Project Outline

Focusing on the neglected area of plant representation in German art and literature of the early 20^th century, my PhD research will fill a crucial gap in scholarship on German modernism. In particular, by examining modernity’s pervasive preoccupation with the “life” of plants, its literary description and its visualization in photography and film, this project will revise our understanding of the way in which modern artists and writers engaged with nature in an era marked by industrial technology and mechanical media. Now entering my 3^rd year in the doctoral program in German Studies at McGill, Montréal, I believe that my preparation puts me in an excellent position to realize this project, for which I have already established a tentative outline with my supervisor, Professor Michael Cowan.

Previous research on the cultural contexts of German Modernism has largely concentrated on the social changes that marked the early decades of the 20^th century, such as urbanization and industrialization. Where scholars have examined modernism’s relation to discourses on nature, this has generally occurred as part of an effort to trace the genealogy of Nazism and its “blood and soil” ideology into earlier decades. However, less attention has been given to the broader appeal of “biocentricism” in art, literature and film of the early 20^th century. While this tendency expressed a longing for a deeper connection to nature, it also exposed how developments in technology and science had enabled easier access to nature’s wonders. Before and during this period—and in the wake of Nietzschean vitalism—authors as diverse as Ernst Haeckel, Ludwig Klages, Oswald Spengler Raoul Francé and Hans Prinzhorn debated, discussed and developed the connection between biology and the artist’s relationship to the subject matter. Analyzing the links between these ideas and representations of plant life in visual art, film, and literature, this dissertation will show how such debates informed artistic production from turn-of-the-century aestheticism through the expressionism of the 1910s to the culture of “New Objectivity” in the 1920s.

Modernity’s preoccupation with plant life was largely influenced by the new possibilities of visualizing organic processes that arose with the spread of photography and film. Thus one can find a wealth of films from cinema’s early decades that present plants from a documentary or scientific stance or use plants as a key part of the narrative. The former films tend to either seek to inform the public (On the Development and Structure of Plants (1932)), or sensationalize the plant world (Love life of Plants (1931), Meat-eating Plants (1922)) by personifying plants or choosing exotic plants as their subject matter. The medium of film allows for plants to be represented in a way that emphasizes their organic qualities such as seeing the plant transform from a seedling to a full-grown plant through time lapse photography. While mimicking life, film also imposes a mechanical order on plants that at the most basic level measures growth at frames per second. Early films involving plants as a narrative element, on the other hand, often reacted to modernity by presenting nature as the other and a threat. In one group of films – e.g., Nelly The Book of a Flowergirl (1914) and The Flowergirl from Potsdamer Square. (1924/5) – women on the city street commodify nature as they sell flowers to support themselves. Nature and plants as they appear in the city can only be indirectly relayed as a commodity and by means of the marginalized members of society. The trope of the Blumenmädchen (flowergirl) stretches across national borders, with the most famous example in Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (1931). Also within the city setting, films such as Alraune(1928), the mythical story of woman grown from a mandrake root, take up the common association of women and nature while staging attempts to dominate both by means of scientific progress.

These films set in the city found their counterpart in the mountain films – a genre particularly popular in 1920s Germany – which were filmed outside of the city in the “wild” and promised to provide an unmediated access to scenes of nature. However, as in the city films, the representation of nature is complicated by its alliance with the feminine figure, who is often represented both as a quasi-natural force infiltrating society from without and a metaphor for technology’s hypnotic force. An example can be found in Arnold Fanck’s Der heilige Berg (1926), in which the female protagonist Diotima harnesses the forces of nature through expressionist dances such as her “Dance to the Sea” and “Alpine Blossoms”, with which she seduces the male protagonist. Part of this seduction is attributed to the filmic form of her dances. Like the flower sellers in the city, the main female character, Diotima, “represents its [nature] elemental force in a mediated access to alpine glory for city audiences” (Nenno 204). The dance Diotima performs recalls the presentation of woman and nature in earlier films such as Pathé’s LebendeBlumen (1907), where flowers destroyed by a spurned lover turn into women dancing. As compared to the documentary films on plants, these films return to the theme of woman as privy to the natural world, who both mediates nature via a powerful technology and disrupts masculine rationality.

Like cinema, still photography in the 1920s also showed a particular preoccupation with plants. Especially important, for my project, is the movement known as “Bioromanticism”, which drew its inspiration from images used for scientific ends to express biocentric ideas about organic life or the creative and destructive forces of nature (Botar ii). German photographers such as Karl Blossfeldt, Ernst Fuhrmann, Albert Renger-Patzsch and Lazslo Moholy-Nagy blended the conventions of science photography with a valorization of life. Blossfeldt’s photographs - which drew the interest of Walter Benjamin and the surrealists—created abstractions of natural forms that were later compared in articles and exhibitions to architecture and are more recently featured in websites that present his work as an amalgamation of art and science. Through his apprenticeship to Moritz Meurer, Blossfeldt was influenced strongly by the decorative artist’s Jugendstil ideals, which required decorative designs to be based on the, “essential urforms of nature” (Poggi 398).

But despite the profound changes in plant representation introduced by photography and film, such media representations drew on a long tradition of German nature poetry, proceeding from Goethe and Romanticism and extending well into the 20^th century, even as they posed new challenges to the representational conventions of that tradition. Published in 1790, Goethe’s “The Metamorphosis of Plants” constituted a foundational and programmatic statement on plant life, and one that profoundly informed all subsequent approaches to plant representation in Germany. Addressed to a lover while walking in a garden, this didactic poem presents nature as a unity manifested in its parts—a whole that is evident through the plant’s organic growth. But this claim to access a holistic world of vegetable cycles would become increasingly problematic in the modernist era. By 1900, poets such as Hugo von Hoffmannsthal and Rainer Maria Rilke would grapple with a growing sense of a fissure between humans and nature caused by the encroachment of technology, mass media and the scientific gaze on daily experience. Their poetry expresses this failure to mediate between nature and humans within the larger discourses of history and science (Powell 70). When these poets evoke tropes from the Romantic cult of nature, as in Rilke’s poem Blaue Hortensie (with its reference to the key romantic symbol of the blue flower), such evocations occur precisely in order reveal the loss of the ideal union between nature and the artist. Neither Romantic natural history nor Newtonian science offer a satisfactory solution in world where humans can no longer understand themselves to be an integral part of it as their experience of nature becomes increasingly mediated by technology.

It is precisely out of this perceived distance between a newly technologized gaze and nature that biocentric notions of art and aesthetics emerge in the early 20^th century. While there exists a great deal of scholarship focusing on nature in romantic thought and literature, the widespread appeal of biocentrism in modernist art and culture has been overshadowed by studies of modernism’s relation to the city, industrial labor and new technologies. My dissertation will help to fill this scholarly gap by investigating how the seemingly primal image of life itself - organic growth - was subjected both to the interactions between different media and to changes in our understanding of human culture and its relation to nature. At a time marked by an increasing awareness of the threats to ecology, such an investigation is not only of literary or cultural-historical interest, but also has relevance for the contemporary world.