating the analyzed texts in broader literary, philosophical, and cultural contexts, or generally problematizing the genre. Overall, in this volume, we pose the following questions: What does the alleged lack of a tradition of German-language nature writing mean for texts that focus on nature and its contexts? Can they be situated in comparable constellations such as Anglophone nature writing? To what extent can this genre discussion be made productive for German-language texts about nature? Which tradition is taken up by contemporary German-language nature texts? Is there a German-language lineage that has been buried, interrupted, or misunderstood in addition to the British and American lineage of nature writing? Are there any characteristic forms of nature writing in German-language literature?

In this introduction, we tease out the different starting points for the varieties of German-language nature writing in the contemporary literary world. The second chapter outlines Anglo-American genre definitions and the development of nature writing with a focus on the American tradition and the role of ecocriticism. The third chapter focuses on the British debate on new nature writing, which, in the face of the global environmental crisis and the loss of nature and landscape, opens up new, also (sub)urban spaces and industrial wastelands as subjects and constructs modern forms of wilderness. The fourth chapter is devoted to a discussion of the German-speaking development of nature writing in recent years, focusing on the concepts of the “mindfulness school” [Aufmerksamkeitsschule], of “resonance,” as well as the ethical impulse of this literature, and the question of its labeling. Based on the contributions, the fifth chapter presents six topics in a more specific way by highlighting certain thematic tendencies that seem significant to us when it comes to examining the question of nature writing in German-language literature. Finally, the question arises as to what would be gained for German literary history with the new category and whether and to what extent it would make sense to use a separate genre classification for the new writing about nature or nature writing in the German-speaking world.

1 On the Tradition of German-Language Nature Writing—Forays and Theses

In his laudatory speech at the first Nature Writing Award ceremony, philosopher Jürgen Goldstein paid tribute to Marion Poschmann’s narrative and lyrical work, placing it in the long-established Anglo-American tradition of nature writing and at the same time tracing references to German-language literature. In doing so, he mentioned not only the diary notes of Goethe’s journey to the Swiss Alps but also Alexander von Humboldt’s travel and nature essays. These were already an important source of inspiration for Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), which is considered by many to be the founding text of American nature writing. Among other authors, Goldstein (2018, 100–113) also highlights Werner Herzog and Peter Handke. Both transformed their own experiences of nature as wanderers. At the same time, he emphasizes the German-language tradition of nature poetry, which creates “new resonant spaces” (Goldstein 2018, 112) in texts of the present, for example by Poschmann or Jan Wagner, so that “with increased attention, things not only appear in a new light, but gain in mystery” (Poschmann 2016, 9).Footnote 2 Goldstein thus provides the first criteria according to which forms of nature writing can also be found in German literature, although “the literary label,” which is “more than just a literary style” (Goldstein 2018, 104), has not yet become established in this country.

Despite Goldstein’s position and despite the manifold publishing and feuilletonist impulses to establish this genre in the German literary scene, the question arises as to whether texts about nature, natural history, nature exploration, and nature experiences in German-language literature can and should be subsumed so simply under the term “nature writing” borrowed from Anglo-American literary studies. Is it truly desirable to call the new German-language nature literature ‘new nature writing’ or would it make more sense to find a new, separate category for the future literary history, not the least in order to avoid the necessary explanations and demarcations with respect to British new nature writing? In her contribution on “Nature Writing at Literary Festivals” in this volume, Simone Schröder notes that the status of nature writing is still discussed: “The place of nature writing in the German publishing industry is still a little uncertain, situated between nonfiction and nature poetry.” In 2018, events on this topic took place at several festivals in the German-speaking world. Against this backdrop, literary festivals themselves appear as valuable players in the literary scene that can help make a new genre accessible to a wider audience.

While the literary industry promotes the term nature writing, skepticism prevails in literary studies’ circles. German scholar Axel Goodbody and Americanist Ursula K. Heise have argued that German environmental literature “does not include the genre of ‘nature writing’” (Heise 2017, 2), since “Germany … has not produced an outstanding nature poet like Henry David Thoreau” (Goodbody 1998, 13). The reasons given for this are ultimately political. Heise cites the National Socialist appropriation of nature-related tropes from the literary and cultural tradition as well as the negative occupation of the concept of Heimat and nature conservation [Naturschutz] by the blood-and-soil ideology (Heise 2017, 3). Goodbody, too, blames “the burdened legacy” (2015, 124) of the concept of nature taken over by Nazi ideology as the reason for the delayed reception of ecocriticism in German literary studies. In addition, Bernhard Malkmus recently stated that it is not so much because the “Romantic mode” has been silent for almost 200 years but rather because “National Socialism with its blood-and-soil ideology contaminated the linguistic matrix for writing about the relationship between humans and nature” (2020, 18).

Despite the multiple connections between the different national literatures and cultures, there may be at least two additional reasons why a comparable tradition has not developed in Germany as it has in Anglophone literature. One of them lies in the “discourse dominances” within the humanities since the 1960s (Malkmus 2020, 18–19); another reason may have to do with the different perceptions of landscape. If American nature writing is mostly inspired by a (seemingly) wild nature and grand landscapes with spectacular mountains, deep gorges, and vast deserts, in Heise’s view the same “sense of place” (Heise 2008) is not present in German literature, as here landscape “means always human-transformed landscape that combines culture and nature” (Heise 2017, 3). For the Anglo-American tradition of nature writing from Thoreau to John Muir, Edward Abbey, Richard Mabey, and Robert Macfarlane, the attachment to a specific locality is strongly associated with a “sense of place” (cf. Schneider 2000; Schröder 2015; Smith 2017), which was often nationally charged. However, here we must differentiate between the self-understanding of the authors on the one hand and a subsequent appropriation for national or political purposes on the other. For example, the accusation of escapism and provincialism (e.g., Poole 2013), which is frequently invoked in the debate on the new nature writing, can also mean a critique of undesirable social developments in a given country, meaning that this kind of literature could just as well pursue an antinational course. Thus, assuming the criterion of a national tendency of nature writing is arbitrary in the best case.

Even if German literature has faced different conditions for the development of a “sense of place,” it is still remarkable that German-speaking (non-)fictional texts often describe experiences of nature in other countries. In this volume, many of the contributions refer to authors who have traveled to foreign, often non-European, places and describe a surrounding nature unfamiliar to them, such as in the examples of Goethe’s Italian Journey [Italienische Reise], Alexander von Humboldt’s Views of Nature [Ansichten der Natur] and other writings on South America (see the article by Schaumann), or the journeys by W.G. Sebald to Great Britain or Corsica. Katharina Gerstenberger even emphasizes the distance to Europe as a specific feature of a German way of nature writing in her comments on the depiction of Alaska in Peter Handke’s Slow Homecoming [Langsame Heimkehr], and Annette Bühler-Dietrich takes a look at the notes of the hitherto unknown writer Ilse Langner on garden culture on Ibiza, which she unearthed at the Marbach literary archive and presents in this volume for the first time.

In his most recent book, Natur im Sinn (2019), the literary scholar and writer Ludwig Fischer laments: “Hardly anyone in this country knows what nature writing actually is” (2019, 24), emphasizing that “… the aesthetically ambitious, reflective realisation of the perception and exploration of nature, based on direct experience, is surprisingly poorly developed in the German-language literature of the last 200 years” (ibid., 33). According to Fischer, it is not a historical rupture that obscures the view of existing approaches, but rather a lack of such literature. At the same time, he points to a “line of natural philosophical tradition that is also influential abroad” (ibid., 35) as well as to the widespread natural history thinking in Germany, ranging from Kant, Goethe, Schelling, and Alexander von Humboldt to contemporary thinkers such as Paul Feyerabend, Hermann Schmitz, and Michael Hampe. Important in this list is the emphasis on a philosophical lineage; however, it leaves out an ecological aesthetics of nature (Gernot and Hartmut Böhme) as well as a cultural ecological perspective (Hubert Zapf) (cf. Goodbody 2015; Müller 2015; Zapf 2002, 2008), which are equally central to the history of German thought, aesthetics, and literature. In the German context, the tradition of Enlightenment natural history and the founding of ecology since Ernst Haeckel are also significant (cf. Starre 2010; Heise 2013, 225). Even Ludwig Klages, who in his 1913 appeal Man and Earth [Mensch und Erde] formulated a sharp critique of the destruction of nature and the transfer of Darwinism to human society, would be a valuable source; while Klages has since been regarded as a pioneer of the ecology movement (albeit with much controversy due to his nationalist and anti-Semitic stance), the problematic aspects of his defense of nature still need to be addressed systematically.

But if there are rudiments of nature writing in German-language literature—and the present volume showcases several fine examples—then the historical rupture caused by National Socialism and the possible connection of nature themes to blood-and-soil ideology would probably have prevented such a genre from being positively connoted. Nevertheless, such a reservation does not apply to the same extent to nature poetry [Naturlyrik], well established in German literature since the eighteenth century. Despite Brecht’s oft-quoted rhetorical, often misunderstood question “To those born later” [An die Nachgeborenen]: “What kind of times are these, when / To talk about trees is almost a crime / Because it implies silence about so many horrors?” (Brecht 1998, 85),Footnote 3 a politically engaged nature poetry, soon dubbed Ökolyrik, as well as a poetic “conversation about trees” (Gnüg 2013), has been able to persist and develop in the postwar literature of the Federal Republic (cf. Detering 2015; Goodbody 2017). There are likely reasons other than the historical rupture caused by National Socialism, the difficult attachment to Heimat (Scharnowski 2019), the tradition shaped by natural philosophy, and specific “discourse dominances” in the humanities in the German-speaking world that can be identified as the cause of the missing tradition and establishment of nature writing in Germany to date.

Nonetheless, initial approaches have discerned a longer line of tradition for German-language literature and introduced it into the current discussion of genre. In particular, the research of Simone Schröder (2018) should be mentioned here. In an anthology on ecological genres, she has promoted the “nature essay” as a hitherto little-noticed genre in German literature since 1800. Using examples from Alexander von Humboldt’s Across the Steppes and Deserts [Über die Steppen und Wüsten] (1808) to Ernst Jünger’s Subtle Hunts [Subtile Jagden] (1967) and Andreas Maier and Christine Büchner’s Bullau: Attempt on Nature [Bullau. Versuch über Natur] (2006), she demonstrates common characteristics of essayistic nature writing and thus contributes to the genre discussion of nature writing. According to Schröder, these texts are “determined by a descriptive, introspective and reflective dimension” in which “scientific, subjective-emotional and ethical contents are linked” (2018, 344). What is important here is “the continuous change of levels” (ibid.) between a realistic description of visible physical nature, introspection, and empathy, which is also extended to overly subjective contexts through individual experiences. In addition, Susanne Scharnowski devoted an intercultural comparative reading to Bullau with respect to the Anglo-American tradition of nature writing since the late eighteenth century, including Gilbert White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789) and Thoreau’s Walden. She sees the essay form as particularly suitable for bridging the two cultures (Snow) as well as the reintegration of distinctive discourses. Nevertheless, she assigns Bullau to another tradition, namely, the idealistically influenced German tradition of nature aesthetics [Naturästhetik], whereby a “deep melancholy” in the face of destroyed nature is expressed in this text (Scharnowski 2015, 21). Malkmus also praises Bullau as a hitherto little-noticed nature essay and sees it as a successful variety of nature writing since the “experience of new resonances with life logged here is a serious attempt to work on language and mourning” (2020, 22). In what follows, we will elaborate on the idea that both are features of the new German-speaking writing about nature.

If one proceeds from the aforementioned starting points, the category of “nature writing” not only seems to indicate a new tendency in contemporary German-language literature but may also be a useful genre classification for the analysis of literary history. However, hardly any literary studies so far have systematically investigated the German-language tradition in this category. In a survey article, Karla Armbruster stated that there remain many “untold stories of nature writing in each cultural tradition” (2016, 157). Reconstructing such traditions is an important task of ecocriticism or, more broadly, of environmental humanities and, of course, of literary history research per se. The present volume is intended as such an attempt: To contribute to a more precise understanding of nature writing as a perspective for German-language literature and literary history, this volume explores the implications, the scope, but also limits of such a genre definition.

2 English and American Genre Definitions

The Anglo-American discussion of nature writing has become widely differentiated over the last three decades and comprises a wealth of themes and motifs, ranging from the problem of rural retreat and the loss of an untouched, pastoral nature to discussions of the complex concept of nature within the cultural construction of wilderness, issues of the conservation movement and the political power of nature writing, and, last but not least, the reappraisal of the literary canon (cf. Philippon 2014). Crucial aspects of these discussions that seem noteworthy for the study of German-language literature are revisited here. German-speaking nature-related texts of diverse genres are both linked to topics of Anglo-American debates and stand apart in certain aspects.

Much of the Anglo-American research refers to the dual roots of nature writing; on the one hand, an empiricist, world-oriented form of writing since Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne (cf. Williams 2017), and, on the other hand, the North American, more transcendentalist literature since Wordsworth and Thoreau, for whom “wild nature” and spectacular landscapes served as a source of inspiration. Both lines of tradition have been widely criticized, not least because they must be decentralized. Gilbert White’s approach to describing nature in the local setting of his garden habitat was criticized of being nostalgic, bourgeois, and provincially oriented (cf. Menely 2004). This criticism applies even more so to American nature writing, which denounces not only the romantic retreat, provincialism, and idealization of local or regional nature and its national, ideological charge (e.g., Brook 1980) but its often elitist, ethnocentric, and androcentric orientation (Philippon 2014, 25–27).

The term nature writing itself was first coined in 1901 by Paul E. More, with reference to American literature. As is so often the case with genre definitions, this was a belated reconstructive attribution for a literary development that was subsequently categorized according to certain characteristics and was subsequently canonized. Nature writing is defined as “a form of the personal, reflective essay grounded in attentiveness to the natural world and an appreciation of science but also open to the spiritual meaning and intrinsic value of nature” (Armbruster and Wallace 2001, 2). According to Thomas Lyons’ widely read Guide to America’s Nature Writing, it is characterized by three main criteria: “natural history information, personal responses to nature and philosophical interpretation of nature” (Lyons 2001, 20). This set of characteristics runs through many subsequent genre definitions. Some defend the importance of a distinct genre, while others propose necessary extensions. Lawrence Buell, for example, in his book The Environmental Imagination (1995), distanced himself from the concept of nature writing, preferring to speak of “environmental nonfiction” (1995, 8), which also includes other genres. Patrick D. Murphy classifies nature writing under the umbrella term “nature-oriented literature” (Murphy 2000, 13), making further differentiations between writing styles and genres in a typology (nature writing, nature literature, environmental writing, environmental literature), which, however, have not become established in literary criticism. In a 2004 handbook article, Scott Slovic subsumes nature writing under the broader category of “environmental literature” (2004, 887, 888). This is partly reflected in the definition of the term since Slovic assumes a greatly expanded conception of nature (“the world,” “the larger planet”) (Slovic 2004, 888). Under the influence of the Anthropocene discourse, US-American nature writing has experienced a further intensification, which henceforth starts from the awareness of anthropogenic interventions in the biosphere on a planetary scale. In this respect, the retreat into seemingly untouched nature by authors such as Ellen Wohl, David George Haskell, or Erik Reece has given way to an often-dystopian discussion of the destruction of nature and technological overshaping of the environment, as well as questions of environmental justice; at the same time, it reflects on the functional role of humans in complex ecological processes (cf. Voie 2017).

Since the publication of Rachel Carson’s famous nonfiction book Silent Spring (1962), considered by many in the Anglophone world to be the origin of the environmental movement, nature writing has steadily gained popularity, especially in North America. At a nature writing symposium on the question of “America’s next great genre” in 1992, John A. Murray even spoke of a significant segment of the American book industry with “dozens of anthologies” (cf. Bass et al. 1992, 73). The rapid increase of nature writing in the 1980s also favored the development of North American ecocriticism, which temporarily led as “convergent trends” (Armbruster 2016, 157) to the formation of canons with predominantly American titles. Many of the monographs produced are still representative for the discussion today (cf. Finch and Elder 1990; Scheese 1995; Gilbar 1998). But soon, a plea was made for a necessary expansion of the field of ecocriticism, which was far too limited by a focus on the study of nature writing about wilderness and the pastoral. Slovic (1992) emphasized the need for the subject’s awareness and, thus, for reflection on the human–nature relationship. He also called for an expansion of nature writing to include fictional genres (Slovic 2004, 888). Furthermore, Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace (2001) pointed to other literary forms and media, expanding the field of nature writing to include not only precursors of nature texts from the Middle Ages, the early modern period, and the eighteenth century, but also critical perspectives on questions of region, ethnicity, and gender. These examples demonstrate the enormous expansion of the initially relatively limited subject of American ecocriticism, which became a subfield of the broader field of environmental humanities starting in around 2010. In addition to the conceptual expansion, alternative terms have also been discussed. Timothy Morton, for example, introduced the term “ecomimesis” in place of nature writing in his book Ecology without Nature (2007) to the current ecological debate, deliberately rejecting the term “nature” in order to deconstruct common figurations of nature and the environment.

The development of the nature writing discussion mainly in the United States—rather briefly condensed in this subchapter—indicates, first, that the narrow focus on nature writing and ecocriticism that existed around 1990 was soon abandoned, not merely by expanding the diverse forms and writing practices of nature writing, but also by expanding the subject of ecocritical analysis. Second, it is apparent that the category of nature writing is often embedded in a broader framework of environmental literature. Third, while a personal observation of the “world” remains central, it is concerned with an awareness of the various relationships between humans and the nonhuman world. Furthermore, against the background of the posthumanistic debate of the “end of nature” (McKibben), scholars have provocatively asked whether nature writing is likewise “dead,” unless it can embrace “ecological health, social justice, and economic viability” (Philippon 2014, 398).

3 The New Nature Writing Debate—Environmental Crisis and the Construction of Wilderness

Against the background of the global climate crisis and the loss of sensuality in an age of digitalization, Macfarlane describes the “recent resurgence” (2013, 166) of nature writing in British literature as a “golden age” (ibid.). In contrast to the American tradition, the “renaissance in Britain” is first of all fed by the “longing for wilderness and nature” and, secondly, “energized by [a] sense of menace and hazard” of the climate crisis (Macfarlane 2013, 167). This vivid current of new nature writing is new because of the extent of environmental degradation, while literary-aesthetic responses to it vary (cf. Lilley 2017). The British scholar and writer Richard Kerridge, who also sees new nature writing as a response to the current ecological crisis, has called for a careful examination of the ideologies that nature writing has sometimes carried and continues to carry (cf. Stenning 2015, 2). The most comprehensive examination of new nature writing to date, Jos Smith’s book The New Nature Writing concerning British-Irish literature, also relates the genre to the environmental crisis (Smith 2017, 11). He shows how authors such as Macfarlane, Richard Mabey, Tim Robinson, and Alice Oswald present a dynamic sense of place opposed to homogenized urban cultures in their depiction of landscapes, islands, or suburban wastelands while at the same time turning away from “nationalist conventions” (Smith 2017, 206). The new nature writing deliberately avoids falling into the trap of nostalgic escapist fantasies. Rather, writers turn to the representation and reflection of ecological and local contexts (Schröder 2018, 339). In the preface to an issue of the journal Granta, which had already published a thematic issue on “New Nature Writing” in 2008, editor Jason Cowley not only emphasizes the experimental character of these texts but also addresses their new relationship with the environment: “They are about the discovery of exoticism in the familiar, the extraordinary in the ordinary” (Cowley 2008, 9, 11). This new eye for the extraordinary can be found in secluded places in addition to cities, on the outskirts, or in industrial sites (cf. Lilley 2017). It is, of course, not limited to British literature but can similarly be found in German-language nature writing, as we will show in what follows.

In the debate on the new nature writing, the question of genre and form plays an important role. In contrast to the earlier narrowing focus of the nature essay, Macfarlane sees new nature writing encompassing a variety of forms, even fictional genres such as poetry and novels: it is “passionate, pluriform and essential” (Macfarlane 2015, 6; idem 2013, 266). Anna Stenning further emphasizes “originality and playfulness with form” (2015, 5; cf. Cowley 2008, 10). Despite the considerable expansion of the genre, the main body of current literature on the new nature writing remains largely confined to non- or semifictional texts such as autobiographies, travelogues, natural histories, and popular science essays (cf. Stenning 2017; Oakley et al. 2018).

In their 2018 overview article on the potential of the new nature writing, Kate Oakley, Jonathan Ward, and Ian Christie highlighted five aspects: (1) “ecologically motivated dissent”; (2) “ecologically informed aesthetic observation,” which includes “epiphany, mourning and celebration of nature at risk”; (3) “downsizing/de-urbanising labour on the land”; (4) “poetic natural history writers” as a variation on the old pattern of “gentleman observers”; and finally (5) “close natural history observation as psychotherapy and psychodrama” (Oakley et al. 2018, 691). Whereas the classical literature of nature writing focused on retreat, solitude, and individual engagement with nature, new nature writing searches for a reconnection with the physical world, for an “ecology of the mind” (Bateson) and brings social engagement back into literature. In this respect, the new nature writing is a kind of “arts activism” that enables an imagination of the scale of the ecological crisis, the loss of biodiversity, and “a sense of future,” thereby contributing to “collective politics” (cf. Oakley et al. 2018, 688, 697) and environmental justice.

Macfarlane explicitly defends new nature writing against “kitsch” and “propaganda” in the sense of an unambiguous environmental message and at the same time points out its specific merits: New nature writing is an important motor for the environmental movement since it can make the damage and loss caused by environmental destruction tangible and, moreover, give hope by articulating our fascination with nature (Macfarlane 2013, 167). Here the power of literature to elicit emotions plays a fundamental role, which can help to exquisitely articulate a sense of resonance with nature. This is also emphasized by Richard Mabey (2018, 22), one of the United Kingdom’s most successful nature writers who has published around thirty books rich in natural history and knowledge in the field of new nature writing describing the flora and fauna of the Chiltern Hills and his home in the southeast of England. He has recently also focused on the healing power of nature, through which (self-)destructive human beings can be cured of their forgetfulness of self and nature and brought back to the senses of nature. Previously, following the publication of his bestseller Flora Britannica, Mabey fell ill with depression (Mabey 2018, 58), which he describes as a symptom of the loss of nature. In his book Nature Cure (2005), published in German for the first time in 2018, he described regaining his once strong connection to nature. In the same text, he anticipates accusations of instrumentalizing nature as therapy (cf. Oakley et al. 2018, 695) by explicitly emphasizing that such a personal disclosure of one’s own crisis is part of his definition of nature writing, even though it is not common, especially in Europe, to put one’s own persona in the spotlight to flaunt “personal stories” (Mabey 2018, 30).

While such lucid confessions are intended to consciously counter the common suspicion of nostalgia or criticism of sentimentalism, another central aspect of the debate on new nature writing should be highlighted: the recall of the wild. With this, authors of new nature writing distinguish themselves from the American tradition—not the least in order to counter the view that there is no wilderness left in Britain (Huggan 2016, 157) but also to point out that the “wild” offers an involuntary reminder of “the violent underside of English pastoral nostalgia” (Huggan 2016, 165). William Cronon had already shown that wilderness as a cultural construction is paradoxically structured: “wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural” (1996, 17).

Using as examples nonfictional nature texts such as Macfarlane’s The Wild Places (2008) or Jay Griffiths’ Wild: An Elemental Journey (2008), Kylie Crane has elucidated that the terms “wild” and “wilderness” continue to serve as placeholders for essentialist ideas of the purity of nature. Both texts assume the wild as a quality of nature while also seeing it as “displaced” (Crane 2016, 43, 55) while embarking on a deliberate search for places of wilderness in, for example, the British Isles. Crane explores not only the tension between “aesthetic and utilitarian values” (Crane 2016, 51) constitutive of nature writing but also the tension between immediate feelings arising from attention to the impact of phenomena and the requirements of aesthetic form, which includes linguistic-historical exploration and knowledge of the history of the wild, so that the wild can only be approximated through writing practice itself. Both tensions articulate a “self-willedness” as a form of “wild nature” that challenges affective resonance and transforms the common notion of the wild as pure, “remote, historyless, unmarked” (Crane 2016, 54–55). The “new natures” explored in the new nature writing thus range from remote islands to densely populated cities and in this respect connect the “wild” with the everyday, the extraordinary with the familiar (Lilley 2017, 10–11). Although the development of the new nature writing is still relatively young, the themes and aspects outlined here demonstrate how complex and differentiated the new nature writing debate has already become. To what extent are these topics also compatible with German-language literature? Are there distinctive ways whereby contemporary German-language nature literature positions itself vis-à-vis Anglo-American nature writing?

4 Previous Determinations of German-Language Nature Writing, the Nature Essay, and Kritisches Naturschreiben

4.1 Opening, Expanding, and Rejecting Genre Limitations

Although Schröder can “indeed demonstrate a German-language tradition [of nature essay]” (2018, 340), she remains within the “classical” definition of nature writing because she does not extend it to fictional texts. For Ludwig Fischer, on the other hand, nature writing is “not a literary genre, genre or text type” (Fischer 2019, 45) but rather a comprehensive term for texts with the following characteristics: (1) “the literary elaboration is based on intensive, ‘authentic’ perception and exploration of concrete nature and landscape, on bodily encounters with and examinations of non-human living beings”; (2) it is crucial “that the writer has actually made the literarily elaborated perceptions and experiences himself/herself and that this is also reflected in the writing style”; and (3) that the texts “meet high literary-aesthetic standards.” (ibid., 45–46) Furthermore, he notes that these texts “almost always … contain essayistic parts” and “frequently display literary hybrid forms” (ibid., 46, 47). The latter restriction is gradual, so that fictional forms are not excluded. Malkmus is also reluctant to define the genre of nature writing when he states: “This is not a ‘tradition’ in the sense of a genre or a literary form, but rather in the sense of a cultural attitude of observing attention in nature” (Malkmus 2020, 22).

For Goldstein, on the other hand, nature writing certainly exists as a genre, although he traces “byways” (Goldstein 2019, 190) regarding German-language literature. He defines nature writing as an “attitude of attention,” but more focused on individual subjectivity, as “mindful writing about one’s own experiences in nature” and a “language-guided school of attention for a discovery of the visible but overlooked” (Goldstein 2018, 104). This rather broad definition takes into account the local, the everyday, and the obvious, which is deemed worthy of subjective attention. In comparison to the British discussion on new nature writing, the rather controversial characteristic of “wilderness” or the “wild,” which is foregrounded in British literature, has not been discussed in German-language nature writing.

4.2 Working on Language and a “Language of Resonance”

The “training of attention” mandatory in new nature writing is inseparable from the labor with language. In his laudation on Marion Poschmann, Goldstein cites her poem “Mossgarden, a ready-made” [Moosgarten, ein Ready-made] as an example of a work that brings to mind a number of different moss species in the native flora and, due to the “allure of names,” allows for a differentiation and precision that is not immediately visible to the naked eye (2018, 213). In Goldstein’s view, poetry is “especially valuable for the unfolding of a more subtle mode of language and is an underappreciated branch of nature writing” (2019, 211). It is not a matter of imitation, but of an “evocation of nature,” of the “evocative power of language,” in which a “poetess” becomes a “midwife of natural phenomena” (Goldstein 2018, 107, 113). Goldstein thus ascribes to language or to “linguistic landscapes” the “function to form the perception” (2019, 27). Here, he refers to the U.S. author and essayist Annie Dillard (1974), who also emphasizes the close connection between writing and perception: “Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization” (Goldstein 2019, 26). In this sense, writing about nature is a project reflecting on language, a project forming language, or, as Bernhard Malkmus states, even a “language-political project,” as it counters the “shocking speechlessness” vis-à-vis natural phenomena and searches for a “language of resonance” to express the “experienceability of worldly interrelations beyond mankind” (2020, 24, 21, 22, 25). Goldstein, too, drawing on sociologist Hartmut Rosa, laments a comprehensive “resonance catastrophe” in our society and recognizes nature writing as a way “to counterpose a sensitivity toward natural phenomena against the threatening silencing of the world” and to “enhance our ability to resonate with our natural surroundings” (Goldstein 2018, 108). Similarly, Ludwig Fischer sees nature writing as gesturing toward “processes of gaining insight into ourselves while being surrounded by nature” and stresses an “implicit ethics” (Fischer 2019, 61–62). When Malkmus considers nature writing as a “cultural attitude of observational attention vis-à-vis or mindfulness in nature” (2020, 22), he likewise targets the subject’s capacity to resonate with natural phenomena while seeking to articulate the “poetics of the earth” (2020, 20). Finding words for this intrinsic resonance that nature observation is meant to trigger, he refers to Macfarlane who describes the “ability to let nature write itself via human language as a medium” (Malkmus 2020, 25). The human subject is called upon to open the senses to natural phenomena and use its creative forces in putting them down on paper. What this might look like in concrete terms remains vague in this discussion, as does the concept of resonance, which will have to be developed further in the field of nature writing.

More concrete answers are found in Ulrike Draesner’s writing. In her Frankfurt Poetics Lecture, she discusses the Anglophone texts of nature writing from a somewhat different angle. She stresses the ambiguity that informs our “habits of seeing, our expectations of texts, and our competence in dealing with indirect realities” (Draesner 2018, 165). Moreover, “writing in accord with nature” explicitly alters the signs of mimesis while giving “the ego relief from itself” (ibid.). In her hybrid poetic-essayistic text in this volume, Draesner suggests that what emerges in the course of “Natur-Schreiben” is a sort of “translating” (2020, 342). For her, it is obvious that there is no original nature out there and a nostalgic turning back is obsolete. And, of course, there is no escape from oneself by writing about nature, either. Meanwhile, Fischer foregrounds the “authentic” experiences and, accordingly, “the autobiographical drive prevalent in nature writing” (Fischer 2019, 45). For Draesner’s as for Schalansky’s part, the withdrawal of the writer’s own ego is an important condition. The term “translation” that Draesner introduces is based on the idea that nature has its own language and that the human subject (as a sort of medium) has to verbalize or transmit it in another mode of articulation.

4.3 Emotional Work, the Return of Awe, and the Ethical Dimension

“Respect,” “regard,” and “recognition” toward nature, as well as “awe” and “wonder”—these are some of the more frequently mentioned terms in current discussions of nature texts. The ethical project of nature writing is at the same time closely related to aesthetic questions. Reflecting on the difficulties of attempting to describe a tree, Poschmann, for example, points to the “unbridgeable hiatus between language and world” that emerges especially when viewing the multitude of German-language “tree poems”; this hiatus is the “fundamental problem” that becomes particularly virulent in nature poetry (2018, 123–124). She also stresses the necessity of a specific emotional work. Such work is not to be understood as “sentimental idealization,” but rather as a “poetic perception of nature” that is “unavoidable” if we want “to prevent an ecological catastrophe” (ibid., 133). It is important to her, Poschmann writes in Moon Watching in a Moonless Night [Mondbetrachtung in mondloser Nacht], that through her specific use of language a sense crystallizes “from which emotional layer a word or an image originates” (2016, 131).

The positions in the German-speaking world about the aforementioned points do not differ significantly from those taken in the British debate on new nature writing. For Richard Mabey, for instance, language awareness and imagination are among the most important components of new nature writing: “I believe that language and imagination, far from alienating us from nature, are our most powerful and natural tools for re-engaging with it” (Mabey 2018, 30). Here, again, he is on the same page as Macfarlane, who, as we have seen, also emphasizes precisely the fascination and awe with respect to nature that is also articulated in new nature writing and that he considers as an important incentive for the environmental movement (Macfarlane 2013, 167). Only from the love of nature can a “sense of responsibility” for the environment emerge, a disposition historian of science Lorraine Daston recognizes, if any, in people of the present (Daston 2018, 59). In contrast to mere rational responsibility, she aims at the feeling, the intrinsic “sense of responsibility.” A similar “sense of responsibility” is observed in British new nature writing (Lilley 2017, 9).

A special sensitivity toward the “more-than-human world” (Abram 1996) is also brought into play by Malkmus in his critique of the “forgetfulness of life” [Lebensvergessenheit] prevalent in the humanities. His plea for a “philosophical attitude … towards life” that includes “an attitude capable of amazement and guided by amazement” (Malkmus 2020, 19) also informs his contribution in this volume on “Wilhelm Lehmann: Nature Writing as a Behavioural Strategy.” Here, Malkmus argues for an emotional energization, aiming primarily at an ethical dimension by situating the German writer and poet Lehmann as a nature writer in the broader cultural context of the Weimar Republic. Lehmann, he argues, as a reaction to the experiences of World War I, developed literary exercises of resonance with the natural world and, in so doing, offered an alternative to the contemporary cultural habitus of new objectivity (Verhaltenslehre der Kälte, Lethen). According to Malkmus, it was Lehmann’s aesthetic program to combine the observational skills of a naturalist with a writing practice of humilitas as an ethics of gift. The specific elements in Lehmann’s writing are representative of a specifically German lineage of nature writing: a phenomenological writing practice based on empirical observation, a nonsubjectivist literary expressiveness, and a reflection on the uncontrollable biological conditions of human life.

In all these attempts to define nature writing, it is a decidedly ethical value that is attached to it. Goldstein also emphasizes a “diagnostic and therapeutic potential” of nature writing in the “field of tension of modernity” (Goldstein 2019, 13). Nature writing can counter “scientism … with a linguistic humanism” (Goldstein 2018, 104) and as such is a “necessary corrective to the technical epoch of the Anthropocene.”Footnote 4

4.4 Energy of Protest and Kritisches Naturschreiben

The new “turn to the natural environment” and the “use of the senses” comes with a counterdiscursive impulse, to which Ludwig Fischer, referencing Alexander Kluge, ascribes an “energy of protest” (Fischer 2019, 59). For nature writing functions neither “as ecological propaganda nor as an aesthetic sedative amid the global ecological crisis” but rather tells “counter stories” (Fischer 2019, 171).

Marion Poschmann also brings a critical-ethical dimension into play in her award speech when she refers to her attempts—which she calls “nature poetry” [Naturdichtung]—to present the “mechanisms” underlying destruction—when she points to the “power concentration in only a few people” and their unrestrained enrichment “without the slightest consideration of the finiteness of resources, without foresight and without respect” (Poschmann 2018, 132).Footnote 5 A critical impetus is also discernible in Schalansky’s texts. The author, who has won several awards and who, in rejecting her own subjectivity in view of the new nature-oriented German writing, calls for the exact opposite of Mabey and is attempting to write in a new, critically attentive way. This occurs in a kind of writing experiment: On the one hand, the writer explicitly becomes a learner when she attempts to describe her natural environment in great detail and through what she calls a “perception training under the open sky.” At the same time, she withdraws her own ego—in “modesty”—and consults field guides.Footnote 6 The natural environment becomes a kind of “mindfulness school” for the author to move in. In the work of identification that subsequently takes place while poring over books on natural history in the library, she becomes a learner who now has words ready for differentiation. On the other hand, Schalansky is clearly focused on awakening a critical sensitivity. During the aforementioned panel discussion, for example, she explicitly called for the vehicle that “sprays the canola field with pesticides for the third time” to be taken into account. Such descriptions convey the notion “that it’s not untouched nature but a cultural landscape,” i.e., these authors are always aware that it is a “poetic endeavor” not “to write … about oneself but of what one sees.” She shares this attitude with numerous authors in the German-speaking world, such as Kinsky and also Poschmann, or Thomas Hettche with his height-challenged female protagonist reflecting on the interdependencies between humans, animals, plants, and minerals in his novel Peacock Island [Pfaueninsel, 2014], whose texts stand up for a writing about and with nature. In addition to the level of description through the work of language, resonance, and emotion, these writings clearly share a critical dimension, which is why Christine Kanz (2020, 58) calls them “Kritisches Naturschreiben.”

5 Further Thematic Fields of a German-Language Nature Writing

Based on the foregoing sketch of the tendencies in contemporary German-language nature writing, further criteria of German-language writing about nature can be identified in the fifteen contributions of this volume. As the discussion of previous positions on German-language nature writing demonstrates, the proponents of this category often, if for the most part implicitly, invoke a phenomenological line of tradition. Nevertheless, from this perspective, no history of nature writing for German-language literature has been published so far. Of course, such a lacuna cannot be filled by a single edited volume. Rather, the question to be asked is the extent to which this category is at all useful and productive for an analysis of German-language literature. In what follows, we shed light on six thematic areas that lay out some of the reasons why the category of nature writing may enable a new perspective on the German-language literary tradition.

5.1 Differentiation Between Aesthetic and Utilitarian Concepts of Nature

The Anglophone research on nature writing has rightly emphasized the complexity of the concept of “nature,” as well as the “multiple and contrasting understandings of nature and their implications” (Lilley 2017, 5). Much the same may be said for German texts. Thus, there is a nuanced debate on nature poetry with its innovations and special varieties of eco-lyrics and “Anthropocene poetry” (cf. Bristow 2015; Bayer and Seel 2016; Goodbody 2017). Yet this debate so far failed to clarify the significance of the German tradition of nature poetry [Naturlyrik] for nature writing and how they are intertwined. 

The contributions in this volume explicitly deal with the writers’ respective nature concepts. In nature writing texts, we usually find a “tension between utilitarian and aesthetic values ascribed to nature” (Crane 2016, 51). Although such a tension is only rudimentarily discernible in German-language literary texts of the early Enlightenment, nature writing may also open up new perspectives for their rereading.

For example, Frank Krause, in his contribution “Barthold Heinrich Brockes and Nature Writing,” demonstrates that physicotheological didactic poetry [Lehrdichtung] is informed by natural history and includes the sensory perception of the individual. Illustrating this with Brockes’ praise of the sense of smell, he explains how natural phenomena as signs of a well-ordered and purposefully organized nature evoke admiring contemplation. However, while Brockes still posited a religiously granted harmony of nature and human needs, the literature of nature writing assumes the exact opposite, an alienation from nature that needs to be overcome. Despite these different historical premises, however, Krause discerns a similar objective of both views: Both follow the “ethical imperative” to bodily explore the inaccessible stubbornness of the co-world, in order to escape the “insensitivity” of instrumental reason (see the contribution by Krause). Here Krause’s argument resonates with Malkmus’ findings regarding Lehmann’s poetry. If we would draw the line even further to the phenomenological tradition of thought (especially in Waldenfels) and its ideal of a continuing atonement of self and natural surroundings, the similarities would become even more obvious. The category of nature writing, as tenuous as its application to Brockes’ writing may be according to Krause, may thus make new connections and historical lines visible.

For the literature of Classicism and Romanticism a different premise applies. Here the Rousseauist alienation from nature was seen as a given. In his contribution “Bringing Nature to Language: Novalis’ Novices of Sais,” Silvio Vietta differentiates between five different concepts of nature, all of which are present in Novalis’ nature-philosophical fragment: (1) nature as cosmos in the sense of the totality of being, (2) nature in the sense of (inner) nature or the essence of a matter, (3) nature as landscape, (4) nature as wilderness, and (5) nature as text. Vietta traces the history of the concept from the triumph of rationality through mechanistic natural sciences to modern technology. He also sees The Novices of Sais as an “initial central text of nature writing” in which Novalis develops an “integrative self-perception of mankind in nature” (see Vietta). On the one hand, Novalis’ text distances itself from a mere mechanistic concept, while on the other hand it describes the transition from a “wild” to a beautiful nature. At the same time, Novalis brings into view a poetic idea of nature in the interior fairy tale, an idea that in the hymnic conclusion celebrates the bodily-spiritual experience of nature and thereby counters the contemporary philosophy of reason.

5.2 Agentive Nature and Approaches of a Nonanthropocentric View

A comparable, if somewhat different, constellation is evident in Hölderlin’s critique of the philosophy of German idealism. In her contribution “Nature Writing in Transcendental Perspective: Friedrich Hölderlin and Henry David Thoreau,” Sieglinde Grimm examines the parallels between these authors’ critical engagement with the idealist subject philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and American Transcendentalism. She demonstrates how Hölderlin and Thoreau developed their concepts of nature writing from the critique of idealism. In so doing, it is only through this parallel approach that Hölderlin comes into view as a potential representative of a form of nature writing that includes nature poetry. Grimm analyzes Hölderlin’s Rhine-Hymn and Thoreau’s famous description of Walden Pond in order to crystallize a concept of an agentic, dynamic nature that resists subject-philosophical assumptions and strives for a valorization of nature over the ego. Nevertheless, both authors did not completely relinquish an idealistic conception of nature but looked for a “balance between transcendentalist cognition and material-geographical reality” (see the contribution by Grimm).

In his contribution “Water, Clouds, Rocks: Nonhuman Temporalities and Adalbert Stifter’s Poetics of Nature,” Oliver Völker examines Stifter’s work as a critical commentary on Thoreau and on contemporary nature writing as a “politically conservative escapist movement.” In contrast to previous interpretations of Stifter’s nature depictions as mere mimesis or as an “expression of a self-referential poetics,” Völker explores the question to what extent Stifter, interrogating his own categories and modes of representation, seeks to approach a nature that has lost its self-evidence (see contribution by Völker). Analyzing different texts such as The High Forest [Der Hochwald], Colored Stones [Bunte Steine], and Late Summer [Der Nachsommer], Völker demonstrates how the representation of meteorological, geological, and climatic processes express an agentive, dynamic, and frequently uncanny power of nature that allows for a nonanthropocentric view of natural phenomena. At the same time, he recognizes in the often non-linear, documentary and ‘unwieldly’ narrative forms of Stifter’s texts a poetic companion to the unpredictable forces of nature that contradict a teleological temporality.

In her contribution “Fluid ‘Heimat’: Water and Nature Writing in Theodor Fontane’s Ramblings through Mark Brandenburg,” Anke Kramer likewise examines the agentive power of nature, especially of water, by drawing a parallel with Thoreau’s nature essay Walden. Instead of a transcendental dimension, however, Fontane’s descriptions of the great diversity of water bodies, lakes, rivers, canals, and wetlands in the Mark Brandenburg focus on historical and cultural contexts. In her rereading of the Wanderungen Kramer relies on approaches of new materialism and material ecocriticism and focuses on the materiality of water. She shows “that nonhuman nature in Fontane’s texts is not a passive object of meaning attribution but unfolds a distinct productive potential” of its own (see the contribution by Kramer). In so doing, she addresses the close intertwining of natural and cultural history and of local topography and cultural construction, and she problematizes Fontane’s concept of “Heimat” as a matter of the past that is not so much reconstructed as brought forth in its wholeness by a poetic act. It becomes clear, that in Fontane’s descriptions of the different water bodies “Heimat” is fluid, fleeting, and changeable. Through Fontane’s “meditative immersion in the atmosphere of individual places,” an aesthetic-cultural value is attributed to the landscape over an economic one (see the contribution by Kramer).

The aforementioned contributions demonstrate how early nonanthropocentric conceptions of nature in German-language literary history may offer a literary-historical basis for contemporary approaches to nature as an agentive force in philosophy and cultural theory.

5.3 Natural History and Taxonomy vs. Holistic Nature Concept

If we are to believe the discussion of natural history in the widely received Norton Book of Nature Writing, many writers can be seen as “children” of Linnaeus’s taxonomy that the “father” of nature writing established in Systema Naturae (1735) and Species Plantarum (1753) for the naming and classification of the various species of animals and plants (Finch and Elder 1990, 21). Two contributions in this volume explicitly connect to these roots in natural history but draw different conclusions from them. In her article “On the Natural History of Nature Writing: Linnaeus’ Followers,” Tanja van Hoorn suggests that the tradition of the nature essay already begins with Linnaeus’ travelogue Iter Lapponicum of 1732 and sees in Linnaeus the forerunner of a long natural history tradition, which she reconstructs in Jean-Henri Fabre’s, Ernst Jünger’s, and Horst Stern’s observations of insects. Van Hoorn argues that there is not only a deep connection between natural history and nature writing but also a living tradition of nature scholars practicing nature writing in the sense of an “aesthetically shaped” personal nature essay. For instance, she attests to Horst Stern’s spider texts a “poetic power.” They show how a naturalist’s exact field observations can be framed in a reflective horizon and be “aesthetically shaped in such a way that natural history becomes nature writing” (see the contribution by van Hoorn).

In her contribution “Humboldtian Writing for the Anthropocene,” Caroline Schaumann also sees an important starting point in Linnaeus but demonstrates that Humboldt’s holistically oriented views of nature transcended the boundaries of Linnaeus’ strict classifications early on. While Andrea Wulf in her bestseller The Invention of Nature even sees Humboldt as the creator of the genre of nature writing,Footnote 7 Schaumann argues that to understand the development of Humboldt’s concept of nature, far more emphasis should be placed on his exchange with South and Central American naturalists. Also, Humboldt’s interdisciplinary, comparative, and ecological approach tends to point more toward a systematic thinking current in the Anthropocene. Since the Anglo-American tradition of nature writing ignores these perspectives, it fails to do justice to the methodological complexity of Humboldt’s travelogues and their broad contextualization in diverse scientific cultures and, thus, is ultimately beholden to a reductive Western perspective (see the contribution by Schaumann).

That Goethe’s understanding of the reciprocal links between the natural environment and human culture transcends the limits of a documentary travel diary and thus comes close to Humboldt’s Kosmos with a similar holistic conception of nature was shown by Katharina Kohm and Jonas Nesselhauf in the German original of this translated volume (2020). They relate the question of whether the category of nature writing can already be claimed for Goethe not to the Swiss Letters but to the later Italian Journey as one of the classical, canonized nonfiction texts of German literature par excellence. Following a discussion of Anglo-American nature writing, Kohm and Nesselhauf regard this category as only partially applicable to Goethe’s text, since nature and landscape, art and culture combine to form a special “Goethean gaze” along the model of the Urpflanze. The geographical, geological, and meteorological observations and the remarks on fauna and flora as well as on art, architecture, and music follow a general scheme of categorizing similarities and differences. At the same time, they recognize a shift in perspective in which the aesthetic categories serve to describe natural phenomena encountered during the journey.

Thus, even if we take the anchoring in natural history and references to Linnaeus’ taxonomy as a strong argument for assigning a nature essay to the category of nature writing, this cannot be viewed as a sufficient categorization. To put it differently, German-language texts about one’s own experience, explorations, and descriptions of nature certainly allow us to identify the same sources with Linnaeus as with the Anglo-American line of tradition. But such a linkage alone would not necessarily make an author a nature writer; additional specifying features are required. Furthermore, as the contribution about Goethe and Humboldt shows, it becomes all the more difficult to apply the category of nature writing if a text is based on a holistic concept of nature and the interdependencies between nature and culture are a constitutive element of the description of the world.

5.4 Natural History, Literature, and Popular Science

The consequence of the dissociation of science and poetry in the late nineteenth century and the growing significance of popular natural history books are the focus of two contributions in this volume. In her essay “From Brehms Tierleben to A Report to an Academy: Franz Kafka’s Animal Story Read as a Critical Commentary on Writing About Nature,” Marita Meyer adopts the paradigmatic turn that occurred within Kafka studies in the wake of Cultural Literary Animal Studies and that revealed Kafka’s references to biological, zoological, and evolutionary knowledge formations in his literary representations of animals. Meyer analyzes the nature book Brehm’s Animal Life [Brehms Tierleben]—popular at Kafka’s time—as a central source of his animal stories. In light of this innovative perspective grounded in the history of knowledge, Meyer wonders whether Kafka’s animal stories might also be subsumed under the label of nature writing. But, she concludes, while the stories themselves cannot be classified as such, they may be read as a critical commentary or even the deconstruction of this popular genre. Kafka not only parodies the scientific discourse on animals but also “deconstructs human hubris,” thereby exposing the violence undergirding the man-made dichotomy between humans and animals (see the article by Meyer).

In her contribution “German Nature Writing: Notes on the German Tradition of the Popular Nature Book and on the Phenomenon of ‘Peter Wohlleben’,” Susanne Scharnowski analyzes Wohlleben’s popular science bestseller The Secret Life of Trees [Das geheime Leben der Bäume] as a “phenomenon” in order to problematize its possible affinity to nature writing. She not only refers to the symbolically charged attachment to the forest, particularly among Germans, but also reconstructs the tradition of the popular nonfiction nature book, here especially the widespread dissemination around 1900 of the accessible prose of Wilhelm Bölsche’s and Raoul H. Francé’s nature books, which were widely available in workers’ libraries. This is not to say that beyond their popular-scientific nonfiction character these works were devoid of an aesthetic value of their own. In fact, Scharnowski regards them as attempts to overcome the growing gap between science and poetry, arguing for the inclusion of popular science books in the current analytical context of ecology and aesthetics. In her view, this context is still shaped by discursive hegemonies in the natural sciences as well as in the humanities and cultural studies, especially in Germanic studies, which still tend to distance themselves from popular literature. Through Scharnowski’s analysis, a “legitimacy” of the popular crystallizes here for the present as well, not least in view of the fast-disappearing basic knowledge of nature in tandem with a growing sense of longing for nature, here especially when viewed against the background of the fact that even texts like Wohlleben’s “forest literature” display an inherent “protest energy” in Fischer’s meaning (see the contribution by Scharnowski).

Natural history knowledge also features in Annette Bühler-Dietrich’s contribution “Roses, Figs, and Gardens in Gertrud Kolmar’s and Ilse Langner’s Writings.” Here, she deals with poetry or what Goldstein calls “the underestimated branch of nature writing” (Goldstein 2019, 211). Analyzing the aforementioned Ibiza garden notes of Ilse Langner and the rose poems of Gertrud Kolmar, and here in particular the cycle Book of the Rose. A Bed of Sonnets [Buch der Rose. Ein Beet Sonette], Bühler-Dietrich demonstrates how by referring to the precise titling of the species names and the often relatively recent breeding data of the plants, Kolmar grounds her various rose descriptions in natural history and that the writer must have started from an actual rose catalog of a company for cultivated roses verified by name. At the same time, the literary quality of these rose poems does not serve as “a criterion … to exclude them from analyzing them under the aspect of nature writing.” The rose sonnets cited by Bühler-Dietrich “all indicate a deeper knowledge of the respective rose species” that “goes beyond a catalog description and must be a result of the writer’s own observations.” At the same time, the Jewish author knew how to combine “plant observation” with “political criticism” of Nazi ideology, making her poems appear compatible with a gesture of social criticism occasionally attributed to nature writing (see the contribution by Bühler-Dietrich).

5.5 “Sense of Place,” but without “Heimat”

If American nature writing can be said to reflect the gradual loss of wilderness and untouched nature celebrated in some texts as national heritage and that have triggered an ongoing discussion of the genre’s heavy nationalist connotations, this is not quite true of German-language literature. The contributions about German-language texts in this volume may partly emphasize the importance of the local and a “sense of place” (Heise 2008), but they do so without necessarily associating this with conventional notions of “Heimat.” Even in Fontane, “Heimat” is only palpable as a construction of a past cultural identity. As an overview of the contributions shows, the aesthetically processed experiences of nature refer to some of the most divergent places in the world—from the Mark Brandenburg to Italy and Ibiza, from the German Rhine to Alaska, from the outskirts of London to South America. Thus, the hypothesis might be advanced that in German-language nature writing the attachment to local nature is not a decisive factor and that the category therefore resists an emphasis on national sentiments. At the same time, all authors stress a sensually, empirically observable world, be it as an expression of a divine order, an agentive, nonpredetermined entity, or as a nature shaped by cultural appropriation in which a formerly clear opposition between nature and culture is questioned. The contributions by Gerstenberger and Bühler-Dietrich in this volume make clear that the term “local nature” is connected to the respective self-chosen private center of life—quite independent of one’s nationality. Gerstenberger, in her contribution on “The Representation of Alaska in Peter Handke’s Slow Homecoming (1979) through the Lens of Nature Writing,” focuses on the first part of Handke’s text and analyzes its engagement, especially with the geological formations in Alaska created by the Yukon. With a German geologist as protagonist, Handke, who visited the country for an extended period of time before writing his novel, integrates scientific language and geological knowledge into his engagement of a particular landscape far removed from Germany. In Gerstenberger’s view, the depiction of the relationship between humans and nature anticipates the goals of new nature writing. While Handke in his autobiographically informed text deals with the small and ordinary in Alaska in a partly almost naturalistic, detailed manner (in “Stifter manner”), the author Ilse Langner, (re)discovered by Annette Bühler-Dietrich, meticulously reports in notes and diary entries what happened in her garden in Ibiza. As Bühler-Dietrich demonstrates, these notes formed the basis for Langner’s long-planned literary text.

5.6 Proliferating Ruderal Flora, or: Constructions of Modern Wilderness in Industrial Wastelands

As in the British new nature writing, constructions of new forms of wilderness in postindustrial wastelands are prominent in contemporary nature texts from Poschmann to Kinsky. Recurring images, for instance, are the new trails in proliferating wildness blazed by the “ruderal flora” (Reents 2020), as described in Poschmann’s 2008 Hundenovelle [Dog Novella]:

Urban wasteland, vague terrain. Non-place, where everything was possible anytime and nothing ever happened. Ruderal flora settled, rose in windy places, in open spaces, in transitional areas. Slowly, very slowly, plants writhed themselves out of the hardened ground, they grew like spirals, turned imperceptibly upwards, to the sides, filled space, opened up buds, leaves flap, scatter pollen, all that was not seen by anybody, too slowly, you did not see it with the naked eyes, maybe saw the result, a prolongation, a thickening.” (Poschmann 2008, 7–8)Footnote 8

This example already indicates that the proliferation of the “dark green,” which Heather Sullivan (2019, 152) introduced into ecocriticism as an image for the ominous human–plant relationship underpinning everything in the age of the Anthropocene, not only increasingly applies to the texts of contemporary German-language authors but also that the descriptions of modern forms of wilderness in the German-speaking world are obviously infused with a critical component. Here, these descriptions transcend not just the comparatively narrow set of characteristics of nature writing, but also that of the new nature writing. Rather, these texts gesture towards a new critical perspective shaped by the discourse of the Anthropocene. At the same time, they are characterized by a high degree of linguistic reflexivity. In his contribution to this volume, Simon Probst reads Esther Kinsky’s “terrain novel” [Geländeroman, 2018], both in light of Timothy Morton’s (2007, 47) “ambient poetics,” that is, as intermedial and as based on synesthetic impressions evoking a sense of the surrounding atmosphere, and Bruno Latour’s conception of a nonmodern modernity. Inspired by the notion of “disturbed lands” [gestörte Gelände] in British literature, he sees “disturbed terrains” as sites of negotiation of natures and cultures that point to processes of human overimprinting and nonhuman reappropriation in the Anthropocene (see the contribution by Probst).Footnote 9 As such, these characteristics, as demonstrated earlier, also apply to other present-day texts.

6 Conclusion and Outlook

In conclusion, it can be stated as a first result that the category of nature writing is quite productive not only for the German literary scene [Literaturbetrieb] but also for literary studies. New questions reveal transnational constellations in which varieties of nature writing in German literature already played a role in the early nineteenth century and can be placed in a dialogue with Thoreau’s foundational text, be it as a model (Goethe or Humboldt), as a parallel setting (Hölderlin or Fontane), or as response (Stifter or Lehmann). Further transnational lines of tradition reaching into the twentieth century might be drawn with respect to the roots of nature writing in natural history and nature study, not least to Linnaeus’ taxonomy. However, in doing this, we must bear in mind that the new focus that makes something hitherto concealed visible risks pushing other, equally relevant traditions into the background (e.g., Humboldt). In contrast to classical American nature writing and its reinforcement of a separation or even opposition of nature and cultureFootnote 10 such a separation is already questioned in German-language literature of the nineteenth century. This is demonstrated by the contributions on Hölderlin, Alexander von Humboldt, Stifter, and Fontane in this volume.

Another finding already mentioned previously is that the “sense of place” in German-language literature is not necessarily linked to a connection to native places and that, consequently, a national connotation of nature writing does not have a comparable standing as in the Anglo-American tradition. This can be noted as a specificity of German nature writing. However, numerous German nature authors, such as Klages or Jünger, did not shy away from aligning themselves in various ways and through different literary genres with Nazi blood-and-soil ideology. Of course, it would be necessary to determine more precisely in which way and for which literary genres this applies. A National Socialist contamination of nature studies and nature-describing literature might be an important reason for a lack of acceptance of this category in the German-speaking world after 1945 (see Heise; Malkmus). However, the hesitant acceptance of this category within German literary studies seems to have another strong reason in the longstanding lack of recognition of essayistic and (semi-)fictional genres, such as travel literature, autobiography, and memoirs, due to the prioritization of an autonomous-aesthetic concept of literature. Such genres have only been valued in the wake of an expanded concept of literature.

There is, then, it appears, a double precondition for German-language nature writing as a sui generis genre of writing, one that seems to be paradoxical: If there is such a tradition of German-language literature, it can only be acknowledged if nonfiction genres are also included. However, this tradition can only be recognized since nature writing has been conceived as a multigenre category that also includes fictional genres, especially nature poetry as a hitherto “neglected branch” (Goldstein 2019, 211). However, the latter definition does not also work in the reverse sense, since nature poetry can certainly not always be labeled as nature writing. Where to draw the boundaries and why the category of nature essay can only partly be subsumed under the category of nature writing will remain part of the debate about the new writing on nature. Whether the category of nature writing itself needs to be historicized, since it has changed significantly since Thoreau, whether a broader category like that of environmental literature [Umweltliteratur] would be useful for German-language literature as well, or whether perhaps it be would be better to speak of “Naturliteratur” (Goldstein 2019, 13), “Natur-Schreiben” (Draesner 2020, 342), or of “Kritisches Naturschreiben” (Kanz 2020, 58)—all this is part of the multitude of questions that still need to be addressed. Thus, the emerging discussion of genre opens up a vast field for exploration, and much remains to be done.