Heather I. Sullivan and Caroline Schaumann, eds. German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 348 pp.

Summary

The title of this volume of collected essays is as programmatic as it is succinct. The adjective “German” marks the disciplinary purview of the essays, which emerged from several conference panels organized by the Trans-Atlantic Network in the Environmental Humanities at the University of Washington and the Environmental Studies Network of the German Studies Association. More than a territorial demarcation, however, this disciplinary choice reflects the editors’ desire to correct the historical belatedness of German Studies (or Germanistik) in embracing ecocriticism. As one can read in the preface by Americanist Ursula K. Heise and in the editors’ introduction, “ecocriticism” first appeared in Anglo-Saxon contexts, and the reasons for Germany's hesitation are varied. Among other things, Heise suggests that the German tradition lacks the genre of “nature writing,” but also that its ecological traditions are both burdened with the loaded history of concepts like Heimat and benefit from significant media resonance and political outlets (i.e., the Green Party), whose failure in the American context may explain a complementary boom in US-academic activism.

As the editors point out, however, “the concept of ‘nature’ has a long-standing and important tradition in German literature, though only few scholars have critically investigated the approaches, definitions, and ramifications of ‘nature’ in German texts in a theoretical and sustained manner” (11). If this is the case, then, as the editors readily admit, the situation is rapidly changing. In the German context, for example, two introductions to ecocriticism (Bühler, 2016; Dürbeck and Stobbe, 2015) now compete with several other collected volumes (Goodbody and Rigby, 2011; Wilke and Frost, 2013; Duerbeck et al., 2017; Novero, Obermayer, and Barton, 2017). Indeed, another volume published in 2017, Readings in the Anthropocene, edited by Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnstone, also takes up the term “Anthropocene,” which has become increasingly popular as a designation for our current state of environmental crisis.

The preface and the introduction of this volume make a compelling case that the “Anthropocene”—an as yet unofficial epoch of geological time first popularized by Paul Crutzen, and now approved by a special working group of the International Union of Geologic Sciences—presents a significant challenge to environmental thinking and “ecocriticism” alike.