Abstract
This chapter proposes a reading of Peter Handke’s 1979 novel Langsame Heimkehr [Slow Homecoming] through the lens of new nature writing. With its origins in the United States as well as Great Britain, new nature writing expands the genre’s aesthetic vocabulary to include fiction as well as non-fiction, moving beyond the solitary individual exploring his subjectivity in a pristine natural setting. In the German-language context in particular, New Nature Writing also reflects on the connections between nature and nationalism and the legacies of the Nazi period. Focusing on the first part of Langsame Heimkehr, this chapter analyses Handke’s literary engagement with nature in Alaska, in particular the earth formations created by the Yukon River. With a German geologist as protagonist, Handke, who visited Alaska prior to writing his novel, integrates scientific language and thinking into his text’s deep engagement with a specific landscape far from Germany. The novel’s depiction of the relationship between humans and nature anticipates the aims of new nature writing.
…allein die Natur gelten zu lassen im Erzählen, allein die Natur und das ursprüngliche Ich. […to allow nature alone to appear in the telling, nature and the original I.]
—Peter Handke, Aber ich lebe nur von den Zwischenräumen (Handke 1990, 26)
The best new nature writing is also an experiment in forms: the field report, the essay, the memoir, the travelogue.
—Jason Cowley, Granta (Cowley 2008, 10)
Translated from the German by Jameson Kismet Bell.
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Notes
- 1.
See Caroline Schaumann’s chapter in this collection.
- 2.
See Simon Probst’s chapter in this volume and Smith’s chapter on “Edgelands” (Smith 2017).
- 3.
See Helga Druxes’ essay on Esther Kinsky’s Am Fluß, which is not so much about nature writing as the connection between Kinsky’s description of the landscapes and her memories of the Holocaust (Druxes 2018). In addition, the British ecocritic Axel Goodbody attributes the delayed establishment of ecocriticism in Germany to the “reluctance” of German academics to deal with a research area tainted by racism and nationalism (Goodbody 2007, 20).
- 4.
Hofer’s chapter analyzes Handke’s journal Am Felsfenster morgens (1998). His concept of ecological poetics defines a broader frame than nature writing.
- 5.
The argument can already be found in Bertolt Brecht’s poem “An die Nachgeborenen” [“To Those Born Later”] (1939), which states that under the conditions like those in National Socialism, “A conversation about a tree is almost a crime” (see also Detering 2015, 205–218).
- 6.
Handke traveled repeatedly to the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, the first trip for the meeting of Gruppe 47 in Princeton in 1966. In the spring of 1971 he completed a reading tour and wrote Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied [Short Letter, Long Farewell], a travel novel based on the model of the road movie, in which the American filmmaker John Ford plays an important role. Handke traveled to Alaska twice in quick succession, in the winter of 1977–1978, and once more in the fall of 1978. The second trip is documented in his notebooks (Handke, 2015). Slow Homecoming contains clear references to the Nazi era in sentences like “die Völkermörder seines Jahrhunderts als Ahnherren”(Handke 1984, 103) (“the mass murderers of his century as ancestors”) Handke 2009, 65) or “in der Epoche der Gewaltherrschaft … ‘keinen Widerstand geleistet zu haben’” (“‘failing to offer resistance’ in the days of government by violence”) (Handke 1984, 140; 2009, 91).
- 7.
All further page numbers refer to Ralph Manheim’s (2009) translation of Langsame Heimkehr (Slow Homecoming). Hereafter SH in the text. The volume also includes translations of Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire [The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire] and Kindergeschichte [Child Story]. All references to the German original LH.
- 8.
In Aber ich lebe nur von den Zwischenräumen, Handke says that an airplane can be described “but not narrated” (Handke 1990, 120).
- 9.
“Ich habe ja alle Örtlichkeiten am Anfang ihrer Namen entledigt; ich habe ja nie geschrieben: ‘Alaska’ oder ‘Yukon’ oder ‘Vereinigte Staaten’ oder ‘San Francisco’ oder ‘Encorage’ [sic]” (“At the beginning, I stripped all localities of their names. I never wrote ‘Alaska’ or ‘Yukon’ or ‘United States’ or ‘Encorage’ [sic]”] (Handke 1990, 139).
- 10.
See Klaus Kastberger’s research on Handke’s preoccupation with geological terminology (Kastberger 2018, 5).
- 11.
For more on the theme of double perspectives in air and earth spaces, see Honold (2017, 275–276).
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Gerstenberger, K. (2024). The Representation of Alaska in Peter Handke’s Slow Homecoming (1979) through the Lens of Nature Writing. In: Dürbeck, G., Kanz, C. (eds) German-Language Nature Writing from Eighteenth Century to the Present. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50910-0_12
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