German literature is silent on the subject. That is their right, say many critics. Our author thinks that this is a denial of the future
The changes in the biosphere and atmosphere caused by humans shape our world today, their unforeseeable consequences are our new reality. In fact, there is little evidence of this in contemporary German-language literature, there are only a few voices, Ilija Trojanows ETTs perhaps. Around 1800 the world population was one billion, today we are scratching the eight billion mark. At the same time, the resource demands of the individual have exploded in many countries.
Until recently, every human life born was a triumph, an ally in mankind’s attempt to settle in difficult environmental conditions. Today every new human life is a mortgage for future life that has to be paid off. You have to get this together in your head first, without going crazy: We are biologically destined to pass on life, and this is how many of us experience the deepest happiness – and that should now have lost all matter of course? This is a turning point in human history that couldn’t be more drastic. Also in the literature: almost nothing. Anja Utlers see it coming perhaps.
Holocene kitsch
In 1979 the narrator wrote in Max Frischs Man appears in the Holocenethat most writers wrote about “souls” and “society” as if the terrain was secured, the earth once and for all earth, the height of the sea level regulated once and for all ”. With a few exceptions, what has continued to be stubbornly and persistently plowed since then are precisely these topics: soul and society. The hyped “Berlin literature” made it even worse: Contemporary German literature as an urban footnote to Jane Austen.
The debate
It was a simple question that Bernd Ulrich asked Time asked: “Why is this fundamental crisis so little reflected in literature? Why the hell ?! ”He was indignant at the serenity of the writers’ answers. Heavy headwinds came from critics. This is how Hilmar Klute replied in the SZ conceited: “Anyone who, with the authority of the Kulturplatzanweiser, demands that literature please understand what is moving the world (ie: him) at the moment – does he still suspect the complicated fabric of which literary texts are made?” Fortunately, the time is over when writers were regarded as oracles or “served a greater whole”. So is Ulrich’s question nonsense? Our author, literature professor and unsuspecting amateurism thinks: Not at all.
At some point, literature became more and more academic and caught the bug of constructivism in the 1960s. As the opposite of culture, nature is always essentialist, it whispered conspiratorially from lecture hall to lecture hall. But nowhere can you be cured of essentialist fantasies faster than in nature. If you just look. But looking and listening in nature was systematically forgotten among the so-called educated, knowledge of natural history was ridiculed for a long time. The writing about it now has to be imported again as Nature Writing in the land of Humboldt and Goethe. And while you embalm your souls with organic products in Prenzlberg, you don’t feel anything of your own inability to mourn over the tearing of the tissue of life. You play your innocence comedies patiently to yourself.
There is also a good deal of cautiousness here that you may have learned from the humanities. One does not want to mess with the leading discourses, with the funding and price structures. One defends the benefices of the Holocene against the unreasonable demands of the Anthropocene. The literary intelligentsia gleefully blamed Armin Laschet’s naivete on industrial affluence. She should touch her own nose. Because she actually wants to live in harmony with him on an earth that no longer exists: the Holocene earth of climatic stability and biosphere integrity. It is part of the delusion context that Laschet made the electoral program. Contemporary literature is sentimental and backward-looking in its ruminating problem areas. She defiantly ignores nature and does not want to feel the fear of loss of species. It presents itself as liberal climate-enlightened, but refuses to face the challenges of the climate crisis for our world and self-image. She would rather continue to play on the imagination of her readership with “soul” and “society” and thereby become Holocene kitsch. Even a new design like Raoul Schrotts First earthEpic, which frees itself from this corset of ideas and deals with the Anthropocene in detail, has nothing to say about the moral complexity of our life in the Anthropocene.
New inner emigration
Literature should not become the enforcer of daily politics, was against Bernd Ulrich’s provocation (see box) objected. With all due respect, the Anthropocene is not politics of the day, it is the history of the earth. And we are unlucky enough to live in a phase of human history in which we have become geological actors. Ulrich is about to claim a language for the planet on which we now live and which our grandchildren still want to inhabit. The silence of contemporary literature on these topics is an inner emigration that refuses to find the language that is so important for a habitable future. So far there have been attempts at such a voice search almost only in poetry, in essays and in climate fiction – and these too are few and far between and fall on deaf ears in the mainstream.
During the preparations for COP26 in Glasgow, it was criticized that the voice of the creative minds received too little attention. In any case, you can do without a German PEN parliamentary group there. She must first learn to speak of our planet and its vitality. Well then: “Tell me, muse”!
Read more in the current issue of Friday.
.