Chapter 12 - Natural History and the Anthropocene

Summary

One of the leitmotifs of W.G. Sebald’s work is his idiosyncratic appropriation of the term Naturgeschichte (natural history). This essay explores the different intellectual traditions from which he borrows to mould this vital subtext. These range from the cultural practice of embedding scientific observations in narratives, evolutionary history, and the entropic cosmology of modern physics to the use of Naturgeschichte in critical theory, the German-Jewish tradition of reflecting on creaturely life, and the perception of warfare as a ‘natural history of destruction’. This overview of Sebald’s diverging concepts of natural history highlights some of the limitations and contradictions inherent in their eclectic narrative employment in works such as After Nature, The Rings of Saturn, A Place in the Country, The Natural History of Destruction, and the abandoned Corsica Project. In so doing, however, evidence is marshalled for the argument that it is precisely this syncretism that allows Sebald to explore the human condition in the Anthropocene, which is marked by the gradual replacement of the biosphere through the technosphere.