Grönland taut ab, Extremwetterereignisse werden zur neuen Normalität, Millionen von Umweltflüchtlingen suchen eine neue Heimat, ganze Kulturen versinken im Ozean … Alles ausgedacht?
Leider nicht. Auch wenn es immer noch einige Zweifler gibt: Der Klimawandel ist real, und wir stecken mittendrin. Was machen wir mit dieser Erkenntnis – und was macht diese Erkenntnis mit uns?
Einen spannenden Zugang zu dem Thema findet die Cli-Fi ---- (''Climate Change Fiction''), für die namhafte Autoren wie Paolo Bacigalupi, Kim Stanley Robinson oder Margaret Atwood als Beispiele gelten.
Philip Boehm has translated the cli-fi novel from Germany titled ''The Lamentations of Zeno'' (by Ilija Trojanow)
Speaking of
Philip Boehm translated cli-fi titled ''The Lamentations of Zeno'' http://northwardho.blogspot.tw/2016/02/philip-boehm-has-translated-cli-fi.html
The Lamentations of Zeno
A Cli-Fi Novel By Ilija Trojanow, [a German-Bulgarian novelist, writing in German]
Now Translated in English by Philip Boehm in USA
(for this cli-fi novel coming out in May 2016 from VERSO Books)
It's also a kind of travelogue: Ilija Trojanow has written many travel books as well as fiction.
see also: THE Cli-Fi Report's COUNTRY REPORT for Germany:
''Cli-Fi'' COUNTRY REPORTS: ''Cli-Fi'' in GERMANY (third in a global series of Country Reports)
[ cli.mate fi.ction ]
A friend of this blog tell us:
"Concerning German cli fi literature.....I've never seen the term ''cli fi'' or anything equivalent (such as maybe "Klimawandelliteratur") used in German media, but that does of course not mean there's no discussion. You might want to contact Professor Axel Goodbody at Bath Spa University in the UK; he's a leading eco-critic specializing in German studies. I'm sure he knows much more about German cli fi and the current debate than most people.
Cli-Fi in GERMANY:
A professor friend who knows German literature from A to Z tells this blog in a midnight email:You want to know about cli fi novels in German?
''Well, Ilija Trojanow's novel '
''Since the 1990s, about 20 popular novels on global warming have also been written in German.
As with the English novels, these range from action narratives in which climate change only serves as a backdrop to thoughtful engagements with the social and psychological implications of global warming, from the alarmist to the satirical, and from passionate calls for action to sceptical refutation.
One of the earliest German cli fi novels would be Günter Grass’s Totes Holz (Dead Wood, 1990): extreme weather events are the most immediate tangible manifestations of climate change in Europe, and it is no accident that the first clifi novels are prompted by them.
Anton-Andreas Guha’s Der Planet schlägt zurück (The Planet Strikes Back, 1993) was an early example of German climate change sci fi.
Thrillers include Frank Schätzing’s phenomenally successful Der Schwarm (The Swarm, 2004: but climate change only plays a marginal role there) and Ulrich Hefner’s Die dritte Ebene (The Third Level, 2009).
Dirk Fleck’s Maeva! (Maeva!) was the final part of a trilogy of speculative accounts of the consequences of climate change. This had begun with the dystopian novel GO! Die Ökodiktatur (GO! The Eco-Dictatorship) in 1994: the second book, Das Tahiti-Projekt (2007), portrayed a utopian state in the Pacific and explicitly promoted the political philosophy of "Equilibrism".
Crime novels include Till Bastian’s and Nele Neuhaus’s Tödliches Klima (Lethal Climate, 2000) and Wer Wind sät (He Who Sows Wind, 2011): the latter resembles Michael Crichton’s State of Fear in in 2004 interpreting global warming as a conspiracy of scientists seeking funding for their project teams, consequently a matter for healthy scepticism and self-assertion against authority.
Literary treatment of climate change in the German language also includes works of young adult YA literature, seeking to enlighten readers at the same time as entertaining them, such as Claus-Peter Hutter and Eva Goris’s Die Erde schlägt zurück (The Earth Strikes Back), and Cornelia Franz’s Ins Nordlicht blicken (Looking into the Northern Lights, 2012).
Probably the best known German climate change novel is "Eistau", or "Melting Ice", which explores the physical, social and psychological consequences of climate change through the story of a German climate scientist whose life is thrown into crisis when the Alpine glacier which he has spent his life observing and measuring melts, leaving just a heap of muddy boulders.
Other European clifi novels include the French Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island (2005) and Finnish Antti Tuominen’s dystopian thriller The Healer (2011) have been well received in English translation.
See also Sven Böttcher's Prophezeiung (Prophecy, 2011).
http://www.goethe.de/ges/umw/
Frank Schätzing's novel ''The Swarm'' (2004) is without doubt the best-known German cli fi thriller devoted, amongst other things, to the subject of climate change. It is now being made into a movie. Schätzing’s novel is without doubt the best-known German cli fi thriller and describes how the yrr, a single-cell, maritime, intelligent life form, punishes humankind for its environmental crimes and in particular for its destruction of the oceans. Nature fights back with tsunamis, underwater landslides and aggressive attacks by various species of marine life.
MOVIE NEWS
http://www.scifimoviepage.com/
At first, it seems that the protagonists in The Swarm are powerless to prevent the yrr from wiping out all of humankind. Finally, however, they succeed in communicating with the yrr. When the protagonists promise to live in harmony with nature in future, they are able to avert the ultimate devastation. In this sense Schätzing’s book reflects to some extent the so-called Gaia theory formulated by the British scientist James Lovelock, which regards the earth as a self-organized dynamic system that can and will take action against humankind for the sake of its own preservation and balance. The cli fi thriller, however, ends with the hope that humankind can after all be persuaded to rethink.
REFERENCE
“Conspiracy” as leitmotif
“Conspiracy” is a motif that frequently appears in climate change literature. One prominent example in the English-speaking world is Michael Crichton’s State of Fear (2004), which portrays climate change as a deception invented by environmental activists, thus absolving humankind from blame. The conspiracy motif, however, also appears in German climate change books, such as Nele Neuhaus’s Wer Wind sät (2011) and Sven Böttcher’s thriller Prophezeiung (2011).Neuhaus’s crime novel ignores the seriousness of climate change and limits itself to criticizing the renewable energies market for its hunger for profits.
Böttcher’s thriller also focuses on the financial aspects of climate change: in the novel, the director of a major climate institute, who has invested heavily in a wind farm, senses an opportunity to eliminate his biggest rival, a photovoltaic manufacturer in China. Using a precise computer forecasting system, he plans to prove that millions of people will die as a result of climate change, China being to blame as the worst carbon emissions culprit. In fact, however, the dramatic weather events that were forecast fail to materialize.Böttcher’s climate thriller critically illuminates climate research in a somewhat more nuanced fashion than the book by Neuhaus, showing that humankind should not be subject to blanket condemnation even if it is responsible for climate change.
Elegy
In Ilija Torjanow’s climate change novel Eis Tau (2011), humankind is explicitly held responsible for climate change. This time, however, the accuser is one of them: Zeno Hintermeier, the novel’s protagonist, is convinced that humankind will destroy everything “that places itself on nature’s side”. As a glaciologist and the leader of cruise ship exhibitions in the Antarctic, he becomes a key witness to the environmental destruction that goes hand in hand with technological progress exploited for tourism: the Antarctic, formerly a desolate continent of courageous explorers, can suddenly be “conquered” even by old-age pensioners thanks to modern ships. In Eis Tau, Zeno’s elegiac grief at the melting of the poles serves not only to give greater emphasis to the “inconvenient truth”; it also serves as the basis for a more general criticism of human ignorance about climate change, the destructive power of which is embodied in particular by the tourists on board the cruise ship. Zeno condemns this through an act of self-administered justice: he throws himself overboard, thereby abandoning the tourists to their fate.
Call for action
Dirk C. Fleck’s science fiction novel Maeva! (2011) is part of a larger political project initiated by the Equilibrism movement, which is searching for ways out of the ecological and economic crisis within the framework of a holistic concept. Rather like Trojanow’s Eis Tau, Fleck’s novel presupposes that humankind is to blame for the natural disasters of the future. It describes how extreme weather, droughts and conflicts over resources will already dominate world events by the year 2028.
In response to the ongoing “tortilla fights in Mexico” and the “pasta demonstrations in Italy”, many industrialized nations have stepped up their military presence. This is the backdrop against which Maeva, the Tahitian president, embarks on a journey around the world aimed at bringing about a paradigm shift. Maeva is battling for an ecological restructuring of all areas of life, for a shift towards a natural circular economy and for sustainable monetary and land regulations and cosmopolitanism.Dirk C. Fleck is thus one of the few German authors to propose concrete changes aimed at averting the imminent climate crisis. He illustrates ways in which humankind can escape its “sentence”. For this to be possible, however, it must start acting right now, as the book demands.
Antonia Mehnert
is a PhD student at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich and researches American climate change novels.Gregers Andersen
is a PhD student in comparative studies at the University of Copenhagen and researches climate change in film and literature.The article is the result of cooperation at the Carson Center in Munich.Translation: Chris Cave
Copyright: Goethe-Institut e. V., Internet-Redaktion
November 2013Any questions about this article? Please write to us!
internet-redaktion@goethe.de
THE MOVIE:
TITLE: The Swarm
WHAT’S IT ABOUT: Nature takes revenge on polluting mankind in the form of rampaging Orcas, destructive tsunamis and mysterious diseases brought about by hither-to undiscovered sea creatures.
It is up to a team of scientists to figure out what is going on before the whole of humanity is wiped clean from the face of the earth.
Imagine a Roland Emmerich movie in which the director actually paid attention to his scientific advisors and you’ll have an idea more or less of what The Swarm is about. Now throw in some Arthur C. Clarke meets The Abyss touches for good measure too . . .
SOURCE:
Instead it is an adaptation of Der Schwarm (translated into English as The Swarm) by German author Frank Schaetzing, an 800-plus pages cli fi epic that dominated German best-selling lists for a year upon its publication in 2004 which has been translated into 18 languages since then.
WHO’S INVOLVED? Actress Uma Thurman and two German producers bought the movie rights back in 2006. Since then Martha De Laurentiis (widow of legendary producer Dino) has been involved as well as soundtrack composer / movie producer Klaus Badelt and Ted Tally (who wrote the screenplay for Silence of the Lambs) and William J. MacDonald (Rome).
.
LAST WE HEARD: In 2007 Martha De Laurentiis announced Ted Tally’s appointment as screenwriter: “We needed a certain screenwriter to preserve the book’s intelligence and message without stepping on the momentum of the book’s cinematically spectacular set-pieces, and we loved the last time we worked with Ted [on Silence of the Lambs].”
Since then the project was updated on 12 March 2012 on Internet Movie Database as being “in development” with an envisaged 2015 release date. One can assume that the project isn’t entirely dead even though the movie rights were acquired more than six years ago by now . . .
CHANCES OF GETTING MADE: Who knows? News on this project has been quiet for some time now. To pull it off properly the project needs a pretty big budget otherwise it’ll be just be a Syfy original movie . . . It might just get made.
WHY IT’D BE GREAT: Schaetzing’s novel may be on the long-winded side seeing as it is “crammed full of scientific fact and learning” as the author himself admits in his post-scriptum, but it is nonetheless a thrilling page-turner of a read.
Producer De Laurentiis has it right when she talks about the book’s intelligence as well as its cinematically spectacular set-pieces. One cool set-piece involves a pod of Orcas attacking a boat of whale watchers as well as another boat containing eco protestors. (Incidentally, the last movie to feature a rampaging killer whale was 1977’s Orca: The Killer Whale, ironically produced by Dino De Laurentiis himself.)
The book’s climax involves a gigantic U.S. navy ship slowly sinking as it is rocked by several explosions.
One practically salivates at the mouth thinking what a skilled action director might achieve with the material. If a director can resist the temptation to jettison the story’s more challenging science stuff (Schaetzing goes to great lengths to make it all as scientifically plausible as possible even working in real life scientists in the process), the end result would be a Roland Emmerich movie . . . but with brains!
is a PhD student at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich and researches American climate change novels.Gregers Andersen
is a PhD student in comparative studies at the University of Copenhagen and researches climate change in film and literature.The article is the result of cooperation at the Carson Center in Munich.Translation: Chris Cave
Copyright: Goethe-Institut e. V., Internet-Redaktion
November 2013Any questions about this article? Please write to us!
internet-redaktion@goethe.deTHE MOVIE:
TITLE: The Swarm
WHAT’S IT ABOUT: Nature takes revenge on polluting mankind in the form of rampaging Orcas, destructive tsunamis and mysterious diseases brought about by hither-to undiscovered sea creatures.
It is up to a team of scientists to figure out what is going on before the whole of humanity is wiped clean from the face of the earth.
Imagine a Roland Emmerich movie in which the director actually paid attention to his scientific advisors and you’ll have an idea more or less of what The Swarm is about. Now throw in some Arthur C. Clarke meets The Abyss touches for good measure too . . .
SOURCE:
Instead it is an adaptation of Der Schwarm (translated into English as The Swarm) by German author Frank Schaetzing, an 800-plus pages cli fi epic that dominated German best-selling lists for a year upon its publication in 2004 which has been translated into 18 languages since then.
WHO’S INVOLVED? Actress Uma Thurman and two German producers bought the movie rights back in 2006. Since then Martha De Laurentiis (widow of legendary producer Dino) has been involved as well as soundtrack composer / movie producer Klaus Badelt and Ted Tally (who wrote the screenplay for Silence of the Lambs) and William J. MacDonald (Rome).
.
LAST WE HEARD: In 2007 Martha De Laurentiis announced Ted Tally’s appointment as screenwriter: “We needed a certain screenwriter to preserve the book’s intelligence and message without stepping on the momentum of the book’s cinematically spectacular set-pieces, and we loved the last time we worked with Ted [on Silence of the Lambs].”
Since then the project was updated on 12 March 2012 on Internet Movie Database as being “in development” with an envisaged 2015 release date. One can assume that the project isn’t entirely dead even though the movie rights were acquired more than six years ago by now . . .
CHANCES OF GETTING MADE: Who knows? News on this project has been quiet for some time now. To pull it off properly the project needs a pretty big budget otherwise it’ll be just be a Syfy original movie . . . It might just get made.
WHY IT’D BE GREAT: Schaetzing’s novel may be on the long-winded side seeing as it is “crammed full of scientific fact and learning” as the author himself admits in his post-scriptum, but it is nonetheless a thrilling page-turner of a read.
Producer De Laurentiis has it right when she talks about the book’s intelligence as well as its cinematically spectacular set-pieces. One cool set-piece involves a pod of Orcas attacking a boat of whale watchers as well as another boat containing eco protestors. (Incidentally, the last movie to feature a rampaging killer whale was 1977’s Orca: The Killer Whale, ironically produced by Dino De Laurentiis himself.)
The book’s climax involves a gigantic U.S. navy ship slowly sinking as it is rocked by several explosions.
One practically salivates at the mouth thinking what a skilled action director might achieve with the material. If a director can resist the temptation to jettison the story’s more challenging science stuff (Schaetzing goes to great lengths to make it all as scientifically plausible as possible even working in real life scientists in the process), the end result would be a Roland Emmerich movie . . . but with brains!
http://pcillu101.blogspot.tw/2015/06/cli-fi-country-reports-cli-fi-in.html
Cli-Fi in GERMANY:
A professor friend who knows German literature from A to Z tells this blog in a midnight email:You want to know about cli fi novels in German?
''Well, Ilija Trojanow's novel '
A ''cli-fi'' about climate disaster and a scientist imploding on a journey to the Antarctic
CRITICS ARE SAYING:
“There is little that a novelist can tell us on the subject that we do not already know, but Trojanow gives the statistics and prognoses a human dimension … one of Europe’s most original contemporary writers.” – UK Times Literary Supplement
“The Lamentations of Zeno is electric, irresistible, well written and movingly topical cli-fi. Ilija Trojanow, with several masterpieces to his name, never puts a foot wrong. He is as important a writer in this day and age as Günter Grass was for his—a joy to read.” – Nuruddin Farah, author of Hiding in Plain Sight
“Thrilling, nuanced, and chillingly meditative … Ilija Trojanow has written a modern cli-fi fable tinged with absurd humor, dramatizing the high stakes of our current climate gamble.” – Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin
see ALSO
Elegy
In Ilija Torjanow’s climate change novel Eis Tau (2011), humankind is explicitly held responsible for climate change. This time, however, the accuser is one of them: Zeno Hintermeier, the novel’s protagonist, is convinced that humankind will destroy everything “that places itself on nature’s side”. As a glaciologist and the leader of cruise ship exhibitions in the Antarctic, he becomes a key witness to the environmental destruction that goes hand in hand with technological progress exploited for tourism: the Antarctic, formerly a desolate continent of courageous explorers, can suddenly be “conquered” even by old-age pensioners thanks to modern ships. In Eis Tau, Zeno’s elegiac grief at the melting of the poles serves not only to give greater emphasis to the “inconvenient truth”; it also serves as the basis for a more general criticism of human ignorance about climate change, the destructive power of which is embodied in particular by the tourists on board the cruise ship. Zeno condemns this through an act of self-administered justice: he throws himself overboard, thereby abandoning the tourists to their fate.
1 comment:
You want to know about cli fi novels in German?
''Well, Ilija Trojanow's novel 'EisTau' (Melting Ice) is probably the best known German novel on climate change. AND he adds:
''Since the 1990s, about 20 popular novels on global warming have also been written in German.
As with the English novels, these range from action narratives in which climate change only serves as a backdrop to thoughtful engagements with the social and psychological implications of global warming, from the alarmist to the satirical, and from passionate calls for action to sceptical refutation.
One of the earliest German cli fi novels would be Günter Grass’s Totes Holz (Dead Wood, 1990): extreme weather events are the most immediate tangible manifestations of climate change in Europe, and it is no accident that the first clifi novels are prompted by them.
Anton-Andreas Guha’s Der Planet schlägt zurück (The Planet Strikes Back, 1993) was an early example of German climate change sci fi.
Thrillers include Frank Schätzing’s phenomenally successful Der Schwarm (The Swarm, 2004: but climate change only plays a marginal role there) and Ulrich Hefner’s Die dritte Ebene (The Third Level, 2009).
Dirk Fleck’s Maeva! (Maeva!) was the final part of a trilogy of speculative accounts of the consequences of climate change. This had begun with the dystopian novel GO! Die Ökodiktatur (GO! The Eco-Dictatorship) in 1994: the second book, Das Tahiti-Projekt (2007), portrayed a utopian state in the Pacific and explicitly promoted the political philosophy of "Equilibrism".
Crime novels include Till Bastian’s and Nele Neuhaus’s Tödliches Klima (Lethal Climate, 2000) and Wer Wind sät (He Who Sows Wind, 2011): the latter resembles Michael Crichton’s State of Fear in in 2004 interpreting global warming as a conspiracy of scientists seeking funding for their project teams, consequently a matter for healthy scepticism and self-assertion against authority.
Literary treatment of climate change in the German language also includes works of young adult YA literature, seeking to enlighten readers at the same time as entertaining them, such as Claus-Peter Hutter and Eva Goris’s Die Erde schlägt zurück (The Earth Strikes Back), and Cornelia Franz’s Ins Nordlicht blicken (Looking into the Northern Lights, 2012).
Probably the best known German climate change novel is "Eistau", or "Melting Ice", which explores the physical, social and psychological consequences of climate change through the story of a German climate scientist whose life is thrown into crisis when the Alpine glacier which he has spent his life observing and measuring melts, leaving just a heap of muddy boulders.
Other European clifi novels include the French Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island (2005) and Finnish Antti Tuominen’s dystopian thriller The Healer (2011) have been well received in English translation.
See also Sven Böttcher's Prophezeiung (Prophecy, 2011).