Telling Deep Time: Geologic Narration in German Fiction since 1945

Abstract

In Telling Deep Time: Geologic Narration and German Fiction after 1945, I examine works of German-language fiction that bring the deep past to life in narrative dimensions to answer the question of how meaningful stories can be told that span both human history and natural history of the deep past, navigating the enormous temporal differences that separate them. The central works for this investigation are Max Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (Man in the Holocene, 1979), Peter Handke’s Langsame Heimkehr (Slow Homecoming, 1979), and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Heimsuchung (Visitation, 2008). All three authors treat the nonhuman environment as a dynamic entity whose ability to make meaning comes into existence through narrative. I situate literary practices within the timescale of geologic change by combining narrative theory with the new interpretive strategies of material ecocriticism to look at the discursive and physical forces that construct the deep past. Responding to current debates surrounding the concept of the Anthropocene, I consider how meaningful stories are told that span both human history and natural history, and how authors bring the deep past to life in narrative dimensions.