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/4.0/71
2021
532-3
‘The Invention of Reality Required No More Records’: Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist
71
2021
Gundolf Graml
This essay focuses on two crucial aspects that undergird literature’s function as archive in the Anthropocene: first, its capacity to record and transmit human experiences across time and space; second, its ability to make visible the multivocality and multiperspectivity that is part of any archive but often silenced in favor of an alleged scientific neutrality. Through a close reading of Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr’s novels Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis (1984) and Morbus Kitahara (1995) this essay argues that the novels’ evocative descriptions of deranged time-space configurations are more than the messy, fictional ‘other’ to the scientific archive’s
alleged accuracy. Building on Hubert Zapf’s notion of literature as cultural ecology, this article presents literary texts as dynamic and indispensable repositories of a holistic human experience. Ransmayr’s novels exemplify literature’s role in inspiring not only the actions that exacerbate the climate catastrophe but also in offering strategies for adapting to it.
cg532-30141
‘The Invention of Reality Required No More Records’: Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist Gundolf Graml Agnes Scott College Abstract: This essay focuses on two crucial aspects that undergird literature’s function as archive in the Anthropocene: first, its capacity to record and transmit human experiences across time and space; second, its ability to make visible the multivocality and multiperspectivity that is part of any archive but often silenced in favor of an alleged scientific neutrality. Through a close reading of Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr’s novels Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis (1984) and Morbus Kitahara (1995) this essay argues that the novels’ evocative descriptions of deranged time-space configurations are more than the messy, fictional ‘other’ to the scientific archive’s alleged accuracy. Building on Hubert Zapf’s notion of literature as cultural ecology, this article presents literary texts as dynamic and indispensable repositories of a holistic human experience. Ransmayr’s novels exemplify literature’s role in inspiring not only the actions that exacerbate the climate catastrophe but also in offering strategies for adapting to it. Keywords: literary fiction, archive, climate catastrophe, Anthropocene, Arctic, science, postcolonialism, postmodernity, Holocaust, memory, tourism, explorer Austrian author Christoph Ransmayr’s breakthrough novel, Die letzte Welt (1988), from whose final pages I borrowed the title phrase for this article, describes the fragility — and, perhaps, futility — of cultural preservation under the conditions of the Anthropocene in seemingly unequivocal terms: “Bücher verschimmelten, verbrannten, zerfielen zu Asche und Staub; Steinmale kippten als formloser Schutt in die Halden zurück und selbst in Basalt gemeißelte Zeichen verschwanden unter der Geduld von Schnecken” (Letzte Welt 287). 1 This quote 142 Gundolf Graml invites a reading of Ransmayr’s novel as yet another dystopian narrative of the end of civilization brought on by the heat waves, floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions that transform the text’s fictional worlds. However, in the context of the overall narrative’s focus on the concept of metamorphoses, the destruction of specific cultural systems of recording only mean the end of a world, not the world. The role of language as essential cultural archive, as tool that mediates between the natural and nonnatural world remains indispensable for the ongoing reimagination of humans’ interaction with their nonhuman environment. With its embrace of creative narration in the midst of natural catastrophes Ransmayr’s novel subverts attempts to read the drastic and violent destruction of European cultural achievements as dystopian roadmap for life in the context of climate change� In doing so, it anticipates what Timothy Clark describes as creative “deranging�” Clark argues that most ecocritical approaches still operate within “discursive practices that construct the scale at which a problem is experienced as a mode of predetermining the way in which it is conceived” (74; my italics). In other words, critical readings of the impact of climate change in a work that plays at the scale of a family or of a particular community will investigate the causes as well as the potential mitigation strategies within that scale. Instead of such limited time-space configurations, Clark challenges ecocritical approaches to think time spans in millennia and consider space at the planetary level (100). Clark’s second point of criticism questions the role of cultural imagination, and, in particular, of literature, in dealing with the consequences of the Anthropocene. His question, “how far is much environmental criticism vulnerable to the delusions that the sphere of cultural representations has more centrality and power than in fact it has? ” (21), must be taken seriously at a time when the overall readership for books is declining, digital media have turned attention into a coveted commodity, and educational curricula prioritize STEM fields over the humanities. However, Clark scrutinizes not only the relevance of literature but also the destructive implications and assumptions of given critical schools (whether historicist, formalist, postcolonial or, indeed, many others) […], whose modes of thought are entrenched in modes of cultural self-understanding that are either inherently destructive or which now become destructive in the Anthropocene. (21—22) Clark’s critical look at the interpretive framework and his questioning of the centrality of culture are relevant for this volume’s focus on ecological archives. For instance, what are the implicit conventions of power and hierarchy that underlie the concept of the archive? What modes of thinking and knowing do we deploy as researchers and scholars when we work with archives? What are Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist 143 our own roles as critics of, contributors to, and participants in the slow-moving catastrophe of climate change that we engage with in our work? As we broaden our interdisciplinary scope, deepen our historical perspective, and diversify the materiality of our archives, how can and should an awareness of the “habitability of the planet” manifest itself in our work? (100). In this article I will use Clark’s ruminations on the role of cultural texts as springboard for a discussion of the archival role of literature in the context of the Anthropocene. Hubert Zapf’s work on literature as cultural ecology shares with Clark a concern that ecocritical approaches are still too beholden to a “mimetic determinism” that prioritizes a topic such as “climate change […] at the expense of the multiplicity of other relevant topics in contemporary ecology as well as in politics, society, and culture” (Zapf 261). But Clark and Zapf differ in their evaluation of the relevance of cultural imagination for responding to life in the Anthropocene. Where Clark polemically questions the value of cultural imagination (see above), Zapf considers literature a central manifestation of language and, therefore, as a cultural ecosystem that has not only facilitated the development of humans as a species but also served as main interface with the nonhuman natural world. For Zapf, literature’s role as cultural ecological system manifests itself as the “dynamic interrelation of three major discursive functions: the functions of a culture-critical metadiscourse, an imaginative counter-discourse, and a reintegrative interdiscourse” (96). This triadic model underscores literature’s role as discursive space for the negotiation and reinvention of cultural memory as well as political and social configurations. In this chapter I will reread Christoph Ransmayr’s novels Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis (1984) and Morbus Kitahara (1995) as literary texts whose self-reflective use of language underscores the unique role of literature as a complex ecocultural archive� With its almost melancholic descriptions about the Arctic icescape before its rapid decline, Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis invites interpretations as prophetic text about the impact of climate change� However, what I will focus on is its use of fictional narrative to represent human experiences with nonhuman nature that are outside the usual discursive construction of the archive� Morbus Kitahara’s relevance for my discussion is based on the novel’s creative reworking of particular historical archives into a fictionalized text that demonstrates the powerful role of literature in accessing complex and complicated memories� Both texts exemplify their relevance as archives in the age of the Anthropocene by how they question particular human self-images based on ideas of dominating and controlling space, time, and communication� Both texts also foreground the role of language as ultimate interface between the human and the nonhuman world and, in doing so, underscore the centrality of language, literature, and of creative imagination as 144 Gundolf Graml archival resources for addressing the ecological challenges posed by life in the Anthropocene� The complex relationship between archives and ‘reality’ play a crucial role in Ransmayr’s debut novel, Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis (1984). 2 At the center of the plot is the character Josef Mazzini, an Italian-born Viennese writer who specializes in inventing fictional stories and events which he then tries to ‘verify’ with actual historical events: Er entwerfe, sagte Mazzini, gewissermaßen die Vergangenheit neu. Er denke sich Geschichten aus, erfinde Handlungsabläufe und Ereignisse, zeichne sie auf und prüfe am Ende, ob es in der fernen oder jüngsten Vergangenheit jemals wirkliche Vorläufer oder Entsprechungen für die Gestalten seiner Phantasie gegeben habe. (SEF 20) Mazzini’s obsession concentrates on the northern regions of the globe, whose “unbewohnte, kahle Landschaften und nördliche Einöden” prove to be perfect “Kulissen” for his fictionalization of the past (SEF 22). In this process he comes across reports about the Austro-Hungarian polar expedition of 1872-74. Thinking that he has found “einen Beweis” for one of his stories, Mazzini “durchwanderte die Archive” where he discovers the torn-up logbook of the Admiral Tegetthoff, the expedition’s ship, as well as the diaries and journals written by the expedition’s leaders, Julius Payer and Carl Weyprecht (SEF 23). But for Mazzini’s quest to revive a “verjährte[.] Wirklichkeit […] waren alle Archive zu eng, zu klein.” His desire to reconstruct the expedition’s ‘real’ experience “vor den Kulissen der Wirklichkeit” leads him to plan his own journey into the Arctic. He travels to Greenland, where he secures a coveted spot on a Norwegian boat conducting scientific exploration in the polar region. The vessel takes him to Svalbard, a group of Arctic islands under Norwegian domination. There he is last spotted, outfitted in the historical garments of nineteenth-century explorers, driving off into the polar night on a dogsled (SEF 23—24). Mazzini’s disappearance at the very beginning of the novel turns out to be the point of origin for the plot. A friend of Mazzini’s asks the narrator to sort through the manuscripts, documents, and notes left behind by the disappeared storyteller. Instead of a linear narrative, the novel’s unfolding plot presents itself as a “bricolage” and “patchwork” (Nethersole 136) in which scientific reports, diary excepts, photographs, and drawings from the historical expedition are intermingled with observations and comments by Mazzini. The narrator then adds his own layer of thinking and writing to the collection when he reveals that his absorption into the “Fall [case]” of Mazzini has prompted him to go beyond simply sorting and sifting through Mazzini’s archive: Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist 145 Das dünne, blau gebundene Heft, das er damals vollkritzelte, liegt jetzt vor mir; […] Gewiss, es ist nicht Josef Mazzinis Handschrift, die auf dem Umschlagbild den Titel dieser heillosen Sammlung von Zitaten festhält. […] Das habe ich geschrieben. Ich. Ich habe auch die anderen Hefte Mazzinis mit Namen versehen. […] Ich bin mit den Aufzeichnungen verfahren, wie jeder Entdecker mit seinem Land, mit namenlosen Buchten, Kaps und Stunden verfährt - ich habe sie getauft. Nichts soll ohne Namen sein. (SEF 177) This “spatial rather than temporal textual ordering” (Nethersole 136) complicates the notion of archives by multiplying their presence and questioning their veracity. The narrator sorts, interprets, and adds to the archive of Mazzini, who has in turn explored and interpreted the archives of the historical Payer-Weyprecht expedition. As the narrator’s montage and framing of Mazzini’s excerpts from the historical diaries and reports make clear, the expedition itself is a result of consulting and interpreting a vast archive of narratives about earlier polar voyages� Mazzini’s disappearance serves as linchpin for how the novel reevaluates literature’s complex role as cultural ecological archive. On the one hand, it criticizes the linear and unidirectional use of archives as containers of information that can be translated into reality. Mazzini’s fruitless efforts to reconstruct the exhibition’s experience via the use of nineteenth-century garments and a dogsled casts such uses of the archive as counterproductive and dangerous� On the other hand, Mazzini’s disappearance provides the narrator (and, ultimately, the author) with the opportunity to reconceptualize the archives in such a way that the multiple voices and perspectives that Mazzini has ignored become audible and visible� While the former, linear and unidirectional use of the archive appears to lead only deeper into a cycle of self-defeating attempts of trying to mold human reality to the constraints of traditioned knowledge, the latter introduces literary narratives as a form of archivization that combines in itself the function of knowledge storage, critical self-reflection, and imaginative reconstruction of present and future� Over the years since its publication, critics have read Ransmayr’s Schrecken variously as a manifestation of a postmodern play with the infinite loop between the signifier and the signified (Menke); as a commentary on the construction of reality through discourse (Müller; Nethersole); and as a eulogy to the role of myth and the human subject (Cook). As incisive and instructive as these analyses are, they mostly gloss over the text’s critical perspective on the tension between the traditional use of historical archives and literature’s imaginative power. Ransmayr repeatedly describes how a conventional use of historical archives produces solutions and discoveries whose long-term negative 146 Gundolf Graml consequences for the planet outweigh their short-term benefits. The imaginative tools of literature provide an opportunity to criticize and also reenvision aspects of scale and power and, consequently, facilitate a reconceptualization of the archive as a multivocal and multiperspectival space� The narrator’s retroactive contextualization and ordering of Mazzini’s archival exploration reveals how archives have traditionally anchored and projected power in a political, economic, social, and also environmental context� Not coincidentally, Mazzini discovers the Admiral Tegetthoff’s logbook and unopened letters and diaries by Payer and Weyprecht in the “Marineabteilung des österreichischen Kriegsarchivs” and the diary of the engineer Otto Krisch in “der Kartensammlung der Nationalbibliothek” (SEF 23). Connected to the strategic centers of power of the former Habsburg empire, the military archive and the disciplines of geography and cartography underscore that the history of polar expeditions is at its core a history of colonialist and imperialist conquest fantasies. Late nineteenth-century attempts to reach the North Pole and to discover new routes through the Arctic sea were propelled by centuries-old dreams about a shortcut to the imagined (and imaginary) riches of Asia: Nordöstliche Passagen, nordwestliche Passagen, Packeismauern, eisfreie Sunde, das Ende der Welt, der Pazifik! , Steine und Kaps, Inseln, Treibeis und guter Wind - wer wollte nicht durch alles Chaos und alle Rätsel hindurch ÜBER DAS EISMEER ins Paradies und daraus mit allen Kleinodien des Ostens zurückkehren, vor die Fürsten und Handelsherren hintreten und sagen: Ich war der Erste! (SEF 56) Although Payer and Weyprecht as commanders of the 1872 expedition proclaim to follow purely scientific goals, their writings echo these orientalist cultural narratives. A cultural script consisting of Romanticist descriptions of sublime Arctic landscapes can be traced in most of the excerpts from Payer’s diaries (Nethersole 139—40), especially in his reminiscing reflections on how they had initially imagined the act of discovering an island in the far north: “Seine Thäler dachten wir uns damals mit Weiden geschmückt und von Renthieren belebt, welche im ungestörten Genuß ihrer Freistätte weilen, fern von allen Feinden ( Julius Payer)” (SEF 38). Payer, who is most of all interested in filling in the last empty spots on the map, nonetheless admits: “Das ideale Ziel unserer Reise war die nordöstliche Durchfahrt […]” (SEF 46). Payer’s diary also repeatedly reveals the Romanticist notions of heroic (male) subject formation through conquest that undergirds narratives of scientific exploration. Even when the Admiral Tegetthoff becomes immobilized by the icefloats of the Arctic sea, Payer transforms it into an act of active exploration: “[…] eine trostlose Wüste nahm uns auf, willenlos für eine unbestimmte Zeit und Entfernung, drangen wir in sie ein ( Julius Payer)” (SEF 100; my italics). Payer’s metaphoric penetration of an icy Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist desert by a group of men trapped on a ship resonates with the symbolic role of the Arctic in Gothic Romanticist tales such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, where the polar region becomes the ultimate space — ultima terra — for male explorers to continue to pursue their unreachable goals (Menke 571; Nethersole 139). Precisely because the North Pole is imagined as unreachable it constitutes the perfect narrative marker for producing closure where the quests themselves would continue ad infinitum: Das Polargebiet dementiert als Bibliotheksphänomen, das es doch ist, durch seine intertextuelle Verfaßtheit das, was an ihm aufgefunden werden sollte, den Ort ohne Spuren und topos der Spurlosigkeit� Spuren müssen schon hinterlassen worden sein� Das Polargebiet, der Ort jenseits aller Eintragungen wird begangen schon immer in den Spuren von Vorgängern. (Menke 571) The legacy of this Romanticist discourse manifests itself in Payer’s characterization of the members of the 1872 expedition as scientific trailblazers and admired public heroes who “in einem Kampf für wissenschaftliche Ziele, der Ehre unseres Vaterlandes dienen […] ( Julius Payer)” (SEF 37). This conflation of scientific goals with patriotic pathos and imperialist fantasies will find its culmination in the discovery of an archipelago of ice-covered islands that brings such hope to the crew that they decided “ihrem fernen Monarchen dadurch ein Zeichen ihrer Huldigung zu bringen, daß sie dem neuentdeckten Lande den Namen Kaiser Franz Josefs-Land gab ( Julius Payer)” (SEF 151). Discovery in the name of science invokes ideas of enlightenment and rationality, but the naming of newly discovered, distant territories pulls them into the existing power structures of an imperialist worldview� It is through its practices of naming and mapping that science reveals its underlying colonialist impulses: “Die Entdecker der Neuen Welt können sich vom Horizont der Alten Welt noch lange nicht verabschieden” (Schlögel 183). Repeated protestations by Payer and Weyprecht that their expedition’s goal was to reach “kein Land, kein zu eroberndes Reich, [sondern] nichts als Linien, die sich in einem Punkte schneiden, und wovon nichts in der Wirklichkeit zu sehen sei! ( Julius Payer)” (SEF 43) only underscore to what extent the discourse of science also draws on the archives of colonization and imperialism. The still relatively new science of cartography had grown out of an enlightenment desire to better understand the world. It also became an essential tool for expanding European imperialist and colonialist power. As Karl Schlögel writes in Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit, geographic surveys had transformed governing power from control over people, roadways, and natural resources into control over space and territories, first in eighteenth-century France, then in other European regions, and finally across the globe (Schlögel 173). While the process of mapping 148 Gundolf Graml and surveying did indeed rely on a grid of lines and triangles only visible in maps, its reality effect transcended the maps, especially when it came to the domination of distant, colonial territories: “Für die Kolonialmächte war die Vermessung der neu eroberten Territorien eine Grundvoraussetzung für dauerhafte Unterwerfung und Ausbeutung […]” (Schlögel 175). Payer’s and Weyprecht’s descriptions of the expedition’s goal as trying to reach a goal identified only by converging lines thus omits to what extent science has become compromised by colonialist power� Weyprecht’s diaries, usually less literary than Payer’s, not only reveal how the expedition’s European scientific gaze marginalizes spaces based on their perceived lack of relevance for a (self-proclaimed) center of power but also illustrate how the colonialist perspective of science impacted humans’ perception of the nonhuman natural world (Nethersole 137, 139). Weyprecht, who spends his time measuring temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure endorses scientific research of all areas of the globe but dismisses the value of any more nuanced engagement with the region through the interface of language: [I]n jenen Breiten, die unbewohnt und unbewohnbar in Folge der dort herrschenden Verhältnisse nur für die reine Wissenschaft von Wichtigkeit sind, hat die beschreibende Geographie nur insoferne Werth, als durch die Bodenverhältnisse die meteorologischen, physikalischen und hydrographischen Erscheinungen der Erde beeinflußt werden; es genügt also die Skizzirung [sic] in großen Zügen (Carl Weyprecht). (SEF 151; my italics) Not only that Weyprecht describes the “arktische Detailgeographie” as irrelevant (“nebensäch-lich”), but he considers it altogether condemnable (“verwerflich”) if it impinges on the “wahre Zweck der Expeditionen, die wissenschaftliche Forschung (Carl Weyprecht)” (SEF 151). Weyprecht’s emphasis on ‘pure’ science anticipates once again the ambivalent legacy of scientific research as an element of the colonialist discourse. While it broadened Europeans’ understanding of the geographical surface of the globe, this acquisition of knowledge came at the expense of non-European people, whose voices and whose historical and cultural complexities were flattened into one-dimensional ‘scientific’ descriptions or silenced altogether. Such scientific colonialism increased humans’ knowledge about a wide range of natural processes and phenomena, while it simultaneously undermined their capacity to imagine themselves as part of the natural world and generated a self-destructive sense of human superiority over the nonhuman world based on the methods of quantitative science. To what extend this scientific perspective has shaped mainstream experiences of our environment becomes most noticeable when the narrator quotes excerpts from a tourism brochure used by Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist 149 the fictional character Mazzini in preparation for his journey to Svalbard. The brochure details the immigration rules, describes the islands’ topography and climate, highlights the flights and ferries that connect the territory with the Norwegian mainland, and cautions visitors to stay away from polar bears (SEF 67—68). As the narrator summarizes, the brochure presents the islands as completely explored and scientifically categorized: “Es ist ein entlegenes, aber längst kein mythenverzaubertes Land mehr, in das Josef Mazzini aufbricht” (SEF 68). Lynne Cook reads Mazzini’s flight from the archives into the Arctic and his eventual disappearance as failed attempt to recover the power of myth as defensive mechanisms against the rationalism of modernity. Comparing Ransmayr’s treatment of myth with Hans Blumenberg’s work on myths as coping strategies that help human communities align their self-perception with the stress generated by modernity’s concepts of rationalism and progress, Cook argues that myth in Ransmayr’s works “does not enable humankind to successfully structure a less anxious space within the relationships with which it constructs its reality.” Instead, as Mazzini exemplifies, the “mythmaking individual” disappears (Cook 226). At first it does indeed seem as if Mazzini’s journey into the Arctic is only the most recent iteration of an unceasing process of the Arctic world’s rationalization and integration into “modern homogeneous time with its atomistic, sharp, clockwork like divisions […].” What began as the desperate fight of daring men in wooden ships against the terrors of ice and darkness culminated in the “annihilation of distances by technological means” (Nethersole 138). The fact that the population of Svalbard consists mostly of Norwegian and Russian coal miners who dig for the fossil fuel that facilitates this “annihilation of distances” casts a strong shadow of doubt on the overall benefits of this rationalization of the modern world (SEF 67). It is against the stifling forces of rationalization that Ransmayr mobilizes the forces of language and, especially, literature to not only chart existing worlds but create new ones: Mit der Sprache kann man zwar kartographieren, was objektiv existiert, aber bisher noch nicht entdeckt wurde, aber die Literatur geht weit über diese Fähigkeit hinaus: Ich kann als Schriftsteller auch weiße Flecken erschaffen. Mit der Sprache kann ich mich also einerseits der vermessbaren und abbildbaren Wirklichkeit zuwenden, habe aber gleichzeitig die Möglichkeit, das Komplementärbild zu entwerfen, die bloße Möglichkeit. (Wilke 38) Mazzini’s disappearance becomes the white space of possibility on the narrator’s own map of ‘reality,’ “[…] als ein Hinüberwechseln aus der Wirklichkeit in die Wahrscheinlichkeit” (SEF 62). Mazzini used the archival texts of the histor- 150 Gundolf Graml ical expedition as source for finding out how it was. The narrator, by contrast, is interested in how it could have been. Rather than simply trying to deduce information from the accumulated mass of documents, the narrator reorders and, as I quoted above, even rewrites Mazzini’s documents (SEF 177). What could be considered a manipulation of the archives results instead in the rediscovery of voices whose presence in the documents had been muted by a conventional understanding of archives and, consequently, in a diversifying of perspectives. When the narrator realizes that the diaries of the various expedition members record different dates for the ship’s arrival in Norway he briefly contemplates explaining the different dates with the range of events or places that the diaries’ authors considered as markers of arrival. However, he decides against it, arguing that a particular day’s degree of reality can never be higher than in the “Bewußtsein eines Menschen, der ihn durchlebt hat […]: […] Also sage ich: Die Expedition erreichte am zweiten, erreichte am dritten, erreichte am vierten Juli 1872 Tromsö. Die Wirklichkeit ist teilbar.” This realization of multiple realities applies not only to the recordings of different arrival dates but also to the vastly differing impressions that the vessel’s commanders and subordinates recorded in their respective journals, which seem to have chronicled not one but various and very different expeditions: “Jeder berichtete aus einem anderen Eis” (SEF 41). In using the “weiße Flecken” created by Mazzini’s disappearance to generate a very different archive of opportunities, a “Komplementärbild” of reality that cannot be verified by the facts housed in conventional archives but that is nonetheless true, the narrator and, by extension, Ransmayr, draw attention to literature’s capacity for making accessible through language that which happens outside the realm of discourse� Not only is the entire novel that the reader holds in her hands the result of Mazzini’s disappearance. The existing text also produces the very experience that Mazzini sought when vanishing in the ice. Only Mazzini would know what exactly he experienced, but since he vanished in a world outside discourse it is literature as a complex form of language that facilitates the creation of alternative worlds “where literature articulates what remains unavailable in the prevailing categories of cultural self-interpretation but nevertheless appears indispensable for an adequately complex account of the lives of humans and their place in the more-than-human-world” (Zapf 108). Besides demonstrating literature’s capacity for making accessible extra-discursive experiences, Ransmayr’s novel also draws attention to literature’s ability for generating “imaginative counterworlds” that allow for a “radical-critical self-reflection of human civilization” (Zapf 59). What Timothy Clark demands from ecocritics, namely an unblinking critical look at how particular “critical schools” and “modes of cultural self-understanding” contribute to anthropo- Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist 151 genic destruction, is an inherent element of literary texts� As Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis emphasizes, the imperialist quest for conquering the North Pole was indeed mostly a “Bibliotheksphänomen.” When Mazzini tries to convince the captain of the science vessel that he is a writer working on a book about the Arctic, the captain ironically comments that each Arctic adventure seems to have generated entire libraries, prompting Mazzini to quip: “aus jeder Bibliothek kommt wieder ein Abenteurer” (SEF 71). But the fact that unreflected reading and writing can exacerbate damaging anthropocentric pursuits does not result in a dismissal of literature’s value as cultural archive. On the contrary, the novel’s intentional and self-reflective engagement with the role and functions of language and literature as essential translation mechanisms between human and nonhuman nature reaffirm literature’s power to wrestle with the distortions of scale that Clark identifies as one of the core reasons for humans’ delayed identification of and response to the emerging catastrophe of the Anthropocene. The way in which the novel’s narrative frame connects the acts of walking with the acts of writing as essential forms of human engagement with the nonhuman environment is a case in point� In a preface titled “Vor allem” the narrator describes how modern forms of transportation seem to have reduced geographical distances and turned traveling into a “bloße Frage der Finanzierung und Koordination von Abflugzeiten” but points out that geographical distances remain “ungeheuerlich”: “Vergessen wir nicht, daß eine Luftlinie eben nur eine Linie und kein Weg ist und: daß wir, physiognomisch gesehen, Fußgänger und Läufer sind” (SEF 9). This passage frames Mazzini’s eventual disappearance in the Arctic as an — albeit quixotic — act of recreating ecologically sustainable scale relations between humans and the nonhuman environment within the discursive sphere of literature. Since Mazzini’s experience as “Fußgänger” is only accessible via a speculative and multi-perspectival narration, the preface is also a comment on literary writing as venue for rethinking our complex scalar relationships with the nonhuman world. The novel’s final sentences merge the image of the walker with the self-image of the writer: “Mit meiner Handfläche schütze ich das Kap, bedecke die Bucht, spüre, wie trocken und kühl das Blau ist, stehe inmitten meiner papierenen Meere, allein mit allen Möglichkeiten einer Geschichte, ein Chronist, dem der Trost des Endes fehlt” (SEF 262). The “Fußgänger” who sets out to experience the non-archival reality in all its dimensions ultimately, and paradoxically, transforms into the “Chronist” who understands the limitations of his literary narratives but is nonetheless compelled to continue them, for it is only through aesthetic literary narratives that one can even get close to communicating the richness and complexity of life� 3 The narrator’s self-categorization as chronicler underscores how literary texts can serve as cultural ecological archives insofar as their “imaginative count- 152 Gundolf Graml er-discourse […] relates back to concrete biophysical forms of information and communication in the pre-cultural world of nature but also transforms them into more abstract, symbolic, and generalizing systems of human interpretation and self-interpretation” (Zapf 80). The interrelation between language, cultural memory, and nature also plays a crucial role in Ransmayr’s novel Morbus Kitahara (1995), which addresses Germany’s and Austria’s post-World War II memory culture. Without once using the terms National Socialism, Holocaust, Germany, and Austria, Ransmayr creates an alternative historical scenario whose imaginative inventions exhibit literature’s role as cultural archive that complements and translates historical documents into an affective representation of history. At first glance, this focus might appear unrelated to the question of ecological archives. Yet, as I will show in my discussion, it is precisely because Morbus Kitahara does not foreground descriptions of a decaying nature and civilization as indicators of anthropogenic ecological decline that the novel illustrates the potential of literary narratives to serve as archive for making intelligible, for preserving, and for continuously regenerating the ecological dimensions of life� Rather than directly addressing the historical discourse of Austrian involvement in National Socialism and the country’s co-responsibility for the Holocaust, Morbus Kitahara deploys the tools of literary aesthetics to recombine three major discursive clusters that undergird postwar Austria’s self-image: history, tourism, and landscape. The novel critiques empty commemoration rituals and mobilizes cultural narratives in a way that reconceptualizes the notion of archivization with regard to Holocaust history and memory. By conflating a pointed and hyperbolic representation of these particular discourses with their simultaneous critical evaluation Morbus Kitahara models how “the generic difference of aesthetic texts” translates into “critical discursive energy which motivates a radical self-examination of prevailing systems” (Zapf 103). The creative and aesthetic fusing of the Austrian tourism landscape with the National Socialist topography of torture illustrates that the notion of literature as cultural ecological archive is grounded in the “dynamic interrelation of three major discursive functions: the functions of a culture-critical metadiscourse, an imaginative counter-discourse, and a reintegrative interdiscourse” (Zapf 96). The novel’s plot plays out in the small alpine town of Moor. The Friede von Oranienburg has brought an end to a protracted war and assigned the region to the victorious American occupation troops, who decided to dismantle the railroad tracks and switches in order to isolate Moor and the surrounding countryside from the industrialized lowlands. Once part of a flourishing tourism industry, Moor’s tourism infrastructure collapses: “Aus den Fenstern des Grand Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist 153 Hotels am See wuchsen Windhafer und Gras, und das eingestürzte Dach des Konzertpavillons bedeckte ein Chaos aus zerbrochenen Stühlen und Sonnenschirmen, deren Bespannung längst verfault war” (Morbus Kitahara 66). 4 During the war, Moor’s granite quarry housed a forced labor camp where the dictatorial regime tortured and worked to death people deemed unfit for its racialized vision of society. To make the locals pay for their complicity in the murders, the American occupation commander Elliott sets up a punitive repentance system. A gigantic inscription, its letters carved out of stone and positioned across the large terraces of the quarry in the former labor camp, broadcasts the murderous deeds far into the countryside: “Hier liegen/ Elftausendneunhundertdreiundsiebzig Tote/ Erschlagen/ Von den Eingeborenen dieses Landes/ Willkommen in Moor” (MK 33). Several times a year the locals must perform as former inmates of the forced labor camp and reenact torture scenes based on photos from the camp’s photo archive: Kostümiert als die Opfer jener geschlagenen Herrschaft, für die Moors Männer in den Untergang gezogen waren, mußten die Uferbewohner schon zur nächsten Party in gestreiften Drillichanzügen mit aufgenähten Nationalzeichen und Davidsternen vor imaginären Entlausungsstationen Schlange stehen, mußten als polnische Fremdarbeiter oder ungarische Juden vor einem ungeheuren Granitblock mit Hämmern, Keilen und Brechstangen posieren - und mußten vor den Grundmauern der zerstörten Baracken zu ebensolchen Zählappellen antreten, wie Elliott sie in seinem Album abgebildet sah. (MK 46) Commander Elliott is not interested in making the people of Moor experience these scenarios, he is mainly focused on visual likeness� During the restaging of a photograph called Die Stiege, which shows hundreds of inmates walking up a steep and long stairway carved into the rocks with large stone blocks on their backs, Elliott allowed the people of Moor to use cardboard or balled-up clothing instead of actual rocks: “Elliott wollte nur, daß sich die Bilder glichen und bestand nicht auf dem unerträglichen Gewicht der Wirklichkeit” (MK 47). Over the years, the population of Moor becomes inured to these attempts at generating remorse and commemorating the past via mimetic reenactments of the images and texts in the historical archives: “Moors Kinder langweilten die Erinnerungen an eine Zeit vor ihrer Zeit. […] [D]ie Rituale der Erinnerung, ob sie nun von der Armee befohlen oder von den Sühnegesellschaften gepflegt wurden, [waren für sie] nur ein düsteres Theater.” What the children of Moor saw on the billboards and heard in their history lessons paled in comparison to what they wanted to see: the multi-lane highways of America; the high-rises of Manhattan; and the statue of liberty (MK 176—77). 154 Gundolf Graml Despite the fact that the novel never mentions Austria by name, the topographical and historical reference points make it relatively easy to read the region of Moor with its nearby lake and its former labor camp as fictionalized version of the town of Ebensee, located at the Traunsee in the Salzkammergut, one of Austria’s oldest and best-known tourism regions. This identification prompted critics to compare the novel’s fictionalized commemoration rituals with the mockery of actual postwar memory culture by right-wing political parties. For instance, writer Christoph Janacs read the novel as manifestation of a postmodernist “Geisteshaltung, der alles eins und zum bedeutungslosen Zitat verkommen ist, und, was noch schlimmer ist, er bedient damit eine Neue Rechte, die begangenes Unrecht gar nicht mehr leugnet, sondern mystisch verbrämt und ästhetisch überhöht” (101). Such accusations miss that Morbus Kitahara’s critique of a fictionally hyperbolized Holocaust remembrance focuses on rituals that prioritize the mimetic reconstruction of spaces as well as the graphic, and often sensationalist, retelling of torture practices in cinematic formats, rituals that emphasize the verisimilitude of images and are not concerned with the “unerträgliche[.] Gewicht der Wirklichkeit” (47). As a self-reflective literary work, Morbus Kitahara explores ecological cultural models of archivization that preserve the weight of the past for a time when no survivors will be available anymore to combat attacks on the veracity and factuality of the historical events� Concerns about the diminishing role of archives in shaping cultural discourses significantly influenced the author’s writing process. The discrepancy between, on the one hand, the overwhelming archival and historiographic documentation of Austria’s co-responsibility for the Holocaust as historical and factual event, and, on the other hand, the often outright denial of these facts in postwar Austrian society troubled Ransmayr: “Es ist mir unmöglich, im Salzkammergut, in Ebensee, in Mauthausen durch die Kulissen meiner eigenen Geschichte zu gehen, ohne dabei nicht immer auch gleichzeitig in dieser Vergangenheit und einer möglicherweise drohenden Zukunft zu sein.” Ransmayr experiences the archives as irrefutable but also recognizes a general lack of awareness, “daß in all diesen Dokumenten von Menschen die Rede ist, von den Augenblicken einer Verhaftung, den Stunden und Tagen eines Verhörs, der Folter, den Jahren, der Ewigkeit, in den Lagern” (”…das Thema hat mich bedroht” 216). In Morbus Kitahara Ransmayr reconceptualizes the idea of the archive by focusing on tourism, arguably the central vanishing point for Austrian discourses of history and identity. Throughout the twentieth century, official Austrian national identity discourses cultivated a particular tourist gaze (Urry) that identified a mixture of beautiful landscapes, classical culture, and alpine nature as foundation for the performative construction of Austrianness (Graml, Revisiting Austria). Morbus Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist 155 Kitahara redeploys the tourist gaze as a critical lens for scrutinizing the cultural practices that undergird the denial of Austria’s involvement in the National Socialist crimes in the first place. While references to Austria’s tourism image composed of beautiful landscapes and of the country’s cultural historical legacy have often deflected from the critical and analytical engagement with Austrian history, Morbus Kitahara reinscribes the landscape and the natural environment itself with the traces of the criminal past. In doing so, the novel also draws attention to the role of language and literature as “culture-critical metadiscourse” (Zapf 96) that has the ability to re-examine its own cultural reference system. References to tourism frame the description of key spaces and plot strands from the very beginning and foreground the ideological underpinnings of this particular cultural matrix. The description of Moor’s location at a lake amidst towering mountains invokes a familiar tourist gaze and reminds the narrator of a “grüne[n] Fjord, ein von Lichtreflexen sprühender Meeresarm” (MK 31). Readers familiar with Austrian literature and geography will recognize the novel’s mentioning of names such as “Steinernes Meer” and “Totes Gebirge” but will be confused by their intentional misplacement� Disorientation begins to overwhelm the initial sense of recognition prompted by a familiar Austrian tourist gaze. And this tourist gaze itself is revealed as compromised: Aus dem Gestänge des zerschossenen Wachturms am Stellwerk war ein schöner Blick auf den See. […] Über die Weite des Wasserspiegels hinweg betrachtet erschienen bei klarem Wetter die Terrassen des Steinbruchs […]. Und hoch oben, irgendwo über dem Scheitel dieser Riesentreppe aus Granit, […] über den […] eingesunkenen Dächern des Barackenlagers am Schotterwerk und den Spuren aller Qualen, die am Blinden Ufer des Sees erlitten worden waren, begann die Wildnis […]. (MK 31—32) The imagined beholder of the tourist gaze who longs to see the beautiful landscape now becomes the point of origin of a visual remapping that centers on a landscape of torture and death. The former concentration camp of Mauthausen, located near Linz and infamous for its “Todesstiege” inside a marble quarry, and its subcamp of Ebensee, almost 100 km southwest of Mauthausen and location of a murderous work camp for rocket engines, merge into a surreal landscape where the murderous past and the arbitrarily cleansed postwar tourism landscape appear in jarring simultaneity� The novel’s invention of a stone inscription on the terraces of the fictional quarry draws attention to this reinscription of the torture landscape into the ‘beautiful’ tourism landscape. By tracing this distorted tourist gaze back to a watchtower, the novel scrutinizes not only the ‘truth’ of what is seen but also the positionality of the one who holds the gaze. Anyone who considers this perspective as affirming a comforting and traditional image of Austrianness 156 Gundolf Graml now also implicitly recognizes her/ himself in the position of a perpetrator, looking out from a watchtower and down into a concentration camp� In doing so, Morbus Kitahara exemplifies what Wolfgang Iser describes as a central role of literature, namely the capacity to not simply “reflect […] reality” but “mirror[.] its reverse side, which would otherwise remain hidden by the cultural context itself-[…]” (228). Ransmayr’s novel reveals “the uncharted regions” of postwar Austrian society’s “prevailing culture” (Iser 228) that wrote this murderous past out of the map of everyday discourses� 5 The gigantic stone letters that invoke tourist welcome signs can be read as effort to reinscribe the deeds of man into nature. However, the concept of nature is always already filtered and culturally contaminated via the discourse of tourism� Nothing can get at the prediscursive condition without reference to language, and yet language constantly fails at producing the versimilitude of experience� Worse, language carries with it all the cultural connotations that led to the atrocities in the first place. The stone inscription is thus more than a monument to history in nature; it is a conflicted monument to language as part of and crucial access route to nature� In his lucid reading of the novel as constructing a monumental “Geschichtslandschaft” Alexander Honold wonders if Ransmayr saw in the alpine sublime a discursive space where the Holocaust could be preserved as uniquely horrendous deed without running the risk “von einem der vielen nachgetragenen Erklärungsversuche bezwungen oder abgeräumt zu werden” (Honold 253). But rather than safeguarding the memory of the Holocaust into some remote terrain, Ransmayr pushes them to the center of Austria’s recharted memory landscape, using the language and aesthetic possibilities of literature to visualize what he calls the “Komplementärwinkel”: Wenn man den Komplementärwinkel nicht im Blick hat, sieht man eben nur einen Ausschnitt der Wirklichkeit, einen ermunternden, heiteren, tröstlichen oder besänftigenden Ausschnitt, aber es fehlt der Komplementärwinkel, der die Perspektive, den Blick auf die Welt schließt. Literatur, eine Erzählung, kann diesen Blick wiederherstellen. (”…das Thema hat mich bedroht” 216) Ransmayr anticipates here what Zapf considers literature’s second discursive function, its “imaginative counter-discourse” that makes intelligible and graspable that which is “culturally excluded and marginalized” (Zapf 108). By letting the imaginary tourist see the beautiful landscape from a watchtower and framed by the former torture camp, Morbus Kitahara suggests that a kind of double vision is required to recognize the horrendous past in the present. In a self-reflective narrative gesture the novel reaffirms the necessity for this double vision qua its negation, namely through the eye disease ‘morbus kitahara’ that afflicts the protagonist Bering. As one of Moor’s postwar children, Ber- Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist 157 ing is disinterested in the past� His refusal to learn more about the crimes of the past regime becomes challenged when he begins to work for Ambras, a survivor of the torture camp whom the American occupiers installed as manager of the quarry and governor of Moor after their departure. Ambras confronts Bering with the experience of Moor as a ‘double-place’ that means natural beauty for some and inescapable pain for others: Zurückgekommen in den Steinbruch? Ich bin nicht zurückgekommen. Ich war im Steinbruch, wenn ich […] durch die Schutthalden von Wien oder Dresden oder durch irgendeine andere dieser umgepflügten Städte gegangen bin. Ich war im Steinbruch, wenn ich irgendwo bloß das Klirren von Hammer und Meißel gehört oder nur dabei zugesehen habe, wie einer irgendeine Last über irgendeine Stiege auf seinem Rücken trug - […]. Ich bin nicht zurückgekommen. Ich war niemals fort. (MK 210) For the first time, Bering becomes aware that victims and perpetrators live “in der gleichen Welt […] wie sie selbst. Am gleichen See. Am gleichen Ufer” (MK 176), but that they also inhabit very different spaces of experience. Rather than trying to enter the experiential space of Ambras, the victim of torture, Bering enacts the same posture that postwar Austrian society has developed with regard to the historiographical archive: he looks away, and he does it so intently that he develops ‘morbus kitahara,’ a temporary eye disease that produces black holes in one’s field of vision. To overcome the blurred gaze at the world, Bering soon fills in the missing areas in his field of vision, “[er] sah, was er sehen wollte” (MK 232). Bering is temporarily able to reject the double vision, but the radical imaginative power of the literary “Komplementärwinkel” eventually forces him to ‘see’ the full weight of Ambras’ memories and join him in the “Unzeit, in der alle Zeiten, ihre Vergangenheit, ihre Gegenwart, ihre Zukunft zusammenschießen” (Ransmayr, “…die Zukunft hat mich bedroht” 215). The encounter between Ambras and Bering illustrates the third discursive function of literature Zapf identifies, its role as “reintegrative interdiscourse” that brings together the civilizational system and its exclusions in new, both conflictive and transformative ways (114). Despite his lack of empathy for Ambras’ suffering, Bering, child of the perpetrator generation who tries to evade the confrontation with the past, eventually becomes entangled and integrated into this past after the Allied occupiers have deported the entire population of Moor to Brazil. During an exploration to a remote former prison island off the Brazilian coast, the prison’s ruins trigger in Ambras a traumatic revival of his time in the torture camp. Misidentifying Bering as a camp guard, Ambras tries to escape and falls to his death, pulling Bering with him via the rope that was supposed to keep both of them safe during their visit to the former prison. What Bering — and, by exten- 158 Gundolf Graml sion, Austrian postwar society — tried to avoid at all cost, namely to empathize with the experience of those who were marginalized and murdered, has now caught up with him and kills him� Nothing in this ending suggests closure, but the literary text accomplishes what the documents housed in the concentration camp archives and the historiographic works cannot accomplish, namely to “semiotically empower[.] the culturally excluded and marginalized as a source of imaginative energy” (Zapf 108). A discussion of the memory of the Holocaust and the history of National Socialism in the context of ecocriticism could easily be misunderstood as attempt to equate the moral catastrophe of the twentieth century with natural catastrophes and, in doing so, absolve human agents of their culpability� However, as I intended to show, quite the opposite happens. Morbus Kitahara starts with the archival documents and relies on historiographic works that ascertain the factuality of the Holocaust and only then taps the power of aesthetic fiction to create what Danilo Kis calls a “‘deeper authenticity’ […] than a merely documentary approach can achieve” (Kis, Homo Poeticus; qtd. in Zapf 211). Ransmayr’s repeated descriptions of moments in which natural phenomena interfere with discursively constructed perceptions of the world — the eye disease and its darkening of the tourist gaze, for instance — or in which the discursive inscribes itself into the landscape and nature — as in the giant stone inscription — provide a crucial framework for this “deeper authenticity�” The novel’s representation of a double vision that reveals the distorted relationship between humans and nature and its evocative descriptions of deranged time-space coordinates where history and present intersect points to archival qualities of literary texts that are central to life in the Anthropocene. As a slow-moving catastrophe of global implications, climate change requires a perspective that connects events happening in disparate places and at different speeds. Furthermore, adjustments to life in the Anthropocene will require the capacity to imagine an ecological form of empathy with human and natural communities not yet alive� Morbus Kitahara demonstrates the abilities of literature to create these common spaces and reintegrate the worlds of human and nonhuman nature into a connected experience� Both of Ransmayr’s novels address in a self-reflective manner the foundational concepts of archives, especially the role of cultural historical discourses and literary imagination. They scrutinize the underlying power structures of conventional archivization as complicit in the developments of the Anthropocene and promote a model of cultural ecological archivization that allows for multiple, even contradictory, voices and perspectives and underscores the value of imaginative aesthetic narratives� Christoph Ransmayr’s Role as Cultural Ecological Archivist 159 This different form of archivization manifests itself in the interand intratextual references between various historical events, the creative fictionalization of nondiscursive experiences, and the repeated reflections on the role of language and literature in this process. By enabling the reader to move fluidly between history, present, and future, and to sometimes inhabit two timescapes simultaneously, Ransmayr’s novels themselves already enact the “emergent unreadability” Clark demands of new ecocritical approaches (63). Both novels demonstrate a (self-)critical rethinking of cultural ecology, and of literature’s role in it, through “creatively deranging the text by embedding it in multiple and even contradictory frames at the same time” (Clark 108). Timothy Clark repeatedly provokes the field of ecocriticism by characterizing as “illusion […] the belief that endorsing certain symbolic or [sic] imaginary events may be far more crucial or decisive than it really is” (21). There is no way to prove the opposite in any definitive form or fashion. But among the many needs global humanity will have during the emergent instabilities and disruptions that define life in the Anthropocene, the need for storytelling as a form of cultural memory, renewal, and resilience will be a central one� Both novels model in exemplary fashion the potential of literary imagination in this process� Notes 1 I would like to thank the editors of this volume for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter. 2 Henceforth cited as SEF� 3 Ransmayr’s descriptions of the Arctic landscape prompted mountaineer Reinhold Messner to consult the author before his own planned traversal of the Antarctic region. Messner was astonished to learn that Ransmayr had never visited the Arctic and conceded: “Der Dichter kommt mit seinen Bildern viel näher an die Wahrheit ran” (Bärnthaler and Herpell n. pag.). 4 Henceforth cited as MK� 5 For examples of the various interpretations of Morbus Kitahara in the context of Austrian postwar history see Wittstock. Works Cited Bärnthaler, Thomas, and Gabriela Herpell. “Man kommt nie wieder wirklich zurück.” sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 28 July 2014. Web. 14 July 2019. Clark, Timothy� Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept� London: Bloomsbury, 2015� 160 Gundolf Graml Cook, Lynne. “The Novels of Christoph Ransmayr: Towards a Final Myth.” Modern Austrian Literature 31.3-4 (1998): 225—39. Graml, Gundolf. “‘We Love Our Heimat But We Need Foreigners! ’: Tourism and the Reconstruction of Austria 1945-55.” Journal of Austrian Studies 46.3 (2013): 51—76. —. Revisiting Austria: Tourism, Space, and National Identity, 1945 to the Present� New York: Berghahn, 2020� Honold, Alexander. “Die Steinerne Schuld: Gebirge und Geschichte in Christoph Ransmayrs Morbus Kitahara�” Sinn und Form 51.2 (1999): 252—67. Iser, Wolfgang� “Towards a Literary Anthropology�” The Future of Literary Theory� Ed� Ralph Cohen. London: Routledge, 1989. 208—28. Janacs, Christoph. “Die Verdunkelung des Blicks: Christoph Ransmayr ‘Morbus Kitahara’.” Literatur und Kritik 30 (1995): 99—101. Kis, Danilo� Homo Poeticus. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995. Lamb-Faffelberger, Margarete. “Christoph Ransmayr’s Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis. Interweaving Fact and Fiction into a Postmodern Narrative.” Modern Austrian Prose: Interpretations and Insights. Ed. Paul F. Dvorak. Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2001. 269—85. Menke, Bettine. “Die Polargebiete der Bibliothek. Über eine metapoetische Metapher.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 74�4 (2000): 545—99. Müller, Beate. “Sea Voyages into Time and Space: Postmodern Topographies in Umberto Eco’s ‘L’isola Del Giorno Prima’ and Christoph Ransmayr’s ‘Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis’.” The Modern Language Review 95.1 (2000): 1—17. Nethersole, Reingard. “Marginal Topologies: Space in Christoph Ransmayr’s Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis�” Modern Austrian Literature 23.3-4 (1990): 135—53. Ransmayr, Christoph. Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1984. —. Die letzte Welt. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1989. —. Morbus Kitahara. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1995. —. “‘…das Thema hat mich bedroht’: Gespräch mit Sigrid Löffler über Morbus Kitahara (Dublin 1995).” Die Erfindung der Welt: Zum Werk von Christoph Ransmayr� Ed� Uwe Wittstock. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1997. 213—19. Schlögel, Karl. Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit: Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik� Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003. Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies� London: Sage Publications, 1990. Wilke, Insa, ed� Bericht am Feuer: Gespräche, E-Mails und Telefonate zum Werk von Christoph Ransmayr. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2014. Wittstock, Uwe, ed. Die Erfindung der Welt: Zum Werk von Christoph Ransmayr. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1997. Zapf, Hubert� Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts� London: Bloomsbury, 2017�
