Suchergebnisse

This essay considers German 'Naturlyrik' in terms of factors contributing to the mid-century emergence of political ecopoetry and 21st-century post-pastoral register. Cold War aesthetic experimentation connected with environmental concerns as poets, anthologists, and scholars bridged ideological differences by acknowledging shared values in relation to nature and environment. Material ecocriticism theory provides insight into how during the Cold War the lyric genre became the first to reclaim nature as a place of refuge, then protested the specter of an uninhabitable world, and eventually responded to humanly shaped nature. Work by poets Hans-Jürgen Heise, Peter Huchel, Wulf Kirsten, Ulrike Almut Sandig, and others is discussed.

This ecocritical reading of Marie Luise Kaschnitz's poetic cycle "Rückkehr nach Frankfurt" 'Return to Frankfurt' (1945/46), Hans Magnus Enzensberger's epic poem Der Untergang der Titanic 'The Sinking of the Titanic' (1978), and a 21st-century poem by Ulrike Almut Sandig analyzes key shifts in poetic representations of water pollution. The essay explores underlying cultural and political attitudes about water that define literary depictions of its pollution. It argues that these texts register a conceptual turn away from aesthetic appreciation of water in terms of its culturally rich, purifying properties and toward scientific understanding that emphasizes the social and legal dimensions of water pollution. Ecocritical interpretation of such works, thus, enables deeper understanding of ongoing transformations in the lyric genre. The concluding interpretation of Sandig's text points to the increasing presence of unnatural elements in representations of the environment as symptomatic of broader literary changes. It argues that developments in German nature poetry since 1945 have increasingly led poets to experiment with expressive possibilities for lyric poetry that foreground cathartic responses to human and environmental history.

This article examines reworkings of Alice in Wonderland in works by postwar authors writing in German. While writers of both genders use Lewis Carroll's fictional character to question the expressive capacities of language, Rose Ausländer, Sarah Kirsch, Elisabeth Plessen, and Angelika Mechtel optimistically interpret her protean character as essential to poetic creativity and psychological autonomy. H.C. Artmann and Jürg Federspiel, by contrast, associate Alice with a postmodern loss of coherence in identity and narrative form. (CM)