Wilhelm Lehmann: Nature Writing as a Behavioural Strategy

Abstract

This exploration of the German novelist and poet Wilhelm Lehmann (1882–1968) as a nature writer situates his seminal writings within the broader cultural context of the Weimar Republic. The guiding hypothesis is that Lehmann developed, in response to the experience of World War I, literary exercises that resonated with the natural world. His systematic privileging of perception aesthetics over production aesthetics problematizes modernist tenets of Neue Sachlichkeit and offers an alternative to the dominant cultural habitus of cool conduct. The essay reads Lehmann’s aesthetic program of converging the observational skills of a naturalist with a writing practice of humilitas as an ethics of gift. It concludes with an attempt to interpret the interconnectedness of specific features in Lehmann’s writing as representative of a specifically German-language vein of nature writing: a phenomenological writing practice that is modeled on empirical observation, a nonsubjectivist literary expressionism, a reflection on the uncontrollable biological conditions of human life.

This study was written during a research stay at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, made possible by a stipend from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Friedrich Nietzsche once remarked that in the modern age humans never appear to be well dressed because none of their social rolls are cut to fit them:

Moderation is foreign to us, let us admit this to ourselves; our thrill is precisely the thrill of the infinite, the unmeasured. Like the rider on a steed snorting to go further onward, we let the reins drop before the infinite, we modern men, we half-barbarians—and we feel supremely happy only when we are in the most—danger. (Nietzsche 2001, 115)

[Das Maß ist uns fremd, gestehn wir es uns; unser Kitzel ist gerade der Kitzel des Unendlichen, Ungemeßnen. Gleich dem Reiter auf vorwärtsschnaubendem Rosse lassen wir vor dem Unendlichen die Zügel fallen, wir modernen Menschen, wie Halbbarbaren—und sind erst dort in unsrer Seligkeit, wo wir auch am meisten—in Gefahr sind.] (Nietzsche 1968, 166)

According to the sociologist Marshall Berman, these immeasurable self-projections into the infinite and into a radical and open future are always grounded in the instinctive anxiety that they could one day actually become a reality in the here and now. He refers to Dostoevsky’s basement dweller in Notes from Underground, who hurls the following philippic against Homo faber for being modernity’s metaphysician of the will:

Is he [man] perhaps so fond of destruction and chaos … because he is instinctively afraid of achieving his aim and completing the building he is erecting? How do you know?—Maybe he only likes the building from a distance and not in the least from nearby; perhaps he only likes building it and not living in it, handing it over afterwards aux animaux domestiques, like ants, sheep and so on and so on. (Dostoevsky 2008, 33)

For Berman, it is Goethe’s version of the Faust myth that expresses this fundamental paradox. Humans, who only feel themselves to be humans while in a state of change, consequently harbor an urge to radically and permanently change the physical, social, and moral world around them. The core of this “tragedy of development” is to be found in the wager whose conditions Faust himself dictates:

The further his mind has expanded, the deeper his sensitivity has grown, the more he has isolated himself, and the more impoverished have become the relationships to life outside—to other people, to nature, even to his own needs and active powers. His culture has developed by detaching itself from the totality of life. (Berman 1988, 41)

The Earth Spirit laughs at Faust as an “Übermensch,” as a person who has lost the ability to be a human being. In this regard he allegorically connects the discrepancy between the longing to be at home in the world, which is often associated with childhood experiences (“and I am earth’s again!”) [“die Erde hat mich wieder”] (Goethe 2014, Faust I: line 784), with the accelerated transformation of human Lebensräume: “since all that gains existence is only fit to be destroyed” [“denn alles, was entsteht, ist wert, dass es zugrunde geht”] (Goethe 2014, Faust I: lines 1339–40). The paradox of the modern notion of the future is all-encompassing, according to Berman: “[Faust] won’t be able to create anything unless he’s prepared to let everything go, to accept the fact that all that has been created up to now … must be destroyed to pave the way for more creation” (Berman 1988, 48). Even Faust himself is not exempt from this forced transformation. His personality becomes absorbed into the fluidity of relationships, as dramatized in Part II, not least in the well-known scene that leads to the death of Philemon and Baucis (Goethe 2014, Faust II: 11239–52). Berman discusses this paradox in relation to the background context of the transformation of processes of production and the rise of the monetary economy in the nineteenth century.

For Günther Anders, this transformation is the foundation of the human being-in-the-world as “titans” who can transform everything but themselves back into human beings (1987, 240). Consequently, the infinitely enthusiastic longing of Faust is no longer possible: “As we have the power to bring an end to each other, we are the masters of the apocalypse. We are the infinite” [“Da wir die Macht besitzen, einander das Ende zu bereiten, sind wir die Herren der Apokalypse. Das Unendliche sind wir”] (Anders 1987, 239).¹ To take Anders’ thought further, we live in a world in which we no longer have the freedom of Dostoevsky’s basement dweller not to have to live in the buildings that we construct. Rather, we have covered our home planet with a technosphere within which we must live and within which we become “animaux domestiques.”

The self-destructive force of this cultural and economic logic of permanent intensification and expansion into the future, which in Anders’ simultaneity of technological potency and psychological impotence culminates in the atomic age, is already anticipated as a historical experience in the war of attrition during the First World War. There, a compulsion to produce and a metaphysics of the will—a combination that deeply influenced the bourgeois culture of the long nineteenth century—leads to an absurd spectacle of unrestricted productive forces and transformative energies. The war of attrition was a war in which scientific rationality, military calculation, and the human workforce led to a greater organizing capability with respect to the self-regulation of industrial productivity. At the same time, it was celebrated as an aesthetic experience connected to the vitalist spirit of the times. As such, it can be regarded as one of the central cultural paradoxes of Weimar Germany (Bohrer 1978).

1 Self-Distancing as Self-Certainty

In Verhaltenslehren der Kälte (1994), translated as Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany (2002), Helmut Lethen demonstrates how the self-positioning of intellectuals in the Weimar Republic was deeply rooted in the forcefield between technocratic control mania and the vitalist loss of control. To release themselves from trauma and self-responsibility, and to make the uninhibited industrial productivity that led to self-destruction in the First World War manageable, many undertook what Lethen calls the “training of a functional ego” (2002, 18). The escalation of World War I did not lead to introspection or a new culture of guilt, but rather to a strengthened focus upon making a consistently formed self-appearance and an orientation toward a behavioral strategy of distance.

This aesthetic of self-management had as its goal “freeing people of the anxieties induced by the process of modernization, to open up for them areas of free movement” (Lethen 2002, 25). A specific and directly resulting habitus from this was new objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), which oriented itself toward a “behavioral strategy of coldness” and was rooted in a double dampening: It coquettishly displayed the wounds and scars of the war, but it also marked these as conquered and in principle conquerable as long as one practiced the appropriate techniques of self-distance. This habitus also represented an attempt at total self-mediation, and it increased therewith the kind of decoupling of the metaphysics of the will from human corporeality that had already, according to Berman, fundamentally influenced the culture of the nineteenth century and its crisis in The First World War. In this way, the behavioral strategy of coldness remained doubly coded and contradictory: It offered itself as a tried and tested strategy for putting distance between oneself and the excessive demands of the historical situation, but at the same time it deepened the split in humans between their rationality and their creatureliness and between a distanced mind and an affected body. As a result of this, the creaturely became increasingly disassociated through extreme forms of self-control. The idea of the “creature” haunted the Weimar period in the form of varying cultural/aesthetic phantasms: “The sense of security contained in the concept of the persona disintegrates in the image of the creature. In the persona there remains an ego made autonomous by consciousness of what (through the mask) appears from the outside, while the creature makes its appearance only once the artificial devices of the persona crumble into pieces” (Lethen 2002, 206).

The art of living according to alienation that was enforced by a behavioral strategy of coldness also included new horizons of possibility for human existence under precarious conditions. This also strengthened and confirmed exhaustion as a mode of existence in a constant state of alarm and “absolute alertness” (2002, 18). This frenzy of expression and staging also affected the resistance of the corporeal and was confronted with its creaturely limitations. The return to the courtly art of diplomatic calculation, its self-fashioning and that which Arthur Schopenhauer described as its “worldly sophistication” (“Weltklugheit”) in his translation of Baltasar Gracián’s influential Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia [The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence] from 1647 was so attractive in the interwar years because it allowed for an apparently rational model for the self that had the following advantage: “not only was [it] not entangled in the paralyzing ambivalence of a psychologizing anthropology, but also did not indulge in a Nietzschean ‘heroic amoralism’” (Lethen 2002, 60–61).² The fact that the courtly habitus was held in such high esteem again was rooted in the conviction that the competitive and combative dimension that we allegedly share with other creatures also directly connects us to the laws underlying life in general. Lethen then interprets various literary personages of the period against the background of such a universal concept of life as competition, such as Bertolt Brecht’s city dweller, Walter Serner’s confidence trickster, and Ernst Jünger’s soldier and worker. “Nothing can better demonstrate the freedom of man than his distance to himself” (2002, 94), writes Helmuth Plessner in his 1924 Die Grenzen der Gemeinschaft [The Limits of Community], which Lethen describes as playing an important role in defining the habitus of self-distancing and the coldness of Neue Sachlichkeit.³

Wilhelm Lehman, who himself took part in the First World War, deserted twice, and eventually ended up in a British prisoner-of-war camp, stands in an ambivalent relationship to this assessment through his development of a narrative persona in the interwar years. On the one hand, he develops, in the wake of Neue Sachlichkeit, clear traits of a new emphasis on description in his prose, which operates a form of self-distance through its narrative roleplaying and choreographs narrative positions as vectors and force fields outside of the subject. On the other hand, paradoxically, the aim of this self-distance is not distance, but rather intimacy, not coldness, but rather resonance with the world, not the experience of competition and death, but rather the experience of the organic creatureliness of one’s own body and of the “more than human world.”⁴ Without abandoning the essential elements of the aesthetics of Neue Sachlichkeit, Lehmann brought this to expression in texts such as his novel Der Überlaufer [The Deserter] (1925–1927, first published in 1962) and most prominently in his Bukolisches Tagebuch [Bucolic Diary] (1927–1932, first published in 1948) in the service of quite different aims. While the simultaneously anachronic-courtly and contemporary-picaresque behavioral strategy of coldness enforced a form of what Erving Goffman would refer to as impression management, Lehmann instead created an experimental literary form in order to test the conditions for the human ability to resonate with the nonhuman world. Part of this alternative plan is the attempt to subvert, through the praxis of writing, the metaphysics of will and deeds that Goethe and Dostoevsky described as the signature of modernity and that Plessner anthropologized and universalized in a problematic manner.⁵

Lethen explains how deeply the aesthetics of Neue Sachlichkeit is influenced by a need to simplify the hypercomplexity of reality by making habitual certain modes of navigating it and, thus, regain the ability to make decisions. To do so, a focus on psychological structural depth must be abandoned. Lehmann—equally emphasizing objective observation and linguistic sobriety—sets in motion a diametrically opposed process of consciousness: the insight that we are embedded in both psychosocial and ecological networks of living conditions. The human ability to experience resonance with nonhuman life processes opens—precisely through the related experience of a complexity that exceeds human cognition—possibilities to secure one’s own sense of being alive. This is achieved in Lehmann’s text through two cultural praxes that are presented as being congenial: observing nature in the tradition of natural history and engaging with the world through writing. Both are joined to morphology through their phenomenological praxis of perception: The human capability to recognize and mold forms is, as with Goethe, evidence of our ability to resonate with nature: “Something like the sun the eye must be, Else it no glint of sun could ever see” [“Wär nicht das Auge sonnenhaft, / Die Sonne könnt es nie erblicken.”] (Goethe 1983, 179).⁶

Being without essential qualities, which the behavioral strategy of coldness had as its aim, was rejected by Lehmann as a form of psychomotricity and as a total mobilization of the subject. For Lehmann, subjectivity is not, as the functionalist ideal of lacking qualities might suggest, something that we have complete control over. Later generations of phenomenologists have worked out with increasing precision that the “I” does not have fully autonomous control over its perceptions through the power of will alone, but rather is itself created essentially through its perceptions in the function of a subject.⁷ In relationship to an “I” created through perceptions, Lehmann experiments with narrators who transpose the habitus of self-distance into a play with self-emptying and self-mediation.⁸ It is here that one can see his affinity with the poetic self-reflection of Romanticism, particularly in the way it expresses itself in P. B. Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” The goal of this self-emptying is by no means a strategic attempt to gain greater control over oneself, as it is in the behavioral strategy of coldness; rather, it attempts to achieve an opening of the self toward contexts of life obscured through the one-sided perception of the self as an exclusively productive and active one.

It is possible for Lehmann’s narrative figures to become sensitive to resonances with living contexts outside of modern subjectivity only through the staging of a loss of control. In this self-mediation, the narrators stage themselves as lacking a language in order to gain a new and different one from an experience of nature. This aesthetics of perception formulates a radical critique of the production aesthetic of modernity without breaking with its procedural method. Indirectly it also forms a poetics that we would today refer to as nature writing, defined by the following features: (1) a critique of the modern author concept dominated by production aesthetics, (2) a belief in the human capability to resonate with a more-than-human world, and (3) an affirmation of literary language as a specialized medium for the enablement and deepening of the ability to sense and create resonances.

2 Lessons in Resonance as Self-Certainty

One can already observe an instinctive immunity against the pathos of war in Lehmann’s novel Der Überlaufer, which was written between 1925 and 1927 and in which he works through his experiences as a deserter in the First World War. It is a pathos that he recognizes as coming from the behavioral strategy of self-distancing and self-theorizing and one that he senses and rejects without compromise. The narrator Hermann Kreishöfer refutes such an ideology in those people who, “without having noticed the damage to their own bodies, justify war as being part of the natural way of the world. He hated all the youths who fell victim to such thinking when they paper over their poverty with the belief that one must be ready for war” [“ohne den Schaden am eigenen Leib gespürt zu haben, den Krieg in den natürlichen Zustand der Welt hineinbegründeten, und er verachtete die ganz Jungen, wenn sie denen zur Beute fielen, die ihre Ärmlichkeit mit dem Glauben auffütterten, man müsse zum Krieg bereit sein”] (Lehmann 1989, 10).

Uwe Pörksen has demonstrated how subtly Der Überlaufer dismisses the hybridity of natural and human efficiency in the central metaphor of the “storm of steel” (2015, 6–10). Hermann, who compiles the life story of Hanswilli Nuch, is fascinated by his ability to continue to express the world in language after the catastrophe of civilization that was the First World War. Nuch acquires this ability, according to Hermann, by his empathy with the creature and the creaturely. This is expressed in a manner that contrasts itself to Ernst Jünger’s “Diary of a Storm Troop Leader,” Storm of Steel: “After the storm the bird dares to sing once more” [“Nach dem Gewitter wagt der Vogel seine Stimme wieder”] (Lehmann 1989, 47). The experience of the frontlines that covertly influenced the behavioral strategy of coldness is made radically unheroic by Lehmann and is presented as a loss of resonance with the world.

In this way he [Hanswilli Nuch] would miss that which he had been seeking since his childhood. A most terrifying force had struck the world, and was prepared to angrily assault it. The wind that pollinated the corn had its breath cut off, each being was denied its own death. He walked the lengths of the Earth. Rage gripped him when he stood still. The birds died. No, they still sang.

[So sollte [Hanswilli Nuch] also entgehen, was er seit seiner Kindheit gesucht hatte. So hatte also der schrecklichste Zwang die Welt gepackt, wütend bereit, sie zu vergewaltigen. Dem Winde, der das Korn befruchtet, wurde der Atem abgeschnitten, jedem Wesen der eigene Tod selbst verwehrt. Er lief den Weg entlang. Zorn erfasste ihn, wenn er still stand. Die Vögel starben schon. Nein, sie sangen noch.] (Lehmann 1989, 119)

Lehmann’s novel is a counterproject to the dialectic of material sobriety and the cult of experience that Jünger himself helped shape and whose continuation in the Weimar period he promoted: “Aufgewachsen im Geist einer materialistischen Zeit, wob in uns allen die Sehnsucht nach dem Ungewöhnlichen, nach dem großen Erleben” [“brought up in the spirit of a materialistic time, it wove into us a desire for the unusual, for great experiences”] (Jünger 2013, 26). Pörksen surmises that part of this counterproject was also the ways and means by which Lehmann wove characteristics of the “Luftmenschen” into the character of Hanswilli Nuch (2015, 20). His literary refusal of the brotherhood with an inhuman humanity was also communicated through subtle references to the topos of the “Luftmensch.” During the First World War this figure became a term for people who, due to their origins, social position, or religious habitus, found themselves in outsider positions; these were people who could not, or would not, find sustenance in the dominant culture of the time and had to find their nourishment, as it were, out of thin air. They were a part of the Jewish self-reflexive culture of this period, in particular, among the Yiddish-speaking Ostjuden (Eastern European Jews).⁹ For Lehman, an engagement with Salomo Friedländer’s 1918 book Die schöpferische Indifferenz [The Creative Indifference], where the “Luftmenschen” were philosophically ennobled by their assumed ability to empty themselves and keep themselves open and receptive, must have been important. Lehmann read this work during the period in which he began to write Der Überläufer. In dialogue with Gestalt psychology, Friedländer here developed a theory of spiritual openness typified by its disinterested and form-giving perceptiveness. He recognized such openness as being the essential creative faculty of man and one that was opposed to the dominant modernist aesthetics of production. Although the term “indifference” suggests a proximity to the behavioral strategy of coldness, it in fact implies a form of spiritual comportment that is directly opposed to coldness. This is a comportment that expresses itself not through an active manipulation of its own outward appearance but rather through the ability to be spiritually absent and, through this absence, to uphold an attitude of attentiveness. Pörksen notes: “Friedländer’s creative indifference corresponds literally with the condition of spiritual absence, one into which Nuch persistently falls. This is an inward and empty openness towards nature which means a pause for breath” (2015, 20). Many of the most impressive descriptions of nature in Der Überläufer can be seen to contain the following double gesture: a resistance against the belief that a “human spirit,” as formulated by Jünger, could triumph over “the violent expressions of materiality” (2013, 222), through an attitude of spiritual absence on the one hand and, on the other hand, an orientation toward the more-than-human world as a literary and perceptive praxis that today we would associate with the term “nature writing.” The narrator practices “creative indifference” when he describes military exercises:

The recruits jumped with clasped knees, bent their upper bodies back and turned. At times they also took part in the company instructions: How to conduct oneself in accordance with rank and uniform, how to carry out a watch and stay at your post, how to fight with gas and hand grenades.

[Die Rekruten hüpften mit umfassten Knien, bogen den Oberleib zurück, machten Wendungen. Zuweilen nahmen sie auch schon teil am Kompanieunterricht: Benehmen gegen Vorgesetzte und Uniformen, Wache- und Postenstehen, Gaskampf, Handgranaten.] (Lehmann 1989, 126)

This indifference facilitates a resilient openness to the creaturely nature of life: “In the early morning, Eckhart’s meadow was thickly hung with gray spider webs, the red silk brambles bloomed, the poppies still flamed and the spiders crawled” [“Der Eckartsanger war in der Frühe dick mit grauen Spinnweben behangen, die roten Seidenbrombeeren blühten, Mohn flammte noch, Spinnen krochen”] (ibid.). In contrast to these thick webs of life, the military training appears to be a distraction or an alienating force (Pörksen 2015, 14).

In a central passage from the depictions of war, this openness toward the creaturely is transposed into a shattering experience of resonance. The war of attrition is raging around Nuch:

The grenades encircled the space in which he sat. He sat in deep loneliness. The world shattered into several pieces. On one of these pieces, between the edges of wound, dwelled Nuch. Out of the graying abyss around him protruded the head of the dead horse, its eyes glazed over, flies crept out of its nostrils and over the bloated muzzle.

[Die Granaten kreisten den Raum ein, in dem er saß. Er saß in tiefer Einsamkeit. Die Welt zerbarst in viele Teile, auf einem dieser Teile, zwischen dessen Wundrändern, hauste Nuch. Aus dem ergrauenden Abgrunde ringsum ragte der Kopf des toten Pferdes, seine Augen glasten, aus seinen Nüstern krochen Fliegen über den gedunsenen Bug.] (Lehmann 1989, 151)

Despite the insistence of his comrades that he should avoid its stench, Nuch stays with the dead horse. In this bond he finds his own creatureliness and with that his aliveness, until the events of battle force him “to stumble out of his friendship with the horse corpse” [“aus seiner Freundschaft mit dem Pferdeleichnam” zu “stolper[n]”] (ibid.). Nuch’s survival strategy consists in affirming his own ability to resonate with life, in this instance through his empathetic reaction to a dead horse. This ability, in the middle of the trenches, to practice a behavioral strategy of affection is a prerequisite for his understanding of his desertion as a form of emancipation. He composes it in the form of resonant images—“the drumskin of the cicada” [“Trommelhaut der Zikade”] and reciprocity: “Joyfully reverent his hand answered the stroke of the willow leaves” [“Glücklich verehrend beantwortete seine Hand das Anstreifen der Weideblätter”] (Lehmann 1989, 171).

A distillation of this ability to resonate, which marks out the force field of Lehmann’s nature writing, is the poem “An meinen Sohn” [“To My Son”]. It not only plays a central narrative role at the start of the novel as a force that triggers the narrator Hermann’s curiosity about exploring the life story of Nuch, it also codifies the behavioral strategy during the war and the writing praxis after the war that influence Nuch: an aesthetic of perception that turns toward natural phenomena and reciprocal processes, a Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) of human resonance that is shared with the natural world and that Nuch passes on to his own son. In the last verse of the poem, he encourages his son to complete the mating call of the male yellowhammer, the last syllable of which occasionally goes astray—a complex image for Lehmann’s natural science–led aesthetic and its ecological concept of tradition:

Verse

Verse A rain flecked the gray stone The last tone Was absent from the male yellowhammer’s song You sing it, son. [Ein Regen fleckt die grauen Steine – Der Letzte Ton Fehlt dem Goldammermännchen zum Liede: Sing du ihn, Sohn.] (Lehmann 1989, 44)Footnote

Lehmann regards this as his first successful poem. “To My Son” can be read as a direct counter position to the behavioral strategy of coldness. It poses an alternative to the central aspect of the cold persona: resonance (between generations and with nature) vs. individualism, expressive and eclectic actors vs. impression management, reciprocity between perceiver and perceived vs. mastery of the objective gaze.

3 Bucolic Diary

Lehmann’s nature writing is an existential form of writing that is deeply rooted in the experiences of the First World War. At the start of the war, his diaries contain numerous entries on the natural sciences. In Der Überläufer, the passages that relate to the natural sciences have a central narrative and philosophical importance. In the Bukolisches Tagebuch, which was written between October 1927 and October 1932 and published as a comprehensive collection in 1948, they are transformed into an aesthetic principle.

Few texts in modern German literature are as perceptive to their natural surroundings as Lehmann’s depictions of the Baltic coast in this diary.¹¹ His perceptions are concerned with “the imageless, thing-sized world” [“die bilderlose, dingegroße Welt”], as Oskar Loerke once defined his own poetry (1955, 156). For his readers today, many of the diary entries may even come across as pain-inducing by virtue of their perceptiveness. In reading Lehmann, they may experience themselves as posthumous to a culture that did not automatically equate the empirical with instrumental knowledge but rather a way of setting free a magic force requiring literary form. They may also find reading Lehmann painful because they can read from his observational richness and linguistic versatility how our contemporary culture has failed to keep hold of natural historical practices and their expressivity. The zeitgeist of our times might be more sensitive to ecological issues, but its understanding of nature is steadily diminishing. Bukolisches Tagebuch demonstrates to modern readers how little we see in nature because we no longer know anything about it. In his diaries, Lehmann has placed the entire expressive potency of literary modernism in the force field of natural agencies:

But in the middle of the month the northwest winds began. With its primordial gesture it frightened the trees. In black drops the pear leaves fall, the ashes fade, the alders thin out, and like a surprised young lady, overspilling with blood, a wild snowball stands suddenly in the bare brightness.

[Doch um die Mitte des Monats setzte der Nordweststurm ein. Mit uranfänglicher Gebärde schreckte er die Bäume. In schwarzen Tropfen fallen die Blätter der Birne, die Esche erbleicht, die Erlen lichten sich, und wie ein überraschtes Mädchen, blutübergossen, steht plötzlich in der nackten Helle der wilde Schneeball.] (Lehmann 1999a, 178)

Everything that Lehmann describes bears witness to a constant metamorphosis: during the night “the furry, delicate yellow flowers of the bur-reed … have transformed into hard zinc maces” [“die gelbflaumigen, [haben sich die] zarten Blüten des Igelkolbens zu hartzinkigen Morgensternen gewandelt”] (Lehmann 1999a, 177). Everything seems to express infinite variations on similar themes, “just as the russet daughter of the wryneck appears through its thin veil, the sun shines around half nine through the white-gray December mist” [“So wie der rotgelbe Dotter des Wendehalses durch seine dünne Schale scheint, so leuchtet um halb neun die Sonne durch den weißgrauen Dezemberdunst”] (Lehmann 1999a, 229). In this manner, Lehmann equips the observed animals and plants with a potency by which they demonstrate themselves to be active cocreators in the web of life. Lehmann sets his constant metamorphoses in opposition to the vulgarized Darwinian notion of life as constant competition: “Every animal that dies, every form of life that passes away, dilutes the vocabulary of the world, brings us further away from the reality which only comes from the harmony of all beings” [“Jedes Tier, das vergeht, jede Art Lebewesen, das ausstirbt, verdünnt das Weltvokabular, bringt uns weiter zurück von der Wahrheit, die nur aus dem Zusammenklang aller Wesen sich heraufarbeitet”] (Lehmann 1999a, 226).

At the start of the diary, the entries come at regular intervals, every two or three weeks, and follow a calendrical rhythm.¹² In the third year, readers become aware of their own seasonal unconscious through the pull of the increasing compression of time and seasons. In this respect, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden has undeniably influenced Lehmann. Toward the end the entries become increasingly impacted by moments of intense sensory and spiritual presence. This culminates in the wonderful final image of the slanted wild apple trees, which scatter their yellow fruits in dark water. Here we find a web of life, out of which and into which the tree presences itself:

In the middle of the sprawling stubble field, between two trees, the ground hollows and collects the water in a small ditch. Around it were sycamores, hornbeams, and briars. The ploughman turns the stones in their ground, which in the summer the high barley hides away. The autumn emptiness allows me near. A blackbird screeches hysterically, a great tit plays its violin. In the dark water wild apple trees are scattering their small, yellow, vigorous fruits. They are withdrawn from the greed of mankind.

[Inmitten des ausgedehnten Stoppelfeldes, zwischen zwei Gehölzen, höhlt sich der Boden und sammelte das Wasser zu kleinem Teich. Ihn umranden Ahorn, Weißbuche, Brombeere. Der Pflüger kehrt Steine in seinen Grund, im Sommer versteckt ihn das hohe Korn. Die herbstliche Leere lässt mich zu ihm. Eine Schwarzdrossel schreit hysterisch auf, eine Kohlmeise geigt. Ins dunkle Wasser streut ein schrägstehender wilder Apfelbaum seine kleinen, gelben, energischen Früchte. Sie sind der Gier des Menschen entzogen.] (Lehmann 1999a, 309)

Only in this space of inappropriability can life become what it is—physis in the sense of Greek philosophy, a force that births forth out of itself: “The small wild apples … are falling into the mud gave themselves back to the stillness, which swells from the dull clang. Growth dissipated into scent. The sacrifice is being accepted” [“Die kleinen, wilden Äpfel … fallen in den Schlamm, sie geben sich zurück der Stille, die nach dem dumpfen Klang anschwillt. Wachstum löst sich in Duft auf. Das Opfer wird angenommen”] (ibid.). The wild apple tree becomes a counterimage to the totalitarianism of instrumental reason and the madness of human self-optimizing at the expense of the biological conditions of their existence. It embodies an ethics of the gift, which Lehmann sees at work in nature. In a memorable sentence from his late essay “Walking,” Thoreau writes “in Wildness lies the preservation of the world.” In such a wildness undoubtedly lies Lehmann’s “preservation of the world” that this final passage brings into view (Thoreau 2004, 260–287).¹³

Lehmann seeks “refuge … in finitude” [“Herberge … in der Endlichkeit”] in the Baltic Sea Bay of Eckernförder (1999a, 181). He understands this finitude as a gift, since it is only through finitude that life can continue. His ability to dedicate himself to exact observations and to find a moment of stasis in the processes of dying and becoming, and his language, through which he finds a suitable attitude of thankfulness for the gifts of nature, fuse together in an ethics of letting-be and recognition, which is also an aesthetic of humility. As an answer to the ethical imperatives of the Weimar period, this aesthetic poses a question that differs essentially from the habitus of distance: How do we preserve, under the psychological pressures with which we are faced, the ability to be astonished? And how to we foster a language that can remain open to this ability?

For Lehmann, during the rise of National Socialism, these are existential questions. In June 1933, in the poem “Sonnenwende” [“Solstice”], he writes “Protected by nothing but the poem / On all of my paths” [“Von nichts als vom Gedicht beschützt / Auf allen meinen Wegen”] (Lehmann 1982, 45). The poem here stands for the intertwining of the metamorphoses of nature and the work of the poet upon language. Bukolische Tagebuch is a workshop in which Lehmann tests the elasticity and resilience of his language through prose experiments in order to produce such poems. It is in these experiments that moments of accomplished prose emerge that contain the seeds of poems. An impulse toward epic prose is gradually delivered over to lyrical presence:

December did not allow the sadness of its darkness to slip out of its hands, but when the midday sun for a moment recalls the crystal clearness of July, then the sky remains bright until late afternoon out of astonishment. The moon rises brass yellow, surrounded by skirtings of blonde down, an arm’s length away the Hesperus twitches. The small stream has overflowed its banks and the ice coats it like the colorless flesh of a candied pear.

[Der Dezember läßt sich die Trauer seiner Dunkelheit nicht aus den Händen winden, aber wenn des Mittags eine Weile die Sonne an die Glasklarheit des Heumonats erinnert, dann bleibt der Himmel vor Erstaunen bis in den Spätnachmittag hell. Der Mond geht auf, messinggelb, von blondem Flaum umhuscht, eine Armlänge entfernt zuckt der Hesperus. Der kleine Bach ist über die Ufer getreten, und die Vereisung umhüllt ihn wie das farblose Fleisch einer kandierten Birne.] (Lehmann 1999a, 183)

Rarely in German literature have radical subjectivity and radical objectivity been so forcefully and clearly interwoven with one other. Rarely has the ability to be astonished been so unshakably inserted into the inaccessible space between subject and object.

This relation is also mirrored in the narrative perspective of the diary, which switches between first and third person, the third being referred to as the “cantor.” The author tends to refer to himself as “I” when he wanders through the landscape and glides into the role of the cantor when he appears as a teacher, father, or citizen. These roles are consciously diffuse in the diary and constitute a fascinating experiment with self-distancing. The self-characterization as the cantor is ironic, as the tiresome everyday routine of a teacher (about which he himself complains frequently) has little in common with the ordered activities of a cantor. Nonetheless, this role has something affirmative about it: the “I” of Lehmann’s diary becomes one of the many birdsongs that he himself conjures up; he becomes the St. Francis who speaks with birds or the creator who summons the creatures to a life in language. He becomes Master Bertram’s creator figure, which Lehmann knew from the Grabow altar. For Lehmann it is a matter of orientating oneself toward things and beings in language and of freeing them from the corset of conventional concepts in order that they can once again become experienced through the senses. In this respect he is equally influenced by contemporaneous linguistics as by the linguistic mysticism of Jacob Böhme.¹⁴ For Lehmann, language is not just a combinatory system but also something that becomes understandable through sensorial and sensual embodiment.

With a certain obsessive tenacity, Lehmann pursues the “shock-like experience of the etymologist” [“schockartige Erlebnis des Etymologen”] in his writing praxis, which according to Pörksen is expressed in the way that “he suddenly finds the original meaning of a cognate and the etymon appears as a revelation of the essence of the thing” [“er plötzlich den ursprünglichen Sinn einer Wortgleichung findet und ihm das Etymon als Offenbarung des Wesens der Sache erscheint”] (Pörksen 1979, 382). He relies then upon that which the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure had shortly before banished from the theory of signs: historicity and iconicity. In terms of the philosophy of language, Lehmann was influenced by Jan von Rozwadowski, who in turn was influenced by the language philosophy of Wilhelm Wundt.¹⁵ According to Rozwadowski, every act of naming misses its object in two ways: First, it emphasizes one particular aspect of the thing and neglects others, which implies that names are always metonymic in nature. Second, it refers to something else (as other objects also possess this emphasized aspect) and has therefore metaphorical agency. According to Rozwadowski, every act of naming becomes a form of the self-reflection of human consciousness that is experienced through its sensory limitations (apperception) and through being oriented toward structural units (Schäfer 1969, 386–388). By virtue of individual sensory experiences, individuals consequently have experiences of the whole that exceed their own experiences. From the background of this theory of signs, Lehmann’s objective writing practice of phenomenological unification of subject and object gains a depth of focus: It is a process of consciousness, a transcendental operation of knowing:

A thing is as part of its essence important for the one that receives it, it stimulates: we react to it with a gestural sound, out of the multiplicity of impressions we rescue ourselves through the naming of a particularity. From the gestural sound, which we retain, we can then find the stimulation that gave it life.

[Das Ding ist an irgend einem Teil seines Wesens für den Empfangenden wichtig, ein Reiz: wir reagieren auf ihn mit einer Lautgebärde, aus der Vielheit der Eindrücke retten wir uns durch Benennung einer Einzelheit. Aus der Lautgebärde, die uns erhalten bleibt, können wir dann rückwärts den Reiz herauslesen, der ihr das Leben gab.] (Lehmann 1999b, 395)

The cantor, who—partly ironically—completes such processes of consciousness and thereby disappears as a narrative instance, allows for the ambivalent appearance of the bucolic element of the title. Admittedly, a positive pastoral figure does wander the pages of the book with the elderly Adamsdotter, yet significantly he is not a pastor but an estate manager. For the narrator he is a congenial companion, perhaps also a mystagogue, but certainly an accomplice in the bringing to language of things: “He spoke to me of the will of things, and as in the autumn a wandering swarm of starlings would suddenly speak with a great oak tree, he spoke of much which, without him, old Adamsdotter, would have remained forever silent” [“Er erzählt mir vom Eigensinn der Dinge, und wie im Herbst ein wandernder Starenschwarm plötzlich den schweren Eichbaum spricht, spricht er manches aus, was ohne ihn, den alten Adamsdotter, immer stumm geblieben wäre”] (Lehmann 1999a, 257). Lehmann uses the word bucolic as a scintillating and contradictory term. Through his concentration upon the borders of the agrarian landscape and upon the wilderness between land and sea, he turns away from the classical topos of the bucolic and circumvents its affinity to idylls. Its cyclical dramaturgy of time is also far removed from the chiliasm of the most influential of pastoral poems, Virgil’s “Fourth Eclogue.” There, a divine child, who is later interpreted as a precursor of the Messiah, speaks of a golden age where people will no longer have to endure the hardships of agricultural life.

Just as the bucolic seeks the tension between heroic verse and prosaic scenes, Lehmann’s diary strikes sparks with its heightened tone, a tone that is totally devoted to things in their finitude: “Below, the sea sprayed salt upon the earth. Of all the scents in the world: that of bread; of all the tastes in the world: that of salt. In this place, existence [Dasein] ceases. Thus, it begins in this place” [“Unten spritzt das Meer Salz auf die Erde. Von allem Geruch der Welt: der des Brotes; von allem Geschmack der Welt: der des Salzes. An dieser Stelle hört das Dasein auf. So beginnt es an dieser Stelle”] (Lehmann 1999a, 196). Like many of the intellectuals of the Weimar period who were trying to work their way out of the shadows of the First World War, Lehmann sought self-certainty in a situation that was psychologically, socially, and politically uncertain. Many brilliant minds fashioned themselves after an ideal of a “cold persona”—after a self-styling as sovereign, shock resistant, and pitiless. This was an ideal that could secure their own relevance in precarious and unstable external conditions through their ability to adapt themselves to it. Against this, Lehmann set his poetics of nature writing, a poetics of disillusionment: The attempt to interpret a deepened perception of nature as an allegory for human life led to a dead end; only through an ability to empty oneself as a subject and as a result to free oneself from preconceived ideas and conventional linguistic forms can nature writing become a medium for the plurality of forms of self-expression in the more-than-human world.

Lehmann has obviously borrowed his play with the poet-persona as a pure medium from Romanticism as another dialectical attempt at self-protection through self-distance, and his natural scientific precision certainly also betrays a proximity to the cold gaze of Neue Sachlichkeit. But nowhere does he practice the behavioral strategy of coldness with which many of his generation sought to fortify themselves against the phantoms of their lost futures. Lehmann’s alternative poetics of humility and astonishment and the self-emptying of the narrative perspective has as its goal to give a face to the self-formative force of the more-than-human world and, in this manner, also to human life. In this respect, his art of perception becomes an art of living. Out of the other temporality of nature and his work upon language he forges a persona of empathy who cares for life. Against the polarization by the courtly cold persona he sets the civic ideal of finely tuned scaling, moderate virtues, and mixed temperatures. If a stiff breeze and an icy wind did not blow through the pages of his texts, one might suggest Lehmann’s diary was a “Verhaltenslehre der Wärme” or “behavioral strategy of warmth.” Certainly, his prose pieces constitute exercises in an orientation toward Dasein that differs from the dominant aesthetics of his time—an orientation that is not fenced in by a subjective experience but instead constantly exhibits experiences of alterity in nature.

As unique as Bukolische Tagebuch might appear to today’s readers, as H.D. Schäfer has shown, it can still be situated in the intellectual and literary attempts of the late 1930s as a work that paved the way for a landscape-oriented Neue Sachlichkeit.¹⁶ The first issue of the short-lived literary journal Die Kolonne (1929–1932), published by Wolfgang Jeß, gives evidence of this: “as ever, we live from fields and seas, and the skies stretch also over the city” [“noch immer leben wir von Acker und Meer, und die Himmel reichen auch über die Stadt”].¹⁷ The affirmation of the enigmatic character of the world forms the aesthetic program:

Whoever has once had the opportunity to see flowers unfold in slow motion will then refrain from setting wonder and objectivity against each other. Likewise, in the realm of poetry a will to objectivity can only gain validity if it is not conditioned by inability, but by the fear to patch over the wonderful by too many words.

[Wer nun einmal in der Zeitlupe sich entfaltende Blumen sehen durfte, wird hinfort unterlassen, Wunder und Sachlichkeit gegeneinander abzugrenzen. So kann auch im Bereich der Dichtung ein Wille zur Sachlichkeit nur Berechtigung erlangen, wenn er nicht von Unvermögen, sondern durch die Furcht bedingt wurde, mit allzuviel Worten das Wunderbare zu verdecken.¹⁸]

This programmatic statement allows one to see how dependent Neue Sachlichkeit is on the reduction of the “I” position, which in other contexts still stands firm. As Schäfer states, for the contributors to Die Kolonne, it was a matter of making the diversity of the living world visible and of experiencing nature as a resonant space. To produce such a resonance through an aesthetics of reception, natural objects were presented as being inappropriable by people, and instrumental reasoning was presented as revoked.¹⁹ In 1932, Lehmann was invited to make a contribution to the anthology Mit allen Sinnen [With every Sense], which brought his work to the attention of other representatives associated the magical realism and landscape-oriented Neue Sachlichkeit.²⁰

The newspaper columns collected in Bukolische Tagebuch originally appeared in the weekly Berlin newspaper Die Grüne Post, which was not known for its urbanity. This did not aid its reception in literary circles. The expectations of its publisher may be responsible for a certain tone of escapist introspection, from which not all of the diary entries manage to remain free. A complete edition of the diary first appeared in 1948 under the “US=W=2013” license of the Allied forces through the Parzeller and Co. publishing company in Fulda, Germany. Klett Cotta then published it in 1999 as part of an eight-volume critical edition. In 2017, Matthes & Seitz published a bibliophile edition, for which Hanns Zischler contributed an afterword, where he compared the Bukolische Tagebuch with Lehmann’s Überläufer, in both of which one finds “a reflex of the self-preservation of the individual and an inseparably interwoven and energetic desire to save the threatened creation in language” [“ein Reflex der Selbsterhaltung des Individuums und untrennbar damit verwoben ein energischer Wunsch, die bedrohte Schöpfung in die Sprache zu retten”] (Zischler 2017, 273–279).

4 Wilhelm Lehmann as a Nature Writer

Martha Nussbaum describes the ability “to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature” as being necessary for a “life worthy of human dignity” to succeed (2011, 32–33). Lehmann contemplates a broadening of this ability by grounding his writing praxis in a phenomenological preparedness for self-emptying. Here a spiritual absence (in reference to the self) is the precondition of full spiritual presence in the writing of living networks. A passage that did end up in the published version of Der Überläufer expresses this in a succinct manner:

But then the forest sank into a Buddhist silence and all creatures had to reflect upon themselves: flowering primula reddened the ground, the thyme scented the air, an ant flew into Nuch’s coat arm, its wings were transparent as if a sign that they had been born out of nothing.

[Aber dann versank der Wald in ein buddhistisches Schweigen und alle Wesen durften sich selbst nachsinnen: blühende Primella rötete den Boden, der Thymian duftete, eine Ameise flog auf Nuchs Rockärmel, ihre Flügel waren durchsichtig wie zum Zeichen, daß das Nichts sie geboren hatte.] (Lehmann 1989, 476)

Perhaps it is this apparent paradox that makes Lehmann’s texts an appropriate starting point for a reflection on the specifics of nature writing in German literature. Essential aspects of its aesthetics can be summarized in the following manner: (1) a praxis of writing rooted phenomenologically in a naturalist praxis of morphological observation that regards itself as being “an integral part” of the process of human consciousness; (2) an expressionism that is based not in an emphatic experience or a sense of self-expression but rather in a dialectic between the self-emptying of the perceiver and the self-expression of the perceived; and (3) a transcendental moment: individuals reflect on themselves as being dependent upon contexts of life which they cannot control. The experience of inappropriability (wilderness) becomes a condition of the possibility to experience oneself as part of life (Thoreau’s wildness).

In this regard, Lehmann’s ideal of a reception aesthetic is a form of transference: In the act of reading, the dialectic between the self-emptying of the perceiver and the self-expression of the perceived can be reenacted cognitively and emotionally. The wonder of language’s becoming is one of language-wilding. An essential aspect of this wildness is the ability to experience wonder, as Thoreau states: “In wildness lies the preservation of the world.” Lehmann understands this to mean that the world can be preserved through the human ability to wonder.

Influenced by the English lyrical tradition and authors such as Henry David Thoreau and Jules Renard, Lehmann remained a solitary and lifelong “inner immigrant,” a person who had to constantly reaffirm his capacity for warmth toward life through writing. He also repeatedly attempted to restrict the basic feeling of existential anxiety through the natural scientific ability to bring things into proximity, yet in doing so he was never totally free from a compulsion to repeat themes and imagery. Alfred Döblin awarded him and Robert Musil the prestigious Kleist Prize in 1923. To this day, critics and scholars have not demonstrated such foresight. Perhaps that is just as well, as “we live from the unexplained” [“wir leben vom Nichterklärten”]—and this unexplained can, in the end, only survive where it is not subjected to a hermeneutic furor:

Wonder always hides itself within the self-explanatory. Wonder is necessary to us as human beings. One can say that the only phenomena which are sufficient for us are those whose incomprehensibility becomes visible in the middle of their understandability.

[Das Wunder verbirgt sich immer im Selbstverständlichen. Das Wunder ist uns Menschen nötig. Man kann sagen, dass uns nur die Erscheinungen recht eigentlich taugen, in denen, inmitten ihrer Verständlichkeit, die Unverständlichkeit sichtbar bleibt.] (Lehmann 1999a, 266)