"Wolken krachen, Berge zittern, und die ganze Erde weint....": Zur kulturellen Vermittlung von Naturkatastrophen in Deutschland 1755-1855 (review)

Research on catastrophes and how individuals and cultures deal with them has been increasing steadily, not least due to the emergence of new professions in the field of posttrauma counseling. American folklorists have examined the expressive forms generated in the aftermath of catastrophes ranging from tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods to the Challenger disaster and most recently the collapse of the World Trade Center. There was a similar upsurge of disaster research in European ethnology after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and with the outbreak of war in the former Yugoslavia. In addition to work on personal narrative or on material culture as testimony to catastrophe, another line of inquiry asks how knowledge about catastrophes spreads, and how cultural innovations take shape (or fail to do so) in the aftermath of disaster. Andreas Schmidt contributes to this line of inquiry with his study "Clouds Clash, Mountains Shake, and the Whole Earth Cries": The Cultural Communication of Natural Catastrophes in Germany, 1755–1855.

The study opens with the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, because it was probably the first widely mediated natural catastrophe and thus constitutes a good case for probing the questions Schmidt privileges. The Enlightenment had initiated explanatory models based on the (re)emerging natural sciences and philosophy, positing the earth created by God as good and not ravaged by the constant battle between divine and devilish forces. The Lisbon quake coincided with other natural catastrophes, as well as the tremors of political and economic transformations and the precursors of an inward-turning romantic sensibility. Among the contemporary explanations offered for the Lisbon earthquake, supernatural or human agency and failure were far more prominent than enlightened scientific ones. Schmidt attributes this to the fact that the new insights of the scientists were not encoded in everyday language and media.

Schmidt documents the discourse on natural catastrophes in a broad range of genres and settings. These early journalistic treatments, literary pieces, illustrations, poetry, and song usually encouraged sensationalizing, emotional responses, and distancing rather than enlightened understanding or innovative responses. Schmidt concludes that science had no interest in raising everyday understanding to the level of scientific knowledge, but instead "reflected on the range of possible everyday understandings of natural catastrophes and prepared means to process them on that level" (p. 311). Through such partial transfer of knowledge, science itself emerged as a new type of mythology.

After an introductory chapter that delineates the argument and the state of (largely German) historical and folkloristic research, the second chapter examines how natural science and philosophy of the time under investigation "decoded" or explained natural disasters. The following chapters turn toward the strategies and styles of encoding catastrophes in different settings and media, starting with the Lisbon earthquake as a core example. Among the sites examined are schoolbooks, almanacs, and newspapers and magazines. One chapter recaps the role of print media in constituting a bourgeois public sphere. Schmidt contrasts an illustrated penny magazine whose approach wavers between enlightened and sentimental discourse and a paper entitled Das Ausland, geared toward the upper class, where scholarly ambition, mixing natural science and ethnography, dominates. The final chapter is on songs and draws on the extensive holdings of the German Folksong Archive, in Freiburg. Schmidt evaluates authored but broadly distributed songs about earthquakes, erupting volcanoes, and storms and floods that set loose apocalyptic visions coupled with traditional values. The book's title stems from the opening stanza of one such song.

Schmidt's study is ambitious in the breadth of data examined. The author's effort to engage with the scientific understandings of the time period under study is admirable; however, one would have...