U RS B ÜTTNER Nature Makes History: Narrating Nature in Gerhard Richter and Alexander Kluge’s December In ancient times, people told stories in which natural powers appear figuratively, often as divine beings. In these stories, human beings make sacrifices in favor of nature or suffer from the deities’ wrath. People also narrated stories about divine humans miraculously fighting the natural powers. In all these stories, the natural powers are credited with agency. These stories share a conception of the world based on the interchange between humans and nature and shifts in constellations of domination. From the early Modern Age onwards, people told stories about nature in a different way as the conception of the world had changed fundamentally. The human subject has been coronated to be the only entity to have agency and to dominate nature by the virtue of creating causal relations (Riskin). However, this conception of the human dominion over nature has been brought to crisis over the last decades since the limits of human control over nature and the non-intentional consequences of human actions have become more and more apparent. Environmental degradation, the extinction of species, and climate change are the most significant indications of this crisis. Recent research argues that these developments, which cannot be overlooked anymore today, are anthropogenic (i.e. man-made). 1 They have already begun in the early Modern Age and have rapidly accelerated since the Industrial Revolution. Narratives about the global environmental crisis and, in particular, about climate change consequently also hinge on discourses about the relationship between humans and nature. While classic templates to narrate nature are mainly premised on the notion of the human domination of nature as I will show in the following, newer texts today offer alternative approaches - especially with respect to the concept of (non-human) agency - which might provide impulses for reconceptualizing the human attitude towards nature. The philosopher Charles Taylor systematically links conceptions of the world to narration. He argues that people’s self-images and imaginations of the world usually remain tacitly assumed. Being a sort of background, they provide context, define particular situations, and frame actions. However, 1 This is one reason why some scientists suggest to not consider our current geological age as still being part of the Holocene and proclaimed a new age, the ‘Anthropocene.’ U RS B ÜTTNER 218 these contextual frames are bound to more general ideas about how oneself exists in a particular world. Eventually, these ideas about existence gravitate towards cosmological and metaphysical attitudes and beliefs. Not all parts of one’s world view have to be coherently connected. Members of a culture share or at least have learned about common interpretative patterns and frames to a certain degree. That enables people to understand each other and to coordinate cooperative actions. In this way, these background assumptions are descriptive and normative at the same time as they entail a sense of how actions and processes normally and properly take place. People are usually not conscious of their background assumptions in a way that they can disclose their premises theoretically, but they are usually able to reveal them illustratively: in the form of narrations, images, or metaphors. Hence, Taylor calls these background assumptions “social imaginaries” (23-30). Adapting Taylor’s theoretical approach to humans’ behavior towards nature I want to speak of “natural imaginaries” (Büttner, “Naturbewältigung” 25-28). Furthermore, I claim that artworks, in contrast to the non-artistic modes of presentation Taylor mainly talks about, do not only illustrate background assumptions but can also reveal them as such. This capability allows art to criticize natural imaginaries. Artworks are able to indicate inherent issues and aporias of familiar ways of narrating nature and to tell stories depicting nature in unfamiliar ways. By their defamiliarization, they gain aesthetic benefit and offer alternative views. Therein lies art’s potential to exert influence on the humans’ attitude towards nature. The central problem of narrating nature in the Anthropocene seems to be connected to the question of agency. Hence, the first question I want to raise in my paper is: What constitutes a narration? Then I will proceed to my second question: What is agency? As I have shown at the beginning of this paper, agency is nothing one ‘has’ but a capability which entities are credited with. Thus, my third question is: Who endows which entity with agency and to whom is it denied for which reasons? This brings me to my forth and last questions: What are, in general, possible connections between the elements of a narration (subjects, objects etc.)? In order to answer these questions, I will turn towards Gerhard Richter and Alexander Kluge’s collaborative work December. 2 The German original came out in autumn 2010, the English translation by Martin Chalmers appeared two years later. The small book combines, as the subtitle says, 39 Pictures and 39 Stories. The 39 pictures are photographs taken by Richter which show winter sights of the snowy woods. Kluge accompanies each of Richter’s photos with a story. Every single day of the title-giving month is attributed a picture and a story (sometimes two at a time), but the stories are dated to different years. The collaboration developed during a winter vaca- 2 The collaboration was continued in Kluge and Richter’s Nachricht. Nature Makes History 219 tion that both spent at the same hotel. As Kluge recounts in an interview from 2010, both are almost same age and became aware of a shared interest in different modes of experiencing time. 3 Gerhard Richter, certainly one of Germany’s most famous artists, is wellknown as a painter, but not as a photographer. Nevertheless, photography plays an important role for his paintings. Many paintings use photography as a template and others are painted over photographs. Sometimes he stylizes the photograph into a painted icon, pointing beyond the motif itself. The effect these techniques produce is that it evokes notions of a certain historical or local referentiality and then instantaneously undermines it again. This interest in playing with referentiality on the one hand and with contiguity and potential temporal orders on the other can also be found in Richter’s contribution to December. His co-author Alexander Kluge was mainly known as a filmmaker and one of the main representatives of New German Cinema for a long time. Since the mid-1980s, he has been noted also as a producer of late-night cultural programs on private TV. Only since 2000, when he republished his previous literary work in two large volumes and then published a book comprised of his latest stories almost every other year, he has been perceived as a writer as well. Kluge writes stories, anywhere from a half page to a few pages in length, not seldom based on historical facts and often anecdotal. His literary repertoire consistently starts with him having a new idea on how to investigate questions like: How can history be told in a different way? How would history have changed, if one detail had been different? What could have happened, even if it actually did not happen? He continues to ask these questions in December as well. It can be observed that environmental issues and humans’ interactions with nature became more and more important to Kluge in the last few years. In December, he deals explicitly with climate change and deep time. In a first section, I will show how Richter’s photographs explore what makes a narration a narration while questioning what can be regarded as a natural event and what are regular occurrences. I continue in the second section with a narrative sketch where I explain how people usually try to avoid natural events by denying the natural powers’ agency and grant agency exclusively to intentional actors. I distinguish three types of narratives that are commonly used to do so: the in-depth-causal-analysis, the miracle story, and the teleological explanation. In a third section, I further discuss how Kluge reveals shortcomings and aporias in the different narrative types and offers alternatives. 3 On this issue see also Birkmeyer. U RS B ÜTTNER 220 Richter’s Photos At first sight, Richter’s photographs create the impression that he just took his camera on a winter walk. The sky on the winter’s day is grey and the light pale. It is not easy to guess what time it is. The photographs show different views of a snowy forest. None of them is very spectacular: Some of the photos detail the barely penetrable branches of trees which are heavily bent under the weight of snow. Others depict a hillside overgrown with greenbrown spruce trees, shimmering through white granulate. And others again capture how the landscape loses its contours, blurred by fog. Nothing happens in any of the photos, or more precisely, almost nothing: One single time, a deer jumps out of the undergrowth at the opposite hillside, discovers the photographer, stops, realizes there is no danger and disappears again into the woods. 4 The following photos in the series again show only snow and branches and branches and snow. Only nature, no humans. Towards the end of the book, the camera’s eye approaches inhabited areas. On the second-to-last picture, a 4 The image shows the photograph printed on page 70 in December. It is reprinted with the friendly permission of Gerhard Richter, who holds the copyright. Nature Makes History 221 house, still far away, can be spotted through two tree trunks. It is followed by a picture of a street with a fence and tire tracks leading out of the forest. In the interview mentioned above, Kluge states that Richter actually shot these photographs in December 2009 close to their vacation domicile in Sils- Maria in Switzerland, but not on a single day. He supposedly took each picture on a different day. It is not important whether or not this is true. In any case, Kluge’s statement draws the spectator’s attention to the artful arrangement of the images. Christmas is clearly marked as the peak on the December holiday calendar, for it is on Christmas Eve that the photographer encounters the deer. And on Christmas Eve, the focus also reaches its largest size and stays large for four days. Previously the focus had gradually changed from smaller to larger following no obvious rule, but without considerable jumps in size. Nearly the same motif appears on two, sometimes on three, and only one time on four pictures in a row. It is not unlikely that the photos with the same motif were taken immediately after each other. Even if the principles of the pictures’ succession cannot be figured out easily, it does not seem as if there were not any. To bring these impressions together, I want to refer to some ideas of Thierry de Duve’s almost classical essay on photography theory. The art critic distinguishes two coexisting yet mutually exclusive modes of perception of any photograph with regard to its temporality. According to de Duve, one can consider a photograph as an event or as a picture. In the first case, one assumes that time passes from one moment to the next and the camera’s eye bans some moments on film. The photo freezes certain moments and preserves them over time. These moments are apprehended as events. Since time keeps moving forward and each occurrence also takes time, the camera’s eye always takes the photo either too early or too late to capture the action as a whole. This way of looking at photographs entails a strong idea of referentiality. The second mode de Duve talks about, the picture mode, grants the photos their own temporality. The whole idea of linear time progression is omitted. Employing a term French philosopher Henri Bergson coined the photo’s temporality is ‘durée’; that means enduring present. Thus, de Duve can say the photos show “protracted life” (117). What they show is perceived as typical or recurring. Nothing surprising is happening on the images. They could have been taken at any time. In fact, it does not matter when exactly they were taken because their ontological status is pure virtuality in a Deleuzian sense. Looking at the photos in this way releases them from any reference function and refers them, if at all, to other pictures. To sum up the contrast between the two modes of perception, one could say in structuralist terms: The first mode (event) takes the single photo primarily as part of a syntagma, the second one (picture) takes the single photo as a U RS B ÜTTNER 222 paradigma. De Duve cleanly distinguishes between the two types as extreme poles of perception. He himself suggests this in his discussion of photographic proofs and memorial photos as particularly good illustrations for the perception of photographs as either an event or a picture. Usual perception lingers somewhere in between these two poles. Bearing de Duve’s conception in mind, I return to Richter’s photographs now. It seems that neither of these extreme positions de Duve outlined fits properly to Richter’s photographs. They do not show events, but they cannot be apprehended as proper pictures either. In the first case, both the succession of the calendar days of December and the rapprochement to inhabited areas in the end introduce a temporal order to the photos. Therefore, one would assume they provide the elements of a plot; these expectations, however, are disappointed. As mentioned above, the pictures show nearly interchangeable snowy winter landscapes and the only potential event is the appearance of a deer. But: Is the appearance of a deer in the woods really an event? Either Richter is ironically playing with the spectator’s expectations of an event or he wants to reveal that, in principle, natural processes cannot be adequately grasped in terms of human historic conceptions like ‘event.’ If the category of the event does not apply to Richter’s photographs, de Duve’s category of picture is similarly unsuitable. Taking the photographs as pictures would mean to emphasize that the book is simply entitled December and does not refer to the particular December of 2009, nor does it matter whether the photos were taken on one or over several days. When one perceives the photographs as paradigmatic, they show typical December sights. This impression, however, would be much stronger if Richter had kept to one single focus and a regular succession, as the mode of presentation would not distract the spectator’s attention. Understanding the largest focus as an indicator lets one assume that the most typical pictures of December are taken at Christmas. Certainly, iconic images of a Christmas tree, presents, and the whole family around a festive dinner table circulate through the cultural imagination in the Western world. Nevertheless, these images are perhaps the most distinctive but by no means the most representative of December on a whole. However, in terms of natural photography it does not matter whether it is Christmas or not. Seen in a sober light, Richter’s Christmas photographs cannot be distinguished from the other winter pictures in a way that allows the viewer to know anything about the day they were taken. Here again Richter plays with the spectator’s expectations. He questions background assumptions about regular processes and tempts the spectator’s desire for meaning and order. In the light of de Duve’s theoretical approach, Richter’s arrangement of the photographs turns out to be an investigation into different modes of possible connections between them. The arrangement is certainly more than Nature Makes History 223 a mere list where this photo and that photo are just held together by addition. The mode of presentation of the book introduces a timeline and by doing so suggests the photos’ temporal order, in the sense of a sequence of first this photo and then that. This strategy of presentation facilitates the transition from a syntagmatic addition to a narrative. However, the result still lacks the foremost feature qualifying a proper narrative: motivation. The spectator’s desire to ask why does this happen first and then that and not the other way round indicates this. A proper narrative provides an interpretation: It says this occurrence comes later because the other occurrence came first and not the other way around. There are two central ways to establish motivation: firstly, a strict physical causal explanation in terms of laws, and secondly, the attribution to an intentional decision (Koschorke 74-77). Richter gives certain hints with respect to explanation and intention in the photos’ subject matter as well as in the artistic way the photos are taken and presented, yet he withholds unambiguous motivations. Hence, the spectator is tempted to imaginatively complete the photos’ arrangement into a proper narrative. At the same time, Richter also suggests that the photos show the law-governed processes of nature and that there is nothing to narrate, since laws cannot be narrated and the pictures are only connected by their subject’s contiguity. Thus emerges the odd experience of Richter’s photos. They converge towards both of de Duve’s categories but never merge with one of them. Three Common Ways of Narrating Nature In a certain way, one could say, Kluge pursues the investigation exactly from where Richter ceases his. Before I move to Kluge’s stories, however, I have to explain how nature was and is usually narrated in order to analyze the way in which Kluge deviates from the norm and narrates it in an unusual way. I will start with the example of factual story telling, since narrative conventions become particularly apparent here. My key question here is: What is agency? Whoever or whatever has agency can make things happen. Making things happen implies that these things would not have happened otherwise. Only the kind of things which we assume to not happen inevitably can be perceived and narrated as an event - although they do not necessarily have to be (cf. Schmid 1-21). According to Schmid, an event means an occurrence perceived as a temporal discontinuity (20), since it seems to leave behind the habitual and expected course or even nature’s lawful organization. The impression of eventfulness results from occurrences that take place too suddenly or only very rarely and for which people do not have interpretative patterns to assess what is going on at once. Since people cannot interpret these occurrences, they cannot predict or control them either (Hampe 79-81). Having agency means being perceived as acting eventfully. U RS B ÜTTNER 224 Now, let me proceed to my third question: Who endows which entity with agency and to whom is it denied for which reasons? Whoever or whatever else that has agency is out of my control. That is the reason why people claim agency for themselves but tend to grant agency only very cautiously to others. If it is inevitable, as happens fairly often, people endow other humans with agency. However, people are much more reluctant to grant agency also to non-human entities. They try to avoid it whenever possible. They sometimes might grant agency to animals but not to wind and stones; only if they cannot disavow the impression that the processes of non-living nature appear as an event. If a potential natural event of such kind breaks into human history, it is therefore very often described as an “incident” or “accident.” These concepts step in as a negative form of agency when agency is missing. Occurrences are considered incidents, to use the more neutral term, if they intervene in an action sequence instead of being a human plan or decision. For that reason, they arouse a certain uneasiness and that is why people normally dislike incidents. This uneasiness has two sources: The first one is the experience of feeling disorientated and powerless. The philosopher Michael Hampe elaborates on this: Understanding [an occurrence] as an incident is a denial and a negative experience of the fact that things are not related with each other and that nothing can be done here. Obviously, living beings want neither to be exposed to mere coincidences nor to be victims of a higher power. What they want is to influence what happens to them so that things are determined by their behavior at least a little bit. This capabilty, however, has only someone who identifies cause-effect-relations and can get involved. (Hampe 21, Trans. Büttner) The second source of people’s uneasiness is the experience of feeling morally violated and not taken seriously. Regardless of whether natural occurrences do a favor or damage, they do not indicate any reason or rationality as to why and to whom they happen. People, however, usually expect any being credited with agency to have intention. Yet, nature seems to ‘refuse’ any answer to this question about intention. Even if there is no inherent meaning in natural processes, people often are not satisfied with nature’s silence and do not cease searching for a deeper meaning. From their point of view, not reacting seems to be a reaction of nature as well. In this sense, nature evokes the impression as if it ‘remains’ completely unimpressed by the people’s desire for responses and explanations. People feel left alone with their moral feelings and these feelings of gratitude or anger and despair do not find a proper addressee in nature. Correspondingly, compensation such as a refund or revenge and punishment, which might be perceived to be able to repair the now imbalanced order, are also not appropriate for the encounters with an ‘un-acting’ nature. If nature ‘insists’ on its entire lack of morality and Nature Makes History 225 therefore ‘evades’ any responsibility (Hampe 22-24, 89-90), people do not know what to do with their moral feelings and claims resulting from how nature ‘behaved’ towards them. Now, let me come to my forth question: What are, in general, possible connections between the elements of a narration? I will answer this question in two parts. First, I will outline three common types of narratives that make it possible to elude a lack of human agency, and second, I will show how and why Kluge uses them in an uncommon way. These three types of narrative are: the in-depth-causal-analysis, the miracle tale, and the teleological narrative. In their modern standard version all three types of narrative appoint the human being as the only subject of action and disavow all powers of nature. In so doing, they save people from any uneasiness. This approach, however, is not followed by Kluge. Just like the stories of ancient times, Kluge’s stories grant agency to nature. The first type of narrative solves the problem of human agency even before the natural event happens. The basic idea is that every event comes about in a causal chain which is, in principle, infinite and branches out into the past. Hence, an in-depth-causal-analysis can always go back further, before the natural event, eventually identifying a human causer and explaining the alleged natural event as a result of his or her action’s means or effects. How far one must go back depends on the chosen scientific, legal, moral or religious interpretative framework (Koselleck 124-125). It is not surprising that such a model of explanation can become very ramified and complex (Winiwarter and Knoll 115-146). The irritation caused by a natural event makes it ‘tellable’ as an event in the first place and, in return, the telling then consumes all the potential irritation. In a perfectly coherent cause-andreaction sequence, there is no place for incidental events anymore. Things go as they always go (Hampe 91-92, 108-109, 204-203). The second type of narrative occurs instantly in the moment when the natural event happens. It uses a different set of roles than the in-depth-causalanalysis which solely employs the roles of perpetrators and victims. Instead, it tells a story about miracles. A hero’s or heroine’s miraculous deeds cut off the causal chain of events and begin a new one. Thus, their deeds can be regarded as the counterpart to the discontinuity of a natural event in terms of human action. Telling a miracle story creates “over-coherence” within the narration as a whole because one can determine its narrative motivation for every single moment, as Albrecht Koschorke explains in his Cultural Narratology (80). Heroes and heroines, one could say, perform like humanincarnated incidents. When incidents break into the ordinary routines of everyday life, heroes and heroines fight them with likewise extraordinary powers that go far beyond what humans normally can do. Both, the natural event and the hero or heroine are able to suspend the laws of nature. Heroes U RS B ÜTTNER 226 and heroines create the rules themselves and are not subject to external rules. In earlier times, they embodied the divine in the world and, in modern times, they embody abstract principles of reason, virtue, and morals. Narrative charismatization of the hero or heroine demands the display of miraculous deeds that originate solely from his or her extraordinary personal abilities instead of depending on any extrinsic precondition. Their deed must be unquestionable, and in order to do so the tale of the hero or heroine utilizes internal focalization for him or her to gain the audience’s favor (Giesen 15- 25). The third and last narrative type unfolds after the natural event that is supposed to happen incidentally. It reveals that, in fact, it does not. In order to create this effect, this third narrative type is split into two points of view: that of the victim and one that is omniscient. Thereby, what seems to be incidental from the victim’s perspective turns out to be planned on a larger scale. The unforeseen event can be explained as an effect of a limited scope of perception. God has the omniscient view; from his point of view, the course of the world which is governed by his providence is useful and just. This very idea of different viewpoints has survived secularization. That is why this narrative type still persists in modernity (Koschorke 82-84), albeit with less religious overtones. With the benefit of hindsight, a natural event can turn out to be caused by a human action that is or is not justified. A storm tide ‘explains’ why an expensive dike has to be built or, if the dike had already been built, the storm tide ‘confirms’ the failure of the intervention protecting the coast. In a teleological interpretation, the natural event is either employed as a preceding cause for an action nor does it comply with the purpose the action is aimed at. The narration motivates the natural event as a ‘prearrangement’ or ‘extension’ of human action. Narrating supposed natural events this way changes them entirely: They are neither natural nor events anymore (Hampe 27, 43, 83, 100). Kluge’s Stories In December, Kluge ties together a multiplicity of stories in his typical manner. They are similar to calendar stories, dating from December 1 to 31, but the calendar years range from the last Ice Age dated 21,999 B.C. up to the the year 2010 A.D. This composition principle develops a dense weave of possible causal relations and repetitive moments. Kluge uses it skillfully to explore leeways and aporias of the three standard narratives introduced above. His aesthetic investigation is driven by the question: Why is agency distributed the way it is in these common narratives and what could be the alternative narrative structures? Nature Makes History 227 At present, the in-depth-causal-analysis is without a doubt the most important strategy in factual story telling to ‘disable’ the natural power’s agency. That is certainly the reason why Kluge attacks the in-depth-causalanalysis so vigorously and questions nearly all of its structural features, even causality itself. In some stories, he amazes the reader by turning the normal usage of the narrative the other way round, tracing back events in human history to their natural causes. In one story, for instance, Kluge reduces world history to a bodily history when he draws the reader’s attention to one of Napoleon’s teeth which had to be extracted shortly before his death. He stylizes the tooth as a hitherto neglected precondition of the Corsican’s military success: He had had this tooth before Toulon, in Italy, in Egypt. He had hardly noticed the individual parts of his body. For years his senses had been directed outwards. His toenails, his neck muscles, yet his heart and fingers (playing their part in a division of labour, hardly felt by him when they were healthy) had accompanied him on his campaigns. […] But he had never paid attention to the tooth. (Kluge and Richter, December 38-39) In this quote, Kluge reveals the narrative arbitrariness to the reader. The narrative cuts off the causal chain at the intentional deciding agent. Yet, the chain does not originate from the Emperor’s strong will but from a tiny part of his body, the tooth. In so doing, Kluge implicitly contests that a clear distinction between culture and nature can be drawn. Kluge takes this one step further when he shows that acting and experiencing are not only irresolvably intertwined in concrete situations but also on a categorical level. He investigates this issue with two stories about weather engineering. Until today, weather is considered to be one of the most important natural influences in everyday life, nevertheless, changes can only be predicted shortly in advance. As a result, weather engineering is still the ultimate phantasm of omnipotence and the dominance of nature. Diverse enterprises in weather engineering have had only very modest success until today (Fleming, Hamilton, Büttner “Art Meteorologie,” “Meteorologie”). In the story assigned to December 4, 1941, Kluge’s narrator describes the National Socialist’s dream of bringing about the final turn at the Eastern Front with the use of weather steering: There was a huge area of high pressure over the Atlantic with its centre to the south-west of Ireland. A weak ridge extended in a north-easterly direction over Scandinavia as far as the Arctic Ocean. It separated an extensive low-pressure area over Russia. At its base cold continental Arctic air mingled with cloud masses pushing up from the south. This was the causal chain which brought about the sudden cold spell of December 1941. According to weather researcher and meteorologist Dr. Hofmeister of the Potsdam Weather Station, by applying the principle of DYNAMIC METEOROLOGY the German forces could have been warned ten days beforehand. […] U RS B ÜTTNER 228 The school of dynamic meteorology pressed for ‘an active intervention in weather conditions.’ In order for that to happen, air squadrons would, if necessary, have to bomb cloud masses to a breadth and length of several hundred miles with dry ice and carbonic acid packs. That would only make sense if one knew in advance what such an active intervention set in motion. Dynamic meteorology came too late for the battles on the Eastern Front. (Kluge and Richter, December 7-8) 5 This story is fascinating since it presents a junction into an alternate possible world at a point of the causal chain which had never before been noticed as a real option to intervene. The natural winter environment in a time of war was assumed to be a ceteris paribus condition. Dr. Hofmeister, however, does not take it for granted anymore. From the reader’s point of view, Hofmeister’s future is already in the past as the whole story is told retrospectively. The time in which Hofmeister talks about what could have been done with weather engineering at the Eastern Front is already known to today’s readers as having passed and the war known to have been lost by Germany. Furthermore, as the narrator adds later, what Hofmeister believes to be the possibilities of dynamic meteorology exceeds its real capabilities at the time by far. Even though Hofmeister did not do anything and, hence, did not change history, the important point is that he believed in his capability to act. Thereby, what retrospectively seems as a non-action turns into an action in the historical moment. Kluge shows that whether something is regarded as an action or an experience exclusively depends on the point of view. A further story provides another good example for the claim that the ascription of action or experience is not restricted to single occurrences, since there are no single occurrences. Whatever happens always affects other processes, too. Hence controlling one process always exerts non-intentional influence on many other processes. Kluge demonstrates this with a story that takes place at the World Climate Congress 2009 in Copenhagen. Surprisingly, an agreement on saving the world’s climate has come within reach. But these hopes are dashed: [T]he representatives of the UN Climate Council shift their hopes. In their circles they say that the LITTLE ICE AGE which Planet Earth is still experiencing holds a quantity of cooling reserve, so that the date of the consequences of the warming caused by carbon dioxide and methane has been further put back. Yesterday’s assumptions have been revised. (Kluge and Richter, December 49) The story continues: Giovanni di Lorenzo, the German weekly’s Die Zeit editor-in-chief, draws a parallel between the World Climate Summit failure and The Hague’s Peace Conference fiasco in 1907 in his lead article. 5 Cf. Kluge and Richter (1). The same narrative strategy can be found in the December 1 story. It tells about a weapon to fight weather in the shape of winter-proof tanks modeled after a mammoth’s physiology. Nature Makes History 229 The story discloses the question of whether acting and experiencing is directed by strategic attributions. If the actual crisis is enduring, then there is no reason to panic and not to act can be the appropriate way to act. The story furthermore reveals how the effect of in-depth-causal-analysis changes from large to much smaller scales. In addition, it shows how the application of different scales is determined by the choice of aspect of a larger topic. Kluge’s text illustrates this in two ways: On the one hand, anthropogenic climate change is shown to be a relatively recent development in geo-chronological climate history. On the other, Di Lorenzo’s comparison defies being read as a simple association because it raises the question of long-term cyclical repetitions in history and its causes. 6 Up to this point, I discussed how nature’s non-action can be declared as an action (i.e. an intentional use of its capacity to act). However, Kluge radicalizes this idea by portraying any kind of action as non-action. For this purpose, he discusses three ‘evolutionary’ approaches to history in his texts. In one story attributed to December, 8, 1941, he portrays Horst Becker, a historian who employs Darwin’s theory to analyze fascist politics with regard to “short-time evolutions.” His question is this: How does the ONE CERTAINTY which leads to catastrophe develop from a muddled structure of uncertainties, while other uncertainties (‘possibilities’) simply dissipate? Boecker is working on a ‘Biological History of Evil.’ (Kluge and Richter, December 20) This story is followed by Kluge’s narrator reporting about two legal scholars in December 1941, discussing the following question: Has “freedom […] evolve[d] in such a way that it would better flourish in the REALM OF EVIL” or has “THE EVOLUTIONARY OPPORTUNITY OF EVIL […] not been great [enough yet]” (Kluge and Richter, December 23)? Eventually the reader learns that a biochemist who owns a transcript of the legal scholars’ dialogue today has calculated on his computer the capacity of Good and Bad under conditions of freedom. He comes to the conclusion that with an increasing degree of human or divine capacity for decision-making, then for lack of averageness, evil falls statistically behind (because arrogant, because extremely taxing, because unsociable). (Kluge and Richter, December 24) The biochemist’s evolutionary narrative provokes the human selfunderstanding of having a free will and the ability to decide morally by describing human history as if it was a natural process. Regrettably, Kluge only tells about evolutionary accounts on history but does not tell such an evolutionary history himself. Nevertheless, it is easy to imagine the features 6 Cf. Kluge and Richter (84). In his December 29, 21.999 B.C. story, Kluge uses the change of scale and the repetition of structure in a similar, complimentary fashion. The Ice Age’s climate is reinterpreted only to become a daily weather forecast. U RS B ÜTTNER 230 of such a story. If human history was a natural process, there would be no intentional agents, and hence, no space for moral critique anymore. Since no one was able to act in a different way than he or she actually did, actions could not be traced back to intentional decisions anymore. One would not call them actions anymore, since they would have been completely determined by laws of nature. Hence, the moral categories ‘good’ and ‘evil’ could not be applied properly to the ‘actors’ any longer. They would only reflect what the historian or scientist understands as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ developments of history. Kluge has developed his critique of the in-depth-causal-analysis considerably far with this narrative about evolution. However, he surpasses the critique of the inherent moments of its structure and even deconstructs causality itself. This critique is more fundamental, since it questions the precondition of the whole narrative’s structure. In one story, Kluge shows that the cause-effect-relation often cannot be sharply distinguished from mere coincidence. On the calendar date of December 19, 2009, Kluge’s narrator notes: Twelve assistants of the US president, two budget chiefs and the White House national security advisor are preparing the largest budget in the history of the Pentagon, six hundred and thirty-six billion dollars. It must be ready for the following day. DURING THE NIGHT THE FIRST SNOW FALLS IN WASHINGTON. At 9 p.m. the president goes over to his family to eat supper. The security advisor leaves at midnight. The others work until five in the morning. When they come out of the White House by a side exit, the surroundings are snow-covered. It is a pleasure to step in the fresh snow. (Kluge and Richter, December 54) At first glance it seems that this short passage reports nothing unusual. It is part of the job of high officers in the US-administration to work through the night sometimes if an important law or act must be prepared for the next day. Yet, the reader will assume that if this story did not tell anything worth telling, Kluge would not have included it. By way of the typography the text gives a hint to the reader to draw closer attention the the details. The reason that makes the story worth telling must reside in the many details it mentions. There are two very remarkable details: First, the story deals with the greatest defense budget in the US history and second, the first snow has fallen, which is in all caps. The reader is then deceivingly encouraged to search for a causal relation between these two occurrences. However, as far as it is humanly possible to judge, there is no solution for this enigma. It is a feint Kluge strategically places in order to reveal to the reader that it is an unreasonable desire to find a relationship between unrelated occurrences and to frustrate this desire. Now that I have presented Kluge’s critique of the in-depth-causalanalysis, I will explore how Kluge engages with the other two narrative Nature Makes History 231 types. The complexity of Kluge’s critique again needs to be unfolded in several steps. However, in this second part, I will proceed much faster (without wanting to create the impression that this part is any less important). What Kluge does with the other two narrative types can be summarized in one essential claim, making it much easier to describe the structure of his argument. Kluge uses the miracle tale and the teleological explanation in a decisively different way than the in-depth-causal-analysis in the December collection. Today, miracles and final causes usually only play a marginal role in our science-based modern world. Kluge, however, discovers the particular appeal of these narrative types in their capabilities of telling alternate stories beyond causal explanations. They provide the possibility of restituting nature as an agentive force. In these narrative forms, nature can appear as a personification or as a principle. Thus it, or rather ‘he’ or ‘she,’ can become an equal counterpart to the human subject. I want to discuss only one miracle tale as an example that is very similar to several other stories in December. 7 In the text associated with the date of December 12, 2009, Kluge mentions that a river has undermined a railroad bridge in New Zealand. The bridge collapses and a fully loaded train falls several meters down. Afterwards the following dialogue takes place: - You exclude the possibility of sabotage? - Who would have carried it out? - You spoke earlier of the Wangachu River being ‘animated.’ The souls of Maori warriors whom the British colonial forces had killed diverted the masses of water towards the bridge piers. - People say that. To me it sounds fantastic. - But it’s noticeable that the accident occurred right in the middle of Advent, in the run-up to the most important Christian festival. What made the heathen souls think of that? - One can’t construct a conspiracy theory around every odd event. - But there’s no need for a conspiracy theory. - Why not? - Because souls living in the water have no need of a conspiracy. (Kluge and Richter, December 35-36) 7 Cf. Kluge and Richter, December 41-42, 76-78 and 86-90. The stories of December, 14, 2009, December, 26, 2004, and December, 30, 1940 follow the same pattern. The first story speculates whether the cosmological theory that a meteor’s impact brought life to planet earth does not prove false. The earth might have been already populated before the meteor collided into the planet and the impact only decimated a number of creatures. Hence, the story concludes, the impact can be identified with the myth of the giant Ymir, who was struck dead by a ‘fellow.’ The second story discusses whether the mud flow on Christmas in South America should be understood as the eradicated Indians’ latest revenge. And in the last story, two physicists who had fled from the National Socialists argue about ‘winter’s will’ and ‘summer’s will,’ whose interaction produces Good and Evil in history. U RS B ÜTTNER 232 Right at the beginning of this dialogue the interlocutors exclude man-madcauses. Instead of searching for someone responsible for the accident, one of the dialogue partners offers an interpretation deeply perplexing the other one. The first speaker insists confidently on her heterodox interpretation and defends it against external labels like “fantastic” or “conspiracy theory.” Her interpretation relies exclusively on the inherent logic and explanatory power of the story. She therefore employs the idea of a cosmological system of revenge not distinguishing between human and non-human agents. Even if Kluge introduces such ‘animistic’ explanatory patterns only as quotes, the frequency in which he does so indicates that he sees potential therein for unsettling common expectations. The explanation comprises subtle irony: Nature in the shape of the animated river turns out to be a figurative ‘hero’ being able to break the ‘laws of nature.’ Finally, I also want to turn the attention to Kluge’s use of teleological narratives. As said before, Kluge revises the in-depth-causal-analysis also by countering it with the teleological narrative structure to produce an alternative. In the text assigned to the date of December 3, 1931, Kluge describes a near-accident. 8 Hitler’s tipsy chauffeur almost collides with another car on an icy road. The text confronts the technical-rational explanation, “[o]nly another 15-16 inches and the two powerful vehicles would have collided on the icy surface with fatal consequences,” with this short dialogue: “It’s only thanks to Providence that the vehicles missed one another. / - What do you mean by Providence? ” (Kluge and Richter, December 5). In the same way like in the story about dynamic meteorology a non-event opens up another possible course of history. The implicit question in Kluge’s story is whether or not fascism could have been prevented in Germany, if Hitler had died in this car crash. Yet, the story goes beyond this question. Beyond any causal explanation the question about meaning arises, even if it remains open. Why did the icy surface in combination with the very physiologically described drunkenness not cause the accident? By referring to providence a classical religious answer is offered and immediately transformed ironically. The text does not pursue the idea of providence any further and the interjection remains a strange foreign body in a very technical description. Furthermore, todays reader would perhaps accept providence as an explanation if Hitler had died, but not if he had survived the crash. 8 There are more stories in December where Kluge experiments with this third type of narrative. None of them, however, deals with natural phenomena. Nature Makes History 233 Conclusion With his photographs in December, Richter explores the human desire to make sense of natural occurrences by employing narrative form. He does not favor a particular interpretation of nature but discloses that every interpretation encounters particular obstacles. To bypass these obstacles, each interpretation produces its own shortcomings. They are inevitable. Therefore, with his artworks, Richter wants to make an argument for a plurality of approaches towards nature. Kluge supports Richter’s argument with his stories. He pursues the investigation of different interpretations’ shortcomings. With his stories, Kluge demonstrates that not only the distribution of the categories ‘natural’ and ‘human’ is negotiable, but also the description of any occurrence as ‘action’ or ‘experience.’ How the decisions are made depends on the narrator’s particular interests. The structure of the in-depth-causal-analyses permits only one single agency, and humans claim this agency for themselves with good reason. Hence, employing the in-depth-causal-analysis prescribes the human domination over and objectivization of nature. This kind of narration is grounded in the predominant natural imaginary of the Western world. Kluge in contrast valorizes the other two narrative types, the miracle tale and the teleologic explanation. These two narrative types’ structures can, but do not necessarily have to, permit more than one agency. Since they are able to consider nature to be an agentive force as well, they allow a human encounter with nature that is of equal footing. Certainly, Kluge does not want to suggest to modern people an animistic, magical or providential attitude towards nature like in the ancient world. He does not want to substitute the indepth-causal-analysis with the other two types of narrative. Rather, his usage of these two narrative types is playful and ironically breached. However, he wants to bring back into play these narrative types as alternative options. Furthermore, he would not claim being able to alter the collectively shared natural imaginary of Western societies alter with one single artwork. This was too ambitious. Nevertheless, Richter and Kluge deconstruct the predominant modern view of nature and collect strategies to approach a moral framework of a human-nature-relation based on mutual and just exchange. Only a humble human subject who knows and acknow-ledges his or her agency’s limits will not extinguish nature, and finally himor herself. Works Cited Birkmeyer, Jens. “Zeitzonen des Wirklichen: Maßgebliche Momente in Alexander Kluges Erzählsammlung Dezember.” Text + Kritik 85/ 86 (2011): 66-75. U RS B ÜTTNER 234 Büttner, Urs. “Art Meteorologie.” Literatur und Wissen: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Ed. Roland Borgards et. al. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2013. 96-100. ---. “Meteorologie.” Futorologien: Ordnungen des Zukunftswissens. Ed. Benjamin Bühler and Stefan Willer. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2016. 405-416. ---. “Naturbewältigung, ‘Natural Imaginaries’ und die Möglichkeiten der Kunst: Ein theoretischer Versuch zur Ökologie des Wissens.” Wind und Wetter: Kultur - Wissen - Ästhetik. Ed. Georg Braungart and Urs Büttner. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2017. 15-28. Duve, Thierry de. “Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox.” October 5 (Summer 1978): 113-125. Fleming, James Roger. Fixing the Sky: Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. Giesen, Bernhard. Triumph and Trauma. Boulder, London: Paradigm Publishers, 2004. Hamilton, Clive. Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering. New Haven/ London: Yale UP, 2013. Hampe, Michael. Die Macht des Zufalls: Vom Umgang mit dem Risiko. Berlin: wjs, 2007. Kluge, Alexander. “Gerhard Richter zeigt den Winter.” Rheinische Post. Rheinische Post, 21 October 2010. <http: / / www.kluge-alexander.de/ aktuelles/ details/ artikel/ gerhard-richter-zeigt-den-winter.html>. Web. 4 November 2016. Kluge, Alexander and Gerhard Richer. December: 39 Stories and 39 Pictures, Trans. Martin Chalmers. London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull, 2012. ---. Nachricht von ruhigen Momenten: 89 Geschichten und 64 Bilder. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013. Koschorke, Albrecht. Wahrheit und Erfindung: Grundzüge einer Allgemeinen Erzähltheorie. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2012. Koselleck, Reinhart. “Chance as a Motivational Trace in Historical Writing.” Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Trans. and introd. Keith Tribe. New York, Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2004. 115-127. Riskin, Jessica. The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Schmid, Wolf. Narratology: An Introduction. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2010. Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2004. Winiwarter, Verena and Martin Knoll. Umweltgeschichte: Eine Einführung. Köln, Wien: Boehlau, 2007. IV. P OSTCOLONIAL R ESPONSES