eJournals Colloquia Germanica 44/2

Colloquia Germanica
cg
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/4.0/61
2011
442

Dirty Nature: Ecocriticism and Tales of E xtraction – Mining and Solar Power – in Goethe, Hoffmann, Verne, and Eschbach

61
2011
Heather I. Sullivan
cg4420111
Dirty Nature: Ecocriticism and Tales of Extraction - Mining and Solar Power - in Goethe, Hoffmann, Verne, and Eschbach HEATHER I. SULLIVAN T RINITY U NIVERSITY While the overloaded concept of «nature» suffers from dualistic and idealized connotations, «dirty nature,» in contrast, offers something for everyone. 1 Dirty nature conveys the physical world on a mundane, human scale where our body and other bodies and matter around us are the most concretely «local» environment, and yet it also takes into account our imbrication in broader material exchanges at the regional and global level. The concept of dirty nature encompasses the bodily processes of consumption and reproduction carried out by all living things, but also their interactions with industrial products that now cover the Earth. Since all of the matter on the Earth’s surface has been imbued with anthropogenic substances or industrially processed elements, scientists have recently labeled our era the «Anthropocene,» or the geological age of human impact on the Earth’s surface and systems most clearly traceable since the Industrial Revolution. 2 As a result, many ecocritics label the physical world «nature-culture» or «natureculture,» meaning inseparable spheres of emergence and construction, while others speak of the «radical pastoral,» «ecology without nature,» or the «end of nature.» 3 In this essay, I focus on «dirty nature» in order to shift away from the question of places, whether natural, cultural, or natural-cultural, and emphasize instead nature as the ongoing bodily processes of all living things using and exchanging matter and energy. 4 Specifically, I explore dirty nature in terms of the dirty processes of modern energy extraction upon which our bodies and most cultures depend today. Dirty nature evokes the material processes of extraction and consumption enabling the survival of all living things but also those fueling technology and the economy. During the Anthropocene, human beings have increased the extraction rates of energy and resources to an unprecedented level, and at the same time, have expanded technology to equally unprecedented levels. These two factors have led to an increasing blindness towards the impact of extraction, and even to the paradoxical claim that we have ever more independence from all environmental limits even as we access and deplete ever more natural resources. In expanding our technological abilities, we must also extract an CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 111 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 111 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 112 Heather I. Sullivan increasing amount of energy. Spurious claims to «limitlessness» reveal a cultural blindness to the obvious parameters of the biosphere - and to the laws of thermodynamics. As the environmental philosopher Val Plumwood writes: the dominant forms of economic, political, and scientific reason are «subject to a systematic pattern of distortions and illusions in which they are historically embedded and which they are unable to see or reflect upon» (Plumwood 16). In fact, Plumwood notes that these «blind spots» form as the emphasis on power (she means cultural, but the implications pertain also to the physical power of energy sources) leads people to «misunderstand their own enabling conditions - the body, ecology and non-human nature» (Plumwood 17). In this essay, I utilize the framework of dirty nature as an effort to render visible the blind spots, particularly in terms of the dirty extractive processes producing both cultural and material power. This essay thus begins with a framework of dirt; that is, it is grounded on cross-disciplinary understandings from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences regarding dirt’s biological and cultural meanings. It then examines several literary portrayals of the dirty processes of extracting matter and energy from the environment. These narratives of extraction include the mining in Goethe’s Faust II (1832), E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Die Bergwerke zu Falun (1819), and Jules Verne’s The Begum’s Millions (1879); and the capturing of solar power in the best-selling science fiction author Andreas Eschbach’s space thriller, Solar Station (1999). Although it is a significant leap from mining into solar energy, I use this juxtaposition here to demonstrate how the cultural role of extractive processes, however radically different in form, still share very significant characteristics as producers of power, pollution, and potential weapons. Throughout the age of the Anthropocene, industrialized nations maintain a dependence upon extensive mining even as they produce many stories about our unlimited capacity to create new (clean) technologies that will save us from our own follies. Hence a study of «traditional» mining stories juxtaposed with a futuristic tale of harnessing solar power replicates the actual status of most industrialized nations today: still digging for coal and minerals (and even more radically with such techniques as mountain-top mining that blasts away entire mountain tops) and drilling for oil and gas, while also imagining and developing other energy sources with the belief that access to unlimited clean and easy energy will - finally - have no costs. These stories reveal that some form of blindness to the costs of accessing and releasing massive energy remains constant, regardless of the energy form, and regardless of the era. They also exemplify the tendency to overwrite large-scale dirty enterprises into glamorous personal adventures documenting significant cultural achievements. CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 112 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 112 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Dirty Nature 113 First, then, is the matter of dirt itself as both material and discursive: dirty nature embraces the materiality of dirt while cautiously avoiding the troubled connotations of soil discourse. Indeed, I strive to be «postsoil» since «soil» is often associated with nationalistic sentiments regarding land ownership that exclude «Others» in a typically idealized and often racist view of agrarian settings reminiscent of «Blut und Boden.» In contrast, the framework of dirty nature provides a more all-embracing, non-nationalistic, postcolonial, and potentially less anthropocentric sense of enmeshment in our gritty and globalized material surroundings. 5 We cannot entirely eliminate «soil» from this formula, however, just as erasing «nature» from environmental discourse is likely impossible despite Timothy Morton’s best efforts. 6 For example, the geomorphologist David Montgomery and the soil scientist Chris Maser assert that soil, as the basis for agriculture, is concretely the basis of all «civilization.» In his essay on forests, Maser even idealizes soil as the very «placenta» for life: Soil is the placenta that nurtures all life - the rocky materials that form the soil in part, and the living components of the system that break down the rocky material and allow it to be used. The soil is the stage upon which the entire human drama is enacted. And if we eliminated the tools of war and had total world peace but destroyed the soil with air-borne pollution, we would still face extinction, because nothing grows without healthy soil. (Maser 14) While Maser refers to soil as «life’s placenta» and so reminds us not to lose sight of the solid materiality of the life-supporting stuff, we shall nevertheless use the broader term of «dirt» here so as to include pollution and in order to avoid the troublingly racist associations with «pure» soil. We are, after all, in the Anthropocene when all dirt is dirty, so to speak, and not just because it is associated with bodily exchanges. Moreover, dirt itself is not an entirely unsullied concept; it is often permeated by gendered, racist, and culturally determined meanings. Mary Douglas, for example, asserts in her 1966 anthropological study of purity and pollution that «our ideas of dirt also express symbolic systems» (47). Dirt, she says, is a cultural designation for disorder: As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder. If we shun absolute dirt, it is not because of craven fear, still less dread or holy terror. Nor do our ideas about disease account for the range of our behavior in cleaning or avoiding dirt. Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organize the environment. (12) Dirt disturbs order; hence dirt is that which is, however one determines it, «out of place.» Similarly, according to Greg Garrard’s second edition of CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 113 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 113 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 114 Heather I. Sullivan Ecocriticism (2012), the term pollution denotes a cultural norm describing something out of place: pollution «does not name a substance or class of substances, but rather represents an implicit normative claim that too much of something is present in the environment, usually in the wrong place» (6). Studies of dirty nature must therefore relate to both the symbolic meanings attributed to dirt and to the actual materiality of soil, pollution, etc. Culturally determined notions of «things out of place» are now, though, rendered rather quaint in terms of the industrial pollution that has already permeated virtually all the living bodies in the biosphere and covered the earth in a geologically traceable layer of anthropogenic substances and human alterations. We citizens in the age of the Anthropocene measure amounts of toxins in our body - and the earth’s surfaces - rather than their presence or absence. Dirty nature’s vital exchanges enabling the biosphere and modern industrial permeations of toxins have become inseparable categories. How can we therefore respond to this understanding of pollution and dirt as that which is «out of place» when there is no place or body without traces of such inescapable matter? Here I study how narratives of extraction address the literal «displacement» of matter and energy for our human benefit. While all living things seek to maximize their extraction of necessary matter and energy, the modern, technologically enhanced efforts of human beings to access any and all energy resources produce cultures whose very base is earthmoving «displacements.» These displacements readily allow blind spots towards long-term, wide-spread impacts. Unlike recent environmental novels such as Ann Pancake’s 2007 Strange as This Weather Has Been that tells of the Appalachian communities buried under the waste and runoff from mountaintop removal coal mining, many older literary narratives of extraction share with current media stories the tendency to overwrite mining’s problems and disasters with glorious tales of heroic extraction and individual accomplishments leading to technological productions and economic might. The benefits derived from resource extraction are visible in the spaces of power and economic clout but the dirty waste of such practices as mining, drilling, fracking, and even the production of solar cells are not. This standard cultural norm of erasure works all the more disturbingly when the industrial dirt and toxic waste that infiltrates our systems cannot be easily seen by human eyes, nor their risks assessed without expert knowledge and advanced technology. 7 The literary texts relating to extractive processes are typical of this erasure and the illusions that emerge in lieu of damage assessment. Even so, they also portray creative means of negotiating with the dreck of extraction in ways that shed light on these illusions. As Ellen Stroud quips in «Does Nature Always Matter? Fol- CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 114 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 114 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Dirty Nature 115 lowing Dirt through History»: «Our primary question is this: where is the dirt? » (80). Mining narratives offer much in the way of dirt. Goethe and Hoffmann document the dawn of the Anthropocene when mining’s expanding influence aided by improved metallurgy provided greater access to (and use of) precious metals and, especially, coal, and thus allowed a literal re-shaping of the world by fueling the Industrial Revolution. Verne’s novel stands midway between the early Anthropocene and the twenty-first century and thus provides an important bridge to Eschbach and contemporary society. Specifically, Verne offers an irreconcilably split vision with, on the one side, an early critique of how modern extractive processes are both devastating to landscapes and wed to power and military conquests and, on the other, a utopian vision of a balanced, modernized, and very green city apparently free from mining waste even as it relishes access to mineral resources. This unacknowledged dissonance continues full force today. Eschbach’s novel, finally, presents the «dusk» of what he calls «the age of fossil fuels,» engaging contemporary debates about «clean» solar energy. As Eschbach perhaps inadvertently reveals in his thriller, however, all power sources, even the sun, have their dark side. Solar power is much more environmentally friendly in terms of extraction, though the power cells require toxic materials; at the same time, all energy sources induce various forms of blindness to inadvertent and often long-term impacts. The accelerated extractions and displacements of energy that fuel our world can produce unexpected effects that are often conveniently ignored. If «pollution» is that which is «out of place» in Douglas’s and Garrard’s terms, then our entire modern culture is built on top of «polluted,» and displaced, or extracted, matter. The physical displacements empower ideological displacements so that illusions of endless, clean power appear part of mundane reality whereas dirty, desolate industrial sites seem the stuff of science fiction. In Goethe’s Faust II, the mining and dike construction make overt such illusions. 8 These illusions divert attention from what is in fact quite visible: the lack of actual gold undergirding the Kaiser’s new paper economy and the putrid swamp left after building the dike. In both cases, Goethe exposes not only how capitalism relies on exploitative greed funded, as Mephistopheles notes, by «war, trade, and piracy» (Faust 11187), but also more broadly on the will of power playing out across the land creating and reinforcing communally accepted illusions. 9 Power in Faust II appears most blatantly as the illusory control over extracted resources like gold, water, land, and the ocean’s energy. Hence Act I quickly turns to the lurid potential of extraction once Faust rouses himself from dreams and despair after losing Gretchen. Mephistopheles CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 115 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 115 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 116 Heather I. Sullivan and Faust arrive at the court and propose digging for gold as an answer to the Kaiser’s financial woes. With the mining of gold, or even just plowing around here or there in case it is randomly buried, the Kaiser has a quick and dirty path to wealth. Mephistopheles assures him that where there is a need, there is an answer: some gold might be buried and need only rediscovery, and some waits in the depths of the earth. Wo fehlt’s nicht irgendwo auf dieser Welt? Dem dies, dem das, hier aber fehlt das Geld. Vom Estrich zwar ist es nicht aufzuraffen; Doch Weisheit weiß das Tiefste herzuschaffen. In Bergesadern, Mauergründen Ist Gold gemünzt und ungemünzt zu finden, Und fragt ihr mich wer es zu Tage schafft: Begabten Mann’s Natur- und Geisteskraft. (Faust 4889-94) With wisdom and talent, one can access the gold and bring it to daylight; one must only enter the depths to find it. And even better, one need not even actually mine: one can just assume there is somewhere gold to be extracted which means that future extraction offers as much heft as actual unearthing. In effect, Mephistopheles suggests that the Kaiser and the «Schatzmeister» base the empire’s financial system on the (illusory) potential to find the gold that might be underground. Already in the early nineteenth century, extractive practices hold such power in German-speaking areas that their mere possibility stimulates dramatic yet ungrounded economic wealth. Goethe is, of course, skeptical here, and his emphasis on illusion is not merely theatrical. He famously condemned the economic shift into paper money, which is the next step after Mephistopheles proposes to claim mining rights without necessarily utilizing them. The actual process of mining in Faust II is depicted as very distant from the dirty realities of the labor; this may well be ironic considering Goethe’s struggles with the Ilmenau silver mine that failed due to flooding and lack of rich veins. In his Amtliche Schriften documenting his work for the «Bergwerkskommission» from 1777-1800, there are innumerable references to the battle against water in reopening the mine and the long-term debates regarding the hoped-for economic benefits long before any mining began. Whereas Goethe contended for years with the practical problems of discerning mine ownership, the direction of profits, and the never-ending troubles with water containment, Mephistopheles promises the Kaiser that he already owns the land and so any potential gold need only be assumed and then later dug up at his convenience. «Das alles liegt im Boden still begraben. / Der Boden ist des Kaisers, der soll’s haben» (Faust 4937-38). Sounding already much like current proclamations regarding access to fossil CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 116 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 116 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Dirty Nature 117 fuels, Faust claims that the land is not lacking gold but rather the imagination necessary to extract it: Das Übermaß der Schätze, das, erstarrt, In Deinen Landen tief im Boden harrt, Liegt ungenutzt. Der weiteste Gedanke Ist solches Reichtums kümmerliche Schranke, Die Phantasie, in ihrem höchsten Flug, Sie strengt sich an und tut sich nie genug. Doch fassen Geister, würdig tief zu schauen, Zum Grenzenlosen grenzenlos Vertrauen. (Faust 6111-18) The mere possibility that something might be extractable can stand in for the actual obtainment of minerals and matter, as Goethe rather presciently portrays. Commodities as illusory power rather than material stuff troubled Goethe. The play clearly links these economic debates about extraction and currency with illusion. In fact, the economic conversations are twice interrupted by theatrical performances that overtly play with illusions within illusions. Thus Mephistopheles’s mining proposal is first interrupted by the «Mummenschanz,» and then the continuing conversation regarding the use of paper money to replace the gold that has not (yet) been mined is interrupted by the magic lantern scene in which Faust conjures Helen. This creation of illusion has such vibrant «realism» that he believes it himself and thus tries to grab her image from within the illusion, thereby destroying it. In other words, illusions, the extractive process of mining, and the concomitant wealth are repeatedly linked in the play. Mining for minerals in Faust II is as much about spreading illusions of power as it is about extracting and displacing matter at whim. While there may be no actual digging in the first act of Faust II, there is plenty in the final act, at least in the background. This digging relates to another process of modern technological accomplishment: the building of the dike and the ensuing need to dig channels for drainage. The problem of water containment thus links Goethe’s experience with mining and the tragedy’s dike. The dirty labor of building a dike, later documented in Theodor Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter, is kept in the background in Faust II and carried out by magical «Lemuren.» Tellingly, this process is also enabled by illusions (though, again, digging channels was the bane of Goethe’s mine commission work). Besides the lemurs, there is also the watery illusion supplied by the sprites when Mephistopheles’s devilish helpers fail to conquer the «other Kaiser’s» armies. Faust needs this victory to fund his plans for the dike. He thus celebrates the astonishing power of cascading yet imaginary water that brings triumph: CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 117 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 117 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 118 Heather I. Sullivan Den Wasserfräulein müssen unsre Raben Recht aus dem Grund geschmeichelt haben, Dort fängt es schon zu rieseln an. An mancher trocknen, kahlen Felsenstelle Entwickelt sich die volle rasche Quelle, Um jenen Sieg ist es getan. (Faust 10717-22) Mephistopheles sneers at the foolish human beings who believe the illusion of «watery lies» with such conviction that they fear they are drowning while on dry soil: Ich sehe nichts von diesen Wasserlügen, Nur Menschen-Augen lassen sich betrügen Und mich ergötzt der wunderliche Fall. Sie stürzen fort zu ganzen hellen Haufen, Die Narren wähnen zu ersaufen, Indem sie frei auf festem Lande schnaufen, Und lächerlich mit Schwimmgebärden laufen. (Faust 10734-40) This illusion of flooding overwhelms the «enemy,» bringing the conquest that Faust and Mephistopheles sought for the Kaiser. In response, the Kaiser helps finance Faust’s new dream to capture the ocean’s energy with a dike. With money wrought from illusion, they receive land from the Archbishop who approves it (despite the obvious deal with the devil) but requires that they pay a certain percentage of profit to the church. In the end, Faust has his dike, but he is literally blind and thus cannot see the putrid swamp that stands where he hoped for «free land.» The meaning of this scene is hotly contested: scholars such as R. H. Stephenson, Krzysztof Lipinski, and Géza von Molnár interpret it as an indication that Faust is the ultimate «land developer» leading us productively into economic modernity. 10 Kate Rigby’s ecocritical work, in contrast, stresses the relevance of Faust’s blindness in this scene as a failure to see the swamp, not to mention the murders that enabled it. 11 Faust’s concrete situation lends credence to Rigby’s reading: as a dying man whom «Sorge» has blinded, he yet again believes his own illusions (this time of «free land» for the «benefit of others» yet enabled by murders, piracy, and war). I concur with Rigby, noting that the association of blindness with land control and extraction in Goethe’s tragedy reveals how modernity all too often «sees» only its own power and profit; it is befallen by blind spots, as Plumwood asserts. While Goethe’s Faust II decisively documents blindness to dirty swamps, it still overlooks the dirt produced by large-scale earth shaping projects. In contrast, Hoffmann’s romantic tale, Die Bergwerke zu Falun, depicts with startlingly detailed «realism» the concrete impact of mining on landscapes. His protagonist, Elis Fröbom, nevertheless follows standard romantic tra- CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 118 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 118 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Dirty Nature 119 jectories and thus finally succumbs to the beautiful illusions evoked by the mine. 12 Hoffmann’s tale smoothly moves between hallucinatory romantic fervor and disturbingly accurate descriptions of mines in one of the few literary examples we find during this era portraying, at least briefly, an actual rather than idealized mine. Indeed, the concrete devastation wrought by large-scale mining and the resulting heaps of slag shock Elis when he first arrives in Falun: Bekanntlich ist die große Tagesöffnung der Erzgrube zu Falun an zwölfhundert Fuß lang, sechshundert Fuß breit und einhundertundachtzig Fuß tief. Die schwarzbraunen Seitenwände gehen anfangs größtenteils senkrecht nieder; dann verflächen 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, […]. Kein Baum, kein Grashalm sproßt in dem kahlen zerbröckelten Steingeklüft und in wunderlichen Gebilden, manchmal riesenhaften versteinerten Tieren, manchmal menschlichen Kolossen ähnlich, ragen die zackigen Felsenmassen ringsumher empor. Im Abgrunde liegen in wilder Zerstörung durcheinander Steine, Schlacken - ausgebranntes Erz, und ein ewig betäubender Schwefeldunst steigt aus der Tiefe, als würde unten der Höllensud gekocht, dessen Dämpfe alle grüne Lust der Natur vergiften. (Hoffmann 180-81) The detailed imagery of a hellish landscape rather ironically lends a sense of weighty realism to this dark and dreamy tale that conjures two seemingly incompatible but actually fully interwoven visions: first, the typical solipsistic fantasies about the alluring depths of the earth as the stand-in for individual subjectivity that is found so frequently in Romanticism (and discussed at length by Hartmut Böhme), and, second, the sensible profiteering provided by a middle-class marriage and career in mine ownership. The apparent conflict between these two paths distracts us from the heaps of slag; indeed, it does not take long for young Elis to be overcome with love for the head miner’s daughter Ulla, whose hand would allow him the opportunity to enter the comfortable middle class, and so to embrace a Faustian blindness to the devastated landscape. This attraction successfully leads him to forget his initial horror and enables him to become a dedicated and industrious miner. Yet Elis remains true to Hoffmannesque fates, for he is equally quickly overcome by the vision of a mineral queen who appears to him in a sexual dream from deep within the earth, as a kind of fantasy earth mother promising unbelievable riches and insights. Significantly, the dramatic tension arising from Elis’s apparent choice between the economic stability offered by Ulla and the erotic fantasies offered by the mineral queen not only depicts his splintered subjectivity, as always in Hoffmann’s tales, but, even more so, works as a distraction from Elis’s other choices in the story. In the face of the dramatic love triangle, CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 119 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 119 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 120 Heather I. Sullivan the more fundamental dichotomy in the text slips away despite its prevalence in the first part of the tale: the sheer horror of mining landscapes as well as the troubles Elis expresses regarding his earlier career choice as a trader on a commercial ship sailing to the East carrying goods and resources extracted from elsewhere. Though scholars most typically read Hoffmann as a schizophrenic visionary torn between two worlds, I assert that Ulla and the mineral queen are not so much oppositions as they are part of interwoven inevitability - two sides of a coin, as it were - emerging from the opportunities and challenges of middle-class economic developments. 13 Elis thus neatly enacts capitalistic illusions based on the belief that he can have it all with no perceivable costs: he can marry Ulla, run the mine, and obtain the magical gems provided by the mineral queen. The illusion of choice between two female figures overrides, or perhaps determines, Elis’s battle to find his way through a world where the slag heaps become invisible in the face of both hallucinatory and real wealth waiting under the depths of the earth. On his wedding day, Elis strives for the ultimate merging of what is already linked: he scurries off to the mine to see his beloved «mineral queen» and to obtain for his human bride an astonishing cherry-red garnet. He states to Ulla with a quivering voice: Mir ist in dieser Nacht alles entdeckt worden. Unten in der Teufe liegt in Chlorit und Glimmer eingeschlossen der kirschrot funkelnde Almandin, auf den unsere Lebenstafel eingegraben, den mußt du von mir empfangen als Hochzeitsgabe. Er ist schöner als der herrlichste blutrote Karfunkel, und wenn wir, in treuer Liebe verbunden hineinblicken in sein strahlendes Licht, können wir es deutlich erschauen, wie unser Inneres verwachsen ist mit dem wunderbaren Gezweige, das aus dem Herzen der Königin im Mittelpunkt der Erde emporkeimt. (Hoffmann 194) Elis lives the middle-class dream all too briefly. Indeed, the economics of mining for gems (Die Bergwerke), marrying for money and position (Der goldene Topf), creating gold with alchemy (Der Sandmann), and shaping beautiful jewelry and murdering to retrieve it (Das Fräulein von Scuderi), are common themes in Hoffmann’s works. As always, the character is distracted from the bounties of bourgeois life and leaps instead into death and madness in the belief that he will somehow find solutions for his divided subjectivity in embracing personal delusions instead of broadly shared societal illusions. The urge to praise Romanticism’s perverse preference for individual madness rather than shared illusions is dampened by the grisly deaths of Hoffmann’s characters; either choice is decidedly disturbing. Significantly, Die Bergwerke zu Falun may appear to erase the dirt of mining but it actually closes with a literal return of the body to dust. Having been trapped on his wedding day in a mine collapse and killed, Elis’s corpse is finally uncovered fifty years later CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 120 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 120 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Dirty Nature 121 in the novella’s final scene. As the miners unearth it, they believe it is fossilized yet with just one touch, it crumbles away into dust. «Man bemerkte, daß der Körper des Unglücklichen, der fälscherweise für versteinert gehalten, in Staub zu zerfallen begann» (Hoffmann 196). Hoffmann’s dichotomy of societal versus individual illusions fades behind this final image of bodily materiality that foregrounds dirty nature. Hoffmann’s and Goethe’s narratives of extraction demonstrate the interwoven celebrations and fears surrounding mining in the early nineteenth century. One can embrace Faustian blindness and Hoffmannesque madness alongside financial success or one can dangerously seek to expose the masscultural illusions built on the unsteady ground of displacement. Certainly, the power of displacement projects like extractive processes and building dikes cannot be underestimated. Mining for coal and minerals during the burgeoning industrial revolution in Europe, during which Hoffmann and Goethe wrote, helped fuel the vast conquest of lands and peoples by the Europeans on virtually every continent. In the German-speaking areas, mining played a significant role even though the relatively few narratives depicting mines directly tend to ignore the filthy coal dust coating the cities like London and emphasize instead the provocative promise of discovering silver and gems underground. This exciting prospect meant that mining was extremely popular during this era in German areas, so much so that many tourists traveled expressly to explore the deep mines. 14 Scientists of the era also celebrated the mines as sites where God’s book of nature - in the form of the stratigraphic history of the earth - is revealed in its full glory to human eyes, as found in Henrich Steffens’s and Novalis’s work, for example, both of whom studied at the famous Freiberg mining academy. The knowledge gained in geology during this period concretely rewrote the biblical account of the planet’s quick creation and caused a revolution in thinking when geologists like James Hutton and eventually Charles Lyell asserted the tremendous antiquity of the earth based on material evidence and layers of rocks. This was a time of intense fascination for rocks, stones, minerals, mines, and mountains, all of which provided the necessary materials for spatial conquest of the globe with colonization as well as a temporal conquest of the earth’s history with evidence for geological history. 15 Rarely, though, do the many romantic texts documenting this enthrallment with earthly excavations evoke the ensuing dirt and damage done by mining. 16 The broad-ranging implications of «dirt,» relevant for dirty nature, are typically overlooked or overwritten in these texts by aesthetic revelry in the beautiful minerals and sublime mountains or else by the mysterious inner journeys into mines and caves carried out by poetic young male protagonists like Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen and CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 121 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 121 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 122 Heather I. Sullivan Ludwig Tieck’s Christian in Der Runenberg. 17 Mining narratives in the age of Goethe exhibit conflicting impulses in terms of depicting or shrouding the inevitable fact that we are fully a part of the «dirty,» that is, material, processes from which we derive the matter and energy necessary for life. The culturally determined and problematic demarcation between humanity, as the «extractors,» and the natural world, as «extractable resources,» emerges in narratives of extraction. 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. Verne’s novel, The Begum’s Millions, written midway between the early Anthropocene and today, even more concretely presents the dualistic stance of modern extractive and economic practices: the devastation of mining on the one side, and on the other, the utopian dreams of endless energy, which are initially presented as two separate cultures. Verne closes his novel, however, with a simplistic reconciliation enabled by military success. The sheer horror of mining portrayed early in the novel is simply replaced by a happy marriage story at the end (as if rewriting Hoffmann with a wedding). Whereas Goethe and Hoffmann address the illusions related to mining and the largescale economic profits, Verne’s tale from 1879 reflecting France’s defeat by the Germans in 1870 initially depicts a seemingly irreconcilable dichotomy between two countries rather than a problem inherent to the extractive processes of modern capitalism itself. 18 This dualistic vision is expressed by the extreme contrasts between the idealized, green, and environmentally friendly «France-Ville» and the grim industrial and mining moonscape of the German «Stahlstadt.» This story was originally written by Paschal Grousset as The Langevol Inheritance, and then revised and recreated by Verne at the behest of his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, in order to make it marketable; in both versions, the sympathetic French doctor Dr. Sarrasin shares a vast inheritance from India with his German nemesis, the Faustian scientist Herr Schultze, who works only to eradicate forever what he perceives to be weak «French sensibilities.» 19 Verne’s young hero, Marcel Bruckmann, «bridges» in name and practice the two rival communities built with the «Begum’s millions»: he works for the protoecotopia of France-Ville founded - as so many ecotopias are - in the Pacific Northwest (Southern Oregon) by infiltrating and spying on the dystopian city of Stahlstadt where Herr Schultze strips the land with mines in order to fuel his Metropolis-like industrial site of oppressive military production. As a long-time family friend and helper of Sarrasin’s lazy son, Octave, and young lover of their daughter, Jeanne, Marcel dedicates his impressive in- CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 122 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 122 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Dirty Nature 123 tellect and skills to become part of the mechanistic German hierarchy. Indeed, Verne dedicates much more space to the intricate clockwork of the mining community, portraying with elaborate detail the machinery, scheduling, and, with much sentimentality, the suffering lives of the hardworking, exploited men, women, and children there. France-Ville, in contrast, is lovely, but equally regulated. Its location is «on the balmy Pacific coast» where it fulfills what we today might describe as middle-class eco dreams filled with green parks and waterways everywhere, individual houses for each family, and an emphasis on clean construction and aesthetics: «Every house will be separate on a lot planted with trees, lawn, and flowers» (Verne 121). The houses can be no more than three stories high in order to share the air and light, and must all have a flower garden in front; the practical needs for water and waste are integral to construction: «Houses will be built over an open basement, with openings on all sides and thus providing under the ground-floor a subsoil of aeration as well as a kind of hall. The water pipes and drains will be exposed, installed against a central pillar in such a way that their state can be easily verified» (Verne 123). Above all, hygiene is the ultimate goal: The layout of the interior rooms is left to the individual’s desires. But those two dangerous sources of disease - veritable hotbeds of miasma and poison - are absolutely forbidden: carpets and wallpaper. The floors, artistically constructed of precious woods assembled as mosaics by gifted cabinetmakers, would be a total waste if they were to be buried under wool fabrics of dubious cleanliness. (Verne 123) The smoke from fireplaces cannot be allowed to rise into the air, but rather it is «carried through subterranean conduits which suck it into special burners, supplied at the city’s expense to the rear of the houses […]. There, the smoke is stripped of its carbon particles and is then discharged in a colorless state into the atmosphere at a height of thirty-five meters above ground» (Verne 124). All these details about clean air as well as public buildings, free enterprise, children’s exercise, and water flow are documented - with implied objectivity - by a German newspaper in the novel, as if Verne himself could not quite bring himself to detail the ecotopia directly. Verne’s vision of Stahlstadt, on the other hand, is portrayed directly by the narrator and at length. Its descriptions reveal dismay at the dingy landscapes colored only by shiny slag: Black macadamized roads, surfaced with cinders and coke, wind along the mountains’ flanks. Under clumps of yellowish vegetation, one can see little piles of slag, dappled with all the colors of the prism, gleaming like the eyes of a basilisk. Here and there, an abandoned mine shaft, worn by the rains, overrun by briars, opens its gaping mouth, a bottomless abyss, like some crater of an extinct volcano. The air is heavy with smoke; it hangs like a somber cloak upon the earth. No birds fly CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 123 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 123 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 124 Heather I. Sullivan through this area; even the insects appear to avoid it; and, within the memory of man, not a single butterfly has ever been seen. (Verne 49) This grim landscape reflects the harsh lives of its inhabitants. Marcel bravely enters this dark world in order to preserve the beauty of France-Ville. In the city of steel, he faces challenges but rises to the occasion and even flourishes, thanks to his clever abilities and dedication. He, like Hoffmann’s Elis, rapidly rises all the way to the top of the local hierarchy. As the new aide and guide to Schultze, Marcel achieves his goal of uncovering the evil German plan to build an enormous cannon that will destroy the French. The cannon can send a projectile many leagues away, and upon arrival, all its small pieces break apart and explode individually to release a poison gas that kills all life in the vicinity instantly. Herr Schultze proudly exclaims: ‹It is made to go only two leagues,› replied Herr Schultze, smiling. ‹But,› he added, pointing to another shell, ‹there’s a cast projectile. It’s loaded, that one, and contains thirty little cannons arranged symmetrically, cast one inside the other like the tubes in a telescope, and which, after being shot off like projectiles, become cannons in their turn, to spit out, one after another, little shells loaded with incendiary materials. It’s like a battery that I can throw into space and which can carry fire and death to a whole city by overpowering it with a shower of inextinguishable flames! › (Verne 100) The cannon is already armed and aimed at France-Ville, thus young Marcel must quickly escape the prisonlike city and warn the French. He succeeds thanks to heroic efforts in the nick of time, along with the fact that Schultze makes an error in his mathematical calculations of the speed and power of the projectile - it ends up spinning harmlessly around the earth like a satellite instead of destroying France-Ville. Hence the French victory provides the modern dream: France-Ville keeps its green harmony while taking over the industrial Stahlstadt from afar, allowing them to live with the best of both worlds. Marcel will ascend to rule Stahlstadt with France-Ville sensibilities, and he gets the girl, too. The novel ends with their happy marriage, the arrival of a baby, and the prospect of future rule of the mining city. Verne leaves completely unexplored how Marcel will transform Stahlstadt from its currently devastating and exploitative practices. The absolutely irreconcilable differences between the ecotopia and the need for mineral extraction in mining are left unresolved. As a «Bruckmann,» Marcel metaphorically suggests a bridging, but the novel closes before actually presenting how this transformation will come to be. From Goethe’s association of illusions and blindness to modern technological extractions and Hoffmann’s portrayal of how there seems to be no sane prospects for navigating the conflicts between widespread cultural illusions of the middle class and individual illusions of desire, CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 124 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 124 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Dirty Nature 125 Verne leaves the readers with a miraculous bridge supported, as pro forma for a late nineteenth-century novel, with a marriage of love. Or rather, he leaves the illusion intact. Environmentally speaking, the «progress» that we see here in moving from the Age of Goethe to Verne’s late-nineteenth century technological speculations is a concretization of the illusions. However, this may well reveal Verne’s growing skepticism regarding modern technology rather than a blindness to its impact, which may explain why this novel, in stark contrast to his world-famous journeys into the earth, under the sea, and around the world, remains relatively unknown much like his equally ignored dark novel of a «futuristic» and dystopian technological Paris in 1960, Paris in the Twentieth Century. 20 Tracing mining tales from Goethe and Hoffmann to Verne, in other words, reveals an almost schizophrenic recognition and erasure of the damage caused by extraction. Despite the leap in time and technological development, the move from Verne’s novel to Eschbach’s at the end of the twentieth century continues this trend, and, in fact, demonstrates a further solidification of the split. Eschbach’s Solar Station portrays the quest to capture solar energy as a technological possibility that should be pursued at all costs in order to overcome the dirty impact of traditional extractive processes like mining that are contributing to climate change. The hard-edged critique with specific reference to environmental damage exists alongside a sentimental technophile celebration of solar energy as an answer to all of our problems. Thus the Vernian structure of critique/ simple solution is upheld, but with technology as the answer rather than French culture. Eschbach’s support of solar energy as the most reasonable alternative to fossil fuels is the underlying theme for what turns out to be a standard action thriller in space. Solar energy, however, is a topic of much significance for environmental thinking, as Eschbach wholeheartedly asserts in the novel and in his non-fiction text in which he takes his own fiction as pathbreaking futuristic prediction, Das Buch der Zukunft. Eschbach’s book of future predictions declares energy itself to be our fate, «Energie: Unser Schicksal,» and he describes our era as «das Ende des Ölzeitalters» and the beginning of «das solare Zeitalter.» He notes, with a techno-optimism undergirded by an acknowledgement of environmental costs, the concrete reality that our entire culture depends upon technological extraction of energy. «Alle Entwicklungsrichtungen, die wir bis jetzt besprochen haben, sind hohe, rasch treibende Äste an einem sehr großen und sehr alten Baum, der ‹technische Zivilisation› heißt. Dieser Baum wurzelt in - Energie» (Eschbach, Buch 101). In this assertion, Eschbach is absolutely right. He then speculates that wind and water energy will not be enough for the future, nor is nuclear energy the answer due to the waste problem. In- CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 125 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 125 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 126 Heather I. Sullivan stead, he states that we need to turn to the sun, which is an endless source of unlimited energy, «wirklich unbegrenzt.» Eschbach enthusiastically notes that: Die einzige Energiequelle, die nach menschlichen Maßstäben wirklich unbegrenzt ist, ist die Sonnenenergie. Die Energiemenge, die unsere Sonne fortwährend ins All ausstrahlt, übersteigt jede Vorstellungskraft, und selbst der winzige Teil davon, den die Erde abbekommt, ist noch zehntausendmal mehr als alles, was wir selber so abfunzeln in unseren Kraftwerken und Triebwerken. (Eschbach, Buch, 114-15) Not unexpectedly for a technophile, he addresses the fascinating challenges of capturing solar energy, but fails to discuss what impact an endless and unlimited source of energy would have on our environment. This is a gap typical of the sorts of cultural assumptions and illusions explored by Goethe and Hoffmann, and exposed and then erased in Verne. It is a gap that we can hardly overlook today, considering the massive impact that the large quantity, yet still limited amount of fossil fuels have had on the planet’s surface and the biosphere broadly. Imagine what we could do and produce - including wastes - with unlimited access to energy! In other words, it is not just access and wastes that create environmental problems, but the potential of energy itself for transforming the environment. Eschbach continues in Buch der Zukunft with an array of practical approaches for possibly capturing solar energy, and explores the likely technological difficulties, as in his novel. In Solar Station, the heroic Leonard Carr, an American scientist working as a mere «Hausmeister» on a Japanese solar station dedicated to capturing solar energy and relaying it to earth as an intense ray, must solve a mysterious murder that occurs in space. The USA has lost its premier role in space in the novel’s world, and Germany/ Europe provides only one of the antagonists, whereas the countries and peoples of Asia dominate the plot. Carr cleverly uses his lowly position among the Japanese to pursue the murderer without interference, and he eventually discovers that it was carried out by Al-Qaida terrorists who have infiltrated the station with one of their own. These terrorists soon arrive in person at the station, which they conquer, pirate style. Their goal is to use the concentrated solar power as a massive weapon, even larger than Herr Schultze’s cannon, in order to annihilate Mecca and then take it over themselves as if divinely inspired by the heavens (rather literally, here, since the power comes from the sun). 21 Carr luckily overcomes the threat in a series of heroic escapades in zero gravity. Eschbach’s hopes for solar energy are directly expressed by the commander of the space station as he encourages his fellow astronauts to save the station from the pirates. He highlights the need, the benefits for the environment, the CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 126 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 126 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Dirty Nature 127 promise of space travel it would allow, and the terrible environmental damage if we do not pursue solar power immediately. Ist Ihnen nicht klar, dass die Solarstation unser Weg ins All ist? Unser einziger? Und dass wir ihn jetzt gehen müssen? Die fossilen Brennstoffe gehen zu Ende. Bald stehen uns auf der Erde keine intensiven Energiequellen mehr zur Verfügung außer der Atomenergie, und dann? Welche Zukunft können unsere Kinder dann noch wählen? Eine Zukunft, in der atomarer Abfall für Hunderttausende von Jahren aufbewahrt werden muss, in der es Reaktorunfälle gibt und in der riesige Landstriche verstrahlt sein werden […]. Oder eine Zukunft, in der es nur noch die Energie von Wind, Wasser und Feuerholz gibt, eine Zivilisation der Ochsengespanne und Dampfmaschinen, der Spinnräder und erbärmlichen Ernten? Was immer sie wählen, ihre Zukunft wird nichts sein können als ein trostloses Dahinvegetieren, ein Abwarten, während die menschliche Art langsam verlischt. Wenn wir nicht aufbrechen in den Weltraum, haben wir keine Zukunft […]. (Eschbach, Solarstation 139-40) Solar energy is the only hope for a society that will otherwise fall backwards into steam engines and ox-driven farming, miserably vegetating, or else succumbing to the inevitable spread of nuclear power’s radioactive waste. Either way, the novel claims, we need to head to space and obtain direct access to solar power. Unfortunately, the cleanest energy source becomes that which the other energy sources so tragically also become: a potential weapon of mass destruction. Eschbach raises the problem of solar weaponry with the goal of providing a thrilling ride for the reader, but also diverting the narrative away from such questions as on-the-ground costs of building a solar station, or what the daily impact of endless energy might be. In short, he neglects to address the fact that the more energy we have, the more things and waste we produce, all of which has an environmental impact. Eschbach leaves the question of dirty nature open: energy extraction is the burning issue, but he optimistically allows the impossible dream of «harmless extraction» endangered only by one radical group of terrorists who can be overcome by individual heroics. Not unexpectedly for a thriller, Carr’s heroic man-to-man space battle finally overwhelms the extraction issues, and so the conflicts between the promise and challenges of solar power are left unresolved after Carr single-handedly saves the day (and gets the girl). On the other hand, Eschbach most notably makes solar energy into a heroic conquest. Extraction narratives exemplify the translation of direct engagements and exchanges with dirty nature into individual stories about personal power, freedom, and transformation. They reveal to varying degrees the cultural illusions and blindness associated with dirty nature in its broad array and the illusions that overwrite its grimy relevance. Faust, for example, appears to conquer the entire Western sphere through three thousand years of history CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 127 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 127 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 128 Heather I. Sullivan and completes his epic story with apparent transcendence when his earthly remains ascend heavenwards, yet the play’s emphasis on illusion and blindness also rather radically reveal - rather than merely replicate - modernity’s blind spots with regard to how we brutally fund and utilize «natural resources.» Hoffmann’s Elis overcomes his initial shock at the horrific devastation of mining and embraces both the earth’s interior and his future career as mine owner only to die in a mine collapse occurring when he joyfully descends to locate just one more magical gem. The juxtaposition of these two moments of horror and embrace presents more than merely the typical romantic interiority transforming itself into cosmic subjectivity. In Hoffmann’s world, bourgeois marriage is not so much opposed to mad immersion into a solipsistic embrace of personal subjectivity, but rather these apparent oppositions are actually wed in contrast to the coldly precise description of the Falun mine with its sulfurous vapors, bare ground devoid of plants, and gaping maw. Readers follow Elis into the initial devastation as well as the distraction by the two versions of feminine wiles, but unlike Elis, we witness the final moment where his body returns to dust - Hoffmann keeps our eye on the dirt of materiality, in other words. Verne’s two communities happily enabled by a surprise inheritance avoid altogether the messy Goethean question of funding based on illusory promises. These communities reveal how intimate the seemingly diametrically opposed realms of France-Ville and Stahlstadt actually are, particularly at the end when they are literally wed. The idealized integration of modern technology, energy use, and green parks on the one hand, and, on the other, the devastating deployment of mining, military, and industry are easily combined at the end of the novel, which only serves to highlight the artificiality of their opposition. Verne’s novel raises the specter of destructive extractive processes only to transform it in utopian dreams of harmony, so long as the right man is at the helm. Nevertheless, this gesture of reconciliation for what was already linked might well be partially ironic on Verne’s part, considering his growing skepticism and other darkly cynical texts that remained relatively unknown in contrast to his happily technophilic best sellers. Finally, Eschbach’s Carr elaborates the possibilities for «clean» solar energy while also highlighting its inevitable potential, as with all energy sources, to be the ultimate weapon. This narrative idealizes the heroic quest for alternative energies and it links them, as does Verne’s novel, to troublingly militaristic quests for energy and power. On the other hand, Solar Station also seamlessly maintains the illusion of heroic technophile activities that will save us all. Whether it is solar energy, coal power, access to valuable minerals, or the creation of «new land,» the process of extraction and harnessing energy is documented by narratives that both reveal and perpetuate the illusions im- CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 128 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 128 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Dirty Nature 129 plying that extracting energy frees us from its basis. Each of these stories exposes different aspects of the illusions and succumbs in different ways to their power. These strategies and/ or lapses help us to trace the dark grime (and vibrant exchanges) of dirty nature undergirding all of our energy and power quests. And on the bright side, vast cultural illusions underpinning entire economic and political systems based on blindness to displacement and denial of our dependence on earthly systems make for fascinatingly dirty tales. Notes 1 For the term «dirty nature» credit goes to John Bruni, Grand Valley State University, who coined it as the title for our 2009 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment conference panel. 2 See Nixon’s discussion of the «Anthropocene» first described as such by Nobel Laureate and atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000 (Slow Violence 12). 3 Regarding «nature-culture» or «natureculture» as inseparable see Iovino and Oppermann; for the «radical pastoral» see Garrard; for «ecology without nature» see Morton; and for the «end of nature» see Heise’s Nach der Natur. 4 Cf. Alaimo’s concept of «trans-corporeality» in Bodily Natures for a thorough discussion of how these processes reveal our bodily immersion in the material surroundings. 5 I explore this at greater length in the essay on «Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticism.» 6 In his book Ecology without Nature. 7 Cf. Heise’s Sense of Place on our «risk society» regarding the inability to assess environmental risks without consulting with experts and technology beyond the ken of most people. 8 The Faustian use of illusion is well-documented; cf. especially Brown, and Schmidt 283- 84. 9 For discussion of capitalism and modern economics in «the German cultural imagination» see Gray. 10 As per Lipinski: «Erstaunlicherweise enthalten Mephistos Pläne einen gesunden Kern - die Nutzung der natürlichen Ressourcen, der Bodenschätze und der Landwirtschaft […] als mögliche Quellen des Reichtums. Hinter diesen Gedanken verbirgt sich das ökonomische Wissen des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts und Faust als Autor des Projekts» (168). 11 Cf. Rigby’s two essays on Faust. 12 Böhme also reads Die Bergwerke in terms of mining and ecology, but sees Elis as returning to «mother earth» at the end, overwhelmed by the «Unheimlichkeiten bürgerlicher Sexualität» (122). 13 For the more typical reading of Hoffmann’s split desires, see Daemmrich. 14 Cf. Ziolkowski’s chapter on «The Mine: Image of the Soul» in German Romanticism and its Institutions. 15 Cf. Rupke for discussion of romanticism and the earth sciences. 16 Alexander von Humboldt is a notable exception; he even developed a respirator for miners to avoid breathing the endless dust and grime in mines. 17 Cf. Arnd’s discussion of mines and the sublime in Tieck. 18 Cf. Unwin’s discussion of how Verne «negotiates change in the 19 th century.» CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 129 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 129 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 130 Heather I. Sullivan 19 See Schulman’s introduction to this English edition. 20 Verne’s rediscovered novel from 1863, Paris in the Twentieth Century, is a dark urban dystopia of a technological future. 21 There is a similar plot in which terrorists use a solar station built for energy capture and transfer to earth as a weapon of mass destruction in the 2012 novel by Lerner: Energized. Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010. Arnds, Peter. «From Eros to Thanatos: Hiking and Spelunking in Ludwig Tieck’s Der Runenberg.» Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. 176-92. Böhme, Hartmut. Natur und Subjekt. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1988. Brown, Jane. Faust: Theater of the World. New York: Twayne, 1992. Daemmrich Horst S. The Shattered Self: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Tragic Vision. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1973. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Middlesex, Eng.: Penguin, 1966. Eschbach, Andreas. Das Buch der Zukunft. 5 th ed. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2012. -. Solarstation. Cologne: Bastei Lübbe, 1999. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. 2 nd ed. London: Routledge, 2012. Goethe, Wolfgang. Amtliche Schriften I. Ed. Reinhard Kluge. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998. -. Faust. Texte. Ed. Albrecht Schöne. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994. Gray, Richard T. Money Matters: Economics and the German Cultural Imagination, 1770-1850. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2008. Heise, Ursula. Nach der Natur. Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010. -. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Hoffmann, E. T. A. «Die Bergwerke zu Falun.» Die Serapions-Brüder. Ed. Wulf Segebrecht. Munich: Winkler, 1993. 171-97. Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Oppermann. «Theorizing material Ecocriticism: A Diptych.» Interdisciplinary Studies in Literatur and Environment 19.3 (2012): 448-475. Lerner, Edward M. Energized. New York: Tor, 2012. Lipinski, Krzysztof. «‹Denn dies Metall lässt sich in alles wandeln …› Gold und Sexualität als Instrumente des Bösen in Goethes ‹Faust›.» Resonanzen. Ed. Sabine Doering, et al. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2000. 159-69. Maser, Chris. «Living with the Forest: Ecology, Community, Economy.» The Idea of the Forest: German and American Perspectives on the Culture and Politics of Trees. Ed. Karla L. Schultz and Kenneth S. Calhoon. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. 11-30. von Molnár, Géza. «Hidden in Plain View: Another Look at Goethe’s Faust.» Goethe Yearbook 11 (2002): 33-76. CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 130 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 130 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Dirty Nature 131 Montgomery, David R. Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. Berkeley: U of California P, 2007. Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011. Pancake, Ann. Strange as this Weather Has Been. Berkeley: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007. Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge, 2006. Rigby, Kate. «Freeing the Phenomena: Goethean Science and the Blindness of Faust.» Interdisciplinary Studies in the Environment and Literature 7.2 (2000): 25-41. -. «Prometheus Redeemed? From Autoconstruction to Ecopoetics.» Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth. Ed. Laurel Kearns and Catherine Keller. New York: Fordham UP, 2007. 233-51. Rupke, Nicholas A. «Caves, Fossils, and the History of the Earth.» Romanticism and the Sciences. Ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 1990. Schmidt, Jochen. Goethes Faust: Erster und Zweiter Teil: Grundlagen - Werk - Wirkung. Munich: Beck, 1999. Schulman, Peter. Introduction. The Begum’s Millions. By Jules Verne. Trans. Stanford L. Luce. Ed. Arthur B. Evans. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2005. xiii-xxxix. Stephenson, R. H. «The Diachronic Solidity of Goethe’s Faust.» A Companion to Goethe’s «Faust»: Parts I and II. Ed. Paul Bishop. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006. 243-70. Stroud, Ellen. «Does Nature Always Matter? Following Dirt through History.» History and Theory 42 (2003): 75-81. Sullivan, Heather I. «Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticism.» Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 19.3 (2012): 515-31. Unwin, Timothy. «Jules Verne: Negotiating Change in the Nineteenth Century.» Science Fiction Studies 32.1 (2005): 5-17. Verne, Jules. The Begum’s Millions. Trans. Stanford L. Luce. Ed. Arthur B. Evans. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2005. Ziolkowski, Theodore. German Romanticism and its Institutions. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990. 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