This virtual exhibition features, in English translation, short excerpts from German-language literary texts that address human-nature entanglements. The aim is to show how literature can contribute to understanding and problematizing the relation between humans and nonhuman nature. What aspects of human-nature relations are addressed, at what point in literary history, and how are they shaped poetically? For the German-language version of this exhibition, click here.

In this chapter of her virtual exhibition, “Human-Nature Relations in German Literature,” Sabine Wilke examines mountains and glacial environments in German-language literary descriptions. Whereas the German Romantic poets still highlighted mountainous nature as deeply ambiguous, Goethe’s Faust tried to understand mountainous nature in its materiality through scientific studies. Modernism focuses on the more often destructive results of human-nature entanglements. For the German-language version of this exhibition, click here.