Abstract
A crucial aspect of Katharina Gerstenberger and Tanja Nusser’s edited volume is highlighted in the title: this interdisciplinary collection goes beyond the discussion of the purely cultural. In this respect particularly, the volume will be of interest to a range of disciplines concerned with catastrophe and disaster – both natural and manmade (a distinction explored in the book) – while at the same time, the collection’s anchor in German culture provides a fascinating new take on more general questions in literature and culture. Some essays demonstrate engagement with geographical or sociological aspects of catastrophes, while others raise wider questions about how we as human beings respond to collective traumas, be it through the media, our responses to media representation, film and literature, or the transmission of community narratives. It is this intersection that makes the book a particularly stimulating read.
As Gerstenberger and Nusser emphasize in their introduction, this is a saturated area of enquiry with ‘over two thousand books pertaining to catastrophe or disaster [having] come out in the United States alone since 2000’. Aesthetically, disaster and catastrophe seem to be fodder for Hollywood, offering narratives of thrill, threat, community identity, individual heroism and cathartic resolution that work well on the big screen in a swirl of special effects. But at the same time, as this volume shows, catastrophe and disaster hardly provide the material for the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, to borrow Coleridge’s phrase. Disaster and catastrophe are about life and death, not just the stuff of escapist entertainment. The volume offers an insight into both of these aspects, unified by the question of narration as catharsis.
The range across the volume is wide. In the first chapter, Christoph Weber provides a fascinating analysis of narratives about the Lisbon earthquake in 1755. He demonstrates the ways in which both eyewitness and reappropriated hearsay accounts of the event make use of classical rhetorical devices to recreate the horror as a kind of theatre, and in so doing restructure the experience as a kind of cathartic spectacle. Janine Hartman explores the man-made catastrophe of the burning of major sites in Paris in 1871. Technological, communicative and transport progress meant that reports on the event were more widely available than ever before, and Hartman engagingly marries historical detail with a discussion of narrative responses to the catastrophe. Claudia Jerzak takes a somewhat different stance in her chapter on the bombing of Hamburg and Dresden in the Second World War by considering forms of recollection and memorialization that are far more distant from the original experience. These catastrophes, Jerzak demonstrates, are particularly challenging in terms of narrative response and cathartic release precisely because they contend definitions of catastrophe and victimhood. Next, Torsten Pflugmacher tackles the interesting topic of German perspectives on the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters in the writing of Alexander Kluge. Pflugmacher argues that Kluge both utilizes and departs from ‘the inventory of disaster narration’ with a disorienting effect that mirrors the experience of catastrophe. Carol Anne Costabile-Heming continues the focus on the Fukushima nuclear disaster with her exploration of Christa Wolf’s Störfall. Costabile-Heming argues that the fears Wolf posits continue to be relevant today. Yasemin Dayıoğlu-Yücel poses the urgent question in her chapter on the writings of Yoko Tawada and Haruki Murakami as to ‘who is authorized to write about a catastrophe and how can one write about catastrophe’. The significance of this question is further emphasised by Lars Koch’s chapter on Joseph Haslinger’s Phi Phi Island, which is a personal attempt at cathartic release from the memory of surviving the tsunami on Phi Phi Don Island in 2007. Tanja Nusser pertinently raises the point about aesthetic appropriations of disaster in the realm of cinema, with intricate theoretical engagement that questions our roles and responses as passive viewers of catastrophic events. In a very different vein, Jan Hinrichsen explores the importance of collective narratives about the prevalent yet terrifyingly irregular avalanches that occur in the Tyrol, suggesting that communities use patterns in collective narrative as a survival mechanism. Finally, Franz Mauelshagen explores how we may even define catastrophe at all, placing it in the context of modernity and posing the interesting question as to how ‘natural’ natural disasters actually are.
The volume certainly offers a thought-provoking – if at times alarming (due to the subject matter rather than the quality) – set of analyses. Occasionally, it seems rather more disparate than dialogic, and this is both an advantage and a shortcoming: the individual analyses are fascinating in themselves but the overarching thread is sometimes harder to discern. Nevertheless, it will be of interest both to those concerned with catastrophe and its cathartic response in a variety of disciplines, as well as to those interested in a rather novel comparative and interdisciplinary take on German culture.