“News from Nature” Harald Zils and Carl Gelderloos Binghamton University The ninth annual Binghamton University German Studies Colloquium, which took place in April, 2018, addressed a topic that has been the subject of broad and intense debate in recent decades, even while it indexes aesthetic, philosophical and cultural questions that have always been at the center of humanistic inquiry� The colloquium, entitled “News from Nature,” convened a diverse set of concerns for thinking about the heterogeneous roles played by “nature” in the texts and contexts of German Studies� This special issue of Colloquia Germanica features eight essays that have grown out of that original colloquium� Given the multiplicity as well as the increasing fragmentation of disparate concerns and approaches including ecocriticism, new materialisms, and the environmental humanities, the colloquium invited unforeseen correspondences that might be generated by inviting submissions under the general rubric of “nature�” What had constituted since Aristotle a formal ideal of wholeness that art had to imitate is now understood in multivalent and often contradictory relationships: nature is alternately understood as a subject and an object, a partner and an opponent, as something to protect and something to fear, as object of desire, as an ideological chimera, as “mother,” investment, source of value, responsibility and refuge� Because we recognized that “nature” is untenable as an essential or pure category and nevertheless continues to do the work of corralling heterogeneous topics and approaches, our goal for the colloquium and for this volume was to preserve “nature” as a useful heuristic, in order to see what texts and questions it might invite, convene, and place into dialogue with each other� This bottom-up framework helped pose the question of what German Studies can do to read the “news from nature,” bringing diverse texts into relationships that might have otherwise been foreclosed, had we set out from a commitment to a particular approach or subfield, such as those indexed by the terms “ecocriticism,” “environmental humanities,” “posthumanism,” “object-oriented ontology,” and the like� The constellation of essays published here covers nature as a motif, nature as an object of aesthetic representation, nature 212 Harald Zils and Carl Gelderloos as a set of epistemological and cultural paradigms, and other positions we could not have anticipated that fall amidst, athwart, or outside this brief sketch� Of course, the core competencies of the humanities scholar are not environmental data, species determination, plate tectonics or DNA analysis, but rather the examination of texts, their classification and often, in the case of a historical approach, the tracing of authors’ signatures� Thus, for those working in the humanities, the task historically has not involved understanding nature itself, but understanding our understanding of nature, tracing how this understanding is mediated through cultural forms and itself shapes these cultural forms, and thinking through the relationships between the disciplines� On the one hand, the opportunity and seduction of the subject of nature for the critic have frequently lain in the culturally foundational perception of the cosmos as a readable structure, in the non-accidental metaphor of the book as world and the world as book� Blumenberg’s collection of paradigmatic approaches to a philology of nature in Die Lesbarkeit der Welt is therefore also an archive of literary interpretation and its main trends: the author as God-like creator; decipherment versus the unavoidable semantic drift of text; the horror before an emptiness of meaning; (genetic) code as the source of all meaning� Unsurprisingly, part of the ecocriticism movement (e�g�, Rueckert 1978) has also tried to apply an ecological vocabulary to literary texts, without much of an echo� On the other hand, concepts of nature have frequently served as a provocation for the humanities to theorize the relationship between the natural sciences and the humanities, and between experimentation and interpretation as two distinct yet related modes of knowing� One way or another, “nature” indicts the kinds of thinking one can and should do in the humanities even as neither the natural sciences nor the humanities can escape the conceptual and material entanglement of nature and history� The eight essays collected here can therefore be read as a cross section of ways in which scholars are grappling with the historical roles played by nature in the texts and discourses associated with German Studies� All concern ways in which nature impinges upon, or is pressed into the service of, human realms ranging from aesthetics to city planning� In these essays’ explorations of the shifting relationship between nature and culture, several distinct research approaches and agendas emerge: literature as an imaginative sandbox for testing attitudes toward nature and future forms of life; literature as dystopian warning and catharsis; literary and philosophical texts as a sedimented record comprising a history of ways of thinking about the relationship between humans and nature; representations of nature as a way of tracking the development and contributions of individual authors; nature as a source of authority, a repository of ways of thinking about culture, in ways that can sometimes naturalize social “News from Nature” 213 categories including gender, nation, or order; nature as a nodal point for thinking about the relationships among disciplines, epistemological realms, or media� The focus of these essays is not, therefore, on the individual scene from nature, be it the still life or the motif� Rather, the approach is more broadly systemic: the individual object of nature as part of the ecological sphere in its relationship to the author, who herself inhabits an ecological niche and whose texts contribute to a corpus, a compound, a hive� This shift of interpretative interest is reflected in the current book market as well� A great success with German critics and buyers in 2019 was Der Große Garten by Lola Randl, which is a collection of plant descriptions, a garden guide and a memoir, all at once� The book is divided into numerous short sections which, although they might belong to different categories, always make explicit and implicit reference to each other� There is constant reflection on the author’s position within her contexts: the urbanite as a newcomer to the village; the gardener and her garden; the planter and the plant; the sexual being and her partners; rural gastronomy in the context of the tourism industry� Contributions to this volume often either retrace individual steps in the historical development of concepts of nature or seek to identify the core of a particular aspect of these concepts� Hans Blumenberg summed up these alternatives as a choice between “world chronicle or world formula” (Lesbarkeit der Welt 125)� But this also indicates that the “nature of nature” is revealed to the critics as an originality, i�e�, a point of departure or initiation� We know this longing for a “primal Ur” from traditional philology, but of course it is not limited to that sphere� As drive and desire, it points to an initial offense, to a displacement, an expulsion that still needs to be fixed: the reconstructed thoughts behind the poem, the explanatory community with the text, the Word reinstated would be, in the phrasing of a traditional discourse about nature, Paradise regained� While it seems obvious that there cannot be a return visit to an original state, perhaps we need more reflection on the longing for it� This is also related to the teachability of the movement: Can a more natural idea of nature, one that accounts for a decentered, more organic proliferation of notions and interpretations, be sustained in the biosphere of academic institutions? The articles in this issue were completed before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic� The pandemic, as a global phenomenon of greatest possible consequence, is the kind of “news from nature” that has, as of summer 2020, dominated the commercial channels for months� Coverage and discussion of the virus have replicated familiar ways of thinking about nature as a peripheral source of malign threats to bodies that are never fully subordinated to our control or knowledge - thus reminding us of our ecological implication in, and dependence on, 214 Harald Zils and Carl Gelderloos the non-human realm - even as the pandemic is anthropomorphized in familiar terms as an “invisible enemy�” As a sudden irruption into human society that has upended lives in ways ranging from the mundane to the catastrophic, the virus seems to bear the signature of a natural disaster� Yet, as Mike Davis and others have shown, the world in which such a zoonotic disease could emerge and spread as it has is a thoroughly anthropogenic one� In this regard, and in the consequent way that the pandemic is retracing the border between nature and culture, adding a new chapter to the relationship between nature and history in the process, the coronavirus can be seen as a concentrated version of the much larger disaster of global heating� (As we write this, in June 2020, a temperature of more than 100° F has been recorded above the Arctic Circle for the first time�) While neither climate change nor COVID-19 are thus purely natural phenomena, they both reflect an ongoing failure of human systems to recognize natural limits and processes� So the short twenty-first century has already made the urgency of the relationship between human society and non-human nature nearly impossible to ignore� This is certainly not a problem that German Studies can solve� As Andreas Malm has argued, theorizing in the humanities about climate change can often blur the issue rather than clarifying it, especially if this theorizing occurs absent any horizon of meaningful political action with the proximate goal of decarbonization� What patient historical excavation of discourses of nature in German Studies texts might be able to do, however, is contribute to our understanding - in ways that are disciplinarily and discursively self-reflexive - of the relationships between non-human nature and the human realm, as these relationships have been reconfigured, revised, and mobilized over time� In this spirit, the eight essays of this volume have been arranged in rough chronological order� We begin with May Mergenthaler’s essay “‘o heylsams Nichts’: Zur Funktion des Lichts in Brockes’ Naturlyrik,” which examines Barthold Heinrich Brockes’s Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott (1721-1748)� A predecessor of eco-conscious poetry, the cycle marks the departure from a purely religious view of nature� Mergenthaler emphasizes not the contradictions, but the connections between the spiritual and the new focus on the empirical� She shows how Brockes combines Lutheran traditions with Christian and non-Christian Kabbalah and Hermetism� Drawing from the first poem in the first edition of Irdisches Vergnügen, Mergenthaler uses the depiction of light as an example that shows the connection of physics, theology, philosophy and science in Brockes’s texts� Peter Gilgen’s essay, “Natural Beauty: From Speculative Realism to Kantian Form,” interrogates the relationships between aesthetics, natural beauty, and epistemology, proposing biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s environmental ontology as a solution to the dilemma of posthumanist engagements with the Kantian “News from Nature” 215 turn� Because recent decades have seen a return to aesthetics as theory grapples with the relationship between subject and object in the wake of constructivism, Kant’s prominent legacy in aesthetic theory is a challenge to the attempts within speculative realism and object-oriented ontology to reject Kantian epistemology� In particular, Gilgen addresses Steven Shaviro’s critique of Kant’s aesthetics, arguing that, in his application of Whitehead’s process philosophy and in his panpsychic conclusion, Shaviro misses the core distinction in Kant’s aesthetic theory between the beautiful and the agreeable, without which the relation between feeling and judgment is incoherent� Yet the experience of natural beauty depends on an object, and on the reflective distance between subject and object� In order to understand this “space of form” between subject and object, Gilgen turns to an unlikely source from the history of science� In distinguishing between an organism’s objective surroundings (Umgebung) and the specific environment (Umwelt) constituted by that organism’s specific possibilities for perceiving and acting upon its surroundings, Uexküll suggests a Kantian epistemology for the natural world: that perceptional limits are not prisons but windows� In her article, “Granit II: An Exploration of Goethean ‘Steigerung’ and ‘Polarität’,” Jennifer Caisley traces two figures of thought and perception in Goethe’s writing and its aftermath, and finds in them important prerequisites for Goethe’s scientific-philosophical world view� She shows how Goethe’s essay on granite describes spiritual (universal) principles resolving from and informing experiences of nature, and also how this contributes to the poet’s self-understanding, influencing his entire poetics� Besides the interplay between the material and the spirit, directional forces and constant movements are shown to be important foundations of the essay� How have knowledge of the natural world and theories of artistic creation informed each other, particularly when it comes to concepts of gender and theories of procreation? Marius Reisener brings the concerns of critical masculinities to bear on the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, in order to ask how Humboldt’s theoretical marriage of poetology and procreation helped shape a modern discourse of masculinity that affects how both art and nature are viewed� Man is conceived of as conceiving himself while women are strategically defined in order to support this male autogamy and autopoiesis� Humboldt’s 1795 essays, “Über den Geschlechtsunterschied und dessen Einfluß auf die organische Natur” and “Ueber männliche und weibliche Formen” seek to ground sexual reciprocity in a philosophy of nature� The ascendant doctrine of epigenesis entails a mutual dependence of the sexes; if both parents are involved in procreation, then the male and the female are recognized as complementary� Yet while it seems that such complementarity might soften the conceptual or metaphorical polarity of 216 Harald Zils and Carl Gelderloos the sexes, the opposite in fact happens� In mapping the epigenetic relationship between male and female onto ideas of aesthetic creation, Humboldt preserved a gendered division of procreative and aesthetic labor, with the male as the active, form-giving principle, and the female as the passive, receiving material� The concept of genius as an autogenerative, procreative force of the mind provides a model for making masculinity the paradigm of beauty and of the human, thereby skirting the risk of complementarity� Crucially, even the creation of Humboldt’s own theory partakes of this logic� What remains at stake, therefore, is not just a better understanding of the foundational gendering of a modern notion of poiesis, but also the risk of theorizing nature in an appropriative mode� Paul Dobryden explores how interwar discourses of public health mobilized tropes associated with the natural world, looking at three films that sought to teach their viewers to see the modern metropolis in a new way� His article, “Teaching Urban Hygiene in the Weimar Kulturfilm,” offers a careful reading of Die Stadt von Morgen (directed by Maximilian von Goldbeck and Erich Kotzer, 1930), Im Strudel des Verkehrs (Leo Peukert, 1925), and Slatan Dudow’s Zeitprobleme: Wie der Arbeiter wohnt (1930)� All three Kulturfilme engage with “a visual idiom of ‘urban nature’” in order to represent the modern urban environment, working within a context set by a decades-old discourse of urban hygiene and public health, which saw the ideal city in terms of organic harmony and natural balance� Both Die Stadt von Morgen and Im Strudel des Verkehrs rely on a notion of organic harmony as an answer to the “forces of nature” that threaten limb and life in the modern city; in so doing, both construct gendered figures of authority and expertise tasked with maintaining the city as harmonious organism� They thereby naturalize modern urban society, suggesting that urban hygiene is apolitical� Dudow’s film, by contrast, politicizes the bad environmental conditions of the modern city� By providing the economic and class context for poor urban hygiene, by insisting on agency and responsibility for shoddy living conditions, and by using montage to provoke critical encounter and reflection rather than to join shots or ideas in a seamless narrative, Zeitprobleme: Wie der Arbeiter wohnt gives a political rather than a merely technocratic account of what might today be called “environmental injustice�” In his interpretation of a classic novel set and published in 1957, “Daemon Absconditus: Entropy in Max Frisch’s Homo Faber,” Eckhard Kuhn-Osius shows us the protagonist Walter Faber as an inhabitant of a modern STEM universe, focused on statistical probabilities and the pure objectivity of the material world� Faber’s thought and experience anchors in the laws of thermodynamics, and Maxwell’s demon as the embodiment of an impossible rebellion against entropy and inevitable heat death is the scientific mythical deity that rules the novel in the background� Faber fails because his antagonism towards the organic in the “News from Nature” 217 name of natural science is itself bound to his humanity, which in turn is subject to the physical laws of entropy and is therefore fallible� Kuhn-Osius demonstrates how this rebellion determines not only the characterization of the protagonist, but also the plot and the formal structure of the novel� Homo Faber is thus also a document of an attitude towards nature and science that appeared in the 1950s in a pure, teachable form, but which is still present in current contexts� Brian McInnis, in his article “The Environment, Fear of the Other, and Violence in Franz Hohler’s ‘Die Rückeroberung’,” dissects an eco-dystopian story by Austrian writer Hohler� Although it is not a new theme that nature strikes back against “civilization,” McInnis shows us a motif that did not exist in King Kong or Godzilla: the presence of complexity in the text, and its understanding of nature as a system, that make strike-backs seem to be concerted actions� This is a transition from the colonialist and moralizing or merely ecocritical narrative to an amoral assertion of the whole against the ignorance of the few� The rebelling animal and plant world is not a metaphor but a metonymy: nature does not stand for something else, but its oppression is a part of the injustice that also dominates politics, economy and social life� And finally, in his article, “Ahumanism, Art, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, and You: An Animal Act by Vilém Flusser and Louis Bec,” Thomas O� Beebee grapples with Flusser and Bec’s speculative portrayal of the seldom-seen vampire squid, an animal whose radical differences from vertebrates in general and human beings in particular make it an apt cicerone for leading the reader into an exploration of the ahuman realm� For Beebee, Flusser and Bec’s 1987 work (Vampyroteuthis infernalis: Eine Abhandlung samt Befund des Institut Scientifique De Recherche Paranaturaliste) is not the treatise promised by the title, nor is it exactly a fable� Rather, drawing on Una Chaudhuri, Beebee identifies it as an example of zooësis, “the discourse of species in art, media, and culture” (Chaudhuri 2016)� Working from a perspective made available by Uexküll’s philosophical biology, Plessner’s philosophical anthropology, and information theory, Flusser develops a “zoosemiotics” as a way to mobilize the alien possibilities of mollusks in order to imagine the ahuman and, crucially, to imagine human culture as seen from “the squid’s withering gaze�” But “De te fabula narratur”: the vampire squid as imagined by Flusser and illustrated by Bec serves, for Beebee, to get a better grasp on the human, and in particular to apply the lessons of this zoosemiotic view back onto human culture and thereby contribute to a non-humanist understanding of art and media in the digital age� 218 Harald Zils and Carl Gelderloos Works Cited Blumenberg, Hans� Die Lesbarkeit der Welt� Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981� Davis, Mike� “In a Plague Year�” Jacobin 14 Mar� 2020� Web� 30 Jun� 2020� Foster, John Bellamy, and Intan Suwandi� “COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism: Commodity Chains and Ecological-Epidemiological-Economic Crises�” Monthly Review 72�2 (2020): 1-20� Liu, Andrew� “‘Chinese Virus,’ World Market�” n+1 20 Mar� 2020� Web� 30 Jun� 2020� Malm, Andreas� The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World� London/ New York: Verso, 2018� Randl, Lola� Der große Garten� Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2019� Rueckert, William� “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism�” The Iowa Review 9�1 (1978): 71-86�