Catastrophe and Catharsis: Perspectives on Disaster and Redemption in German Culture and Beyond ed. by Katharina Gerstenberger, Tanja Nusser (review)

Catastrophes and disasters have become reliable audience generators for cable TV, internet platforms, and publishers of popular-science journals. Over the last decade or so, scholars from different disciplines have also shown heightened interest in disasters, often revolving around climate change and its anthropogenic causes. Do we thus really need another scholarly anthology on this topic? Katharina Gerstenberger and Tanja Nusser’s edited volume demonstrates that we do.

The editors’ introduction frames the volume by connecting pre-modern notions of catharsis with modern forms of media narrations and genres. Drawing on the work of Martha Nussbaum, Gerstenberger and Nusser trace the transformation of catharsis from its philosophical interpretation as a moral and ethical cleansing aid to its function in Freudian psychoanalysis, where the cathartic effect came to designate the performative “reenactment” of trauma, a crucial step in the eventual restoration of the patient’s trust in the symbolic order (Gerstenberger and Nusser 6–7). As Gerstenberger and Nusser argue, such cathartic performative moments are identifiable in most disaster narratives, especially in the “mechanisms of managing, the attempts at coping, and the efforts for commemorating” (7).

The subtitle’s qualifying phrase “German Culture and Beyond” enables the various essays to work a geographically and historically expansive field, from the Lisbon earthquake in the 18^th century to the 2004 tsunami in the Philippines, from the bombing of Dresden and Hamburg to the 2011 nuclear meltdown in Fukushima. Despite this wide angle, a series of overlapping foci on topics and genres emerges.

Christoph Weber’s essay on the Lisbon earthquake, “Tableaux of Terror,” Janine Hartman’s essay on the demise of the 1871 French Commune, “The French Burn Paris,” and Claudia Jerzak’s chapter, “Memory Politics: The Bombing of Hamburg and Dresden,” highlight the important role of genre in the cultural commemoration of catastrophes. Weber shows how attempts at a more sober, scientific explanation of the Lisbon earthquake fail to gain traction with contemporary audiences who prefer spectacular renditions of the destruction (Weber 29–30). The rhetorical devices of European theater and religious imagery help 18^th-century middle-class readers to reaffirm their moral framework in the narrativized encounter with remote disasters by framing “the horrors as a cathartic spectacle of sin and atonement” (31).

Hartman’s essay illustrates what happens when catastrophe hits too close to home. As the two eminent French writers Victor Hugo and Catulle Mendès become personal witnesses of the French Commune’s violent demise, their literary output decreases until they fall more or less silent on the subject after 1871. Hartman succeeds in demonstrating how crucial “order and a sense of personal security” are for that “passive enjoyment” of a catastrophe as morally cleansing spectacle (49).

Jerzak’s comparative analysis of Hamburg’s and Dresden’s attempts to cope with their respective history as fire-bombed cities focuses on the complex intersection of historical, religious, and ideological discourses. Something resembling catharsis could only be achieved when competing and exclusionary narratives about victimhood and perpetratorship were replaced by “the memories—of German, British, and other civilians, forced laborers, Jews, and members of the Allied forces—[as] overlapp[ing] and were presented in commemorative events in an intersection [ . . . ] of individual and cultural memories” (63–64).

Nuclear disasters form another cluster in this volume. Torsten Pflugmacher’s chapter “Observing the Observation of Nuclear Disasters in Alexander Kluge,” Carol Anne Costabile-Heming’s “Rereading Christa Wolf’s Störfall following the 2011 Fukushima Catastrophe,” and Yasemin Dayoğlu-Yücel’s “Narrating the Untellable: Yoko Tawada and Haruki Murakami as Transnational Translators of Catastrophe” analyze literary and filmic representations of nuclear disasters as symptomatic of a global crisis of capitalism and imperialist politics.

As Pflugmacher shows convincingly, Kluge’s films and texts about the nuclear meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima suggest that what’s actually disastrous about these events is...