Abstract
Historical studies in search of nature writing in German literature occasionally mention the Early Enlightenment poet Barthold Heinrich Brockes, who presents natural phenomena as manifestations of a purposive order that proves the benevolent design of an almighty Creator. Nature writing also deals with the experience of ethically significant plays of forces that link inner and external nature in dynamics beyond human reach, but it can no longer read nature as a scripture, and it prefers immersion in to a contemplation of nature. This study compares these modes of writing in more detail: Both belong to the genealogy of ethical demands to surpass the limits of instrumental thought through bodily explorations of nature. But whilst Brockes complements instrumental thought with exercitations about the theonomous foundations of human autonomy, nature writing rejects the estrangement of instrumental reason from our bodily belonging to an unwieldy nature, and it thus breaks with the modern aesthetico-religious project to reconcile nature and human needs.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
All translations in this article are mine.
- 2.
Schröder associates Brockes with the Baroque; Goodbody mentions physico-theological nature poetry but does not explore its relation to the comparatively weak tradition of nature writing in German literature.
- 3.
The Enlightenment teases out and hierarchises the specific contributions of each sense to our knowledge of the world; usually, the distance senses of sight and hearing are ranked at the top (Utz 1990, p. 8). Brockes’ “Conclusion” about the senses [“Beschluß”] also covers sight and hearing first (Brockes 1740a, p. 989). This is the only translation in which I have tried to capture the rhyme-scheme and metre of the original.
- 4.
As a simile for floral scents, the smell of ambergris is positive for Brockes; see his “Graceful Objects of the Senses in Spring” [“Anmuthige Vorwürfe der Sinnen im Frühling”] (Brockes 1739, p. 11).
- 5.
Cf. Brockes’ poem “Anmuthige Vorwürfe der Sinnen im Frühling”: “Smell enlivens mindful souls, / With very ambergris-like scent, / Of part white and part ruddy tree bloom, / And adorns at once the buoyant air. / They are, through the soft blowing of the winds, / soon gently lifted and soon gently raised, / And, as a filled censer, gently / Swung gracefully to and fro.” [“Durch riechen erquicket ein achtsam Gemüthe, / Mit einem recht ambrirten Duft, / Der Bäume theils weisse, theils röthliche Blüthe, / Und ziert zugleich die heitre Luft. / Sie werden, durch liebliches Blasen der Winde, / Bald sanft erhöht, bald sanft gesenkt, / Und als ein gefülletes Rauchfaß gelinde, / Voll Anmuth, hin und her geschwenkt.”] (Brockes 1739, p. 11).
- 6.
In his poem “Harmony of Smell” [“Harmonie des Geruchs”], Brockes makes a similar point when he praises the synergies of the refreshingly balsamic scent of roses with the spice-like and soothing orange-tree blossom as the source of a pleasure which well-guided thought can easily recognise as a gift from God (Brockes 1740b, pp. 112–113).
- 7.
See, for example, the poem “The Garden” [“Der Garten”]: “If one beholds fruit-bearing trees, … / Is not the smallest branch an ample bunch of flowers? / And does their plenty not exhale the strongest musk? / They spice with their so pleasant scent, / So full of ambergris and civet, / The copious and tepid air, / So that their balmy powers properly affect our heart.” [“Betrachtet man die Obst-Bäum’, … / Ist nicht der kleinste Zweig ein grosser Bluhmen-Strauß? / Haucht ihre Menge nicht den stärksten Bisam aus? / Sie würzen durch so angeneme Düfte, / Die voller Amber und Ziebeth, / Die ausgespannten lauen Lüfte, / Daß ihre Balsam-Kraft uns recht ans Herze geht.”] (Brockes 1724, pp. 156–157).
- 8.
Brockes varies the Christian smell symbolism of St Paul with a motif from the Old Testament which evokes a direct relation of human beings to God, without Christ as a mediator. Brockes’ tendency to marginalise Christ (Kemper 1991, pp. 72–73) is thus also evident from his choice of motifs.
- 9.
“It takes on the form that characterises lilies; only that it is crimson, whilst the latter are silvery-white” [“Sie nimmt die Gestalt an, die Lilien eigen ist; nur ist sie purpurfarben, jene aber sind silberweiß.”] (P. Ovidius Naso 2015, pp. 536–537).
- 10.
Brockes’ poetic travel into extraterrestrial space serves a different purpose; it compensates for the heliocentric shock, which expelled humanity from its assumed position at the spatial centre of the universe (Kemper 1991, pp. 57–61).
- 11.
Brockes also expects this from poetry (Brockes 2012, p. 25).
- 12.
The sense that something is amiss in modern views on the world has given rise to debates between theology and philosophy; from the latter’s point of view, “Modern science forced philosophical reason that had become self-critical to part with metaphysical constructs of nature and history as a whole.” [“Die moderne Wissenschaft hat die selbstkritisch gewordene philosophische Vernunft zum Abschied von den metaphysischen Konstruktionen des Ganzen aus Natur und Geschichte genötigt.”] (Habermas 2008, p. 27). Habermas’ plea to consider the relation of post-metaphysical thought to religion with a view to “the common origin of philosophy and religion in the revolution of world-views during the Axial Age” [“den gemeinsamen Ursprung von Philosophie und Religion aus der Weltbildrevolution der Achsenzeit”] (Habermas 2008, p. 28) does, of course, not aim in the same direction as nature writing.
References
Alt, Peter André. 1994. Tragödie der Aufklärung. Tübingen and Basel: Francke.
Brockes, Barthold Heinrich. 1724. Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott, bestehend in Physicalisch- und Moralischen Gedichten. Vol. 1. Hamburg: Joh. Christoph Kißner.
Brockes, Barthold Heinrich. 1739. Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott, bestehend in Physicalisch- und Moralischen Gedichten. Vol. 6. Hamburg: Christian Herold.
Brockes, Barthold Heinrich. 1740a. Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott, bestehend in Physikalisch- und Moralischen Gedichten, Mit Musicalischen Compositionen begleitet Von Johann Caspar Bachofen. Zürich: Johann Heinrich Bürckli.
Brockes, Barthold Heinrich. 1740b. Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott, bestehend in Physicalisch- und Moralischen Gedichten. Vol. 5. Hamburg: Conrad König.
Brockes, Barthold Heinrich. 1748. Land-Leben in Ritzebüttel, als des Irdischen Vergnügens in Gott Siebender Theil. Hamburg: Christian Herold.
Brockes, Barthold Heinrich. 2012. Selbstbiographie—Verdeutschter Bethlehemitischer Kindermord—Gelegenheitsgedichte—Aufsätze. Göttingen: Wallstein.
Fischer, Ludwig. 2019. Natur im Sinn: Naturwahrnehmung und Literatur. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz.
Frick, Werner. 1988. Providenz und Kontingenz: Untersuchungen zur Schicksalssemantik im deutschen und europäischen Roman des 17. u. 18. Jahrhunderts. Vol. 2. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Goldstein, Jürgen. 2018. Nature Writing: Die Natur in den Erscheinungsräumen der Sprache. Dritte Natur 1: 101–113.
Goodbody, Axel H. 2007. Nature in German Culture: The role of writers in environmental debate. In Nature, Technology and Cultural Change in Twentieth-Century German Literature: The Challenge of Ecocriticism, ed Axel H. Goodbody, 3–43. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Habermas, Jürgen. 2008. Ein Bewußtsein von dem, was fehlt. In Ein Bewußtsein von dem, was fehlt: Eine Diskussion mit Jürgen Habermas, ed. Michael Reder and Josef Schmidt, 26–36. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Kemper, Hans-Georg. 1988. Barock-Mystik. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Kemper, Hans-Georg. 1991. Frühaufklärung. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Muchembled, Robert. 2020. Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times. Cambridge: Polity.
Naso, P. Ovidius. 2015. Metamorphosen. Lateinisch / Deutsch. Trans. Michael von Albrecht Stuttgart: Reclam.
Schröder, Simone. 2017. Turning nature into essays: The epistemological and poetic function of the nature essay. PhD diss. University of Bath.
Schröder, Simone. 2018. Deskription, Introspektion, Reflexion: Der Naturessay als ökologisches Genre in der deutschsprachigen Literatur seit 1800. In Ökologische Genres. Naturästhetik—Umweltethik—Wissenspoetik, ed. Evi Zemanek, 337–353. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Silesius, Angelus. 2000. Cherubinischer Wandersmann. Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Louise Gnädinger. Stuttgart: Reclam.
Utz, Peter. 1990. Das Auge und das Ohr im Text: Literarische Sinneswahrnehmung in der Goethezeit. Munich: Fink.
Waldenfels, Berhard. 1985. In den Netzen der Lebenswelt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Wieland, Christoph Martin. 1967. Briefe an einen jungen Dichter. In Werke, ed. Fritz Martini and Hans Werner Seiffert, vol. 3, 449–466. Munich: Hanser.
Wieland, Christoph Martin. 1984. Geschichte der Abderiten. Stuttgart: Reclam.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Krause, F. (2024). Barthold Heinrich Brockes and 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_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50910-0_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-50909-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-50910-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)