Ecocriticism in German Literary Studies

Abstract

Without a doubt, environmental concerns are currently among the most pressing of our time, as the “Fridays for Future” movement resonating across the globe over the past two years has astonishingly shown. In recent years, this broad interest in ecological issues has also found expression in the German literary market. Peter Wohlleben’s popular science book The Hidden Life of Trees (2015) as well as Maja Lunde’s bestselling novel The History of Bees (2015) have been overwhelmingly successful; to mention just two prominent examples from the wealth of literature talking about the suspenseful and strained relationship between humankind and nature as well as increasingly dramatic environmental changes. Issues of this kind are also discussed in less popular, or rather, less mainstream literary genres such as contemporary German poetry, frequently with recourse to the multifaceted concept of the Anthropocene (Bayer/Seel 2016, Falb 2019). Over the two past decades, ecological issues have also taken a firm hold in the fields of German literary and cultural studies. This essay aims to present a brief overview of the evolution of ecocritical research within German literary studies in Germany in recent years. It will show that this field of research—unlike American studies and comparative literary studies in Germany (cf. for instance the thematic focus Ecocriticism in Komparatistik 2013)—tends to address such issues under the key term of ecology rather than ecocriticism (cf. e.g. Detering). Ecological questions are indeed highly present within German literary studies, but are not united under the terminological umbrella of ecocriticism. Apart from re-readings and new editions of canonical texts that draw more attention to ecological concerns—one might consider, for example, the most recent publications occasioned by the Humboldt Year in 2019, which discussed Alexander von Humboldt as one of the first German ecological authors—relevant lexica and handbooks from the discipline of German literary studies usually contain entries on the relationship between nature, ecology, and literature. However, these contributions do discuss but rarely employ the term ecocriticism, since there is, in contrast to the Anglophone world, no long-standing research tradition in Germany that bears its name. There are mainly three reasons for this. First of all, even though nature writing has been imported from the Anglophone world and launched in recent years as a successful genre on the German literary market,1 there is no long-standing tradition for this kind of physiographic genre in Germany. Even though currently gaining momentum (see for