The German Ecological Imagination

It is common to read in the paper about the coming climate crisis, framed as a matter of saving the environment or planet. Less often invoked, however, is an older, more metaphysical notion of ‘nature naturing’ actively (natura naturans). When (if ever) did the concept of the ‘environment’ replace that of nature? What are the exact differences between the terms we use to refer to the planet as our shared home, whether ‘nature,’ ‘(e/E)arth,’ ‘world,’ ‘environment,’ ‘planet,’ or ‘globe’? And what ramifications might the semantic shifts between these six terms have for current environmental debates?] This interdisciplinary course asks these questions by examining three phases in the history of the idea of nature as instigated by key German poets, thinkers, and visual artists. Beginning with the period around 1800, we will reconstruct the tensions animating Romanticism’s holistic conception of nature by reading works by Kant, Goethe, Schelling, and Alexander von Humboldt, while the landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich will furnish our artistic case study. Turning to the first half of the twentieth century, we will encounter the first use of the German term Umwelt (‘environment’) in its modern sense in the work of theoretical biologist Jakob von Uexküll, who was friends with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. We will reconstruct Martin Heidegger’s critique of modern technology and compare and contrast his conception of the artwork’s ties to ‘earth’ and ‘world’ vis-à-vis comparison to Schelling’s theory of the artwork’s relation to nature. Our exemplary artist for this second phase is Paul Klee, who grounded his aesthetic vision in nature’s formative processes. Approaching our contemporary moment, we will read literary works by W.G. Selbald while attending to the political and communicative vicissitudes of coming to societal awareness of a transhistorical phenomenon such as climate change. Joseph Beuys’s politico-aesthetic agitations and the first photos of the Earth taken from outer space provide our last artistic case studies. German students and majors will meet in an additional weekly section to discuss excerpts of select texts in German.