Aerial withdrawal: An atmospheric reading of Monika Maron's Flugasche

Abstract

In Monika Maron's Flugasche (1981)—the first novel from the GDR to deal with environmental issues—the poisoned atmosphere in the city of B. functions as an affective centre, around which emotions, actions and reactions of the main protagonist as well as of the other characters revolve. The journalist Josefa Nadler falls into the sphere of the environmental catastrophe and is overwhelmed by the atmospheric power of this meaningful situation. The corporeal experience of being exposed to subtle environmental violence, which has devastating consequences for the city of B. and debilitating effects on its inhabitants, evokes feelings such as fear, anger, shame and compassion. Moreover, it develops into a driving force for thoughts, decisions, commitment and resistance against the unfair air distribution, accompanied by a sense of powerlessness. The aim of the article is a re-reading of the novel with a central focus on the largely non-representational, affective and meteorological elemental spacetimes, which can not only be felt or bodily experienced but also designed or engineered in order to produce a certain time-bound structure of feeling, for example, an oppressive climate of fear.