Nature in the German Tradition

The concept of nature in all its complexity--as environment, agent, inspiration, and threat--runs through the history of German thought like a particularly slippery red thread. From the nature poetry and philosophy of the German Romantics, which accompanies the emergence of biology, earth science, and chemistry as academic disciplines, to the climate activism and apocalypse narratives of the 20th and 21st centuries, the question of what nature actually is, and of what it has to do with us humans, gets posed again and again to radically varying effect. The course will explore this tradition via stories, poems, films, and philosophical texts. Reading, writing, and discussion in German.