2023-07-11 21:00:13
HomeBerlinBernd Scherer: A Berliner is looking for traces of the Anthropocene
From 2006 to 2022, Bernd Scherer headed the House of World Cultures (HKW). Now the pensioner devotes himself to the passion of determining a new geological era.
Harry Nutt
Bernd Scherer was director of the House of World Cultures (HKW) until 2022. Sebastian Wells/OSTKREUZ
Climate change, loss of species, pandemics – planetary crises are omnipresent, and it is not uncommon for them to be negotiated in the mode of impending uncontrollability. Is it possible that we can no longer get at them with terms that have become precarious? That is, roughly speaking, the question for the proposal to speak from now on of the Anthropocene, that epoch in which it can be proven that humans intervened in the history of the earth and changed it significantly.
From a bird’s eye view into the depths
An ambitious group of researchers, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), has now announced that it will begin research on a sedimentary layer from 1950 at the bottom of Lake Crawford in south-eastern Canada, around the Anthropocene, which has so far been discussed primarily as a cultural-scientific assumption , also to be defined according to geological standards.
The Berlin philosopher and long-time director of the House of World Cultures (HKW) Bernd Scherer also belongs to the AWG. After his retirement, he can devote himself even more to his passionate study of the Anthropocene. In several books, Scherer has dealt with the role of the human species in the history of the earth, most recently in the volume “The Attack of the Signs. Thoughts and patterns of action of the Anthropocene” (Matthes & Seitz). “In 200 pages,” wrote the critic of the magazine Zeit Wissens, “the philosopher rushes through thought spaces, sign systems and ideas from antiquity to the Anthropocene, gaining so much height that the reader can get a new bird’s-eye view of the present.” With the project in Canada, Scherer now indulges in the intoxication of the depths in order to find so-called geomarkers of the Anthropocene, such as radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests after the Second World War.
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Marvel at the wonders of the earth
Bernd Scherer was born in Scheuern in Saarland in 1955. Between 1989 and 2004 he was director of the Goethe Institutes in Pakistan and Mexico. The external perspective on the German situation ultimately predestined him to head the HKW in the Berlin Tiergarten, which he expanded between 2006 and 2022 into an artistic and theoretical think tank of the postcolonial and postmigrant perspective. Scherer’s reflections on the Anthropocene are driven by the conviction that a new astonishment at the wonder of the earth is needed. The AGW group proposes the beginning of the Anthropocene to be around 1950, because the far-reaching changes of that time left traces in all sediments around the world.
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