eJournals

Colloquia Germanica
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/71
2021
532-3
ISSN 0010-1338 Themenheft: Ecological Archives Gastherausgeber: in: Caroline Schaumann und Paul Buchholz Paul Buchholz: Introduction: Why Ecological Archives? Hubert Zapf: Cultural Ecology, the Environmental Humanities, and the Ecological Archives of Literature Gundolf Graml: ‘ The Invention of Reality Required No More Records’: Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist Jens Klenner: Suspended in the Archives - The Three Natures of the Miner of Falun Joela Jacobs: Umweltschutz als Moralkeule: The German Past, the Refugee Present, and the Planet’s Future Tanja Nusser: Flüchtlingsströme against / and / or Wohlfahrtsfestung. An Ecology of the So-called Refugee Crisis Jack Davis: Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction Jason Groves: Dark Geology: The Arcades Project as Earth Archive Seth Peabody: Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive Ian Fleishman: “Naturgeil”: Homo-Eco-Erotic Utopianism in Hitler Youth Film Propaganda and ‘Boy Scout’ Porn narr.digital Band 53 Band 53 Heft 2-3 Harald Höbus ch, J oseph D. O ’ Neil (Hr sg.) C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a t i o n a l e Z e i t s c h r i f t f ü r G e r m a n i s t i k C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a ti o n a l e Z e it s c h r ift f ü r G e r m a n i s ti k Die Zeitschrift erscheint jährlich in 4 Heften von je etwa 96 Seiten Abonnementpreis pro Jahrgang: € 135,00 (print)/ € 172,00 (print & online)/ € 142,00 (e-only) Vorzugspreis für private Leser € 101,00 (print); Einzelheft € 45,00 (jeweils zuzüglich Versandkosten). Bestellungen nimmt Ihre Buchhandlung oder der Verlag entgegen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG, Postfach 25 60, D-72015 Tübingen, Fax +49 (0)7071 97 97 11 · eMail: info@narr.de Aufsätze - in deutscher oder englischer Sprache - bitte einsenden als Anlage zu einer Mail an hhoebu@uky.edu oder joseph.oneil@uky.edu (Prof. Harald Höbusch oder Prof. Joseph D. O,Neil, Division of German Studies, 1055 Patterson Office Tower, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0027, USA). Typoskripte sollten nach den Vorschriften des MLA Style Manual (2008) eingerichtet sein. Sonstige Mitteilungen bitte an hhoebu@uky.edu © 2021 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Alle Rechte vorbehalten/ All Rights Strictly Reserved Druck und Bindung: CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 0010-1338 Linguistik \ Literaturgeschichte \ Anglistik \ Bauwesen \ Fremdsprachendidaktik \ DaF \ Germanistik \ Literaturwissenschaft \ Rechtswissenschaft \ Historische Sprachwissenschaft \ Slawistik \ Skandinavistik \ BWL \ Wirtschaft \ Tourismus \ VWL \ Maschinenbau \ Politikwissenschaft \ Elektrotechnik \ Mathematik & Statistik \ Management \ Altphilologie \ Sport \ Gesundheit \ Romanistik \ Theologie \ Kulturwissenschaften \ Soziologie \ Theaterwissenschaft \ Geschichte \ Spracherwerb \ Philosophie \ Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft \ Linguistik \ Literaturgeschichte \ Anglistik \ Bauwesen \ Fremdsprachendidaktik \ DaF \ Germanistik \ Literaturwissenschaft \ Rechtswissenschaft \ Historische Sprachwissenschaft \ Slawistik \ Skandinavistik \ BWL \ Wirtschaft \ Tourismus \ VWL \ Maschinenbau \ Politikwissenschaft \ Elektrotechnik \ Mathematik & Statistik \ Management \ Altphilologie \ Sport \ Gesundheit \ Romanistik \ Theologie \ Kulturwissenschaften \ Soziologie \ Theaterwissenschaft \ Geschichte \ Spracherwerb \ Philosophie \ Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft \ Linguistik \ Literaturgeschichte \ Anglistik \ Bauwesen \ Fremdsprachendidaktik \ DaF \ Germanistik \ Literaturwissenschaft \ Rechtswissenschaft \ Historische Sprachwissenschaft \ Slawistik \ Skandinavistik \ BWL \ Wirtschaft \ Tourismus \ VWL \ Maschinenbau \ Politikwissenschaft \ Elektrotechnik \ Mathematik & Statistik \ Management \ Altphilologie \ Sport \ Gesundheit \ Romanistik \ Theologie \ Kulturwissenschaften \ Soziologie \ Theaterwissenschaft Linguistik \ Literaturgeschichte \ Anglistik \ Bauwesen \ Fremdsprachendidaktik \ DaF \ Germanistik \ Literaturwissenschaft \ Rechtswissenschaft \ Historische Sprachwissenschaft \ Slawistik \ Skandinavistik \ BWL \ Wirtschaft \ Tourismus \ VWL \ Maschinenbau \ Politikwissenschaft \ Elektrotechnik \ Mathematik & Statistik \ Management \ Altphilologie \ Sport \ Gesundheit \ Romanistik \ Theologie \ Kulturwissenschaften \ Soziologie \ Theaterwissenschaft \ Geschichte \ Spracherwerb \ Philosophie \ Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft \ Linguistik \ Literaturgeschichte \ Anglistik \ Bauwesen \ Fremdsprachendidaktik \ DaF \ Germanistik \ Literaturwissenschaft \ Rechtswissenschaft \ Historische Sprachwissenschaft \ Slawistik \ Skandinavistik \ BWL \ Wirtschaft \ Tourismus \ VWL \ Maschinenbau \ Politikwissenschaft \ Elektrotechnik \ Mathematik & Statistik \ Management \ Altphilologie \ Sport \ Gesundheit \ Romanistik \ Theologie \ Kulturwissenschaften \ Soziologie \ Theaterwissenschaft \ Geschichte \ Spracherwerb \ Philosophie \ Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft \ Linguistik \ Literaturgeschichte \ Anglistik \ Bauwesen \ Fremdsprachendidaktik \ DaF \ Germanistik \ Literaturwissenschaft BUCHTIPP Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG \ Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (0)7071 97 97 0 \ Fax +49 (0)7071 97 97 11 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de Stefan Neuhaus Der Krimi in Literatur, Film und Serie Eine Einführung 1. Auflage 2021, 340 Seiten €[D] 22,90 ISBN 978-3-8252-5556-5 eISBN 978-3-8385-5556-0 Ein Blick in die Programme von Verlagen, Fernsehsendern und Filmanbietern zeigt, dass es kein populäreres Genre gibt als den Krimi. Allein von Agatha Christies Romanen wurden über zwei Milliarden Exemplare verkauft. Die Figur Sherlock Holmes gehört zu den frühesten Film- und Serienhelden und am Anfang der modernen Krimiliteratur stehen Erzählungen nicht nur von Edgar Allan Poe, sondern auch von Friedrich Schiller und E.T.A. Hoffmann. Erstmals wird der Versuch gewagt, an exemplarischen Beispielen aus Literatur, Film und Serie in den ‚ganzen‘ Krimi ein-zuführen - in Merkmale, Geschichte und Entwicklung. Die englischsprachige Krimitradition wird in die Darstellung mit einbezogen. Bisher hat sich die Forschung selten mit dem als trivial geltenden Genre beschäftigt. Ein genauerer Blick zeigt aber, dass der Krimi genauso anspruchsvolle Beispiele bereithält wie andere Genres. BAND 53 • Heft 2-3 Themenheft: Ecological Archives Gastherausgeber: in: Caroline Schaumann und Paul Buchholz Inhalt Introduction: Why Ecological Archives? Paul Buchholz � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 109 Cultural Ecology, the Environmental Humanities, and the Ecological Archives of Literature Hubert Zapf � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 121 ‘The Invention of Reality Required No More Records’: Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist Gundolf Graml � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 141 Suspended in the Archives —The Three Natures of the Miner of Falun Jens Klenner � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 161 Umweltschutz als Moralkeule: The German Past, the Refugee Present, and the Planet’s Future Joela Jacobs � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 179 Flüchtlingsströme against / and / or Wohlfahrtsfestung: An Ecology of the So-called Refugee Crisis Tanja Nusser � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 197 Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction Jack Davis � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 215 Dark Geology: The Arcades Project as Earth Archive Jason Groves � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 233 Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive Seth Peabody � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 249 “Naturgeil”: Homo-Eco-Erotic Utopianism in Hitler Youth Film Propaganda and ‘Boy Scout’ Porn Ian Fleishman � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 269 Verzeichnis der Autorinnen und Autoren � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 289 Introduction: Why Ecological Archives? Paul Buchholz Emory University In March 2018, the symposium Ecological Archives: Histories of Environment in German Studies, hosted by Emory University’s Department of German Studies, brought together a diverse group of humanities scholars engaged with cultural facets of ecology and environment. The symposium was motivated by the idea that, in order to help along the emergence of critical approaches to environment in German Studies, we as a community of scholars will need to redefine and expand the sources from which we draw our objects of study� As with any new field of inquiry, it becomes necessary to turn to forgotten or neglected histories, sites, traditions, textual corpuses, and artifacts that attain new significance in light of the currently unfolding history of global warming in particular and the Anthropocene in general� Symposium participants were invited to engage in acts of discovery and rediscovery: some reinterpreted and reread ‘canonical’ or ‘classical’ German texts in terms of their relevance for ecological and environmental thought, while others worked to transcend or renegotiate the boundaries of the canonical� What is an ecological archive? Each inquiry in this volume answers this question differently, but they do so against a shared conceptual backdrop that has emerged within literary and cultural studies over the past decades� Since the heyday of poststructuralism, the term “archive” has gained a remarkable flexibility, and has become a central concept for approaching the ways in which power relations are inscribed in texts and cultural artifacts. The archive is not only the official records collection of a state or municipality; after Michel Foucault, it is “the law of what can be said,” the entire system of knowledge-power that selects and organizes discourse (145). Jacques Derrida also provided an influential definition of the archive derived (almost exclusively) from the word’s etymology. The archive is a site (but not necessarily a physical one) where singular objects are made into examples of universal laws, a place “where law and singularity intersect in privilege” (9). In founding the law in this way, the archive has an “archic, in truth patriarchic function,” which however is always by necessity hidden from view behind the veil of objectivity (9). Both Foucault’s 110 Paul Buchholz and Derrida’s definitions allow the analysis of any given literary text as an archive� A nineteenth-century novel can be an archive in the sense that it manages and organizes what is sayable (for instance, what emotions are worthy of recording), and that it makes a singular story into a putatively exemplary case of universal virtues� In recent years, these broad poststructuralist approaches to archives have given way to more concrete inquiries into the ways that archives silence certain voices and elevate others, and in this way have been complicit with historical violence, while in other cases offering glimpses of resistance and resilience when read against the grain� Scholars of colonialism and postcolonialism have emphasized how archives were integral instruments of colonization and empire; documents in the “imperial archive” cannot be treated as objective records of the past but as thoroughly ideological artifacts that hide more than they reveal (Ward and Wisnicki 201). Marisa J. Fuentes, a historian of slavery in the British Caribbean, writes of how “colonial power made the archive complicit in obscuring the offenses committed against the enslaved,” and adopts an approach that “eke[s] out extinguished and invisible but no less historically important lives” (7). Scholars of queer studies, too, have confronted this problem of archival silence and violence; Charles Morris has coined the term “archival queer” to name an approach that reads archival records for the muted and suppressed traces of “queer movement: traversal of time and space, mobilization and circulation of meanings that trouble sexual normalcy and its discriminations” (148). This short sampling of discourse should demonstrate the two primary concerns that define contemporary debates over archives: how archives record and erase at the same time, how they document, perpetrate, and obscure violence, and what critical practices of reading and analysis make it possible to give contours to these silences and retrieve hidden histories and life stories of oppressed groups and individuals� Any study of “ecological archives” must keep this array of power dynamics in mind, particularly because the topics of “nature” and “ecology” often risk being depoliticized and separated from histories of oppression. In German-speaking contexts, environmental concerns and the conception of nature in general have been consistently politically fraught. The myth of the “German forest” is a case in point of how the Romantic aestheticization of nature can go hand-in-hand with reactionary ethno-nationalism. Nineteenth-century German explorers, who contributed to the development of natural and environmental science, traveled by necessity along the pathways of European colonial domination, as crassly admitted in the writings of the ethnologist Adolf Bastian (himself an epigone of Alexander von Humboldt), who stated in an essay on European colonization of Africa that “if expeditions that are for the time being of scientific Introduction: Why Ecological Archives? 111 interest […] maintain their (locally modifiable) validity, the practical results will not, in the case of wisely conducted research, fail to appear” (40). In short, good research points the way to profit — and any archivable knowledge gained on such an expedition is also a blueprint for extraction� Nor can the modern concepts of ecology and environment be separated from histories of racial eugenics: the biologist Alfred Ploetz, “the founder of racial biology,” was a student of Ernst Haeckel, who himself coined the term “ecology” and inaugurated it as a field of scientific study, and whose book Art Forms of Nature might be considered one of the most beloved ‘ecological archives’ to reach a wide audience (Sprengel 458). Haeckel had, for his part, helped to propel social Darwinism by translating and disseminating Darwin’s concept of the “struggle for life” as “Kampf ums Dasein,” a term that aligned evolutionary science with Schopenhauerian pessimism and the late nineteenth-century liberal economic system of imperial Germany (Sprengel 460). Against this backdrop, it is unsurprising that National Socialism developed its own variety of eugenic ecological and environmental thought, as exemplified by organic farming practices that flourished after 1933, and that some of the most influential thinkers of nature and environment of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger and Jakob von Uexküll, both vocally supported Hitler. Flashing forward to the environmental movements that emerged in the 1970s, which were eventually formalized into Green electoral coalitions and parties in Germany and Austria, one discovers distinct but related problems� Antinuclear and environmental activists were an ideologically eclectic bunch, as Maoists, neo-Marxists, Christian conservatives and former technocrats found themselves rallying around a cause that was, in some instances, also embraced by avowedly fascist Heimat preservationists� This cursory overview makes clear that any inquiry into “ecological archives” in German-speaking contexts will by necessity need to engage with the interwoven histories of nationalism, racism, and exploitation and extraction broadly defined, alongside another baseline problem of an “ecological” archive. An archive — if we casually define it here as an organized collection of documents and records — by necessity contains things that have been removed from their circulation through the world, and are metaphorically or literally dead� Vance Byrd, in a recent study of serialized wood specimen collections (books that collected paper-thin samples of living trees for perusal by a mass readership), describes how these books are caught in a likely unstoppable process of decay, even when carefully preserved in archives (236). The literal archiving of living matter is only ever the temporary storage of perceptibly deteriorating remains. All of these conceptual problems are reflected in the articles collected in this special issue on ecological archives. Rather than proceeding from a singular agreed-upon definition of the term, the contributors engage in their own deep 112 Paul Buchholz inquiries into German-language literary and cultural history, to reflect on the limits and possibilities of identifying ecological archives in different media. Of course, the reflections collected here are not a radical new beginning in a totally new field of inquiry, but a continuation of existing scholarly tendencies within the field of German Studies. Environmental history is already a long-established academic subfield that draws on archival research to better understand past coimbrications of the social realm and the environment� Humanities scholars have recently begun to ask how our engagements with cultural memory would change when confronted with the insights of ecocriticism, posthumanism, and Anthropocene discourse� Writing in 2014, Tom Bristow asked how “new archives [might] more explicitly embody and evoke culturally specific emotions, constituted within and by particular cultures vis-à-vis their environments,” and suggested that oral history would acquire a new significance in the assembly of these archives (307). Also in 2014, the environmental historian Frank Uekötter edited the collection Ökologische Erinnerungsorte, which took both a German-specific and transnational focus to consider how the established concept of the lieu de mémoire could be adapted to the study of environmental history. The scholars in this volume consider a range of definitions of place, noting that while memories of environment (and its transformations and/ or destruction) may be specific to particular national cultures, they also by definition transcend human-imposed political and cultural boundaries� Ecological memory, they show, is multidirectional and heterogenous, shaped not only by such national and linguistic differences but by the more overtly conflictual political perspectives on a particular environmental occurrence (for instance the Exxon-Valdez oil spill or the Chernobyl disaster). What Uekötter underscores is the social dimension of memory, which is communicated and held by particular situated groups and individuals� Instead of only foregrounding the memory of environmentalist movements, Uekötter et al. show how different social and political sectors reacted differently to the same environmental occurrence. The environmental humanities, Uekötter and Bristow agree, could learn a great deal from the methods of oral and social history� Today, we find ourselves in a predicament — that of accelerating global warming — in which the democratized conceptions of environmental memory outlined above are increasingly urgent, while at the same time we are faced with an ongoing environmental crisis that not only overwhelms the specificity of any given place, but also proceeds at a speed that likely overwhelms our established means of assembling and preserving memories, as “living arrangements that took millions of years to put into place are being undone in the blink of an eye,” as Elaine Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Nils Bubandt write (1). The Introduction: Why Ecological Archives? 113 condition of the Anthropocene places an uncertain (yet still statistically probable) future at the center of our cognition of time, as the geological, technological, and economic past drives us towards a disaster we may yet avoid through collective action. Andreas Malm captures the dizzying nature of this historical predicament by enumerating its coordinates in the past, present, and future: “the fossil fuels hundreds of millions of years old, the mass combustion developed over the past two centuries, the extreme weather this has already generated, the journey towards a future that will be infinitely more extreme — unless something is done now.” (11). Gan, Tsing, Swanson, and Bunbandt articulate these vexing, emergent relations between past and future succinctly and poetically: “The winds of the Anthropocene carry ghosts -the vestiges and signs of past ways of life still charged in the present” (1). In this context, humanities scholars are not only encouraged, but compelled, to explore alternative conceptions of “archives” that adapt to this epistemological and environmental predicament, above all by maintaining a dynamic and self-reflexive approach to archives and the functions they perform. The inquires assembled in this issue are, of course, only a set of first steps towards the definition and exploration of ecological archives. The more modest task performed by this volume is to consider how the cultural archives — the source bases, canons, and media repositories — that we as German Studies scholars make use of, are transformed and expanded in light of the jarring facts of our changing environment� A core concern of this special issue is the consideration of literature as a distinct archive of ecological thought that could be activated in our current time of environmental emergency. Literature, in its verbal creativity and self-reflexivity, might point to alternative ways of coexisting with the nonhuman which do not repeat the exploitative histories that have led us to global warming and pending mass extinction� Literature is also an alternative archive, in this case, in that it critically reflects on the ways in which archivization itself (defined broadly as the collection, preservation, and cataloging of things in the world) has been complicit with the destructive lifeways of the Anthropocene. This framework is succinctly presented in Hubert Zapf’s programmatic article “Cultural Ecology, the Environmental Humanities, and the Ecological Archives of Literature�” Zapf usefully understands the agenda of “ecological archives” as a project that moves “beyond the mere dismissal of the cultural past” and engages in the “recovery, reexamination, and contemporary actualization of forgotten, marginalized, suppressed, or underestimated documents, texts, ideas, and genres” that “can indeed become sources of alternative models of a more ecologically minded future�” Building on his previous articulations of cultural ecology and 114 Paul Buchholz sustainable texts, Zapf provides the outlines of a literary history of ecological archives, dating back to the role of fire and water in the literature of Roman antiquity, and extending into postmodern reflections on the Black Atlantic (in Toni Morrison’s Beloved) and the condition of the Anthropocene (in Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 film The Shape of Water and Canadian writer Martha Baillie’s 2014 novel The Search for Heinrich Schloegel) (see Gilroy 1995). What Zapf’s article illustrates, in its exemplary set of brief, incisive close readings, is how existing interpretive paradigms (such as the postcolonial) can productively (rather than competitively) interface with posthumanist and biosemantic forms of reading. Continuing with this line of inquiry, Gundolf Graml considers how the contemporary Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr has emerged as a “cultural ecological archivist” whose self-reflexive novels revolve around “human experiences with nonhuman nature that are outside the usual discursive construction of the archive�” Literature, in this case, archives the very ways in which nature has escaped archivization, at key historical junctures that anticipated our predicament of the Anthropocene. Ransmayr’s novel Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis (1984) approaches the European conquest of the Arctic through a metanarrative framework that presents multiple potentially truthful accounts of a research expedition; what the novel underscores above all is the bibliographic significance of Arctic exploration, which sought to capture and contain a remote landscape for European readerly consumption in the nineteenth century — over a century before the disappearance of the Arctic as such through the ravages of global warming. As Graml shows in a further study of the novel Morbus Kitahara, Ransmayr consistently attends to the ways in which encounters with the nonhuman environment are imbricated in histories of imperialism and fascism� Whereas Graml demonstrates how a single literary text can constitute an alternative archive of ecological relations, Jens Klenner’s study “Suspended in the Archive — E.T.A. Hoffmann and the Three Natures of the Miner of Falun” takes an intertextual approach to better understand the transformative effects of archivization. Klenner considers how a single, famous ‘specimen’—the vitriol-embalmed body of Swedish miner Mathias Israelsson, discovered in the early eighteenth century — metamorphosed through each attempt to describe and preserve qua archive it, from journalistic reports and scientific texts to literary narratives� Klenner reconstructs the long physical and literary journey taken by Israelsson’s body after his disappearance down a mine shaft in the late seventeenth century and subsequent discovery — turned, as it were, to stone — in 1720. Beginning with the reports of mining assessor Adam Leyel and the lectures of naturalist and physician Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, the case of the Miner of Falun attracted first scientific, then literary attention, inspiring a range of adaptations, including “Unverhofftes Wiedersehen” by Johann Peter Introduction: Why Ecological Archives? 115 Hebel (1811) and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s novella “Die Bergwerke zu Falun,” published in the Serapions-Brüder cycle in 1819—seventy years after Israelsson’s decaying body, which had been on display in the Falun mining museum, was given a proper burial. Hoffmann’s story, as Klenner shows, epitomizes the metamorphic nature of the miner’s body, which despite scientific and literary efforts to identify it as a preserved specimen immune to the ravages of time, underwent ongoing metamorphoses, just as the literary articulations of its story underwent formal and generic metamorphoses. The case provides a basic reminder for any project of identifying an ‘ecological archive’—namely, that nature itself can only be properly understood as a constant process of metamorphosis, and what is ‘archived’ is a mutable form, subject to unpredictable future transformations. The interventions discussed above all remain committed to the study of literary texts as alternative archives of ecological thought and coexistence� Two further contributions, with a focus on contemporary media coverage of the refugee situation in Germany since 2015, suggest the ways in which German Studies scholars can expand explorations of ecological archives beyond literary studies� In her article “Umweltschutz als Moralkeule: The German Past, the Refugee Present, and the Planet’s Future,” Joela Jacobs investigates the media discourse surrounding a particular facet of the “refugee crisis”: the educational programs that teach refugees the ways of German environmentalism (such as recycling) to promote their “integration” in German culture. What Jacobs finds is that the triumphant rhetoric of these educational projects is interwoven with the ongoing project of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (including a reckoning with Germany’s refugee situation of the immediate postwar period), and is bound up in complex ways with contemporary Islamophobia. By analyzing attempts to develop a positive German national identity based on environmental friendliness, Jacobs illuminates the ways in which environmental crisis and the putative crisis of migrants in Europe are co-constituted. Tanja Nusser scrutinizes another facet of this contemporary sociopolitical situation in the article “Flüchtlingsströme against / and / or Wohlfahrtsfestung: An Ecology of the So-called Refugee Crisis.” Nusser focuses on the widespread use of ecological metaphors in the medial framing of recent refugee arrivals, such as “flow” and “flood,” reflected in the concept of the “Flüchtlingsstrom” that overwhelms the German nation, disturbing its ecological balance, as it were. Nusser’s inquiry exposes the biopolitical dangers that have accompanied ecological thought since its inception through Ernst Haeckel� In an era where climate crisis and refugee movement are inseparable (and will without a doubt continue to be in the decades to come), it is especially urgent to develop a self-critical approach to medial representation of “crisis,” a concept that can justify exclusion and oppression as much as it can drive positive forms of environmental mobilization. What Jacobs’ and Nusser’s 116 Paul Buchholz articles have in common, then, is a concern for how environmental awareness can tragically support the same repressive structures that cause a crisis of the environment in the first place. Returning to an earlier juncture of German intellectual history, the next two contributions consider the contemporary ecocritical potential of two major Marxist/ Marxian writers of the twentieth century: Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin. In his article “Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction,” Jack Davis shows how Bertolt Brecht’s writings — despite their apparently univocal avowal of the human conquest of nature — offer an important corrective to the models of ecological interconnection presented by posthumanist theory. Timothy Morton, whose influence can be felt implicitly or explicitly across the contributions to this issue, has developed a form of ecological thought that relinquishes “nature” as a concept, based instead on a model of radical interconnection — a “mesh” in which humans and nonhumans are intimately intertwined despite their apparent alterity. In Morton’s thought, nonhumans become “people,” and the relations between these beings is always one of fragile, consistently mutable attachment. By putting Morton into dialogue with Brecht, Davis shows that this model of the “mesh” falls short in accounting for any contradictions that arise between such beings, muting the violence involved in ecological interconnection and glossing over the reality of political decisions that would necessitate choosing the interests of one species over another (for instance, the human over the mosquito). Davis shows how Brecht’s affinities to Taoist thought, epitomized in Me-ti: Book of Interventions in the Flow of Things, actually led to an acknowledgement of a universal interconnection not unlike Morton’s “mesh,” but one that nonetheless insists on the necessity of contradiction — thereby enabling a political perspective on the conflictual aspect of ecological relations. Like Davis’ discussion of Brecht, Jason Groves’s article “Dark Geology: The Arcades Project as Earth Archive” takes the ecological thought of Timothy Morton as a starting point, in an innovative reappraisal of the work of Walter Benjamin. Focusing on the prevalence of geological tropes in The Arcades Project, Groves argues that Benjamin’s archaeology of urban modernity prefigures a “dark geology” (a concept inspired by Morton’s “dark ecology”). The dark geology of the Arcades Project would not only capture the material history of nineteenth-century Paris, but opens a view onto the broader ecological-geological upheaval of the Anthropocene, during which human industry radically changes the face of the earth. In Benjamin’s observations of capitalism’s fossils, we are sensitized to an earth archive contained in any built environment — a particularly compelling example being the lions that flank the entrance to the New York Public Library, which contain not only the fossils of microbial life, but also bear witness to an anthropogenic destratification of the Introduction: Why Ecological Archives? 117 earth interior through “drilling, mining, and quarrying.” Groves concludes by showing how dark geology, as a way of seeing, enables a new kind of pedestrian and pedagogical experience, where slow movement through a city reveals a palimpsest of catastrophic geological upheavals� In this way, it becomes possible to appreciate both immediate and mediated presences of the Anthropocene in the most familiar inhabited environments� The final contributions to this special issue turn to cinema as another cultural archive of ecological relations. Seth Peabody’s article “Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive” shows how this iconic science fiction film of the Weimar era addresses multiple environmental discourses of its time. The film accounts for what Peabody calls the “underground Anthropocene,” indexing the technological and environmental transformations that brought about urban modernity� While scholars have already extensively studied the iconography of skyscrapers in Metropolis, Peabody attends to the film’s equally important thematization of subterranean infrastructures for the control of water and pollution. The climactic flood at the film’s end — a special effect that was itself the product of elaborate set engineering — exposes an entire invisible infrastructure of water supply and disposal that undergirds the artificial luxury of the technological metropolis. In other words, the opposition between workers and factory owners (those above and those below) is mirrored in the film’s exploration of the towering heights and abyssal depths of urban space. Ian Fleishman’s cinematic study, “‘Naturgeil’: Homo-Eco-Erotic Utopianism in Hitler Youth Film Propaganda and ‘Boy Scout’ Porn,” ventures beyond the canon of German cinema to pose vexing questions about the contemporary imaginaries of ecology and queerness. While the specter of Nazi environmentalism (or reactionary environmentalism in general) has haunted other discussions in this issue — indeed, in German Studies the ecological thought of the Nazis must factor into any genuinely ‘archival’ investigation of the environmentalist past — Fleishman’s article engages with this specter directly by considering how contemporary, liberatory ideals of a holistic, ecological existence might echo the idyllic qua eugenic conceptions of Blut und Boden ecology. Through a close reading of the film “Hitlerjugend in den Bergen,” Fleishman first stipulates two commonly observed features of Hitler Youth propaganda films: a romantic love of nature, which countenanced an eco-fascist sensibility; and a more or less overt homoerotic impulse. Fleishman then turns to a contemporary body of subcultural film (also from Germany), ‘Boy Scout’ porn which exemplifies both the social freedom of liberal society and a vision of “green” living that strikes balance with the environment. What Fleishman’s close readings of this allmale pornographic films reveals is a homo-eco-erotic norm that, unsettlingly, reconstructs nationalist and expansionist fantasies of the Nazi films considered 118 Paul Buchholz above. Fleishman’s point is that these two bodies of homo-eco-erotic cinema are not simply marginal, anomalous expressions of an obscure ideology; rather, Fleishman asks that we consider critically, in the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s remarks on the aestheticization of politics, how and where such homo-eco-erotic imaginaries are at work within contemporary green, ecocritical discourses� The ecological archives discussed in this issue have been diverse in terms of both their definitions and locations: contained within literary texts and films, stored in online news repositories or entombed in the stone of urban structures, these literal and metaphorical “archives” each represent a distinct medium of remembrance, whether it was intentionally organized for that purpose or not. Our hope, as editors, is that each of these inquiries prefigures a future line of scholarly inquiry and reflection, where ecocritical concerns are combined with a concrete engagement with the historical past. The age of global warming, whether or not it retains the name Anthropocene in the popular sector, will be one of tremendous cultural and environmental loss, in which so many things we now take for granted will live on only as a memory, if at all. This much has come to light through Ashlee Cunsolo’s and Neville R. Ellis’ identification of “ecological grief” as a condition that emerges “in response to experiences or anticipated losses in the natural world” (279). Reflecting on the political and epistemological stakes of locating and studying ecological archives, we hope, may prepare a small amount of groundwork for future humanities scholars, who will be reflecting on losses that stand beyond our own horizons today. Works Cited Bastian, Adolf� Europäische Kolonien in Afrika und Deutschlands Interessen sonst und jetzt. Berlin: Dümmlers Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1884� Bristow, Tom. “Memory.” Environmental Humanities 5 (2014): 307—11. Byrd, Vance. “Saving the Forest: The Serialization of Wood Specimen Collections.” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 94 (2019): 228—38. Cunsolo, Ashlee, and Neville R. Ellis. “Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss�” Nature Climate Change 8 (2018): 275—81. Derrida, Jacques. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Diacritics 25 (1995): 9—63. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language� Trans� A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books, 1982. Fuentes, Marisa J. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2016. Gan, Elaine et al. “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Ed. Anna Tsing et al. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2017. 1—14. Introduction: Why Ecological Archives? 119 Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness� Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Malm, Andreas. The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World� London: Verso, 2018� Morris, Charles. “Archival Queer.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 9 (2006): 145—51. Sprengel, Peter. “Fantasies of the Origin and Dreams of Breeding: Darwinism in German-language Literature around 1900.” Trans. Paul Buchholz. Monatshefte 102�4 (2010): 458—78. Uekötter, Frank, ed. Ökologische Erinnerungsorte. Vienna: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014� Ward, Megan, and Adrian Wisnicki. “The Archive after Theory.” Debates in the Digital Humanities. Ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2019. 200—05. Cultural Ecology, the Environmental Humanities, and the Ecological Archives of Literature 121 Cultural Ecology, the Environmental Humanities, and the Ecological Archives of Literature Hubert Zapf University of Augsburg, Germany Abstract: The paper discusses the role of literature in relation to the general archives of culture from the perspective of cultural ecology� It places literary studies in the transdisciplinary framework of the Environmental Humanities; looks at how the ecological turn in literary studies has changed the literal and metaphorical archives of our disciplines; outlines some basic ideas of a cultural ecology of literature and the ways in which literature acts as an ecological force in culture; and traces the ecological agency of literary archives, which are reaching back into deep-time memories of culture-nature-coevolution, as sources of imaginative energy in examples from American literature, referencing texts by Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, and Morrison. In the final part, the article addresses the productive relation between archive and experiment in creative responses to the Anthropocene in contemporary examples ranging from German poetry to the novel The Search for Heinrich Schloegel by Canadian writer Martha Baillie and to the 2017 Guillermo de Toro film The Shape of Water� Keywords: cultural ecology, environmental humanities, ecological archives, Anthropocene, North American literature, German poetry Let me start with a few comments on the environmental humanities which are being institutionalized worldwide as centers of environmental research and teaching in an attempt to reassess the epistemic, social, cultural, and political relevance of the humanities in the knowledge production of universities and in the creation of a more sustainable society� Within this new interdisciplinary assemblage of disciplines, however, the status of literature and literary studies seems rather uncertain. While it is frequently asserted that literature, art, and other forms of cultural creativity as a core area of the humanities have some- 122 Hubert Zapf thing important to offer to environmental knowledge, it often remains rather unclear what this special contribution could consist of apart from general moral, culture-critical, and political interventions that can as well be made by sociologists, political scientists, or cultural philosophers — or, in fact, by engaged citizens and environmental activists. This uncertain role of literature has to do with at least two complex questions that such an interdisciplinary dialogue entails — the age-old but newly relevant question of how the knowledge provided by literature relates to the knowledge produced in other disciplines both within the humanities and in relation to the hard sciences; and the very urgent contemporary question of the role of literature — and of other forms of cultural creativity — in an age of global ecological crisis designated by the omnipresent new concept of the Anthropocene� The first question demands new reflection on the specific potential of literature as a form of ecological knowledge and communication in its own right — which is what cultural ecology is trying to do; the second question, which uneasily intersects with the first, concerns the role of the cultural past in general, and of literature in particular as part of the anthropocentric history of Western thought. If the escalating ecological crisis is to a significant extent due to a deeply ingrained mindset based on the hierarchical domination of mind over body, culture over nature, humans over the nonhuman world that shapes the grand narratives of Western culture, then it is evidently the task of the environmental humanities to expose these historical ideas and narratives as manifestations of a false consciousness that has to be radically revised and replaced by new ideas and narratives more adequate to the political, ethical, and aesthetic challenges and responsibilities of the Anthropocene� Of course, such critical examination of traditional concepts of culture and nature and of the asymmetries of power that they helped to legitimize in colonial, racist, gender, and capitalist discourses, is an indispensable task of literary studies and textual analysis in an environmental humanities context. The problem with such a hermeneutics of suspicion 1 is that in its totalizing gesture it undermines the very attempt to bring literary studies into the epistemic field of environmentally oriented knowledge not just as a disavowal of its own past or as a merely derivative illustration of the knowledge of other disciplines but as its own domain of alternative, specifically complex forms of ecological knowledge which offers a history of thought and imagination that may not be obsolete at all but rather of special importance precisely in an age of ecological crisis� It seems to me that the theme of this special issue, “Ecological Archives,” points in this direction� In choosing this particular focus, the editors act on the epistemic premise that there is a task beyond the mere dismissal of the cultural past, which is the recovery, reexamination, and contemporary actualization of Cultural Ecology, the Environmental Humanities, and the Ecological Archives of Literature 123 forgotten, marginalized, suppressed, or underestimated documents, texts, ideas, and genres that appear in a new light as precursors and anticipators of current ecological thought, and that can indeed become sources of alternative models of a more ecologically minded culture of the future� In its widest sense as proposed by Foucault in The Archeology of Knowledge, the archive is what regulates everything that can be said and what remains unsayable in the discourses of a culture, what is preserved and what is silenced in the cultural memory� Archives in this view always involve processes of inclusion and exclusion, of selection and legitimation that are intrinsically related to the historical power structures, the ‘regimes of truth’ from which such archives emerge� In the case of the archives of literary studies, this means that the sources of disciplinary knowledge production such as texts and theories, canons and methods of interpretation are both preserved and constantly being redefined by the shifting epistemic paradigms that are shaping the discipline. In this ongoing process of defining their foundational epistemic premises, literary studies are therefore centrally confronted with “the question what legitimately belongs to the archive” (Manoff 13). In our situation today, it would certainly be misleading to assume any one such single predominant epistemic paradigm in literary studies, but among the range of diverse current approaches in the field, a development towards a more ecologically minded orientation does seem to be one of its characteristic overarching features� It therefore does not seem an exaggeration to talk of an ecological turn in literary and cultural studies that began in the late 20th century and gained increased momentum in the 21st century� What this entailed in terms of redefining the archives of the discipline manifested itself at first in the emergence of ecocriticism in the 1990s, when with the landmark book by Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination, the tradition of American nature writing in the footsteps of Henry David Thoreau was reassessed as an important contribution to a more ecologically minded literary culture than that offered by the then prevalent canons of modern and postmodern texts and theories� As this narrow realist focus widened in the successive waves that characterized the accelerating growth of ecocritical studies in the last couple of decades, other hitherto neglected or unheard sources and voices were rediscovered or newly written into the archive from ecofeminist, postcolonial, indigenous, mediaor genre-specific perspectives and from the unearthing of an ever-increasing wealth of proto-ecological sources from earlier historical periods (Zapf, Handbook of Ecocriticism). The effect has been an enormous extension and diversification of the field, but also an ecological rereading of major texts and theoretical models� 124 Hubert Zapf One of the most significant of these developments was the extension of the initial Anglo-American focus towards a transnational and indeed global framework, which at the same time went along with a growing awareness of the diversity of distinct cultures of ecological knowledge� A sign of this double but interconnected tendency are volumes such as the Cambridge Global History of Literature and the Environment (Parham and Westling) on the one hand, and the volume Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture (Dürbeck et al.) on the other, one trying to convey a sense of the multiplicity of ecological cultures worldwide, the other taking the example of German studies to assess the distinct contributions of German literature and culture to transnational ecological thought� In between these poles, the Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology that I edited in 2016 steers a middle course in that it is conceived from a European background but also includes exemplary ecocritical positions from the U�S� and from around the world� The redefinition of the archive that this entails can be clearly seen in the German studies volume just mentioned. While covering emergent genres of environmentally engaged writing such as climate change fiction, ecothrillers, and ecopoetry, it also traces proto-ecological ideas in classical and romantic writers and reassesses the contributions to ecological thought by theoretical approaches from Naturphilosophie to phenomenology, from the Frankfurt School to Luhmann’s systems theory and Ulrich Beck’s notion of world risk society (Dürbeck et al.) Caroline Schaumann’s contribution on Alexander von Humboldt, for example, reassesses the new relevance of this eminent explorer, writer, and multidisciplinary scientist, by pointing out how Humboldt conceived the world as a dynamic interweaving of active forces and thus anticipated the modern ecological idea of interactive networks as a fundamental feature of the global web of life (“Alexander von Humboldt as Ecologist”). Schaumann elucidates how in Humboldt’s writings, among which his massive Kosmos stands out as his opus magnum, Humboldt already pointed out the first symptoms of the global environmental challenges of the Anthropocene — deforestation, desertification, species depletion, and climate change -, and therefore must be considered a pioneer ecologist whose reception, after long neglect, has significantly intensified in recent years. Another example of a classical German writer who has been reread from an ecocritical angle is Goethe, whose attempts to bring art and the sciences more closely together resonate with contemporary ecotheory as much as his view of life and literature as a process of continuous becoming that unfolds in always emergent moments of contact between world and self, nature and culture, mind and matter. In her chapter on “Goethe’s Concept of Nature,” Heather Sullivan looks at this process in Werther, the Farbenlehre, and in Faust, and reads this core text of the canon in new ways by showing how the journey Cultural Ecology, the Environmental Humanities, and the Ecological Archives of Literature 125 of the human mind towards self-discovery leads in the end not to a separation but to a reconnection of mind and matter as the source of meaning and survival. Another instructive case in this ecological rewriting of the archive of German Studies is the reassessment of German romantic poetry and philosophy by ecocritics such as Kate Rigby, Sabine Wilke, Wendy Wheeler, and others. Poetry and Naturphilosophie were intersecting in the works of Goethe, Schlegel, Novalis, or Schelling, and it is especially this connection between poetry and philosophy that has found new attention in its fusion of mind and matter, thought and imagination, human and natural creativity, as epitomized in Schelling’s formula that “nature [is] visible mind, mind invisible nature” (Rigby, “Romanticism and Ecocriticism” 67). In the semiotic networks that link the communicative processes of life with human language and communication, such as in the notion of Natursprache (language of nature), these writers and philosophers in this view anticipate insights of modern biosemiotics, which has become one of the new, cutting-edge directions of current ecological thought (Rigby, “Earth’s Poesy” 45). This reassessment also applies to later authors, texts, theories, and movements in German intellectual history such as the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, whose significant contribution to ecological thought had not been acknowledged in former paradigms such as Marxist, poststructuralist, or historical-materialist approaches (Müller). In terms of of literary genres, the volume Ökologische Genres, edited by Evi Zemanek, likewise documents this rewriting, addressing not only the established ecocritical modes of pastoral and apocalypse but diverse genres from fairy tale to gothic novel, from Bildungsroman to science fiction, from diary to travelogue as part of the long-term archive of an ecological imagination� Cultural ecology is a theoretical project which participates in this rewriting of the archive as a way to bring different periods, genres, and epistemic models into conversation with each other from an overarching transdisciplinary interest in their contribution to ecocultural knowledge, with a particular focus on their elucidation of the ecological dimension of literature and other forms of aesthetic discourse� This brings me to a necessarily very brief outline of some of the basic assumptions of a cultural ecology of literature that I have summarized in Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts� A guiding assumption of this approach is that imaginative literature deals with the basic relation between culture and nature in particularly multifaceted, self-reflexive, and transformative ways, and that it produces an ‘ecological’ dimension of discourse precisely on account of its semantic openness, imaginative intensity, and aesthetic complexity. This focus on imaginative, artistically complex texts does not imply any presumption of cultural elitism but rather an exploration of the critical-creative potential of 126 Hubert Zapf the aesthetic as a vital mode of ecological knowledge and transformation� It resonates with Derek Attridge’s notion of the “singularity of literature,” even while acknowledging the indissoluble interdependence and semiotic coagency of individual texts with their intertextual and historical-cultural environments� One of the theoretical background references is Gregory Bateson’s Ecology of Mind, which explores what he calls “connecting patterns” between mind and life, expanding the mind of the individual ego toward an ecology of vital interrelations with other minds and with their material as well as historical-cultural environments (Steps to an Ecology of Mind). What is of special interest to literary studies is that Bateson posits an analogy between ecological and poetic thought and ascribes a central role to metaphor in expressing and communicating those ‘patterns which connect’ heterogeneous domains of mind and life (A Sacred Unity). Another key reference is Peter Finke’s Evolutionary Cultural Ecology and the notion of cultural ecosystems that he develops from Bateson’s ecology of mind and from Jakob von Uexküll’s distinction between Umwelten, Merkwelten and Innenwelten, of the interacting worlds of ambience, memory, and interiority in ecological processes� Combining evolutionary biology, systems theory, and linguistics, Finke points out that the characteristic environments of human beings are not just external but internal environments, the inner worlds and landscapes of the mind, of language, the psyche, and the cultural imagination which follow their own metabolic processes of energy transaction and make up the habitats of humans as much as their external natural and material environments (“Die Evolutionäre Kulturökologie”). Literature, art, and other forms of cultural creativity are essential in this view to contribute to the richness, complexity, and diversity of those cultural ecosystems to ensure their continuing evolutionary potential of self-correction and self-renewal� A cultural ecology of literature is positioned, on the one hand, in this general field of cultural ecology; on the other hand, it is likewise positioned in contemporary ecocritical theory and resonates with other approaches in the field such as material ecocriticism or biosemiotics, but also with traditions of critical and aesthetic theory that have helped to describe the cultural functions of literature (see Zapf, Literature as Cultural Ecology). In this transdisciplinary perspective, literature can itself be described as the symbolic medium of a particularly potent form of “cultural ecology.” This approach considers literary texts both as part of the discursive systems of a culture and a distinctive mode of knowledge, representation, and communication in its own right, a paradoxical, nondiscursive form of discourse which gains its creativity from the conflictual tension between the civilizational system and its exclusions. Its central assumption is that literature is not only a preferred medium for complex negotiations of the culture-nature relationship but that in its aesthetic transformation of experi- Cultural Ecology, the Environmental Humanities, and the Ecological Archives of Literature 127 ence, it acts like an ecological force in the larger cultural system� It breaks up closed structures of thought, language, and discourse, symbolically empowers the marginalized, and reconnects what is culturally separated. It inscribes the ecological principles of connectivity and diversity into language and discourse, bringing together conceptual and perceptual dimensions, ideas and sensory experiences, human and more-than-human domains in complex forms of embodied interactivity. The aesthetic mode in this view challenges the deep-rooted divide between mind and body, self and other, culture and nature that has shaped the dominant anthropocentric narratives of linear civilizational progress. Aesthetic theory, since its 18th-century manifestations in Baumgarten through Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche and Adorno up to Wolfgang Iser’s literary anthropology and Gernot Böhme’s ecophilosophical aesthetics of nature, has struggled with the double nature of art and literature as both a lived experience and a form of knowledge, as a form of sinnliche Erkenntnis, of “sensuous knowledge,” in which the tension and ambiguous coagency between mind and life was part of the ways in which the productivity of aesthetic and imaginative processes was conceived. What has emerged from these often controversial and still ongoing debates as a viable reference for cultural ecology is that literature — and aesthetic communication more generally — represents a specifically complex, nonsystemic, and intrinsically transdisciplinary form of embodied knowledge which is at the same time an ever-renewable source of critical and creative energies in the cultural system. The relationship of culture to nature is an intrinsic part of these “cultures of complexity,” as Sacha Kagan (Art and Sustainability) calls aesthetic processes, not in the sense of nature as an ideological construct but as a force field of energies which both sustain and exceed cultural processes of evolution and survival� The ecological function of literature in culture is thus not limited to questions of content or to explicit environmental themes but is a transformative semiotic force which opens up closed circuits of communication by reconnecting mind and body, internal and external environments, the cultural memory to the deeptime memory of culture-nature coevolution� It resists straightforward ascriptions of meanings but helps to create the imaginative space for otherness — both in terms of the representation of the unrepresented, and in terms of the reader’s coagency in the textual process� As such, it represents a source of ever-renewable creative energies in culture for ever new generations of readers, and in this sense I call literary texts sustainable texts (Zapf, Literature as Cultural Ecology and “Cultural Ecology and the Sustainability of Literature”). This assumption also has important implications for the notion of ecological archives in literature, which are not just sites of stored ecocultural memory but an 128 Hubert Zapf agentive force in texts and in their creative engagement with changing sociohistorical environments� Indeed, literary creativity characteristically emerges from feedback loops between these generative archives and the new text, between the recycling of deep-time ecosemiotic imaginations and their adaptation to current historical and aesthetic challenges� One such sustainable source of ecocultural energies from the literary archive are the four classical elements of water, earth, air, and fire which, even though they were replaced in science in the early 19th century by the periodic chemical system, remained active in art and literature as catalysts of aesthetic processes and imaginative stagings of human-nonhuman interactivity that draw on the ambivalent, both creative and destructive agency of material forces. The poetics of the four elements dates back to ancient cultures but is, as Anke Kramer and Evi Zemanek show in their respective chapters in the volume Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture, still influential as a source of both transgressive and connective energies in modern and contemporary texts� While Kramer demonstrates this primarily in mythic tales and romantic narratives (“Cultural History of the Four Elements”), Zemanek explores the common ground between elemental poetics and the notion of material agency in contemporary poetry, taking poems by Josef Czernin and Ulrike Draesner as her examples (“Elemental Poetics”). Another example is the motif of metamorphosis as a long-term generative form of the literary archive. Since its codification in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, itself a collection of previous archival sources, the motif has been enormously influential throughout literary history. Metamorphosis implies no strict ontological separation but a living interconnection of all animate and inanimate beings, and is closely associated with elemental poetics in that the elements can transform into each other and between human and nonhuman shapes (Kramer). In German literature, its significance is marked by key texts such as Goethe’s “Metamorphosis of Plants,” which takes the leaf as an archetypal form of both plant life and literary writing, deriving from the autopoiesis of nature the evolving patterns of human communication and creativity. But the motif likewise remains active in later transformations� In American literature, Walt Whitman’s poetry that he collected in his Leaves of Grass is a prime example� In its form, it is radically innovative and breaks out of former poetic conventions, while at the same time drawing in its texture on a rich repertoire of classical and romantic sources. The Dionysian flow of his free verse gains its creative energy not just from the affirmation of the new, but from the intertextual dialogue with the literary past inscribed into its language, motifs, and metaphors, but also from the actualization of the deep-time semiotics of Cultural Ecology, the Environmental Humanities, and the Ecological Archives of Literature 129 human-nature coevolution in the form of elemental poetics, human-animal metaphors, and ever new metamorphoses pervading his texts� Grass is of course the central symbol of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which as an unspectacular phenomenon of external nature becomes an inspirational source of both infinite diversity and infinite connectivity, a multiple source of mutual transformations between mind and nature, life and text (“O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues”; Whitman 26). It is the basis for always new metamorphoses of the self and the world in which the poet, too, includes himself, and which he passes on as his testimony to his readers when he rapidly ages in the end, anticipating his transition to death as a series of polymorphic shape changes between self, land, water, clouds, and air (“I depart as air / I shake my white locks at the runaway sun / I effuse my flesh in eddies / and drift it in lacy jags”), a modern Proteus figure who immerses himself in a very material sense into the deep-time knowledge and regenerative cycle of nature: “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles” (Whitman 78)—a metamorphosis of text into life which autopoetically reflects back on the ongoing interactivity between text and reader� It is worth noting here that in a transdisciplinary context, Whitman’s leaves of grass not only resonate with Goethe’s notion of the leaf as an archetype of both natural and ecopoetic creativity, but with contemporary observations on the significance of grass in human history that Dipesh Chakrabarty addresses in his landmark essay on “The Climate of History.” Chakrabarty points out that the widespread flourishing of grass coincided with the beginnings of agriculture in the Holocene about 10,000 years ago, at a threshold time after the last Ice Age when the atmosphere of the planetary ecosystem gained a state of precarious balance that made the development and survival of human civilization possible in the first place. Grass in its diverse forms including barley and wheat is indicative of the precarious coevolution of human with nonhuman life in the past millennia, which is increasingly threatened by anthropogenic alterations in climate, biodiversity, and the material atmosphere of the planetary ecosystem. Poetic voices like Whitman’s are interventions in this process which, by taking the semiotic potential of this icon of environmental fertility as a creative matrix of their texts, revitalize the deep-time knowledge of human-nature coevolution in the semiosis of modern texts� What Chakrabarty postulates as a new orientation in historiography in times of the Anthropocene, therefore, namely the fusion of human with natural history, of historical with evolutionary time is thus in a way already part of the long-term ecological archives that are actualized in ever new ways in the creative processes of literature� 130 Hubert Zapf As has been said before, cultural archives are themselves not closed monolithic systems of stored knowledge but exist in an ambiguous relation between what they contain and leave out, what they authorize and discard in their forms of institutionalizing the cultural memory. This tension between inclusion and exclusion, between “excision and excess,” as Sarah Nuttall calls it, limits their reliability but also represents a constant incentive to the imagination (283). In some of the best-known American novels, the archive is the starting point for their explorations of these tensions between past and present, exclusion and revitalization, control and excess, death and life associated with their creative processes� A prominent example is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, which can be read, on one important level, as an explicit autopoetic parable of this agency of the archive in the literary imagination. The story of the scarlet letter is derived from a discovery by the narrator in the archives of the Boston Custom House, where he finds enclosed in some forgotten documents a faded piece of scarlet cloth forming the letter A, which had once been sewn by the historical protagonist of the narrative, Hester Prynne. This material signifier, which had initially been a mark of social stigmatization intended to mean “adultery,” had been turned by Hester into an artful sign of her resistance to cultural conformity, which gains unexpected new force, after a lapse of two centuries, in the narrator’s present. As he touches the newly discovered sign in the archive, it emanates an electrifying heat as if of “red-hot iron” (Hawthorne 62) that affects his whole body and reawakens his long-dormant imagination in a sudden eruption of creative energy. The marginalized past gains new presence in the novel in its imaginative reincarnation in the story of Hester Prynne, which, carried forward by the magical force of the letter which is throughout associated with the element of fire, generates a critical metadiscourse on the imprisoning effect of Puritan fundamentalism as well as of Victorian regimes of gender roles and authoritative power, but at the same time activates counterdiscursive energies of emancipation and cultural self-renewal by reconnecting self and other, mind and body, intellect and passion in intense moments of contact and embodied interaction� The archive is also the starting point for the imaginative journey of another classical American novel, Melville’s Moby Dick, which begins with multiple extracts from sources on whales compiled by a sub-sub-librarian that, as it were, materialize in the white whale as a powerful agency in the novel. The whale represents opposite versions from the archive, as the demonized enemy of a biophobic civilization personified by Captain Ahab, and as a source of biophilic connectivity for the narrator Ishmael, who in the course of his deeply felt en- Cultural Ecology, the Environmental Humanities, and the Ecological Archives of Literature 131 counters with the whale is becoming aware of his “Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals” (Melville 254). In a historically and culturally different context, this transformation of the conflictual potential of official archives into an ecocultural counterdiscourse is shaping the creative process of one of the most important African American novels, Toni Morrison’s Beloved� In African American ecocritical approaches, questions of ecology are inseparably connected with questions of race, gender, and memory, 2 which are defining perspectives in all of Morrison’s novels, especially in Beloved. From various historical sources about slavery in the U.S., many of which she herself had compiled as a Random House editor in The Black Book, 3 Morrison retrieves the case of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who started killing her children as she was about to be recaptured by her owner, and turns the story of this forgotten victim of slavery into the main narrative of her novel. The driving force of this multiperspectival narrative, however, is a strange, half real, half imaginary woman called Beloved, who one day appears like a ghost from the past that seems to be a reincarnation of the protagonist’s dead daughter, but beyond this personal dimension also represents all anonymous victims of slavery since the times of the Middle Passage that are brought back to life in the stream-of-consciousness memories of various characters� Waves and water are an important element in the novel both as a grave of history in the Black Atlantic and as a medium of what Morrison calls “rememory,” a process of reliving and symbolically overcoming the traumas of the past through transformative story-telling (Morrison 44—45). In this process, African American traditions of story-telling, jazz rhythms and the sounds of blues are integrated into a painfully dissonant, experimental style which in its improvisational openness confronts the civilizational structures of modernity with the aberrations of its repressed past, but also activates deeper sources of creative energy from the reconnection of past and present, culture and nature, traumatic memory and tentative new beginnings in a postcatastrophic world� When Beloved reappears as a grown-up young woman at the novel’s beginning, she emerges from water: “A fully dressed woman walked out of the water” (63), and when she disappears again from her mother’s world at the novel’s end, she returns into her element of water, a naked pregnant woman, “with fish for hair” (328). 4 The historical-political narrative of African American trauma and regeneration has a mythopoetic subtext which blends human with nonhuman, cultural with natural energies. The fictional rewriting of the archives of history gains its imaginative force by the contextualization of its political and cultural dimensions within an ecological dimension that resonates with the deep-time memory of human-nature coevolution as a regenerative source of postcatastrophic life and survival� 132 Hubert Zapf In contemporary literature, the archive gains new significance in the context of the challenges to traditional aesthetic practices posed by the Anthropocene, which has become one of the key frames of reference in recent environmental studies (Dürbeck). It has been argued that in view of the unprecedented scale of the environmental, economic, intellectual, and ethical challenges of the Anthropocene not only political agendas and sociocultural practices need to be drastically changed, but inherited categories of literature and literary knowledge need to be adjusted to a posthuman condition, which limits the range of human agency and entangles the lives of individuals in hyperreal interdependencies that exceed their cognitive and emotional grasp� Inasmuch as all traditional literature and story-telling are based on such human categories of perception and experience, this fundamental crisis requires completely new forms of literary representation and communication including the extension of human to geological time-space, decentering the human subject, embedding individual lives in complex networks of relationships, acknowledging the independent agency of the nonhuman, and translating into aesthetic form the multiscalar nature of the problems in which these interconnected actor-networks in the Anthropocene are enmeshed (Clark 2015). However, while such ideas have provided fruitful impulses for both theory and various forms of creative practices, a purely oppositional, radically discontinuous view of the relation between the literary past and the Anthropocene not only neglects the significance of cultural memory for any sustainable vision of the present and future (Assmann). It also eclipses the long history of the ways in which imaginative literature has been dealing with crisis, disaster, and, indeed, with alternative forms of culture-nature communication� In its experimental innovations, the literature of the Anthropocene inevitably draws on the repertoire from various historical, cultural, and literary archives in its creative response to the challenges of this new gobal mega-crisis of human history� A binary definition of Anthropocene literature in the neo-avant-gardist mode of a complete break with the literary past is not only theoretically unsustainable but also fails to correspond with the actual forms of literary production� A case in point is the German poetry collection Lyrik im Anthropozän, which features texts from a wide spectrum of both established and emergent poetic voices within the overarching framework of the Anthropocene (Bayer and Seel). The poems are verbal explorations at the interface between geological and historical time, scientific and metaphoric language, realism and phantasy, biomorphic and technomorphic images, elemental poetics and subjective dreamscapes, urban and wild spaces, human and animal ecologies. It is these self-reflexive poetic excursions into the boundary zones between the familiar and the alien, the human and the nonhuman, the sayable and the unsayable, language and its Cultural Ecology, the Environmental Humanities, and the Ecological Archives of Literature 133 limits that provide for the enormous variety and productivity of the collection� The deep-time archives of poetic creativity as described above — elemental poetics, human-animal symbiosis, metamorphosis — remain potent sources of these anthropocenic poetic experiments. In the concluding essay, Karin Fellner points out four characteristic features of poetic writing in the Anthropocene — bezeugen, inmitten sein, defokussieren, durchlässig werden — i.e., to “bear witness” to what has been lost but needs to be remembered in the face of the environmental crisis; to be aware of our being “in the midst” of multiple relations with the material environment; to “defocus” one’s mind and perception by allowing the poetic word play to wander into the blurred margins of prevailing discourses; to “become permeable” by opening oneself to the small, the inconspicuous and apparently insignificant, the sublime traces of living interconnections between humans and nature even within a world of anthopogenic deformations. For each of these four features of Anthropocene poetry, Fellner cites poetic precedents, proto-ecological voices from the literary past — Eichendorff, Droste-Hülshoff, Jean Paul, Robert Walser. As Axel Goodbody writes in his essay in the same collection, citing Heinrich Detering, “contemporary poets such as Jan Wagner, Silke Scheuermann and Nico Bleutge have drawn from the archive of past forms and treatments of themes in their creative response to the Anthropocene” (Goodbody 303; my trans.). Alongside the remarkable spectral pastoral of human-geological metamorphoses in Droste-Hülshoff’s “Die Mergelgrube” (“The Marl Pit”), he names Goethe’s “Metamorphosis of Plants” as one particularly influential precursor text (Goodbody 301). This creative recycling of the archive produces “ecologically sensitive, self-reflexive forms of writing” (303) which address topics like species depletion and the devastations of global capitalism not in a one-dimensional, didactic manner but in multifaceted and polysemic forms, whose openness to the active cointerpretation of readers is one of their constitutive elements� In the genre of the novel, an example of the rewriting of the archive as a transformative link between past and future, cultural memory and ecological counterdiscourse, which is of special interest in a transatlantic context, is the novel The Search for Heinrich Schlögel (2014) by Canadian writer Martha Baillie. Because of its exemplary character for the previous observations, I discuss this relatively little-known but artistically remarkable novel in somewhat more detail. The search that the novel describes involves a double plot — the expedition of a young man named Heinrich Schlögel to the Canadian Arctic in the tracks of the explorer Samuel Hearne -, and the search of Heinrich’s sister Inge for her brother, who disappears one day from his German town of Todtnang into the New World without leaving any trace. For a long time, the two plot lines seem rather unconnected and the narrative switches back and forth between 134 Hubert Zapf them in the form of letters, journal entries, remembered scenes, comments, observations and philosophical comments by both siblings. This shifting assemblage of texts is composed from a continuously expanding archive in which an anonymous archivist collects every source of information that can be found about Inge’s missing brother and through which the reader is pulled into the strange obsessiveness and erratic turns of Heinrich’s quest. While we follow his expedition into an increasingly fantastic wilderness of the Canadian north, we encounter sublime and bizarrely beautiful landscapes which manifest their geological agency in epiphanic moments of revelation, and witness how Heinrich is transported into a time warp when, like a latter-day Rip van Winkle, he only realizes on his return to civilization that he has been away for thirty years instead of a few weeks� On his journey, he imaginatively enters a deep-time zone of natural history that precedes the anthropocentric world from which he had escaped, but also bears witness to the environmental changes brought about in the Anthropocene. As he returns to civilization, he is confronted with new confusing inventions such as the computer, email, globalized travel, commerce, and communication, while at the same time suffering from an unceasing and ever-intensifying noise in his ears like the sound of rushing water — the noise of the melting glaciers whose symptoms he had witnessed in his excursion into the Arctic. The real and the imaginary are indissolubly mixed in this story of exit and return, and while the fantasmatic exploration of the wild is infused by the reality of ecological crisis, the realistic depiction of civilization is shot through with phantasmatic scenes and images from wild nature — as in the final scene of the novel, in which Heinrich is spotted to be followed by two wild animals, a fox and a stag, in the streets of Toronto, where he had finally met up with his sister, only to take leave again and continue on his unfinished search, accepting in the end his in-between position between past and present, the cultural ecosystems of humans and the natural ecosystems of the earth as his precarious condition of existence� The Search for Heinrich Schlögel is thus not a linear but a multiply recursive, nonlinear narrative emerging from an archival imagination which both confirms and suspends the connections between self and other, human and nonhuman world, time and space, past and present that the novel is trying to explore� This search also involves a cross-cultural dimension. The title resonates with the Schlegel brothers as representatives of German romanticism, whose concept of progressive Universalpoesie (progressive universal poesy) clearly influenced the composition of Baillie’s novel in its mixture of genres, its blending of poetic and philosophical language, of science and imagination, and in the fragmentary open-endedness of its search for knowledge and truth� It also resonates with the importance of translation that is central to the Schlegel brothers’ notion of Cultural Ecology, the Environmental Humanities, and the Ecological Archives of Literature 135 philology, art and literature. Its evolving fictional archive is composed from both German and English sources, and extends its range to the Inuktikut language and culture which Heinrich Schlögel encounters on his journey. The legacy of German romanticism alluded to in the title is translated in the novel into a New World context in two ways — as a sensorium for the global impact of the Anthropocene on the natural world of the Arctic from an awareness of deeptime culture-nature coagency, and as an acknowledgement of the indigenous knowledge of nature in Inuktitut culture, whose representatives combine an exceptional resilience and ability to adapt to modernity with an awareness of the cultural dispossession and environmental damage that this modern lifestyle has brought about� It is in the contact with this indigenous knowledge and sensitivity that Heinrich’s hearing of the melting glaciers intensifies to an ultimately unbearable noise at the end of the novel, which transgresses the textual attempt of an archival comprehension of the geo-ecological changes of the Anthropocene, and translates the derangement of the human scale which this entails from a linguistic into an embodied experience, from a semantics into a somatics of aesthetic communication� As novels such as these show, alongside the other examples from different periods and literary styles that I have discussed in this essay, literature can contribute in important ways to the environmental humanities. It offers imaginative models of complex culture-nature interaction, which are a rich source of various directions of research and teaching at the interface of science and narrative, cultural and natural history, environmental and social justice, indigenous and cosmopolitan ecologies, postcolonial and transcultural studies, traditional narratives and narratives of the Anthropocene� It goes without saying that these or similar observations are also applicable to other genres, media, and forms of cultural creativity. In the medium of film, the 2017 movie by Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water, is a case in point, and I want to conclude with this example because it is a highly condensed illustration of aesthetic processes as creative forms of a cultural ecology� In this film, a strange attraction and growing intimacy develops between a mute cleaning woman named Elisa Esposito and an amphibian hominid creature that has been abducted from its natural South American habitat and is being subjected to horrific experiments for purposes of military research in the high-security government laboratory in which she works� Both Elisa, who was born in the liminal space of a river shore, and the alien creature are associated with the element of water, which becomes a major semiotic agency in the film that eludes and transgresses the rigid control of a biophobic civilization represented in the prison-like dystopia of the laboratory. This fluid force of transformative contact, which coemerges with their intensifying relationship, counteracts the 136 Hubert Zapf systemic repressions of a Cold War mindset personified in the leader of the secret experiment, Richard Strickland, whose aggressive claim to social normality goes along with a completely depersonalized, self-eliminating sense of duty and discipline� Together with her gay neighbor, her African American friend, and a defected Russian spy who discovers his scientific ethos, Elisa manages to free the amphibian man from the tank in which he is enchained, and hides him from Strickland’s furious fanaticism in the bathroom of her private apartment. The transspecies erotic romance which develops in this unlikely environment is a phantasmatic condensation of the ecological forces that the film as a whole activates against a xenophobic culture based on a rigid ideology of white suprematist nationalism, which is depicted as an imprisoning wasteland, a ‘stricken land’ and culture of death whose toxic atmosphere poisons all lives and relationships under its control. The regenerative energies that this ecological counterdiscourse supplies for the self-renewal of the cultural ecosystem are symbolically expressed in the magical self-healing power of the water monster, whose influence also bodily revivifies those in his contact sphere and bestows on them unknown resources of vitality, courage, solidarity, and civil disobedience. In the end, this regenerative force survives even after Elisa’s death, who is killed by Strickland in her attempt to save her beloved stranger from destruction but is resurrected dancing with him into the fluid medium of an oceanic imagination — which is of course the imaginary power of the film itself and of the various forms of cultural creativity that it incorporates� This conflict between biophobic and biophilic forces that drives the film’s creative process is staged within a multiplicity of aesthetic codes that are supplied by the archives of literature, film, music, painting, and dance. Framed retrospectively in the tone of a fairy tale by the voice-over of Elisa’s gay friend, the film quite conspicuously draws on narrative sources from ancient mythology, from elemental poetics and tales of sea nymphs, water spirits, and human-animal metamorphosis, but also on filmic adaptations of these sources as well as on a broad repertoire of TV shows, musicals, and performances, and especially on jazz which the mute Elisa uses as a means of nonverbal communication to bridge the gap of semiotic codes� In this multigeneric interplay of stories, images, and sounds, the film activates the archives of cultural creativity in ways that link the cultural memory to the evolutionary memory of the human species, restoring the values of love and empathy to the paralyzing divisions of society and envisioning a more sustainable form of life from the biophilic reconnection of humans to the living community of all creatures� The film, which won four Oscars, shows that the ecological archives of literature and art are still very much alive in contemporary culture� As a cross-medial fable of ecological renewal in an anthropocenic dystopia, The Shape of Water is Cultural Ecology, the Environmental Humanities, and the Ecological Archives of Literature 137 a critical intervention in a cultural imaginary in which forms of domination, repression and xenophobic nationalism resurface on the political scene. The film lends itself to productive readings in terms of environmental justice, of queer and postcolonial ecologies, of biosemiotics, of material ecocriticism, and of cultural sustainability studies, thus demonstrating the considerable relevance of art and literature for various domains of the environmental humanities� Notes 1 Originally coined by Paul Ricoeur, the phrase “hermeneutics of suspicion” has gained new critical relevance in current debates about more constructive forms of literary studies as advocated, among others, by Rita Felski in “Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion.” 2 See, e.g., Ruffin. 3 The Black Book. Ed. Roger Furman, Middleton Harris, Morris Levitt and Ernst Smith. New York: Random House, 1974. 4 The ecocritical significance of water as a transformative force in African American literature is pointed out, e�g�, by Wardi� Works Cited Assmann, Aleida. “The Future of Cultural Heritage and Its Challenges.”-Cultural Sustainability: Perspectives of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Ed. Torsten Meireis and Gabriele Rippl. London: Routledge, 2019. 25—35. Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Baillie, Martha. The Search for Heinrich Schlögel. Portland and New York: Tin House Books, 2014� Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. London: Paladin, 1973. —. A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind� New York: HarperCollins, 1991� Bayer, Anja, and Daniela Seel, eds� All dies hier, Majestät, ist deins. Lyrik im Anthropozän� Berlin: kookbooks, 2016� Böhme, Gernot. “Aesthetics of Nature — A Philosophical Perspective.” Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology. Ed. Hubert Zapf. 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Naturästhetik — Umweltethik — Wissenspoetik� Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018. ‘The Invention of Reality Required No More Records’: Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist Gundolf Graml Agnes Scott College Abstract: This essay focuses on two crucial aspects that undergird literature’s function as archive in the Anthropocene: first, its capacity to record and transmit human experiences across time and space; second, its ability to make visible the multivocality and multiperspectivity that is part of any archive but often silenced in favor of an alleged scientific neutrality. Through a close reading of Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr’s novels Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis (1984) and Morbus Kitahara (1995) this essay argues that the novels’ evocative descriptions of deranged time-space configurations are more than the messy, fictional ‘other’ to the scientific archive’s alleged accuracy. Building on Hubert Zapf’s notion of literature as cultural ecology, this article presents literary texts as dynamic and indispensable repositories of a holistic human experience. Ransmayr’s novels exemplify literature’s role in inspiring not only the actions that exacerbate the climate catastrophe but also in offering strategies for adapting to it. Keywords: literary fiction, archive, climate catastrophe, Anthropocene, Arctic, science, postcolonialism, postmodernity, Holocaust, memory, tourism, explorer Austrian author Christoph Ransmayr’s breakthrough novel, Die letzte Welt (1988), from whose final pages I borrowed the title phrase for this article, describes the fragility — and, perhaps, futility — of cultural preservation under the conditions of the Anthropocene in seemingly unequivocal terms: “Bücher verschimmelten, verbrannten, zerfielen zu Asche und Staub; Steinmale kippten als formloser Schutt in die Halden zurück und selbst in Basalt gemeißelte Zeichen verschwanden unter der Geduld von Schnecken” (Letzte Welt 287). 1 This quote 142 Gundolf Graml invites a reading of Ransmayr’s novel as yet another dystopian narrative of the end of civilization brought on by the heat waves, floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions that transform the text’s fictional worlds. However, in the context of the overall narrative’s focus on the concept of metamorphoses, the destruction of specific cultural systems of recording only mean the end of a world, not the world. The role of language as essential cultural archive, as tool that mediates between the natural and nonnatural world remains indispensable for the ongoing reimagination of humans’ interaction with their nonhuman environment. With its embrace of creative narration in the midst of natural catastrophes Ransmayr’s novel subverts attempts to read the drastic and violent destruction of European cultural achievements as dystopian roadmap for life in the context of climate change� In doing so, it anticipates what Timothy Clark describes as creative “deranging�” Clark argues that most ecocritical approaches still operate within “discursive practices that construct the scale at which a problem is experienced as a mode of predetermining the way in which it is conceived” (74; my italics). In other words, critical readings of the impact of climate change in a work that plays at the scale of a family or of a particular community will investigate the causes as well as the potential mitigation strategies within that scale. Instead of such limited time-space configurations, Clark challenges ecocritical approaches to think time spans in millennia and consider space at the planetary level (100). Clark’s second point of criticism questions the role of cultural imagination, and, in particular, of literature, in dealing with the consequences of the Anthropocene. His question, “how far is much environmental criticism vulnerable to the delusions that the sphere of cultural representations has more centrality and power than in fact it has? ” (21), must be taken seriously at a time when the overall readership for books is declining, digital media have turned attention into a coveted commodity, and educational curricula prioritize STEM fields over the humanities. However, Clark scrutinizes not only the relevance of literature but also the destructive implications and assumptions of given critical schools (whether historicist, formalist, postcolonial or, indeed, many others) […], whose modes of thought are entrenched in modes of cultural self-understanding that are either inherently destructive or which now become destructive in the Anthropocene. (21—22) Clark’s critical look at the interpretive framework and his questioning of the centrality of culture are relevant for this volume’s focus on ecological archives. For instance, what are the implicit conventions of power and hierarchy that underlie the concept of the archive? What modes of thinking and knowing do we deploy as researchers and scholars when we work with archives? What are Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist 143 our own roles as critics of, contributors to, and participants in the slow-moving catastrophe of climate change that we engage with in our work? As we broaden our interdisciplinary scope, deepen our historical perspective, and diversify the materiality of our archives, how can and should an awareness of the “habitability of the planet” manifest itself in our work? (100). In this article I will use Clark’s ruminations on the role of cultural texts as springboard for a discussion of the archival role of literature in the context of the Anthropocene. Hubert Zapf’s work on literature as cultural ecology shares with Clark a concern that ecocritical approaches are still too beholden to a “mimetic determinism” that prioritizes a topic such as “climate change […] at the expense of the multiplicity of other relevant topics in contemporary ecology as well as in politics, society, and culture” (Zapf 261). But Clark and Zapf differ in their evaluation of the relevance of cultural imagination for responding to life in the Anthropocene. Where Clark polemically questions the value of cultural imagination (see above), Zapf considers literature a central manifestation of language and, therefore, as a cultural ecosystem that has not only facilitated the development of humans as a species but also served as main interface with the nonhuman natural world. For Zapf, literature’s role as cultural ecological system manifests itself as the “dynamic interrelation of three major discursive functions: the functions of a culture-critical metadiscourse, an imaginative counter-discourse, and a reintegrative interdiscourse” (96). This triadic model underscores literature’s role as discursive space for the negotiation and reinvention of cultural memory as well as political and social configurations. In this chapter I will reread Christoph Ransmayr’s novels Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis (1984) and Morbus Kitahara (1995) as literary texts whose self-reflective use of language underscores the unique role of literature as a complex ecocultural archive� With its almost melancholic descriptions about the Arctic icescape before its rapid decline, Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis invites interpretations as prophetic text about the impact of climate change� However, what I will focus on is its use of fictional narrative to represent human experiences with nonhuman nature that are outside the usual discursive construction of the archive� Morbus Kitahara’s relevance for my discussion is based on the novel’s creative reworking of particular historical archives into a fictionalized text that demonstrates the powerful role of literature in accessing complex and complicated memories� Both texts exemplify their relevance as archives in the age of the Anthropocene by how they question particular human self-images based on ideas of dominating and controlling space, time, and communication� Both texts also foreground the role of language as ultimate interface between the human and the nonhuman world and, in doing so, underscore the centrality of language, literature, and of creative imagination as 144 Gundolf Graml archival resources for addressing the ecological challenges posed by life in the Anthropocene� The complex relationship between archives and ‘reality’ play a crucial role in Ransmayr’s debut novel, Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis (1984). 2 At the center of the plot is the character Josef Mazzini, an Italian-born Viennese writer who specializes in inventing fictional stories and events which he then tries to ‘verify’ with actual historical events: Er entwerfe, sagte Mazzini, gewissermaßen die Vergangenheit neu. Er denke sich Geschichten aus, erfinde Handlungsabläufe und Ereignisse, zeichne sie auf und prüfe am Ende, ob es in der fernen oder jüngsten Vergangenheit jemals wirkliche Vorläufer oder Entsprechungen für die Gestalten seiner Phantasie gegeben habe. (SEF 20) Mazzini’s obsession concentrates on the northern regions of the globe, whose “unbewohnte, kahle Landschaften und nördliche Einöden” prove to be perfect “Kulissen” for his fictionalization of the past (SEF 22). In this process he comes across reports about the Austro-Hungarian polar expedition of 1872-74. Thinking that he has found “einen Beweis” for one of his stories, Mazzini “durchwanderte die Archive” where he discovers the torn-up logbook of the Admiral Tegetthoff, the expedition’s ship, as well as the diaries and journals written by the expedition’s leaders, Julius Payer and Carl Weyprecht (SEF 23). But for Mazzini’s quest to revive a “verjährte[.] Wirklichkeit […] waren alle Archive zu eng, zu klein.” His desire to reconstruct the expedition’s ‘real’ experience “vor den Kulissen der Wirklichkeit” leads him to plan his own journey into the Arctic. He travels to Greenland, where he secures a coveted spot on a Norwegian boat conducting scientific exploration in the polar region. The vessel takes him to Svalbard, a group of Arctic islands under Norwegian domination. There he is last spotted, outfitted in the historical garments of nineteenth-century explorers, driving off into the polar night on a dogsled (SEF 23—24). Mazzini’s disappearance at the very beginning of the novel turns out to be the point of origin for the plot. A friend of Mazzini’s asks the narrator to sort through the manuscripts, documents, and notes left behind by the disappeared storyteller. Instead of a linear narrative, the novel’s unfolding plot presents itself as a “bricolage” and “patchwork” (Nethersole 136) in which scientific reports, diary excepts, photographs, and drawings from the historical expedition are intermingled with observations and comments by Mazzini. The narrator then adds his own layer of thinking and writing to the collection when he reveals that his absorption into the “Fall [case]” of Mazzini has prompted him to go beyond simply sorting and sifting through Mazzini’s archive: Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist 145 Das dünne, blau gebundene Heft, das er damals vollkritzelte, liegt jetzt vor mir; […] Gewiss, es ist nicht Josef Mazzinis Handschrift, die auf dem Umschlagbild den Titel dieser heillosen Sammlung von Zitaten festhält. […] Das habe ich geschrieben. Ich. Ich habe auch die anderen Hefte Mazzinis mit Namen versehen. […] Ich bin mit den Aufzeichnungen verfahren, wie jeder Entdecker mit seinem Land, mit namenlosen Buchten, Kaps und Stunden verfährt - ich habe sie getauft. Nichts soll ohne Namen sein. (SEF 177) This “spatial rather than temporal textual ordering” (Nethersole 136) complicates the notion of archives by multiplying their presence and questioning their veracity. The narrator sorts, interprets, and adds to the archive of Mazzini, who has in turn explored and interpreted the archives of the historical Payer-Weyprecht expedition. As the narrator’s montage and framing of Mazzini’s excerpts from the historical diaries and reports make clear, the expedition itself is a result of consulting and interpreting a vast archive of narratives about earlier polar voyages� Mazzini’s disappearance serves as linchpin for how the novel reevaluates literature’s complex role as cultural ecological archive. On the one hand, it criticizes the linear and unidirectional use of archives as containers of information that can be translated into reality. Mazzini’s fruitless efforts to reconstruct the exhibition’s experience via the use of nineteenth-century garments and a dogsled casts such uses of the archive as counterproductive and dangerous� On the other hand, Mazzini’s disappearance provides the narrator (and, ultimately, the author) with the opportunity to reconceptualize the archives in such a way that the multiple voices and perspectives that Mazzini has ignored become audible and visible� While the former, linear and unidirectional use of the archive appears to lead only deeper into a cycle of self-defeating attempts of trying to mold human reality to the constraints of traditioned knowledge, the latter introduces literary narratives as a form of archivization that combines in itself the function of knowledge storage, critical self-reflection, and imaginative reconstruction of present and future� Over the years since its publication, critics have read Ransmayr’s Schrecken variously as a manifestation of a postmodern play with the infinite loop between the signifier and the signified (Menke); as a commentary on the construction of reality through discourse (Müller; Nethersole); and as a eulogy to the role of myth and the human subject (Cook). As incisive and instructive as these analyses are, they mostly gloss over the text’s critical perspective on the tension between the traditional use of historical archives and literature’s imaginative power. Ransmayr repeatedly describes how a conventional use of historical archives produces solutions and discoveries whose long-term negative 146 Gundolf Graml consequences for the planet outweigh their short-term benefits. The imaginative tools of literature provide an opportunity to criticize and also reenvision aspects of scale and power and, consequently, facilitate a reconceptualization of the archive as a multivocal and multiperspectival space� The narrator’s retroactive contextualization and ordering of Mazzini’s archival exploration reveals how archives have traditionally anchored and projected power in a political, economic, social, and also environmental context� Not coincidentally, Mazzini discovers the Admiral Tegetthoff’s logbook and unopened letters and diaries by Payer and Weyprecht in the “Marineabteilung des österreichischen Kriegsarchivs” and the diary of the engineer Otto Krisch in “der Kartensammlung der Nationalbibliothek” (SEF 23). Connected to the strategic centers of power of the former Habsburg empire, the military archive and the disciplines of geography and cartography underscore that the history of polar expeditions is at its core a history of colonialist and imperialist conquest fantasies. Late nineteenth-century attempts to reach the North Pole and to discover new routes through the Arctic sea were propelled by centuries-old dreams about a shortcut to the imagined (and imaginary) riches of Asia: Nordöstliche Passagen, nordwestliche Passagen, Packeismauern, eisfreie Sunde, das Ende der Welt, der Pazifik! , Steine und Kaps, Inseln, Treibeis und guter Wind - wer wollte nicht durch alles Chaos und alle Rätsel hindurch ÜBER DAS EISMEER ins Paradies und daraus mit allen Kleinodien des Ostens zurückkehren, vor die Fürsten und Handelsherren hintreten und sagen: Ich war der Erste! (SEF 56) Although Payer and Weyprecht as commanders of the 1872 expedition proclaim to follow purely scientific goals, their writings echo these orientalist cultural narratives. A cultural script consisting of Romanticist descriptions of sublime Arctic landscapes can be traced in most of the excerpts from Payer’s diaries (Nethersole 139—40), especially in his reminiscing reflections on how they had initially imagined the act of discovering an island in the far north: “Seine Thäler dachten wir uns damals mit Weiden geschmückt und von Renthieren belebt, welche im ungestörten Genuß ihrer Freistätte weilen, fern von allen Feinden ( Julius Payer)” (SEF 38). Payer, who is most of all interested in filling in the last empty spots on the map, nonetheless admits: “Das ideale Ziel unserer Reise war die nordöstliche Durchfahrt […]” (SEF 46). Payer’s diary also repeatedly reveals the Romanticist notions of heroic (male) subject formation through conquest that undergirds narratives of scientific exploration. Even when the Admiral Tegetthoff becomes immobilized by the icefloats of the Arctic sea, Payer transforms it into an act of active exploration: “[…] eine trostlose Wüste nahm uns auf, willenlos für eine unbestimmte Zeit und Entfernung, drangen wir in sie ein ( Julius Payer)” (SEF 100; my italics). Payer’s metaphoric penetration of an icy Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist desert by a group of men trapped on a ship resonates with the symbolic role of the Arctic in Gothic Romanticist tales such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, where the polar region becomes the ultimate space — ultima terra — for male explorers to continue to pursue their unreachable goals (Menke 571; Nethersole 139). Precisely because the North Pole is imagined as unreachable it constitutes the perfect narrative marker for producing closure where the quests themselves would continue ad infinitum: Das Polargebiet dementiert als Bibliotheksphänomen, das es doch ist, durch seine intertextuelle Verfaßtheit das, was an ihm aufgefunden werden sollte, den Ort ohne Spuren und topos der Spurlosigkeit� Spuren müssen schon hinterlassen worden sein� Das Polargebiet, der Ort jenseits aller Eintragungen wird begangen schon immer in den Spuren von Vorgängern. (Menke 571) The legacy of this Romanticist discourse manifests itself in Payer’s characterization of the members of the 1872 expedition as scientific trailblazers and admired public heroes who “in einem Kampf für wissenschaftliche Ziele, der Ehre unseres Vaterlandes dienen […] ( Julius Payer)” (SEF 37). This conflation of scientific goals with patriotic pathos and imperialist fantasies will find its culmination in the discovery of an archipelago of ice-covered islands that brings such hope to the crew that they decided “ihrem fernen Monarchen dadurch ein Zeichen ihrer Huldigung zu bringen, daß sie dem neuentdeckten Lande den Namen Kaiser Franz Josefs-Land gab ( Julius Payer)” (SEF 151). Discovery in the name of science invokes ideas of enlightenment and rationality, but the naming of newly discovered, distant territories pulls them into the existing power structures of an imperialist worldview� It is through its practices of naming and mapping that science reveals its underlying colonialist impulses: “Die Entdecker der Neuen Welt können sich vom Horizont der Alten Welt noch lange nicht verabschieden” (Schlögel 183). Repeated protestations by Payer and Weyprecht that their expedition’s goal was to reach “kein Land, kein zu eroberndes Reich, [sondern] nichts als Linien, die sich in einem Punkte schneiden, und wovon nichts in der Wirklichkeit zu sehen sei! ( Julius Payer)” (SEF 43) only underscore to what extent the discourse of science also draws on the archives of colonization and imperialism. The still relatively new science of cartography had grown out of an enlightenment desire to better understand the world. It also became an essential tool for expanding European imperialist and colonialist power. As Karl Schlögel writes in Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit, geographic surveys had transformed governing power from control over people, roadways, and natural resources into control over space and territories, first in eighteenth-century France, then in other European regions, and finally across the globe (Schlögel 173). While the process of mapping 148 Gundolf Graml and surveying did indeed rely on a grid of lines and triangles only visible in maps, its reality effect transcended the maps, especially when it came to the domination of distant, colonial territories: “Für die Kolonialmächte war die Vermessung der neu eroberten Territorien eine Grundvoraussetzung für dauerhafte Unterwerfung und Ausbeutung […]” (Schlögel 175). Payer’s and Weyprecht’s descriptions of the expedition’s goal as trying to reach a goal identified only by converging lines thus omits to what extent science has become compromised by colonialist power� Weyprecht’s diaries, usually less literary than Payer’s, not only reveal how the expedition’s European scientific gaze marginalizes spaces based on their perceived lack of relevance for a (self-proclaimed) center of power but also illustrate how the colonialist perspective of science impacted humans’ perception of the nonhuman natural world (Nethersole 137, 139). Weyprecht, who spends his time measuring temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure endorses scientific research of all areas of the globe but dismisses the value of any more nuanced engagement with the region through the interface of language: [I]n jenen Breiten, die unbewohnt und unbewohnbar in Folge der dort herrschenden Verhältnisse nur für die reine Wissenschaft von Wichtigkeit sind, hat die beschreibende Geographie nur insoferne Werth, als durch die Bodenverhältnisse die meteorologischen, physikalischen und hydrographischen Erscheinungen der Erde beeinflußt werden; es genügt also die Skizzirung [sic] in großen Zügen (Carl Weyprecht). (SEF 151; my italics) Not only that Weyprecht describes the “arktische Detailgeographie” as irrelevant (“nebensäch-lich”), but he considers it altogether condemnable (“verwerflich”) if it impinges on the “wahre Zweck der Expeditionen, die wissenschaftliche Forschung (Carl Weyprecht)” (SEF 151). Weyprecht’s emphasis on ‘pure’ science anticipates once again the ambivalent legacy of scientific research as an element of the colonialist discourse. While it broadened Europeans’ understanding of the geographical surface of the globe, this acquisition of knowledge came at the expense of non-European people, whose voices and whose historical and cultural complexities were flattened into one-dimensional ‘scientific’ descriptions or silenced altogether. Such scientific colonialism increased humans’ knowledge about a wide range of natural processes and phenomena, while it simultaneously undermined their capacity to imagine themselves as part of the natural world and generated a self-destructive sense of human superiority over the nonhuman world based on the methods of quantitative science. To what extend this scientific perspective has shaped mainstream experiences of our environment becomes most noticeable when the narrator quotes excerpts from a tourism brochure used by Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist 149 the fictional character Mazzini in preparation for his journey to Svalbard. The brochure details the immigration rules, describes the islands’ topography and climate, highlights the flights and ferries that connect the territory with the Norwegian mainland, and cautions visitors to stay away from polar bears (SEF 67—68). As the narrator summarizes, the brochure presents the islands as completely explored and scientifically categorized: “Es ist ein entlegenes, aber längst kein mythenverzaubertes Land mehr, in das Josef Mazzini aufbricht” (SEF 68). Lynne Cook reads Mazzini’s flight from the archives into the Arctic and his eventual disappearance as failed attempt to recover the power of myth as defensive mechanisms against the rationalism of modernity. Comparing Ransmayr’s treatment of myth with Hans Blumenberg’s work on myths as coping strategies that help human communities align their self-perception with the stress generated by modernity’s concepts of rationalism and progress, Cook argues that myth in Ransmayr’s works “does not enable humankind to successfully structure a less anxious space within the relationships with which it constructs its reality.” Instead, as Mazzini exemplifies, the “mythmaking individual” disappears (Cook 226). At first it does indeed seem as if Mazzini’s journey into the Arctic is only the most recent iteration of an unceasing process of the Arctic world’s rationalization and integration into “modern homogeneous time with its atomistic, sharp, clockwork like divisions […].” What began as the desperate fight of daring men in wooden ships against the terrors of ice and darkness culminated in the “annihilation of distances by technological means” (Nethersole 138). The fact that the population of Svalbard consists mostly of Norwegian and Russian coal miners who dig for the fossil fuel that facilitates this “annihilation of distances” casts a strong shadow of doubt on the overall benefits of this rationalization of the modern world (SEF 67). It is against the stifling forces of rationalization that Ransmayr mobilizes the forces of language and, especially, literature to not only chart existing worlds but create new ones: Mit der Sprache kann man zwar kartographieren, was objektiv existiert, aber bisher noch nicht entdeckt wurde, aber die Literatur geht weit über diese Fähigkeit hinaus: Ich kann als Schriftsteller auch weiße Flecken erschaffen. Mit der Sprache kann ich mich also einerseits der vermessbaren und abbildbaren Wirklichkeit zuwenden, habe aber gleichzeitig die Möglichkeit, das Komplementärbild zu entwerfen, die bloße Möglichkeit. (Wilke 38) Mazzini’s disappearance becomes the white space of possibility on the narrator’s own map of ‘reality,’ “[…] als ein Hinüberwechseln aus der Wirklichkeit in die Wahrscheinlichkeit” (SEF 62). Mazzini used the archival texts of the histor- 150 Gundolf Graml ical expedition as source for finding out how it was. The narrator, by contrast, is interested in how it could have been. Rather than simply trying to deduce information from the accumulated mass of documents, the narrator reorders and, as I quoted above, even rewrites Mazzini’s documents (SEF 177). What could be considered a manipulation of the archives results instead in the rediscovery of voices whose presence in the documents had been muted by a conventional understanding of archives and, consequently, in a diversifying of perspectives. When the narrator realizes that the diaries of the various expedition members record different dates for the ship’s arrival in Norway he briefly contemplates explaining the different dates with the range of events or places that the diaries’ authors considered as markers of arrival. However, he decides against it, arguing that a particular day’s degree of reality can never be higher than in the “Bewußtsein eines Menschen, der ihn durchlebt hat […]: […] Also sage ich: Die Expedition erreichte am zweiten, erreichte am dritten, erreichte am vierten Juli 1872 Tromsö. Die Wirklichkeit ist teilbar.” This realization of multiple realities applies not only to the recordings of different arrival dates but also to the vastly differing impressions that the vessel’s commanders and subordinates recorded in their respective journals, which seem to have chronicled not one but various and very different expeditions: “Jeder berichtete aus einem anderen Eis” (SEF 41). In using the “weiße Flecken” created by Mazzini’s disappearance to generate a very different archive of opportunities, a “Komplementärbild” of reality that cannot be verified by the facts housed in conventional archives but that is nonetheless true, the narrator and, by extension, Ransmayr, draw attention to literature’s capacity for making accessible through language that which happens outside the realm of discourse� Not only is the entire novel that the reader holds in her hands the result of Mazzini’s disappearance. The existing text also produces the very experience that Mazzini sought when vanishing in the ice. Only Mazzini would know what exactly he experienced, but since he vanished in a world outside discourse it is literature as a complex form of language that facilitates the creation of alternative worlds “where literature articulates what remains unavailable in the prevailing categories of cultural self-interpretation but nevertheless appears indispensable for an adequately complex account of the lives of humans and their place in the more-than-human-world” (Zapf 108). Besides demonstrating literature’s capacity for making accessible extra-discursive experiences, Ransmayr’s novel also draws attention to literature’s ability for generating “imaginative counterworlds” that allow for a “radical-critical self-reflection of human civilization” (Zapf 59). What Timothy Clark demands from ecocritics, namely an unblinking critical look at how particular “critical schools” and “modes of cultural self-understanding” contribute to anthropo- Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist 151 genic destruction, is an inherent element of literary texts� As Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis emphasizes, the imperialist quest for conquering the North Pole was indeed mostly a “Bibliotheksphänomen.” When Mazzini tries to convince the captain of the science vessel that he is a writer working on a book about the Arctic, the captain ironically comments that each Arctic adventure seems to have generated entire libraries, prompting Mazzini to quip: “aus jeder Bibliothek kommt wieder ein Abenteurer” (SEF 71). But the fact that unreflected reading and writing can exacerbate damaging anthropocentric pursuits does not result in a dismissal of literature’s value as cultural archive. On the contrary, the novel’s intentional and self-reflective engagement with the role and functions of language and literature as essential translation mechanisms between human and nonhuman nature reaffirm literature’s power to wrestle with the distortions of scale that Clark identifies as one of the core reasons for humans’ delayed identification of and response to the emerging catastrophe of the Anthropocene. The way in which the novel’s narrative frame connects the acts of walking with the acts of writing as essential forms of human engagement with the nonhuman environment is a case in point� In a preface titled “Vor allem” the narrator describes how modern forms of transportation seem to have reduced geographical distances and turned traveling into a “bloße Frage der Finanzierung und Koordination von Abflugzeiten” but points out that geographical distances remain “ungeheuerlich”: “Vergessen wir nicht, daß eine Luftlinie eben nur eine Linie und kein Weg ist und: daß wir, physiognomisch gesehen, Fußgänger und Läufer sind” (SEF 9). This passage frames Mazzini’s eventual disappearance in the Arctic as an — albeit quixotic — act of recreating ecologically sustainable scale relations between humans and the nonhuman environment within the discursive sphere of literature. Since Mazzini’s experience as “Fußgänger” is only accessible via a speculative and multi-perspectival narration, the preface is also a comment on literary writing as venue for rethinking our complex scalar relationships with the nonhuman world. The novel’s final sentences merge the image of the walker with the self-image of the writer: “Mit meiner Handfläche schütze ich das Kap, bedecke die Bucht, spüre, wie trocken und kühl das Blau ist, stehe inmitten meiner papierenen Meere, allein mit allen Möglichkeiten einer Geschichte, ein Chronist, dem der Trost des Endes fehlt” (SEF 262). The “Fußgänger” who sets out to experience the non-archival reality in all its dimensions ultimately, and paradoxically, transforms into the “Chronist” who understands the limitations of his literary narratives but is nonetheless compelled to continue them, for it is only through aesthetic literary narratives that one can even get close to communicating the richness and complexity of life� 3 The narrator’s self-categorization as chronicler underscores how literary texts can serve as cultural ecological archives insofar as their “imaginative count- 152 Gundolf Graml er-discourse […] relates back to concrete biophysical forms of information and communication in the pre-cultural world of nature but also transforms them into more abstract, symbolic, and generalizing systems of human interpretation and self-interpretation” (Zapf 80). The interrelation between language, cultural memory, and nature also plays a crucial role in Ransmayr’s novel Morbus Kitahara (1995), which addresses Germany’s and Austria’s post-World War II memory culture. Without once using the terms National Socialism, Holocaust, Germany, and Austria, Ransmayr creates an alternative historical scenario whose imaginative inventions exhibit literature’s role as cultural archive that complements and translates historical documents into an affective representation of history. At first glance, this focus might appear unrelated to the question of ecological archives. Yet, as I will show in my discussion, it is precisely because Morbus Kitahara does not foreground descriptions of a decaying nature and civilization as indicators of anthropogenic ecological decline that the novel illustrates the potential of literary narratives to serve as archive for making intelligible, for preserving, and for continuously regenerating the ecological dimensions of life� Rather than directly addressing the historical discourse of Austrian involvement in National Socialism and the country’s co-responsibility for the Holocaust, Morbus Kitahara deploys the tools of literary aesthetics to recombine three major discursive clusters that undergird postwar Austria’s self-image: history, tourism, and landscape. The novel critiques empty commemoration rituals and mobilizes cultural narratives in a way that reconceptualizes the notion of archivization with regard to Holocaust history and memory. By conflating a pointed and hyperbolic representation of these particular discourses with their simultaneous critical evaluation Morbus Kitahara models how “the generic difference of aesthetic texts” translates into “critical discursive energy which motivates a radical self-examination of prevailing systems” (Zapf 103). The creative and aesthetic fusing of the Austrian tourism landscape with the National Socialist topography of torture illustrates that the notion of literature as cultural ecological archive is grounded in the “dynamic interrelation of three major discursive functions: the functions of a culture-critical metadiscourse, an imaginative counter-discourse, and a reintegrative interdiscourse” (Zapf 96). The novel’s plot plays out in the small alpine town of Moor. The Friede von Oranienburg has brought an end to a protracted war and assigned the region to the victorious American occupation troops, who decided to dismantle the railroad tracks and switches in order to isolate Moor and the surrounding countryside from the industrialized lowlands. Once part of a flourishing tourism industry, Moor’s tourism infrastructure collapses: “Aus den Fenstern des Grand Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist 153 Hotels am See wuchsen Windhafer und Gras, und das eingestürzte Dach des Konzertpavillons bedeckte ein Chaos aus zerbrochenen Stühlen und Sonnenschirmen, deren Bespannung längst verfault war” (Morbus Kitahara 66). 4 During the war, Moor’s granite quarry housed a forced labor camp where the dictatorial regime tortured and worked to death people deemed unfit for its racialized vision of society. To make the locals pay for their complicity in the murders, the American occupation commander Elliott sets up a punitive repentance system. A gigantic inscription, its letters carved out of stone and positioned across the large terraces of the quarry in the former labor camp, broadcasts the murderous deeds far into the countryside: “Hier liegen/ Elftausendneunhundertdreiundsiebzig Tote/ Erschlagen/ Von den Eingeborenen dieses Landes/ Willkommen in Moor” (MK 33). Several times a year the locals must perform as former inmates of the forced labor camp and reenact torture scenes based on photos from the camp’s photo archive: Kostümiert als die Opfer jener geschlagenen Herrschaft, für die Moors Männer in den Untergang gezogen waren, mußten die Uferbewohner schon zur nächsten Party in gestreiften Drillichanzügen mit aufgenähten Nationalzeichen und Davidsternen vor imaginären Entlausungsstationen Schlange stehen, mußten als polnische Fremdarbeiter oder ungarische Juden vor einem ungeheuren Granitblock mit Hämmern, Keilen und Brechstangen posieren - und mußten vor den Grundmauern der zerstörten Baracken zu ebensolchen Zählappellen antreten, wie Elliott sie in seinem Album abgebildet sah. (MK 46) Commander Elliott is not interested in making the people of Moor experience these scenarios, he is mainly focused on visual likeness� During the restaging of a photograph called Die Stiege, which shows hundreds of inmates walking up a steep and long stairway carved into the rocks with large stone blocks on their backs, Elliott allowed the people of Moor to use cardboard or balled-up clothing instead of actual rocks: “Elliott wollte nur, daß sich die Bilder glichen und bestand nicht auf dem unerträglichen Gewicht der Wirklichkeit” (MK 47). Over the years, the population of Moor becomes inured to these attempts at generating remorse and commemorating the past via mimetic reenactments of the images and texts in the historical archives: “Moors Kinder langweilten die Erinnerungen an eine Zeit vor ihrer Zeit. […] [D]ie Rituale der Erinnerung, ob sie nun von der Armee befohlen oder von den Sühnegesellschaften gepflegt wurden, [waren für sie] nur ein düsteres Theater.” What the children of Moor saw on the billboards and heard in their history lessons paled in comparison to what they wanted to see: the multi-lane highways of America; the high-rises of Manhattan; and the statue of liberty (MK 176—77). 154 Gundolf Graml Despite the fact that the novel never mentions Austria by name, the topographical and historical reference points make it relatively easy to read the region of Moor with its nearby lake and its former labor camp as fictionalized version of the town of Ebensee, located at the Traunsee in the Salzkammergut, one of Austria’s oldest and best-known tourism regions. This identification prompted critics to compare the novel’s fictionalized commemoration rituals with the mockery of actual postwar memory culture by right-wing political parties. For instance, writer Christoph Janacs read the novel as manifestation of a postmodernist “Geisteshaltung, der alles eins und zum bedeutungslosen Zitat verkommen ist, und, was noch schlimmer ist, er bedient damit eine Neue Rechte, die begangenes Unrecht gar nicht mehr leugnet, sondern mystisch verbrämt und ästhetisch überhöht” (101). Such accusations miss that Morbus Kitahara’s critique of a fictionally hyperbolized Holocaust remembrance focuses on rituals that prioritize the mimetic reconstruction of spaces as well as the graphic, and often sensationalist, retelling of torture practices in cinematic formats, rituals that emphasize the verisimilitude of images and are not concerned with the “unerträgliche[.] Gewicht der Wirklichkeit” (47). As a self-reflective literary work, Morbus Kitahara explores ecological cultural models of archivization that preserve the weight of the past for a time when no survivors will be available anymore to combat attacks on the veracity and factuality of the historical events� Concerns about the diminishing role of archives in shaping cultural discourses significantly influenced the author’s writing process. The discrepancy between, on the one hand, the overwhelming archival and historiographic documentation of Austria’s co-responsibility for the Holocaust as historical and factual event, and, on the other hand, the often outright denial of these facts in postwar Austrian society troubled Ransmayr: “Es ist mir unmöglich, im Salzkammergut, in Ebensee, in Mauthausen durch die Kulissen meiner eigenen Geschichte zu gehen, ohne dabei nicht immer auch gleichzeitig in dieser Vergangenheit und einer möglicherweise drohenden Zukunft zu sein.” Ransmayr experiences the archives as irrefutable but also recognizes a general lack of awareness, “daß in all diesen Dokumenten von Menschen die Rede ist, von den Augenblicken einer Verhaftung, den Stunden und Tagen eines Verhörs, der Folter, den Jahren, der Ewigkeit, in den Lagern” (”…das Thema hat mich bedroht” 216). In Morbus Kitahara Ransmayr reconceptualizes the idea of the archive by focusing on tourism, arguably the central vanishing point for Austrian discourses of history and identity. Throughout the twentieth century, official Austrian national identity discourses cultivated a particular tourist gaze (Urry) that identified a mixture of beautiful landscapes, classical culture, and alpine nature as foundation for the performative construction of Austrianness (Graml, Revisiting Austria). Morbus Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist 155 Kitahara redeploys the tourist gaze as a critical lens for scrutinizing the cultural practices that undergird the denial of Austria’s involvement in the National Socialist crimes in the first place. While references to Austria’s tourism image composed of beautiful landscapes and of the country’s cultural historical legacy have often deflected from the critical and analytical engagement with Austrian history, Morbus Kitahara reinscribes the landscape and the natural environment itself with the traces of the criminal past. In doing so, the novel also draws attention to the role of language and literature as “culture-critical metadiscourse” (Zapf 96) that has the ability to re-examine its own cultural reference system. References to tourism frame the description of key spaces and plot strands from the very beginning and foreground the ideological underpinnings of this particular cultural matrix. The description of Moor’s location at a lake amidst towering mountains invokes a familiar tourist gaze and reminds the narrator of a “grüne[n] Fjord, ein von Lichtreflexen sprühender Meeresarm” (MK 31). Readers familiar with Austrian literature and geography will recognize the novel’s mentioning of names such as “Steinernes Meer” and “Totes Gebirge” but will be confused by their intentional misplacement� Disorientation begins to overwhelm the initial sense of recognition prompted by a familiar Austrian tourist gaze. And this tourist gaze itself is revealed as compromised: Aus dem Gestänge des zerschossenen Wachturms am Stellwerk war ein schöner Blick auf den See. […] Über die Weite des Wasserspiegels hinweg betrachtet erschienen bei klarem Wetter die Terrassen des Steinbruchs […]. Und hoch oben, irgendwo über dem Scheitel dieser Riesentreppe aus Granit, […] über den […] eingesunkenen Dächern des Barackenlagers am Schotterwerk und den Spuren aller Qualen, die am Blinden Ufer des Sees erlitten worden waren, begann die Wildnis […]. (MK 31—32) The imagined beholder of the tourist gaze who longs to see the beautiful landscape now becomes the point of origin of a visual remapping that centers on a landscape of torture and death. The former concentration camp of Mauthausen, located near Linz and infamous for its “Todesstiege” inside a marble quarry, and its subcamp of Ebensee, almost 100 km southwest of Mauthausen and location of a murderous work camp for rocket engines, merge into a surreal landscape where the murderous past and the arbitrarily cleansed postwar tourism landscape appear in jarring simultaneity� The novel’s invention of a stone inscription on the terraces of the fictional quarry draws attention to this reinscription of the torture landscape into the ‘beautiful’ tourism landscape. By tracing this distorted tourist gaze back to a watchtower, the novel scrutinizes not only the ‘truth’ of what is seen but also the positionality of the one who holds the gaze. Anyone who considers this perspective as affirming a comforting and traditional image of Austrianness 156 Gundolf Graml now also implicitly recognizes her/ himself in the position of a perpetrator, looking out from a watchtower and down into a concentration camp� In doing so, Morbus Kitahara exemplifies what Wolfgang Iser describes as a central role of literature, namely the capacity to not simply “reflect […] reality” but “mirror[.] its reverse side, which would otherwise remain hidden by the cultural context itself-[…]” (228). Ransmayr’s novel reveals “the uncharted regions” of postwar Austrian society’s “prevailing culture” (Iser 228) that wrote this murderous past out of the map of everyday discourses� 5 The gigantic stone letters that invoke tourist welcome signs can be read as effort to reinscribe the deeds of man into nature. However, the concept of nature is always already filtered and culturally contaminated via the discourse of tourism� Nothing can get at the prediscursive condition without reference to language, and yet language constantly fails at producing the versimilitude of experience� Worse, language carries with it all the cultural connotations that led to the atrocities in the first place. The stone inscription is thus more than a monument to history in nature; it is a conflicted monument to language as part of and crucial access route to nature� In his lucid reading of the novel as constructing a monumental “Geschichtslandschaft” Alexander Honold wonders if Ransmayr saw in the alpine sublime a discursive space where the Holocaust could be preserved as uniquely horrendous deed without running the risk “von einem der vielen nachgetragenen Erklärungsversuche bezwungen oder abgeräumt zu werden” (Honold 253). But rather than safeguarding the memory of the Holocaust into some remote terrain, Ransmayr pushes them to the center of Austria’s recharted memory landscape, using the language and aesthetic possibilities of literature to visualize what he calls the “Komplementärwinkel”: Wenn man den Komplementärwinkel nicht im Blick hat, sieht man eben nur einen Ausschnitt der Wirklichkeit, einen ermunternden, heiteren, tröstlichen oder besänftigenden Ausschnitt, aber es fehlt der Komplementärwinkel, der die Perspektive, den Blick auf die Welt schließt. Literatur, eine Erzählung, kann diesen Blick wiederherstellen. (”…das Thema hat mich bedroht” 216) Ransmayr anticipates here what Zapf considers literature’s second discursive function, its “imaginative counter-discourse” that makes intelligible and graspable that which is “culturally excluded and marginalized” (Zapf 108). By letting the imaginary tourist see the beautiful landscape from a watchtower and framed by the former torture camp, Morbus Kitahara suggests that a kind of double vision is required to recognize the horrendous past in the present. In a self-reflective narrative gesture the novel reaffirms the necessity for this double vision qua its negation, namely through the eye disease ‘morbus kitahara’ that afflicts the protagonist Bering. As one of Moor’s postwar children, Ber- Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist 157 ing is disinterested in the past� His refusal to learn more about the crimes of the past regime becomes challenged when he begins to work for Ambras, a survivor of the torture camp whom the American occupiers installed as manager of the quarry and governor of Moor after their departure. Ambras confronts Bering with the experience of Moor as a ‘double-place’ that means natural beauty for some and inescapable pain for others: Zurückgekommen in den Steinbruch? Ich bin nicht zurückgekommen. Ich war im Steinbruch, wenn ich […] durch die Schutthalden von Wien oder Dresden oder durch irgendeine andere dieser umgepflügten Städte gegangen bin. Ich war im Steinbruch, wenn ich irgendwo bloß das Klirren von Hammer und Meißel gehört oder nur dabei zugesehen habe, wie einer irgendeine Last über irgendeine Stiege auf seinem Rücken trug - […]. Ich bin nicht zurückgekommen. Ich war niemals fort. (MK 210) For the first time, Bering becomes aware that victims and perpetrators live “in der gleichen Welt […] wie sie selbst. Am gleichen See. Am gleichen Ufer” (MK 176), but that they also inhabit very different spaces of experience. Rather than trying to enter the experiential space of Ambras, the victim of torture, Bering enacts the same posture that postwar Austrian society has developed with regard to the historiographical archive: he looks away, and he does it so intently that he develops ‘morbus kitahara,’ a temporary eye disease that produces black holes in one’s field of vision. To overcome the blurred gaze at the world, Bering soon fills in the missing areas in his field of vision, “[er] sah, was er sehen wollte” (MK 232). Bering is temporarily able to reject the double vision, but the radical imaginative power of the literary “Komplementärwinkel” eventually forces him to ‘see’ the full weight of Ambras’ memories and join him in the “Unzeit, in der alle Zeiten, ihre Vergangenheit, ihre Gegenwart, ihre Zukunft zusammenschießen” (Ransmayr, “…die Zukunft hat mich bedroht” 215). The encounter between Ambras and Bering illustrates the third discursive function of literature Zapf identifies, its role as “reintegrative interdiscourse” that brings together the civilizational system and its exclusions in new, both conflictive and transformative ways (114). Despite his lack of empathy for Ambras’ suffering, Bering, child of the perpetrator generation who tries to evade the confrontation with the past, eventually becomes entangled and integrated into this past after the Allied occupiers have deported the entire population of Moor to Brazil. During an exploration to a remote former prison island off the Brazilian coast, the prison’s ruins trigger in Ambras a traumatic revival of his time in the torture camp. Misidentifying Bering as a camp guard, Ambras tries to escape and falls to his death, pulling Bering with him via the rope that was supposed to keep both of them safe during their visit to the former prison. What Bering — and, by exten- 158 Gundolf Graml sion, Austrian postwar society — tried to avoid at all cost, namely to empathize with the experience of those who were marginalized and murdered, has now caught up with him and kills him� Nothing in this ending suggests closure, but the literary text accomplishes what the documents housed in the concentration camp archives and the historiographic works cannot accomplish, namely to “semiotically empower[.] the culturally excluded and marginalized as a source of imaginative energy” (Zapf 108). A discussion of the memory of the Holocaust and the history of National Socialism in the context of ecocriticism could easily be misunderstood as attempt to equate the moral catastrophe of the twentieth century with natural catastrophes and, in doing so, absolve human agents of their culpability� However, as I intended to show, quite the opposite happens. Morbus Kitahara starts with the archival documents and relies on historiographic works that ascertain the factuality of the Holocaust and only then taps the power of aesthetic fiction to create what Danilo Kis calls a “‘deeper authenticity’ […] than a merely documentary approach can achieve” (Kis, Homo Poeticus; qtd. in Zapf 211). Ransmayr’s repeated descriptions of moments in which natural phenomena interfere with discursively constructed perceptions of the world — the eye disease and its darkening of the tourist gaze, for instance — or in which the discursive inscribes itself into the landscape and nature — as in the giant stone inscription — provide a crucial framework for this “deeper authenticity�” The novel’s representation of a double vision that reveals the distorted relationship between humans and nature and its evocative descriptions of deranged time-space coordinates where history and present intersect points to archival qualities of literary texts that are central to life in the Anthropocene. As a slow-moving catastrophe of global implications, climate change requires a perspective that connects events happening in disparate places and at different speeds. Furthermore, adjustments to life in the Anthropocene will require the capacity to imagine an ecological form of empathy with human and natural communities not yet alive� Morbus Kitahara demonstrates the abilities of literature to create these common spaces and reintegrate the worlds of human and nonhuman nature into a connected experience� Both of Ransmayr’s novels address in a self-reflective manner the foundational concepts of archives, especially the role of cultural historical discourses and literary imagination. They scrutinize the underlying power structures of conventional archivization as complicit in the developments of the Anthropocene and promote a model of cultural ecological archivization that allows for multiple, even contradictory, voices and perspectives and underscores the value of imaginative aesthetic narratives� Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist 159 This different form of archivization manifests itself in the interand intratextual references between various historical events, the creative fictionalization of nondiscursive experiences, and the repeated reflections on the role of language and literature in this process. By enabling the reader to move fluidly between history, present, and future, and to sometimes inhabit two timescapes simultaneously, Ransmayr’s novels themselves already enact the “emergent unreadability” Clark demands of new ecocritical approaches (63). Both novels demonstrate a (self-)critical rethinking of cultural ecology, and of literature’s role in it, through “creatively deranging the text by embedding it in multiple and even contradictory frames at the same time” (Clark 108). Timothy Clark repeatedly provokes the field of ecocriticism by characterizing as “illusion […] the belief that endorsing certain symbolic or [sic] imaginary events may be far more crucial or decisive than it really is” (21). There is no way to prove the opposite in any definitive form or fashion. But among the many needs global humanity will have during the emergent instabilities and disruptions that define life in the Anthropocene, the need for storytelling as a form of cultural memory, renewal, and resilience will be a central one� Both novels model in exemplary fashion the potential of literary imagination in this process� Notes 1 I would like to thank the editors of this volume for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter. 2 Henceforth cited as SEF� 3 Ransmayr’s descriptions of the Arctic landscape prompted mountaineer Reinhold Messner to consult the author before his own planned traversal of the Antarctic region. Messner was astonished to learn that Ransmayr had never visited the Arctic and conceded: “Der Dichter kommt mit seinen Bildern viel näher an die Wahrheit ran” (Bärnthaler and Herpell n. pag.). 4 Henceforth cited as MK� 5 For examples of the various interpretations of Morbus Kitahara in the context of Austrian postwar history see Wittstock. Works Cited Bärnthaler, Thomas, and Gabriela Herpell. “Man kommt nie wieder wirklich zurück.” sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 28 July 2014. Web. 14 July 2019. Clark, Timothy� Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept� London: Bloomsbury, 2015� 160 Gundolf Graml Cook, Lynne. “The Novels of Christoph Ransmayr: Towards a Final Myth.” Modern Austrian Literature 31.3-4 (1998): 225—39. Graml, Gundolf. “‘We Love Our Heimat But We Need Foreigners! ’: Tourism and the Reconstruction of Austria 1945-55.” Journal of Austrian Studies 46.3 (2013): 51—76. —. Revisiting Austria: Tourism, Space, and National Identity, 1945 to the Present� New York: Berghahn, 2020� Honold, Alexander. “Die Steinerne Schuld: Gebirge und Geschichte in Christoph Ransmayrs Morbus Kitahara�” Sinn und Form 51.2 (1999): 252—67. Iser, Wolfgang� “Towards a Literary Anthropology�” The Future of Literary Theory� Ed� Ralph Cohen. London: Routledge, 1989. 208—28. Janacs, Christoph. “Die Verdunkelung des Blicks: Christoph Ransmayr ‘Morbus Kitahara’.” Literatur und Kritik 30 (1995): 99—101. Kis, Danilo� Homo Poeticus. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995. Lamb-Faffelberger, Margarete. “Christoph Ransmayr’s Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis. Interweaving Fact and Fiction into a Postmodern Narrative.” Modern Austrian Prose: Interpretations and Insights. Ed. Paul F. Dvorak. Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2001. 269—85. Menke, Bettine. “Die Polargebiete der Bibliothek. Über eine metapoetische Metapher.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 74�4 (2000): 545—99. Müller, Beate. “Sea Voyages into Time and Space: Postmodern Topographies in Umberto Eco’s ‘L’isola Del Giorno Prima’ and Christoph Ransmayr’s ‘Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis’.” The Modern Language Review 95.1 (2000): 1—17. Nethersole, Reingard. “Marginal Topologies: Space in Christoph Ransmayr’s Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis�” Modern Austrian Literature 23.3-4 (1990): 135—53. Ransmayr, Christoph. Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1984. —. Die letzte Welt. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1989. —. Morbus Kitahara. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1995. —. “‘…das Thema hat mich bedroht’: Gespräch mit Sigrid Löffler über Morbus Kitahara (Dublin 1995).” Die Erfindung der Welt: Zum Werk von Christoph Ransmayr� Ed� Uwe Wittstock. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1997. 213—19. Schlögel, Karl. Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit: Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik� Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003. Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies� London: Sage Publications, 1990. Wilke, Insa, ed� Bericht am Feuer: Gespräche, E-Mails und Telefonate zum Werk von Christoph Ransmayr. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2014. Wittstock, Uwe, ed. Die Erfindung der Welt: Zum Werk von Christoph Ransmayr. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1997. Zapf, Hubert� Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts� London: Bloomsbury, 2017� Suspended in the Archives —The Three Natures of the Miner of Falun 161 Suspended in the Archives —The Three Natures of the Miner of Falun Jens Klenner Bowdoin College Abstract: This essay centers on the idea that archival storage requires metamorphic processes to achieve scientific order and taxonomic stability and asks what happens when obdurate objects resist archiving� In a reading of texts by Adam Leyel, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, the essay investigates the curious case of the miner of Falun, who troubles epistemological boundaries and principles of taxonomy� It argues that the mine and the miner are archives of co-existent adversative narratives, offering a surplus of information about nature at times incomprehensible, ungraspable, and untranslatable. The miner’s instability as an archival object requires semantic stabilization through narrative, and the multiple stories surrounding the miner establish an ecological archive, emphasizing the archival potential of the literary imagination� Keywords: extraction, inorganic, metamorphosis, mining, mineral, narrative, organic, taxonomy Archives, museums, even Wunderkammern commonly bring to mind rooms and boxes stuffed with papers, artifacts, and objects. They are storehouses of items considered worthy of keeping and worthy of knowing, and they suggest an inherent sense of stability, reliability, and retrievability regardless of the principles that appear to motivate or order the collections. For a community, be it social, political or scientific, an archive is often the foundational physical presence of its communal cohesion, existence, and beliefs� In a recent study on archives, historian of science Lorraine Daston and her collaborators examined this commonly held believe of archival stability and suggested that a process of metamorphosis is inherent to the creation of any archive� With regards to the archive of the sciences, Daston writes: 162 Jens Klenner Scientific empiricism converts first nature into second nature. Under the carefully controlled conditions of the laboratory but also in the selective observation in the field […] [i]ndigestible first nature becomes intelligible second nature […]. But once second nature slips from science present to science past, collective empiricism requires a third nature: the repository of those findings of second nature selected to endure. These are the archives of the sciences. (“Introduction” 4) Daston identifies three metamorphic states or natures of an object’s archival existence: the object’s first nature is its appearance in the field, incomprehensible and illegible to the scientist. The change from first to second nature can be understood as a process of translation: an object takes on its second nature after the researcher identifies and integrates it into an encompassing scientific discourse and disciplinary framework which renders it legible. The change from second to third nature requires a method of selection and transcendence: not every object’s second nature is deemed worthy of receiving an archival afterlife beyond all time, worthy “of the transcendence of time, of past, presence, and future, merged in the archives” (12). Daston’s here admittedly severely simplified and truncated conception of the archive is intriguing� She contends that archival practices, while historically specific, are largely consistent across the disciplines, and ensures that who or what makes it into the archives—“the very palpable, fragile, expensive, and often recalcitrant stuff”—is never accidental but admittance is highly selective and jealously guarded, vesting great power in the scientist as archival and disciplinary gate keeper. Looking ahead, the archive, in Daston’s description, “is the physical expression of how science creates a usable past for future science” (“Epilogue” 329). Yet what happens to the “recalcitrant stuff” mentioned by Daston? What happens to an object deemed worthy of study and inclusion that resists the metamorphosis from first to second or second to third nature? An object that proves to be so stable in its first nature that it defies archival transformation, and hence defies classification and inclusion? Or conversely, an object whose stability rests in its very instability, eluding all attempts of classification? To put it differently, what if the multiple recorded attempts of transitioning from first to second and second to third nature constitute an archive in their own right — an archive of obstinate objects? In what follows, I will trace the curious case of a petrified miner, who was discovered deep inside in an iron ore mine in 1719, and whose body defied all attempts of classification. As the miner’s body moves through a variety of states — animate, inanimate, organic, inorganic, and something in between — it also moves as an object through a variety of texts. The body’s recalcitrance and the mercurial nature of the miner’s materiality pose problems for representa- Suspended in the Archives —The Three Natures of the Miner of Falun 163 tion — textual and archival — as the body has the ability to synchronically exist in multiple states and textual registers at the same time, exceeding the scope of linear narratives, and demanding narrative and poetic devices that reflect this elusive dynamism. The many factual and fictional stories surrounding the curios case of the petrified miner are part of the ecocritical genre of “tales of extraction,” narratives about mines and mining, with Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), Ludwig Tieck’s Der Runenberg (1804), and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Die Bergwerke zu Falun (1819) at their core. 1 These narratives originate in a period that Jason Groves recently coined “German petroromanticism,” a period “typified by genres centered on human-mineral romances and occurring in a larger cultural-historical context of intensive interest in forms of mining, particularly of precious stones, metals, and ores — but not coal and other fossil fuels” (18). Heather Sullivan has shown in great detail how “scientist-poets like Novalis and Goethe” and other writers of that time were “actively engag[ed] with scientific ideas […] about the Earth, its history, and the distinctions of organic and inorganic,” as well as with ideas about the composition of the human body itself, which were oftentimes at great odds with commonly held beliefs (Sullivan, “Bodies” 27). In her reading of narratives of extraction and contemporaneous scientific treaties, Sullivan identifies the period around 1800 as a period of widespread cultural anxiety over the inability to establish stable boundaries between the organic and inorganic: Thus, geologists and mineralogists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century perceived a very urgent need to try to define precisely the classifications for the organic and the inorganic. […] It was becoming clear not only that the mineral earth itself is in flux, but also that the very distinction between the realms of inorganic and organic remain enigmatic and that they might actually blend. (33—34) These unstable boundaries described by Sullivan are not only conceptual and epistemological but also physical as mankind increasingly penetrates the lithosphere separating above and below. In this period, Groves argues, “Romantic imaginaries are underpinned by material acts of extraction,” and “literary texts might be likened to an incidental mining product rather than the recovered ores” (22). Building on Groves, I would like to argue that the “incidental mining product” in the case of the miner of Falun is not just the vast textual archive surrounding the miner, yet also the petrified miner himself. The stories about the miner of Falun share the main characteristics common to other extraction narratives — a young man’s journey from the lowlands to the mountains; a seductive, irresistible, arcane, and mysterious natural force above and below ground — with one significant exception: what is ultimately extracted from the mine is not mineral but man. Emphasizing this distinction is not intended to 164 Jens Klenner recenter mankind; quite to the contrary: “although inherently anthropocentric, such narratives unleash ecologies-in-motion that subtly challenge that perspective” (Cohen 10). The opacity of the miner’s body frustrates scientific efforts and defies taxonomic order. Its cryptic nature becomes the creative catalyst for literary endeavors, a creativity that “can be interpreted as a form of narrative transmitted through the interchanges of organic and inorganic matter, the continuity of human and nonhuman forces, and the interplay of bodily natures, all forming active composites” (Oppermann 21). In July and September of 1720, two Copenhagen newspapers, the Nye Tidender om lærde Sager and the Extrait des Nouvelles, reported a curious mining incident: in December of the previous year, deep inside an iron ore mine in Falun, Sweden, miners had discovered what, once brought to light, appeared to be a sculpture� 2 At a depth of three hundred cubits inside the rock, between two unconnected mining shafts, workers found the body of a young man while cutting a crosshead linking the levels. The body was discovered in a previously undeveloped area of the mine, submerged in a water-filled cavern. Upon bringing it to the surface, his livery revealed the youth to have been a miner� He had sustained injuries to both legs, his right arm, and the back of his head� A liquid had soaked his corpse, and his flesh and skin were horn-like in texture (Leyel 252). Injuries aside, the miner’s body, his face, and even his clothes were uncompromised� In fact, while underground, he was a pliant corpse, but upon being brought above ground, he immediately became hard and mineral-like� At first, nobody could identify the remains; no one was currently posted missing and the chronicles of the mine were thought to be complete. After some investigation, Magnus Johannssen stepped forward and testified before the mining council that he believed he recognized the deceased as Mathias Israelsson, also known as “Fet Mats”—“Big Mathias.” Johannssen remembered that a miner had indeed gone missing in the fall of 1670, after descending into the mine alone, and was assumed to have succumbed in a rockslide. Mayor Erik Michelsen and the ropemaker Erik Petersen corroborated Johannssen’s statement. It was concluded that in 1670, Israelsson had gone into the mine by himself, perished in an underground explosion, and was buried. Further analysis showed that for fifty years, the dead man lay in a lake of blue vitriol known as cuperic sulfate, his body saturated by the crystalline solution, which preserved him� 3 The official identification should have solved the mystery of the young man and earned him an entry in the annals of the mine, but one further witness came to the scene: an old woman who claimed to have finally found her long-lost love. She had been engaged to Mathias over fifty years ago, when the young man was sixteen, and now demanded that the body be returned to her, although not for the final romantic reunion of star-crossed lovers in death� What ensued was an argu- Suspended in the Archives —The Three Natures of the Miner of Falun 165 ment over the corpse that ended with the former fiancée selling it for medical research; and to be displayed in the Falun mining museum, first in a barrel, then in a glass vitrine� 4 Over the years, the body of the miner began to decay after all and became rather unsightly� 5 What remained of Mathias Israelsson was finally laid to rest on 21 December 1749, nearly eighty years after his disappearance and thirty years after his reappearance. Naturally, the young man was the subject of multiple scientific inquiries and visits, most prominently the study by the mining assessor Adam Leyel� Leyel, who scrutinized the corpse and its story shortly after its appearance, gives the most detailed and ‘scientific’ account of the occurrence, written “in the style of the erudite” (252). “Narratio accurata de cadavere humano in fodina cuprimontana ante duos annos reperto,” published in the first volume of Acta litteraria Sveciae publicita of 1722, is Leyel’s extensive report of his examination. 6 After a thorough investigation — he washed the body, studied it, and gathered reports from the inhabitants of Falun — Leyel determines, “it is clear that this is in no way a petrified cadaver, or one changed into stone, but one that was only hardened by a supply of bubbling vitriolum” (254). Leyel, however, concluded his report with a striking remark: What is there that more strongly refutes the nature and character of vitriolum than the force of that kind of petrification? Indeed, since vitriolum never changes anything to rock, but bursts through everything with the true animated motion of the slightest vapor, binds everything together, and protects it from decay and decomposition. (254) To what “force of that kind of petrification,” capable of unhinging the inevitable process of breakdown and of establishing a moment of suspension between strength and suppleness, might Leyel refer? And why would it “strongly refute” the character of vitriols, a lapidescent substance, capable, as the definition of lapidescent has it, “of tending to petrify,” “of turning Bodies into a stony Nature”? 7 In these lines, Leyel attributes to vitriolic salts a great deal of dynamic energy: they are said to be “scantentis”—bubbling or effervescent, from the Latin scantere� And the process of saturation is not a slow infusion but an “animated motion of […] vapor[s]” “bursting through everything” (254). Judging by his comments, Leyel appears unsatisfied with the outcome of his examinations and his discontent evokes an air of resistance in his text, as the hardened body continues to push against his analysis. Leyel offers neither answer nor alternative, but in his treatise, we encounter the difficulties in translating or transcribing the external reality of the body into legible text. Leyel’s language seems to exceed the norms of the scientific genre in which he writes. As he attempts to describe the energies of vitriol, which “bursts through everything with the true animated motion of the slightest vapor,” his language becomes 166 Jens Klenner increasingly poetic (254). We are alerted here to the power that physical transformations seem to exert on language at the junction of the ontological problem of material transformation across taxonomic boundaries on the one hand, and the creative act and poietic principle on the other, yoking poetic transgression to the problem of material transformation� Said otherwise, Leyel has, in the words of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, a “stoney encounter” that requires “narrative enfleshing” to allow for a meaningful temporal trajectory without ever fully bridging the disjunction between the “recondite object” and its “interpretive vocabulary” (91—92). Just as words on the page conjure up the illusion of the real, they can also make it disappear, cause it to vanish behind the opacity of words. The materiality of the miner’s body turned to stone seems to resist full inclusion into the abstract poetics of the text� Time and again, this body disrupts the structure of the text� Its peculiar hardness, its radical materiality, is the immediate antagonist to the textual sign designated to replace it: “Neither dead matter nor pliant utensil, bluntly impedimental as well as collaborative force, stone brings story into being, a partner with language (just as inhuman), a material metaphor” (Cohen 4). For the textual sign to come to the fore, the body must withdraw, or better, step down and let itself be transformed. Because of the noticeable hesitation in Leyel’s account, one could even suggest that Leyel wants to preserve the miner — archive him — but to do so in a state of animation that would redefine Daston’s notion of an archival second nature. 8 Instead of becoming an archival object within the order of things, the body undergoes a strange metamorphosis in matter and a change in the state of aggregation that seems to question its stable objecthood and renders difficult a clear taxonomy. By identifying an inorganic principle — the bursting energies of vitriols — that is animate but not alive, Leyel discloses the tension inherent in metamorphosis. These tensions arise when changes have to take place across different epistemic, taxonomic, and ontic states, or more simply, from organic to inorganic, from soft to hard, and, as the body’s journey through its textual archive shows, from fact to fiction. Ultimately, Leyel’s inability to establish steady epistemological borders foreshadows a “disquieting question” inherent to eighteenthand nineteenth-century handbooks of natural history: “whether the borders are stable and eternal, and what to do with bodies that seems appropriate for several categories” (Sullivan, “Bodies” 35). It should come as no surprise then that Fet Mats finds his way into the lecture halls, where, among others, the well-known naturalist and physician Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert made him the topic of his popular and widely read lectures at the Universities of Dresden and Erlangen. Published collectively in 1808 as Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft, the title of the compendium refers to Schubert’s counter-Enlightenment approach: He considers the interplay of bright and dark, of light and shade, and displays a fascination for that Suspended in the Archives —The Three Natures of the Miner of Falun 167 darkness which remained obscure� In a series of lectures on dreams, the harmony of man with nature, planetary orbits, animalistic magnetism, and clairvoyance, Schubert also takes up the case of the miner from Falun. In lecture eight, “Die organische Welt,” Schubert discusses the petrified miner as an example of an undecayed corpse—“[…] Beyspiele von lange unverwesten Leichnamen, welche an der Luft sehr schnell zerstört wurden […]”—and presents a two-part analysis of the episode (217). Part one consists of the factual details, part two of more emotional observations, rendered in an amplified, imaginative fashion. Schubert’s account, however, is not as clear-cut as I have just presented it, since the two parts of his lecture envelope one another� A closer look at an excerpt from Schubert’s lectures illustrates the intertwining of images and ideas: Auf gleiche Weise zerfiel auch jener merkwürdige Leichnam, von welchem Hülpher, Cronstedt und die schwedischen gelehrten Tagebücher erzählen, in eine Art von Asche, nachdem man ihn, dem Anscheine nach in festen Stein verwandelt, unter einem Glasschrank vergeblich vor dem Zutritt der Luft gesichert hat. Man fand diesen ehemaligen Bergmann, in der schwedischen Eisengrube zu Falun, als zwischen zween Schachten ein Durchschlag versucht wurde. Der Leichnam, ganz mit Eisenvitriol durchdrungen, war Anfangs weich, wurde aber, so bald man ihn an die Luft gebracht, so hart als Stein. (215—16) Schubert’s elaboration of the incident obviously unfolds in the context of an empirical inquiry. The miner is part of a discussion of Schubert’s hypothesis that human bodies decay much faster than those of animals, which he, in reference to an established scientific apparatus, illustrates through this example. Yet Schubert also asks why there are no findings of petrified humans: Funfzig Jahre hatte derselbe in einer Tiefe von 300 Ellen, in jenem Vitriolwasser gelegen, und niemand hätte die noch unveränderten Gesichtszüge des verunglückten Jünglings erkannt, niemand die Zeit, seit welcher er in dem Schacht gelegen, gewußt, da die Bergchronicken so wie Volkssagen bey der Menge der Unglücksfälle in Ungewißheit waren, hätte nicht das Andenken der ehemals geliebten Züge eine alte treue Liebe bewahrt. (216) The first half of this passage begins in an objective, factual style, yet in part two, Schubert’s text takes on a kind of plasticity when he touches upon the identity of the miner conserved in vitriolic water� In the course of the lecture, the features of the miner change from “jugendlich” and “unverändert” to “geliebt.” Formally speaking, the scientific report gives way to an emotionally charged narrative. Schubert juxtaposes the imagery of youth, “noch jugendlicher Bräutigam,” with old age, “altes Mütterchen,” “Verwelken und Veralten des Leibes,” depicting the progression from life to death� 168 Jens Klenner Denn als um dem kaum hervorgezogenen Leichnam, das Volk, die unbekannten jugendlichen Gesichtszüge betrachtend steht, da kömmt an Krücken und mit grauem Haar ein altes Mütterchen, mit Thränen über den geliebten Toden, der ihr verlobter Bräutigam gewesen, hinsinkend, die Stunde segnend, da ihr noch an den Pforten des Grabes ein solches Wiedersehen gegönnt war, und das Volk sah mit Verwunderung die Wiedervereinigung dieses seltnen Paares, davon das Eine, im Tode und in tiefer Gruft das jugendliche Aussehen, das Andere, bey dem Verwelken und Veralten des Leibes die jugendliche Liebe, treu und unverändert erhalten hatte, und wie bey der 50jährigen Silberhochzeit der noch jugendliche Bräutigam starr und kalt, die alte und graue Braut voll warmer Liebe gefunden wurden. (216) The report ends with an almost lyrically composed, nested opposition. On the one side is the youth, yet “starr und kalt,” on the other the old bride filled with youthful, warm love� In a chiasmic combination, the lady and her young love possess complimentary characteristics that bedizen one young and one old lover. However, each has the qualities normally assigned to the other. Taking a closer look at Schubert’s language — the bodies described as wilting like plants, yet stiff und cold like inorganic minerals — we see several bold propositions. One concerns the transition from organic to inorganic matter, the other transitions in space and time. Time appears to have passed at different speeds in the two locations separated by the lithosphere. Above ground, time affects the external features of the physical body in its customary fashion, yet an internal, emotional time appears to stand still, stalled at the height of the couple’s youthful love. The inverse is true for the subterranean body: while its surface displays eternally young features, the core has grown cold and stiff. Schubert conjoins two moments in time that would never coincide in a linear chronology. He also emphasizes the asynchrony of the miner’s body, now in juxtaposition with that of his fiancée. Both represent an aberration from the presumed course of nature and an interruption of the chronology of an aging human body. Schubert observes the miner’s state of youthful suspension, citing vitriol again as the instrument of preservation or deferral� But in a poetic digression from the factual accounts, Schubert begins his own narrative treatment, his “narrative enfleshing” of the event with its end, the body’s discovery and its disintegration, emphasizing the text’s archival dynamic of tracing it back to its origins. This imaginative inscription is necessary because the archival object rejects its functional stability and becomes ephemeral� While the facts of Schubert’s account in many ways correspond to Leyel’s, there is something peculiar about its opening: in the very first sentence of his text, Schubert dissolves the petrification and turns the miner to ashes. Schubert emphasizes a pulverulent condition, though the sources are divided with regard to the way, form, and exact state to which the corpse from Falun dis- Suspended in the Archives —The Three Natures of the Miner of Falun 169 integrated during its years on display in the service of science. The descriptions by scientists and curious visitors range from praise for the body’s miraculously pristine condition to observations of its black color and morbid stench� Dissolution into ashes may be an expected outcome, but Schubert foregrounds this particular condition before going on to depict the reunion of the lovers in the text’s second part� He uses poetic license to accelerate the process of a slow and unsightly decay, thus revealing his own romantic interest in the subject matter. His interest in the love story prevents him from adhering to the factual accounts —though he does invoke them in his opening — and he glosses over the barter of the body and its decay in order to integrate the body into a different explanatory system. Around 1800, the factual accounts surrounding the miner slowly gave way to fictional accounts, and Schubert was instrumental to the story’s dissemination. His fictionally amended love story of the reunited fiancées was republished in 1808 in the literary magazine Phöbus, and in the following year 1809 in Jason with no other title than “Dichter-Aufgabe”—a task for poets — admonishing authors to take up this story and bring Schubert’s already very imaginative narrative frame to further heights� 9 The petrified body subsequently inspired many aesthetic forms� Since Jason’s call, no less than thirty German-speaking artists and authors have retold the story of the miner in poems, novellas, librettos, and plays, among them most famously Johann Peter Hebel, Achim von Arnim, Clemens von Brentano, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, Richard Wagner, and Georg Trakl. 10 What sets apart E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1819 “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” from the many other adaptations is that it most extensively inquires into the life of the miner before his death. Hoffmann allows us to speculate on the origins of the enigmatic body and the story of his life, as he tells the tale of a young sailor, renamed Elis Fröbom, who becomes a miner and perishes in the mines. What further distinguishes Hoffman’s “Bergwerke” from other literary examples of extraction narratives is that it contains a realistic account of an open pit mine. In his description of the pit, Hoffmann not only vividly describes the destruction and exploitation with all is coloric and olfactoric concomitants in their various shades of black and brown to sulfuric yellow, but he also makes mention of the exact dimensions and construction of the pit: Bekanntlich ist die große Tagesöffnung der Erzgrube zu Falun zwölfhundert Fuß lang, sechshundert Fuß breit und einhundert und achtzig Fuß tief. Die schwarzbraunen Seitenwände gehen Anfangs größten Teil senkrecht nieder; dann verflachen sie sich aber gegen die mittlere Tiefe durch ungeheuern Schutt und Trümmerhalden. In diesen und an den Seitenwänden blickt hin und wieder die Zimmerung alter Schächte hervor, die aus starken, dicht auf einander gelegten und an den Enden in einander gefugten Stämmen nach Art des gewöhnlich Blockhäuser-Baues aufgeführt sind. (220) 170 Jens Klenner This data corresponds almost verbatim to the mines of Falun as described in the fifth volume of geologist and mineralogist Johann Friedrich Ludwig Hausmann’s travelogue Reise durch Skandinavien in den Jahren 1806 und 1807; Hoffmann in fact includes a footnoted reference to Hausmann. Hoffmann’s prosaic rendering of the mine is interesting insofar as the mine of Falun was, according to Hausmann’s report, a highly productive and technologically advanced enterprise of impressive dimensions. This can be gleaned not only from the travelogue, but also from a detailed map and cross section of the mine in Hausmann’s appendix. In comparison to the gigantic subterranean sprawl of the mine, the visible part above ground seems miniscule. The sketch shows an older section of the mine that was apparently belabored in open-cast style, while the younger section is a vast network of horizontal, subterranean tunnels accessible by vertical shafts. The buildings above ground are dwarfed in comparison to the dimensions of the mine. Hoffmann presumably read Hausmann’s sketch as an allegorical emblem of what is visible and what remains invisible� This proportional asymmetry is relevant not only to the infrastructure of the mine, but also to the relation of what is rationally explicable and what must remain irrationally vague and unknowable in nature and in the mind (Hausmann 434, Tab. IV). Hoffmann published “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” as a story in the four-volume collection of his Serapions-Brüder cycle, a project in narrative experimentation, published between 1819 and 1821. Taking its cue from Hebel (“[…] ein sehr bekanntes und schon bearbeitetes Thema”), Schubert’s Nachtseiten, as well as Hausmann’s Reise durch Skandinavien, Hoffmann’s tale draws upon a rich textual genealogy of sources, which documents the period’s fascination with the curious find. 11 The story appropriates and transforms elements of different epistemological and generic orders in light of the taxonomic mutability of the miner’s body. The body, and stories surrounding it, complicate notions of stable form and ask whether stability may be paradoxically strongest at the very point of form’s dissolution. As a heterogeneous collection, the Serapions-Brüder confronts us with an experiment in storytelling. The experiment is conducted by a brotherhood of six friends —Theodor, Ottmar, Cyprian, Vinzenz, Sylvester, and Lothar — who meet weekly to read and discuss stories. The stories and their subsequent debates reflect on modes and parameters of fictionalization and provide a testing ground for poetic principles. They also explore differing readers’ expectations on how to transform preexisting stories — be they folklore, journalistic pieces, fairy tales, or historic events — into literary narratives. And, after Cyprian took the friends to Danzig with “Der Artushof,” it is Theodor’s turn to recount the story of the miner: Suspended in the Archives —The Three Natures of the Miner of Falun 171 Es wird spät, und das Herz würde es mir abdrücken, wenn ich euch nicht noch heute eine Erzählung vorlesen sollte die ich gestern endigte. Mir gab der Geist ein, ein sehr bekanntes und schon bearbeitetes Thema von einem Bergmann zu Falun auszuführen des Breiteren, und ihr sollt entscheiden, ob ich wohl getan der Hingebung zu folgen oder nicht. (Hoffmann 208) Before Hoffmann, Achim von Arnim’s ballad Des ersten Bergmanns ewige Jugend appeared in 1808; three years later Johann Peter Hebel published his “Unverhofftes Wiedersehen” as a calendar story for Der rheinländische Hausfreund� Before Hoffmann, too, of course, came the accounts by Schubert, Leyel, and the newspaper articles. But unlike those who came before him, Hoffmann gives the miner a backstory. He introduces Elis Fröbom, a sailor, who was destined to be a mariner from childhood. At a moment of total loss — Elis’ parents died — Elis meets Torbern, an old miner who is in fact undead. A traveler from a different time, an asynchronous entity able to traverse ontological and categorical boundaries, Torbern is convinced that Elis is at an age when his life is just about to begin instead of end and points him toward a new way of life� He encourages Elis to forsake his life at sea, certain that Elis was never suited to be a sailor� Instead, Elis should follow the calling nature had destined for him: “Aber zum Seemann habt Ihr Eure Lebtage gar nicht im mindesten getaugt. […] Folgt meinem Rat, Elis Fröbom! Geht nach Falun, werdet ein Bergmann” (214). Torbern advises Elis to undergo a transformation: to move from sea to land� 12 From the beginning of the tale, it is apparent that Elis’ path from sailor to miner is anything but accidental: Hoffmann places Elis at a juncture, and Elis chooses the life of the pitman. What follows is the story of Fröbom’s passage from sea to land, yet although Elis does relocate, his transition remains incomplete and cannot change his predicted fate� In fact, as we will see, Elis remains caught in an eternally transitory state, in an intermediary realm between what he was before and what he could be, a recalcitrant body defying organized transition between natures. Between Schubert and Hoffmann, the miner’s body disintegrates once at the beginning of an account and once at the end, reanimated several times in between. Like Schubert, Hoffmann also has the miner transform into ashes or dust as he is brought to the surface and reunited with his lover (239). And there is yet another echo of Schubert in Hoffmann’s ending. In itself, this is not very surprising, given Hoffmann’s explicit reference to Schubert in his Serapion’s cycle as well as the widespread reception and inspirational history of the Nachtseiten lectures. But Hoffmann, instead of focusing on the facts of the story, picks up Schubert’s fictionalization, amplifies it, and enacts a process of strong, literary metamorphoses. Hoffmann recounts the reunion of the former lovers in dramatic detail: 172 Jens Klenner Da geschah es, daß die Bergleute, als sie zwischen zwei Schachten einen Durchschlag versuchten, in einer Tiefe von dreihundert Ellen im Vitriolwasser den Leichnam eines jungen Bergmanns fanden, der versteinert schien, als sie ihn zu Tage förderten. […] Es war anzusehen als läge der Jüngling in tiefem Schlaf, so frisch, so wohl erhalten waren die Züge seines Antlitzes, so ohne alle Spur der Verwesung seine zierlichen Bergmannskleider, ja selbst die Blumen an der Brust. […] Man stand im Begriff den Leichnam weiter fortzubringen, nach Falun, als aus der Ferne ein steinaltes eisgraues Mütterchen auf Krücken hinankeuchte. […] Und damit kauerte sie neben dem Leichnam nieder und faßte die erstarrten Hände und drückte sie an ihre im Alter erkaltete Brust, in der noch, wie heiliges Naphtafeuer unter der Eisdecke, ein Herz voll heißer Liebe schlug. (238—39) Hoffmann adopts some of Schubert’s language verbatim to present the basic elements of the story. The description of the mine and the discovery of the miner is lifted from Schubert, as is the old woman on her crutches, and the fact that nobody recognized the young man. Hoffmann continues by describing the body’s pristine state and renders the miner in a dainty portrait as he limns his handsome face, his delicate clothes, and the still fresh boutonniere� Well rested and invigorated, we can imagine the young man might awaken at any moment from his slumber, in good health and ready to return to work in the mines� Ulla, the fiancée is rendered as his exact inverse — an old, crippled woman. Ulla herself is transformed from organic to inorganic matter: old as stone and grey as ice, her hybrid state complements that of Elis. Neither the young miner, nor the fiancée, now an aged woman, remain stable beings. The identity of the miner takes shape through the narration of someone who herself had to first abdicate her own identity. It is curious that Hoffmann, in the very moment of identification and formation has the miner crumble to ashes� 13 His lack of physical stability as an archival object seems to require semantic stabilization through the “enfleshing” of romantic narrative, or rather, as I would argue, the recalcitrant object has to crumble and give way to such a projection� In both Schubert and Hoffmann, the corporeality of the miner’s body achieves its significance only once the body itself is beyond recognition and has fallen to ashes. The material body of the miner and the materiality of the text cannot coexist in time, because the obstinacy of the object to neatly transform into its second nature challenges the epistemic order of the archive� Trapped in rock, between two passageways, unmarked by time, and changing his form in his movement from dark to light, from the depth of the mine to the surface, Fet Mats was always of more than one form, category, and order� He was perpetually in a liminal state. Hoffman’s text offers a description of Mats in his early years that is intelligible, if marked by transition and instability. But upon discovery, Fet Mats Suspended in the Archives —The Three Natures of the Miner of Falun 173 presented the people of Falun with more than the problem of an unidentified corpse on their hands� He was a semiotic problem, a cipher that no one could decode� Although the body moves from darkness to light and therefore from geology to geography, it remains illegible� 14 Despite the body’s emergence, its movement into the realm of the geo-graphein, the miner remains inscrutable� The miner as cipher is precisely at the semantic margins of the known and the unknown� In both Leyel and Schubert, the curious body is indecipherable to science. Hoffmann writes such a detailed prehistory of the miner in order to emphasize the power of literary imagination vis-à-vis scientific observation. Where Leyel’s taxonomic efforts were frustrated and Schubert expanded a scientific account through poetic license, Hoffmann frees the case from the shackles of the factual. For the illegible physical body to become a legible textual sign, the physical body must disappear through metamorphosis into text� It is this second disappearance of the body that paradoxically emphasizes the figural corporeality of the miner and demands his reformation and reanimation. The transforming material body suggests an alternative archival trajectory and questions traditional epistemic orders, foregrounding fiction as the poetic site where the complex connection of natura naturata and natura naturans becomes evident� In their entirety, the many stories surrounding the miner of Falun establish what Hubert Zapf calls a “cultural ecology,” an approach that connects the “question of creativity with an ecocritical framework” (55). Within this cultural ecology, Zapf emphasizes the critical role of literature as an “ecological force”: “literature is a medium that represents the exclusions of the cultural system and symbolically reintegrates the nonintegrated into language and discourse” (66). Physically and metaphorically, the body of the miner becomes a point of intersection for multiple processes of metamorphosis: it undergoes material transformations from animate to inanimate and from organic to inorganic, troubling principles of taxonomy in disconcerting ways. The body also moves as object and protagonist through textual and poetic states, from factual to fictional accounts, from newspaper articles to scientific analysis, from the historiographic to the literary, registering and “reintegrating” the multiple attempts of the body’s archival transformation. Hoffmann focuses on the body of the miner as a source of asynchrony and poetic impulse: its emergence from a grave in the mountain’s depths causes a rupture in the close-knit fabric and order of contemporary knowledge production. The body resurfaces as an unruly relic from a different time, it unsettles social order by resisting taxonomic and scientific explanations. The body of the miner engenders new narratives that allow Hoffmann to explore the archival potential of the literary imagination and to search for a literary form dynamic enough to capture the elusive miner, weaving historical, scientific, and other cultural documents into his text. At the 174 Jens Klenner same time, the body itself becomes a site through which a literary genealogy can be established, revised, or even demolished. This type of hybridity results in a process that destabilized the boundaries between organic and inorganic, between fact and fiction, between object and archive. Hoffmann’s “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” offers a poetics of a suspended archival transformation, in which narrative self-consciously imposes a semantic order without ever fully obliterating the obstinacy of the recalcitrant object. Hoffmann’s text works to move back and forth between forms and topics of study, often asking the reader to inhabit the space between multiple possibilities and conditions and leaving the reader suspended in epistemic doubt� “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” outlines the connection between considerations of poetic transformation — from object, historic source and material, to literary narrative — and material transformation — from organic to inorganic, between different aggregate states of fluid, firm, and crystalline, from inanimate object to living being and back. The different orders depicted in the story comprise a taxonomy, a Romantic order of knowledge that Hoffmann interrogates. “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” invokes this controversy by fictionalizing a factual, historical incident that at its own time already destabilized taxonomic categories and binaries. Hoffmann transforms historic material into literary narration. Events leave their traces in documents, changing from one aggregate state into another; textual sources transform from fact to fiction, from scientific description to historiography and literary narrative. Material objects are sometimes obdurate, resisting change and at other times uncontrollably dynamic, moving from one state into another. Hoffmann’s story, like Daston’s description of the archival process, thus envisions a temporality of metamorphosis; it deals with the transition from one space, from one realm of order, to another. But it also questions the plausibility of such transitions, suggesting that such transitions are not always complete, logical, or legible, and that the archival does not easily lend itself to processes of verifiable knowledge production. In particular, incomplete transformations in Hoffmann’s text leave objects and readers suspended between temporal markers. Poised in between origins and endings, the matter undergoing change often inhabits a strange, nearly timeless state. Tracking the transformations of the miner’s body and the text in which the story is told exposes the relationship between physical matter and literary form. Ultimately, the body that emerges from the mines proves both resistant to change and generative of it; so too is literary form, which Hoffmann molds in order to narrate the dual, and sometimes in-between state of his source material� Hoffmann, at the time of his writing already at the end of a long textual genealogy, problematizes the body’s representation by addressing the process of fictionalization and the contingencies of narrative production and, consequently, Suspended in the Archives —The Three Natures of the Miner of Falun 175 by asking for the appropriate form or medium to archive the miner’s body. Yet Hoffmann indicates that he expects the miner to resurface in future accounts and that his body has not come to rest� Narrated in the simple past, that tempus which emphasizes the imperfect, the unfinished, or not yet complete, and which links the present to the past in service of the future, Hoffmann’s story emphasizes what Daston recognized as the archival transitions between first, second, and third nature. In a final move, Hoffmann removes his own story from time and projects it into a future yet to come� In the story, the sole calendric date mentioned is 1687, the year of the terrible rockslide in the mine of Falun in which Torbern perished� According to lore, Torbern lived “more than one hundred years” ago, which places the narrative and the year of Elis’ vanishing in the mines around the year 1790 at the earliest� If Elis himself remained buried in the mine for half a century, the star-crossed lovers will not have been reunited until 1840, twenty-one years after the publication of Hoffmann’s “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” in 1819. 15 Notes 1 I am borrowing “tales of extraction” from Sullivan 2011. For recent ecocritical scholarship on Romantic mines, see Groves, Rigby, and Sullivan. 2 Nye Tidender om lærde Sager (29), 20 July 1720; “Extrait des Nouvelles” du Mois de Septembre 1720, 206—08-; cited in Friedmann 9—11. 3 Copper and not iron vitriols must have preserved the miner in question. Vitriols are crystalline salt compounds of sulfur and metals like iron or copper. They form dense, hair-like fibrous aggregates with varying degrees of hydration, ranging from hard crystals to complete dissolution. For a detailed analysis of the scientific findings, cf. Küchler Williams. 4 The Extrait des Nouvelles reports the following on the barter over the body: “[…] mais une chose aussi singulière, quoy que moins savante, est la dispute qu’il y a eue pur ce corps, l’école de Medicine le demandoit pour faire des observations, les ouvriers le pretendoient come un bien qui leur aoartenoit, on ne savoit à qui l’ajuger, lors qu’une fille ou feme [sic], à qui le deffunt, elle reclamé ce corps, sur le quel elle a soutenu ques a promesse de Mariage luy avoit donné des droits, que la mort mesme ne povoit par detruie, le corps lui a eté adjugé, et ayant offert de le remettre à ceux qui lui en donneroient le plus, la faculté de Medicine lui en a donnè [sic] cinq cents écus” (206—08). Regarding the storage and exposition of the cadaver, see Wiman 149. 5 On July 2, 1737, Réginald Outhier makes the following entry in his travel log: “Le Mardi, nous fumes voir un Home que l’om difoit être pétrifié; il avoit été étouffé sous des cartiers de Rocher, qui s’étoient écroules dans 176 Jens Klenner le fond de la Mine. Au bout de 40 ou 50 ans, en fouillant on trouva son corps; ils étoit fi peu défiguré, qu’une Femme le reconnut; il y avoit seize ans qu’on le conservoit dans un fauteuil de fer par curiosité. Nous ne vîmes qu’un corps tout noir, fort desseché et fort éfiguré, qui exhaloit une odeur cadavereuse” (282). 6 A note on translation: Wherever possible, I refer to English translations of works cited. On occasion, I have modified the translations to better reflect the original text� Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own� 7 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, s.v. “lapidescent”; Oxford English Dictionary, 1 st ed�, s�v� “lapidescent�” 8 In a more general introduction of vitriolic acids, Leyel does indeed claim that human bodies, “nevertheless by their own brackishness, and their attractive force, so conspicuously condense and harden, that they leave their natural softness for the hardness of stone” (251). 9 Schubert, close friends with Schelling and Kleist, was widely read by many writers around 1800� Of greater importance, however, is the forefather of modern geology Abraham Gottlob Werner, who was in personal contact with numerous authors, most notably Novalis, his student at the Bergakademie in Freiberg. Cf. Haberkorn. Theodore Ziolkowski showed that there was hardly a writer of that period not interested in the science of mining (18—63). 10 The most recent German-language adaptation is most likely Franz Fühmann’s unfinished “Bergwerk Projekt.” For a collection of Falun adaptations see Eicher� 11 Theodor, the narrator of the story, mentions that versions of the tale of Falun exist by other authors. When discussing the story, Ottmar explicitely mentions Schubert’s Nachtseiten, and Hoffmann refers to Hausmann in a footnote (Hoffmann 208, 220, 240). For Hausmann’s travels to Falun see also Hartmann 94—97. 12 For a detailed discussion of Elis’ transition from sea to land, see Bachmann 145—68. 13 Heather Sullivan interprets the return to dust of Elis’ body as symbolic of the impossibility to erase the pollution and dust of extractive mining: “Goethe and Hoffmann write mining as the site where the concrete (environmental) results of digging are overwritten by the desire for gold, jewels, and modern economic power. Yet the dirt finally reappears in both cases: as putrid swamp and body crumbling to dust” (“Dirty” 122). 14 The reluctance of the object — the organic-inorganic body of the miner — to assume its proper place within the taxonomic and epistemological order of a scientific archive is not dissimilar to Heather Sullivan’s definition of dirt Suspended in the Archives —The Three Natures of the Miner of Falun 177 and pollution in her analysis of extraction narratives� Sullivan describes the “matter of dirt itself as both material and discursive. […] Dirt disturbs order; hence dirt is that which is, however one determines it, ‘out of place.’ […] Similarly, […] the term pollution denotes a cultural norm describing something out of place” (“Dirty” 113—14). 15 Hoffman 229, 230, 239. Cf. Schnyder (42), whose math, though different from mine, arrives at similar conclusions� Works Cited Bachmann, Vera� Stille Wasser - tiefe Texte? Zur Ästhetik der Oberfläche in der Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts� Bielefeld: transcript, 2013� Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2015. Daston, Lorraine. “Introduction: Third Nature.” Science in the Archives: Past, Presents, Futures. Ed. Lorraine Daston. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2017. 1—14. —. “Epilogue: The Time of the Archive.” Science in the Archives: Past, Presents, Futures� Ed. Lorraine Daston. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2017. 329—32. Eicher, Thomas, ed. Das Bergwerk von Falun: Varianten eines literarischen Stoffes. Münster: Lit Verlag, 1996� Friedmann, Georg. Die Bearbeitung der Geschichte von dem Bergmann von Fahlun. Diss. Königliche Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin, 1887. Berlin: Druckerei der Berliner Börsenzeitung, 1887. Fühmann, Franz. Im Berg. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Ed. Ingrid Prignitz. Rostock: Hinstorff, 1991. Groves, Jason. The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary. New York: Fordham UP, 2020. Haberkorn, Michaela. Naturhistoriker und Zeitenseher. Geologie und Poesie um 1800. Der Kreis um Abraham Gottlob Werner (Goethe, A.v. Humboldt, Novalis, Steffens, G.H. Schubert). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004. Hartmann, Regina. “Technischer Fortschritt als menschheitlicher Progress? Reiseberichte über das Bergwerk von Falun zwischen Aufklärungshoffnung und Aufklärungsskepsis.” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 122 (2003): 184—99. Hausmann, Johann Friedrich Ludwig. Reise durch Skandinavien in den Jahren 1806 und 1807. Vol. 5. Göttingen: Johann Friedrich Römer, 1818. Hoffmann, E.T.A. “Die Bergwerke zu Falun.” Die Serapions-Brüder. Sämtliche Werke in sechs Bänden. Ed. Wulf Segebrecht. Vol. 4. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2001. 208—41. Küchler Williams, Christiane. “Was konserviert den Bergmann zu Falun - Kupfer- oder Eisenvitriol? Eine chemische Fußnote zu den Variationen des ‘Bergwerks zu Falun’.” Athenäum 10 (2000): 191—97. 178 Jens Klenner Leyel, Adam� “Narratio accurata de cadavere humano in fodina cuprimontana ante duos annos reperto�” Acta litteraria Sveciae publicita 1 (1722): 250—54. Oppermann, Serpil. “From Ecological Postmodernism to Material Ecocriticism: Creative Materiality and Narrative Agency.” Material Ecocriticism� Ed� Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2014. 21—36. Outhier, Réginald. Journal d’un voyage au nord, en 1736 & 1737. Amsterdam: H.G. Löhner, 1776. Rigby, Kate. “‘Mines aren’t really like that’: German Romantic Undergrounds Revisited�” German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene� Ed� Caroline Schaumann and Heather I. Sullivan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 111—28. —. Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2004. Schaumann, Caroline, and Heather I. Sullivan. “Introduction: Dirty Nature: Grit, Grime, and Genre in the Anthropocene.” Colloquia Germanica 44.2 (2011): 105—09. Schnyder, Peter. “Die Wiederkehr des Anderen: Ein Gang durch die Zeichenbergwerke zu Falun.” Figur, Figura, Figuration: E.T.A. Hoffmann. Ed. Daniel Müller Niebla et al. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011. 31—43. Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich. Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft� Dresden: Arnoldsche Buchhandlung, 1808� —. “Dichter-Aufgabe.” Jason� Eine Zeitschrift. Herausgegeben vom Verfasser des goldenen Kalbes 1 (1809): 394—96. —. “Fragmente aus einer Vorlesung.” Phöbus 4/ 5 (1808): 67—68. Sullivan, Heather I� “Dirty Nature: Ecocriticism and Tales of Extraction — Mining and Solar Power — in Goethe, Hoffmann, Verne, and Eschbach.” Colloquia Germanica 44�2 (2011): 111—31. —. “Organic and Inorganic Bodies in the Age of Goethe: An Ecocritical Reading of Ludwig Tieck’s ‘Rune Mountain’ and the Earth Sciences.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 10.2 (2003): 21—46. —. “Ruins and the Construction of Time: Geological and Literary Perspectives in the Age of Goethe.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 30 (2001): 1—30. Wiman, C. “Über neue und einige alte Leichenwachsfunde.” Bulletin of The Geogical Institution of The University of Upsala 28 (1941): 141—55. Zapf, Hubert. “Creative Matter and Creative Mind: Cultural Ecology and Literary Creativity�” Material Ecocriticism� Ed� Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann� Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2014. 51—66. Ziolkowski, Theodore. German Romanticism and its Institutions. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. Umweltschutz als Moralkeule: The German Past, the Refugee Present, and the Planet’s Future 179 Umweltschutz als Moralkeule: The German Past, the Refugee Present, and the Planet’s Future Joela Jacobs The University of Arizona Abstract: By drawing on the virtual archive of German news media, this article shows how Willkommenskultur is interacting with Vergangenheitsbewältigung in public discourses about the “refugee crisis” of 2015, taking into account similar crises of solidarity in 1945 and 1992� While some of the media examples highlight shared experiences between refugees in 1945 and 2015, others demand to “do better” than in 1992, which yet others take to be an attempt at atonement, or even redemption for Nazi deeds. Rightwing voices call for a Schlussstrich instead, invoking the vocabulary of Vergangenheitsbewältigung while rejecting it, as they do refugees� But racism arises not only from this direction: Umweltschutz has taken on widespread national pride, which shows in the white saviorism of environmental education initiatives, where well-meaning volunteers teach the supposedly homogenous blank slate of “the refugee.” This makes environmentalism appear more pertinent for “integration” than the planet at times, and Umweltschutz emerges as a Moralkeule that stops complicated conversations about racism and environmentalist efficacy. The media archive therefore demonstrates that public discourses about the German past are inextricably bound up with the present and future, and it reminds us that environmentalism needs to be practiced and taught with attention to social justice. Keywords: environmental culture, environmentalism, environmental racism, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, refugees, refugee crisis, Willkommenskultur The influx of refugees into Germany since 2015 has prompted the creation of a variety of initiatives geared at their orientation in German society and culture. Funded by federal money but conducted mainly by volunteers, a whole subset of these programs is focused on environmental education and the protection of 180 Joela Jacobs nature. As I have shown elsewhere ( Jacobs) and will briefly reestablish with the help of one example in the first part of this article, the online self-presentations and news media depictions of these well-intended initiatives inadvertently reveal the problematic notion of a specific kind of German environmentalism as the path to a one-sided “integration” (a problematic concept in itself), which can mobilize a metaphorical repertoire in which refugees are equated with trash that has yet to find its way into the correct recycling category in order to fit into the system productively. From the digital archive I examined, environmentalism emerges as a culturally mediated concept that can be instrumentalized in social discourses about national identity� In the main part of this article, I discuss what one might call the moral implications of this contemporary situation by examining a local, historically-oriented dimension, namely German Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which ties into a global, future-facing aspect, namely the social and ecological elements of environmentalism: On the local level, this involves the complicated connections between contemporary refugees and the first “refugee crisis” in Germany after 1945, which has the potential to bring citizens and new arrivals together over a shared experience of the violence of war and flight as well as the accompanying losses and resource scarcity. For some, the guilt of the Holocaust as well as the violent German response to the second “refugee crisis” of the early 1990s seem to create a moral imperative to do better this time. This linking of the past and present triggers resentment in those who have been arguing for a Schlussstrich under the German Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or dealing with the Nazi past, which we see most clearly among supporters of the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland� But even outside of the right-leaning spectrum, the invocation of the Holocaust can produce the problematic notion that the positive engagement in this third “refugee crisis” somehow issues a pardon for the misdeeds of the past. And despite the best intentions, when citizens volunteer to teach presumably “illiterate” others about how to behave in their culture, it can go along with a sense of moral superiority and activate a variety of the white savior complex. This resurfaces in media reporting about the environmental education initiatives, on which my analysis draws as a digital archive of cultural discourses about national identity, since environmentalism appears to be one of the few areas of life (soccer being another example) in which Germans currently allow for a form of national pride. While questions of national identity and environmentalism traditionally appear as two separate realms, digital media (such as the online newspapers and program websites I examined) provide an alternative, noncanonical archive that undermines this separation and shows many ways in which these two discourses are intertwined in what I call cultural environmentalism� Umweltschutz als Moralkeule: The German Past, the Refugee Present, and the Planet’s Future 181 These complex moral entanglements of social and environmental dimensions in Germany speak to an emerging global question in the context of climate migration that Ghassan Hage has articulated in Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (2017). By showing that racism and environmentalism emerge from and reproduce some of the same social structures, Hage has answered this question with a resounding yes. Given that many of the refugees in Germany are Muslim (or assumed to be), Hage’s particular focus on Islamophobia resonates with the German situation (Weber; Plumly), both regarding the notion of a sociocultural conversion of Germany prompted by the influx of refugees from a variety of cultural and religious backgrounds and in view of the particular postwar relationship of Germans and Jews in this context. The digital news archive of recent years includes, for instance, many pieces describing instances or just fears of renewed anti-Semitism brought by Muslim refugees to Germany, dovetailing with a discussion of the future of Vergangenheitsbewältigung and German identity (Schenk). This discourse of concern often fails to account for the problem of homegrown anti-Semitism, expressed by German anti-refugee and anti-Muslim voices such as those of the Pegida movement (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes, founded in late 2014) and the AfD (Meisner). This disjunction of discourses is an example of a larger tendency of placing the onus of adaptation one-sidedly on refugees rather than conceiving of the ongoing societal shifts as a complex, heterogeneous process that requires German culture to change too. The same misconception of one-sided adaption and its moral implications are also apparent in the otherwise largely uncontroversial environmental education programs — both on their own program websites (sometimes mediated through a parent organization and mostly directed at fellow or prospective volunteers rather than refugees) and in national as well as local media reporting about them (ranging from traditional newspaper articles to video formats, all of which predominantly seem to address an imagined autochthonous German audience). These digital media depictions therefore turn out to be an alternative, noncanonical archive of cultural discourses that negotiate issues of German identity past, present, and future in both its social and ecological dimensions. In order to substantiate this claim, I will first briefly close read an example of one of these local newspaper depictions that I have discussed in depth in a previous analysis ( Jacobs), so as to establish common metaphors and ideas that are typical for many of these articles� In the second part, I turn to the historical context of the “three refugee crises” in order to flesh out my larger argument about Vergangenheitsbewältigung, before drawing two sets of conclusions from this work — one about environmentalism and social justice, and the other about the archive� 182 Joela Jacobs German Environmentalism as Kulturgut in Contemporary Society “In Deutschland ist Mülltrennung zum Kulturgut geworden,” states the CEO of a municipal waste company in an article in the local, Northern German paper Eckernförder Zeitung, in order to explain why his company is sponsoring a recycling course for refugees in 2015 (Messerschmidt). This program is one of many initiatives for the environmental education of refugees that primarily took place between 2015 and 2017 (“Umweltbildung und BNE mit Flüchtlingen”), some financed by the government and some by foundations (Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt; “Integrationsprojekte auf einen Klick”), others organized by churches, environmental organizations, and volunteer groups, and some supplied by local waste companies, schools, and all kinds of Vereine (“Alle Projekte von A bis Z”). The large investment in environmental education by so many different groups and its prize-winning successes (“Auszeichnung für das Geflüchteten-Projekt”) confirm the CEO’s words about the centrality of environmentalism as a cultural value in Germany, and much of the news reporting about these initiatives suggests that mastering the performance of specific environmental actions, such as recycling, is considered a measure of “integration” success for new arrivals� The specific culture of environmentalism that is transmitted in these courses is therefore tied to an assumption of providing a path to “integration,” comparable to learning about and abiding by culturally specific understandings of politeness or physical touch, for instance. Its validity and efficacy both as an environmental strategy and a cultural value are not typically questioned, though its economic implications, specifically taxpayer cost, are occasionally discussed ( Jacobs 190). As I have shown in more detail previously by close reading these programs’ self-depictions on their websites and in news articles from across the political and geographic spectrum ( Jacobs), the assumption of many of these well-intended initiatives is that refugees come without environmental knowledge, that there is only one way to save the environment (a complex German-specific system that puts the onus on the individual), and that the mastery of this system is a requirement to earn respect and acceptance in German society. If refugees or asylum seekers do not abide by these rules, they are themselves often described as being societally out of place in the media, becoming associated with unrecycled refuse, such as in the beginning of this example article about “Recyclingkurse für Migranten,” published 2016 in Bayerischer Rundfunk, a regional public service broadcast for southern Germany: Es ist leider ein vertrautes Bild: Auf dem Gelände einer Flüchtlingsunterkunft im Landkreis Fürstenfeldbruck liegt Müll. Verteilt auf den Wegen, zwischen den Fahrrädern, die vor dem Haus abgestellt sind und im Rasen rund um das Gebäude. Sogar außerhalb des Zaunes liegt der Abfall. Papier, Plastiktüten, Verpackungsmaterial. Die Umweltschutz als Moralkeule: The German Past, the Refugee Present, and the Planet’s Future 183 Mülltonnen quellen über. In ihnen stecken sämtliche Überreste westlichen Konsumalltags. Ungetrennt! Zugegeben, auch die Einheimischen sind nicht immer Musterknaben im Müllvermeiden und Mülltrennen. Aber Menschen aus anderen Kulturen kennen weder die Regeln dafür, noch deren Sinn. Und das kann zu Problemen führen. (Hackl n. pag.) This seemingly “familiar sight” of trash around asylum housing and the indignation of the exclamation “Ungetrennt! ” are connected to ominously stated “problems” with refugees that seem to go beyond a lack of recycling. “People from other cultures” are said to have “no sense” for environmentalism and by extension the culture to which it seems to “belong,” which positions them as Others who are unwilling to learn and do not care about “the right way of doing things�” This attribution of blame makes asylum seekers appear as a homogenous group of supposed environmental transgressors, instead of a culturally diverse group grappling with a host of immediate survival and comprehension issues in a new country� No mind is paid to other possible reasons for the trash problem, such as insufficient pick-up and overcrowded conditions, for which the German state would be responsible. In addition, the “natives” (Einheimische) get away with a slap on the wrist for “not always being a poster child of recycling and reducing either,” while those who arrived with no more than what they could carry on their backs are accused of overindulging in “Western consumerism�” Many of the media depictions of environmental education initiatives (especially in the local and regionally oriented news) emphasize these points with similar choices of visual and metaphorical materials ( Jacobs), in which recycling becomes a metaphor for separating “what does not belong together,” just like asylum housing keeps “people from other cultures” separate from Germans. According to these pieces, the solution to overcoming this separation is for new arrivals to learn “the rules and their meaning.” The same article later cites environmental project organizer Birgit Baindl, who puts it this way: “Wer die Werte unserer Gesellschaft kennenlernt, wer versteht wie auch unsere Ressourcen geschützt werden, der wird Teil dieser Gesellschaft. Und umgekehrt wird der von der Gesellschaft geachtet. Weil die Menschen dann sehen, die Neuankömmlinge teilen diese Werte mit Ihnen [sic] und setzen sie auch engagiert um” (qtd. in Hackl n. pag.). These sentences make the refugees’ successful “integration” a condition for their respectful treatment in German society. In effect, Baindl suggests that those who do not “understand how to protect our resources” (another ominously vague statement) do not become part of German society and therefore should not expect respect. This discussion of environmental practices is all about preserving cultural values and expectations for social interactions, rather than saving the planet. In citing Frau Baindl, the article is typical of the 184 Joela Jacobs program websites and news reports of these programs, which rarely feature refugee voices. If they do, the few quoted refugee participants are often addressed by their first names only, denying the respect of the formal address granted to the German officials in the same piece. 1 With their general insistence on the refugee as an environmental blank slate, who “knows neither the rules nor their meaning,” articles like this one not only assume that knowing how to recycle in Bavaria is equivalent to being an environmentalist and by extension a morally good person everywhere in the world; they also ignore that the experience of effects of climate change is often a central factor in migration and that refugees know resource scarcity and conservation needs first-hand. Rather than turning toward the world by involving refugees in the shaping of such environmental initiatives, as I suggested previously ( Jacobs), media depictions of these programs by and large paint a picture of German culture as being about the ability to navigate a complex and idiosyncratic recycling system (whose color-coded system varies by region and can therefore easily stump “natives” too). Indeed, being able to master this system seems to be a shibboleth for belonging in German culture, a litmus test with moral implications that casts those who fail out of the circle of respect� Given the rise of anti-refugee sentiment in Germany since my first examination of these dynamics, which shows in the success of the Pegida movement and high number of votes for the right-wing party AfD in the 2017 election, the need for critical debate and a broader historical contextualization of these complicated connections, which I am undertaking here next, has only increased in urgency� A History of Three “Refugee Crises” The influx of what is often cited as over one million people into Germany in 2015 has widely been labeled as “the refugee crisis” in the media (Feld et al. 24). Alternative suggestions, such as “solidarity crisis” (Ki-moon), move the burden from the refugees to the entire human community, but retain the alarmist notion of the crisis rather than characterizing migration as a not-so-new reality that has been happening at the doorsteps of Western countries for a long time� Similarly, while talk about the environmental, ecological, or climate crisis is appropriate in drawing attention to the urgency of the planet’s dire situation, the sense of momentariness of the term “crisis” nonetheless seems like a mismatch for the Anthropocene’s only intensifying status quo, which has been known for a long time too� In his examination of Islamphobia as an environmental threat, Ghassan Hage discusses the entanglement of ecological and social factors of these two “crises” and argues that “Racism is an environmental threat because it reinforces and reproduces the dominance of the basic social structures that Umweltschutz als Moralkeule: The German Past, the Refugee Present, and the Planet’s Future 185 are behind the generation of the environmental crisis — which are the structures behind its own generation” (14). As mutually reinforcing harbingers of “crises,” xenophobia and environmental anxiety co-construct ideas about refugees in Germany that are reinforced in a variety of ways both from the right and the left of the political spectrum under the specter of the “crisis.” 2 Racist stereotypes and environmental concerns converge on many, perhaps unexpected fronts, whether it is fearmongering by right-wing populists that claim that refugees and asylum seekers are hunting local birds for food and render them extinct (Redaktion), or whether it is leftist alarm about refugees and asylum seekers polluting the environment because they do not recycle (Hackl). Thus, to approach Hage’s claim from another direction, I argue that environmentalism can turn into a racist threat� 3 The current “refugee crisis” is not the first of this magnitude (Stokes), and German debates of the topic draw on history in ways that are instructive both for the environmental and the social components under discussion� In the aftermath of the Second World War and again in the 1990s after the fall of the Iron Curtain and in the context of violent conflicts in the Balkan region, large numbers of people were seeking a temporary or permanent home in Germany. The immediate postwar years saw an influx of ca. 11.9 million Germans (Heimatvertriebene) from formerly German communities in Eastern Europe, 7.9 million of which settled in West Germany, while 4 million settled in what would become the GDR by 1950 (Feld et al. 12). These numbers do not include the approximately 7 million Displaced Persons in Germany during those same years, many of them Jewish and other victims of the Holocaust who were leaving German DP camps for Israel, the United States, and other countries — though a significant number also stayed, not always by choice� 4 Given the scarcity of livable space and basic resources in the destroyed country as well as the ideological legacy of the Nazi period, these large population movements resulted in significant conflict. “Die fremden Deutschen aus dem Osten wurden in den vier Besatzungszonen, [sic] vielfach als ‘Polacken’, als ‘Zigeuner’, als ‘Rucksackdeutsche’ diffamiert. Willkommen waren sie nicht, vielmehr bestimmte Fremdheit ihren Alltag” (Kossert, “Wann ist man angekommen? ” n. pag.). Complaints about the Zwangseinquartierung of the 11.9 million “ethnic Germans” into existing German households focused on the obvious struggles of sharing scarce resources, such as food, supplies, and livable space, but also harped on what seem like minor differences today, such as not speaking the same German dialect and belonging to different Christian denominations (Feld et al. 12; Hoefer; Kossert, “Böhmen, Pommern, Syrien”). “Mitnichten kamen jedoch Deutsche zu Deutschen, denn zu unterschiedlich waren kulturelle und mentale Prägungen. Bauern aus Galizien trafen auf urbane Württemberger, Prager Großbürger auf Oberfranken auf dem 186 Joela Jacobs Land. Dialekte, Mentalitäten, Konfessionen und Sozialisationen — die Unterschiede konnten kaum größer sein” (Kossert, “Wann ist man angekommen? ” n. pag.). Yet in hindsight, this “refugee crisis” is considered a success story today, in part due to the economic upswing of rebuilding Germany and the so-called Wirtschaftswunder years, in which these new arrivals actively participated (Feld et al.; Hoefer; Kossert, “Wann ist man angekommen? ”). Nonetheless, former German refugees in Germany recall a host of negative experiences both during their Flucht and after their arrival — a theme that also appears in the canon of German Nachkriegsliteratur, such as in the works of Günther Grass and Christa Wolf (Kossert, “Wann ist man angekommen? ”). Seeing the current “refugee crisis” has reminded some of these former refugees 5 of their suffering during their journeys west and the difficulties of being accepted there, and consequently they have spoken about what they have in common with the most recent refugees in the media. The video “Flucht 1945 und heute: 2 Generationen. 1 Schicksal.” (Deutschland3000) 6 , for instance, brings together young Syrian refugees and elderly Germans under the rubric of shared experiences� As they are talking in pairs about the horrors of their journeys, it not only becomes clear that war and flight have an unchangingly violent face, but their stories also reactivate certain tropes of Flucht that connect the post- World War II legacy with the Middle East. The participants have been traumatized by rape and violence, by losing their homes (Heimat) and possessions, and by fearing for their lives on a boat in the Mediterranean and in a handcart near the Eastern front. They also all experienced hostility upon their arrival. Thus inscribing Syrian refugees into a part of German history that has been on the margins of the spotlight of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Kossert, “Wann ist man angekommen? ”), videos and articles like these create an emotional connection through a set of tropes that positions both Syrians and Germans as victims. The notion of German victimhood becomes possible because the generation retelling their World War II horrors was one of children and young adults during the Nazi period, and so are the Syrian refugees featured. This keeps questions of large-scale culpability out of this very personal and emotional discourse, and the fluent German spoken by the refugees seems to signal that they are successful arrivals. Just as the first “refugee crisis” became a success story, so can the third one, the video implicitly suggests, and accordingly, it ends with an elderly German telling a young Syrian: “Berlin braucht dich�” In the media, these (family hi)stories of Flucht have been cited as one motivation for volunteers to help refugees today (Kossert, “Wann ist man angekommen? ”), while other articles have also drawn a line from the support for refugees in 2015 to the shock over the violent reactions to the “refugee crisis” of the early 1990s (Diestelmann; Schreiber; Vitzthum). While the numbers of asylum seekers Umweltschutz als Moralkeule: The German Past, the Refugee Present, and the Planet’s Future 187 in Germany had been quite low before the 1980s and the migration discourse was primarily focused on so-called Gastarbeiter*innen and Aussiedler*innen, the political changes in Eastern Europe, the war in former Yugoslavia, and increasing conflicts between Turks and Kurds in the late 80s and early 90s resulted in 1.5 million individual applications for asylum in Germany between 1990 and 1994, which included the subsequent addition of 2.1 million family members (Feld et al. 18). In addition, ca. 2.5 million (Spät-)Aussiedler*innen moved from Eastern Europe to Germany between 1988 and 1998 as the Iron Curtain fell (Feld et al. 14). What made these population movements a “crisis” in the public eye were not only the numbers, but also the German reaction, which was intensified by anxieties surrounding the fall of the Wall and the German Reunification during that same time period: The years between 1991 and 1993 saw a series of violent acts, primarily involving individual beatings and arson attacks on refugee and asylum seeker housing. These events were named after the locations of the incidents in East and West Germany, such as Hoyerswerda, Rostock-Lichtenhagen, Mölln, and Solingen. There were two kinds of attacks, which resulted in many injuries and several deaths: Those that involved mob violence, which tended to take place in former East German states and were televised, and those planned in secret by small groups of neo-Nazis in West German cities (Lüdemann and Ohlemacher 90). The public debate about this “crisis” was structured around these differences between East and West, especially since the majority of the early incidents had happened in the former East Germany, and according to the Verfassungsschutzbericht 1990, these Bundesländer were struggling with statistically higher numbers of skinheads (Lausberg 39). In particular the events in Rostock-Lichtenhagen were often referred to as a “pogrom” (Prenzel), inscribing them into an Eastern European lineage of state-sanctioned anti-Semitic violence before World War II but also events such as the euphemistically named “Reichskristallnacht,” and thus drawing on terminology whose multiple equations suggest that “Germans have not learned” from the Holocaust (neither that violence against Others is wrong, nor that the instrumentalization of the history of Jewish suffering erases it). Since this language of the “pogrom” was primarily applied to the mob violence of the East German events, it implied that East Germany’s lack of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (and not Vergangenheitsbewältigung itself or German society writ large) was to blame for these acts. This attribution conveniently shifted the responsibility to “less enlightened Germans” and reinforced the cultural trenches between “Ossis” and “Wessis” by aligning East Germans with the Russian history of violence against Jews and invoking the GDR’s anti-Semitism (Haury). Rather than engaging with the reunited country’s apparent racism in both East and West — poignantly described by May Ayim in “Das Jahr 188 Joela Jacobs 1990: Heimat und Einheit aus afro-deutscher Perspektive” 7 —this appropriation of the Jewish past and the use of Vergangenheitsbewältigung implicitly allowed the trauma of the German separation and the conflicts of the Reunification to take center stage in these debates, thus focusing on the perpetrators rather than their victims� The deaths of those murdered in these violent attacks of the early 1990s were commemorated during the most recent “refugee crisis” of the 2010s, which brought those parallels into the media spotlight (“25 Jahre Brandanschlag in Solingen”; Diestelmann; Prenzel; Schreiber; Vitzthum). 2016 saw twice as many applications for asylum as 1992, the year with the highest numbers in the 90s (Feld et al. 18), and right-wing sentiment rose again across many different demographic portions of the population, as the election success of the AfD in 2017 demonstrated� 8 Those sharing the anti-refugee sentiment of the AfD have also been arguing for a Schlussstrich under the German Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Maas; Meyer). This terminology of the Schlussstrich originated with discontent over denazification after 1945 and was picked up again in 1998, when Martin Walser warned of the instrumentalization of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in his controversial Friedenspreis speech in the Frankfurter Paulskirche. In his speech, he referred to the burning asylum seeker housing of the early 1990s and introduced the famous notion of the Moralkeule Auschwitz, saying: “Auschwitz eignet sich nicht dafür, Drohroutine zu werden, jederzeit einsetzbares Einschüchterungsmittel oder Moralkeule” (Walser 303). Walser’s description of the use of Holocaust references as a moral cudgel to end all conversation triggered a public debate accusing Walser of anti-Semitism that further ingrained these terms into German public discourse (and though he never spoke of a Schlussstrich, his speech was often referred to as such). 9 AfD politicians such as Björn Höcke and Alexander Gauland have drawn on this language in 2017 and embedded it in overtly nationalist statements when calling for a Schlussstrich under what rightwing representatives characterize as the German “Schuldkult” (Maas; Meyer). Their rhetoric implies that current German politics regarding refugees are a result of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, a claim that entangles racist xenophobia with Islamophobia and anti-Semitism� Yet the third “refugee crisis” in 2015 was not only met with negative reactions. The media registered an outpouring of support for refugees by citizen volunteers that has been subsumed under the term Willkommenskultur (a word with its own complicated implications), 10 and is characterized by Angela Merkel’s dictum “Wir schaffen das! ” (Dockery). In the media, both in Germany and abroad, this approach to embrace refugees and make them feel welcome in Germany has also been associated with German guilt about the Nazi past, and hence Vergangenheitsbewältigung, from both the left and the right of the politi- Umweltschutz als Moralkeule: The German Past, the Refugee Present, and the Planet’s Future 189 cal spectrum. It has been called a “deutsches Moralmonopol” (Winkler; Sabrow), “Sondermoral,” and “Judenknacks”: “Konservative Kommentatoren von Washington über London bis Berlin sind sich einig: Die Hilfe der Deutschen für die Flüchtlinge ist eine schräge Form der Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (Augstein). German media have additionally connected Willkommenskultur to the violence of the early 90s, suggesting that those events have created a moral imperative to do better (Diestelmann; Schreiber; Vitzthum). These connections can imply the problematic notion that past violence can be made up for, pardoned, or conclusively “dealt with” (bewältigt) through these acts. The environmental education initiatives emerged in the context of this Willkommenskultur, which has successfully established relationships between people of different backgrounds and fostered community. Yet the environmental programs did not account for the complex cultural nature of Umweltschutz in Germany, so rather than being prepared for negotiating cultural differences, the programs assumed untrained German volunteers to be experts and refugees to be a sort of tabula rasa in a one-sided transfer of purportedly purely functional knowledge. Those programs that reflected on the struggles they subsequently encountered 11 show an emerging awareness of these cultural implications, yet they lack the realization that environmentalism as a Kulturgut has become a site for a displaced sense of national pride in Germany that tends to be taboo in many other contexts because of the discourses of Vergangenheitsbewältigung� German national pride is displaced onto the local (allowing for proud Berliners but not proud Germans) as well as perceived German achievements such as soccer and, so I argue here, environmentalism� In these contexts, Umweltschutz can turn into a Moralkeule of sorts, when it assumes moral implications about environmental protection as an absolute good (in contrast to the absolute evil of Auschwitz) that ends any conversation about, in this case, racist and exclusory side effects of its practices. The Future of Nature and Culture Suggesting that Umweltschutz can be used as a Moralkeule is a controversial statement, both in respect to the original context of this term, the Holocaust, and in regard to the valuable work that Germans have been doing both for refugees and the environment. Yet by contextualizing this most recent “refugee crisis” in the discourses surrounding previous “refugee crises,” Vergangenheitsbewältigung emerges as a thread that connects German responses to these events and shapes even environmental initiatives, which seem unrelated to the history of the Holocaust� Whether we like it or not, even positive achievements such as environmentalism are implicated in the violent history that shaped their 190 Joela Jacobs emergence: Just as the environmentalism of Western countries has a colonial legacy that becomes apparent in debates about the responsibility for emissions on the global stage and the shipping of waste from developed to developing nations, so is German environmentalism entangled in its cultural history of discourses about racial hygiene and selection� 12 The impact of historical events might be easier to accept with other examples: Chernobyl and Fukushima have shaped German energy policy just as much as the notion of der deutsche Wald has impacted activism against Waldsterben (Goodbody). Yet similarly, discourses about sorting like with like that evoke notions of purity and cleanliness are part of both environmentalist and social discourse� The two previous “refugee crises” also seem to teach us that the sense of crisis evaporates over time and refugees turn into an enrichment of society in hindsight (Feld et al.; Kossert, “Wann ist man angekommen? ”). Yet statistics suggest that refugees and asylum seekers themselves experience lasting disadvantages (Ziegler). Ending with a nostalgic, all-will-be-well view to the past would therefore be a hazardous simplification that shifts the focus away from the ongoing suffering, the lasting trauma, and those who do not fit into the mold of the successfully “integrated.” To return to the emotional video that shows what German and Syrian refugees share in common, it is important to listen to the voices of these young Syrians and other new arrivals in Germany. Yet, refugees need to be heard and taken seriously even when their German is not fluent, when they continue to feel alienated in German culture, and when they are struggling to fit into the dominant cultural narrative — which goes beyond the curated clip. That is to say, returning to Hage’s words, that we need to begin cultivating an archive of cultural discourses that does not “reinforce and reproduce the dominance of the basic social structures behind its generation” (14). One way to amend this approach is to stop the discourse of the “crisis,” realize the new status quo, and face it as our future� We need to imagine fundamentally changed ways of living together on a dying planet. This entails ecological and social justice in equal parts — one becomes dystopian without the other. In this process, those who know how to live with resource scarcity and social injustices firsthand have valuable expertise from which their privileged counterparts need to learn� Two Conclusions about the Archive Researching online media of various kinds presents scholars with a variety of considerations regarding the notion of the archive� On the one hand, digital resources seem to have opened up an endless treasure trove of new materials, which can seemingly be translated with a mouse click, and whose vastness seems unconquerable without quantitative tools. At the same time, a differ- Umweltschutz als Moralkeule: The German Past, the Refugee Present, and the Planet’s Future 191 ent set of rules than that of the traditional archive applies to these materials� While most newspapers archive their articles meticulously, they often charge for access and thus introduce inaccessibility and economic difference into the seemingly egalitarian digital landscape� Other media change their content and URLs frequently, thus exposing the temporal and ephemeral nature of the digital archive. My qualitative approach to this vast sea of materials shines spotlights on cultural developments by close reading individual pieces, yet among others, my most central article (Hackl) can only be retrieved with the help of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (https: / / archive.org/ ) at this point, which poses problems for citation practices� Since this article was featured in a local newspaper, my published research about it is presumably the only place where excerpts from it have become archived publicly, and it is contextualized in a specific way that is shaped by my analysis and the context of German studies in the US. This raises many questions about research methodology that especially ethnographers and other qualitative researchers of culture have long been grappling with� Deliberations about researcher positionality, for instance, might provide useful approaches for scholarship about this new archive and the digital humanities writ large� This constantly changing digital archive is not only relevant for research but also the academic teaching of German culture through topics such as environmentalism and the “refugee crisis” across the United States� Usually, those two themes are not presented as connected, and each follows its own canon of established tropes and texts, which the digital archive is able to redefine. When presenting Umweltschutz and Willkommenskultur only as achievements in the German context, these courses are in danger of reproducing uncritical discourses� Yet close reading digital media together with students, including perhaps not only professionally produced sources as I did here, but also personal blogs, vlogs, and social media, can be an effective tool in exposing the ways in which these discourses operate and intersect both with one another and with historical debates� At the same time, a comparative view toward discourses about racism and immigration as well as environmentalism in the US and beyond might help sharpen the analytical toolkit of the students and surely adds additional dimensions� Ultimately, existing practices of expanding the canonical concept of the archive in German studies to include new media have shown themselves to be particularly valuable for both the research and teaching of contemporary cultural phenomena, especially in swiftly evolving areas that are impacted by world politics such as the environmental humanities and social justice discourses� 192 Joela Jacobs Notes 1 Gender is another relevant dimension of analysis for these programs and their depictions, for instance when they offer gardening and cooking initiatives for women or only feature men in a training program for “environmental experts.” For more information, see Jacobs. 2 See Langstaff for the conceptual history of this term. 3 See also similar suggestions based on other national and transnational, postcolonial contexts in Bullard; Teaiwa. 4 It is important not to conflate the various, very different populations of migrants in German history, such as so-called Vertriebene, Kriegsflüchtlinge, and Displaced Persons, Gastarbeiter*innen, Asylbewerber*innen, and various generations of Aussiedler*innen and Spätaussiedler*innen. Feld et al. provide a good overview of the distinctions; see also Stokes. 5 Contemporary German discourse accounts for the notion that the term Flüchtling suggests an ongoing, never-ending status of fleeing by calling the new arrivals Geflüchtete, those who have fled, instead. Additionally, the -ling ending is diminutive and has negative associations in many contexts, e�g�, Schädling, Eindringling, according to the glossary of Neue deutsche Medienmacher*innen. 6 “Deutschland3000 wird produziert von funk. funk ist ein Gemeinschaftsangebot der Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (ARD) und des Zweiten Deutschen Fernsehens (ZDF)” (Deutschland3000, “About”). 7 See also Goertz; Plumly. 8 In the 2017 election, the AfD jumped from 4�7% in 2013 to 12�6%, making it the third-strongest party (“Bundestagswahl”). 9 See Jansen. 10 See Weber� 11 See exemplarily Rittershofer. 12 See the work of Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Marc Cioc, Peter Staudenmaier, Corinna Treitel, Frank Uekötter, Thomas Zeller, and others. The focus on the Nazi period in discourses of Vergangenheitsbewältigung has overshadowed the necessary engagement with other aspects of Germany’s history, such as colonialism, which is also absent from the media depictions of environmental education initiatives for refugees� Umweltschutz als Moralkeule: The German Past, the Refugee Present, and the Planet’s Future 193 Works Cited “25 Jahre Brandanschlag in Solingen.” bpb.de. Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 24 May 2018. Web. 2 Feb. 2019. “Alle Projekte von A-Z.” umweltbildung-mit-fluechtlingen.de. Arbeitsgemeinschaft Natur- und Umweltbildung Bayern, n.d. Web. 2 Feb. 2019. “Auszeichnung für das Geflüchteten-Projekt.” umweltbildung-mit-fluechtlingen.de. Arbeitsgemeinschaft Natur- und Umweltbildung Bayern, n.d. Web. 2 Feb. 2019. Augstein, Jakob. “Weil Opa für Adolf gekämpft hat.” spiegel.de. Der Spiegel, 18 Jan. 2016. Web. 2 Feb. 2019. Ayim, May. “Das Jahr 1990. 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Umweltschutz als Moralkeule: The German Past, the Refugee Present, and the Planet’s Future 195 Schreiber, Wolfgang. “Rückkehr eines Traumas.” deutschlandfunk.de� Deutschlandfunk, 29 May 2018. Web. 2 Feb. 2019. Stokes, Lauren. “The Permanent Refugee Crisis in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1949—.” Central European History 52 (2019): 19—44. Web. 14 Mar. 2020. Teaiwa, Teresia� “How Climate Change is Like the Slave Trade�” e-tangata.co.nz� E-TANGATA, 28 Feb. 2016. Web. 2 Feb. 2019. “Umweltbildung und BNE mit Flüchtlingen.” umweltbildung-bayern.de. Arbeitsgemeinschaft Natur- und Umweltbildung Bayern, n.d. Web. 2 Feb. 2019. Vitzthum, Thomas. “Die Schande, die bleibt.” welt.de. Welt, 24 Aug. 2015. Web. 2 Feb. 2019� Walser, Martin. “Erfahrungen beim Verfassen einer Sonntagsrede.” Aus dem Wortschatz unserer Kämpfe: Prosa, Aufsätze, Gedichte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001. 295—310. 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Flüchtlingsströme against / and / or Wohlfahrtsfestung An Ecology of the So-called Refugee Crisis Tanja Nusser University of Cincinnati Abstract: The chapter investigates the connection between archives, ecology and the so-called refugee crisis� While it seems to be surprising that the so-called refugee crisis is articulated within the environmental and ecological concepts, this discursive framing speaks to broader issues at hand� The questions are what can be said and how can it be articulated, which articulations become statements that seem to be able to describe or define a situation� In this sense, the description of the so-called refugee crisis within concepts of ecology or / and environment have to be understood, as the chapter argues, within the Foucauldian notion of archive. Concepts like landscape or flows do not only shape our understanding of the so-called refugee crisis and the massive movements of people all over the world but also shape massively the discourse about the sociopolitical realities and as such function as part of an archive of what can be said and which realities exist� Keywords: refugee crisis, Human Flow, Ai WeiWei, archive, Zentrum für politische Schönheit, environmental metaphors, ecology Europe’s new border walls in this way make manifest an obdurate physicalist fact about ‘flows’ on land: they cannot be stopped, only routed. The seas, of course, are another matter: there, migrant flows can be dissolved, dissipated, even disappeared, as evidenced by the tens of thousands of migrants allowed to drown in the Mediterranean since the Arab Spring. (Brown 8) What is the connection between archives, ecology and the so-called refugee crisis? At first glance, this constellation seems to direct the gaze in different directions� However, as the following essay will argue, the debates about the so-called 198 Tanja Nusser refugee crisis in Europe are partly framed within the concepts of ecology and environment, as the motto of this essay already indicates. The massive ‘influx’ of people that is portrayed time and again as a flood or flow seems to not only threaten and change the understanding of the German nation as a (more or less) stable environment for its citizens but also seems to destabilize the definition of German citizens itself (as organisms living in and as part of the environment). Taking a closer look at different materials, I conceptualize the situation since 2015 from a relational standpoint that perceives the different materials like media, technologies, human and nonhuman actors (and so forth) as shaping and being shaped by the same environment; this means essentially that I try to show on the following pages how medial, sociopolitical and ecological environments are intertwined in creating our understanding and perception of the so-called refugee crisis� 1 While it seems to be surprising that the so-called refugee crisis is articulated within the environmental and ecological concepts, this discursive framing speaks to broader issues at hand. The questions are what can be said and how can it be articulated, which articulations become statements that seem to be able to describe or define a situation. In this sense, the description of the so-called refugee crisis within concepts of ecology or / and environment have to be understood within the Foucauldian notion of archive. The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events. […] Far from being that which unifies everything that has been said in the great confused murmur of a discourse, far from being only that which ensures that we exist in the midst of preserved discourse, it is that which differentiates discourses in their multiple existence and specifies them in their own duration. (Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge 129) Nevertheless, before I further elaborate the topic of this essay, let me step back and take a closer look at the archival discourse to show why Michel Foucault’s relatively short description of the archive in The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language is important for the following pages. The past 20 years have seen an explosion of archival studies. Already in 1995, Jacques Derrida speaks of an Archive Fever (in French published 1994). Although he is not concerned with the multiplication and dissemination of the concept, the English title points towards a range of meanings the concept takes on (fever, in my reading, becomes a metaphor for a discourse that flames up or flares and becomes visible as neuralgic point). We speak, as Marlene Manoff highlights, of a “‘social archive,’ the ‘raw archive,’ the ‘imperial archive,’ the ‘postcolonial archive,’ ‘the popular archive,’ ‘the ethnographic archive,’ ‘the geographical archive,’ ‘the liberal archive,’ ‘archival reason,’ ‘archival consciousness,’ ‘archive cancer,’ and ‘the poetics of the archive” (11). Flüchtlingsströme against / and / or Wohlfahrtsfestung 199 We also talk about a film as archive, 2 and an archive of films, photography as archive and photographic archives, gestures as archives, archival records, electronic archiving, digital archives, “counter-archives” (Amad) and so on. I have to agree with Jacques Derrida: “nothing is less clear today than the word ‘archive’” (57). The multiplication of archives and archival structures and Derrida’s dictum in mind, his definition of archive becomes informative: for him, the function of an archive is “unification, […] identification, […] classification” but the function is also one “of consignation” (10). Consignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration. In an archive, there should not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate (secernere), or partition, in an absolute manner. (Derrida 10) Derrida sees the principle of the archive as “gathering together” (10). This definition harkens back to older definitions of the word archive. Originally, the word archive describes in the first place a collection of files, documents, material records as well as the place where this collection is being kept and preserved; 3 to be more precise: it is a ‘storage place’ for public documents, records, and testimonies (Kluge 51). The documents or materials being stored claim to be originals, foundational; they are the source, origin, reign and government (Archiv). Staying within this context or logic, an archive becomes also the space that places history as facts or creates an understanding of history based on documents as generating facts and a reality or version of reality. This means an archive is at the same time a collection as well as storage place, a generator of reality as well as a form of organizing knowledge and a spatial concept. Nevertheless, the idea that archives and the collected documents they house (be it texts, photos, films, artifacts and so on, and might the archive be a film, photos or other media) are capable of objectively documenting history, reality or the real (all concepts are problematic) is disputable; the factuality or truth claim (Steyerl; Gouigah 1) that is being attributed to archives has been questioned time and again. Archives have to be understood as subjective configurations of existing materials that are housed in a ‘container’ (it might be a digital storage space, a building, a shelf, a box and so on), which seems to adequately provide the space and room for this subjective configuration. An archive housing documents is also to a certain extent a forceful, even structurally violent organization of fragments that shapes understanding and a new reality (Dever 121). As such, the documents become part of a narration or construction that already questions both the status of the document and of reality. In the end (that is actually not the end) it can only be stated that “archives are eminently political, not only because of their nature and purpose but because of their dependence on a method of knowledge perpet- 200 Tanja Nusser uation at the heart of Western epistemology, namely writing or more generally material inscription” (Gouigah 128). The archival collection of material is also fundamentally connected to colonial attitudes and conquests: cataloging, naming, and giving the collected material a place within an order of things, hierarchical, exclusionary, and based on material objects taken out of time and context and only fragmentary, as well as organized from a Western-centric standpoint. Foucault now turns away from the concept of archive as either “the sum of all the texts that a culture has kept upon its person as documents attesting to its own past” (The Archaeology of Knowledge 128) or as “the institutions, which, in a given society, make it possible to record and preserve” (129). The archive, in his writings, becomes a concept that moves between being a method, way of thinking and space, and it becomes a system that defines what is enunciable (129). For Foucault the archive “is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements” (130) within a certain time. As Heath Massey points out: Foucault’s “archive is not a collection of written works so much as a set of rules or norms determining what can be said or written. […] In this way, the archive limits discourse” (Massey 82). This turn away from the archive as being and housing documents, a collection and storage place that seems to be capable of documenting history, towards a concept of the archive as an enunciation, or to be more precise an enunciability of statements that produce and restrict what we can know and say, and, to borrow a formulation from David Webb, as a “specific set of conditions for a given discourse” (117) is significant. It allows us to conceptualize the use of environmental and ecological metaphors describing the so-called refugee crisis as part of an archive in the Foucauldian sense that produces and restricts the field of that which can be formulated. Concepts like landscape or flows do not only shape our understanding of the so-called refugee crisis and the massive movements of people all over the world but also shape massively the discourse about the sociopolitical realities and as such function as part of an archive of what can be said and which realities exist� Wendy Brown’s formulation exemplifies exactly this point; while she argues that the border politics that forcefully inand exclude through building walls have to be understood as performative spectacles she also falls back on an established language of landscapes, flows and barriers when she writes about the movement of people: [T]he new nation-state walls are part of an ad hoc global landscape of flows and barriers both inside nation-states and in the surrounding postnational constellations, flows and barriers that divide richer from poorer parts of the globe. This landscape signifies the ungovernability by law and politics of many powers unleashed by globalization and late modern colonialization, and a resort to policing and blockading in the face of this ungovernability. (Brown 36) Flüchtlingsströme against / and / or Wohlfahrtsfestung 201 Interestingly, this use of environmental metaphors intersects, as Heath Massey puts it, with an understanding of the archive as “a geographical or topographical exploration, a mapping” (83) that tries to ‘discover’ the rules and regulations that make it possible that “one particular statement appear[s] rather than another” (Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge 27); it is not so much an archeological digging to uncover some kind of truth under the surface or subconsciousness of the text� 4 It is quite simply a process of a continuous transformation of knowledge or truth claims (Ebeling 221) and at the same time a diagnostic tool that “deprives us of our continuities” and “establishes that we are difference” (Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge 131). This means while on the one hand the archive is understood as transformative and as an exploration, on the other hand the use of environmental and ecological metaphors works against this exploration in restricting the field of the expressible. Before delving deeper into the use of environmental and ecological metaphors in the discursive framing of the so-called refugee crisis I want to take a step back to situate briefly my understanding of ecology and environment for this essay. I take Ernst Haeckel’s foundational formulation—“Unter Oecologie verstehen wir die gesammte Wissenschaft von den Beziehungen des Organismus zur umgebenden Aussenwelt, wohin wir im weiteren Sinne alle ‘Existenz-Bedingungen’ rechnen können. Diese sind theils organischer, theils anorganischer Natur” (286)—as a starting point for the exploration of the use of ecological and environmental metaphors and concepts within the different articulations, “statement[s]-event[s]” (Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge 129) centering on the so-called refugee crisis� In Fall 2017, Amazon released Ai Weiwei’s film Human Flow, which premiered in October 2017 for its Prime members (and was one of the films competing at the Venice film festival). Ai Weiwei filmed the documentary in 23 countries with the help of 200 crew members. The film was shot with different technologies; for example, cameras, iPhones, and drones. As one motivation for making the film the production notes state that Ai Weiwei “has said the crisis before us is not only the staggering number of refugees with nowhere to go right now but the temptation to turn away in a time that asks something of each of us� So he set out on a journey of his own” (“Human Flow. Final Press Notes” 3). The film “does not propose a solution” to current conditions; instead, “the intention is that it operates as a spark that, along with other sparks, might help light the flame of rethinking priorities and re-examining our capacity for compassion and creative problem solving” (6). However, I am not so much interested in the film itself or Ai Weiwei’s motivation to make the film or that it is an Amazon Studio Production. What caught my attention is the title: Human Flow� Taking 202 Tanja Nusser its cue from the film’s title, the essay circles around the word “flow” used in connection to humans, more precisely to refugees and migrants, as it has been increasingly used to discuss the massive movement of people in the world� Human Flow signals the movement of people as an unstoppable force� However, it also marks this unstoppable force as nature-like. Like water people will flow, starting as small creeks, coming together from different places, to unite into bigger rivers, into streams (this is the image that comes to mind). Not only does the title posit the movement of people or, to be more precise, refugees and migrants, within concepts of nature, but it also marks this movement as fluid, as uncontrollable. Fluids, as John Urry argues, for example, “demonstrate no clear point of departure, just de-territorialized movement or mobility (rhizomatic rather than arboreal)”; “move in particular directions at certain speeds but with no necessary end-state or purpose”; they might be “channeled along particular territorial scapes or routeways which can wall them in”; they “move according to certain temporalities, over each minute, day, week, year, and so on” and do not always keep within the walls — they may move outside or escape” (Urry 38). In her new foreword to the second edition of Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Wendy Brown argues in a similar direction when she points out that “great floods of migrating humanity, like any other kind of flood, inevitably breach or flow around walls and dams” (8): “they cannot be stopped, only routed” (15). Fluids, fluidity and flow have become important metaphors used in theoretical concepts to describe social movements and even more so the understanding of global interactions or “global fluids,” as John Urry puts it. He describes “global fluids” as “the remarkably uneven and fragmented flows of people, information, objects, money, images and risks across regions in strikingly faster and unpredictable shapes” (38). Fluidity, water, and metaphors that are connected to this metaphoric field need to be understood in their multiple meanings (Roe). To point out only a few of the images and areas that are discursively connected to concepts of fluidity: water can trickle slowly, unseen; will undermine and erode surfaces, territories; it floods huge areas, transports human goods, connects and divides people and is essential for survival� While the oceans have become the sites of human tragedy in the last years, fluidity is at the same time a concept that questions stability, and this means also the borders and boundaries of nations (Brown 36). However, fluidity also seems to signal unstoppable change and new forms to conceptualize global or cosmopolitan structures; it is also being used to describe the reality of millions and millions of people who leave their countries because of ‘catastrophic living conditions’ or of being reduced to bare life. These migrants or refugees are after all not perceived as global or cosmopolitical citizens; their flow seems to question partly the concepts of fluidity as they have been theorized in the last years, and if we follow the rhetoric that Flüchtlingsströme against / and / or Wohlfahrtsfestung 203 has been used again and again: Europe needs to fortify itself against this flood. Interestingly enough no clear-cut line can be observed of who uses the concept of fluidity in which manner. Academic discourses tend to position fluidity for both argumentative fields, whereas politicians as well as media outlets who are potentially more on the middle-right, populist scale and who fear foreignization or make politics by inciting this fear use it in the first meaning. More middle-left, nonpopulist newspapers or journals tend to use it again in both manners� Let me turn back to Ai Weiwei’s film Human Flow or, to be more precise, to its title again, to further elaborate the topic of the naturalizing discourse. Perceiving the movement of humans as flows indicates, as already mentioned, a multidirectional conceptual framework. The advertising materials to the film at the same time complicate and simplify the understanding of human refugees and migrants as an unstoppable natural force, highlighting that “65 million people have been forcefully displaced globally.” This statement or information (the reader has to decide how to understand the sentence) is contrasted on one poster with the statement that “70 countries built border fences and walls by 2017.” The center of the poster is framed by two additional statements� On the top of the page one sentence reads, in white letters superimposed on water with a man standing in a raft, “The refugee crisis by the numbers.” At the bottom of the page, a second sentence states: “It’s not a refugee crisis. It’s a human crisis — Ai Weiwei.” Ai Weiwei advertising material for the film Human Flow 204 Tanja Nusser Connecting these different pieces of information on only one of several posters with the title of the film (Human Flow), a complex but also ambiguous discursive field emerges that moves back and forth between global and national, flows and restriction, refugees and humans, numbers and lives, culture and nature without further developing how these different ‘positions’ are defined and how they are interconnected� Within this ping-pong game of catchwords, a subject is seemingly constructed that makes sense to those who are (even only basically) informed about the so-called refugee crisis. Mirroring the way newspaper headlines portray the ‘crisis,’ the material simplifies the situation. It does this even more so in the way the poster is designed. The information is monocausal and monological but circularly organized, borrowing its design from infographical depictions: arrows with text (upper half from left to right — following the Western tradition of reading, lower half from right to left and thus building a circle between both halves of the poster) point towards photos that seem to illustrate the message. However, while the photos seem to illustrate the sentences, they, in turn, can only be interpreted as showing a refugee camp and border patrols at one of the 70 countries because the sentences state information and produce meaning: the borders are being closed trying to stem the Human Flow� Interestingly, the different interpretational directions the title and poster of the film take us, in dispersing meaning while at the same time constructing a circular, monocausal logic, reflect the discursive field that has emerged in Germany since late 2015. In ‘reaction’ to the ‘flood of refugees’ but also anticipating the changes of German society, different levels of official and non-official rhetoric could be observed. While on the one hand the official rhetoric in 2015 constructed the image of an environment that could integrate and needed the refugees to evolve as a nation that defined itself not any longer as white, hegemonic, and so on, an Othering happened on the other hand and a rhetoric of crisis emerged, which argued that the stability of the German nation was threatened. It is striking how often newspaper articles use the word “Flüchtlingsstrom” or the plural “Flüchtlingsströme” in their titles: “IWF warnt vor Mega-Flüchtlingsstrom durch den Klimawandel” (Ettel and Tschäpitz, Die Welt); “Flüchtlingsströme in der Geschichte: Menschen waren schon immer auf der Flucht” (Harhermsen, Berliner Zeitung); “Flüchtlingsströme in Europa. Von wegen arme Afrikaner” (Busse, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung); “Flüchtlingsströme - Die Karte der Wahrheit” (Slominski, Journalistenwatch); “An der Drehtür der Flüchtlingsströme” (Schmid, Neue Züricher Zeitung)—to quote only a few of the headlines. While all the headlines allegedly only ‘label’ a situation — the massive movements of people — they already situate the following article (and none of the quoted articles uses the word “Flüchtlingsstrom” again in the text) within two different discourses. Firstly: Photos illustrating the newspaper articles connect Flüchtlingsströme against / and / or Wohlfahrtsfestung 205 the Flüchtlingsstrom to the crossing of the oceans by desperate people, trying to reach Europe in small boats or rafts with the help of smugglers. Water becomes visible as a metaphor that connects and translates into each other different and unrelated discursive fields and makes it possible to connect to a third metaphor which became very prominent in the 1990s and is increasingly being used again since 2016, characterizing the fear that Germany will decline or Germans will drown if more migrants and refugees come into the country: “Das Boot ist voll�” The second discourse is the more obvious one: similar to Ai Weiwei’s film title Human Flow, the newspaper headlines do naturalize the movement and portray it as an unstoppable force (even if this is not the explicit message) that cannot be controlled. Exactly here, the naturalizing discourse of flow and fluidity that erodes or has the capability to erode (not only sociopolitical) landscapes connects to another discourse and logic that positions “the old trinity of state-nation-territory” (Agamben 21) as a body and at the same time as a building and system (see for example the concept of “Wohlfahrtsfestung” (Slominski)) that needs to be protected and whose outer borders need to be fortified. 5 This understanding of the German nation as body, building and system positions the massive migratory movement of people as a threat to Germany. It might be helpful to consider the concept of a homeostatic balance to understand the implicit logic that informs positions that argue that Germany is threatened by these migratory movements. The concept of homeostasis was developed by Walter Cannon in 1929, and describes first and foremost a self-regulating system. The concept was very quickly picked up in biology and cybernetics and made it possible to describe systems within biological paradigms and biological entities within system-theoretical concepts� Homeostasis became a concept that refers to an inner milieu and its flexible stability. 6 Michel Foucault then used the concept to draw an analogy between the population of a state and the individual biological body, arguing that homeostasis aims at “the security of the whole from internal dangers” (“17. March 1976” 249). To secure the system, state or body regulatory mechanisms are needed — and all three have been conceptualized within this model of homeostasis and became — following the Macy Conferences (1943-54) and until the 1990s — insofar interchangeable as cybernetics and genetics used the same vocabulary and theories (Hayles; Bergermann). If we stay within this logic or theoretical frame and follow this certainly problematic transfer of the concept of homeostasis from an individual system/ body unto a population, then the question has to be asked how it can be protected in each of its cells (speak humans), and how all these activities are being coordinated? To that end Foucault introduced the concept of racism, through which the whole body/ the population is being fragmented, and “a biological-type caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain” (“17. March 1976” 255) 206 Tanja Nusser is being positioned� Operating with concepts of norm and normality, a very troubling logic based on social Darwinian concepts is being established that makes it possible to single out the ‘abnormal’ and discard and or eliminate her/ him/ thems: “‘The more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more I — as species rather than individual— can live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate’” (Foucault, “17. March 1976” 255). Even if Foucault’s considerations are outdated today, the contemporary fear of Überfremdung (and it is telling that in English no equivalent word exists; one of the English formulations used is: “the fear of being flooded with foreigners”—which is telling in itself too) functions exactly within this logic of degeneration because it can attach itself to the discourse of decline or demise as it exists in Germany throughout the twentieth century (Etzemüller). Biopolitically speaking, the foreigner as the Other threatens the inner stability, not at least because —that is one of the fears voiced — Germans will not reproduce enough and will eventually die out. Now, the interesting thing is that Germany does not have to fortify its borders. In the ‘middle of Europe,’ it is protected by all the borders that other countries have erected in the last years� Zentrum für politische Schönheit The photo above is part of an online documentation about a political campaign/ art happening (depending how one wants to interpret it) organized by the Zentrum für politische Schönheit. The Zentrum für politische Schönheit decribes itself as Flüchtlingsströme against / and / or Wohlfahrtsfestung 207 an assault team that establishes moral beauty, political poetry and human greatness while aiming to preserve humanitarianism. […] It believes that Germany should not only learn from its History but also take action. The Center for Political Beauty engages in the most innovative forms of political performance artan expanded approach to theatre: art must hurt provoke and rise in revolt� In one basic alliance of terms: aggressive humanism. (https: / / politicalbeauty.com/ ) In 2014 the Zentrum für politische Schönheit moved fourteen white crosses, commemorating the people who died at the German/ German Wall between 1961 and 1989, “to their brothers and sisters across the European Union’s external borders, more precisely, to the future victims of the wall” (https: / / politicalbeauty.com/ wall.html). Zentrum für politische Schönheit People followed the call for action: travelling with busses to the Bulgarian border, they tried to destroy the barbed wire fence. 25 years after the so-called unification, the Zentrum für politische Schönheit brings two different situations into contact to question our as well as Germany’s stance towards Europe’s fortification. While most official reactions unsurprisingly condemned the political campaign/ art happening, I want to highlight two positions that grasped the dimensions of it. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung pointed out that the “campaign’s success consists in revealing the absurd effort with which German authorities and the Bulgarian police protect the European border — even from a few harmless art tourists. […] At the end of the day, the Center for Political Beauty revealed some unpleasant certainties: ignorance for the true problems” 208 Tanja Nusser ( https: / / politicalbeauty.com/ wall.html ). And the Erich Maria Remarque Society stated: This campaign plays off courage and imagination against inhumanity and a bureaucratic lack of imagination. It connects the memories of the Berlin wall to today’s reality of refugees in despair throwing themselves against barricades and barbed wire fences. […] ‘Being human did not count then, a valid passport was everything.’ This description of a refugee’s fate is more up to date than ever on a European continent isolating itself from refugees and willingly accepting the death of people in need� ( https: / / politicalbeauty.com/ wall.html ) While here the connection to the Berlin Wall is being made, the phrases “Festung Europa” (Leubecher, Die Welt; Deutsche Wirtschaftsnachrichten; Spiegelhauer, Deutschlandfunk; Spiegel Online), “Festung Deutschland” (Bielicki, Süddeutsche Zeitung) or “Deutschland, eine Festung? ” (Handelsblatt) actually refer back to another very important time in German history. “Festung Europa” was being used in World War II for the areas in Europe that had been occupied by Nazi Germany. While not everyone might be aware that the formulation has a history, the discourse that is being evoked is troublesome because it hints at the biopolitical dimensions of forceful, violent, murderous, nationalist exclusion� The materials presented position the refugees or migrants in a space that is defined on the one hand by metaphors of fluidity, of instability, of an undefined geographical location and as such an undefined environment, and on the other by fortification, closed borders, nations, an environment that excludes them from being part of it. Being discursively positioned, for the lack of a better word, in a definitional inbetweenness, “the refugee,” as Agamben argues, “should be considered for what it is, namely, nothing less than a limit-concept that at once brings a radical crisis to the principles of the nation-state and clears the way for a renewal of categories that can no longer be delayed” (21). Or, as Asian Dub Foundation in their song Fortress Europe state at one point: “This generation has no nation.” While so far refugees or migrants have been conceptualized within a discourse of fluidity, we now become aware that the global situation in itself becomes fluid and the environment of the nation becomes unstable in its historical trajectory if we consider it from a relational standpoint. The medial, sociopolitical and ecological environments pull the so-called refugee crisis into different directions and make it into a human crisis that is not located within nation states, even if they try to reestablish themselves again and again (and in such follow exactly a performative model of reinscription unto the surface of the body to produce some ‘inner truth’—this would be the Butlerian model) as such in global times (Brown). Flüchtlingsströme against / and / or Wohlfahrtsfestung 209 However, as part of a media-ecological system or of the mediascape as Arjun Appadurai describes it—“both viewers and images are in simultaneous circulation. Neither images nor viewers fit into circuits or audiences that are easily bound within local, national, or regional space” (Modernity at Large 4)—media themselves are globally migrating, moving, dispersing and ever shifting or changing (depending on the other scapes that influence each other) while at the same time working on momentarily producing a temporally-spatially organized or localized meaning. It is and can only be momentarily stable because “(a) ethnoscapes; (b) mediascapes; (c) techno-scapes; (d) finanscapes; and (e) ideoscapes” 7 as “deeply perspectival constructs” (Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference” 296) produce a fluidity that negates the possibility of stable definitions and principals on which some kind of cosmopolitical or global ethics or politics could be based� Ai Weiwei’s film poster then essentially becomes the image for the inability to form stable definitions, stable borders, stable nations or stable human communities. Or to phrase it differently: it shows the instability of environments and of archives in the Foucauldian sense. Ai Weiwei film poster 210 Tanja Nusser An extreme high-angle shot by a drone camera shows dispersed people standing or moving in a nondescript desert-like space overlaid by the title Human Flow� However, the title does not show the flow, the masses; it shows (even if they are not recognizable) individual humans. Nevertheless, in combining a concept of fluidity and an image of sand/ desert the sent message is twofold: 1) these spaces are more or less uninhabitable, and 2) they defy geographical/ cultural as well as historically established borders. Going back to Ernst Haeckel’s foundational definition that ecology is concerned with the relationship of the organism to its surrounding external world or, phrased differently, its conditions of existence (286), the material presented makes it impossible to define or even describe the relationship of the migrants or refugees to their environment or their conditions of existence� At the same time, the relationship is marked by a lack or absence of a structure or system that is quintessential for defining the environment (understood here also as the framework that in return defines the organism within it). The fences thematized earlier in the essay are the delineations of exactly this absence and mark the refugees as liminal figures in the Agambian sense who are always already a discursive, medial, and sociopolitical part of the fortress, even if Europe works hard on expelling them or restricting them discursively through using the mentioned metaphors, concepts, and images� Turning back to the beginning of this essay, the environmental and ecological metaphors that I explored are part of an archive that positions “the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events” (Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge 129). Employing these metaphors (even those of fluidity) fence in the liminal figure and constrain him/ her/ them in a non-place that is nevertheless a place defined by ‘our’ archive that speaks for and defines refugees as refugees, and positions them as other� Notes 1 For the relational understanding of an ecological thinking see Hörl; Latour. 2 “The cinema’s central role as entertainment does not preclude its intimate relation with new epistemologies, its inextricability from the reorganization of knowledge taking place in modernity. For photographic media offered new standards of accuracy, memory, knowability. The cinema, unlike fairs, vaudeville, and magic theater, requires a permanent inscription, an archival record� While all of these forms celebrate the ephemeral, it is cinema which directly confronts the problematic question of the representability of the ephemeral, of the achievability of presence.” (Doane 24) 3 “Archiv n. ‘Sammlung von Schriftstücken, Urkunden, Akten, Aufbewahrungsort einer solchen Sammlung’, entlehnt (15. Jh.) aus gleichbed. Flüchtlingsströme against / and / or Wohlfahrtsfestung 211 spätlat. archīvum, einer Nebenform von lat. archīum, anfangs noch häufig in lat. Form. Zusammensetzungen wie Landesarchiv und Stadtarchiv sind im 17. Jh., Reichsarchiv im 18. Jh. bezeugt. Lat. archīum führt auf griech. arché͞ion (ἀρχεῖον) ‘Regierungsgebäude, Behörde, Amt’, das von griech. archḗ (ἀρχή) ‘Anfang, Ursache, Ursprung, Herrschaft, Regierung’, einem Verbalnomen zu griech. árchein (ἄρχειν) ‘der erste sein, vorangehen, anfangen, herrschen’, abgeleitet ist (s. ↗ Archaismus, ↗ Architekt, ↗ Hierarchie sowie die Vorsilbe ↗ Erz-). Archivar m. ‘Betreuer eines Archivs’; nach Archivarius (1. Hälfte 17. Jh.), gebildet aus Archiv mit der lat. Endung -ārius, setzt sich Archivar von der Mitte des 18. Jhs. an mehr und mehr durch. archivalisch Adj. ‘die Archivalien betreffend, urkundlich’ (2. Hälfte 18. Jh.). Archivalien Plur. ‘in einem Archiv aufbewahrte Schriftstücke’ (Anfang 19. Jh.), gebildet mit der Pluralendung -alien (aus lat. -ālia) nach Mustern wie ↗ Naturalien (s. d.). archivieren Vb. ‘Schriftstücke in ein Archiv aufnehmen’ (Mitte 19. Jh.).” (Archiv) 4 We must, in Foucault’s terms “grasp the statement in the exact specificity of its occurrence; determine its conditions of existence, fix at least its limits, establish correlations with other statements that may be connected with it, and show what other forms of statement are excluded� We do not seek below what is manifest the half silent murmur of another discourse” (The Archaeology of Knowledge 28). 5 I agree with Wendy Brown’s statement that the concept of fortification was in the early 2000s mainly used by the Left as “derogatory term for restrictive EU immigration policy towards non-Europeans” to become in the middle of the 2010s “the affirmative rallying cry of a growing European right” (7). 6 This self-regulation can also be connected to the second and third thermodynamic theorems, as Norbert Wiener’s and Stanislaw Lem’s considerations illustrate (representative for a bigger discourse). Norbert Wiener argued in the 1950s that processing of information in biological or mechanical systems can be understood as a process of organization that works against the tendency of entropy in isolated systems as it is formulated in the second thermodynamic theorem� As such it interprets the information transported in a message as “essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability.” (21) To be able to conceptualize processes of information as organization that works against entropy, Wiener needs to assume that living beings and machines can be explained within the same parameters. In his opinion the attempt to control entropy presumes feedback mechanisms� Only these mechanisms enable “to control the mechanical tendency toward disorganization; in other words, to produce a temporary and local reversal of the normal direction of entropy” (25). Feed- 212 Tanja Nusser back means in this context the capability of machines (as well as humans) to react in an “actual performance rather than its expected performance” (24) to situations. However, the concept of organization can also mean, as Stanisław Lem argued, that contrary to the third thermodynamic theorem biological evolution always strives to reach a higher order/ organization (Lem 47—74). 7 “The suffix scape allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes, shapes that characterize international capital as deeply as they do international clothing style” (Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference” 297). “These landscapes thus are the building blocks of what, extending Benedict Anderson, I would like to call ‘imagined worlds,’ that is, the multiple worlds which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe” (296—97). Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Means without End: Notes on Politics. 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Berliner Zeitung, 23 Sept� 2015� Web� 12 Mar. 2018. Hayles, N� Katherine� How We Became Posthuman - Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 1999. Hörl, Erich. “Die Ökologisierung des Denkens.” Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 14�1 (2016): 33—45. Human Flow. Dir. Ai Weiwei. Amazon Studios/ Participant Media, 2017. Film. “Human Flow. Final Press Notes.” humanflow.com/ press-kit/ . humanflow.com, 2018. Web. 12 Mar. 2020. Kluge, Friedrich, and Elmar Seebold. Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1999. Latour, Bruno� Existenzweisen. Eine Anthropologie der Modernen� Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014� Lem, Stanisław� Dialoge. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981. Leubecher, Marcel. “Die Festung Europa nimmt Konturen an.” welt.de. Welt, 26 Jan. 2017. Web. 14 Mar. 2018. Manoff, Marlene. “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines.” Libraries and the Academy 4.1 (2004): 9—25. Massey, Heath. “Archeology of Knowledge: Foucault and the Time of Discourse.” Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism. Ed. David Scott. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. 79—94. 214 Tanja Nusser “Österreichs Innenministerin will eine ‘Festung Europa’.” spiegel.de� Der Spiegel, 28 Oct. 2015. Web. 14 Mar. 2018. Roe, Michael. Maritime Governance. Speed, Flow, Form, Process� New York: Springer, 2016� Schmid, Ulrich.-“An der Drehtür der Flüchtlingsströme.” nzz.ch.-Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 4 Aug. 2016. Web. 12 Mar. 2018. Slominski, Marilla. “Flüchtlingsströme - Die Karte der Wahrheit.” journalistenwatch. com. jouwatch, 20 Dec. 2017. Web. 12 Mar. 2018. Spiegelhauer, Reinhard. “Ansturm auf die ‘Festung Deutschland’.” deutschlandfunk.de. Deutschlandfunk, 15 Apr. 2014. Web. 14 Mar. 2018. Steyerl, Hito. “Documentarism as Politics of Truth.” transversal.at. transversal texts 05 (2003). Web. 12 July 2017. Urry, John. Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-first Century� London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Webb, David� Foucault’s Archeology. Science and Transformation� Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013. Wiener, Norbert� The Human Use of Human Beings. Cybernetics and Society� New York: DaCapo Press, 1988. Zentrum für politische Schönheit. politicalbeauty.com/ . Web. 14 Mar. 2018. —. “The victims at the EU’s borders.” politicalbeauty.com/ wall.html. Web. 14 Mar. 2018. Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction 215 Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction Jack Davis Truman State University Abstract: This article explores the utility of Bertolt Brecht’s thought for the “postnatural” turn in the humanities as exemplified in the work of Timothy Morton. Brecht’s theory and praxis aim at unsettling “natural” concepts and ways of life, exposing them as historically and socially determined and therefore contingent. In a similar way, Morton and other theorists of the posthuman turn argue that “nature” is an ideological description of an interwoven totality of human and nonhuman actors so interconnected as to be indistinguishable. Furthermore, both Morton and Brecht borrow from Eastern thought to inform their theories: Morton from Buddhism, Brecht from Taoism� However, upon closer examination, it becomes clear that Brecht and Morton part ways when it comes to the question of contradiction. While Morton describes a differential network of interrelated actors coexisting in a “mesh” without center, Brecht insists on antagonism within difference. It is the emphasis on contradiction — and not merely difference as such — that distinguishes Brecht’s dialectical anti-naturalism from Morton’s “ecology without nature�” Keywords: mesh, Verfremdung, dialectic, Hollywoodelegien, humankind, naturalism A cursory reading of Bertolt Brecht’s writing would suggest that his stance towards the relationship between humans and the nonhuman world is clear� In numerous poems and dramatic situations, he pits heroic workers or other human agents against the forces of a recalcitrant nature, sometimes in the name of material or technological progress, other times as part of a vain struggle for survival which they are doomed to lose. For example, in The Flight over the Ocean the heroic pilot must confront and overcome the personified antago- 216 Jack Davis nists of “the Fog” and “the Snowstorm.” In The Caucasian Chalk Circle, the two farming collectives in the frame story decide to flood the valley to plant fruit trees; little thought is given to the ecological impact of this action. Other times, nature is a primal force that threatens humanity: the primeval forests in The Ballad of Cortez’s Men which strangle the eponymous figures, or the winds that Baal predicts will herald the age of human extinction (Knopf 12; Kleinschmidt 9). The nonhuman natural world appears as a force external and other to human beings, a force which must either be conquered or acceded to (Kleinschmidt 7). Ecology, as in the famous “conversation about trees” in “An die Nachgeborenen,” seems at best a distraction from the “real” issues, and at worst a threat to human prospering� We see in these examples the first way in which Brecht’s texts form an “ecological archive”: as documents of the twentieth-century conquest of nature celebrated by a Marxism in keeping with the spirit of the real existing socialism of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries, with ecological results qualitatively no different from the ravages of capitalism. Seen from this first perspective, Brecht would seem to have little to offer the present ecological crisis. Furthermore, given recent scholarship which argues for the necessity of new epistemological and ontological frameworks which explicitly call into question the two categories Brecht was most concerned with (humans and nature), it would seem that Brecht’s thought is unfit for the age of catastrophic climate change. This article is occasioned, however, by the tantalizing similarities between several key concepts in Brecht’s thought and the theoretical framework on ecology developed by Timothy Morton. In a series of books including Ecology without Nature, The Ecological Thought, Hyperobjects and Humankind, Morton has argued for the need to fundamentally rethink the categories we use to conceptualize the natural world. Morton’s work follows much other recent writing on ecology that explicitly posits itself as “post-” or “anti-”natural in claiming that the term “nature” is an ideological screen that obscures and occludes other views on ecology. According to Morton and other writers in the “post-natural” vein (most notably Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway), nature and culture are inextricably interwoven to the extent that they are indistinguishable� 1 Indeed, Morton argues through-out his work since Ecology without Nature that not only is the border between nature and culture undecidable, but that insisting on this border is actually pernicious to the goals of true ecology� 2 Therefore, Morton argues that the most pressing issue for contemporary ecology is the need to do away with the concept of “nature” entirely and replace it with superior concepts and metaphors for thinking the “ecological thought”: the interconnection of all Being, human and nonhuman� 3 It is in Morton’s discourse of “denaturalization” that a comparison between his writing Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction 217 and that of Brecht presents itself. Brecht’s theory and practice of historicization, gestus and Verfremdung, focused as they are at unsettling seemingly natural positions and ways of seeing in order to make historical and material contingencies visible, appear at least somewhat compatible with much recent ecological theory that troubles the nature/ culture distinction, including Morton’s. Morton espouses an “ecology without nature,” while Brecht’s dramatic theory aims at disclosing the ideological dimension of supposedly “natural” relations� Morton’s early writing on ecology launched a critique of “ecomimesis” (the attempt to “render” an environment through text), while Brecht’s early polemics inveighed against the attempt to create a sense of “milieu” in the theater of Naturalism (see discussion below). Furthermore, both Brecht and Morton propose what at first seem to be similar solutions to the aesthetic impasses they identify: ways of seeing the everyday world in a new, “strange” light. For Brecht, this means deploying the Verfremdungseffekt to highlight social relations; for Morton, it means encountering nonhumans as “strange strangers” within an infinite “mesh” of beings associated only through difference (Morton, Ecological Thought 28, 38). There are further resonances between Brecht and Morton’s thought. Both appropriate eastern philosophy in their critiques of the natural. It is well known that Chinese theater had a profound impact on Brecht’s theorization of the Verfremdungseffekt. Not only that, Brecht also had an acute interest in the “flow” of Taoism, which he conceived of as an eternal flux that exposes the transitoriness of all naturalized concepts, destroying and destabilizing all concretions. 4 Morton in turn relies on Buddhist thought as an antidote to “nature,” using it to inform his concept of the “mesh” (Morton, Ecological Thought 39). But what are the actual commonalities between Brecht and Morton’s thought? Are their particular strains of “anti-naturalism” actually compatible at all? It is the aim of this article to articulate the differences in such a way as to highlight both the utility of Brecht’s work and its potential as an alternative to Morton’s in addressing the challenge of global climate change� The crux of my juxtaposition will be Morton’s concept of the “strange stranger,” that is, the nonhuman “person” whom we meet in the “mesh” (Morton, Ecological Thought 38—39). Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s reading of Brecht, I will contrast this with the dialectic that Brecht develops in his writings on nature and the natural world, which informs his deployment of the principle of contradiction as a distinct kind of difference. I will then briefly tie this Brechtian method of “contradiction” to the work of Andreas Malm, who argues that the need for a concept of nature in the age of global warming is more important now than ever before. His concept of “historicized nature,” and his praise of 218 Jack Davis polarization and call for a return to “binary thinking,” strongly resonate with Brecht’s thought (Malm 185—88). Several authors in the burgeoning “second wave” 5 of ecocriticism in German Studies have engaged with Morton’s thought in readings of German literature (Groves; Schaumann and Sullivan). Others have contextualized or critiqued it within the field of German-language culture and philosophy including Niklas Luhmann and the Frankfurt School (Wilke; Müller; Bergthaller). This article adds to these emerging conversations on Morton in a German-language context by connecting them to scholarship on Brecht from before the “post- (or non-) human turn” in the humanities. Multiple scholars of Brecht have either theorized the concept of “nature” in his work or examined his writing and thought from an ecocritical perspective (Arendt; Heukenkamp; Irrlitz; Knopf; Kleinschmidt; Müller and Kindt; Powell). Furthermore, the “use value” of Brecht’s work for the ecological crisis has also not been neglected. To my knowledge, scholar and founder of Epic West theater R.G. Davis’s work represents the first attempt at applying Brecht’s thought to contemporary environmental problems� 6 Jost Hermand’s recent reassessment of Brecht’s work, Die aufhaltsame Wirkungslosigkeit eines Klassikers, also gives Brecht’s relationship to nature a central place. The first chapter of Hermand’s study makes a similar argument to the one put forward by R.G. Davis: Brecht’s thinking is valuable precisely for its tendency to simplify and reduce complexity while thinking through issues of ecology and economics (Hermand 14—30). This article represents a link between these two existing bodies of scholarship: one concerning nature writing in Brecht, and the other encompassing multiple attempts at conceptualizing an ecology without or beyond nature. Morton’s pathbreaking book Ecology without Nature is a reckoning with the practice of “ecomimesis” in nature writing and a demonstration of its deleterious effects for the cause of ecology. Ecomimesis, according to Morton, is a process by which nature writers seek to embed the reader in an environment through a series of rhetorical techniques (4). These techniques include, for example, the description of ambient sound and the use of paratactic lists of events occurring at the place of composition, often used to place the reader at the scene of writing (32). Ecomimesis, according to Morton, is a strategy of nature writing that seeks to evoke the place of its composition, while simultaneously suggesting that the reality of this place is “(1) […] solid, veridical, and totally independent (notably of the writing process itself) and (2) it would be better for the reader to experience it directly rather than just read about it […]” (30—31). “Strong” ecomimesis “purports to evoke the here and now of writing,” while “weak” ecomimesis is in effect whenever writing attempts to invoke an envi- Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction 219 ronment (32—33). Put simply, “[e]comimesis is an authenticating device” (33). The problem with ecomimesis is that the more it seeks to embed the reader in a natural environment, the more that environment recedes into the “background” becoming something “over there” just out of reach of the writing (or reading subject). Ecomimesis promotes a type of false consciousness that sets human beings apart from nature and therefore unable to truly conceive of their intimate connectedness to it� What is the solution Morton proposes to the impasse that he identifies in ecological art and thought characterized by ecomimesis? A destruction of the idea of nature, and with it, the idea of place� In The Ecological Thought, which Morton calls a “prequel” to his book Ecology without Nature, he revisits the former book’s titular phrase, sketching out some of the implications for the radicality of an “ecology without nature”: Why ‘ecology without nature’? ‘Nature’ fails to serve ecology well. I shall sometimes use a capital N to highlight its ‘unnatural’ qualities, namely (but not limited to), hierarchy, authority, harmony, purity, neutrality, and mystery� Ecology can do without a concept of a something, a thing of some kind, ‘over yonder,’ called Nature. Yet thinking, including ecological thinking, has set up ‘Nature’ as a reified thing in the distance, under the sidewalk, on the other side where the grass is always greener, preferably in the mountains, in the wild. (Ecological Thought 3) The first consequence is this one: the destruction of the concept of nature robs us of the backdrop against which human thought can construct itself� The Ecological Thought is an attempt to understand the implications of what it would mean to think “truly” ecologically, that is, without this backdrop� Losing “nature” means losing the ontological anchor that guarantees humanity’s place in the ecosystem, and even the universe. We are left within a centerless web of being. “Thinking interdependence involves thinking difference,” Morton writes, “[t]his means confronting the fact that all beings are related to each other negatively and differentially, in an open system without center or edge” (39). As a way of understanding this “open system without center or edge,” Morton introduces the metaphor of the “mesh,” a concept which borrows from both Buddhism and post-structural linguistics� Like language, “[t]he mesh is also made of negative difference, which means it doesn’t contain positive, really existing (independent, solid) things. This should be an utterly mind-blowing idea, so don’t worry if you’re having trouble imagining it” he reassures his readers (39). As in the post-structural view of language, where in the absence of a master signifier to anchor them the other signifiers in a system float free in infinite play, within the natureless mesh there is no way to orient the human subject: 220 Jack Davis Consider Indra’s net, used in Buddhist scripture to describe interdependence: ‘At every connection in this infinite net hangs a magnificently polished and infinitely faceted jewel, which reflects in each of its facets all the facets of every other jewel in the net� Since the net itself, the number of jewels, and the facets of every jewel are infinite, the number of reflections is infinite as well.’ (39) The other beings that we meet in this mesh, according to Morton, are “strange strangers” (38). The redoubled alienation in the phrase indicates for Morton that the “strange stranger” is so foreign that it upends our conceptual and ethical categories such as “parasite” and “host”: In symbiosis, it’s unclear which is the top symbiont […]. Am I simply a vehicle for the numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me? Who is the host and who is the parasite? There is no longer a privileged “center” of ecology: There is no being in the “middle”—what would “middle” mean anyway? The most important? How can one being be more important than another? This creates problems for environmental ethics, which risks oversimplifying things to coerce people to act. (38) For Morton this radical decentering means that “[…] the ethics of the ecological thought is to regard beings as people even when they aren’t people” (8). Morton’s most recent book at the time of this writing, Humankind, is an expansion of the idea of thinking about “beings” as “people,” i�e�, collapsing the idea of the human and the nonhuman� It repeats not only the sentiment from The Ecological Thought in the quote above, but also some of the actual words themselves, verbatim� 7 The importance of nature and the natural world, especially in Brecht’s early poetry, has been a central focus for many scholars� 8 While not the only scholar to write on Brecht and nature, Ursula Heukenkamp has offered a succinct and convincing systemization of Brecht’s thought on nature, identifying three key moments in its development� According to Heukenkamp, Brecht begins with the attitude characteristic of his generation, which saw nature as ancient and unchanging (Heukenkamp 12). Paradigmatic for this stance is the passage in “Vom armen B.B.” depicting the “pissing” fir trees and their “vermin,” the birds (12). This intentional disdain for nature is combined with images — also in the early poetry — of the power of primal nature, which reclaims the humans unlucky enough to have tested themselves against it. The salient example here — picked up by Jan Knopf in his biography of Brecht as well — is The Ballad of Cortez’s Men, which imagines the conquistador and his retinue being strangled by limbs (Knopf 12). 9 This is a timeless, eternal and ahistorical nature which, as Sebastian Kleinschmidt indicates, is contrasted with the decadence of human society (9). Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction 221 For Heukenkamp, the second phase of Brecht’s relationship to nature is exemplified by Der Ozeanflug� In this play and in other works from this time, people take a collective stance towards nature, with the goal of making it productive� In this concrete case, the pilot must confront and overcome the personified antagonists of “the Fog” and “the Snowstorm.” Heukenkamp observes that in Der Ozeanflug, the act of flying is seen as labor, and conquering nature is paradoxically connected to the overcoming of alienated labor (21). According to Heukenkamp, the figure of the pilot (who was explicitly tied to Charles Lindbergh in Brecht’s early drafts), is the first of three key “Forscher” figures used by Brecht in search of a model of unalienated labor. The other two are Galileo Galilei (from Leben des Galilei) and Tschaganak Bersijew (from the poem “Erziehung der Hirse”). “Erziehung der Hirse,” according to Heukenkamp, represents a “Gegenentwurf” to Galilei, and ultimately a reconciliation with nature for Brecht. In the figure of the illiterate farmer Bersijew, who invents a new method for growing millet, Brecht finds a model for a new harmony untainted by the romantic “return to nature” he disdained in his early work� Heukenkamp writes: “Die idealisierte Naturbeziehung soll ein Dreiecksverhältnis sein, in dem tätige Menschen, Natur und Gesellschaft miteinander korrespondieren” (25). In this analysis, an ecological lifestyle will be achieved once human relations are in some sense “renaturalized” in that they become “more human” once more (i.e., no longer characterized by “inhuman coldness”). This is a dialectical view on the human relationship to nature, where a new harmony is obtained only after a passage through alienation. 10 In summary, Brecht’s critique of nature does not appear to be a critique of the concept of nature itself, but rather of undialectical representations of nature and their implications for human relations and thought. The trajectory of Brecht’s thinking about the natural world leads him from a vision of nature as primal and unchanging, through a celebration of humankind’s ability to manipulate and conquer nature, towards a sort of latent ecological awareness� While Heukenkamp, Knopf and others convincingly trace the development of the aesthetics of nature in Brecht’s work, especially (though not exclusively) in his poetry, their considerations are largely concerned with the content of Brecht’s literary works, not the form of his language or the place of “nature” (in a sense that encompasses more than the natural world) in his thought more generally� 11 Morton’s critique of nature writing does not focus merely on writing that has ecology, or even “nature” as its object, but rather on the formal procedure of “ecomimesis,” that is to say, the way in which prose attempts to render an environment. In a similar vein — as I have suggested above — Brecht’s writings which are relevant to his “ecological archive” do not concern only the places in which he explicitly engages with nature or the natural world, but 222 Jack Davis extend to formal and aesthetic concerns as well. Often, these concerns (like Morton’s criticism of all writing that evokes an environment) have little to do with the representation of the natural world as such. For example, Brecht’s approach to ecology can also be read alongside his early critiques of Naturalism in the theater. The context of Brecht’s criticism of Naturalism is his tracing of the development of what he terms a dialectical form of dramatic writing. This writing begins with a critique of the bourgeois tendency to mistake culture for nature, a kind of definition which does in fact recall Morton’s intervention: Because artists, partly influenced by bourgeois Impressionist painting, had treated ‘natural objects’ undialectically, not seeing them as being in flux and capable of independent action but as parts of ‘Nature,’ as dead things, they had channeled the vitality into the atmosphere, into the effect ‘between’ the (base) words. This meant that instead of knowledge they had conveyed—‘experiences,’ in such a way that ‘Nature’ became an object of enjoyment […] and in a sense they ended up with a crude cannibalistic drama! (Brecht, Brecht on Theatre 53) While these polemics preserve “nature” as a category, they nevertheless identify the evocation of “milieu” as an ideological screen — in a similar way to Morton’s critique of ecomimesis 12 : This style was termed Naturalism, because it portrayed human nature naturally, that is to say, directly just the way it was (phonetically). The ‘human’ factor played an important role here: it ‘unified’ everyone (this sort of unification was all that was necessary). And the idea of ‘milieu as fate’ inspired compassion; the emotion that ‘one’ feels when one cannot do anything to help but does at least suffer vicariously. Milieu was treated as a natural phenomenon, immutable and inescapable. (53) Even if Brecht preserves the concept of “nature” he criticizes sharply the naturalization of “milieu,” i.e., environment. Notably, this naturalization is achieved through sonic (in Brecht’s terms, “phonetic”) means: the use of dialect that vouches for the authenticity of the social milieu being portrayed on stage. This may in fact remind us of Morton’s critique of “ecomimesis,” which is not solely concerned with writing about nature, but rather any kind of writing that seeks to evoke an “environment” and place the reader in it� 13 The linguistic evocation of sound, especially in its ambient form, is in Morton’s analysis one of the key components of ecomimesis. Naturalist theater, in its attempts to conjure milieu “phonetically,” (though not through what the words signify but rather through the dialectal inflection of the signifiers themselves) engages in a strictly formal ecomimetic practice, regardless of the actual content of the play in question. 14 Taking these formal considerations even further, we can see that even when the content of Brecht’s writing concerns the confrontation between the human Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction 223 and the natural worlds, it is often highly “anti-ecomimetic.” For example, in the Hollywoodelegien (1942), Brecht’s terse lines sketch intimate connections between nature, culture and commerce. The bones of prospectors panning for gold in canyons are juxtaposed with oil rigs on the coast, which in turn power (economically or otherwise) the industry built by the sons of these unfortunate men: Am Meer stehen die Öltürme. In den Schluchten Bleichen die Gebeine der Goldwäscher. Ihre Söhne Haben die Traumfabriken von Hollywood gebaut� Die vier Städte Sind erfüllt von dem Ölgeruch Der Filme. (Brecht, Die Gedichte 283) There are a number of relationships set up here: the men’s corpses have been left to rot in the open like carrion, suggesting both the bestiality of human relations under capitalism and the animal (that is to say, physical) nature of human beings� Indeed, when we consider the fact that the oil being extracted by the rigs on the coast is itself made up of organic material compressed over geologic time, we are left with the impression that the bones of the dead gold prospectors will themselves become fodder for the machine of capital in the distant future� Furthermore, the “oil smell of film” is multivalent, calling to mind the status of film as an industry (like the oil industry), and thereby connecting cultural and economic production, but also the physical medium of the film stock itself. Celluloid and triacetate (two substances used in film stock at this time) are not derived from petroleum, but rather from cellulose — a natural product like oil. The oily smell of the film fills the cities, suggesting an omnipresent, inescapable web of interrelations between nature and culture: what Morton and other theorists might refer to as an “ecology without nature” in the Anthropocene� Capitalism has rendered the natural paradise of Southern California a hellscape� In the Hollywoodelegien, we are dealing with nature poetry that is at odds with the “ecomimesis” in Ecology without Nature. While there is an attempt to evoke an environment — that of Southern California — there is no attempt to place the reader at the site of the poem’s composition, the “as I write” gesture that Morton identifies as being particularly prominent in nature writing that displays characteristics of “ecomimesis.” Indeed, we can say that the way in which Brecht’s poetic practice appears to overlap with Morton’s theory, as presented in this early work, is not coincidental, insofar as Marxist thought underlies much of Brecht’s writing. As Timo Müller argues, in Ecology without Nature, Morton develops a method somewhat akin to Theodor Adorno’s in order to “[…] emphasize the dialectical reciprocity of all environmental experience […]. While classical ecocriticism tends to situate the work of art in relation to an idealized, 224 Jack Davis nonalienated nature, […] an aesthetics of ambience considers the work in its reciprocity with natural and cultural environments alike” (Müller 98). 15 This partial affinity with Brecht’s dialectical method falls away, however, when we delve further into Morton’s later work. These brief reflections on the formal procedures underlying Brecht’s poetic practice in the Hollywoodelegien may be connected to broader observations made by Fredric Jameson in Brecht and Method. Jameson points out that nature in Brecht (especially in the poetry) often appears as drained of color (“fahl”) or isolated (as in the single lonely cloud in “Erinnerung an die Marie A.”), while artificial structures seem imbued with life: the cities are a “jungle” as the translation of the famous play has it; the more accurate “thicket” still proves the same point. This is largely the same point that Heukenkamp makes about Brecht’s generational disdain for the natural world that is expressed in the first phase of his aesthetics of the natural. However, Jameson connects Brecht’s language itself, specifically its dependence on the definite article, to the impoverishment of nature, arguing that it highlights the isolation of the object in Brecht’s poetry, especially when applied to natural objects: the tree, the branch, the leaf ( Jameson 134). The formal procedure by which individual objects are isolated through the use of the definite article is a fundamentally anti-organic procedure which proliferates difference. However — and this point is key to understanding one of the fundamental distinctions between Brecht’s anti-naturalism and Morton’s — this procedure does not lead to the kind of celebration of difference as such which we might associate with post-structuralism, or, in the case of Morton, the post-human “mesh.” While Brecht plays with many of the same ideas of heterogeneity, multiplicity and difference that concern (for example) Deleuze, these qualities are not simply celebrated in and of themselves, they crystalize into something more. Jameson writes: […] it is […] crucial to understand that for Brecht, these qualities which we have been enumerating — dissonance, Trennung, distance, separation, surcharge, multiplicity and so on — also have a meaning [emphasis mine]� And it is a meaning rather distinct from that of non-identity or heterogeneity, which are the current terms of ideological celebration, even though it includes those and draws them into its own allegorical centrality. For that meaning is contradiction [emphasis mine], and a Brechtian method is not fully realized if we have not begun to understand how the merely distinct and differentiated is gradually to be drawn into contradiction itself, or rewritten as contradiction, unveiled and disclosed as contradiction; or, finally, like a role one studies, acted and acted out in the form of sheer contradiction as such. (76) The Brechtian principle of contradiction identified by Jameson is necessarily related to Brecht’s Marxism and its materialist dialectics. It is also, of course, Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction 225 specifically connected to the notion of class struggle, the symptom of the central contradiction that traverses the social fabric according to Marx. Therefore, I will turn briefly to Morton’s Humankind, in which he explicitly confronts Marxist thought, attempting to subject it to a post-human turn so that nonhumans (i.e., “nonhuman people” in his parlance) can be included in its project of liberation. As he puts it in the opening line of the book: “A specter is haunting the specter of communism: the specter of the nonhuman” (1). For Morton, extending solidarity to nonhumans also means questioning the ontological distinctions between humans and nonhumans (and indeed, between life and death): The more we think ecological beings — a human, a tree, an ecosystem, a cloud — the more we find ourselves obliged to think them not as alive or dead, but as spectral. The more we think them, the more we discover that such beings are not solidly “real” nor completely “unreal”—in this sense, too, ecological beings are spectral. Since the difference between life and non-life is neither thin nor rigid, we discover that biology and evolution theory are actually telling us that we coexist with and as ghosts, specters, zombies, undead beings and other ambiguous entities, in a thick, fuzzy middle region excluded from traditional Western logic. (55) The upshot of Morton’s argument is not explicitly that humans are things, but rather that nonhumans are also “people.” This is both a revision and an expansion of the concept of the “strange stranger” laid out in The Ecological Thought� This concept may not actually be so foreign to us. After all, we all like to think of our pets as “people.” But what is largely — though not completely — absent in this book and other places in Morton’s writing is any sense of antagonism between humans and nonhuman “persons�” In Humankind, we find Morton refining his idea of the “mesh” and introducing the term “implosive holism,” a concept in which the whole is less than the sum of its parts, an infinite regress of “objects” that make up each individual being. Morton’s preferred metaphor for describing these objects is “rocking,” a movement that recalls the German Romantics’ favored term “Schweben,” but does not seem to involve actual conflict, just the “shimmering” between two positions (175). Where antagonistic relations between humans and nonhuman “strangers” are concerned, Morton remains largely ambivalent: The logic of the neighbor or of the stranger is the logic of the symbiotic real, not the logic of friend and enemy� Sovereignty and exception and decision are not capable of operating with the symbiotic real in mind, because they are based on the logic of exclusion� Stranger-logic means that the whole that is the biosphere is subscendent: it is tattered and jagged, it has pieces missing, it’s less than the sum of its parts. It 226 Jack Davis might then be the case that there can be no totality to rule them all, and that if this is only what communism means, we cannot think communism without metaphysical universalisms concerning the human� If, however, it is possible to imagine a host of communisms then we will be able to include nonhumans in communist thought� Interdependence (the basic fact of ecology) means that one lifeform is always excluded from a group: caring for rabbits means not caring for rabbit predators� Communisms can only be contingent, fragile and playful. (163) While the inherent conflict between rabbits and their predators seems to imply that a new ecology must draw battle lines, this front still remains undefined, and indeed perhaps undefinable in a completely non-anthropocentric ontology. In the final section of Humankind, Morton does offer the beginnings of a theorization of violence, but one without victims and perpetrators. This is the further exposition of the theory of “rocking” as an antidote to the binary distinction between activity and passivity: A new theory of action would alter how we think violence, which would be equivalent to a deep shift in notions of solidarity. Violence, in the new theory of action, would belong not to the greater explosive whole but to the fragile contingency (of whatever size). There would be a host of micro-violences (even though they might be ever so large), rather than a pantheon of macro-violences. (179) But what of those “macro-violences” (or host of “micro-violences”) which demonstrate a clear contradiction between the interests of humans and nonhuman “strangers”? The ultimate example of this ecological antagonism might be mosquitos. The WHO estimates there are 400,000 annual deaths from malaria alone, 16 a fact that has prompted some scientists to entertain the possibility of completely eradicating mosquitos. 17 In the antagonism between mosquitos and humans we can also see the antagonism between the denaturalizing tendencies of both Morton and Brecht. In Brecht’s writing, antagonistic relationships become political (and, in this case, ecological) litmus tests used to clarify, not problematize relationships. From difference arises contradiction as lines of conflict become visible. It happens that one particularly clear example of this process in Brecht is also a dramatization of the human-mosquito relation: the poem “The carpet weavers of Kuyan-Bulak,” the second in the cycle “Stories from the Revolution.” This poem tells the story of carpet weavers from a small town in the south of Turkestan who wish to honor Lenin� It is a time of contagion: Fever is going around: the train station Is filled with the buzzing of thick clouds of mosquitos that rise from the swamp behind the old camel burial ground Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction 227 The train that visits this plague-stricken station also brings news that comrade Lenin is to be honored soon. The carpet weavers take up a collection for a bust of the late leader. But one of them, a Red Army soldier Stepa Gamaleew, noticing the way that the weavers’ hands tremble with fever as he collects their money, suggests that they honor Lenin instead by buying petroleum and dumping it in the swap behind the camel cemetery to kill the mosquitos. The carpet weavers agree: On the day of the ceremony, they carried their dented buckets, filled with the black petroleum one after the other out to the swamp and poured them in (Brecht, Die Gedichte 141; translation mine). The workers then install a plaque at the train station, commemorating their action in Lenin’s memory. Here, we have what seems to be yet another example of the heroic Marxism of Der Ozeanflug� It is in the principle of contradiction, however, where the two later stages in Brecht’s approach to nature — the heroic Marxist conquest of nature, and the “go-with-the-flow” Taoist conception — begin to show a commonality. As it happens, Brecht’s Tao-inspired “flow” does not entirely resist the questions posed by post-nature authors like Morton, Haraway and Bennett who wish to decenter humans and human agency� 18 One particular passage of Me-ti: Book of Interventions in the Flow of Things 19 takes up the question of the agency (or to be more precise, the life) of inanimate matter directly. The passage in question is one of several titled On the Flow of Things, and it crystallizes the difference between the (dialectical) contradiction posited by Brecht, and the glorification of the erasure of borders and celebration of difference as such in the above-mentioned discourses of post-nature. Me-ti begins with an observation: And I saw that nothing was completely dead, not even the deceased. The dead stones breathe. They change and are the cause of changes. Even the moon, said to be dead, moves� It casts light, although extraneous, on the earth and determines the trajectory of falling bodies and causes the sea water to ebb and flow. (55) However, this is not enough for Me-ti to conclude that one should speak of the moon as “alive”: “Yet, I saw, it is in a certain way dead; if, namely, you accounted for everything in which it lives, it is too little or is not relevant, and so it has on the whole to be called dead” (55). Me-ti gives a reason: For if we did not do that, if we did not call it dead, we would lose a designation, the very word dead and the possibility to name something we really can see� But since, 228 Jack Davis as we also saw, it is not dead, we must simply think both things of it and treat it like something that is both dead and not dead, though actually more dead […]. (55) Me-ti’s conclusion is dialectical in the sense that it preserves the original contradiction within a new perspectival frame� 20 It does not, however, erase the distinction between the moon and living things� It allows for the fact that the moon may in some sense be “alive,” while insisting that referring to it as “alive” would be to lose an important conceptual category� It shows, in other words, a tension or contradiction between the terms “living” and “dead” without insisting on the “undecidability” of this relationship, as we have seen in the passages from Morton above. Brecht offers contradiction as an alternative to both the neo-vitalist materiality of Bennett and the “implosive holism” of infinite difference posited by Morton. Like Morton, he offers a vision of beings and Being as ultimately characterized by difference. But for Brecht, some differences are more different from each other than others� The importance of Brecht’s writing as an archive of the ecological is obviously not to be found in his praise of an ecologically destructive variant of Marxism (even if this does not characterize all of his oeuvre). However, Brecht’s thought, in its willingness to draw lines, to posit and outline contradictions between the needs of the “strange strangers” (represented for, example, by the mosquitos) and the human beings who suffer from the parasites these strange nonhuman persons carry, may actually ultimately be better suited to a new ecological politics� In a time of rapidly increasing global temperatures our task is not to pour oil on the swap, but to keep the oil in the ground. This requires a dialectical view akin to Me-ti’s: it is not that there are not numerous causes and actors at work in the event called “global warming,” but certain concrete actors are more responsible for the extraction of fossil fuels than others. This means not positing a web of relations with no center, but placing responsibility where it is due� 21 As Brecht famously wrote in the Kriegsfibel under a photograph of a woman in the rubble of a destroyed house in Berlin: Such nicht mehr, Frau: du wirst sie nicht mehr finden! Doch auch das Schicksal, Frau, beschuldige nicht! Die dunklen Mächte, Frau, die dich da schinden, Sie haben Name, Anschrift und Gesicht. (172) 22 The position I have outlined here strongly resonates with Andreas Malm’s recent polemic against the philosophical trends which radically contest the concept of “nature” as distinct from “culture,” The Progress of this Storm. Nature and Society in a Warming World. In this book, Malm breaks down post-natural ecological theory into three categories: “constructivism,” “hybridism,” and the “new Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction 229 materialism.” The constructivist argument, familiar from the “cultural turn” in the humanities, insists that “nature” is an effect of discourse, a way of talking about something that has no actual correspondence to the world “out there�” Hybridism, whose main representatives are Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, insists that human agency ceases the moment that it meets resistance from nonhuman objects or animals. Finally, there are the “new materialisms,” represented by the thought of Quentin Meillassoux and others. Morton’s thought does not fall neatly into any of Malm’s categories, but rather has elements of all three. Malm’s description of the potential role of theory in a situation which cries out for praxis helps crystalize the potential importance of Brecht’s work as an “ecological archive.” Addressing the election of Trump, Malm insists that now is the time for action on climate change, stating that while theory is not central to this call, it nevertheless has an important role to play: “some theories might make the situation clearer while others might muddy it� Action remains best served by conceptual maps that mark out the colliding forces with some accuracy, not by blurry charts and foggy thinking […]. Theory can be part of the problem” (16). In its push to clarify relationships, to map the “names and addresses” of responsible parties, Brecht’s theory is a potential part of the solution. Notes 1 According to Haraway, the division between the human and the nonhuman is the result of “[…] the culturally normal fantasy of human exceptionalism. This is the premise that humanity alone is not a spatial and temporal web of interspecies dependencies” (11). See also Latour (who Haraway explicitly draws on), especially the section “The End of Nature” (25). Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things is another example of this influential line of thought. 2 See, for example, Morton, Ecological Thought: “This ghostly Nature inhibited the growth of the ecological thought” (5); “In the name of ecology, we must scrutinize Nature with all the suspicion a modern person can muster. Let the buyer beware” (7). 3 “[…] the ecological thought is interconnectedness in the fullest and deepest sense” (Morton, Ecological Thought 7). 4 See Jameson’s discussion of Me-ti (117). 5 The “second wave” designation comes from Helga Braunbeck (119). 6 He writes: “[…] I have always assumed that I could turn Brecht’s thinking patterns — not necessarily his work — towards a useful aesthetic for ecology […]” (51). It is through reading R.G. Davis’s work that I discovered the poem “The carpet weavers of Kuyan-Bulak honor Lenin,” which provides a 230 Jack Davis central example for my argument. A further recent attempt to use Brecht and ecology together comes from director Sam Williams (see “Trading Brass with Brecht: Towards an Ecorealist Theatre”). 7 “In symbiosis, it’s unclear which is the top symbiont, and the relationship between the beings is jagged, incomplete� Am I simply a vehicle for the numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me? Who is the host and who is the parasite? ” (Humankind 1). 8 Hans-Harald Müller and Tom Kindt state the importance of nature for Brecht’s early lyric plainly: “‘Natur’ ist der für Brechts Frühwerk entscheidende Grundbegriff” (41). In a similar vein, Jan Knopf begins his biography of Brecht with a discussion of the famous “black forests” in “Vom armen B�B�,” connecting them to the “cool forests” of Alaska in the later Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (9—10). See also Christine Arendt’s Natur und Liebe in der frühen Lyrik Brechts� 9 Knopf’s biography traces Brecht’s relationship to nature and its reflection in his writing during his exile in multiple countries and climates. For example, in Finland (383—84), California (390—91), and Switzerland (474—75). 10 This reading may strike us as a bit too harmonious to be truly “dialectical.” Malm’s critique of Jason Moore’s Capitalism and the Web of Life applies here as well, insofar as this interpretation of Brecht’s poem also seems to support “a view of dialectics as a method not so much for articulating antagonism as for achieving holism [italics in original]” (Malm 182). 11 Larson Powell deviates in an interesting way from this reading, demonstrating the relationship between Brecht’s exile poetry and natural law (178—226). 12 In the text “Dialectical Dramatic Writing” from 1930/ 31, we find the following description of Naturalist drama: “A crude and shallow realism, which never revealed any deeper contexts and which was therefore at its most excruciating when it aimed at tragic effects, because it was not (as it believed) portraying nature, which is an eternal and immutable human category” (Brecht on Theatre 52; emphasis mine). 13 There are numerous other contexts in which Brecht discusses “naturalness,” for example, when discussing acting. He often defends his theater against charges that it is in some way “unnatural.” For example, in “Verfremdung Effects in Chinese Acting,” we read: “The V-effect does not in any way demand an unnatural way of acting� It has nothing whatever to do with ordinary stylization. On the contrary, triggering a V-effect absolutely depends on lightness and naturalness of performance” (Brecht on Theatre 154—55). 14 Brecht’s critique of the phonetics of the Naturalist stage suggests the tantalizing possibility that the “ecological archive” of Brecht’s thought might also be approached in terms of Jacob Smith’s “eco-sonic media,” detailed in Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction 231 his book of the same name (Smith). Thanks to the anonymous reviewer for pointing this out� 15 “Ambience” in this context refers to a concept that encompasses “ecomimesis” but also goes beyond it (Morton, Ecology without Nature 34). 16 http: / / www.who.int/ mediacentre/ factsheets/ fs387/ en/ . Accessed 1 April 2019. 17 https: / / www.wpr.org/ shows/ mosquitoes-must-die-1. Accessed 1 April 2019. 18 In Humankind, Morton explicitly distances himself from the theory of distributed agency, but in the context of arguing against the binary distinction between “active” and “passive” (180). 19 Brecht worked on Me-ti from 1934 to 1955 (Me-ti. Interventions 10). The English-language translation of this text appeared only in 2016� 20 Cf., once again, Müller (98). 21 Hannes Bergthaller, in critiquing Morton and other theorists of the post-human from the perspective of Luhmann’s systems theory, points out a similar contradiction: “Humans are not singular, we are told — and yet, they are singularly responsible for the ecological crisis. The ecological embeddedness of human beings puts their self-sovereignty radically into question — and yet, it is presumed that they are able to refashion society in accordance with ecological insights” (121). 22 Thanks to Carl Gelderloos for making this connection. Works Cited Arendt, Christine� Natur und Liebe in der frühen Lyrik Brechts. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Bergthaller, Hannes. “Beyond Ecological Crisis: Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Social Systems�” Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture. Ed. Gabriele Dürbeck et al. Lanham: Lexington Books,-2017. 119—32. Braunbeck, Helga. “Review Essay: Recent German Ecocriticism in Interdisciplinary Context�” Monatshefte 111.1 (2019): 117—35. Brecht, Bertolt� Brecht on Theatre. Ed. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles and Tom Kuhn. Trans. Jack Davis et al. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. —. Die Gedichte. Ed. Jan Knopf. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000. —. Kriegsfibel� Bertolt Brecht. Werke. Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe. Ed. Jan Knopf. Vol. 12. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989. —. Me-ti. Book of Interventions in the Flow of Things� Trans� Antony Tatlow� London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016� Davis, Ron G. “Brecht/ Science/ Ecology.”-Drive b: Brecht 100. Ed. Marc Silberman. Berlin: Theater der Zeit/ International Brecht Society, 1997. 80—83. 232 Jack Davis Groves, Jason. “Writing after Nature: A Sebaldian Ecopoetics.” German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene. Ed. Caroline Schaumann and Heather Sullivan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 267—92. Haraway, Donna� When Species Meet. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Hermand, Jost. Die aufhaltsame Wirkungslosigkeit eines Klassikers. Brecht-Studien. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2018. Heukenkamp, Ursula� “Brechts Ästhetik der Natur�” Das Angesicht der Erde: Brechts Ästhetik der Natur. Brecht-Tage 2008. Ed. Sebastian Kleinschmidt. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2009. 10—27. Irrlitz, Gerd. “Ästhetische Naturanschauung und philosophischer Naturbegriff bei Brecht�” Das Angesicht der Erde: Brechts Ästhetik der Natur. Brecht-Tage 2008. Ed� Sebastian Kleinschmidt. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2009. 28—86. Jameson, Fredric. Brecht and Method� London and New York: Verso, 1998� Kleinschmidt, Sebastian� “Vorwort�” Das Angesicht der Erde: Brechts Ästhetik der Natur. Brecht-Tage 2008. Ed. Sebastian Kleinschmidt. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2009. 7—9. Knopf, Jan. Bertolt Brecht - Lebenskunst in finsteren Zeiten: Biografie. Munich: Carl Hanser, 2012� Latour, Bruno� Politics of Nature. How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy� Trans� Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. Malm, Andreas. The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World� London and New York: Verso, 2018� Moore, Jason. Capitalism in the Web of Life. Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital� London and New York: Verso, 2015� Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics� Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007. —. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010. —. Humankind� London and New York: Verso, 2018� Müller, Hans-Harald, and Tom Kindt. Brechts frühe Lyrik - Brecht, Gott, die Natur und die Liebe. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002. Müller, Timo. “Ecocriticism and the Frankfurt School.” Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture. Ed. Gabriele Dürbeck et al. Lanham: Lexington Books,-2017. 91—100. Powell, Larson.-The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature: Nature in Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin. Rochester: Camden House, 2008. Schaumann, Caroline, and Heather Sullivan. “Introduction: Dirty Nature: Grit, Grime, and Genre in the Anthropocene.” Colloquia Germanica 44.2 (2011): 105—09. Smith, Jacob. Eco-Sonic Media. Oakland: U of California P, 2015. Wilke, Sabine. “Planetary Praxis in the Anthropocene: An Ethics and Poetics for a New Geological Age.” Readings in the Anthropocene: The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond. Ed. Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnstone. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. 296—312. Williams, Sam. “Trading Brass with Brecht: Towards an Ecorealist Theatre.” ecibs: Communications of the International Brecht Society 2 (2017): n. pag. Dark Geology : The Arcades Project as Earth Archive Jason Groves University of Washington Abstract: -Dark ecology, as elaborated by Timothy Morton, appropriates the complicit position of the protagonist typical of-film noir-in order to articulate an ecological thought that does not permit metapositions and neutral points of view. This article will propose a dark geology in order to account for the increasing implication of human elements in the complex geologic flows that compose cities, and it will also begin to conceptualize the dark geological archive. This thought experiment will take shape around a work of an important forerunner of a dark geology who perhaps better than any other of his time understood how the tropes of nineteenth-century geology and natural history could evoke the poetics of urban life, namely Walter Benjamin’s-Das Passagenwerk.-Benjamin understands the Paris arcades, and more broadly the city, as a collection of trace fossils and in a way that is not only metaphorical but also material� Not only do these technofossils invite inclusion into earth archives in an epoch tentatively known as the Anthropocene; moreover, Benjamin’s materialist historiography also-offers an opportunity to reconceptualize the earth archive by proposing new possibilities for geohistorical understanding that were not available through the stratigraphic logic of conventional historicism� Key words : Walter Benjamin, Passagenwerk, earth archive, fossils Some of New York City’s more compelling archives might be located outside rather than inside the Public Library. In Geologic City: A Field Guide to the Geo- Architecture of New York, Jaime Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth of smudge studio ask us to consider Patience and Fortitude, the lion statues flanking the library entrances, as a kind of repository� Composed of a limestone that formed from the remains of bryozoa and other marine life forms starting in the Ordovician period some 460 million years ago, they write that the geological substances and fossilized life archived in the lions’ regal forms carry intimate knowledge of microbial ‘crud,’ shallow continental seas, tropical warmth, the tickle of trilobites, ice ages — and the second largest extinction in planetary history. The mineral intelligence of these New York icons rivals the preeminent repository of human thought and experience they have come to symbolize. (Kruse and Ellsworth n. pag.) Presenting the iconic statues as an archive comparable to the special collections of the New York Public Library might seem somewhat immoderate, but this proposal can be situated within a tradition in geological discourse of regarding the earth as archive. One finds this approach already in the writings of Torbern Oof Bergman, the Swedish chemist and mineralogist who argued in his 1766 Physisk beskrifning öfvert jordklotet (Physical Description of the Earth) that fossils are “laid down on the originating earth surface, whose layers are archives older than all annals [deras lågen åro archiver, åldre ån alla annaler]” (266). These terrestrial archives have been supplemented by the institutional archives of earth stored within the built environment -institutional collections of geologic specimens, ice and sediment — but in Patience and Fortitude, urban geologic objects that are neither, strictly speaking, naturally occurring nor institutional, the built environment offers an informal earth archive of cultural and geological significance. While so-called “naturally occurring” archives remain crucial for the study of both the deep history of the planet and its volatile futures, artifacts from the built environment promise, paraphrasing Kruse and Ellsworth, to facilitate human capacities to design, imagine, and live in relation to deep time� Just as these latter earth archives are distinguished from the former, so too is their study: let’s call it dark geology, adapting Timothy Morton’s notion of a dark ecology. Morton’s term has been extensively adapted already, as in Heather Sullivan’s elaboration of a “dark pastoral,” and Morton himself adapts this term from the genre of film noir, as he writes in The Ecological Thought: “The form of dark ecology is that of noir film. The noir narrator begins investigating a supposedly external situation, from a supposedly neutral point of view, only to discover that she or he is implicated in it” (17). 1 Thus, for dark ecology, which introduces hesitation, uncertainty, and irony into ecological thinking, “there is no metaposition from which we can make ecological pronouncements” (Morton 16). A dark geology, in turn, would take note of Jennifer Fay’s recent elaboration of postwar American film noir as an ecological genre in Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene, but rather than Fay’s insistence on the noir world as one that negates any human imprint, a dark geology could take as its motto Ilana Halperin’s sculptural series We form geology, especially given the impersonal exhibition title in which these artwork featured, Steine� 2 The premise 234 Jason Groves of a dark geology might be further summed up in an observation from Geologic City: “There is no ‘outside of’ the complex geologic flows that compose our city. Humans live within and contribute to this mix” (Kruse and Ellsworth n. pag.). A dark geology would explore the implication of humans in the geological and the geological in the human in all of its monstrous, montage forms: technofossils, petrofiction, geoarchitecture, geosocialities, geotrauma, anthroturbation, anthropogeomorphology, the Anthropocene, the Humusities� The archives of a dark geology would differ from those of geology and paleontology proper: urban snow dumps rather than Arctic ice sheets, warehoused salt mounds rather than glacial moraines, maps of metropolitan street grids rather than prehistoric footprints, body stones rather than meteorites. Moreover, drawing on the paradigm put forth by historian of science David Sepkoski in “The Earth as Archive: Contingency, Narrative, and the History of Life,” the illustrated Field Guide in which Patience and Fortitude feature could itself constitute an earth archive: if the lions are construed as an “original” or “natural” archive of the earth then the field guide would be archive2 or “pictorial atlases of fossils” (71). One interesting aspect of Sepkoski’s model is that it accounts for the mediated reconfigurations of fossil collections (e.g., illustrated atlases, taxonomic compendia, digital databases) within the paradigm of the archive, and so an illustrated field guide to the urban geology of New York, if its illustrated objects are recognized as (dark) geological specimens, would also constitute an archive. This account of the archive that encompasses both terrestrial and textual materials is not particular to Sepkoski but is also elaborated by literary scholars. Drawing on Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, Tove Holmes argues that literature, like Adalbert Stifter’s literary engagement with geology and the history of the earth, participates in “the recursive writing and reading that make up the archive and its understanding” (Holmes 282). While it is the case that most of the twenty specimens and sites collected in the Field Guide are not fossils, they are all, according to the authors’ elaboration, geologic objects that constitute a contemporary rock record (namely, the anthrostratum), and as such may be as instructive for a future paleontologist as prehistoric fossils are today� Sepkoski, writing about the emergence of paleontology as a historical and moreover historiographic discipline, does not speculate on how the geological records of the earth’s deep history might deviate from those of its recent and future history, particularly where those histories become entangled with human histories. Though, as Sepkoski notes, the eighteenth-century “geohistorians” of France and Germany proceeded to reconstruct the history of the earth using geological relics “just as human history is pieced together from texts, coins, monuments, and other artifacts,” he does not consider the possibility of such artifacts themselves one day being used to piece together geologic history, let Dark Geology: The Arcades Project as Earth Archive 235 236 Jason Groves alone whatever archive might abstract those artifacts (181). If the methods of the human sciences informed the earth sciences, their materials did not� However, it does not take the speculative fiction of extraterrestrial geologists visiting the earth in the distant future and observing the built environment reduced to a “remarkable stratum” -encompassing “layers of angular pebbles with hard organic coatings,” the “remains of a long tubular structure, now oxidized, that had once been metallic,” and “shards of a white glassy substance” (Zalasiewicz, The Earth After Us xiv)—to envision cities and other cultural artifacts as comprising the earth archive, not in the distant future but in a geologic now that arguably extends back to the emergence of the modern earth sciences if not much further. Already prior to Sepkoski’s article a number of scientists from geology and related fields have proposed considering “human artefacts as technofossils” within a larger subfield of technostratigraphy (Zalasiewicz, “Technofossil Record” 36). Such a use of “fossil” seems to retrieve an earlier sense, which Martin Rudwick traces back to Aristotle’s Meterologica, of “any distinctive objects or materials dug up from the earth or found lying on the surface” (Rudwick 1). But in fact, there is a growing push by geologists to classify human artifacts along the lines of ichnofossils, or “trace fossils” in distinction to the more frequently encountered “body fossils.” They argue that the industrial materials that make up cities (anthropogenic lithologies like concrete and bricks; mineraloids like artificial glass and plastics) and the sites of excavation and extraction that underlie and underwrite them “may be considered in general as ichnofossils (trace fossils)” but have “distinctive characteristics, which serve to separate them from trace fossils as normally understood” (Zalasiewicz, “Technofossil Record” 35—36) and as such would constitute what Sepkoski calls an earth archive. Or as geographer Kathryn Yusoff pithily puts it, “in unearthing one fossil layer we create another contemporary fossil stratum that has our name on it” (784). One important forerunner of a dark geology is the writer who perhaps better than any other of his time understood how the tropes of nineteenth-century geology and natural history could evoke the poetics of urban life� In the Arcades Project Walter Benjamin writes of Paris as a counterpart to Vesuvius: “Ein drohendes, gefährliches Massiv, ein immer tätiger Herd der Revolution” (5.1: 134), outmoded hair styles, such as the permanent wave, become “versteinerte Haartouren” (5.1: 270), and he observes the bourgeois collector “seine Spur so betreuend wie im Granit die Natur eine tote Fauna” (1.2: 549). As Adorno remarks, Benjamin’s fondness for regarding cultural objects as natural ones is hardly surpassed: “Ihn sprachen die versteinerten, erfrorenen oder obsoleten Bestandstücke der Kultur, alles an ihr, was der anheimelnden Lebendigkeit sich entäußerte, so an, wie den Sammler das Petrefakt oder die Pflanze im Her- Dark Geology: The Arcades Project as Earth Archive 237 barium” (242). Cities and their inhabitants are not only like (“wie”) fossils, as Benjamin occasionally writes; today they might be regarded as literal fossils (unearthed fragments) in “völlig unmetaphorischer Sachlichkeit,” as he writes in another context (4.1: 11). While in the translation essay from 1923 it is the continued “life” of the literary work in translation that Benjamin regards both as a metaphor and as a “fully unmetaphorical reality,” in the Arcades Project there seems to be a similar ambivalence around the fossilization of the city. Though the figurative fossils in the Arcades Project might be accounted for by Benjamin’s reception and redeployment of Hegel’s concept of second nature and the Marxian category of commodity fetishism, they can also be accounted for by a dark geology in which cultural fragments and manufactured artifacts are understood as forming an emergent earth archive of a unique stratigraphic interval that would correspond to a new geological epoch tentatively and contentiously known as Anthropocene� In this way they would not be metaphorical but literal fossils. With Benjamin’s familiarity with the importance of both fossils for nineteenth-century geology and nineteenth-century history for geology more or less given, in this essay I propose to reassemble and reassess some of the urban geological figures in the Arcades Project, as part of a putative dark geological archive, in order to speculate on an expanded earth archive in the Anthropocene, if not also the Capitalocene� 3 If the “natural archive” can be expanded to include the postnatural archive of manufactured materials and other technofossils, a wager that many in the geological community have already made, it would follow that the reconfiguration of the latter in the documents collected in the Arcades Project could also constitute an earth archive, if only marginally and tentatively, both metaphorically and in its fully unmetaphorical objectivity� What follows is a thought experiment exploring this scenario� Walter Benjamin is not generally regarded as an important figure in the history of environmental thought� While his work has been anything but neglected in recent decades, its disregard by ecologically engaged literary studies could stand to be corrected. This is the opinion of Andreas Malm, author of Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming� Of ecocriticism he writes, Benjamin might well serve as a lead interpreter in its general pursuit, defined by Lousie [sic] Westling as the reevaluation of “traditions in light of present environmental concerns” (Malm 128). Malm’s article makes a case for developing Benjaminian dialectical images from fossil fuel fiction, his term for literature that makes sustained and explicit reference to oil and coal economies. Together with the reader’s presence of mind (Geistesgegenwart), dialectical images possess the capacity to cast light on the present, and thus to acquire meaning that they did not originally possess. Im- 238 Jason Groves ages from the past might be recovered so as “to bring the present-into a critical state,” (5.1: 588) writes Benjamin in the Arcades Project, and thus to contribute, as Malm adds, “to a critical understanding of our current epoch, fracturing the narrative of the human species as a united entity ascending to biospheric dominance in the Anthropocene” (121). Accordingly, dialectical images can give insight into how the “miseries of global warming have been in preparation for a long time,” certainly before the advent of the term “global warming,” and also into how some more than others “have felt the heat from the start” (Malm 121). Malm’s article discusses dialectical images drawn from a veritable fossil fuel fiction archive of Chinese, Indian, Chilean, and European literature, but he does not look to Benjamin for these images. The one exception is a line from “Feuermelder,” a thought-image in Einbahnstraße about twentieth-century class struggle and the urgent overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat before the latter’s self-destruction: “Bevor der Funke an das Dynamit kommt, muß die brennende Zündschnur durchschnitten werden” (4.1: 122). How could this be read today, Malm asks, “if not with the approaching tipping points of global warming- suffusing the text? ” (128). Malm’s attempt to rescue this image of twentieth-century revolt in the context of twenty-first century ecocide, also shows how Benjamin has anticipated the methods of ecocritics who have largely neglected him. If Malm’s reading of this antiquated image retraces Timothy Clark’s recent argument in Ecocriticism on the Edge that literature today is subjected to an “emergent sense” in that it “exceeds that of the situation in which it occurred” and moreover where “that situation is being reconceptualized as a context that must now also include the present and an uncertain future,” Clark himself is sketching out a critical practice that highly resembles Benjamin’s dialectical image, a predecessor to whom he makes no reference (65). This “emergent unreadability” (and emergent readability) of literary texts is something that Benjamin already diagnoses in his 1939 commentary on the poems of Bertolt Brecht (Clark 62). Here it must be observed that if Benjamin’s writings do not offer many glimpses of fossil fuels, they nevertheless elaborate the practice of reading in which those texts that make no explicit reference to fossil fuels might nevertheless be read with reference to them. The audacity of such readings, Benjamin writes, and the audacity of writing a classical commentary on a contemporary, anti-authoritarian poet such as Brecht, is derived from the knowledge (Erkennntnis), “dass nämlich schon der kommende Tag Vernichtungen von so riesigem Ausmaß bringen kann, daß wir von gestrigen Texten und Produktionen wie durch Jahrhunderte uns geschieden sehen” (2.2: 540). Thus, as Benjamin adds in a parenthetical statement, “Der Kommentar, der heute noch zu prall ansitzt, kann morgen schon klassische Falten werfen. Wo seine Präzision fast indezent wirken könnte, kann morgen das Geheimnis sich Dark Geology: The Arcades Project as Earth Archive 239 retabliert haben” (2.2: 540). Here Benjamin poses the challenge of reading during a terminal phase of the world that turns out to have been the terminal phase of the Holocene. For Benjamin, reading “today,” a time marked by an extraordinary scale of destruction, entails becoming attuned to the capacity of literary texts to dramatically deviate from the interpretive frames that readings place on them� The significance of this position increases not despite but because of his commentary’s inability to address the planetary crisis that was emerging alongside the political and historical crisis to which it most directly responds. The archive of texts held to constitute a record of our contemporary ecological crisis must be continually subjected to revision� Malm’s discovery of the potential of Benjamin’s dialectical images for ecocriticism, however, itself neglects the work of Catriona Sandilands, who already in a 2010 article explored “the role of the dialectical image in the cultivation of a critical ecology” (“Thinking Ecology” 219). While there are several significant differences to their projects, they can be glossed over relatively easy. Whereas Malm takes up the figure of the dialectical image in order to address and contend with a present defined by anthropogenic climate change, Sandilands takes up Benjamin’s dialectics of seeing in the less historically specific “age of the nature-commodity” (212) but with a no less urgent mission to “[wrest] nature from the bourgeois historical narrative that finds its congratulatory victory in the park, the nature-store, the eco-tour, the IMAX wildlife documentary, the hybrid SUV” (217). If for Sandilands we only now recognize the dream-image of a “universally consumable nature ‘beyond’ history” as such (namely, as a dream-image), then the peculiar kind of “dream interpretation” offered by the Arcades Project might facilitate our awakening from the “eco-phantasmagoria” of “public nature spectacles” offered by zoos, North American national parks, and other “arcades of our ecologically consumer age” (223). The sites and artifacts discussed by Sandilands, such as North American zoos and nature parks, certainly could inform a novel ecological archive of an outmoded nature-ideal that is complicit in the current ecological crisis. (A study of zoo director Carl Hagenbeck’s “empire” would surely figure into such an archive, not only in a German but also in a global context; Eric Ames’ monograph Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments would offer a solid starting point.) In other words, the methodologies that inform the Arcades Project could be mobilized to unearth the anti-ecological archives of our present ecological crisis� But rather than again taking up Benjamin’s theoretical insights only to apply them to contemporary North America, in the following I will consider the Arcades Project as itself a dark geological archive, if a rudimentary one and removed from the archives currently under consideration by geologists� 240 Jason Groves As a work consisting of “rags and refuse” that were rescued from oblivion by a practice of recycling (“Methode dieser Arbeit: literarische Montage. Ich habe nichts zu sagen. Nur zu zeigen.”), the Arcades Project might be a model ecological archive (5.1: 574). Indeed, in a follow-up article, “Green Things in the Garbage: Ecocritical Gleaning in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades,” Sandilands reads the historical work of the Arcades Project as a project of “waste diversion” that could “animate a practice of ecocriticism” (36). And while Sandilands makes a compelling case for the role that Benjamin could play in cultivating an environmental literary criticism, first of all in his identification and critique of phantasmagoria, it might also be said that the identification of ecology with “green” environmentalism and practices of salvage might be the contemporary phantasmagoria� Perhaps what is ecological about the Arcades Project today is not how green its practices of gleaning are but rather how grey its material is, and not only in terms of the unmetaphorical chromatic appearance of the Parisian arcades — the grey of men’s clothing, the grey of working class women’s uniforms, the socalled grisettes, the streets’ gradations of grey and the palette of grey that its painters used to paint them, the grey of boredom, and “das unansehnliche abgebleichte Grau der Häuser, die alle aus dem mürben Flözkalkstein gebaut sind, welcher bei Paris gebrochen wird” (5.1: 164)—but also in the metaphorical sense of an ecology that refuses any clear distinction between nature and culture, an ecology that occupies the liminal spaces of twilight, of thresholds, and other hybrid spaces. “Landschaft,” writes Benjamin in one of the most well-known passages of the convolute on the figure of the flaneur, “das wird sie in der Tat dem Flanierenden. Oder genauer: ihm tritt die Stadt in ihre dialektischen Pole auseinander. Sie eröffnet sich ihm als Landschaft, sie umschließt ihn als Stube” (5.1: 125). The grey ecology of the Arcades Project is announced by the flaneur (and also the sex worker and collector), for whom the dialectical image of the urban landscape first becomes a possibility and whose subject position, marked by an implication in the commodification and fossilization they observe, makes them a key protagonist in a dark ecology in which, as Susan Buck-Morss writes in an excellent overview of fossils in The Arcades Project, there is no longer any “absolute, categorical distinction between technology and nature” (68). If the flaneur undertakes dark ecology in the world-ecology of the Capitalocene, it is less as an outsider figure characterized by gleaning and salvage, practices which can be mobilized to sustain vulture capitalism equally if not more than resist it, and more as a complicit figure endowed with a critical reflexivity. An ecology folded around grey, marking both the color of liminal zones and the process of decomposition, refuses green ecology’s anthropocentric separation of culture and nature, the human and the inhuman. Grey, as Jeffrey Cohen writes in his contribution to Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green, “reveals Dark Geology: The Arcades Project as Earth Archive 241 the inhuman as a thriving of life in other forms, a vitality even in decay that demonstrates how the nonhuman is already inside, cohabitating and continuing” (274). Cohen’s vital materialist rescue of grey things from their moribund connotations parallels Benjamin’s historical materialist project. Seeing vitality in decay (“Das Pathos dieser Arbeit: es gibt keine Verfallszeiten.”) and decay in vitality (“die Monumente der Bourgeoisie als Ruinen zu erkennen noch ehe sie zerfallen sind”) belongs to the dialectics of seeing that inform and underwrite The Arcades Project (5.1: 571; 5.1: 59). Just as things are not inert for Cohen, the past is not inert for Benjamin� A grey ecology is nevertheless a moribund ecology, if only partially, and the Arcades Project is likewise characterized by a focus on “Erstorbene Natur” and the “Unabsehbarkeit der ausgestorbenen Passagen” (5.1: 271—2). What makes the Arcades particularly unfathomable is not their terminality, however, but rather the extension of their existence into a kind of deep time, or in Benjamin’s terms, prehistory (Urgeschichte). As Benjamin writes in Convolute R: Wie Gesteine des Miozän oder Eozän stellenweise den Abdruck von Ungeheuern aus diesen Erdperioden tragen, so liegen die Passagen heute in den großen Städten wie Höhlen mit den Fossilien eines verschollenen Untiers: der Konsumenten aus der vorimperialen Epoche des Kapitalismus, des letzten Dinosaurus Europas. (5.2: 670) In a related passage from a 1929 draft of the Arcades Project, Benjamin writes of the colored illustrations of petrified landscapes and the “Seen und Gletscher zur ersten Eiszeit” in children’s history books: “Solch ideales Panorama einer kaum verflossenen Urzeit tut mit dem Blick durch die in alle Städte verteilten Passagen sich auf. Hier haust der letzte Dinosaurus Europas, der Konsument” (5.2: 1045). Here a key difference between the geoarchitectures of smudge studio’s New York and Walter Benjamin’s Paris might be observed: whereas the former uses fossils and other geologic figures to resituate the history of the city within the history of the earth (and vice versa), the latter uses the figure of the fossil — and more specifically the fossilization of the recent past — to make apparent the radical difference and distance between two adjacent epochs of human history. It is a human-on-human story, but one that can only be conveyed in an inhuman, geological context. The experience of an unprecedented derangement of temporality and timescale where “Zum erstenmal […] hier das Jüngstvergangene ferne Vergangenheit [wird],” and where the new nature is even more transient than the old is, shares less with the Modernist chronophilia of Proust, Woolf, or smudge studio, and more the chronophagy of an alternative, moribund petromodernity (5.2: 1250). To reconstruct historical transformation through body fossils is only part of that story; in fact, most of the fossils that crop up in The Arcades Project are what 242 Jason Groves paleontologists would call ichnofossils, the study of which, ichnology, became intensely popular in the mid-nineteenth century, which is to say, in the period most extensively documented by The Arcades Project� Ichnology begins with a radically Benjaminian premise: that the ichnos — the track, footstep, or other imprint — constitutes a legible logos. The ichnologist reads what was never written. Continental ichnology studies those organisms whose presence on the earth, due to the transience of those organisms as well as radical changes in their environment, was not preserved directly in the form of a body, but indirectly in preserved traces (e.g., footprints, burrows) of behaviors such as walking (Cruziana) and resting (Rusophycus). Thus, when Benjamin writes of “places in the stones of the Miocene or Eocene Age that bear the impression of huge monsters out of these geological epochs” he might be referring to Rusophycus species of fossils; likewise, his impulse is a neoichnological one when he writes of his resolution: Was ich vorhabe ist, Baudelaire zu zeigen, wie er ins neunzehnte Jahrhundert eingebettet liegt. Der Abdruck, den er darin hinterlassen hat, muß so klar und so unberührt hervortreten wie der eines Steines, den man, nachdem er jahrzehntelang an seinem Platz geruht hat, eines Tages von seiner Stelle wälzt. (5.1: 405) With its focus on traces and interiors (such as Convolute I), the Arcades Project offers an incipient urban ichnology and not only of the nineteenth century but potentially also of the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene. Part of the work of The Arcades Project, then, involves developing an attunement to fossils: “seeing ourselves in the present as the material expenditure of the remains of late capitalism,” as geographer Kathryn Yusoff writes (784). As a textual documentation of those body fossils and trace fossils, which is to say, as a reconfiguration of the postnatural archive of the “capital of the nineteenth century,” the Arcades Project deserves to be considered as something of a speculative earth archive, which, as Benjamin recognized, is made up less of intact bodies and more of impressions and traces, where it is not so much a question of encountering a fossilized other as it is of engaging “the presence of an absence: the mark of the here-no-longer that remains” as Dana Luciano eloquently writes of such traces (100). The Arcades Project is a record of a radical transience characteristic of modernism — the “Hinfälligkeit und Gebrechlichkeit” (5.1: 419) of Paris in Baudelaire’s verse; a historical period defined by Baudelaire’s axiom “le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent” (5.1: 312)—and certain characterizations of the Anthropocene. The vulnerability of the Parisian arcades, and the related vulnerability of the textual materials collected in the Arcades Project to all kinds of historical contingencies, obtain a distinct legibility in a geologic now understood as a moment of destratification: as Bronislaw Szerszynski writes, “what is in the ascendant [in the Anthropocene] is […] not the durable world of things made by Homo faber, Dark Geology: The Arcades Project as Earth Archive 243 but impermanence and change” as in “the fluxes and flows of substances such as CO 2 , SO 2 and NO; the migrations of species; the transformation of ecological communities; accelerated erosion and denudation” (174—5). The demolition of the arcades that inspired The Arcades Project, in order to make way for the broad thoroughfares of automobile traffic, figures into this history. Further, the limits of a stratigraphic logic correspond to the practice of materialist historiography that underlies The Arcades Project, and which is registered, as Benjamin writes in a crucial passage, “in der Aufsprengung der historischen Kontinuität […], mit der der historische Gegenstand sich allererst konstituiert” (5.1: 594). Citing from the same section of The Arcades Project, Jennifer Wenzel has recently identified a distinctly Benjaminian critique of stratigraphic logic based on an analogy between stratigraphy and “the kind of thinking Benjamin derided as historicism, where the past is safely past, neatly buried under the present in smooth and legible layers” (180). With Wenzel, but also drawing on historians of science like Sepkoski and Rudwick, it might be said that this similarity is not only an analogy but an historical and historicizable appropriation — by earth scientists “of ideas, concepts, and methods from human historiography” (Rudwick 181)—that was constitutive for stratigraphy and modern geology. This was highly expedient for the earth sciences, and it facilitated the historicization of nature and the mobilization of an earth archive for the production of stratigraphic knowledge. But in a moment where it is recognized that human activity operates as a “destratifying force” that manifests itself as igneous “extrusive and intrusive formations” which break the stratigraphic “logic of superposition” (Szerszynski 179), a historical materialist historiography suddenly offers new possibilities for geohistorical understanding that were not available through a conventional historicism, and it also offers expanded criteria for what constitutes an earth archive, in order to more adequately represent that “record of the contingent history of life on the earth” that is its supposed function (Sepkoski 56). Part of the record of that contingent history must be the historical contingency of historiographic practices� This, too, is a matter of and for reading. As Wenzel shows, from Freud to Coetzee the logic of superposition that underlies stratigraphy is “more fundamental to literary interpretation than we might expect” (174—5). Increasingly, however, Benjamin’s acts of interpretation and commentary bear witness to the untenability of inherited practices of reading, and they do so in a way that recognizes the increasing untenability of the Holocene, the logic of superposition, and the historiographic practices that underlie modern geology� When Benjamin writes “dass nämlich schon der kommende Tag Vernichtungen von so riesigem Ausmaß bringen kann, dass wir von gestrigen Texten und Produktionen wie durch Jahrhunderte uns geschieden sehen” (and one might add, Jahrtausende), 244 Jason Groves he is charting a deranged temporality which breaks with the prevailing geohistorical model of reading, while also arguing that acts of reading (and moreover misreading) might offer a metric for the dark geohistorical event currently unfolding: “Der Kommentar, der heute noch zu prall ansitzt, kann morgen schon klassische Falten werfen. Wo seine Präzision fast indezent wirken könnte, kann morgen das Geheimnis sich retabliert haben” (2.2: 540). If only a minor footnote in the great book of nature, this expression of the contingent history of reading nevertheless also constitutes part of the record of the contingent history of life that is known as the earth archive� And it is also a matter of reading stories in deviant stone. As Kruse and Ellsworth remind the bibliophiles, the lion statues outside of the New York Public Library are another kind of repository or earth archive, as worthy of attention as any geological object catalogued inside� Beyond their intended symbolic significance, as allochthonous blocks the statues also commemorate an epochal destratification whose monument may not be the accumulation of a novel anthrostratum but rather the gap in the existing rock record left by drilling, mining, and quarrying, as well as the unconformities produced by the deposition of those materials elsewhere (Zalasiewicz et al. 3—9). The daily encounter with such dark geological specimens and phenomena — voids and resulting unconformities in the built environment — offer glimpses into a pedestrian Anthropocene: pedestrian in the sense of an “everyday Anthropocene” that offers “a more granular and personal account of near catastrophic change” than that of specialized experts and pedestrian in the sense of one that is acutely informed by walking or otherwise moving slowly through the city (LeMenager 225). Inspired by contemporary pedestrian-oriented field guides such as smudge studio’s Geologic City, the pedestrian Anthropocene exists outside of, or at least on the margins of, scientific and academic institutions. But like Benjamin’s commentary that becomes antiquated as soon as it is written, the rapid alteration of the built environment today means that dark geological inquiry might also take shape in the disjunction between the guide and the environment� In closing I can offer one account of stumbling over such an unconformity. One day in 2016 I met up with Ilana Halperin in downtown San Francisco to take the “Petrographic Nature Walk Through the Financial District” that I had found in A Walker’s Guide to the Geology of San Francisco, a special supplement to the USGS’s Mineral Information Service (Volume 19, Number 11, 1966). The guide was compiled by none other than Clyde Wahrhaftig, author of the legendary Streetcar to Subduction and Other Plate Tectonic Trips by Public Transport in San Francisco, and both were held by the Observatory Library that Rick and Megan Prelinger developed for the Exploratorium Museum, where, coincidentally, Dark Geology: The Arcades Project as Earth Archive 245 Ilana was developing the exhibit that would become A Library of Earth Anatomy. Though the directions of Wahrhaftig’s “guide to geological street walking” were faultless and though the building descriptions both exact and lavish—“The next building down California St., Pacific Mutual Life, has genuine laurvikite as a decorative stone. The feldspar with schiller here is not labradorite, but a peculiar orthoclase. This rock is from Norway. On the Kearny St. side of this same building, basaltic volcanic bombs are used as decorative effect with small evergreens in a window garden” (Wahrhaftig 14)—Ilana and I struggled greatly to follow the guide. The reason for this had less to do with my lack of geological expertise and much more with the absence of the described buildings and building facades: like so many in the walk, the building mentioned above had been demolished decades ago� Where the buildings discussed in the guide happened to still stand, in some cases the stone cladding at street level had been replaced by massive glass panels or other manufactured materials. After completing the walk, we had determined that no more than five of the original twenty buildings and related petrographic features remained� Not despite but because the city no longer conformed to the guide, the guide turned out to be surprisingly useful to understand the city as a (dark) geological process. Yet the absence of the geological objects and features catalogued by Wahrhaftig, in some cases only decades after their formation, suggests that the urban geological archive may be marked by its transience, and here The Arcades Project will be profoundly instructive� Notes 1 Dark ecology, of course, holds other resonances than those for which Morton listens� An alternative dark ecological archive could begin not with film noir but instead Afrofuturism, Black feminist fugitivity, and the “dark feminine” as elaborated by Alexis Pauline Gumbs in M Archive: After the End of the World. I plan to pursue this (mis)reading of dark ecology elsewhere, but here mark the for the most part unmarked whiteness of Dark Ecology� 2 The title Steine is, upon closer inspection, not neutral at all� As Halperin once related to me, the title for this prominently advertised Berlin show can be parsed as both a common noun and a German-Jewish surname; read as the latter the show overtly if implicitly commemorates the liquidation of German Jews, and as such the curated body stones, mineralized sculptures, and geologic specimens of this exhibition might also be understood with reference to, if not also participating in, the Jewish tradition of leaving pebbles on gravestones, a tradition tremendously complicated in a city with so many who were deported and otherwise disappeared� 246 Jason Groves 3 By most accounts the Capitalocene is not understood to be coterminous with the Anthropocene, though accounts of the former generally delegitimize the latter, and vice versa. Where Benjamin’s account of the arcades might be useful for the Capitalocene rather than the Anthropocene is its support for the former’s dialectical framework in which capitalism constitutes, in Jason Moore’s term, a “world-ecology,” which is to say that “capitalism does not act upon nature so much as develop through nature-society relations […]. Capitalism does not have an ecological regime; it is an ecological regime” (Moore 2). Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. “Charakteristik Walter Benjamins.” Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Vol. 10.1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. 238—53. Ames, Eric� Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2008� Benjamin, Walter. “Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire.” Gesammelte Schriften� Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Vol. 1.2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974. 513—19. —. Einbahnstraße� Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Tillman Rexroth. Vol. 4.1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983. —. Das Passagenwerk� Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Vol. 5. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982. Bergman, Torbern Olof� Physisk beskrifning ofvert jordklotet. Upsalla: Joh. Edman Kongl� Acad� Boktr�, 1773� Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project� Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989. Clark, Timothy.-Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept� London: Bloomsbury, 2015� Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Grey (A Zombie Ecology).” Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2013. 270—98. Fay, Jennifer.-Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene� Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018. Gumbs, Alexis Pauline.-M Archive: After the End of the World. Durham: Duke UP, 2018. Holmes, Tove. “An Archive of the Earth: Stifter’s Geologos.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 54.3 (2018): 281—307. Kruse, Jamie, and Elizabeth Ann Ellsworth.-Geologic City: A Field Guide to the GeoArchitecture of New York� New York: smudge studio, 2011� LeMenager, Stephanie. “Climate Change and the Struggle for Genre.” Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times. Ed. Tobias Menely and Jesse-Oak Taylor. University Park: Penn State UP, 2017. 220—38. Dark Geology: The Arcades Project as Earth Archive 247 Luciano, Dana. “Romancing the Trace: Edward Hitchcock’s Speculative Ichnology.” Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times. Ed. Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor. University Park: Penn State UP,-2017. 96—116. Malm, Andreas. “‘This is the Hell that I Have Heard Of’: Some Dialectical Images in Fossil Fuel Fiction.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 53.2 (2017): 121—41. Moore, Jason. “Transcending the Metabolic Rift: A Theory of Crises in the Capitalist World-Ecology�” The Journal of Peasant Studies 38.1 (2011): 1—46. Morton, Timothy.-The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010. Rudwick, Martin. The Meaning of Fossils. Episodes in the History of Paleontology. London: Macdonald, 1972. Sandilands, Catriona. “Thinking Ecology in Fragments: Walter Benjamin and the Dialectics of (Seeing) Nature.” eco(lang)(uage(reader))� Ed� Brenda Iijima and Evelyn Reilly. New York: Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs / Nightboat Books, 2010. 211—26. —. “Green Things in the Garbage: Ecocritical Gleaning in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades.” Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches. Ed. Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P. 2011. 30—42. Sepkoski, David. “The Earth as Archive: Contingency, Narrative, and the History of Life�” Science in the Archives: Pasts, Presents, Futures� Ed� Lorraine Daston� Chicago: Chicago UP, 2017. 53—84. Sullivan, Heather. “The Dark Pastoral: A Trope for the Anthropocene.” German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene� Ed� Caroline Schaumann and Heather I� Sullivan� New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 25—44. Szerszynski, Bronislaw. “The End of the End of Nature: The Anthropocene and the Fate of the Human�” Oxford Literary Review 34.2 (2012): 165—84. Wahrhaftig, Clyde. A Walker’s Guide to the Geology of San Francisco� Special Supplement to Mineral Information Service. San Francisco: California Division of Mines and Geology, 1966. Wenzel, Jennifer. “Stratigraphy and Empire-Waiting for the Barbarians, Reading Under Duress�” Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times. Ed. Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor. University Park: Penn State UP, 2017. 167—83. Yusoff, Kathryn. “Geologic life: prehistory, climate, futures in the Anthropocene.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31.4 (2013): 779—95. Zalasiewicz, Jan. The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks? Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. —. “The Technofossil Record of Humans.” The Anthropocene Review 1.1 (2014): 34—43. Zalasiewicz, Jan, Colin N. Waters, and Mark Williams. “Human Bioturbation, and the Subterranean Landscape of the Anthropocene�” Anthropocene 6 (2014): 3—9. Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive1 249 Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive 1 Seth Peabody Carleton College Abstract: Fritz Lang’s comments about the inspiration for his film Metropolis emphasize the verticality and bright lights he encountered on his first view of Manhattan in 1924. Scholarship on the film’s cityscape has likewise focused on skyscrapers, the influence of and discourse about New York, and the debate about skyscrapers in Germany. Yet events high above ground constitute a minority of the film’s action. The present study argues that the upward focus in past scholarship has distracted from the equally dramatic ecological archive underground. After discussing ideas about archives that undergird the study, the article offers a new analysis of the film’s cityscape in relation to the rapidly expanding underground infrastructures of early twentieth-century Europe and ideas about ecology and pollution that circulated around the time of the film’s release. With these contexts in mind, Metropolis resonates as an ecological archive of Weimar Germany as much as a science fiction fantasy of the future. Keywords: Fritz Lang, Metropolis, German film, infrastructure, environment, ecocinema, ecocriticism When researching the filmic environment of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, frequently cited as the prototypical science fiction cityscape, a curious puzzle emerges. Lang’s comments about the inspiration for the film emphasize the verticality and bright lights he encountered on his first view of Manhattan in 1924. Scholarship on the film’s cityscape has likewise focused on skyscrapers, the influence of and discourse about New York, and the debate about skyscrapers in Germany. Yet events high above ground constitute a minority of the action: in the 2010 reconstruction, the film spends roughly equal amounts of time high above ground in the Eternal Gardens, offices, or apartments; at street level; and underground. The present study asks: What is missed by focusing on the above-ground cityscape? I argue that the upward focus in past scholarship has distracted from the equally dramatic ecological archive underground. This paper aims to reopen that archive� In what follows, I use the framework of cinema as an ecological archive to analyze Metropolis and argue that Lang’s film serves as an archive for the manifold environmental relations of its time. I begin by briefly reflecting on ideas about archives that inform the present study. I then examine four different areas of environmental discourse that are evident in Lang’s film. Two of these fields of discourse — the debate about skyscrapers in Weimar Germany and the interaction between environment and social tensions — have already received significant scholarly attention. The other two — rapidly expanding underground infrastructures of early twentieth-century Europe and notions about ecology and pollution that circulated around the time of the film’s release — have gone largely unnoticed, and will therefore receive the majority of the attention in this study� Archives have been described as “prosthetic memory” (Kieckhefer n. pag.): the physical materials of the archive enhance the limited capacity of the human brain for storing information. In defining the word “archive,” dictionaries tend to focus on collections of documents deliberately preserved by archivists� But an ecological archive — understood in this study as a collection of sources that yields insight into the physical environment, changing ecological processes, and environmental discourses — also draws on physical materials created and preserved independently of, or as an unintentional byproduct of, human agency� The ecological archive of cinema includes films’ explicit plotlines about environmental topics, landscapes captured in the background of a film scene about an unrelated topic, and even the scratched surface of a film print that bears witness to the past environments of the film’s storage, distribution, and exhibition. The storytelling power of film draws on all of these environmental components. Scholars of new materialisms argue that “things (or matter) draw their agentic power from their relation to discourses that in turn structure human relations to materiality”; in other words, “phenomena result from the intra-actions of material and discursive practices and agencies” (Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction” 4; cf. Barad 3). Film, with its inherent tension between creative manipulation and indexical realism, is a particularly useful medium for this approach because it sits at a middle ground between documents created and preserved intentionally, and physical materials into which information is inscribed regardless of human intent (cf. Lethen 16). In Metropolis, a clear link between film archive and ecological archive arises through the film’s focus on massive engineering projects to control the physical 250 Seth Peabody Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive 251 environment, especially through the tunnels, caverns, and waterworks of the underground city. The ecological archive of Metropolis became even more evident when a nearly complete copy of the film was discovered in a Buenos Aires film archive in 2008. In the twenty-five minutes of new scenes that were added to the film in the 2010 reconstruction, the heavily scratched surface of the image reminds the viewer of the materiality of film and the impacts of nonhuman factors alongside deliberate filmmaking practices. Further, several of the newly restored scenes deal with the film’s underground spaces and climactic flood (cf. “New Scenes” 4—6). Lang’s Metropolis is of course one of the most canonical films of German cinema, yet it is not generally considered as an environmental text� Canon formation and archival preservation tend to reflect power structures and dominant patterns of taste (cf. Kacandes 11—12). Yet both archives and canons, even as they try to establish stable traditions, also contain the potential for destabilization through diverse interpretive possibilities. According to Jacques Derrida, the multiplicity of discourses within any text comprises “an earthquake from which no classificational concept and no implementation of the archive can be sheltered. Order is no longer assured” (Derrida 11). Whatever the rationale for a document’s preservation or canonization, it might also yield insight into any number of conditions that influenced its creation — including relationships between humans and their environment. An ecological approach thus offers a chance to read the canon, but “read it slant,” to adapt Emily Dickinson’s (no less revolutionary than canonical) phrase, so that we might circle back through familiar works and reveal new layers of truth. After all, “success,” Dickinson assures us, “in circuit lies” (Dickinson 563). Metropolis is sufficiently well known that I will forego a thorough plot summary. For the purposes of this analysis, it suffices to note that the film displays a city divided vertically into three distinct environments: wealthy businessmen live and work high up in skyscrapers; laborers and machines are buried underground; and the traffic and business of city residents circulates at ground level. A conflict between the skyscraper elites and the underground workers erupts through a riot in the machine halls, a flood in the underground city, and a reconciliation at street level� Past discussions of the environmental discourses in Metropolis, or what I am describing as the ecological archive of the film, have focused on two primary areas: the relation of the film’s skyscrapers to the Weimar-era “Schrei nach dem Turmhaus” or skyscraper mania, and the way in which the environments in the film create spatial symbols for social tensions. Dietrich Neumann’s 1994 essay on the cityscape of Metropolis set the tone for scholarly discussions of the film’s 252 Seth Peabody relation to skyscraper discourse in Weimar Germany. Neumann writes that “the film’s architecture is one of the few features that has not been analyzed in any detail up to now” (Neumann 146) and describes H. G. Wells’s review of the film as “the only analysis that dealt with Metropolis’ urbanistic vision in any detail” (147). Wells’s New York Times Magazine review of 17 April 1927 criticized the film for showing an outdated vertical vision of the city, when urban planners had long since abandoned the notion of growth upward in favor of sprawl outward into suburbs (Neumann 148; cf. Wells 95). Neumann responds by arguing that the film reflects the “skyscraper mania”—consisting of plans and debates, not predictions or realized projects — in Germany during the 1920s. As evidence, Neumann discusses parallels between leading architects’ visions for German skyscrapers and Erich Kettelhut’s revisions of his set design for the film (149, 151—52, 155—62). The gap that Neumann identified regarding scholarship on the architecture of Metropolis has largely been filled. 2 In subsequent studies of the filmic environment, commentators have often focused on the relationships between Lang’s filmic cityscape and the film’s social structures. As Thomas Elsaesser points out, Lang does not endorse or reject verticality, but uses it as a “universally understood metaphor of social power” (Elsaesser, Metropolis 88). Several essays have dealt with the city’s underground realm, often treating it metaphorically as a space of myth or oppression within the film’s vertically oriented symbolic structure. These analyses tend to argue that Lang’s filmic city combines “the verticalized cityscape of Manhattan with the mythic underworld of Paris and the contemporary concerns of Berlin” (Pike, Subterranean Cities 283; cf. Elsaesser, Metropolis 88; Kaes 175—76; Pike, “Kaliko-Welt” 477). The underground layers are marked on the one hand by the mysticism of the catacombs, and on the other hand by the social issues represented by the bell in the underground city’s central square. The bell’s base was patterned after a monument in Weimar, designed by Walter Gropius, that memorializes the murder of workers who had gone on strike in 1920 to oppose the Kapp Putsch. The bell thus displays in condensed form the sociopolitical tensions embedded into Metropolis’s vertical structure (cf. Neumann 153). The role of underground water has likewise been explained metaphorically: the continual rising, boiling, and bubbling water stands as a recurrent symbol for the rising social unrest of the oppressed masses (Elsaesser, Metropolis 26; Kaes 185; Schönemann 66). Past analyses have helpfully elucidated the architectural debates and symbolic implications of the urban landscape in Metropolis� But as a product of environmental discourses in 1927, Lang’s film serves as an archive for much more than Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive 253 just urban design discussions and social tensions. It also reflects and expands on realities on the ground, and underground, in Germany and around Europe. Underground tunnels, caverns, machines, and water systems create a massive infrastructure beneath the surface of the cinematic city in Metropolis. These elements of the filmic environment serve as an ecological archive of ideas inspired by the massive construction projects that underlay all of the European metropolises in which Fritz Lang had lived, studied, and worked. In the most famous review of the film, H. G. Wells derides Metropolis for its failure as a work of creativity: rather than imagining the future, Wells argues, the film shows technologies such as cars and airplanes that already exist. It then implants them into a vertical notion of urban growth that may be visually impressive, but that had been abandoned by architects and urban planners decades before the film was made (Wells 94). Wells might have been more impressed if, rather than expecting a futuristic account of urban technologies, he had considered how Lang’s film reveals crucial technologies that are often hidden such as underground tunnels, structural supports, and sewers. In his search for flashy gadgets, Wells ignores the film’s infrastructures. Paul Edwards, a leading scholar of infrastructure studies, writes that “the most salient characteristic of technology in the modern […] world is the degree to which most technology is not salient for most people, most of the time” (Edwards 185). When we talk about technology, he continues, we usually mean high tech, while the vast majority of technologies — from foundational building blocks of culture such as ceramics, screws, and paper to “mature technological systems” such as roads and sewers — reside in a “naturalized background, as ordinary and unremarkable to us as trees, daylight, and dirt” (185). These technological systems have become infrastructures; they are remarkable precisely because they are invisible. In Metropolis, H. G. Wells may not have seen anything new or futuristic, but he certainly saw technologies of the present that he was not accustomed to seeing. Raymond Bellour writes that “the focus of Lang’s mise en scène is so often vision itself,” a trait frequently exemplified in the figure of the detective seeking clues (Bellour 25). Metropolis is not about searching for answers to a mystery; instead, it emphasizes vision by showing what is known but rarely seen or even acknowledged. It creates a visual archive of the often invisible infrastructural layers of the city� Numerous developments in infrastructure history form the backdrop for the cinematic environment in Lang’s film. When Metropolis was released in Berlin in 1927, the city was undergoing a rapid transformation of its transportation, water, and power infrastructures� Subway tunnels were being rapidly expanded: “Der Bau mehrerer neuer U-Bahn-Linien ab 1927 entpuppte sich als eine Herausforderung auch für die Wasseringenieure” (Schug et al. 136). The water 254 Seth Peabody infrastructure at the center of the filmic city in Metropolis comprises an imagined archive of projects taking place in Berlin and across Europe� Building on major water engineering projects underway since the eighteenth century (cf. Blackbourn 5), the construction of elaborate and costly water infrastructure played a major role in efforts to modernize cities across Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Environmental historian Frank Uekötter notes that “cities from Paris to Budapest were competing for the latest and best urban technology”; even today, “the quality of life and the attractiveness of the European metropolises rest not least on accomplishments from the turn of the century” (Uekötter 41). Fritz Lang had lived his formative years in some of the primary cities in which these infrastructure projects had been underway� He grew up in Vienna, and Patrick McGilligan writes that “the architecture of the city towered in Lang’s psychology. […] The characteristic shots from high places, the extreme upward-slanting low angles, the lingering emphasis on the size and structure of massive buildings, the people dwarfed by walls or doors — these were a legacy that was distinctly Viennese” (McGilligan 6). When Lang left Vienna, he next settled in Paris, which Matthew Gandy describes as a classic example of the “plumbed city” in which “private and public realms have been regularized and separated” (Gandy 6). Paris’s impressive sewers had entered the public consciousness through a prominent photography exhibit in the 1860s and public tours starting in 1867; they were a familiar sight long before Lang’s arrival in 1913 (Gandy 33). In 1918 Lang moved to Berlin� In 1920, the Groß-Berlin Gesetz was passed; it vastly increased the land area and population of the city, and also called for unification of 21 distinct waterworks covering 46 municipalities. The system now included 1,400 kilometers of water pipes and had an annual capacity of 40 million cubic meters of water� During the decade that followed, the capacity would increase to 256 million cubic meters, and by 1932 it would reach one million cubic meters per day (Schug et al. 124, 136). The furious expansion of the city’s water infrastructure did not occur without glitches. The city’s waterworks had just made it through a shortage of workers during the Great War. Then in 1919, a general strike called by communists and left-wing Independent Social Democrats (USPD) was met a with a brutal response ordered by Gustav Noske, an official of the centrist Majority Social Democrats (MSPD), and carried out by right-wing Freikorps troops, causing some disruption to gas, water, and power supplies. Further, the general strike that followed the Kapp Putsch in 1920 — alluded to in Metropolis via the Gropius-inspired bell at the center of the worker’s city — led to interruptions of the water supply for some Berlin residents (Schug et al. 105—06). Later in the decade, the rapid expansion of waterworks coincided with the development of subways as well as Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive 255 the growth of infrastructure for gas and electricity, leading to enormous costs and a “Gedränge unter der Straßenoberfläche” (Schug et al. 136). Lang and his viewers had experienced the rapid growth of infrastructure and had witnessed its susceptibility to social and political upheaval� While interruptions to the water supply were limited in scope and brief in duration (Schug et al. 105), they made it clear that political upheaval on the streets had consequences within the homes and apartments where people lived — especially for those workers who lived on the upper floors of apartment buildings, where reduced water pressure had its first impacts in the form of reduced or nonexistent water supply. Thus, the portrayal of social strife within a context of water infrastructure in Metropolis — and the fact that this conflict directly impacts the workers’ homes — would have been uncomfortably familiar to the first viewers of Metropolis� With all of these elements of the film and of Lang’s own experience in mind, it appears that the filmic environment in Metropolis draws much inspiration from European cities and underground infrastructures, not just from the glittering skyscrapers of New York� Why, then, did Lang ignore these underground environments in his written comments? As it turns out, he didn’t, even in his texts about the United States� Instead, his writings have been sampled selectively by critics (and by Lang himself). Commentators frequently discuss the travelogue that Lang published in Film-Kurier shortly after his return from America in December 1924� 3 The text describes the glittering lights and shining skyscrapers of Manhattan; it plays into Lang’s “carefully cultivated myth” regarding the flash of inspiration that led him to create Metropolis (Bachmann 5). But this summary ignores half of the story. The full title of Lang’s article is “Was ich in Amerika sah: Neuyork — Los Angeles.” About half of the text deals not with New York towering upward, but rather with Los Angeles sprawling outward and digging downward. In another travelogue published shortly after the Film-Kurier article, Lang focuses entirely on this second form of urban expansion that he had witnessed in the United States. The article “Zwischen Bohrtürmen und Palmen: Ein kalifornischer Reisebericht” was published in the magazine Filmland on 3 January 1925. The report begins with a focus on oil derricks: “Im Anfang war der Bohrturm. Dann kam die asphaltierte Straße, die sich Meilen um Meilen durch trostloses Oedland erstreckt, immer flankiert von den wild wachsenden Bohrtürmen. Dann, zur Verschönerung der Gegend, werden die Palmen angesiedelt” (Lang, “Zwischen Bohrtürmen und Palmen” 16). Lang describes the roads as leading through a wasteland, and the palm trees are added as an ornamental afterthought: the primary element is the growing forest of oil rigs digging underground� When Lang arrived in Los Angeles, the city was three years into an oil boom that had begun with the discovery of three 256 Seth Peabody major oil fields in 1920 and 1921 (Tygiel 13—15). Due to the “rule of capture” by which, according to United States law, oil belonged to whoever brought it to the surface — unlike in Germany, where oil belonged to the state regardless of where it was located — and because land in Los Angeles was already divided into small plots owned by numerous individuals, a race of “town lot” drilling ensued. Wells were drilled side by side, with each landowner trying to profit individually from the underground resource (Tygiel 29). The landscape above the oil fields came to resemble a crowded forest of densely packed oil derricks stretching across entire neighborhoods (Tygiel 30; Elkind 84). While the underground resource was oil, not water, the city nonetheless provided an image of frenzied development to gain wealth by controlling underground fluids, resulting simultaneously in a strange growth of vertical structures above ground. Past scholars have noted that the California portion of Lang’s trip was as important as New York for the development of Metropolis because of what Lang and Erich Pommer learned by visiting American film studios (Elsaesser, Metropolis 19; Bachmann 8). Lang’s writings about the trip suggest that the landscapes and underground resources of Los Angeles, not merely the city’s film industry, played a significant role. Two years after Lang’s trip to America, publicity materials leading up to the release of Metropolis offer further evidence that the film’s underground elements merit close attention. One promotional article, written by UFA foreign publicity director Alfred Sander and published in the New York-based Motion Picture News, shows six images, five of which display underground spaces. Figure 1. From “Metropolis Likely to Be Sensation,” Motion Picture News, August 28, 1926 Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive 257 The only above-ground photo shows Rotwang’s house — the most cave-like of above-ground spaces in the film. It is also the only image showing the sets still under construction, suggesting that the appeal of the city above ground lies in the impressive construction efforts rather than the completed filmic environment. Further, a striking continuity exists between the bottom left image, showing the mass of children struggling to climb the underground stairs to escape the flood, and the image showing Rotwang’s house. Identical vertical metal columns rise to the full height of the frame in both images� In the staircase image, two vertical columns occupy the foreground in the center and left of the image, pushing the main action of the scene — the children trying to escape death by drowning — into the background. In the image of Rotwang’s house, three vertical columns rise up in the center of the image; Rotwang’s house is essentially hidden behind them� In both cases, what appears to be the main focus of the scene is relegated to the background, thus foregrounding the role each physical space plays in supporting the towering structures that are suggested to exist above. The fact that these specific images were chosen to market the film suggests that underground infrastructure held a deep fascination and appeal for audiences; meanwhile, the skyscrapers that have dominated discussions about Metropolis are nowhere to be seen� All told, the underground imagery has been undervalued in the film, as has the film’s construction of a cityscape built around water infrastructure� Bearing this context in mind, a close analysis of underground scenes from Metropolis reveals a fictionalized archive of massive underground infrastructure projects. When Matthew Gandy writes about Berlin’s infrastructure in his book The Fabric of Space, he analyzes the 1930 semi-documentary Menschen am Sonntag due to the film’s focus on transport connections between the urban center and the forests and lakes at the periphery (Gandy 72—78). In contrast, Metropolis trains its gaze squarely on the center of the city — and as a result, the film offers an important supplement to the environmental discourses referenced in Menschen am Sonntag� Metropolis opens with an animated sequence that dissolves from the ornate art-deco title frame into a 10-second image of the city skyline, followed by the famous machine montage. In other words, after just 10 seconds of supposedly above-ground imagery, we are already underground with the machines and their operators. A minute into the film, the workers are shown at shift change in a windowless corridor or tunnel. 258 Seth Peabody Figure 2. Still from Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) The walls and ceiling consist of thick brick arches that seem to be supporting a heavy structure above. The tunnel serves several visual functions: first, it mirrors the portrayal of the humans contained within it. The low vaulted arches angle down toward the hunched shoulders of the workers leaving their shift, and the tunnel’s disappearance into the darkness of the elevator emphasizes the lack of a goal or meaning that results from complete alienation between the laborers and the fruits of their labor. The workers move in the exact same formation — blocks of workers six deep and six across, clad in matching dark uniforms and hats, marching in synchronized, slow, plodding steps — that they will use shortly later in the film, when Freder witnesses an explosion in the machine halls. Following the explosion, Freder sees a hallucinatory vision of slave-like workers marching into the mouth of the Moloch machine, sacrificing themselves to the demonic god of industry. The opening tunnel, like the vast machine hall of the later scene, comprises an environment in which oppressive underground architecture determines the direction of human lives� According to Thea von Harbou’s novel of Metropolis, created simultaneously with the screenplay, a single device known as the heart machine lies at the center of the film’s infrastructure. The heart machine is a generator that provides Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive 259 power to all the machines of the city — there is “no machine in all Metropolis which did not receive its power from this heart” (von Harbou 123). 4 Among the machines that thus receive power, many work to pump away water that would otherwise inundate the workers’ homes: It was said that a river wound its way deep under the city. Joh Fredersen had walled up its course when he built the subterranean city, the wonder of the world, for the workmen of Metropolis. It was also said that the stream fed a mighty water-basin and that there were pump-works there, which were powerful enough, inside of less than ten hours either completely to empty or to fill the water basin — in which there was room for a medium-sized city. (Von Harbou 128; cf. Cowan 240) The description employs the language of folklore or urban legend (“It was said that. . .”), thus lending an aura of mythical awe to the machines’ infrastructural function. Moreover, the workers’ city is labeled as “the wonder of the world.” Given the focus on skyscrapers in discussions of the cityscape of the film Metropolis, it is remarkable that this laudatory language from the novel does not describe the skyscraper city above, but rather the tenement-filled cavern below ground, made possible through extensive water infrastructure� H.-G. Wells, as part of his scathing review of the film, suggests that the machines in Metropolis do not seem to do anything: “The machines make wealth. How is not stated. […] One is asked to believe that these machines are engaged quite furiously in the mass production of nothing that is ever used” (Wells 95). Wells criticizes the film’s portrayal of mechanical mass production, but he never considers that the machines might not be engaged in production at all� In fact, the machines reside, for most of the film, within what Edwards describes as the “naturalized background” of infrastructure (Edwards 185). Their function becomes visible when the machines break down and, as a result, the underground city floods. While the script of Lang’s film does not explicitly state the function of the city’s machines as water infrastructure, the film’s visuals emphasize water infrastructure at multiple levels. At the diegetic level, the machines’ function can be deduced from the fact that the city floods immediately after the workers destroy the heart machine. Further, at the extradiegetic level, filming the flood scene required construction of an impressive off-screen network of water basins, pipes, and pumps� In other words, creating a diegetic scene of infrastructure failure required the creation of an extradiegetic system of water infrastructure that would remain functional but unseen� In a production report published in the Berliner Zeitung three days before the film’s premiere, production co-designer Otto Hunte describes the elaborate preparations made for the flood scene: 260 Seth Peabody One scene in which a trick shot was completely out of the question was the flooding, where the cement and iron concrete pavement of the streets is broken open and destroyed by the masses of water. The large quantities of water needed for this had to be dammed up and kept on a higher level in order to achieve the necessary pressure� For this purpose, four reservoirs with a capacity of 1,600 cubic meters were built, and in addition to that several smaller tanks for special shots. (Hunte 81) Based on his involvement in creating Metropolis, Hunte sees the flood scene as an example of the film’s impressive physical structures, not its special effects. Film critic Lotte Eisner agrees: Admirable, too, are the ‘documentary’ techniques used for the flood-scenes, when the water spouting from the destroyed tanks mingles with the steel structures in the luminous mists, or when the surging flood nibbles at the asphalt in front of the workers’ barracks, and begins its gradual rise. Wherever the film concentrates on documentary and technological details, the private sentimentalism of the story is supplanted by genuinely dramatic effect. (Eisner 90) While most critics have described the underground scenes as mythic spaces or representations of political tensions in the film’s striated vertical vision, Eisner describes the underground flood sequence as “documentary” — showing events that really happened — and thus a counterexample to precisely the overblown pathos and symbolism that dominate much of the film. This contradiction embodies a tension not just within Metropolis, but within the filmic medium. Helmut Lethen has described film and photography as occupying a border position between indexical signs that document reality and creative products that are mediated, curated, or performed. According to Lethen, viewers often find themselves in the paradoxical position of knowing that they should be skeptical of the reality content of any media, including visual media, but nonetheless feeling an instinctive trust toward photography and film as supposedly unmediated and objective sources (Lethen 14—16). The flooding scene exemplifies both sides of this tension. With its exaggerated acting and stylized architecture, the scene is clearly artificial and heavily mediated through many components of the filmmaking process. Yet the film also presents the viewer with a sense of materiality independent of the filmmakers’ agency: gushing water fills the massive basin and splashes at the legs of the children. In Thea von Harbou’s novel of Metropolis, the scene is described with exaggerated personification; the flooding water speaks to Maria in direct, threatening quotations (von Harbou 155—57). As a result, the overtly constructed expressionist style eliminates any sense of a realistic portrayal of events. But in the film, the materiality of the scene exists undeniably alongside its creative signification, reminding the viewer that the Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive 261 failed infrastructure created in filmic fantasy required very real and functional water infrastructure hidden off screen. As an ecological archive, the film records both the anxiety regarding infrastructure failure within the diegesis, and the impressive achievements of the extradiegetic water infrastructures captured simultaneously on screen� By providing an archive of fantasies and anxieties relating to water infrastructure, Metropolis also reveals patterns of ecological thought that helped to create Weimer-era environments. The film creates a world in which pollutants and pristine nature can be neatly segmented off from each other. Rather than everything being connected to everything else, to borrow from Barry Commoner’s first law of ecology (Commoner 29), Lang’s film presents a world in which everything can be separated or diluted to minimize interaction. In 1920s Europe, separation and dilution were promoted as successful ways to mitigate pollution. In Sweden in 1928, the year after Metropolis was released, a 145-meter-high smokestack at a smelting plant in Sweden was inaugurated as the tallest chimney in Europe (Högselius et al. 337). Build a smokestack — or a city — high enough, and the thinking was that the pollution would be rendered harmless through dilution. The same logic governed discussions of water quality. In 1927, a number of Dutch waterworks joined forces to fight pollution in the Rhine. Industrialists upstream in Germany thought this effort was not worth the trouble. As Karl Imhoff, the Managing Director of the Ruhr Cooperative, declared in 1928: “Except to protect the fisheries, there is no rationale whatsoever to do anything about the pouring of wastewater in the Rhine because its water volume is so large that it can absorb and cleanse the waste itself” (Högselius et al. 298). In discussions of air and water, concerns about pollution were assuaged simply by separating bodies that ought not to meet: if the polluting element is far enough away, and if enough water or air is flowing through the space, there is no cause for concern� Lang’s film shows a similar logic regarding pollution, and thus archives not only the physical structures of its time, but also the dominant ecological thinking of the era. The film ends with a flood, seemingly a sort of natural disaster, and yet all-out destruction seems to be the only environmental problem that the film can imagine. Pollution and contamination are absent; air and water flow cleanly through the shining city. There is smoke in the machine halls — indeed, when Freder attempts to take over the role of a worker during his initial descent into the underground city, he chokes on the smoke after entering the machine room. But he can contain the smoke by closing the door; it does not pollute the air outside, let alone the water beneath the city. In von Harbou’s novel, the reader gains two brief glimpses outside the city — one when Josaphat escapes a 262 Seth Peabody plane crash and is nursed back to health in a rural setting, the other when Joh Fredersen, master of Metropolis, visits his mother in a farmhouse (complete with a walnut tree outside her reading window) that he has relocated to a rooftop in the city (Gunning 83). Both of these idyllic scenes feature green vegetation, clear skies, puffy white clouds, and refreshing breezes. They appear to be fully separate from the city — either above the din, or beyond the lateral borders. But both would certainly share a watershed and would be impacted by the city’s smokestacks� Bringing this discussion back to the question of Lang’s film as part of an ecological archive, we might ask: What histories and discourses are at work here? How do these images of pollution and dilution contribute to the film’s effect as a work of environmental storytelling? Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, two leading scholars of material ecocriticism, have written about modes of analysis that go beyond “the conventional ecological vision according to which everything is connected with everything else.” They suggest that nonhuman entities inscribe themselves into human discourses; agency is distributed among a “mesh” of actors including nonhumans alongside humans (Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction” 5; cf. Morton 28—30). Regarding Lang’s film, production reports emphasize the extensive efforts to contain and control the water required for the flooding scenes; meanwhile, the extras (largely children) were often chilled after long sessions of shooting while partially submerged in water, with little warmth — in the midst of a chilly fall of 1925 — provided by the cavernous spaces of the UFA studios (McGilligan 118—19). The impressive final effect of the scene results from a combination of deliberate storytelling and filmmaking practices by Lang, von Harbou, and others, combined with the indelible imprint of the nonhuman agencies exerted by cold air and water� While these various people and forces seem to act independently, the multiple entities that shape a narrative are often intertwined. As theorists of transcorporeality have shown, the human body is itself subject to other forces and agencies; the body is “a material palimpsest in which ecological and existential relationships are inscribed” (Iovino and Oppermann, “Material Ecocriticism” 84; cf. Alaimo 2). But if there are multiple agencies at work in Metropolis, they seem to be limited to the macro level: humankind and machine; labor and capital; fire, water, and masses of human bodies. The idea of contamination between these elements is beyond the excessively stratified vision of the film. And once more, in this way the film was not of the future but precisely of the present. A surprising link with H. G. Wells helps us to appreciate the view of ecology that is archived in Metropolis. Less than a decade after Lang’s film was released, H. G. Wells was involved in a science fiction film project that attempted a very different mode of environmental storytelling. In perhaps the ultimate statement Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive 263 of his disdain for Metropolis, Wells declared that for his 1936 science fiction film Things to Come about a futuristic city called Everytown, “whatever Lang did in Metropolis is the exact contrary of what we want done here” (qtd. in Neumann 154). Wells therefore decided on an urban landscape in which there are no skyscrapers; instead, the surface of the earth has returned to a natural state and the city exists entirely within a “womb-like cavern” underground (Neumann 154). While Wells’s womb-like caverns might seem like the opposite of Lang’s phallic skyscrapers, the two urban visions are closely related in their ecological implications. They both suggest that an ideal state of nature can thrive, if only human industry is removed — whether on the rooftops or outside the city limits of Metropolis, or on the city-free surface of the earth in the Everytown. These visions both call to mind the “natural climax” that contemporary scientists felt would be achieved in an ecosystem free of human impacts. There is not yet any hint of the dynamic and unstable status of ecosystems, a field of knowledge that would only gain traction in the 1950s (Mauch 5). Within their moment in 1927 and 1936, both Lang and Wells envision an environment in which nature is preserved simply by keeping it separate from the blight of the city. The notion that pollution from the city might flow downstream is not considered. 5 In conclusion, the filmic environment of Metropolis is precisely of its time: not only in its reference to skyscraper debates and social tensions in Weimar Germany that past analyses have emphasized, but also in its portrayal of massive underground waterworks as sites of simultaneous fascination and anxiety, and in its display of idyllic peripheral spaces uncontaminated by the nearby urban center� Metropolis displays a cinematic environment largely determined by developments in infrastructure in Germany and around Europe; in terms of time on screen, the Manhattan-inspired skyscrapers are a small but powerful minority. When attention is given to the street-level and underground landscapes, it is clear that the film is not merely an “allegory of the future as triumph of the machine,” as Tom Gunning has declared (Gunning 55). It also reveals a fantasy of the city in Lang’s present moment, inspired by Berlin as much as New York, without yet any awareness of mutual entanglement of spaces within ecological systems. While H. G. Wells may be correct that the film offers little as an image of the future, it has much to offer as an ecological archive of Weimar Germany. Notes 1 I would like to thank participants at the “Ecological Archives” symposium hosted at Emory University in March 2018; Paul Buchholz and Caroline Schaumann for organizing the symposium and providing helpful editorial feedback; two blind peer reviewers; Abigail Bauer and Jacob Schimetz for 264 Seth Peabody their work as undergraduate research assistants; and the Rachel Carson Center (RCC) of the LMU Munich, where I completed significant revisions on the manuscript during a fellowship in summer 2019� 2 On the relation of Lang’s filmic city to literary science fiction sources, contemporary American culture, and environmental catastrophes, see essays by Bachmann (9), Jordanova (179), and Dover (283). Many essays discuss the relation between the film’s cityscape and Lang’s 1924 trip to the United States; two helpful examples include Bachmann (5—8) and Elsaesser, Metropolis (19). Scholars have discussed additional contexts that are not detailed in Neumann’s essay, including the high-profile competition to design a skyscraper for the Friedrichstraße train station in 1921-1922, as well as debates regarding workers’ housing that framed Weimar-era discussions of skyscrapers: see Elsaesser, Metropolis (87); Kaes (175—77); Schönemann (78—80); and Elsaesser, “City of Light” (92—96). 3 Lang’s travelogue was published in Film-Kurier on 11 December 1924� It was the first of three articles, all with the main title “Was ich in Amerika sah,” that Lang published in Film-Kurier about his trip to the United States� All three of these articles, as well as “Zwischen Bohrtürmen und Palmen” from the journal Filmland, can be found in the volume Die Stimme von Metropolis, edited by Fred Gehler and Ullrich Kasten. 4 The citations for Thea von Harbou’s novel are from a recent English-language publication of the novel. The passage regarding the heart machine and water pumps can also be found reprinted on page 60 of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear, edited by Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann. 5 Other German urban films of the era could serve equally well. Both Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Walter Ruttmann, 1927) and Menschen am Sonntag (Robert Siodmak et al., 1930) cut between the bustling pace of the city and idyllic recreational landscapes on the edge of town, with an emphasis on transit infrastructure that carries humans between these two otherwise distinct landscapes� Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy� Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010. Aurich, Rolf, Wolfgang Jacobsen, and Cornelius Schnauber, eds. Fritz Lang: Leben und Werk, Bilder und Dokumente. Berlin: Jovis, 2001. Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive 265 Bachmann, Holger. “Introduction: The Production and Contemporary Reception of Metropolis�” Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear� Ed� Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann. Rochester: Camden House, 2000. Barad, Karen� Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Bellour, Raymond. “On Fritz Lang.” Fritz Lang: The Image and the Look� Ed� Stephan Jenkins. London: British Film Institute, 1981. 26—37. Blackbourn, David� The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany� New York: Norton, 2006� Commoner, Barry� The Closing Circle: Nature, Man & Technology� New York: Knopf, 1974� Cowan, Michael. “The Heart Machine: ‘Rhythm’ and Body in Weimar Film and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.”-Modernism/ Modernity 14.2 (2007): 225—48. Derrida, Jacques. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Trans. Eric Prenowitz.-Diacritics 25.2 (1995): 9—63. Dickinson, Emily� “Tell all the truth but tell it slant�” Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them. Ed. Cristanne Miller. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016. Dover, Julia. “The Imitation Game: Paralysis and Response in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Contemporary Critiques of Technology.” Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear. Ed. Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann. Rochester: Camden House, 2000. 272—87. Edwards, Paul. “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems�” Modernity and Technology. Ed. Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg.-Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. 185—225. Eisner, Lotte H. Fritz Lang. New York: Da Capo Press, 1986. Elkind, Sarah S. “Oil in the City: The Fall and Rise of Oil Drilling in Los Angeles.” The Journal of American History 99.1 (2012): 82—90. Elsaesser, Thomas. “City of Light, Gardens of Delight.” Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis� Ed� Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson� London: Wallflower, 2008. 88—101. —. Metropolis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Gandy, Matthew. The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination� Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014. Gehler, Fred, and Ullrich Kasten. Fritz Lang: Die Stimme von Metropolis� Berlin: Henschel, 1990� Gunning, Tom. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity� London: British Film Institute, 2000. Högselius, Per, Arne Kaijser, and Erik van der Vleuten. Europe’s Infrastructure Transition: Economy, War, Nature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Hunte, Otto. “My Work on Metropolis.” Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear. Ed. Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann. Rochester: Camden House, 2000. 80—81. 266 Seth Peabody Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann. “Material Ecocriticism: Materiality, Agency, and Models of Narrativity.”-Ecozon@ 3.1 (2012): 75—91. —. “Introduction: Stories Come to Matter.” Material Ecocriticism� Ed� Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2014. 1—18. Jordanova, Ludmilla. “Science, Machines, and Gender.” Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear. Ed. Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann. Rochester: Camden House, 2000. 173—97. Kacandes, Irene. “German Cultural Studies: What Is at Stake? ” A User’s Guide to German Cultural Studies. Ed. Scott Denham, Irene Kacandes, and Jonathan Petropolous. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997. 6—13. Kaes, Anton� “Metropolis (1927): City, Cinema, Modernity.”-Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era. Ed. Noah Isenberg. New York: Columbia UP, 2009. 173—91. Kieckhefer, Daniel� “Archive�” The Chicago School of Media Theory: Keywords. https: / / lucian.uchicago.edu/ blogs/ mediatheory/ keywords/ archive/ . 13 Feb. 2020. Lang, Fritz. “Was ich in Amerika sah: Neuyork - Los Angeles.” Film-Kurier 6�292 (11-Dec. 1924): n. pag. —. “Zwischen Bohrtürmen und Palmen: Ein kalifornischer Reisebericht.” Filmland 3-Jan. 1925. 16—21. https: / / archive.org/ stream/ filmland18berl#page/ n239/ mode/ 2up. 16 Dec� 2018� Lethen, Helmut� Der Schatten des Fotografen: Bilder und ihre Wirklichkeit� Berlin: Rowohlt, 2014. Mauch, Christof. “Introduction.” Nature in German History. Ed. Christof Mauch. New York: Berghahn, 2004. 1—9. McGilligan, Patrick. Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997� Metropolis. Dir. Fritz Lang. Perf. Brigitte Helm, Gustav Fröhlich, Alfred Abel, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge. 1927. Kino Lorber, 2010. DVD. Minden, Michael, and Holger Bachmann, eds. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear. Rochester: Camden House, 2000. “New Scenes Added from the Print Discovered in Buenos Aires 2008.” kinolorber.com. Kino Lorber, 2010. 25 Feb. 2020. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010. Neumann, Dietrich. “The Urbanistic Vision in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis�” Dancing on the Volcano: Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Republic. Ed. Thomas W. Kniesche and Stephen Brockmann.-Rochester: Camden House, 1994. 143—62. Pike, David L. “‘Kaliko-Welt’: The Großstädte of Lang’s Metropolis and Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper.”-MLN 119.3 (2004): 474—505. —. Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945� Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2005. Sander, Alfred� “Metropolis Likely to be Sensation�” Motion Picture News 34�9 (Aug.-1926): 752. https: / / archive.org/ stream/ motionnew34moti#page/ n751/ mode/ 2up� 15 Dec� 2018. Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive 267 Schönemann, Heide.-Fritz Lang: Filmbilder, Vorbilder� Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1992� Schug, Alexander, Katja Roeckner, Bernd Kessinger, Frank Petrasch, and Stephan Natz, eds.-Berliner Wasser: Die Geschichte einer Lebensnotwendigkeit� Berlin: Vergangenheitsverlag, 2014� Tygiel, Jules. The Great Los Angeles Swindle: Oil, Stocks, and Scandal During the Roaring Twenties. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. Uekötter, Frank. The Greenest Nation? A New History of German Environmentalism� Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014. von Harbou, Thea. Metropolis. Norfolk: The Donning Company, 1988. Wells, H. G. “Mr. Wells Reviews a Current Film.” Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear. Ed. Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann. Rochester: Camden House, 2000. 94—100. “Naturgeil”: Homo-Eco-Erotic Utopianism in Hitler Youth Film Propaganda and ‘Boy Scout’ Porn269 “Naturgeil”: Homo-Eco-Erotic Utopianism in Hitler Youth Film Propaganda and ‘Boy Scout’ Porn Ian Fleishman University of Pennsylvania Abstract: An avid attachment to the earth was fundamental to the Blut und Boden ideology of National Socialism, and the oddly environmentalist strand of this political philosophy is nowhere more evident than in the numerous Hitler Youth propaganda films produced by the Third Reich. In more recent decades, a popular trend of bareback ‘boy-scout’ erotica has emerged in the European-American — and particularly the German — market for gay video pornography. Filmed almost exclusively outdoors and bearing titles such as-Bare-Scouts,-Fucking-Scouts,-Jungs unter sich spielen Pfadfinder-and, most tellingly perhaps,- Jungs unter sich sind naturgeil, these films explicitly attempt to link the ‘natural’ and healthy appearance of their actors to their idyllic surroundings� If one can truly speak of ecofascism or of an ecofascist mentality beyond the historical specificity of the Nazi era, one might begin with an examination of its unconscious drives — specifically of its sexuality. Putting these already disturbing filmic archives into an even more discomfiting constellation will afford the unexpected and unwelcome insight that it might be precisely a- barely disavowed homo-eco-erotic imaginary that constitutes the necessary precondition for channeling this libidinal investment in national landscapes into a justification for militaristic expansionism. Keywords: queer ecology, Hitler Youth, boy scouts, scouting, pornography, film propaganda, pornotopia An avid and, as I hope to demonstrate, even erotic attachment to the earth was fundamental to the Blut und Boden ideology of National Socialism� 1 The notion of a wholesome Heimat associated with recognizably ‘German’ landscapes — from the panoramas of a Luis Trenker Bergfilm to the vistas of Hitler’s chalet at Berchtesgaden 2 —was essential not only to the construction of a national(ist) sense of self established in contradistinction to the supposedly decadent metropolitan sensibilities of the Weimar Republic; it also provided affective justification for the pursuit of Lebensraum (a term itself borrowed from ecological theory) and the consequent occupation, dubbed resettlement, of eastern territories (Brüggemeier et al. 12). This aspect of German fascism is perhaps particularly evident in the organization of the Hitlerjugend, which was formed through the confluence of a number of preexisting Pfadfinder associations, such as the youth hiking group, Der Wandervogel — whence the Nazis took their salute “Heil! ”—and the Bund der Artamanen — a small, ultranationalist organization devoted to the concept of Blut und Boden, who aimed (albeit ultimately unsuccessfully) at bringing city boys into a life of agricultural labor and who believed they could reunite with their ancient Teutonic roots by communing with the ethereal spirits of nature� What unified various scouting groups under the later umbrella of the Hitler Youth, in the words of Jean-Denis-Lepage, was their stance “against blind industrialization, material consumerism and soulless society” and their emphasis on “the need to return to nature, to a simpler and healthier life” (16). Already, a 1903 report to the Kulturministerium of Steglitz justifying the foundation of the Wandervogel club lists among its central goals “den Sinn für die Natur zu wecken, zur Kenntnis unserer deutschen Heimat anzuleiten, […] kameradschaftlichen Geist zu pflegen, allen den Schädigungen des Leibes und der Seele entgegenzuwirken, die zumal in und um unseren Großstädten die Jugend bedrohen” (quoted in Giesecke 18). 3 In 1911, an influential decree issued by the Prussian government on the subject of Jugendpflege summarized the goal of youth hiking excursions in similarly resonant language: “Diese sollen vor allem […] einen frischen, fröhlichen Sinn wecken, Freude an der Natur, an der Heimat und an der Kameradschaft gewähren” (qtd. in Giesecke 64). It is this tacit association between Heimat, male bonding and Freude an der Natur — what I will theorize to be a homo-eco-erotic impulse — that concerns us here. Yet, despite this call for a return to the earth, National Socialism’s relation to the natural world is anything but uncomplicated. There was a great deal of scholarly interest and significant debate, in the first decade of the present century, surrounding the apparent political affinities between fascism and the coeval conservation movement, 4 but it is worth bearing in mind the inherent tension between a desire for conservationism and the military industrialism, Rassenhygiene, and desire for expansion equally central to the Nazi party’s goals. 5 Joachim Wolschke- Bulmahn has demonstrated, for example, how National Socialist landscape planning for the annexed eastern territories reposed on a “a particularly aggressive definition of ‘living space,’ in which conquering other countries and exploiting their populations was an integral part of landscape care” (248). He continues: 270 Ian Fleishman Homo-Eco-Erotic Utopianism in Hitler Youth Film Propaganda and ‘Boy Scout’ Porn 271 Conceptions of an ‘ideal’ environment are connected not only to the spatial environment itself — that is, to the natural and built landscape — but also to specific notions of what constitutes an ‘ideal’ human being in an ‘ideal’ human society. During World War I, for instance, the Second Reich made plans to colonize the conquered portions of Polish-speaking Europe with German settlers. In what can be viewed as a dress rehearsal for a later era, many urban planners and landscape architects in Germany planned for the permanent occupation of conquered territories without feeling any need to take existing social and spatial structures into consideration (244). If we similarly consider Weimar-era German scouting groups as an inadvertent dress rehearsal for later conquest, the deep-rooted eugenic aspect to these blond bodies in virgin landscapes comes into relief� It is thus tempting to conclude with the editors of one volume on Nazi environmentalism, that, “[i]nasmuch as [the Nazis] thought about Germany’s forests at all, they thought in terms of propaganda: it provided an opportunity to meld the Romantic ‘love of the woods’ to Nazi thinking” (Brüggemeier et al. 9). But we must be equally cautious not to dismiss this discomfiting convergence as mere propaganda; there are, after all, undeniable and deeply troubling ideological inheritances of such Romantic Naturliebe in Nazi discourses on purity, conservation, even eugenics —in essence, what Walter Benjamin famously identifies as fascism’s aestheticization of politics. Here I will examine how such aestheticization extends to and capitalizes on the sexualization of what Susan Sontag, in her influential essay on “Fascinating Fascism,” reveals to be a “utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity of a biological given) impl[ying] an ideal eroticism” (93). Like its ambivalent environmentalism, the homosocial, even homoerotic, aspect of the Hitler Youth, specifically, is an inheritance from the scouting groups out of which it grew. From the very beginning, soupçons of homosexuality preoccupied the fundamentally male-oriented German outdoor youth movements. As early as 1914, a Catholic politician had denounced the Wandervogeljugend as “a club of homosexuals” and a den of free love (qtd. in Lepage 14). Two years earlier still, in what remains one of the touchstone studies of this and other German youth movements of the era, Hans Blüher had famously declared the Wandervogelbewegung to be explicable only as a fundamentally erotic phenomenon� And this is not to mention similarities and associations between the Wandervogel and Adolf Brandt’s explicitly homosexual Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, including the eroticized images of athletic young men frolicking outdoors in various states of undress in its flagship publication: Der Eigene (subtitled Ein Blatt für männliche Kultur). While Blüher’s book develops and even celebrates a model of ‘inversion’ that he is careful to distinguish from contemporaneous definitions of homosexuality or pederasty, 6 cultural historian Jost Hermand gives an extremely disquieting account, in 272 Ian Fleishman his memoirs of life in the Hitler Youth cadets, of how sadomasochistic sexual practices ranging from mutual masturbation to ritualized rape were commonly employed among the Hitler Youth themselves as a means of reinforcing hierarchical power structures (55—56; also cited by Heinemann 31). Sontag is certainly right to read fascism’s idealized eroticism as “sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a ‘spiritual’ force, for the benefit of the community” (93). But, immediately directing her attention to the gender(ed) implications of this sublimation, she strangely ends up eliding the erotic from the communal (she will connect it, instead, exclusively to sadomasochism): “The erotic (that is, women) is always presented as a temptation, with the most admirable response being a heroic repression of the sexual impulse” (93). My contention, by contrast, is that fascist sexual desire is neither denied nor repressed — at least not in this sense — but instead seeks gratification in the homo-eco-erotic utopia, which is to say that the reason fascism turns us on is not reducible to the erotic allure of sadomasochistic subjugation, as Sontag would have it, but finds (additional) satisfaction in a sentiment of homosocial (homo here in the strict sense of same, including but not limited to same-sex) community and sense of place� My own analysis of this phenomenon will emerge from an examination of Hitler Youth propaganda films beside a peculiar trend in all-male moving image pornography (dating back to the early 1970s at the least) that features actors wearing boy scout uniforms. Putting these already disturbing filmic archives into an even more disconcerting constellation, my aim is less to imply a fascist sensibility or aesthetic in gay pornography than it is to demonstrate that the filmic representations of the Hitler Youth and particularly of their natural surroundings were already in their own way pornographic; my goal is not so much to contend that there is something inherently fascist about a love of nature as it is to argue that there is something inherently pornographic about the way in which it was mobilized by fascism. Expanding Queer Ecological Archives Indeed, if one can truly speak of eco-fascism or of an eco-fascist mentality beyond the historical specificity of the Nazi era, one might begin with an examination of its unconscious, of its underlying drives — to wit: of its sexuality. As Dagmar Herzog reminds us in her introduction to a special journal issue on the sexualities of fascism, in addition to the more frequently acknowledged repressive aspects of fascist sexuality, “the Nazis also used sexuality to consolidate their appeal — and that they did so in many different ways. […] We Homo-Eco-Erotic Utopianism in Hitler Youth Film Propaganda and ‘Boy Scout’ Porn 273 simply cannot understand why Nazism was attractive to so many people if we focus only on its sexually repressive aspects” (6; also qtd. by Halberstam 154). We must therefore remain sensitive to what such potentially offensive or off-putting genres as propaganda (or pornography) can reveal to us with regard to the cultural-historical background of which they are symptomatic and, more troublingly, about the historical constitution of our own ecologically minded episteme as well — affirming but also complicating recent calls for queer ecology. As Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson define it in their oft-cited volume on the subject: The task of a queer ecology is to probe the intersections of sex and nature with an eye to developing a sexual politics that more clearly includes considerations of the natural world and its biosocial constitution, and an environmental politics that demonstrates an understanding of the ways in which sexual relations organize and influence both the material world of nature and our perceptions, experiences, and constitutions of that world (5). 7 Excavating the libidinal investment underlying far-right environmentalism and its propagandistic deployment will require us, then, to take a sober and potentially unsettling look not only into the darker moments and movements of the German environmentalist tradition but, indeed, into what informs erotic, ecological, and utopian imaginaries in general. Resisting what Jack Halberstam describes as a temptation to “represent gay and lesbian history as a repressed archive” and a “tendency to select from historical archives only the narratives that please,” my intervention is of a piece with recent approaches in queer studies that recognize, as Halberstam does, paraphrasing Leo Bersani, “the erotic [as] an equal opportunity archive: it borrows just as easily, possibly more easily from politically problematic imagery than from politically palatable material” (149, 148). An examination of the convergence between fascist propaganda and gay pornography will put pressure precisely on some of the least palatable, if most morbidly intriguing, aspects of this archive� There is, in fact, a pronounced literary and filmic legacy to this tradition extending beyond either genre� Kadji Amin has demonstrated, for instance, how, in Vincent Lapie’s 1946 novel Saint-Florent-la-Vie, the protagonist’s total corruption into pederasty precedes his no less dramatic rehabilitation through participation in a Boy Scout troop for inmates. […] For if, in Saint-Florent, pederasty is bad for the vitality of the race, it nevertheless carries within it a crucial positive value, that of an affective attachment to male hierarchies, presented as the structural basis not only of scouting, but also of healthy male homosociality within the modern nation. (Amin 53) 274 Ian Fleishman Amin’s larger purpose for evoking scouting is to demonstrate that “European modernity is […] pederastic — that is, structured by the masculinist inegalitarianism of normalized hierarchies between men, men and boys, and between boys, hierarchies that are never far from overt sexualization” (56). An honest examination of early scouting as an example of what Amin calls modern pederasty (by which he designates such disavowed modes of attachment deemed archaic by contemporary queer identity formations) thus responds to his call for attachment genealogies and the work of deidealization seeking to excavate neglected and often unwelcome queer histories and archives. The archive in question here could be expanded to include a whole host of filmic intertexts too numerous to list exhaustively: Volker Schlöndorff’s cinematic adaptation of Michel Tournier’s Le Roi des aulnes (The Erl-King, 1970), The Ogre (1996)—which explicitly links forestry to what the misguided protagonist sees as the protection of beautiful Aryan boys — and, in a much different idiom, Dennis Gansel’s Napola - Elite für den Führer both restage scenes from Alfred Weidenmann’s Hitler Youth films nearly shot for shot. The opening montage of Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron (1977) draws on these same images as well as on clips from the short propaganda film I will be reading most closely here. Rosa von Praunheim’s documentary Männer, Helden, schwule Nazis (2005) might fit into this constellation. Or, on this note, Kenneth Anger’s Ich will! (2008) consists entirely of Hitler Youth footage mined from historical archives� As Anger describes the project to Artforum: My film is a poetic, ironic reverie on the Hitler Youth in which I make a parallel with the Wandervogel movement that preceded it� Ich Will! is deliberately not a documentary but a visual poem, for which I conducted research for ten years in the historical archives of Europe and North America, ultimately choosing footage shot between 1933 and 1938. I built up my assemblage from various Hitler Youth propaganda films and amateur shorts, additionally taking several sequences from the propaganda feature Hitlerjunge Quex (Hitler Youth Quex, 1933), notably the rally around the flag observed by Quex through the trees. There were a multitude of cameras rolling in Nazi Germany, filming just about everything, and often the people behind the cameras didn’t quite know what they were filming. A poignant moment in Ich Will! is when a Hitler Youth glances at the camera and we are uncertain what constitutes the history� It seems as if the Nazis left the footage in by mistake. But I think it could be revealing of a secret love of some kind. (qtd. in Gronlund n. pag.) The same interview also announces a sequel titled Und Du? to debut on the vernal equinox in 2009. The troubling erotic appeal of the Hitler Youth clearly still remains in force today� Homo-Eco-Erotic Utopianism in Hitler Youth Film Propaganda and ‘Boy Scout’ Porn 275 More pointedly: in recent decades, a popular trend of bareback ‘boy scout’ and outdoor erotica has established itself as a dominant genre in the European-American — and, it appears, particularly the German — market for gay video pornography. Filmed almost exclusively outdoors and bearing titles such as Boy Scouts, Gay Scouts, Bare Scouts, Fucking Scouts, Shameless Scouts (and the sequel of the same title), Jungs unter sich… spielen Pfadfinder and, most tellingly perhaps, Jungs unter sich… sind naturgeil, these films — all released after 2005, to give only the most recent sampling — explicitly attempt to link the so-called natural and healthy appearance of their actors to the idyllic (or at the very least outdoor) surroundings in which the sex scenes take place. Tino Media, the Berlin-based production company responsible for the low-budget Jungs unter sich series, claims that their models have “eine frische und natürliche Ausstrahlung” with special emphasis put on a “sportliches, natürliches Aussehen”—an assertion recalling not only turn-of-the-century scouting charters nearly verbatim but also echoing the sentiment of the second of the ten Gesundheitspflichtgebote of the Hitler Youth: “Du mußt dich stets sauber halten und deinen Körper pflegen und üben. Licht, Luft und Wasser helfen Dir dabei.” 8 The loci classici of this pornographic archive are two films by director Jean-Daniel Cadinot, rather universally considered France’s foremost gay porn auteur, 9 whose earliest releases include Scouts (1981) and Scouts 2: Le Jeu de pistes (translated into English as Hot on the Trail, 1984; the tagline for the rerelease reads: “…you’re invited to get back to nature with a troop of young men who learn how to use what nature gave them! ”), featuring a young protagonist with hair conspicuously dyed blond as if to emphasize the stereotypically Aryan aspect of his appearance� 10 Comparison of “Hitlerjugend in den Bergen” and Cadinot’s Scouts 2: Jeu de pistes 276 Ian Fleishman Rolf Hammerschmidt, almost certainly Germany’s most prolific gay porn director and producer, similarly launched his career with the explicitly eco-dystopian two-part Boytropolis in the early 1990s and made a now lesser-known film called Hot Scout around that same time� In fact, a keyword search of the information archived at gayeroticvideoindex�com turns up just shy of twenty feature-length ‘boy scout’ titles since the turn of the century. 11 When taken in tandem with this unmistakable prevalence of scouting imagery dating back as far as the genesis of mainstream moving image pornography (the period from roughly 1969 to 1984 has often been theorized as the genre’s ‘golden age’), the undeniably homoerotic element of scouting culture exploited by Hitlerjugend film propaganda invites us, perhaps, to examine the latter archive through the scholarly apparatus developed to discuss the former — to read HJ film as (if it were) pornography, or, at the very least, as pornographic� Eco-Pornotopias Here, then, I will interrogate the perplexing subliminal connection between homoeroticism and an enthusiasm for the outdoors, both in Nazi film propaganda and in certain strains of gay pornography, arguing that both genres eroticize nature with utopian aims. The utopian stakes of pornography, generally, and all-male pornography, specifically, are well documented. Already in 1989, Linda Williams applied Richard Dyer’s categories of utopianism in the movie musical to the analysis of pornography, examining “utopian ‘numbers’ [sex scenes] that represent solutions to narrative problems” (Hard Core 270). A few years later, Dyer himself noted how “the effective multiplication of sex acts through elaborate narrativity [in gay porn] is an analogue for a (utopian) model of a gay sexual lifestyle that combines basic romanticism with an easy acceptance of promiscuity” (130). Along these lines, Steven Marcus has coined the term “pornotopia” to describe the immediate availability of sex in pornography: quotidian occurrences like a pizza delivery provide an instant and uncomplicated occasion for intercourse. Or, in the case of ‘boy scout’ porn, camping, hiking, and swimming are typical pretexts� More acutely, Rich Cante and Angelo Restivo have argued that gay pornography, inasmuch as it stages non-normative sexual practices, is always situated in relation to an imagined public gaze and that it therefore occupies public space even when the scenario is private — in short: that by projecting spaces where gay sex can appear normal and natural, “all-male pornography is utopian in a strictly spatial sense. That is, it is utopian in its own uniquely troubling way” (153). What is specific to homosexual pornography, according to this argument, “inherent in both its aesthetic terms and its sociocultural functions, is the ne- Homo-Eco-Erotic Utopianism in Hitler Youth Film Propaganda and ‘Boy Scout’ Porn 277 cessity of a passage through an imagined public gaze where what is at stake in the encounter is precisely one’s position within the greater socius, something never at stake in the same way in heterosexual porn” (152). In the genre of ‘boy scout’ porn, it is, without a doubt, the fetish object of the scouting uniform itself — icon of a strictly codified, quasi-militaristic camaraderie — that implicitly legitimizes and ‘naturalizes’ homosexual behavior, becoming the quilting point stitching together the public and the private in order that an ecological pornotopia might come into being� As Sontag notes in her essay on the fascination of fascism: “There is a general fantasy about uniforms. They suggest community, order, identity (through ranks, badges, medals, things which declare who the wearer is and what he has done: his worth is recognized), competence, legitimate authority, the legitimate exercise of violence” (99). Bearing in mind this passage through the social to the sexual, reading pornography beside propaganda allows us to begin to unlock the association between the (homo)erotic and the national-environmental imaginary — and to explore the implications of this unexpected coupling� In the case of the pornography in question, these films are utopian in the sense that they envision a world in which the allegedly obscene act of gay sex has become what Williams might call an on/ scene norm — with gay sex acts both liberating and occupying open, outdoor public spaces. In the oftentimes borderline homoerotic Hitler Youth films, the objectified young boys constitute only part of the erotic charge: equally important, perhaps, is the way that distinctly ‘German’ natural surroundings are represented and politicized as a setting for these homosocial utopian relations. As Williams defines it in her pioneering study Hard Core, “[t]he term on/ scenity marks both the controversy and scandal of sexual representation and the fact that its details have become unprecedentedly available to the public at large. On/ scenity is the flashpoint where conventions of public and private, lustful and lascivious, prurient and ordinary collide, public discussion is produced and old-fashioned obscenity […] is no longer possible” (Hard Core 282). Putting it more succinctly in the introduction to a later edited collection on porn studies, Williams redefines the term as “the gesture by which a culture brings on to its public arena the very organs, acts, bodies, and pleasures that have heretofore been designated ob/ scene and kept literally off-scene” (“Porn Studies” 3). In short, the on/ scene is a testing ground for the making-public of what had before been tacit (and tacitly dismissed as potentially perverse). The evident homoeroticism of certain Hitler Youth films and the homosocial tradition they are part of, then, might similarly be seen as an expression of an unspoken homosocial desire underlying the fascist public arena� 278 Ian Fleishman Cases Study: “Hitlerjugend in den Bergen” (1932) Film propaganda was one of Hitler’s and Goebbels’s chief instruments of influence and manipulation over the German public — who proved an enthusiastic audience, indeed. To recall Eric Rentschler’s pithy formulation: “If the Nazis were movie mad, then the Third Reich was movie made” (Ministry 1). And here again, the Hitler Youth warrants particular mention� As David Welch notes in his book on Nazi Propaganda, “[o]ne explanation for th[e] undoubted success [of the Hitler Youth] was the Nazis’ remarkable ability to stimulate the imagination of an alienated youth with the promise of a romantic Utopia” (72). Film was a key source of this stimulation. In 1934 Goebbels inaugurated mandatory Hitler Youth film screenings, called Jugendfilmstunden, which in the 1942 season alone attracted more than eleven million viewers (Ministry 262). And even before the Nazis seized power, the organization had begun to produce its own films with HJ boys as actors. By the end of the war they had put out more than a dozen shorts as well as the seven full-length montage films that made up Alfred Weidenmann’s Junges Europa series, produced between 1942 and 1944� It makes sense that golden-age gay pornography, especially, would draw on this tradition� In an epilogue to the expanded edition of Hard Core, Williams revisits the issue of the on/ scene with regard to gay pornography in particular: Gay male pornography emerges on/ scene as a popular genre in public theaters at the same time [as the classical era of seventies pornography] and in some of the same spirit of on/ scenity as straight porno� But because it was exhibited in the context of emerging gay subcultures rather than in general theaters, it was somewhat more tentatively on/ scene� On the one hand, its exhibition in public theaters in gay communities partly continued the underground, semi-illicit tradition of the stag film in the sense of appealing to a more specialized, single gender audience rather than a general adult public� On the other hand, it cautiously extended itself into a more public sphere (297). Chronologically connecting such tentative on/ scenity directly to the historical advent of the genre of moving image ‘boy scout’ porn, Williams perhaps reveals both it and its antecedent in the Hitler Youth films from which it largely borrows its imagery and aesthetics to be moments of emerging public expression of male same-sex desire. After all, Hitler Youth film propaganda similarly depicts a samesex subculture, extending it (though in this case more enthusiastically, with an exemplary character) into the larger national community — it is pornographic, in this sense, precisely by dint of its utopianism� But if the utopian element of outdoor gay pornography is the way in which it takes normally non-normative private sex acts for granted and projects them into a self-consciously public Homo-Eco-Erotic Utopianism in Hitler Youth Film Propaganda and ‘Boy Scout’ Porn 279 space, the political propaganda under examination here redeploys this underlying erotic drive in the service of its own troubling utopic vision� Christian Delage has argued that an exaltation of nature plays a predominant role in the ideological and thematic entirety of Nazi film propaganda (33, 135— 51). But while work has been done on representations of nature in other aspects of this archive — in Nazi documentaries, 12 the Kulturfilm 13 and the Bergfilm 14 —I am unaware of any study treating the role of the outdoor environment in the dozen feature-length youth films endorsed by the National Socialist regime or the films produced by the Hitler Youth and disseminated to the same during the Jugendfilmstunden. It is the very first Hitler Youth film — a 1932 production called “Hitlerjugend in den Bergen”—that I propose to analyze here. Written and directed by Stuart Josef Lutz, apparently under the supervision of Leni Riefenstahl’s chief professional rival, Arnold Raether, 15 we can situate “Hitlerjugend in den Bergen” somewhere between the three other genres I have just listed: in its style it straddles the border between Kulturfilm and propaganda documentary, and both Gilbert Guillard and Rolf Seubert have described it as an ideologically inflected inheritance of the Weimar-era Bergfilm� As its title would imply, the twenty-minute film chronicles (or stages, rather) an overnight camping excursion of a Hitler Youth group� “Hitlerjugend in den Bergen” was billed as a triumph of propaganda: a film that excited extraordinary enthusiasm, particularly among young people� 16 I would like to suggest that part of this enthusiasm issues from an erotic charge transferred between the young boys and their Arcadian surroundings — the construction of an all-male homosocial utopia in a self-consciously ‘German’ outdoor setting. Take, for instance, a central sequence from “Hitlerjugend in den Bergen” depicting scouts at play in a little lake framed by trees before cutting to a plan américain of a boy with a whistle, leaning in a relaxed posture with his hands at his hips. Probably the most markedly blond boy in the entire film, a reverse eyeline match establishes him as a spectator, and perhaps as a model for our own spectatorship: his posture suggests a relaxed voyeurism and, if watched closely, he appears to wet his lips with his tongue while observing the younger boys in the water. The soundtrack, which was only added later, is a kind of slop sync (common in low budget pornography, incidentally): while individual sounds match up to what is being visually portrayed onscreen, the general ambient yelling continues at the same volume throughout the sequence. The effect that this has is to render the entirety of this outdoor space as a single, unified location, which an intertitle (“Werdet zu Männern, die Deutschand verlangt”) manifestly designates as a space of socialization: these secluded natural surroundings become the arena in which boys become men, boy scouts become soldiers, and where a hidden homoeroticism is metamorphosed into targeted aggression� 280 Ian Fleishman This spatial conflation might be compared to the collapse between the political and the private that Lauren Berlant has described as public intimacy — through which mechanism the hegemony of implicitly heterosexual national culture governs ostensibly private sexual practice� In their landmark essay on “Sex in Public,” Berlant and Michael Warner assert that “official national culture […] depends on a notion of privacy to cloak its sexualization of national membership” (547; also qtd. in Cante and Restivo 147). Adapting Oscar Wilde’s famous dictum on homosexual desire, they describe “national heterosexuality” as “something that cannot speak its name, though its signature is everywhere” (Berlant and Warner 549). And yet, in his work on the stubbornly popular mental association between fascism and homosexuality, Andrew Hewitt builds on Ernst Bloch’s notion of the unspeakability of fascism to contend that this trope of unrepresentability is precisely what links the two: “If homosexuality dare not speak its own name, it will nevertheless serve as the ‘name’ of something else that cannot be spoken — fascism. […] The allegorical press-ganging of homosexuality as a vehicle for articulating a historically resistant fascism relies on the fact that neither homosexuality nor fascism speaks in its own name” (9). This unpresentable aspect of fascism is what Antonios Vadolas describes as its perversity: “The ‘perverse’ side of fascism may reflect nothing but the part of it that eludes representation, the part that, up to today, retains the fascist mystery” (11). As Vadolas notes, “The question regarding fascism’s ideological foundation still troubles political theorists” (9). It might just be possible, then, if profoundly discomfiting, that the unanticipated intersection between the pornographic and propagandistic archives I am mining here hints at what Berlant and Warner once declared to be impossible, namely: a tacit, socially constitutive homonormativity — an unspoken assumption of same-sex desire as the sine qua non conditioning and structuring a certain national, public space� As Berlant and Warner see it, “Heteronormativity is thus a concept distinct from heterosexuality. One of the most conspicuous differences is that it has no parallel, unlike heterosexuality, which organizes homosexuality as its opposite. Because homosexuality can never have the invisible, tacit, society-founding rightness that heterosexuality has, it would not be possible to speak of ‘homonormativity’ in the same sense” (548, note 3). To my mind, however, the latent but insistent homoeroticism of the Hitler Youth may well testify, pace Berlant and Warner, to precisely such a tacit, society-founding power� A defining generic characteristic of ‘boy scout’ pornography — common to both narrativized feature-length films and those that merely present a series of loosely connected sexual vignettes — is how wilderness settings participate in both the aesthetics and the erotics of the sexual numbers in order to bring them on/ scene: secluded campgrounds and pristine forests offer heterotopic Homo-Eco-Erotic Utopianism in Hitler Youth Film Propaganda and ‘Boy Scout’ Porn 281 privacy for otherwise illicit sex acts and these films frequently portray voyeurs or copulating pairs concealing themselves behind trees or bushes, with the natural surroundings at times even obstructing the camera’s view of the bodies ostensibly on display. Similarly, throughout the sequence from “Hitlerjugend in den Bergen” under discussion the youthful bodies are aesthetically aligned with the natural backdrop: boys playing tug of war matched perfectly against the mountain horizon behind them as others are tossed up by their companions as if above the mountaintops. As another set of young voyeurs with a flag observe the action from above, these activities take on an undeniable homoerotic charge: the boys wrestle, ride on each other’s backs, slap each other’s asses in a spanking game called Schinkenkloppen, and are filmed playing leapfrog from an angle that in pornography would clearly connote sodomy, alternating between long shots and close-ups as porn does between full-body views and ‘meat shots’ (close-ups of penile penetration). Homoerotic games in “Hitlerjugend in den Bergen” Throughout the sequence, the games become increasingly belligerent and increasingly recognizable for what they are: namely, war games. This will be confirmed by the following sequence, in which these more playful activities are replaced by grueling military drills� A concluding cut back to the blond with whom the sequence began — as he snaps to attention in a more upright posture — seems to imply that this is his overview, but again the eye-line match betrays that he is watching the bathers, who grumble plaintively as he orders them out of the water with the blow of a whistle� I would like to propose that the whistle here is a sublimated echo of the wetting of his lips before, transforming sexualized voyeurism into an authoritative act of surveillance. This feeling is later heightened by the dissolve for which this film is best known: a still image of Hitler’s countenance superimposed over the faces of the sleeping young boys — meant to establish the Führer as their protector, but inevitably suggesting an unnerving aspect of sexualized observation as well� 282 Ian Fleishman The film concludes with an orgiastic action sequence: three of the young scouts climbing a treacherous mountain at dawn to claim it with a Nazi flag, then saluting toward Potsdam where we see Hitler’s followers marching through the streets. Given the preceding investigation, it becomes difficult to overlook the erotic nature of the supple cinematography and suggestive editing of this sequence. A series of ascending tilts caresses the boys’ bodies, pressed flat against the rocks, as the montage fetishistically dissects them into their constituent parts: hands, feet, limbs, torsos, faces, asses. That the flagpole passed from hand to hand has a phallic quality seems too obvious to be worth mentioning and the ejaculatory way in which it ultimately unfurls, with the boys arms erect in a protracted Hitlergruß, when analyzed from a pornographic angle, reads almost like a sick in-joke or self-parody� 17 Fetish shots in the final sequence of “Hitlerjugend in den Bergen” An enthusiasm for the outdoors has been definitively politicized, in part because this Bavarian wilderness has provided the space in which latent homoeroticism can be harnessed for ends both propagandistic and militaristic. The variety of (re)socialization that will later play a role in all-male moving image pornography has been preemptively coopted in this earlier film as a means of encouraging militarism among these boys becoming the men “die Deutschland verlangt,” as the earlier intertitle had put it. The utopian thrust of comparable ‘boy scout’ porn — the occupation of nature as a space for non-normative sexual practices to be normalized — has been refigured as armed conquest (one might choose to call it ecological rape), and the Bavarian Alps have been utopically rendered as the ideal space for these war preparations to be staged� Conclusion What is particularly toxic about this admixture is that the potentially progressive aspect of all-male pornography and the potentially environmentalist facets of fascist ideology in fact contaminate each other. That Nazi propaganda would Homo-Eco-Erotic Utopianism in Hitler Youth Film Propaganda and ‘Boy Scout’ Porn 283 mobilize either an underlying homoeroticism or an ecological sentiment for militaristic purposes is unsurprising. The unexpected and unwelcome insight afforded by the constellation I have mapped is that it might be precisely an unspoken and not even entirely disavowed homo-eco-erotic imaginary — the homo-eco-erotic as assumed norm — that constitutes the necessary precondition for channeling this libidinal investment in ‘national’ landscapes into a justification for Landnahme. Adapting Benjamin’s oft-cited pronouncement, we might conclude that if fascism sexualizes politics and, for that matter, ecology, we must respond by politicizing sex through a frank and potentially unflattering excavation of our own erotic and ecological archives� Notes Figures 3 and 4 are screenshots taken from David Korn-Brozoza’s television documentary- Jeunesses hitlériennes: l’endoctrinement- d’une nation, which first aired on France 2 on 23 September 2019. Figures 5 and 6 are screenshots taken from the opening montage of Sam Peckinpah’s-Cross of Iron-(1977). 1 Until recently, in fact, the European far right has been rather more ecologically minded than one might expect. Heike Graf and Steffen Werther have, for instance, insightfully examined the imagery and narratives underlying neo-Nazi environmentalism with specific attention paid to the media of the NPD. The climate change skepticism of the recently established electoral breakthrough AfD constitutes a relative anomaly in this respect� One might rightly speak, in this context, of a ‘Trumpification’ of the far right - although, as Milo Yiannopoulus’s brand of political discourse and Lucian Wintrich’s “Twinks4Trump” photo series make evident, the new right has hardly been similarly purged of its homosocial, homosexual or homoerotic elements� 2 See, for instance, Brett Ashley Kaplan on the landscape of the Obersalzberg. Rob van der Laarse has argued for landscape painting as a key site of a Nazi “’nationalization of nature’ that confronts us with the uncomfortable possibility that Nazism still ‘speaks’ to present generations” (345). 3 In the early pages of his study of the Wandervogel, Giesecke identifies the “Judenfrage” and homosexuality as the two central political concerns troubling youth movements like the Wandervogel (25—27). 4 For a good summary of this debate, see Frank Uekötter. 5 Uekötter, surveying the scholarship on the subject, concludes that “[t]here were not just affinities but also significant divergences between conservation sentiments and Nazi ideology, both in their conceptions of nature and in their political styles. The conservation movement had traditionally 284 Ian Fleishman shown a strong distaste of the hustle and bustle of party politics, and had in fact never sided with any one political party before 1933� At the same time, any discussion of the topic needs to take account of the fact that Nazi Germany was by no means the only totalitarian society with a conservation movement” (267—68). 6 As Julius H. Schoeps summarizes: “Wenn Blüher über Erotik in der Jugendbewegung spricht, über das Verhältnis männlicher Jugend zu älteren und verehrten Männern, so unterscheidet er zwischen den erotischen Triebkräften und den sexuellen Betätigungen, zwischen einer geistig-erotischen und einer sinnlich-sexuellen Haltung. Ihm geht es nicht […] um das Problem der Homosexualität bzw. der Päderastie im Sinne medizinischer oder strafrechtlicher Abnormitäten, sondern um eine spezifische Ausformung der Geistigkeit, einer Geistigkeit, die sich […] am griechischen eros paidikos orientiert, der im dorischen Sparta und Theben ein Mitträger des politischen Lebens war” (140). 7 Perhaps problematically, in their “Genealogy of Queer Ecologies,” Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, alluding to Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), touch on the depiction of male homosexuality as anything but queer - a representation reaffirming virile masculinity and portraying “sex [that] unfolds almost naturally as part of a deepening, homosocial intimacy that would be as welcome in a camp full of Boy Scouts as it would in a group of urban gay men: indeed, possibly more welcome” (2). And while critical of this trope, the authors at once seem at pains to recognize it as the heritage of an historically queer tradition and also to see it as exemplary in its subversive qualities. Nicole Seymour - who notes that “‘Natural’ has actually become a dirty word in queer theory, […] though one it seems unable to do without” (2) - takes a dimmer view of the film. 8 Quoted in Buddrus 921, note 86. 9 The production company responsible for marketing the pornographic work of Sebastian Bleisch compares him directly to Cadinot and describes the appeal of his films with attention to both nation (“deutscher Orignalton”) and nature (“natürliche Jungs”): “Ein kometenhaftes Coming Out erlebten seit 1991 die Gay Videos von Sebastian Bleisch. Der Newcomer aus der ehemaligen DDR, Schriftsteller im Hauptberuf, hat mit seinen Boy-Filmen neue Maßstäbe gesetzt. Sein Erfolgsrezept: hübsche, natürliche Jungs, eine echte Handlung und deutscher Originalton” (qtd. in Goyke and Schmidt 29; original emphasis). Bleisch appears to have filmed at least one relevant picture, Die Pfadfinderschlacht, during his years as a pornographer in the early 1990s� At the time of his arrest in 1996, for the employment of actors between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, Bleisch had apparently gained access to the overgrown Homo-Eco-Erotic Utopianism in Hitler Youth Film Propaganda and ‘Boy Scout’ Porn 285 military compound where he was filming by pretending to make a movie about neo-Nazis (Goyke and Schmidt 10, 75). 10 The same actor, Pascal Duvet, appears prominently in at least one other Cadinot feature, Classe de neige (Ski Fever, 1985), as a bookish brat with glasses and discernably darker hair� 11 The list of pertinent films would include, without any aspiration to comprehensiveness, Be a Good Scout (1971), Scout’s Honor (1977), Boy Scout (1981), Scouts (1981), Scouts 2: Le Jeu de pistes (1984), Hot Scout (exact year of release unknown), Scouts on Patrol (2002), Scouts on Patrol Again (2002), Scouting for Wood (2004), Bare Scouts (2006), Scout’s Honor (2006), Boy Scouts (2007), Fucking Scouts (2007), Jungs unter sich… spielen Pfadfinder! (2007), Gay Scouts (2009), Shameless Scouts (2009) and Shameless Scouts 2 (2010), Secrets of Scouts (2010), Scouting for Boys (2011), Bare Scouts (2012), Raw Scouts (2012), Raw Scouts 2 (2014), Scouts (2015), Scouting for Daddy (2015) and yet another Raw Scouts (2016). 12 For instance, by Delage himself. 13 See Wilke’s treatment of Ewiger Wald� 14 See Rentschler’s article on the Bergfilm� 15 See Rother 33—34. 16 Cited in Rother 34. The attempt at indoctrination was, in fact, so transparent, that authorities in Bavaria (where schoolchildren were at the time still forbidden from taking part in political organizations and events) raised an objection with the Film Review Office, that the film was clearly aimed at encouraging enrollment in the Hitler Youth. For further discussion, see Hanna-Daoud 239—43. 17 Or a parody by exaggeration, perhaps, of what had been latent in the Bergfilm. 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Verzeichnis der Autorinnen und Autoren Paul Buchholz Department of German Studies Modern Languages, Emory University 532 Kilgo Circle Atlanta, GA 30322 USA paul.joseph.buchholz@emory.edu Jack Davis Truman State University McClain Hall 321 100 E� Normal Ave Kirksville, MO 63501 USA jackdavis@truman.edu Ian Fleishman Germanic Languages and Literatures University of Pennsylvania 745 Williams Hall 255 South 36th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA flei@sas.upenn.edu Gundolf Graml SUMMIT Global Learning and Leadership Development Agnes Scott College 141 East College Avenue Decatur, GA 30030 USA ggraml@agnesscott.edu Jason Groves Department of Germanics University of Washington Box 353130 Seattle, WA 98195-3130 USA jagroves@uw.edu Joela Jacobs Department of German Studies University of Arizona 1512 E. First St. Tucson, AZ 85721 USA joelajacobs@arizona.edu Jens Klenner Department of German Bowdoin College 7700 College Station Brunswick, ME 04011 USA jklenner@bowdoin.edu Tanja Nusser Department of German Studies University of Cincinnati 2600 Clifton Ave. Cincinnati, OH 45221-0372 USA tanja.nusser@uc.edu 290 Verzeichnis der Autorinnen und Autoren Seth Peabody Department of German and Russian Carleton College 1 North College Street Northfield, MN 55057 USA speabody@carleton.edu Caroline Schaumann 563 Grove Street Bishop, CA 93514 USA cschaum@emory.edu Hubert Zapf Bozener Strasse 07 86316 Friedberg Germany hubert.zapf@philhist.uni-augsburg.de Die Zeitschrift erscheint jährlich in 4 Heften von je etwa 96 Seiten Abonnementpreis pro Jahrgang: € 135,00 (print)/ € 172,00 (print & online)/ € 142,00 (e-only) Vorzugspreis für private Leser € 101,00 (print); Einzelheft € 45,00 (jeweils zuzüglich Versandkosten). 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KG Alle Rechte vorbehalten/ All Rights Strictly Reserved Druck und Bindung: CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 0010-1338 Linguistik \ Literaturgeschichte \ Anglistik \ Bauwesen \ Fremdsprachendidaktik \ DaF \ Germanistik \ Literaturwissenschaft \ Rechtswissenschaft \ Historische Sprachwissenschaft \ Slawistik \ Skandinavistik \ BWL \ Wirtschaft \ Tourismus \ VWL \ Maschinenbau \ Politikwissenschaft \ Elektrotechnik \ Mathematik & Statistik \ Management \ Altphilologie \ Sport \ Gesundheit \ Romanistik \ Theologie \ Kulturwissenschaften \ Soziologie \ Theaterwissenschaft \ Geschichte \ Spracherwerb \ Philosophie \ Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft \ Linguistik \ Literaturgeschichte \ Anglistik \ Bauwesen \ Fremdsprachendidaktik \ DaF \ Germanistik \ Literaturwissenschaft \ Rechtswissenschaft \ Historische Sprachwissenschaft \ Slawistik \ Skandinavistik \ BWL \ Wirtschaft \ Tourismus \ VWL \ Maschinenbau \ Politikwissenschaft \ Elektrotechnik \ Mathematik & Statistik \ Management \ Altphilologie \ Sport \ Gesundheit \ Romanistik \ Theologie \ Kulturwissenschaften \ Soziologie \ Theaterwissenschaft \ Geschichte \ Spracherwerb \ Philosophie \ Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft \ Linguistik \ Literaturgeschichte \ Anglistik \ Bauwesen \ Fremdsprachendidaktik \ DaF \ Germanistik \ Literaturwissenschaft \ Rechtswissenschaft \ Historische Sprachwissenschaft \ Slawistik \ Skandinavistik \ BWL \ Wirtschaft \ Tourismus \ VWL \ Maschinenbau \ Politikwissenschaft \ Elektrotechnik \ Mathematik & Statistik \ Management \ Altphilologie \ Sport \ Gesundheit \ Romanistik \ Theologie \ Kulturwissenschaften \ Soziologie \ Theaterwissenschaft Linguistik \ Literaturgeschichte \ Anglistik \ Bauwesen \ Fremdsprachendidaktik \ DaF \ Germanistik \ Literaturwissenschaft \ Rechtswissenschaft \ Historische Sprachwissenschaft \ Slawistik \ Skandinavistik \ BWL \ Wirtschaft \ Tourismus \ VWL \ Maschinenbau \ Politikwissenschaft \ Elektrotechnik \ Mathematik & Statistik \ Management \ Altphilologie \ Sport \ Gesundheit \ Romanistik \ Theologie \ Kulturwissenschaften \ Soziologie \ Theaterwissenschaft \ Geschichte \ Spracherwerb \ Philosophie \ Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft \ Linguistik \ Literaturgeschichte \ Anglistik \ Bauwesen \ Fremdsprachendidaktik \ DaF \ Germanistik \ Literaturwissenschaft \ Rechtswissenschaft \ Historische Sprachwissenschaft \ Slawistik \ Skandinavistik \ BWL \ Wirtschaft \ Tourismus \ VWL \ Maschinenbau \ Politikwissenschaft \ Elektrotechnik \ Mathematik & Statistik \ Management \ Altphilologie \ Sport \ Gesundheit \ Romanistik \ Theologie \ Kulturwissenschaften \ Soziologie \ Theaterwissenschaft \ Geschichte \ Spracherwerb \ Philosophie \ Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft \ Linguistik \ Literaturgeschichte \ Anglistik \ Bauwesen \ Fremdsprachendidaktik \ DaF \ Germanistik \ Literaturwissenschaft BUCHTIPP Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG \ Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (0)7071 97 97 0 \ Fax +49 (0)7071 97 97 11 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de Stefan Neuhaus Der Krimi in Literatur, Film und Serie Eine Einführung 1. Auflage 2021, 340 Seiten €[D] 22,90 ISBN 978-3-8252-5556-5 eISBN 978-3-8385-5556-0 Ein Blick in die Programme von Verlagen, Fernsehsendern und Filmanbietern zeigt, dass es kein populäreres Genre gibt als den Krimi. Allein von Agatha Christies Romanen wurden über zwei Milliarden Exemplare verkauft. Die Figur Sherlock Holmes gehört zu den frühesten Film- und Serienhelden und am Anfang der modernen Krimiliteratur stehen Erzählungen nicht nur von Edgar Allan Poe, sondern auch von Friedrich Schiller und E.T.A. Hoffmann. Erstmals wird der Versuch gewagt, an exemplarischen Beispielen aus Literatur, Film und Serie in den ‚ganzen‘ Krimi ein-zuführen - in Merkmale, Geschichte und Entwicklung. Die englischsprachige Krimitradition wird in die Darstellung mit einbezogen. Bisher hat sich die Forschung selten mit dem als trivial geltenden Genre beschäftigt. Ein genauerer Blick zeigt aber, dass der Krimi genauso anspruchsvolle Beispiele bereithält wie andere Genres. ISSN 0010-1338 Themenheft: Ecological Archives Gastherausgeber: in: Caroline Schaumann und Paul Buchholz Paul Buchholz: Introduction: Why Ecological Archives? Hubert Zapf: Cultural Ecology, the Environmental Humanities, and the Ecological Archives of Literature Gundolf Graml: ‘ The Invention of Reality Required No More Records’: Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist Jens Klenner: Suspended in the Archives - The Three Natures of the Miner of Falun Joela Jacobs: Umweltschutz als Moralkeule: The German Past, the Refugee Present, and the Planet’s Future Tanja Nusser: Flüchtlingsströme against / and / or Wohlfahrtsfestung. An Ecology of the So-called Refugee Crisis Jack Davis: Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction Jason Groves: Dark Geology: The Arcades Project as Earth Archive Seth Peabody: Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive Ian Fleishman: “Naturgeil”: Homo-Eco-Erotic Utopianism in Hitler Youth Film Propaganda and ‘Boy Scout’ Porn narr.digital Band 53 Band 53 Heft 2-3 Harald Höbus ch, J oseph D. O ’ Neil (Hr sg.) C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a t i o n a l e Z e i t s c h r i f t f ü r G e r m a n i s t i k C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a ti o n a l e Z e it s c h r ift f ü r G e r m a n i s ti k