{"title":"Enemy of the people? Warum uns die Kohlmeise nicht retten kann","authors":"Dorothee Häußermann","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12474","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12474","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 3","pages":"411-414"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142013659","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ja, sind denn alle verrückt geworden?","authors":"Luisa Neubauer","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12467","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12467","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 3","pages":"370-372"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141817487","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Grün statt Grau: The garden of planetary politics","authors":"Thomas Lekan","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12473","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12473","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Recently, I was invited to take part in a panel discussion at the Ludwig Maximilian University's (LMU) Center for Advanced Studies in Munich on the topic of “Global Climate Justice,” the fourth and final in a series there on “Climate Futures: Dialogues across the Science-Society-Policy Interface.” As the event date approached, my misgivings about my role kept intensifying. “You've invited the wrong person!,” I thought, as I struggled to frame my opening remarks, since I'm neither a climate historian nor a climate ethicist.</p><p>My climate history colleagues—such as fellow panelist Eleanora Rohland—are far more adept than I am at connecting past climate fluctuations, such as the seventeenth-century Little Ice Age, to agricultural yields and social dislocations, or in elaborating the connections among fossil-fuel use, colonialist legacies, and future vulnerability. Climate historians have also collaborated with earth systems scientists in correlating the industrial take-off in Europe around 1750 with the rapid rise in atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations that have led to global warming. This correlation informed the 27<sup>th</sup> United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) establishment of a “loss and damage” fund that acknowledges the Group of 20 (G20) countries’ historical responsibility for a stark planetary inequality: the nations least responsible for GHG pollution are suffering the worst effects of climate change. The 2023 Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has called for “climate resilient development,” mostly through technology sharing and financial loans, to achieve the targeted 2030 halving of emissions. It will be a monumental and costly task (Summary 24).</p><p>As an environmental historian interested in local landscapes and grassroots environmentalisms, I have shied away from tackling climate change or climate justice head on because the temporal and spatial scales of my work don't seem commensurate with a planetary crisis with no historical precedent. After all, as Dipesh Chakrabarty noted in his much-cited 2009 essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” climate change has merged human and geological time scales in ways that belie phenomenological continuities between past and present. In his view, the “we” of the Anthropocene only emerges in reference to a geo-historical past that has included “us” for just a small sliver of time. Yet we have become a geophysical “force” on par with the asteroid that triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs over 65 million years ago (Chakrabarty 207). In Chakrabarty's view, it isn't useful to blame the agents of capitalism, socialism, nationalism, or any other ideology for this mess—humans as a <i>species</i> “stumbled” (217) into their role as fossil-fuel burners, reshaping the planet's geochemical cycles and the parameters for human evolution even as they sought enlightenment, fought for human rights, and built magnificent cities","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 3","pages":"398-403"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gequ.12473","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141818563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Performing solidarity and building activist communities in Simone Dede Ayivi's Solidaritätsstück","authors":"Kristopher Imbrigotta","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12466","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12466","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 3","pages":"385-388"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141817732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Academic conferences and climate justice: The CLEAT report","authors":"Sabine von Mering","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12470","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12470","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In times of climate emergency, air travel for conference attendance is neither sustainable nor ethical. As a 2020 article in <i>Nature</i> concluded, “[t]he sum total of travel associated with attendance at one large academic conference can release as much CO2 as an entire city in a week” (Klöwer, Hopkins, Allen, and Higham). According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which produces regular summary reports about the newest climate science, by 2030 global carbon emissions must be reduced by 45% compared to 2010 levels in order to avoid irreversible tipping points. Since airline travel is generally the highest contributor to academia's carbon footprint (Thaller, Schreuer, and Posch), this is an all-hands-on-deck moment for scholars in all disciplines. Those of us in German studies have a particular responsibility: Although climate denial is unfortunately becoming more common in Germany today (see Stöcker), the country has long been considered a leader on climate action (Eckersley). Germanists are therefore well-positioned to assume a leading role in moving academia beyond the fossil fuel age.</p><p>This is very much a question of justice. The Paris Agreement's “common but differentiated responsibilities” require more aggressive decarbonization from countries that have historically emitted more (United Nations 1). Climate injustices are disproportionally perpetrated on women and other vulnerable populations, including young people and future generations. It would therefore behoove academics to adopt “common but differentiated responsibilities” as well. For senior scholars, who have not only contributed the most to the existing emissions, but are also typically flying more than their junior counterparts, reducing their carbon footprint becomes an act of climate justice. But real change cannot be left to individuals. It requires action on the part of academic associations and conference organizers.</p><p>There is no question that in-person meetings have benefits. Being in the same room together, getting to know one another beyond a limited one- or two-hour Zoom, shaking hands, or sharing a meal likely makes it easier to build strong relationships and nurture more resilient networks. It is certainly more fun. And yet, studies show that more flying does not equal higher productivity (Wynes, Donner, Tannason, and Nabors), which suggests that it must be possible to build successful networks right from where we are. Although some of us who have benefitted from in-person conferences for decades may feel provoked by the accusation that it is literally contributing to the destruction of a habitable planet, we should step into the shoes of our youngest colleagues and the generations to come who will have to live with the consequences of our emissions (see for example Neubauer and Repenning). Yes, younger colleagues benefit from engaging with more experienced scholars in person, but they are often also the most comfortable with new vi","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 3","pages":"377-380"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gequ.12470","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141818548","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Enduring colonial legacies in Philadelphia","authors":"Bethany Wiggin","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12472","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12472","url":null,"abstract":"<p>By training, I am a cultural historian of early modern Europe and North America, and thus of the networks that created colonial Atlantic worlds, including the region that became known as Pennsylvania. The Schuylkill River is one of present-day Philadelphia's two rivers; it was named “hidden river” by Dutch explorers who knew it to be an important waterway from native informants but who couldn't find its mouth amidst the lush marsh that straddled its confluence with the larger Delaware. This “hidden” river plays a vital role in the book I am writing, <i>Utopia Found and Lost in Penn's Woods</i>. I also work very near the banks of the Schuylkill River, and I often spend time there when I need to take a break from reading, to walk, and to think.</p><p>In 2015, after a day spent submerged in the pages of various seventeenth- and eighteenth-century descriptions of the river's bounty—in German, English, and French, some translated from the “Delaware” (Lenape)—the river as it was on that day insisted that it be considered. How had it become what ecologists variously call a “patchy environment,” a “novel ecosystem,” or more pointedly, “trash” (for more on these distinctions, see Wiggin, Premoli, and Sarti). Lined by walking trails, traversed by major highways and rail lines, the river had simultaneously become the site of an oil refinery and Bartram's Garden, naturalist and slave-owner John Bartram's landmark historic home perched on a high bluff over a broad bend in the waterway. Facing one another across the river, the juxtaposition between the polluting petrochemical complex and the verdant garden was jarring. In the weeks, months, and years that followed, I became somewhat obsessed with this “forgotten place” (Gilmore) that was sorely missing a community of care.</p><p>Over the past several decades, humanistic fields of study, including some strands of German studies, have grown to include vastly more diverse objects of examination. For those, like myself, trained originally in language and literature departments, this slow interdisciplinary turn has meant learning to read myriad other forms, often through creative interdisciplinary lenses. And yet, humanistic objects of inquiry remain, as Caroline Levine also argues, most often diminutive: the untranslatable concept, the luminous detail, the exceptional event. (One notable exception is of course “distant reading,” or what Franco Moretti also called the study of “normal literature” and the sociology of literature more broadly.) The humanist occupation with the small is not limited only to the <i>space</i> that humanistic objects take up, but as David Armitage and Jo Guldi have documented, it is also true of humanistic analytics of <i>time</i>. Working at the scale of a work or even a movement, style, or period limits apprehension of lives “in the wake,” as Christina Sharpe has shown, and it blinkers our view of the forms and structures that, over centuries, shape both landscapes and individual liv","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 3","pages":"404-410"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gequ.12472","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141845645","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"When climate policy bogs down, humanities and the arts can move things forward","authors":"Simon Richter","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12471","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12471","url":null,"abstract":"<p>At least since the publication of Amitav Ghosh's <i>The Great Derangement</i> (2016), it has become commonplace to say that the climate crisis is also a crisis of the imagination. Policymakers and their publics find it difficult to imagine how things could be otherwise. For scholars dedicated to the study of German culture and works of imagination, this would seem to be our moment. But many of us are not quite sure how to seize it. We understand the urgency, but deeply ingrained habits of mind and discipline stand in our way. As Caroline Levine emphasizes, our commitment to critique has taught us to be wary of “instrumentality” in any form. But I would argue, it's precisely the instruments of our discipline that are needed now. For the past two years, I've been experimenting with ways to put my skillset to work for climate adaptation in the Netherlands and Germany. I can readily imagine that there are policy contexts where you could do the same with yours.</p><p>People in the Netherlands don't like to talk about managed retreat. Moving to higher terrain is one of the ways low-lying communities, even whole cities and regions, can and will adapt to sea level rise. That's important because the 2022 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that scientists cannot rule out two meters of sea level rise by 2100 and five meters by 2150. Other climate scientists such as James Hansen and Michael Mann think it could be much more and much sooner. For a country that regards itself as “the safest delta in the world,” even though 26% of its densely populated terrain already lies below sea level—in some places as low as seven meters—the idea of managed retreat is at odds with its national narrative of an eternal and ongoing battle with the sea. Dutch engineers boast that they can take on another ten meters of sea level rise. Retreat, they say, is for losers.</p><p>There are some Dutch climate scientists and ecologically-oriented water management experts who worry that the Netherlands is locking itself into maintaining an inflexible technocratic system that can't keep up with accelerated sea level rise. Since 2016, they've tried various strategies to keep retreat on the table, with moderate success. Landscape architects and designers have helped by offering visions of what an adaptive, inundated Netherlands might look like. The engineering lobby wants none of it. Recent opinion pieces in prominent newspapers suggest that those who advocate for retreat and cast doubt on Dutch engineering prowess are committing <i>landverraad</i> (treason).</p><p>I've been tracking the conversation on managed retreat in the Netherlands for the past six years. I was intrigued by a phenomenon that manifests in many other regions as well: low-level awareness of the urgency of climate change, coupled with a supreme confidence in technical solutions, bolstered by political inertia. As I spoke with climate and water professionals in the Netherlands, I realized that ","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 3","pages":"373-376"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gequ.12471","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141829611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Teaching sustainability in German studies: Culture, curriculum, and collaboration","authors":"Kiley M. Kost","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12468","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12468","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 3","pages":"381-384"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141829471","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}