The wilderness begins on your doorstep Professor Jan Röhnert receives the Seume Literature Prize for his book "Wildnisarbeit" (work in the wilderness)
In “Wildnisarbeit”, Professor Röhnert explores landscapes that many people hardly notice at first glance, such as the wastelands of Leipzig, the Höhbeck archipelago on the Elbe, and the quarry meadows of eastern Thüringen. The literary scholar has now been awarded the Johann Gottfried Seume Literature Prize for his exceptional work of literary non-fiction. “With him, we delve deep into the layers of life that surround and sustain us. Culture, landscape and nature are viewed, described and appreciated in a unique way. The author walks, thinks, reflects, organises and follows his calling to gain insights from movement and being on the move,” said the jury in their statement. A conversation with Professor Röhnert from the Institute of German Studies about wild spaces, landscape conservation and nature writing.
“I don’t look for wilderness in deserted spaces, but rather where something unexpected and ‘wild’ suddenly bursts forth.” Photo credit: Mirette Bakir
Professor Röhnert, what does the term “wilderness” actually mean and why do we need it, especially in an urban environment?
It depends on the angle from which you approach the term. “Wilderness” is a catch-all term that you encounter pretty much everywhere. Of the many different uses, fantasies and conceptions of wilderness, it is usually possible to extract a core that contains the idea of untouched, “serene” nature. In biology, “wild forms” are manifestations of nature that occur without human intervention. However, “wilderness” is also a legal term that determines the status of large nature reserves and the like, as set out in the United States’ “Wilderness Act”, for example. In literature and popular culture, wilderness is often associated with the idea of a place that has never been inhabited by humans. However, my perception of wilderness differs slightly: since humans have set foot everywhere on the globe, which does not necessarily result in the disappearance of natural, “wild” spaces, and since humans are part of nature, I do not seek wilderness in uninhabited areas, but rather in places where something unexpected and “wild” suddenly emerges.
Urban spaces seem to represent the antithesis of “wilderness” with their regulated transport infrastructure, small-scale development and functional architecture. However, what we forget is that cities are also embedded in a concrete landscape and nature, and remain part of ecosystems that are often obscured by development and civilisation, but rarely completely covered. Fortunately, urban wastelands provide large areas of unused space where nature can flourish undisturbed, at least temporarily. It is often astonishing what emerges in terms of biological diversity in such “eyesores” of rubble, abandoned factory buildings, industrial complexes, ruins, and even highly contaminated areas. An extreme example is the wilderness that has developed in the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl reactor. Discovering, perceiving and “mapping” these areas on the outskirts or sometimes even in the centres of urban areas, and contributing to the preservation of such newly created biotopes wherever possible, is also part of “wilderness work” as I understand it. Conversely, my research as a literary scholar critiques the concept of wilderness.
In times of climate crisis and biodiversity loss, what significance does “wilderness work” have today?
As I understand it, wilderness work involves landscape conservation in areas where human intervention balances permanently “working” nature with human ideas and goals, such as re-cultivation, sustainability, biodiversity, climate protection, beauty, design, and landscape art. Ideally, this work would focus on what occurs or has occurred in the wild, such as rare and endangered species, helping them to settle or reproduce permanently through conservation measures. In this sense, wilderness work therefore requires not only constant action, but also the opposite: letting go, observing and immersing oneself in the rhythm of nature. The climate crisis and biodiversity loss are man-made phenomena of the Anthropocene. However, human existence does not necessarily have to have a negative impact on nature (and, consequently, ourselves). For centuries, extensive agriculture has ensured the proliferation and preservation of biodiversity in “old Europe”.
Stefan Reinsch, the son of a long-standing Professor of Geology at TU Braunschweig and curator of the mineral collection, manages areas for NABU, BUND and the Loki Schmidt Foundation in Wendland, Lower Saxony. He has created the area of greatest biodiversity in northern Germany. I have spoken to him several times about what “working” with nature means to him in this context. He believes that the time when Beethoven wrote his 6th symphony, the “Pastoral”, at the beginning of the 19th century, was the moment of greatest biodiversity in Central Europe. That’s the time period to which he aspires to return. Everyone can contribute to increasing biodiversity in their ecosystem, even in small urban areas, through small activities. For example, almost ten years ago, I installed nesting aids for birds on the North Campus, where I teach, with a colleague from the Department of Biology Education.
In your book, you describe three places: Leipzig’s brownfield sites; the Elbe floodplain in Wendland; and an orchard slope in East Thürigen, overlooking an overgrown sandstone quarry. Why did you choose these places in particular?
These locations represent three stages in my essay, in which I engaged intensively with the topic of “wilderness work” in different ways. Until recently, Leipzig offered an exciting example of a large city whose inner-city area had a lot of wasteland where nature was able to develop undisturbed for years, despite being very busy. Unfortunately, despite their ecological diversity, these wastelands did not enjoy permanent protection. They contribute to improving the urban climate and biodiversity, and offer open spaces for people and nature. However, many of these wastelands are under threat from municipal development plans and the booming real estate industry, and many have already disappeared. Leipzig is an exciting urban example because it shows how urban and rural areas interact ecologically, especially on brownfield sites, if these sites are preserved in the long term with more intelligent development concepts instead of being sacrificed for short-term profit (which, incidentally, contradicts the municipalities’ own climate targets).
The Wendland Elbe seems to be the perfect counterexample to urban development. Where the inner-German border once ran, Klaus Töpfer established the biosphere reserve, connecting four federal states (Lower Saxony, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg and Saxony-Anhalt) across the Elbe. At the same time, humans have undoubtedly had a significant impact on this area, from deforestation and agriculture to the construction of embankments and border security, not to mention the plans for the Gorleben nuclear waste repository. Nevertheless, much of the area appears to be almost undisturbed wilderness, and it is indeed exceptional in terms of biodiversity for a place between Berlin and Hamburg. I am fascinated by how people in the Wendland region, such as Stefan Reinsch, think about wilderness and how they interact with it. I have often taken my students on excursions to this area.
Having grown up in Thüringen myself, it was important to me to provide an example from my own experience of “East Germany” – I try to avoid thinking in such broad categories as East and West – that avoids both common Western stereotypes about the East and new stereotypes about the East itself. Nature knows no east or west; it knows the wind, which carries spores and pollen – potential wilderness – and spreads them across the land. The Hermsdorf Crossroads was already a transit point in GDR times. The mobility that brought East and West Germany together back then has become a European hub. At the same time, there are sandstone quarries that offer a glimpse into the depths of geological history and seemingly barren landscapes dotted with old orchards that need to be preserved.
What role does “doing” play in relation to “writing” in this book for you?
In the context of a humanities scholar’s reflections on ecology, “doing” is precisely the issue that preoccupies me. In my field of literary studies, there is currently much discussion surrounding the “environmental humanities”, with research into the Anthropocene, Anthropocene writing and thinking, and the different intrinsic and deep times of non-human and human actors. While all of this is extremely exciting, it only makes sense to me if the connection to practical action is also taken up and included from the perspective of the humanities, as is self-evident to natural scientists and engineers. In times of climate emergency and species extinction, the humanities can no longer claim to be concerned solely with theory and ideas. In the context of the Master’s programme in Culture of the Technical-Scientific World, for example, I envisage courses in which the ecological, literary and practical dimensions of trees or birds are given equal importance. You cannot, for instance, write about the “ecological dimension of trees in literary history” without knowing how to plant trees.
How would you define “nature writing” for yourself and what distinguishes your approach from other works in this genre?
Nature writing is a literary exploration of nature that requires a great deal of knowledge and experience of the natural world, as well as a literary form that differs from the strictly empirical writing of the natural sciences. However, it does not forego the acquisition of knowledge through subjective observation. As Goethe put it in his literary-scientific practice, nature writing is more about a “delicate empiricism that identifies intimately with its subject”. Interestingly, Anglophone literature, in which nature writing has existed as an independent genre for around 150 years, has repeatedly cited the German authors Goethe and Humboldt as role models for their depictions of nature. Recently, strong impetus has come from Cambridge literary scholar Robert Macfarlane, who has become a leading exponent of New Nature Writing with books such as The Wild Places (2008). My concept of nature writing aligns with this. On the one hand, the vanishing point of nature writing is working on our idea of wilderness. On the other hand, nature writing is, in my view, only legitimised as an attitude towards the subject through its connection to concrete ecological action. This could be commitment to preserving fallow land, working on a meadow orchard or “letting go” of gardening activities such as leaf blowing and excessive lawn mowing in favour of nature.