The Whole Earth: Poetics and Planetary Ecology, 1950-1990

Abstract

This dissertation examines the attempts of German writers from the 1970s and 1980s to find a language, poetic forms, and narratives to engage with and communicate the diagnosis of global environmental deterioration and the possibility of global environmental catastrophes. Following the first photographs of planet earth from space, a growing awareness of the limits of global environmental resilience, and the popularization of metaphors like spaceship earth within scientific and political discourse in the late 1960s and early 1970s, various writers showed an interest in finding metaphors, imagery, and narratives that would be able to communicate the complexity and magnitude of the relationship between humans and planet earth in its entirety. Based on the analysis of a corpus of literary, philosophical, and journalistic texts, I argue that the problem of describing the planetary scale of environmental deterioration becomes a challenge for the capacity of language. In the wake of this challenge, literary texts defer to the pictorial via the technique of ekphrasis to negotiate the limits of their capacity to frame the planetary scale of environmental catastrophe. I begin by tracing precursors to these discussions in cybernetic discourse in the 1950s and reactions to the first images of earth from space by Hans Blumenberg, Günther Anders, and Hannah Arendt. My main analysis focuses on works by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Max Frisch, and W.G. Sebald.