What the German Romantics Can Teach Us About Sustainability

Against the present-day backdrop of growing climate anxiety, Meryem Deniz draws inspiration from concepts that are more than 200 years old.

As Deniz sees it, the great minds of German Romanticism—names like Goethe, Novalis, Schelling, Hölderlin, Jean Paul, and Humboldt—are in many ways the often-uncredited pioneers for how we think about the environment and sustainability today. Their work in the late 18th and early 19th century underpins her multidisciplinary approach to considering distinctly 21st-century challenges.

"I'm trying to bridge the natural sciences with the humanities in my work and my teaching," says Deniz, who arrived at Dartmouth last year as an assistant professor in the Department of German Studies. "German Romanticism already engaged with topics like nature, agency, and the human-nonhuman relationship from an interdisciplinary perspective. The relationship is there, I just want to bring it into the foreground."

That expertise, in addition to her focus on new materialisms, sound studies, contemporary transnational literature, and migration studies, informs her teaching across a wide range of subject matter, from German language classes of all levels to courses taught in English.

"What distinguishes Professor Deniz's research and teaching is her ability to move freely between centuries," says associate professor Yuliya Komska, chair of the Department of German Studies. "Her scholarship not only gives environmental humanities a stronger foothold in the department, it also builds bridges between environmental humanities and such vast and important areas of research as migration studies and sound studies. What she does makes clear to our students the importance of interdisciplinary thinking and the inseparability of these topics in life—especially today."

Old ideas, new applications

In her dissertation, Deniz focused on the Romantics' recuperation of an ancient term, "ether," as a "universal fluid medium" integral to understanding the less-understood workings of the human mind, aesthetics, and nonhuman entities.

"Only after I finished my first drafts did I come to realize that the Romantics' sometimes obscure ideas about elemental and material thinking around this concept could be made more legible through new materialist and ecocritical terminologies such as 'agency,' 'entanglement,' 'intra-action,' and 'fluidity,'" Deniz says. At this point, her interest in disparate German literary traditions—Romanticism and contemporary transnational literature and culture—began to merge.

In a vein of scholarship that can be dense with key terms that can seem obscure, Deniz illuminates insights about the agency of matter.

"When we think of agency, we tend to associate it with humans and living organisms," she says. "But when we think about non-living beings such as the weather and water, they have an effect or impact on our lives. The weather affects our lives immensely when it comes to climate change. Air pollution affects us. It has its agency. Wildfires are not living organisms, but they impact nature and the environment that humans, animals, and plants inhabit."

In this context, agency is understood as the ability to affect other things rather than the more human-centric ideas of willpower or control that are associated with consciousness. This is where the other legacy of German Romantics, who are usually considered 'subjectivists,' becomes incredibly important, Deniz says.

"German Romantics, in my opinion, saw this subtlety. They realized that agency is not unique to human beings or living organisms, but it is also a feature of the non-living," she explains. "In that sense, I find their experimental thinking and imagination about human-nonhuman relationships more complex than it has been credited, see them as pioneers for our ecological focus and endeavor to create sustainable ways of thinking and living in our shared world," Deniz says.

"If you attribute agency to non-human beings, we create a kind of equality," she adds. "We are not the only beings on this planet who are in control of everything. We are not at the center. Not everything has to be for our ends."

Sustainability and the German environmental imagination

Deniz brought this material into the classroom during the winter term with her deeply interdisciplinary course, Sustainability and the German Environmental Imagination, which drew on elements of biology, physics, philosophy, literature, sound studies, environmental studies, engineering, visual arts, and political science. Each adds a relevant layer to the discussion and multiple ways to make it approachable. 

"When you talk about all these issues on a conceptual level, it does sound  abstract," Deniz says. "And when we think about these concepts from various perspectives by way of using various disciplines, then they could become more accessible and also more useful. It's very important for us, for environmental humanists, to work through concepts so that we can understand each other well. Collaboration is a key thing to deal with our current environmental predicament, and these concepts are very helpful if you understand each other."

Students explored how myriad environmental issues interact with each other in complex ways and underline the need for wide-ranging collaboration across multiple fields—natural and social sciences, as well as the humanities. This included looking at the connection between environmental justice and social justice, and exercises in environmental literacy, with students reflecting on their environmental identity and their own connections to the more-than-human world.

"Environmental literacy is coming to life and it's getting easier and more productive to understand each other, to exchange ideas, to find solutions," Deniz says. "Even in the classroom environment, you can bring solutions, you can brainstorm. It's not only in the hands of those who are in charge politically or economically. Every individual has agency, we just need to understand the ways in which we can think and act."

In her teaching and scholarship, Deniz centers some of the most pressing issues of our time in a way that acknowledges those challenges and hardships with empathy rather than despair. By learning from the work of German Romantic thinkers, she and her students can illuminate ways to remain open-minded and imaginative. 

"We don't deny these difficult emotions, but we need to find ways to deal with them. Our connection to the nonhuman world, to the environment, is a great way to deal with these emotions without being overwhelmed," Deniz says.

And Deniz's work has garnered recognition from her peers. Last year, she won the Goethe Society of North America's essay prize for her article in The Germanic Review titled, "The Entanglements of Matter, Mind, and Meaning: Novalis's 'Elastic Mode of Thinking'." 

Deniz approached that prize-winning piece as the prototype for a book project that explores Goethe's productive and competing relationship with the other Romantic writers. Now that work continues as she settles into a Dartmouth community whose own unique appreciation for the environment offers the former Stanford professor another interconnected field of inquiry: New England collegiate anthropology. 

"Students bring their gear to class because afterward they're going skiing. They don't want to do homework on Saturday, they save it for Sunday because they're going skiing," Deniz says. "The enthusiasm people feel for skiing and winter sports fascinates me!"