The New German Nature Lyric

Nicola Thomas

doi:10.3390/h9020050

Abstract

Naturlyrik has long been a contested category in German poetry, but however politically suspect some may find ‘Gespräch(e) über Bäume’ (Brecht), they are vitally important in the era of anthropogenic environmental collapse. The current generation of German-language poets have sought new ways of writing about the natural world and environments; these differ from, and draw on, pre-twentieth-century Naturlyrik as well as the complex, often critical, representations of nature in poetry after the Second World War. Representations of gardens and other human-‘managed’ natural spaces, references to and rewritings of German literary tradition, and the exploration of non-human voices and subjects all serve as means of restoring subjective fullness and complexity to Naturlyrik. The questions of voice and form which are central to the idea of the lyric genre as a whole are implicated in the development of a contemporary nature poetry beyond both Brecht and Benn, and Anthropocene Naturlyrik is pushing German lyric poetry itself into a new phase.

Highlights

The last ten years have seen a new blossoming of what might be called Naturlyrik or Ökolyrik in German-language literature. This has caught some critics by surprise, given that nature poetry is a contested category in German language literature
Wendy Anne Kopisch has demonstrated the elusiveness of Naturlyrik, which is at once both deeply familiar and demonstrably imprecise (Kopisch 2012)
The term Ökolyrik emerged as an alternative in the late 1980s and early 1990s, intending to highlight the newly political force of nature poetry in the context of a growing awareness of environmental issues (Kohlross 2000, pp. 11–12)

Summary

Introduction

The last ten years have seen a new blossoming of what might be called Naturlyrik (nature poetry) or Ökolyrik (eco-poetry) in German-language literature. In common with those working in other language-traditions, they must address the current climate crisis with urgency, and in terms which acknowledge the driving role of wealthy late capitalist nation-states like Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in bringing this crisis about In light of this triple bind, one might wonder at the fact that so much contemporary German poetry manages to deal with the natural world in a multitude of interesting ways—with its landscapes, spaces and places; its inhabitants (human and nonhuman); and its politics. Writers including those addressed in this article—Yoko Tawada, Jan Wagner, Silke Scheumann, and Ulrike Draesner—have all produced, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, collections or work in German which deal with the complex inheritance of German-language Naturlyrik and Ökolyrik Surveying their diverse practices, one recognizes the emergence of a new, vital poetics which does justice to the imbrication of the human and the non-human, the literary present and the literary past, and the self with others in ways which challenge the basis of lyric subjectivity. German-language nature poetry: the new German nature poetry grows in new directions and pushes lyric poetry itself into a new phase

Domesticated Nature

Inherited Nature

Inhabited Nature

The Lyric ‘with Reference to a Vegetative Ensemble’