Nature, Technology and Cultural Change in Twentieth-Century German Literature. The Challenge of Ecocriticism, Axel Goodbody
(Palgrave, Macmillan 2008)
The central question of Axel Goodbody’s new book is whether literature can do anything for the ecological lobby. Goodbody’s topic is littérature engagée. He finds it in a wealth of examples stretching from the late 18th century, with Johann Wolfgang Goethe, to the 21st century, but his principle focus is the 20th century, and the subject matter is appropriately chosen for this diverse century. The works he assesses present a growing disquiet with the implications of the Enlightenment (principally Goethe), urban alienation in the wake of industrialization (Georg Kaiser), a Heideggerian reassessment of human relationships with environments (Oskar Loerke and Johannes Bobrowski), a yearning for a closer knowledge of the natural world (Otto Alscher and Horst Stern), and urban green utopian vision (Paul Gurk and Günter Seuren).
Goodbody’s work stands on its own. There are good reasons why Germans themselves avoid assessing their own green literature: Blut und Boden means that a lot of ecological writing reeks of Fascism. This attitude is changing, slowly, but still there is little to compare to Nature, Technology and Cultural Change. The other reason why the book is unusual is that ecological ideas only found a wide base of support from the early 70s onwards, and thus most ecocritical reviews tend to focus on the last 30-40 years. The major exception to this is the work of the Böhme brothers, which provides Goodbody with his conclusion: “Nature as a Cultural Project”. However, in the English language, nobody has so far set out to map the development of ecological ideas within German literature from Goethe to now.
That Goodbody succeeds in his endeavour is due firstly to his exhaustive scholarship. His breadth of reading means that Nature, Technology and Cultural Change is the perfect handbook for anyone engaged in analysing ecocritical writing in German. This is helped by his clarity: for example, even passages from notoriously tortuous writers, such as Adorno and Heidegger, seem almost lucid with his explanations. We also discover a range of possible answers (from different critics) to the question posed by my title. Literature can be seen metaphorically as ecology in that it evolves without design just as the biological world evolves without design (Peter Finke and Hubert Zapf). Apparently, literature can help us realise the full import of what we might rationally know but do not feel. Alternatively, according to Odo Marquard, literature can be seen as compensation, cushioning the impact of rationalisation. Another value of the work is the foregrounding of little-read authors, such as Otto Alscher. Being a rabid Nazi, Alscher is perhaps unsurprisingly unpopular in contemporary Germany. Unfazed, Goodbody draws attention to Alscher’s ecologically important message of interaction and knowledge of our natural environment.
The book is not without its faults: the chapter on hunting is an uncharacteristically subjective rant. Faced with a wealth of literary and other cultural examples of the bloodthirstiness of humankind, Goodbody strains to interpret these as conditioning rather than reflection. What’s more, he wanders into conjecture about the psychology of hunter-gatherers, condemns Western hunters outright, and adopts a paternalistic attitude towards primitive hunters. But to concentrate too heavily on this aberration would be to do an injustice to a first rate piece of scholarship which investigates in depth the problematic and at times contradictory human attitudes towards nature. A quotation used by Goodbody sums this up concisely: “A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is happy to salt away its pork. What is significant [...] is that the 2 statements [...] are connected by an and and not by a but.”
Andrew Liston
