German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene ed. by Caroline Schaumann and Heather I. Sullivan, and: Readings in the Anthropocene: The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond ed. by Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnstone (review)

In studies of place in German culture, "Anthropocene" has taken on the status held by "heterotopias" ten years ago. Like Foucault's sketchy but provocative elaboration of "other spaces," the notion of a geological epoch marked by human impacts on the physical world, proposed nearly twenty years ago by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, has given rise to diverse scholarly projects and forms a node at the intersection of countless distinct lines of thought and analysis. Two recent volumes on German ecocriticism demonstrate this anthropocenic turn in German studies: Readings in the Anthropocene: The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond, edited by Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnstone; and German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene, edited by Caroline Schaumann and Heather I. Sullivan. The two volumes share an overarching methodology: one title proclaims "ecocriticism," the other, "readings." In both books, the individual chapters analyze a wide range of texts to explore new critical reading strategies within the context of the Anthropocene.

"Reading," in the sense pursued in these two volumes, is disciplinary—it is the task at which Germanists continue to claim expertise. This emphasis on disciplinary expertise seems to contradict the radical interdisciplinarity that some scholars have claimed is needed in order to comprehend and respond to the Anthropocene. Axel Goodbody's contribution in Readings offers a possible response to this tension: regarding the power of literature and art, Goodbody writes: "They make more things matter to us" (317). These two volumes provide a venue for scholars of German culture, primarily German literature, to use their own disciplinary expertise to broaden the range of things that matter when analyzing environmental problems.

The range of texts analyzed in both volumes, dating from the late 1700s to today, matches one possible timeline for the Anthropocene, in which the geological epoch begins with the industrial revolution. This timeline is not self-evident. The Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy argues for the epoch to begin in the twentieth century due to the layer of cesium-137 deposited by nuclear tests. Following this chronology could have led to a detailed examination of contemporary environmental fiction. Other scientists have argued that the Anthropocene began millennia ago with the onset of settled agriculture; this longer span might have yielded new emphases such as the environmental visions of medieval literature, or baroque literature's portrayals of ecological as well as human devastation in the Thirty Years' War—topics that have been largely ignored in past ecocriticism. These two volumes choose a more comfortable timeframe by starting with the classical era of German literature, yielding a productive and chronologically coherent, if less surprising, set of essays.

While the two anthologies feature many insightful individual readings, a particular benefit arises when multiple analyses treat the same primary text. Theodor Storm's Schimmelreiter (1888) is one example: Katie Ritson (in Readings) discusses the novella's technophilic narrative in tandem with its complex narrative form, arguing that the multiple layers of the frame story and the unresolved outer frame suggest open-ended possibilities of a future marked neither by mythic superstition nor dominating rationality. Heather Sullivan likewise emphasizes ambiguity: her chapter (in Ecocriticism) explores the tension between the novella's seeming celebration of Enlightenment-oriented progress through environmental engineering and the "dark pastoral" impact of its ghost story narrative. Adalbert Stifter's works likewise receive multiple complementary analyses. Sean Ireton's chapter in Readings argues that the Austrian writer portrayed a "gentler" mode of interaction with the natural world through thoughtfully curated, ecologically minded landscapes such as the "Fürstengarten" in Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters (1847) and Risach's estate from...