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. 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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.