The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory

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Nature, Condensed: Reading Paul Celan,

Esther Kinsky, and Theodor W. Adorno in the
Anthropocene

Natalie Lozinski-Veach

To cite this article: Natalie Lozinski-Veach (2023) Nature, Condensed: Reading Paul Celan,
Esther Kinsky, and Theodor W. Adorno in the Anthropocene, The Germanic Review: Literature,
Culture, Theory, 98:4, 379-395, DOI: 10.1080/00168890.2023.2257350

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00168890.2023.2257350

Published online: 19 Oct 2023.

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THE GERMANIC REVIEW: LITERATURE, CULTURE, THEORY
2023, VOL. 98, NO. 4, 379–395
https://doi.org/10.1080/00168890.2023.2257350

Nature, Condensed: Reading Paul Celan, Esther Kinsky, and

Theodor W. Adorno in the Anthropocene
Natalie Lozinski-Veach
Arizona State University

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This essay explores a particular kind of German postwar aesthetics as Anthropocene; ecology;
a framework for thinking through the conceptual challenges of the aesthetics; history;
Anthropocene. Focusing on the relationship between nature and his­ Holocaust; naturecultures;
poetry; Shoah
tory, the article reads Paul Celan’s “The World” from Speech Grille
(Sprachgitter) together with Esther Kinsky’s 2013 volume Nature
Preserve (Naturschutzgebiet) to trace how both authors intertwine
commemoration of the Shoah with exact attention to the more-
than-human world. These two aspects of their poetry are not merely
complementary but mutually constitutive; together, they give shape
to the ecological entanglements that Donna Haraway has referred to
as naturecultures. Considered in relation to Theodor W. Adorno’s
Aesthetic Theory, both poets combine reflections on language, his­
tory, and the natural world in a way that remains conscious of its
own mediation as a specifically human—and, as such, necessarily
partial—form of expression. In this way, memory gives rise to a
poetics of condensation, a form of literary expression in which his­
tory and nature, including human nature, emerge as interwoven in
language.

What times are these, when

A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it entails a silence about so many misdeeds!1
Considered in our present moment of ecological precarity, Bertolt Brecht’s famous lines
take on new meaning. Today, conversations about trees can no longer be understood as
distractions from other, more urgent matters. Ecological damage has become so perva­
sive that the attempt to discuss any one of its aspects in isolation inevitably falls short:
not only do different forms of environmental destruction exacerbate one another, they
have become indivisible from social, political, and cultural implications. Economic deci­
sions made decades ago in one part of the globe now cause drought and starvation in
another; disease quietly follows the slow violence of environmental pollution, insepar­
able from poverty and war; wildfires burn with the legacy of colonial histories.

CONTACT Natalie Lozinski-Veach nlozinsk@asu.edu School of International Letters and Cultures, Arizona State
University, Tempe, AZ, USA.
1
Bertolt Brecht, The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, trans. David Constantine and Tom Kuhn (New York: Liveright
Publishing, 2019), 734.
� 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
380 N. LOZINSKI-VEACH

Whatever we choose to call this period—Anthropocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene—

our world is shaped by invisible causal networks.2
In such a time, speaking of trees, or even of nature, once more no longer suffices.
According to the Anthropocene hypothesis, humans are not only biological but also
geological agents, a collective force that has—and continues to—alter the very constitu­
tion of the planet and its atmosphere in ways that are difficult to parse. The notion that
humans affect and are affected by the natural world is not new by any means; what is
new, however, is the realization of the extent to which we ourselves are nature. As
Dipesh Chakrabarty has noted, “it is no longer a question simply of man having an
interactive relation with nature,” an idea that has long been part of the Western imagin­
ation.3 Now, “humans are a force of nature in the geological sense.” For Chakrabarty,
this shift has consequences for a thinking of history, which can no longer be separated
into human and natural counterparts.4 In the Anthropocene, individual responsibility
and inadvertent complicity are only part of a story that spans deep time, one, in which
humans are not the only significant actors. As Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing have
pointed out, our current predicament is not a “species act,” not an inevitable conse­
quence of evolution in which all humans are equally culpable.5 Rather, it is the legacy
of a particular notion of “Man,” most closely associated with the Enlightenment and its
project of mastery over nature, in—often forced—collaboration with countless other
beings, from microbes to plants to other animals and humans. History, according to
Haraway and Tsing, is a multispecies affair.
In light of these conceptual shifts, critics such as Haraway, Tsing, and Bruno Latour
have called for new ontologies that unsettle such dichotomies along with human excep­
tionalism.6 Among other things, Haraway has proposed the term “naturecultures” to
account for the ways in which both realms are always already at work in each other,
not only symbolically, but materially.7 She insists that “history matters in nature­
cultures,” that is, that specific events and conditions leave concrete traces that shape our
world and our thinking. These traces are both material and semiotic; they have both
meaning and weight. For Haraway, the thinking of such entanglements depends not

2
Due to its etymological focus on humans, the term Anthropocene has been contentious. Plantationocene and
Chthulucene are possible alternatives. The former explicitly links our current ecological crisis with colonialism and
racism, while the latter, coined by Donna Haraway, emphasizes non-human agency and the need to move away from
anthropocentric frameworks. Sophie Sapp Moore et al., “The Plantationocene and Plantation Legacies Today,” Edge
Effects, January 22, 2019, https://edgeeffects.net/plantation-legacies-plantationocene/. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with
the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
3
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222, 207.
4
As Chakrabarty notes, this distinction had been in place “even in environmental histories that saw the two entities in
interaction” (207). Jason Moore has referred to this dynamic as the “Green Arithmetic, [ … ] the idea that our histories
may be considered and narrated by adding up Humanity (or Society) and Nature, or even Capitalism plus Nature” (2).
For Moore, this calculation continues to do damage by projecting the existence of separate realms, “Society without
nature, Nature without humans.” Such a division has, of course, always been questionable, and yet Cartesian dualisms
have hardened into political and economic agendas, determining not only extractionist policies, but also efforts to
curb them, shaping approaches to conservation over the course of the twentieth century. On this last point, see also
Jamie Lorimer, “The Anthropo-Scene: A Guide for the Perplexed,” Social Studies of Science 47, no. 1 (2017): 117–42, 25.
5
Gregg Mitman, “Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing Reflect on the Plantationocene,” Edge Effects, June 18, 2019, https://
edgeeffects.net/haraway-tsing-plantationocene/.
6
Lorimer, “The Anthropo-Scene,” 17.
7
Donna J. Haraway, “The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness,” in Manifestly Haraway
(University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 95.
 THE GERMANIC REVIEW: LITERATURE, CULTURE, THEORY 381

only on theory, but also on stories.8 Art can give expression to alternative imaginaries,
allowing us to reconsider our place on the planet. Finding the right form of expression,
however, is key; the challenge is not only what to represent, but how to do so in a way
that remains wary of the many clich�es and archetypes endemic to nature discourses.9
In this article, I suggest that a specific kind of German postwar aesthetics has much to
offer in this regard. Reading Paul Celan and Esther Kinsky together with Theodor W.
Adorno, this essay traces how both poets interweave commemoration of the Shoah with
exact attention to the more-than-human world. These two aspects of their poetry are not
merely complementary but mutually constitutive; they invite a thinking of nature and his­
tory as symbiotic. If Brecht’s “conversations about trees” can be understood as a reference
to a particular type of escapist nature poetry prevalent among authors in inner exile dur­
ing the Nazi regime, Celan and Kinsky unsettle the tropes on which such Naturlyrik is
based. Here, nature is neither ahistorical nor apolitical; it is also not merely representative
of something else.10 Read alongside Kinsky, whose writing explores questions of memory
and environmental devastation from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, the
ecological dimension of Celan’s poetics makes itself felt in three interconnected ways.11
For one, there is the historical and lexical precision that marks both poets’ diction.
Fragmenting monolithic notions of Nature, it focuses on the minute, even trivial—a small
sprout of green on an otherwise dying tree; a weed flourishing in a space that will soon
be razed for construction. This attention has a temporal dimension; it is “mindful of all
our dates,” as Celan writes in “The Meridian.”12 In the Anthropocene, such focus cuts

8
This argument for the importance and challenges of aesthetic representation in the Anthopocene forms one of the
central tenets of the environmental humanities. Important examples include Amitav Ghosh’s controversial critique of
the novel in relation to climate change, Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey’s study of allegory as a mode of representation in
indigenous and postcolonial art, and Timothy Clark’s thorough consideration of art and criticism in the Anthropocene.
Gosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016);
DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019); Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The
Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
9
While novels, for instance, have the capacity to tell stories of nonhuman agency across vast scales of time and space,
they run the risk of reiterating all-too familiar terms and narrative structures that may inadvertently sustain
anthropocentric perspectives. Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, 178. See also Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions. The
Novel in a Time of Climate Change (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015). Critics like David Farrier,
meanwhile, have argued for the value of poetry in this context. David Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time,
Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
10
While it falls outside of the purview of this essay, another relevant context to consider would be more traditional
post-war nature poetry, for instance that of G€ unther Eich or Peter Huchel. Often explicitly political and written in a
purposefully simple language that at times also plays with questions of mediation in response to the experiences of
the war, such poetry nevertheless differs significantly from the poetics of condensation I trace in Celan and Kinsky.
Among other things, it does not employ complexity to open up nonanthropocentric perspectives and often remains
faithful to familiar nature imagery. See Annette Graczyk, “Naturlyrik des 20. Jahrhunderts. Ein kritischer
Literaturbericht,” Zeitschrift f€ur Germanistik 14, no. 3 (2004): 614–18, 616.
11
Celan’s nature imagery has played a central role in the critical literature, from Peter Szondi’s canonical reading of
“Engf€uhrung” to its critique by Rochelle Tobias in her monograph on natural-scientific discourse in Celan; the
ecological dimension of his work has received less attention, however. While many prominent readings focus on the
linguistic self-reflexivity of Celan’s work, I hope to add an additional layer to this scholarship by considering this
aspect of his work in light of the idea of naturecultures. Such a perspective not only renders Celan’s poetry fruitful
for thinking history otherwise, but also challenges readings that posit Celan’s alienation from the natural world, as
Wolfgang Emmerich does (408). Emmerich, “Kein Gespr€ach Uber € B€aume: Naturlyrik Unterm Faschismus Und Im Exil,”
in Exilliteratur 1933-45, ed. Wulf Koepke and Michael Winkler (Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1989), 394–423; Peter
Szondi, “Reading ‘Engf€ uhrung’: An Essay on the Poetry of Paul Celan,” trans. D. Caldwell and S. Esh, Boundary 2 11,
no. 3 (1983): 231–64. Rochelle Tobias, The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan: The Unnatural World
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
12
Paul Celan, The Meridian: Final Version, Drafts, Materials, ed. Bernhard B€ oschenstein and Heino Schmull, trans. Pierre
Joris (Stanford University Press, 2011), 9.
382 N. LOZINSKI-VEACH

through deep time, emphasizing the ephemeral, and thus vulnerable, aspects of nonhu­
man life. Finally, and most importantly perhaps, both poets intertwine reflections on lan­
guage, history, and the natural world in a way that remains conscious of its own
mediation as a specifically human—and, as such, necessarily partial—form of expression.
This awareness, however, does not reinforce traditional lyric subjectivity in juxtaposition
with its objects; if history and nature are as closely intertwined as these works suggest,
the poem and its point of view are also part of these interconnections.
In this way, Celan and Kinsky’s poems invite a thinking of naturecultures in which,
as Haraway writes, “history matters.” Neither Celan nor Kinsky try to resolve the diffi­
culties of these entanglements; if one task of art and literature today is to help clarify
the stakes of environmental damage in order to engage the human imagination and
prompt political action, their poems offer a different, more complex approach.13 Here,
the Latin roots of complexity flash up, suggesting interdependence; a seminal aspect of
Haraway’s alternative ecologies, complexity in this sense is also vital to any poetics that
might give expression to them. The fact that their work responds to and takes shape
after the Shoah is crucial in this regard, as is Celan’s insistence that poetic language can
give rise to new realities.14 History comes to matter in both senses. For one, nature is
always historically and culturally contingent; to write about nature in German after
1945 brings up different resonances than it would in another time and place. What is
more, this context also generates a particular poetic self-reflexivity that is more than
merely an aftereffect of modernist aesthetics. Their awareness of the complicity of the
German language in the Shoah imbues Celan’s and Kinsky’s poetry with a particular
kind of linguistic acuity; as spaces of memory, their poems insist on concreteness and
materiality.
It is this specific historical perspective that renders their poems especially significant
today. Critics have noted that Celan’s poems inscribe history in nature in order to com­
memorate the Shoah.15 Revisiting Celan with Kinsky and Adorno from today’s perspec­
tive, however, also suggests the possibility of a different, reciprocal interpretation:
memory gives rise to a poetics of condensation, in which history and nature, including
human nature, emerge as intertwined in language. Adorno’s negative nature aesthetic,
which links all three, frames my thinking on this subject. The English etymology of con­
densation suggests compression, evoking, in turn, the German word for poetry,
Dichtung. In Celan’s poem “The World” and Kinsky’s Naturschutzgebiet (Nature
Preserve), such poetic condensation results in a writing of nature that is both nonan­
thropocentric and mindful of human suffering. Prioritizing complexity over clarification,
their poems weave together human and nonhuman histories, inviting us to reconsider
both in light of uncertain futures.

13
For a summary, and critique, of theoretical positions that favor an aesthetics of complexity and disjunction, see Clark,
Ecocriticism on the Edge, 183–94.
14
Paul Celan, Collected Prose, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (New York: The Sheep Meadow Press, 1986), 34.
15
Aleksandra Ubertowska, “Nature as a Counter-Historical Narrative in Holocaust Poetry (Milosz, Celan, and Pagis),” in
Ecopoetics and the Global Landscape: Critical Essays, ed. Isabel Sobral Campos (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019), 105–
28, 112f.
 THE GERMANIC REVIEW: LITERATURE, CULTURE, THEORY 383

The natural history of art after Auschwitz

As Brecht’s lines suggest, nature is by no means a neutral topic in German poetry. Even
before the war, associations between national identity and the German landscape,
implied in the concept of Heimat, tied notions of belonging and exclusion to the envir­
onment. Such frameworks were antisemitic from the start; Jews, after all, were not
allowed to own land for centuries. Tropes such as that of the “wandering Jew” antici­
pated NS-ideologies of blood and soil, marking Jewish communities as foreigners, dis­
connected from the physical places in which they lived.16 These legacies call into
question the idea that nature could ever be an innocuous subject, and yet it was per­
ceived as such by writers in inner exile during the Nazi-regime. Those who would nei­
ther leave Germany nor openly oppose National Socialism could write about nature
instead. In poetry, Nature became a refuge from History for those not affected by it.
Cyclical, and thus eternal, it formed a space outside of time that was not only thematic­
ally safe from censorship, but also permitted escapist disengagement both before and
after the war.17
This context frames Adorno’s reflections in Minima Moralia when he writes: “There
is nothing innocuous left. Even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is seen
without the shadow of terror.”18 In his work, nature, art, and history are intimately
intertwined, spun together in webs of repression and domination.19 This all-encompass­
ing implication places impossible demands on both art and philosophy after the Shoah;
for Adorno, their task is not to recover lost meaning, but rather to express its absence,
and so, paradoxically, to sustain the possibility of hope. In relation to our current
moment, this aesthetic poses a counterweight to more traditional narrative representa­
tions of nature.20 Celan’s work explicitly appears as one possible manifestation of such
art in Adorno; Kinsky’s poems, too, reflect some of its crucial aspects. Before turning to
their poetry, then, it is fruitful to trace the intricacies of Adorno’s negative nature
aesthetics.
In many ways, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory can be thought of as an extended medita­
tion on the continued possibility of art after the Shoah, a nuanced reprisal of his earlier
provocations about poetry after Auschwitz.21 The question of nature and its

16
Vivian Liska, “‘Roots against Heaven.’ An Aporetic Inversion in Paul Celan,” New German Critique 91, no. 91 (2004): 41–
56, 44.
17
For a thorough discussion of this kind of Naturlyrik, see Emmerich as well as Graczyk. Wendy Anne Kopisch discusses
the legacy of this poetry for nature writing in the German context in Naturlyrik im Zeichen der €okologischen Krise:
Begrifflichkeiten - Rezeption - Kontexte (Kassel: Kassel University Press, 2012).
18
Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (New York: Verso, 2005), 21. For a meditation on
Adorno’s thought image in relation to both Brecht and the position of the intellectual in the modern world, see
Gerhard Richter, “Gespr€ach € uber B€aume,” Zeitschrift f€ur kritische Theorie 34/35 (2012): 202–13.
19
These entanglements mark Adorno’s thought from the very beginning, appearing in one of his earliest lectures, “Die
Idee der Naturgeschichte,” from 1932. Theodor W. Adorno, “Die Idee der Naturgeschichte” in Gesammelte Schriften,
vol. 1, Philosophische Fr€uhschriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 345–65.
20
For a detailed exploration of the many ways in which Adorno’s aesthetics relate to the challenges of the
Anthropocene beyond the question of art after the Shoah, see Marah Nagelhout, “Nature and the ‘Industry that
Scorched It’: Adorno and Anthropocene Aesthetics,” Symploke 24, no. 1–2 (2016): 121–35, https://doi.org/10.5250/
symploke.24.1-2.0121.
21
The most notorious—and most frequently misunderstood—of these statements can be found in “Cultural Criticism
and Society:” “Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To
write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to
write poetry today.” Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
MIT Press, 1982), 34.
384 N. LOZINSKI-VEACH

representation emerges as central to these contemplations. For Adorno, each genuine

artwork is inscribed with an “immanent historicity” that consists of the “dialectic
between nature and its domination.”22 This paradoxical relationship is summed up in
The Dialectic of Enlightenment as the process in which “the subjugation of everything
natural [alles Nat€ urlichen] to the sovereign subject culminates in the domination of
what is blindly objective and natural.”23 Adorno and Horkheimer’s phrasing here is tell­
ing. Das Nat€ urliche indicates an uncontainability not found in the more common noun,
die Natur. As a concept, die Natur is thoroughly predetermined in its signification: it is
inscribed within a Western tradition of thought that determines it as the other to cul­
ture, history, and, above all, reason.24 This perceived dualism keeps nature at a safe dis­
tance. Das Nat€ urliche, in contrast, knows no such limits; instead, it is much closer to
the incongruent ecologies of the Anthropocene. The grammatical neuter of the word in
combination with the suffix -lich, which indicates the most tenuous relation, renders it
volatile. On the one hand, everything, including reason, is a part of nature, nat€
ur-lich, if
only in its most alienated form.25 On the other hand, nature as a category is culturally
and historically contingent, and thus never stable.
At any given moment, therefore, anything and anyone at all could be identified with
nature and subjugated in the name of progress. If nature is brutal, civilization keeps this
brutality at bay by reproducing it. In Adorno’s thought, all human violence has its roots
in this dynamic. Its execution hinges on identity thinking, the mode by means of which
reason represses everything that it perceives to be other than itself. Identity thinking
abstracts material realities into concepts, and so eradicates the value of the individual,
rendering objects and beings, including humans, expendable.26 The ultimate culmin­
ation of this process is the reification of human lives in the Shoah.27 The domination of
nature, then, is never merely an environmental concern. It permeates every aspect of
our lives, our cultures, and our politics; it seeps into our philosophies and shapes our
histories.
Artworks inherently participate in the subjugation of the natural, and yet, they also
yearn to give voice to a nature that cannot speak for itself: “Mediate nature [Natur mit­
telbar], the truth content of art, takes shape, immediately, as the opposite of nature

22
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1997), 5. This ambiguity accounts for the fact that while some critics have lauded the ability of modernist aesthetics
to give expression to the complexities of the climate change and other environmental crises, these same aesthetic
frameworks have at times also contributed to the domination of nature. See Matthew Griffiths, The New Poetics of
Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World, Environmental Cultures Series (London: Bloomsbury
Publishing, 2017).
23
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noeri, trans. Edmund
Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), xviii. German original: Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.
Adorno, Dialektik der Aufkl€arung. Philosophische Fragmente (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2011), 6.
24
It is important to note that nature in Adorno’s work is not simply a self-identical concept; rather, the notion refers to
a continuously shifting constellation of meanings. Owen Hulatt gives an excellent summary of this problem: “Much of
the difficulty of Adorno’s conception of nature arises from Adorno’s commitment to the idea that nature is: (1) a
historical category which is constituted by the conceptual presuppositions of a given historical period, (2) a
determiner of the nature of thought, and (3) an extra-conceptual repository for ‘non-identical’ truths which cannot be
captured by the conventional application of concepts” (793). Owen Hulatt, “Review: Adorno on Nature by Deborah
Cook,” Mind 121, no. 483 (2012): 793–95.
25
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik, 45.
26
Deborah Cook, Adorno on Nature (Durham: Acumen Publishing Limited, 2011), 88–89.
27
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik / Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 6, Gesammelte Schriften
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 355.
 THE GERMANIC REVIEW: LITERATURE, CULTURE, THEORY 385

[bildet unmittelbar ihr Gegenteil]. If the language of nature is mute, art seeks to make
this muteness eloquent.”28 This effort is doomed to fail, and yet Adorno’s first sentence
nevertheless indicates that art can, in some way, give expression to nature. Referring to
nature in its historically and culturally mediated form, the unusual expression
“mittelbar” immediately evokes another, more common word: mit-teil-bar. Questions of
communicability and mediation intersect here, for all that can, in fact, be communi­
cated about nature is its mediation. Any attempt to depict nature directly merely
becomes complicit in covering up its exploitation.29 Not even the representation of
environmental damage is exempt from this complicity since it normalizes and thus con­
firms the existing state of the world. The truth content of art, in contrast, is the silent
intimation of the incommunicability of nature in the midst of mediation.
In this regard, too, the nuances of Adorno’s wording are crucial to the overall mean­
ing of the sentence. Not only is mediate nature, as the grammatical subject, given an
agency here that would otherwise be impossible; as the truth content of art, nature in
its present condition brings forth something entirely new, as of yet indefinite, and
nevertheless strangely solid. The verb “bilden” evokes a quasi-autonomous process of
formation, an impression that Adorno confirms elsewhere:
This is the locus of the idea of art as the idea of the restoration of nature that has been
repressed and drawn into the dynamic of history. Nature, to whose imago art is devoted,
does not yet in any way exist; what is true in art is something nonexistent [wahr an der
Kunst ein Nichtseiendes]. What does not exist becomes incumbent on art in that other for
which identity-positing reason, which reduced it to material, uses the word nature. This
other is not concept and unity, but rather a multiplicity. Thus truth content presents itself
in art as a multiplicity, not as the concept that abstractly subordinates artworks.30
The truth content of art emerges almost inadvertently from the ever-shifting networks
of relation between a particular artwork and a specific socio-historical context, forming
a contrast to both. Truth content is the critical capacity of art, its juxtaposition to the
world as it currently is. In relation to nature, what materializes as the truth in art is
nonexistent, at least for now. A contradiction made manifest, the negative utopian pos­
sibility of nature that emerges in artworks is, however, not entirely powerless.
Indefinable, it contains multitudes, and so fragments the idea of a conceptual, external
nature that can be manipulated at will. Disrupting any one specific image, such multi­
plicity reflects the ecological complexities of our current moment. In art, something
impossible condenses, offering a rare instance of resistance to identity thinking and the
omnipresent repression of nature.
Yet, how might such a nature aesthetic, one that relies on pure negativity, find
expression in specific instances of art? Here, Adorno offers an unusually concrete
example:
That today any walk in the woods, unless elaborate plans have been made to seek out the
most remote forests, is accompanied by the sound of jet engines [D€ usenflugzeuge] overhead
not only destroys the actuality of nature as, for instance, an object of poetic celebration.
[ … ] Nature poetry is anachronistic not only as a subject: Its truth content has vanished.

28 €
Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 78. German original: Theodor W. Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Gretel
Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 121.
29 €
Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, 104.
30 €
Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 131; Asthetische Theorie, 198.
386 N. LOZINSKI-VEACH

This may help clarify the anorganic aspect of Beckett’s as well as of Celan’s poetry. It
yearns neither for nature nor for industry; it is precisely the integration of the latter that
leads to poetization, which was already a dimension of impressionism, and contributes its
part to making peace with an unpeaceful world.31
This passage appears right after a restatement of the core concern of Aesthetic
Theory, “whether and how art is possible that, as an uneducable innocence thinks of
it, would be relevant in today’s world.”32 In Adorno, this world is overshadowed by
the historical fact of the Shoah and the questions that arise in its aftermath, a con­
text with which the quotation above seems to have little to do at first. At closer con­
sideration, however, references that appear innocuous reveal themselves as anything
but: the scene of Adorno’s image is the forest, a landscape closely associated with the
German spirit as far back as Tacitus’ Germania and therefore an environment of par­
ticular mythological significance for the National Socialists;33 the jet planes soaring
overhead, used for commercial air travel in Adorno’s time but developed in 1936 in
Germany and England for military purposes and used extensively during the war; the
mention of Celan, whose name continues to be as synonymous with poetry after
Auschwitz as Adorno’s own. As such, the experience of nature that Adorno delineates
here does not permit any escape from the entanglements of history. Despite the fact
that for Adorno, material nature exists beyond any doubt, this nature is also inextric­
able from the social and political dimensions of life. It is the task of art to make
these layers of mediation perceptible.
Adorno’s criticism of Naturlyrik is doubly relevant in this sense. It is both a rejection
of the poetic genre, with its withdrawal into nature during National Socialism, and also,
more importantly, a criticism of an idea of nature that would make such a retreat pos­
sible in the first place. Given the weight that Adorno attributes to the domination of
nature in his theories on human violence, the concept of nature as an apolitical and
eternal backdrop to human history is no mere omission but detrimental. It not only
reinforces a view of nature that renders it ripe for exploitation, but actively contributes
to this possibility.34 The fact that the truth content of such art is decreasing in a world
that suffers from the consequences of the subjugation of nature in every regard is not
surprising—it has lost its critical edge, since it no longer stands in opposition to the
prevailing conditions of existence.

World poetry
In contrast to such an idea of nature, Adorno cites the “inorganic” poetry of Celan and
Beckett in general, but the imagery of his passage points to a particular poem from
Celan’s Sprachgitter, a volume that was very much on Adorno’s mind as he was drafting
Aesthetic Theory:35

31 €
Ibid., 219. Asthetische Theorie, 325.
32 €
Ibid., 218; Asthetische Theorie, 325.
33
See Simon Schama, “Der Holzweg: The Track Through the Woods,” in Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage
Books, 1996), 75–134.
34 €
Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, 104.
35
Joachim Seng offers a comprehensive account of the personal and intellectual connections between Adorno and
Celan in “‘Die wahre Flaschenpost.’ Zur Beziehung zwischen Theodor W. Adorno und Paul Celan,” in Frankfurter
Adorno Bl€atter VIII, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 151–76.
 THE GERMANIC REVIEW: LITERATURE, CULTURE, THEORY 387

DIE WELT, zu uns THE WORLD, joining

In die leere Stunde getreten: us in the empty hour:
Zwei Two
Baumsch€afte, schwarz, tree trunks, black,
unverzweigt, ohne unbranched, without
Knoten. nodes.
In der D€usenspur, scharfranding, das In the contrail, sharp edged, the
eine frei- one free-
stehende Hochblatt. standing spathe.
Auch wir hier, im Leeren, We too, here in the emptiness,
stehn bei den Fahnen.36 stand by the banners.37

The collocation of jet planes and trees in Adorno’s passage evokes “The World,” draw­
ing an implicit connection between the philosopher’s thoughts on the representation of
nature, the task of art after the Shoah, and Celan’s poem. The associations that accom­
pany these two images, trees and planes, remain the same, intensified in the density of
the poem and tinged with a sense of afterness. The tree trunks, mere remnants of trees;
the trail of condensation, left in the aftermath of a passing plane. It is, then, a poem of
survival, or rather, something like it—resilience perhaps. The trees, black or blackened,
as if by fire, have no branches or nodes (“Knoten”) from which leaves, and thus susten­
ance, could sprout. All that remains standing, as if in defiance, is a bract (“Hochblatt”),
free, but also exposed, and therefore vulnerable.38 Still, it is all the more striking in its
contrast to the condensation trail, “scharfrandig,” so exact as to be almost cutting. A type
of leaf that grows right below a blossom, a bract is neither foliage nor petal, but it does
form part of a plant’s reproductive system. By itself, it cannot possibly keep both or even
one of the trees alive, and yet it maintains an impossible promise of regeneration, against
all odds.
All this is, of course, figurative in the extreme: the burnt trees inevitably invoke the
victims of the Shoah; given the particular symbolic significance of the German forest,
this connection runs even deeper, referring particularly to those, who, like Celan’s
mother and he himself, were raised in the German tradition and closely connected to
the language; the “Fahnen” of the last line are also “Rauchfahnen,” plumes of smoke
that allude to the inseparable fusion of German national identity and the indelible leg­
acy of the Holocaust. At the same time, Celan’s poem also evokes his own present: the
commentary in the complete edition of his poems connects its creation with an FAZ
article on France’s plans to develop a nuclear program.39
“The World,” then, is by no means a traditional nature poem; one could even say
that it is not “about” nature in any significant sense of the word—were there not the
radically precise plant language, taken from Morphologie der Pflanzen by Lothar Geitler.
Celan’s poems are notorious for their employment of scientific terms, drawing on

36
Paul Celan, “Die Welt,” in Die Gedichte. Neue Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe in einem Band, ed. Barbara Wiedemann
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2018), 114.
37
Paul Celan, Memory Rose into Threshold Speech. The Collected Earlier Poetry, trans. Pierre Joris (New York: Farrar, Straus,
Giroux, 2020), 219f.
38
Joris’ translation of “Hochblatt” as “spathe” is also accurate, since the German term can denote both. A spathe is a
specific kind of bract that is usually found on either palm trees or flowers such as lilies. The more general “bract,” in
contrast, can also refer to parts of common European tree species, such as linden trees.
39
Ibid., 767.
388 N. LOZINSKI-VEACH

biology, geology, astronomy, and, as in this case, botany. In her study of natural-scien­
tific discourse in Celan’s poetry, Rochelle Tobias makes the case that these word choices
enhance his poems’ figurative reflexivity: in speaking of nature in this particular man­
ner, Celan’s poems explore their own conditions of possibility as and through language.
In this way, according to Tobias, they reveal themselves as unnatural, just like the idi­
oms on which they draw.40 This dynamic, however, is also part of what makes Celan’s
poetry resonate today. In drawing attention to themselves as language in such moments,
Celan’s poems also highlight the artifice of familiar notions of nature; at the same time,
they emphasize their own specifically human perspective. What is more, it is not simply
that Celan, with his interest in words, uses these lexica as resources for new and
unusual expressions; his poems rely on a technical understanding of these terms, and so
invite the reader to expose herself to words, and thus worlds, beyond her own.41 These
terms, incomprehensible from the vantage point of quotidian German, reinvent and
expand the language that had become a tool of genocide under National Socialism; at
the same time, they also infuse Celan’s poems with a new materiality.
These two aspects are interwoven, for the German that emerges from the Shoah bears
the traces of its complicity in its euphemistic tendencies. The desire to overcome this
metaphoricity, to forge a different language, one that would be true to the past and the
present, shapes German postwar poetry throughout. Yet while writers like Brecht turn
to a simplified, more direct idiom, Celan takes a different path. His language is pur­
posefully dense, rich with implications, and as such resistant to paraphrase. It insists on
the utmost specificity: “This language, notwithstanding its inalienable complexity of
expression, is concerned with precision. It does not transfigure or render ‘poetical’; it
names, it posits, it tries to measure the area of the given and the possible.”42 This accur­
acy reflects an aesthetic and an ethical imperative after the Shoah; it demands exact
attentiveness to the intricacies of the world.
Celan’s poems extend such care to all their aspects, including to their representation
of nature. A different conversation about trees than Brecht’s, Celan’s nature aesthetic is
rooted in history. Inscribed with the “acute of today,”43 that is, carefully attuned to the
complexities of their time, Celan’s poems reject the ahistorical and monolithic notion of
nature so essential to the Nazi ideology of Blut und Boden.44 Nothing in Celan is out­
side of history, everything is entangled in language. The botanical idiom of “The
World” gives shape to these interdependencies, combining the specificity of scientific
terms with the implications of the poetic. Celan’s trees are never just trees, never mere
nature; they are inscribed in and with history, and cannot be extracted from these
entanglements. And yet Celan’s commitment to precision insists that they also be trees,
no matter what else they signify. Celan’s poems, after all, are not merely mimetic: they

40
Tobias, The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan, 13.
41
Barbara Wiedemann, “‘In der Blasenkammer‘. Paul Celans Physikalische ‘Anreicherungen‘,” Wirkendes Wort 2 (2018):
267–84.
42
Paul Celan, “[Reply to a Questionnaire from the Flinker Bookstore, Paris, 1958],” in Collected Prose, trans. Rosmarie
Waldrop (New York: The Sheep Meadow Press, 1986), 16.
43
Paul Celan, The Meridian: Final Version, Drafts, Materials, ed. Bernhard B€oschenstein and Heino Schmull, trans. Pierre
Joris (Stanford University Press, 2011), 4.
44
For a comprehensive summary of ecocritical interpretations of the idea of nature under National Socialism, see Donna
Coffey, “Blood and Soil in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces: The Pastoral in Holocaust Literature,” Modern Fiction Studies
53, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 27–49.
 THE GERMANIC REVIEW: LITERATURE, CULTURE, THEORY 389

seek to establish reality in language.45 As he writes in his Bremen speech, after losing
not only his parents and his hometown but also his country in the Second World War,
language is all that remains.46 After the end of the world, his poetry can be thought of
as ecopoetic, even when there is no nature. Capable of projecting new realities, Celan’s
poetry takes shape as oikos, a home in language.47
The result is a poetics of condensation that emerges from the kind of painstaking atten­
tion that Celan attributes to the poem in the “Meridian,” an attention that takes into con­
sideration everything, including the “‘twitches’ and ‘intimations” that Celan, with and
through Georg B€ uchner, associates with the natural and the creaturely.48 This focus
imbues every being and object with a specific temporality and historicity. In the poem,
everything has its time, in more than one sense: this consciousness does not only situate
its subjects in particular historical moments but also maintains an awareness of their tran­
sience. Quoting from Walter Benjamin’s Kafka-essay, Celan calls such attention “the nat­
ural prayer of the soul.”49 It looks past the obvious, challenging the pre-determined.
Focusing on the small and seemingly insignificant, the smallest expressions of life, it
breaks up deep time and conceptual distance, pulling us into the present moment. Such
attention, which also marks Kinsky’s poetry, focuses on the particular in order to trace
the connections that make up the world. No wonder, then, that for Haraway, attention
constitutes a crucial aspect of the kind of art that can give shape to naturecultures.50
Celan’s understanding of the poem as a conversation has its roots in his focus on attention:
The poem becomes—under what conditions!—the poem of someone who—always still—
perceives, is turned toward phenomena, questioning and addressing these; it becomes
conversation—often a desperate conversation.
Only in the space of this conversation does the addressed constitute itself, as it gathers
around the I addressing and naming it.51
Entering into such poetic conversation with things (“den Dingen”) imbues them with a
different sense of materiality, one that gathers only in language. Whatever “the
addressed” may be, in the context of the poem, it condenses. As a conversation, poetry
is a form of utmost receptivity, an attempt to be radically open to the difference
(“Anderssein”) of its interlocutors. The effect of the double gesture of address and nam­
ing is not unilateral, however. Celan’s diction, with its many nominalized adjectives,
suggests a reciprocal process of constitution in which the usual asymmetry of subject
and object collapses. Despite their syntactical function, words like der Wahrnehmende
and das Erscheinende lack the substance of true nouns, an impression that is further
enhanced by their restriction to the present tense. Here, too, time and finitude come
into play. Whatever happens in the poem, it is bound to a particular “here and now.”52
Nevertheless, by referring to both interlocutors with the same grammatical form,
Celan’s text creates a sense of equity between them. For a mere moment, there are no
subjects here—or perhaps, only subjects.

45
Celan, “Answer,” 16.
46
Paul Celan, Collected Prose, 33.
47
Ibid., 34.
48
Celan, Meridian, 4.
49
Ibid., 9.
50
Donna J. Haraway, “The Companion Species Manifesto,” 116.
51
Ibid., 9.
52
Celan, Meridian, 9.
390 N. LOZINSKI-VEACH

No wonder, then, that such a conversation would often be desperate. Celan’s descrip­
tion of this process as a constitution evokes his considerations on the darkness of the
poem after the Shoah. It is “a constitutional, a congenital darkness [ … ] the poem [ … ]
comes as a result of a radical individuation into the world as a piece of language, [ … ]
laden with world.”53 Bearing the weight of the world in language, the poem can also,
however briefly, bring forth worlds that stand in opposition to our own. The constitu­
tion of the other can be thought of as a form of condensation—Verdichtung—a gather­
ing of complexity in words of radical accuracy, without any pretense to naturalistic
depiction. Layers upon layers of world inhabit the spaces between them. The area
between the given and the possible cannot, by definition, exist, at least not yet—to use
Adorno’s term, it is “ein Nichtseiendes.” Celan’s poetry reaches toward this negative
space. In their linguistic self-reflexivity, his poems speak through intimations, outlining
connections too intricate to be untangled and thus resistant to unraveling. Congenitally
dense, these poems also approach the world through this darkness—“das Gedicht kommt
dunkel zur Welt.”54 In their linguistic density, then, Celan’s poems take on a particular
concreteness, writing the world anew with micrological precision.

Disturbances
In this dedication to accuracy, a connection between Celan’s poetry and that of Kinsky
makes itself felt. For Kinsky, one of Germany’s most lauded contemporary writers, this
precision includes not only full awareness of the ecological crises of our time, but also
an acute consciousness of writing both after Auschwitz and after Celan.55 Born in 1956,
Kinsky experienced the German that was spoken outside her home as atrophied: “the
processes of naming the world were withered, the path of linguistic convention became
increasingly tighter and narrower.”56 Celan’s poems were a counterpoint to such degen­
eration. Although Kinsky came to understand the technical gradations of Celan’s work
only much later, and even though she unquestionably has a style entirely her own, there
remains an elective affinity between their respective oeuvres. Kinsky’s work can by no
means be reduced to its engagement with the German past, but her attunement to the
nuances of language is nevertheless inscribed with an ongoing resistance to such atro­
phy.57 Her explicit focus on processes of naming (“Bennenungsprozesse”) reflects this
concern.58 Whatever her topic or format, Kinsky’s emphasis is on language.

53
Ibid., 84. Der Meridian, 84: “eine konstitutive, kongenitale Dunkelheit [ … ] das Gedicht [ … ] kommt, als Ergebnis
radikaler Individuation, als ein St€
uck Sprache zur Welt, [ … ] mit Welt befrachtet.”
54
Ibid.
55
A poet, translator, essayist, and novelist, Kinsky has received numerous literary awards for her work. including the
Paul-Celan prize (2009), the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize (2016), the Leipzig Book Fair Prize (2018), and the newly
founded W.-G.-Sebald Literature Prize (2020). She has also been long-listed for the German Book Award (2011, 2014).
Most recently, her oeuvre was awarded the prestigious Kleist Prize for 2022, which she shares with the likes of Bertolt
Brecht, Robert Musil, Anna Seghers, and Herta M€ uller.
56
Esther Kinsky, email message to author, January 5, 2022: “die Prozesse der Bennenung der Welt waren verk€ ummert, der
Pfad der sprachlichen Konvention wurde immer schm€aler und enger dabei.” My translation, thereafter marked as nlv.
57
The Shoah is also thematized in some of Kinsky’s other work. See Helga Druxes, “Transgenerational Holocaust
Memory in Anne Weber’s Ahnen and Esther Kinsky’s Am Fluß,” Feminist German Studies 34, no. 1 (2018): 125–50.
58
Kinsky, "Die Sprache der Wahrnehmung und Erinnerung. Esther Kinsky im Gespr€ach mit Jente Azou und Hanne
Janssens, interview by Jente Azou and Hanne Janssens," April 21, 2021, https://www.literature.green/en/die-sprache-
der-wahrnehmung-und-erinnerung-esther-kinsky-im-gesprach-mit-jente-azou-und-hanne-janssens/.nlv.
 THE GERMANIC REVIEW: LITERATURE, CULTURE, THEORY 391

Despite the fact that Kinsky was recently awarded the German Prize for Nature
Writing, therefore, she does not see her work as part of this genre.59 For her, nature
writing is, among other things, too didactic. Her own texts, in contrast, try to resist any
agenda. Above all, they explore “the transposition of matter, of the seen, the heard, the
perceived in language [die Umsetzung von Materie, von Gesehenem, Geh€ortem,
Wahrgenommenem in Sprache].”60 To do so as truthfully as possible calls for an unpre­
possessed perspective as well as for a language that, as Celan writes about his own,
remains weary of sentimentalization. Kinsky’s 2013 Nature Preserve is a case in point:
Du€nnh€autige erinnerung Thinskinned memory
aufgespannte membran €uber leise outstretched membrane over a quietly
atmendem bild fr€uherfr€uhergeschichten breathing image onceoncestories
scheinpuls in der violetten €aderung von seemingly a pulse in the violet veining of
bl€uten blossoms

tr€ubweiß und m€ochtesch€on €augend murky white and wannabebeautiful

peering
schwarzes bilsenkraut darunter black henbane underneath it
leerger€aumtes feld. a cleared field.61
Layer upon layer, an image takes shape: a toxic plant in a razed field. What at first seems
to be only a reference to human memory also turns out to be an exact rendering of hen­
bane, unknown histories inscribed in its diaphanous petals. Kinsky’s text builds slowly, her
composites making palpable human projections, even while disupting them. The direction­
ality of the text is unusual, but important: rather than moving form the plant to the mem­
ory and thus risking metaphorization, the poem grows in the opposite direction, its focus
on the plant becoming more and more concrete. Matter turns to language, language
becomes almost material. Stripped of pathos, the final image presents itself as a matter of
fact. In Kinsky, the commitment to le mot juste that has its roots in the German postwar
context is transplanted into a different sphere, forging an environmental aesthetic that
responds to the categorical shifts of the Anthropocene with thorough attentiveness.
Under such scrutiny, the concept of Nature cannot possibly hold up; it is both too
vague and too predetermined to contribute anything of value. Instead, Kinsky has found
a different key expression through which to consider the many interwoven layers of
today’s world: “gest€ortes Gel€ande.”62 A translation of “disturbed lands,” a term from
English ecology, it denotes areas once altered by human interference. They include over­
grown housing developments, abandoned parking lots, and deserted farm lands. Life is
always in the process of reestablishing itself here, however impaired or futile. In such
places, desolation and hope are inseparable. Regeneration is possible, but what survives
here no longer coincides with established environmental imaginaries. In perpetual flux,
such environments unsettle binary conceptual divisions, giving shape to naturecultures.

59 €
She has spoken about her complicated relationship to nature writing many times, including in "Nature Writing / Uber
Natur schreiben heißt u€ber den Menschen schreiben," interview by Katharina Teutsch, January 28, 2018, https://www.
deutschlandfunk.de/nature-writing-ueber-natur-schreiben-heisst-ueber-den-100.html.
60
Kinsky, “Sprache der Wahrnehmung und Erinnerung.” nlv.
61
Esther Kinsky, Naturschutzgebiet (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2013), 81. As the volume has not yet appeared in English, all
translations are my own.
62
This key term appears again and again in Kinsky’s reflections on her work, including in my personal communication
with her (January 5, 2022). She has also coined a new genre, Gel€anderoman, for her prose text Hain (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 2018). See also Kinsky, “Nature Writing.”
392 N. LOZINSKI-VEACH

As such, they are therefore particularly representative of the Anthropocene. There is no

pure Nature here, but much that could be called natural (“Nat€ urlich”) in Adorno’s
sense. Physical manifestations of the intangible processes that mark our time, disturbed
lands make uncontainability perceptible, although not necessarily legible. Incarnations
of Walter Benjamin’s natural history, such places forge connections in moments of tran­
sience, troubling the human capacity to imbue them with stable symbolic meaning.63
Although not traditionally beautiful, these spaces reflect an aesthetic of resilience that
is worth our attention. The question is how to write them without erasure or overdeter­
mination, how to translate them into words that open up rather than foreclose consid­
eration. In this regard, too, poetic accuracy is crucial. In contrast to Landschaft
(landscape), for instance, Kinsky sees the term Gel€ande as more neutral, less clouded by
legacies of Romanticism and expectations of normative nature.64 Gel€ande does not
immediately signify anything specific; indeterminate, it remains receptive to the particu­
larities of a space, full of traces that must be read—geological, linguistic, historical,
organic. These strata enter the texture of Kinsky’s writing to make words palpable in
their mediation; to trace their grain is to gain new perspectives.
Nature Preserve is an exercise in such reading. The volume contains both poems and
photographs, the latter small enough that a careful examination requires a magnifying
glass. Set on the grounds of the Oscar-Helene-Heim in Berlin-Zehlendorf, the poems
weave a tapestry of complex histories. Originally founded in 1905 for the care of children
with physical disabilities, the institute quickly became a pioneering orthopedic facility.
Later, it was claimed by the National Socialists and run under the directorship of an SS-
physician before reestablishing itself once more as a reputable medical institution after the
war. By the time Kinsky first encountered the property in 2012, the once park-like grounds
had run to seed while waiting to be razed for the construction of residential homes. It was
during her research of the area that Kinsky came across the term “gest€ ortes Gel€ande.” It
seemed accurate not only in its reference to the material state of the grounds, but also
more broadly descriptive of their tainted history and their connection to human vulner­
ability.65 Throughout the volume, these layers of signification coincide, interweave, and
overlap, connected by a sense of more-than-human historicity.
In the book’s epigraph, Henry David Thoreau is struck by the “interesting progressive
history” in the blossoms of blue vervain, concluding simply: “It has a story.”66 The
poems that follow explore what it might mean to trace such histories in a language that
is itself full of traces, not the least of which is its inevitable humanity. Kinsky’s poetry
does not deny this human perspective, but rather considers its potentialities and limita­
tions, positing a task both for itself and for its readers: “but there are other things to do
like the / palpation of the rifts and cracks / in everything that seemed firm.”67 The
negative spaces of these fissures are material as much as conceptual, particularly now.
Like braille, the poems prompt us to trace their nuances, to become aware of shifts in
our own epistemic frameworks: “in the fingertips nests the intuition of looming

63
Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag,
1963).
64
Kinsky, “Nature Writing.”
65
Kinsky, email.
66
Kinsky, Naturschutzgebiet, 5.
67
“doch gibt es anderes zu tun wie das / ertasten der risse und spr€
unge / in allem was fest schien.” Ibid., 85.
 THE GERMANIC REVIEW: LITERATURE, CULTURE, THEORY 393

ruptures.”68 In the context of the poem, this somatic knowledge alludes to the coming
razing of a clearing that, by all appearances, seems to be recovering. On a different level,
however, the lines indicate a disruption of established forms of knowledge. The aware­
ness of the fingertips, closer to instinct than logic, breaks down the divisions between
humans and other beings. The body senses what cannot quite be grasped otherwise:
that we are as much part of “nature” as Thoreau’s blue vervain, that our histories can­
not be kept apart, try as we might.
In Naturschutzgebiet, these connections take shape in the disquieting entanglements
of imminent ecological destruction, human mortality, and allusions to the lingering
ghost of National Socialism. As in Adorno, nothing here is harmless, and yet there is a
strange, almost certainly futile kind of hope. Full of irresolvable contradictions, Kinsky’s
poems combine beauty with dread, comfort with devastation:
Beil€aufig wachsende Casually growing
aufwerfung randl€angs excrescence along the edge
des lichtflecks da stand dem of the light spot there the
wurzelkn€otchen der sinn nach ersprießen little root node felt like sprouting
in schutt und schutz des erstaunten bereichs in the rubble and shelter of the
astonished reach of
unerwarteter wirtlichkeit. unexpected hospitality.69

The nonchalance of the diminutive root node, its almost ironic resilience, suggests the pos­
sibility of a different reality, a mere letter away, in the happenstance of hospitality.
“Wirtlichkeit,” a rare word in modern German, tricks the eye with its suggestion of
Wirklichkeit (truth), a truth content that manifests just as the misconception dissolves. Like
Celan’s bract, this one plant does not spell salvation, despite its ability to briefly transform
the idiomatic phrase in Schutt und Asche (in rubble and ash) into “in schutt und schutz.”70
The former hangs in the air, unspoken; perhaps it also permeates the ground, with the
concentration camp Sachsenhausen and its crematoria less than fifty kilometers away.
Ash, in all its material symbolism, returns in the third and last stanza, on the lower
blossoms of a labiate, “hanging dustward and / bedewed with ash.” Despite the clear
references to finitude in dust and ashes, there are incongruencies even here. Preceded
by a question about resilience (“What makes it bloom [ … ]?”), the stanza reads:
Nichts Nothing
sagt das spr€osslein says the little sprout
nichts als der bote der alten nothing but the messenger of ancient
unsterblichkeit heut kommt es daher immortality today it comes along
als lippenbl€utler mit stumpflappig verzerrter as a labiate with a snub-lobedly contorted
unterer lippe lower lip
staubw€arts h€angend und hanging dustward and
von asche benetzt so bedewed with ash
tut es bescheiden das it plays at modesty the
weißschwarze whiteblack
weißnichtwas. dontknowwhat.71

68
“in den fingerkuppen nistet die ahnung sich anbahnender br€ uche.” Ibid.
69
Ibid, 29.
70
“Etwas in Schutt und Asche legen” translates to “to reduce some to rubble and ash.”
71
Kinsky, Naturschutzgebiet, 29.
394 N. LOZINSKI-VEACH

Kinsky’s enjambments drive the poem forward, generating and dispelling illusions that
beget ever changing readings. Shifting in tone and meaning from line to line, the poem
performs an uncontainability that brings to mind Adorno’s non-conceptual notion of the
multiplicity of nature. First, it seems that there is no reason at all for the growth; then,
for just a moment, the plant, personified, seems to have an answer, tongue in cheek,
before it becomes clear that there is no prosopopoeia—bracketed by “nichts,” the sprout
has nothing to say. Coy, even whimsical in its false modesty, the plant is nevertheless “the
messenger of ancient/immortality,” and as such embodies a slight sense of hope. And yet,
this old immortality does nothing to alleviate the realities of the suffering that the ash
evokes. At the same time, the description of the plant, with its exact botanical terms
(“lippenbl€
utler,” “stumpflappig”), suggests a materiality bound to deteriorate, both as the
sprout dies and as the images of the poem dissolve into “the/whiteblack/dontknowhat.”
In the end, the poem leaves us no ground to stand on. White and black at once, or per­
haps ash-gray, it closes on an instance of unknowability that incites reconsideration, both
of the poem itself and the sense of incongruity it leaves behind.
Kinsky’s poems are full of such moments of condensation that unsettle what we
thought we understood. They present traces, not explanations. Phrases and images from
Germany’s contentious past appear throughout, denaturalizing the area as well as
Kinsky’s language. Among other things, there is the repetition of “night and fog (Nacht
und Nebel),” representative of the interconnections between German high culture and
Nazism that is the core thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment. A reference to Goethe
and Wagner, the phrase also gave its name to Hitler’s notorious 1941 decree to kidnap
and execute members of the resistance in German-occupied lands, as well as to Alain
Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard, which Celan translated. In Nature Preserve, the phrase
regains some of its literalness without losing any of these connotations, intertwining lin­
gering history with ongoing environmental destruction—“night and fog always and for­
ever.”72 Simultaneously transhistorical and acutely present, the phrase reminds us that
even today, we continue to live in a world after Auschwitz. Just as the land that she
writes about, then, Kinsky’s language itself can be thought of as “disturbed lands” that
hold uncertain promises of regeneration in full awareness of the damage already done.
A certain constitutive darkness, this is another correspondence between her and Celan.
As disturbed lands, her wordscapes also have the power to disturb, to disrupt clich�es
and tropes in order to present the world, organic and otherwise, in all of its intricacy.
Kinsky’s work, itself a kind of Nature Preserve, also invites us to read Celan anew,
with a focus on the ways in which his poetry brings more-than-human histories
together in language. In their density, their poems give rise to an aesthetics of negativity
that always invites us to look, and to read, one more time. As in Celan, such attentive­
ness on the part of the reader is necessary in Kinsky. Spelled without any capitalized let­
ters, printed without titles, structured in counterintuitive ways, often without
punctuation, her poems continuously defamiliarize their subjects, while also reminding
us of their linguistic mediation of the world. What is more, their many layers are never
made explicit. Both contextualization and interpretation are left up to the reader and
her willingness to do her part. This necessary effort also means that at least some of the con­
nections that the poems forge will go unnoticed. This is an inherent risk in both Celan and

72
“nacht und nebel immer und ewig.” Ibid., 100.
 THE GERMANIC REVIEW: LITERATURE, CULTURE, THEORY 395

Kinsky; by its very nature, a poetics of condensation neither elucidates nor resolves any­
thing. Here, Timothy Clark’s caveat not to overestimate the transformative power of either
culture or its criticism in the Anthropocene comes to mind, along with Adorno’s reflections
on the complicity of art and critique in the domination of nature.73 Considered through
Adorno, the “faith that environmental destruction can be remedied by cultural means,” ubi­
quitous in the environmental humanities, is a partial solution at best.74
Yet neither Celan nor Kinsky make such claims. Under the pressures of German his­
tory, their poems, each in its own way, condense language and time, not to clarify, but to
distort preexisiting notions. Reading them is, to use another one of Haraway’s terms, an
exercise in staying with the trouble. To trouble, she notes, is “to stir up,” “to make
cloudy.”75 The historical, lexical, and material specificity of a poetics of condensation
does just that, thickening language with histories far beyond the human. For David
Farrier, this capacity to evoke multiple scales and temporalities is an important aspect of
Anthropocene poetics, able to connect us to deep time.76 While geology plays a role in
both Celan and Kinsky, however, their specific focus on the recent German past also
evokes a different kind of temporal density.77 Countless histories, some almost too minute
to notice, unfold in and alongside a present that is much closer than deep time, embed­
ding us in naturecultures. Like Adorno’s notion of the natural, such complexity cannot be
represented outright, but it can be traced through moments of connection, yielding a sin­
gular kind of knowledge in line with its etymology: to embrace, to comprehend. Rejecting
transparency in favor of another form of understanding, a poetics of condensation invites
us to hold together ideas and objects whose ragged edges will not quite fit; attentive to
the spaces between them, we may yet find new ways to speak about trees.

Notes on contributor
Natalie Lozinski-Veach is an Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Cultural Studies at
Arizona State University, as well as affiliate faculty in Jewish Studies and a Senior Sustainability
Scholar in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. Her current book project traces how
philosophers and poets reimagine language beyond the human after the Shoah.

ORCID
Natalie Lozinski-Veach http://orcid.org/0009-0006-5721-1425

73
Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, 19.
74
Ibid. For a critique of this premise through the lens of Adorno’s work, see Timothy W. Luke, “Reflections from a
Damaged Planet: Adorno as Accompaniment to Environmentalism in the Anthropocene,” Telos 2018, no. 183 (2018):
9–24.
75
Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 1.
76
Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics, 9.
77
On Celan’s “geological lyric,” see Jason Groves, “‘The Stone in the Air’: Paul Celan’s Other Terrain,” Environment and
Planning. D, Society & Space 29, no. 3 (2011): 469–84, https://doi.org/10.1068/d10009. Kinsky’s volume Schiefern traces
more than-human-histories in the geological formations of the Scottish Slate Islands. Kinsky, Schiefern (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 2020).