The essay series

In the 19th century, this tentative approach would be abandoned. The industrialisation discovered the phenomena, incorporated it into its technical processes and promoted and marketed it with an intensity that has been unrivalled even to this day. It’s at this time, too, that the vocabulary with which we are all familiar today pops up: power and electricity plant, generator, dynamo... Electrical energy is far from being self-evident in the 19th century, but the process in which it becomes a cultural driver accelerates rapidly. If in the 1800s it was a speculative variable, in the 1900s it becomes an engineering one; where erstwhile it soared metaphysical heights, in the 19th century it touches ground for the first time with electrical lines, first for telegrams, later also for high voltage current. On 25 August 1891, the first three-phase current transmission across 175 kilometres from Lauffen to Frankfurt represents a key achievement for the unprecedented optimism displayed by the engineering culture.

Wherever electrical energy flows, the ‘new age’ begins, as progress and future have shown. Or more succinctly: electricity is modernity.

However, before this idea was accepted, a different energy system would dominate the social debates and spark the literary imagination: coal-fired steam power. For the sake of tradition, the symbol of this energy transformation is derived from Antiquity: Prometheus, the mythical and literary ‘bringer of fire’, to whom humanity owes new ways of life and creation. The transformation was noticeable in many places, nevertheless the prevalence of this new technology was nowhere as tangible as in the field of transportation and its infrastructure: steam ships and steam trains open new paths and become part of the landscape, cities and folklore. In other words: even the heroines and heroes of 19th century literature are exposed to this great leap forward. One inevitably encounters them inside these modern means of transport; travel is frequent and ever swifter. That the fossil culture is already sawing off the branch on which it is sitting, is shown by one of the greatest visionaries of the steam era: in Jules Verne’s (1828-1905) Around the World in Eighty Days, published in 1873, the notoriously hurried Phileas Fogg burns large parts of his wooden steam ship due to a dramatic shortage of coal in order to cross the Atlantic and still arrive in London on time.

Probably the most monumental artistic testimony of any shift in energy and transportation in the fossil age, however, is a painting: in vibrant colours, English painter William Turner (1775-1851) depicts the final stretch of the Fighting Temeraire. The tall ship HMS Temeraire (HMS being short for “Her or His Majesty’s Ship”) was a proud three-master that achieved great notoriety in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Here, it is being tugged to its final berth over the Thames by a much smaller, unnamed and far less majestic steamboat. This is the last stretch for this elegant wind-powered vessel, painted against an energetic and glowing red sky. The French scientific historian and philosopher Michel Serres dedicated an instructive text to this Turnerian scene that is just as beautiful. Entitled Turner translates Carnot, Serres bridges the gap between art and physics: William Turner, the early impressionist painter and Sadi Carnot (1796-1832), the physicist behind thermal engines are both portrayed by Michel Serres as protagonists of the thermodynamic age, as the focus is no longer on the relationships between stable objects, but on intensities and the lively hustle and bustle of undefined phenomena (such as steam and clouds).

What’s more, in 2005 Turner’s picture was chosen as Britain’s greatest painting in a BBC survey, which incidentally shows how central a position the subject of energy takes in a nation’s cultural memory. Another recent flash of Turner's picture testifies to this: in 2008 it gave the James Bond series a shot of art-historical elegance. In Skyfall, the slightly haggard muscle man Bond (Daniel Craig) and the clever tinkerer Q (Ben Whishaw) are sitting on a bench in the London National Gallery, in front of Turners painting. The Fighting Temeraire once more comes into play as a hint to a change in time and energy, but this time it is the explosive fighting machine Bond, around whom it has become a bit lonely, while the delicate Q has since long performed the agent job with networked and smart energy. The age of digitised energy is forthcoming here as well, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

But let’s get back to the old forms of energy that were new in the mid nineteen hundreds and were considered a guarantee for progress. When the euphoria of the ‘marriage between water and fire’ reached the literary world, it produced remarkable testimonies such as poems about technology and machinery. Worth mentioning is Theodor Fontane’s (1819-1898) four-stanza poem Lord Steam (Junker Dampf) written in rhythmic alternate rhyme, published in 1843 in the magazine ‘Die Eisenbahn’. As one can suspect from the title, the poem is somewhat curious. It deals with the new forces that can only develop their potential in a tamed and domesticated form - that is, with the use of technology, or, as Fontane says, in the "dungeon kettle" - and can then be used as locomotives, for example. The fourth stanza of Lord Steam goes as follows:

And thus, despite his bonds of metal

Fastened still to foot and hand,

He carries away the dungeon kettle

On his flight across the land,

Rooting up the rows of houses

On his rampaging foray,

Until once more he’s in the open

Wilderness, a child at play.[1]

This culture of fire, steam, rivets and pipes is currently undergoing an aesthetic revival in the neo-Victorian imagery and fashion of so-called Steampunk. ­– A phenomenon that when considered from our current point of view, being the second solar age, already puts the fossil era at a considerable historical distance, as it only appears ‘in costume’, romanticised in an equally fantastical and glorifying manner. Another poet, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), is staying in Paris when the steam-powered transportation shift is taking place. He describes it in 1843 (the same year as Fontane) in one of his Lutetia reports on politics, art and way of life for the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, as follows:

The opening of the two new railways, one to Orleans and one to Rouen, causes a shock that is felt by all [...]. The entire population of Paris is currently forming a chain in which the electrical spark jumps from one to the other.[1]

As can be seen, the text appropriates terms from the domain of electrical phenomena. This metaphor paints the image of the start of an era while evoking quite ambivalent thoughts and sentiments. According to Heinrich Heine, an energy transition equals a change of era:

We barely notice that our entire existence is dragged and hurled onto a new track, that new relationships, joys and hardships await us, and the unknown works its unearthly charm, tempting and terrifying in equal measure. This must be how our forefathers felt when America was discovered, when the discovery of gunpowder was announced by the first shots, when the printing press sent the first pages of God’s word out into the world.[1]

Soot: considered with the sobriety of history, the age of coal-driven industrialisation was a dark time. Dark with regard to the misery of large parts of the population in the industrial cities and their unimaginable working and living conditions. Dark also in the literal sense, as the natural light was veiled by soot. This is how railway and England traveller Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) described his visit to Manchester.

A sort of black smoke covers the city. The sun seen through it is a disc without rays. Under this half daylight 300,000 human beings are ceaselessly at work. A thousand noises disturb this damp, dark labyrinth [...].

Today, this soot from the industrial chimneys can still be found in core samples of Alpine glaciers and as we’ve since long known, the ‘historic’ environment already responded in a striking manner as well, namely in its evolutionary colour developments, to the changes in the air and the constant twilight of the industrialisation. The so-called industrial melanism signified an impressive change, mainly in the population of peppered moths, a species of moth whose number of bright specimens dropped significantly in the soot-covered industrial regions of 19th century England. Conversely, the number of dark forms now rose, as they found much better cover on the blackened surfaces of their habitat. It is not least this massive influence on the environments and living areas that led to wide-ranging deliberations about alternative forms of energy in the late 19th century and brought a known player back to the fore: electricity.

[1] Free translation

Literature

• Jules Vernes, Around the World in Eighty Days, 1873 (any edition).
• Michel Serres, „Turner übersetzt Carnot“, in: Ders., Über Malerei, aus dem Französischen v. Michael Bischoff, Merve-Verlag, Berlin 1992, S. 89-109.
• Theodor Fontane, Junker Dampf, 1843 (any edition).
• Heinrich Heine, „Lutetia“, 2. Teil, LVII, 5. Mai 1843, in: Ders., Sämtliche Werke, 6. Band, Vermischte Schriften, II Abteilung, John Weiß-Verlag, Philadelphia 1856. Furthermore: http://www.heinrich-heine-denkmal.de/heine-texte/lutetia57.shtml
• Alexis de Tocqueville, „Notizen über eine Reise nach England“ (1835), in: Wilhelm Treue u.a., Quellen zur Geschichte der industriellen Revolution, Musterschmidt-Verlag, Göttingen 1966, S. 128.

Research recommendations

• Christoph Asendorf, Batterien der Lebenskraft. Zur Geschichte der Dinge und ihrer Wahrnehmung im 19. Jahrhundert, Anabas Verlag Gießen 1884 (zgl. Weimar, Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften 2002).
• Michel Serres, Hermes III. Übersetzung, übers. v. Michael Bischoff, Merve Verlag, Berlin 1992.
• Prometheus. Menschen, Bilder, Visionen, Eine Gemeinschaftsproduktion des Deutschen Historischen Museums, Berlin, und der Stiftung Industriekultur, Völklingen Saarland, Dokumentation, hg. v. Rosmarie Beier 1998.
• Philipp Frank, Theodor Fontane und die Technik, Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005.
• Götz Großklaus, Heinrich Heine. Der Dichter der Modernität, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, München 2013.

French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922), for instance, recounts a summer in one of the mundane coast towns of Normandy. Balbec is the name of the town mentioned in his In Search of Lost Time, which he based on the actual coast town Cabourg, with its larger-than-life grand hotel and a beach promenade with hazy impressionist views of the English Channel. Every now and then, the novel’s narrator does not look out towards the sea and its appearance that changes with the weather and the time of day, but rather inland. One evening, the scenes in the hotel restaurant are revealed, bathed in electric light. The dining hall and the social life therein appear like a high-society luxury aquarium, not without a hint of mockery and a feel for the grotesque. The electricity creates “eddies of light” in the room: “an immense and wonderful aquarium against whose wall of glass the working population of Balbec, the fishermen and also the tradesmen’s families, clustering invisibly in the outer darkness, pressed their faces to watch, gently floating upon the golden eddies within, the luxurious life of its occupants.”

The peculiar thing about the innovation of electricity, however, is that its almost democratic and collective character is already recognised relatively soon after its introduction. This is based on elementary physical and technical properties: electric current, and more precisely alternating current, is relatively easy to divide, transmit and distribute. Inherent to current is that it flows; not in closed-off aquariums, but in the public space, in other words in fanned-out and branching grids. Especially because of these properties, electrical energy is acknowledged as an alternative to the very stationary and static steam power. The star of coal-fired steam machines had sunk again quickly after its euphoric rise at the start of the century. The main cause for complaints was a technical disadvantage: apart from transmission shafts, distribution was not possible. The room for steam power in principle remained the production room. Contemporary witnesses therefore described the highly concentrated force as a vehicle possessed by few; the exploitative character of early industrialisation was thus already present in its technical infrastructure.

The second disadvantage: the already mentioned pollution. The early 19th century had had its fill of smoke and soot.

Electricity as clean and distributed energy, by contrast, represents an energy transition and the path towards a second, more gentle phase of industrialisation. Looking at this historical innovation process, similarities with our present day are striking, as the properties are mentioned that also characterise our current energy transition. The fact that renewable energy is cleaner (especially compared to coal), is self-evident; however that the concept of decentralisation is experiencing a renaissance is also worth noting. Today, this signifies the generation and storage of electricity by many small, geographically spread installations. At the time, one discovered the advantages of decentralisation at the other end of the distribution chain: it concerned a wide-scale and affordable supply and use of electricity, for instance the possibility to operate electric motors in smaller workshops, so that manual labour was offered greater opportunity in the hard competition with large centralised steam-powered enterprises. Although the two energy transitions occurred during very different periods, it is striking that clean and innovative energy, both then and now, is not an exclusive commodity, but creates a manner of joint venture in which a democratic and civil-society spirit of undertaking is manifest.

Meanwhile, another question remains: from which sources and by which power plants was electricity ultimately produced around 1900? One relatively quickly switched to coal-fired generation of electricity and as such set the course for the centralised energy system of 20th century. Nevertheless, there was also a pioneering phase, during which hydropower in particular was planned and experimented with. Thus, the use of eco-power was certainly deliberated by the people of those days: the rivers of the Alps, for instance, are energy suppliers that make alternating current flow into the German lowlands (according to Oskar von Miller). The idea of green electricity is therefore over a hundred years older than one might think.

Democratic, decentralised, clean: with these accents, electricity became the driver of a gentle modernisation. Noteworthy is the symbolic side of this project, as it is aggressively endowed with feminine imagery and allegories. The first one worth mentioning is a character whose ancestry can be traced back to the realm of fairy tales. Here name is taken from French: la fée électricité; here, in its form of a fairy, the mysterious character of electric current and its swift flow, crossing space in a flash, on one hand, is combined with the promise of progress and hope for a future free of austerity and worth living on the other hand. The fée électricité is the model for the many allegorical characters of any energy transition, appearing on posters and frontispieces. They are all heroines in a noble, bright and idealised appearance. They are often used to advertise electricity exhibitions or electrification projects; this incidentally shows that electrical current already had acquired the status of a commodity.

Not seldom does electricity appear in some sort of antagonistic duet, namely in juxtaposition with, or better yet, in confrontation with Prometheus, her male counterpart and the embodiment of steam. He most often appears in compact masculine but at the same time defensive and broad lines. This is yet another way to express that one has already dismissed this energy system as one of the past and has become aware of its high social and ecological price.

A price that is once more appraised in literature: among the later works of Émile Zola (1840-1920), one of France’s greatest realists of the 19th century, is a novel with the sober prosaic title Work (‘Travail’). The story is set against the ominous setting of a steel mill named abyme, which translates into ‘abyss’, or even more drastically into ‘Hölle’ (hell) in the German version of Leopold Rosenzweig. This evokes the heat and hiss of the furnaces and steam plants on one hand, and on the other hand, the wretched living conditions of those who work there and must fight for their daily survival. According to one of Zola’s central theses, work is corrupted in such conditions, does not benefit the community or have any democratic aspects, nor does it help those who carry it out achieve a free existence. If you will, Zola deals with a paradox: work is no longer the basis of culture, but leads to its destruction. What is striking in this context is the constant aggression and the omnipresent alcoholism, which are direct consequences of the working conditions. About steelworker Fauchard, he writes the following: “His ration meant four quarts of wine a working-day, or night, and he said that that was but just enough to limber up his body, so completely did the furnace dry up all the blood and water that was in him”.

The tale takes a lighter and distinctly utopian turn, however, when the hero Lucas Fremont, an engineer, enters the scene. Through his clever use of electricity, he transforms the city of workers into a modern and liveable place. One must remember that the picture painted here is neatly black and white. In any case, though, it is historically significant that a new character is gaining in cultural in literary prominence: the engineer, who embodies progress and carries out an absolutely heroic social task. In Zola’s work, this Lucas Fremont appears as a young man of twenty-five but leaves the story after some six hundred pages in his old age, looking back on a successful life’s work. He set in motion an energy transition, with which the meaning of work also took a turn, since it could unfold its collective potentials.

Literature

• Marcel Proust, Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit, übers. v. Eva Rechel-Mertens, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 2000.
• Émile Zola, Arbeit, übers. v. Leopold Rosenzweig, Verlag Th. Knaur, Berlin 1928.

Research recommendations

• Ulrike Sprenger, Proust-ABC, Reclam Verlag, Leipzig 1997.
• Imke Buck, Der späte Zola als politischer Schriftsteller seiner Zeit, Mateo-Monographien Bd. 27, Mannheim 2003. www2.uni-mannheim.de/mateo/verlag/diss/buck/buck.pdf
• Klaus Plitzner, Elektrizität in der Geistesgeschichte, Verlag für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaft und Technik, Bassum 1998. Darin insbesondere: Ulrike Felber, „La fée électricité. Visionen einer Technik“, S. 105-121.
• Rolf Spilker (Hg.), Unbedingt modern sein. Elektrizität und Zeitgeist um 1900, Rasch Verlag, Osnabrück 2001. Darin insbesondere: Jürgen Steen, „Die fée électricité trifft Prometheus – Die internationale Elektrotechnische Ausstellung 1891 und die ‚Neue Zeit‘“, S. 34-49.

This story, which could easily be imagined as a Monty Python film, not least because of its satirical tone, was penned down by the French author Jean Echenoz (1947*). In 2016 he published his novel Special Envoy. The title refers to this singer, Constance, the ‘perseverant’, who is mainly selected for her undaunted character. Part of her rather in- or semi-voluntary retraining from singer to agent is a long stay in one of France’s southern Departments, including in the following, very particular place:

The next morning, Constance enjoyed a wide panoramic view of over 180° thanks to the all-round glazing [...]. At regular intervals, the view on this landscape was briefly interrupted by some kind of pin or paddle rushing by, until she understood that it was a blade of an enormous propeller and that she was therefore occupying the nacelle of a wind turbine, all the way at the top of such a device, as one sometimes sees from the car, off in the far-away distance. Who would have thought that the latest models could also, in addition to their function of converting wind into energy, act as an accommodation, even if after a very rudimentary fashion.[1]

It is worth mentioning that this scene on the tower and in the wind turbine’s nacelle has hardly any significance in the story. The exact opposite is the case, the plot takes a break here and runs a short extra lap, as it were. The view from the tower is therefore dramatic idleness, a poetic surplus. Exactly because of this, it marks a highlight in the text and occupies a special place which might remain longer in the reader’s thoughts than the rest of the secret service plot. Perhaps Jean Echenoz was travelling by car through the sparse fields of the southern Departments and thought that the current energy architecture should at least once be connected to the long symbolic history and iconography of tower construction. Maybe this could be used to play around a little in a literary way and remind us of the houses of the hermits, ivory towers or the Rapunzel motif... Whatever the case, the passage not least demonstrates in all its playfulness that architecture, and especially tower architecture, resonates with the power of imagination and artistic imagery. Meanwhile, Jean Echenoz’s interest in energy is more pronounced, certainly elsewhere in his work. Let’s continue and move away from the tower.

In 2006, in a novel titled Lightning, Echenoz follows the biography of a Croatian emigrant and as such dives deep into the energy history of the 19th and early 20th century, which would be strongly impacted by the arrival of this migrant in the USA. Gregor is the name of his hero, who grows up as the child of a pastor in a small town in the Croatian mountains. He proves to be a highly gifted pupil, who is particularly at home in the world of numbers and technology. His later engineering studies in Graz and Prague, however, are far from uneventful. Perhaps it is already clear at this time, that the torrent of ideas which he undoubtedly produces and only finds applications for in his first own inventions, is mirrored by a constant unconventionality. A number of quaint character traits also emerge, which apparently amuse Jean Echenoz and are once again given the Monty Python treatment. This is illustrated by a number of painfully curious fears of germs, bacilli, jewellery and especially pearls. At the same time, a strong attraction to birds, especially pigeons, arises, as does a pronounced penchant for a luxurious lifestyle and an expensive wardrobe: scarves, hats and finger gloves that are constantly changed for the sake of cleanliness. And then there are his arrogant desire to go it alone, paired with his tremendous naivety with regard to the legal and economic interests of his projects. The latter will lead to it that he is often negligent in patenting his later inventions, contributing to the rapid financial ups and downs of his biography.

Gregor’s path leads him to Paris, then New York. In addition to many other inventions (such as neon tubes or radio), he develops the alternating current system used to electrify the USA. Echenoz: “It is clear that this concerns a very extensive project. A considerable operation. A plan without equal.”[1] And naturally, one has long understood that it is Nicola Tesla (1856-1943) to whom Jean Echenoz has dedicated a biographical novel. What is important here, as is typical of the genre, are not necessarily the biographic details, which are given a very free and fictitious treatment. Rather, the novel seems to be more concerned with capturing the innovative events that unfolded around 1900 and during the first decades of the 20th century, with their immense momentum and creative chaos. And it succeeds in its intent. The main focus is the so-called war of the currents that was waged between former technology magnate George Westinghouse (1846-1914) and another exceptional inventor of his time, Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931). This war of currents was sparked by the question which type of current should be used to supply the North-American continent. Edison favoured direct current, which could nevertheless not be transmitted across large distances. Westinghouse, however, put his faith in Tesla’s alternating current technology, exactly that energy that could ultimately be developed further so that it still supplies us with power today and has conquered almost the entire globe.

In the years of the war of the currents, Tesla’s genius is not least exhibited by combining the disciplines of engineering and entertainment. He travels the country and demonstrates the power of electricity on the scene. Tesla knows how to present himself on stage; his strikingly tall figure of almost two metres and his equally elegant and photogenic appearance do the rest. He is the Master of Lightning. These spectacles are still intertwined with the energies of the romantically mysterious electricity, however, with the difference that Tesla also presents himself in his capacity of engineer, in other words, as the person who has seen through this power, controls it and can build devices to reliably use them. In the long run, however, the enormous potential he and the electrification unfolded, would not profit him, while others, especially Westinghouse, would capitalise on it. A victim of his economic naivety, Nikola Tesla sinks into poverty in his old age and retreats entirely from the public and scientific life.

TESLA. These two elegant-sounding syllables would rise to fame once more a turn of a century later, and once again surround a story of sweeping innovation. It emerged from the realisation that our mobility must be organised largely without the combustion of fossil fuels and the emission of CO2. To describe the basic extent of this project, one might be tempted to quote Echenoz again and apply his phrases with some élan to the history of energy systems: “It is clear that this concerns a very extensive project. A considerable operation. A plan without equal.”

Two engineers from the USA, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpening, were inspired in 2003 to christen their electric car the ‘Tesla'. It should meet certain requirements: it would have to be elegant and sporty, a roadster, which on the one hand would be good for the weight and range, and on the other hand appeal to a segment for whom a car with a large combustion engine is no longer just an ecological problem, but also more and more a question of aesthetics. Elon Musk will later finance the start-up and become its CEO. After the luxurious models developed at the start, the company entered the broader segment with its Tesla 3; by late 2018, its production had increased to one thousand cars a day. In the meantime, the brand name has become one of the most powerful driving forces of the traffic transition and e-mobility. And let’s not forget the entertainment value: in 2018, Elon Musk shot his own red Tesla into space using rocket technology that was also developed by him. The name also seems to be attached to highly energetic extravaganza.

Whatever the case may be, the name Tesla stood and stands for inspirational momentum and for a peculiar sense for the future. A sense that sees the opportunities of novelties and provides a flood of images, narratives and justifications that oppose the outmoded ideas of the powers that be. Nikola Tesla’s alternating current technology was initially seen as a fad. Even the idea that electricity could become the predominant form of energy was long considered preposterous at the previous turn of the century. Around the year 2000, circumstances were similar: electric mobility was often objected to as being no more than an eccentricity. The notion that the vehicles could be mainly driven by renewable energy, was equally dismissed.

The name Tesla manifests itself in these events through sheer tenacity and as a symbol of things to come. Echenoz’s portrait of Nikola Tesla shines a spotlight on the dynamics of innovation at selected moments of the history of energy. Not least, however, Echenoz also imparts on his readers a feeling for Tesla’s or ‘Gregor’s’ weaknesses and his tragic fate. It must have been his solitude: a figure like a lone tower, with too few friends, too few comrades-in-arms.

[1] Free translation

Literature:

• Jean Echenoz, Unsere Frau in Pjöngjang, übers. v. Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel, Hanser Verlag, Berlin 2017.
• Jean Echenoz, Blitze, übers. v. Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel, Berlin Verlag 2013.
• Nikola Tesla, Meine Erfindungen. Eine Autobiographie, übers. v. Daniel Fedeli, Sternthaler Verlag, Basel 1996.

Research works:

• W. Bernard Carlson, Tesla. Der Erfinder des technischen Zeitalters, übers. v. Elisabeth u. Thomas Gilbert, FBV, München 2017.
• Frank O. Hrachowi, Tesla. Die Geschichte einer Automarke, Edition Technikgeschichte, 2017.
• Dororthea Schmidt-Supprian, Spielräume inauthentischen Erzählens im postmodernen französischen Roman. Untersuchungen zum Werk von Jean Echenoz, Patrick Deville und Daniel Pennac, Tectum Verlag, Marburg 2003.

Even though dating art epochs is always a rough process, Expressionism takes up about the first three decades of the last century. The most catastrophic event in the middle of this period is therefore World War I. This event is even more monstrous because of its completely new technical and energetic dimensions. The war was an incomprehensible and destructive explosion of energy that was unleashed in the hearts of the highly industrialised European culture in 1914. It is becoming more and more urgent to ask whether technology and energy are destructive or even monstrous forces. The answer to this question is yes: a technological world that has become fatally independent and uncontrollable is always a centre of gravity for the arts and literature. Expressionism also shows this in its descriptions of cities or modern worlds of working. The industrialised metropolis appears as a dazzling place charged with energy and full of roaring noise. Especially the expressionist metropolitan lyricism repeatedly immerses itself in this “machine war”, for instance in Georg Heym’s (1887-1912) poem Ophelia of 1910. Electrified cities pervaded by energy infrastructure come to life here with a demonic and monstrous appearance.

A fantastic potential already surrounded electricity in the dramas of the Romantic period, when the idea arises to create artificial life using energy. Automatons are created that threaten to escape their creator’s control with fatal consequences. The most famous example is undoubtedly Mary Shelley’s (1797-1851) Frankenstein of 1818. From Shelley's horror figure, the lines lead into the pictorial worlds of the expressionist arts and into a world of technology that confronts man as an uncontrollable being. We observe a coalescence of physics and fantasy, a boom in fictional tales.

Like hardly any other epoch, Expressionism is able to see how the physical phenomenon of energy is reflected in cultural forms of expression: in texts, images, designs and films. Dance and theatre also visualise and make it possible to experience energies. Energy is not just a partial aspect of this culture, but, as one is tempted to phrase it, culture appears as an energetic phenomenon.

Gasand Gas II are two plays by Georg Kaiser (1878-1945), one of the most popular playwrights of this age. The plays appeared in 1918 and 1920. Especially the first part was enormously successful on the German scenes and is considered one of the sources of inspiration for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. What’s more, the play is by no means light fare, the plot is an obscure staccato and the characters are not given names. Kaiser prefers to use anonymous job descriptions such as engineer, worker, writer, government representative or billionaire’s son. These 'names' - including the latter - are less about describing individualities than the constraints of relationships. The setting remains abstract and can only be identified as a factory hall or a factory site. Even the gas that gives the title to the piece is not specified and does not even have an approximate chemical definition. There are nevertheless two things that become clear: on the one hand, that it concerns the development and production of a fuel type that will be far “mightier” than the competing forms of energy:

coal and hydraulic energy are outdone. The new form of energy moves millions of new machines with more powerful propulsion. We create it. Our gas feeds the technology of the world.

On the other hand, that this technological potential remains uncontrollable, so that a surprisingly precise allegory with regard to the massive side effects of atomic and fossil energy production emerges in Kaiser’s energy drama. That is also why the play starts with the report of a serous accident: an explosion that destroys the factory and claims innumerable victims, despite the fact that no one committed any error. Even the technical engineer responsible can claim in all honesty that he was always right. However, he has to note the character of his calculation, his "formula", as having fallen into a dilemma that is as technical as it is philosophical:

Right - and not right! We have reached the limit. Right - and not right! There is no example for this. Right - and not right! It calculates itself and turns itself against us. Right - and not right.

Thus the relationship between energy and society in the last year of the First World War appears to have become acutely paradoxical and metaphysical.

Taking a few steps back from this combustible substance, one notices that more detailed trains of thought lead to the cultural history of the early 20th century. This for example concerns the prominent role of the engineer in the play. The profession of engineer is gaining new visibility and acknowledgement in this era, not least in connection with new academic regulations, as around the turn of the century, the academic degree of engineer and their right to earn a doctorate was introduced in the German Empire. At the same time, some members of the profession recognised that their field of activity should not only include technological developments, but should also consist of social reflection and communication about technology. The insight behind this seems to be that technological innovation and transformation phases are very complex processes that can be better understood and shaped if one also looks at their cultural facets. What engineers do therefore also has a cultural side in addition to the technological (and the obligatory economical and legal) aspects. This requires a look beyond the horizon and a joint development of disciplines. An exemplary figure for this foresight leads us deeper into the domain of electricity: Munich-based engineer Oskar von Miller (1855-1934). Miller had a highly successful engineering company that realised important power plant and electrification projects such as the then largest water storage power plant in the world on the shore of Bavaria’s Walchensee. (This plant, a protected monument since 1983, still generates renewable electricity in the more atomic-fossil energy mix of the Uniper group.) Not only that, but Miller was also active as a museum founder and director. And with plenty of panache. He first gained experience at the major electricity exhibitions of the late 19th century in Paris in 1881, in Munich in 1882 and in Frankfurt in 1891. While the technology was presented here in event format - the main attractions were mostly the still experimental long-distance transmission of alternating current - Miller thought of giving the interested public a constant insight into technological developments. In May 1903, he first publicly voiced the idea of building a technological and scientific museum in Munich. He was inspired by already existing houses in Paris and London he had visited. The rest reads like a magnificent success story: after the first exhibitions were soon shown in temporary premises, the impressive Deutsche Museum on Munich's Museum Island was founded in 1925. Miller proved to have a great talent for organisation with equally original and paternalistic traits. For example, in the sources and the research literature, there frequently appears a bizarre sentence with which he identified the Deutsches Museum as his sovereign domain: “Here, anyone can do what I want.”

Miller’s concept consisted in designing the museum as a living educational format. It was conceived as a site that could be visited to learn about the history and development of technology, bring it closer to the visitors’ attention and ideally inspire them. This scholarly focus was necessary, as Miller put it, because “industry and the technical sciences [...] are coming into their own in all cultural domains.”

If you look closely, two points of innovation are named here, one of which, obviously, is technology and science. The other is the result of any historic look beyond the horizon, with which engineer Oskar von Miller taps into the cultural sphere. In it, the museum plays a central part as a downright medium to inform the general public. Miller’s project is furthermore one of a wide range of innovative museum concepts proposed during this period, which in part can also be described as a museum reform. What appeared here in the exhibition landscape - be it technical and scientific artefacts, arts and crafts, or the works of the expressionist avant-garde - was intended to have an effect on the everyday lives of its visitors. One of the central ideas of this very progressive, open and undogmatic culture could readily inspire our present day: the success of modern life projects and the opportunities of a future-oriented community are not least based on the coalescence of technological and aesthetic resources.

Literature

• Georg Heym, Werke, Reclam Verlag, Stuttgart 2006.
• Georg Kaiser, Gas / Gas. Zweiter Teil, Reclam Verlag, Stuttgart 2013.
• Mary W. Shelley, Frankenstein – oder Der neue Prometheus, Verlag Das neue Berlin, Berlin 1978.

Research recommendations

• Thomas Anz, Literatur des Expressionismus, Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart 2002.
• Žmegač, Viktor: „Zur Poetik des expressionistischen Dramas“ in: Reinhold Grimm (Hg.), Deutsche Dramentheorien II: Beiträge zu einer historischen Poetik des Dramas in Deutschland, Athenäum Verlag, Wiesbaden 1981, S. 154-180.
• Wilhelm Füßl, Oskar von Miller 1855-1934. Eine Biographie, Verlag C.H.Beck, München 2005.
• Anke te Heesen, Theorien des Museums zur Einführung, Junius Verlag, Hamburg 2012

In the late 1940s, Pollock’s drippings, often numbered rather than titled, quickly rose to fame. With the outrageous energy of this art form, he struck a nerve in his day. Pollock himself describes this neuralgic and not least traumatic point. He only used a few words to articulate how artistic forms of expression, such as media, infrastructure and energy scenarios intersect. In an interview taken in the summer of 1950, the then 83-year-old painter stipulates:

It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express his age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or any other past culture. Each age finds its own technique.

The remarkable thing about this quotation is first of all that Pollock does not explain his art from the perspective of art history, he does not sketch any historical course or evolution in painting. For example, it is not about traditions or the influences that significant predecessors have exerted. What Pollock does is rather to outline the cultural web that forms his age. The explanation is therefore not given by time, in diachronic form, but rather by neighbourhoods, i.e. synchronous, simultaneous connections. Orientation takes place beyond the horizon; it is transdisciplinary and inspires us to inquire into parallels between cultural phenomena. (As a reminder: a similar interpretation was already used by Michel Serres, which made it possible to relate William Turner's painting to physics and Sadi Carnots' thermodynamic paradigm. See e-story no. 2.)

Let's just stick to the arts for now: the explosive energies made visible by Pollock's pictures can also be found in the music of the 60s. It is thanks to the Internet that, for example, the last live sounds of the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane (1926-67) can still be heard and the events on stage can also be seen in a few short camera recordings. At the Newport Jazz Festival in July 1966, almost nothing remains of swing jazz. On a radiant summer day, John Coltrane, his wife Alice on piano, co-saxophonist Pharo A Sanders, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Rashied Ali start improvising. Like the painter Jackson Pollock, they perform on the edge of chaos and produce extremely free sounds and rhythms with their instruments. Author Kat Kaufmann (1981*) writes aptly about these evolutions in jazz:

Since the sixties at the latest, jazz has been demanding, eruptive, searching, wild - a music that expects you to let go of prefabricated expectations, for example, likeable, pleasing clichés and performance styles adapted to mainstream taste such as "You like tomato and I like tomato" by Louis Armstrong.

One of their last concert tours took the quintet to Japan, one of the gravitational centres of avant-garde jazz at the time. It's hard to imagine today that an art as extraordinarily challenging and exhausting as Coltrane's would produce scenes more familiar in popular fan culture. At Tokyo Airport, the free jazz formation was welcomed by hundreds of enthusiastic people. Most surprised of all was probably John Coltrane himself, who is said to have inquired from a fellow traveller whether there was a high-ranking state official on board who was subject to this reception. The good fourteen days that the quintet spends in Japan are packed with concert dates, and not just limited to the big cities. Modernity in all places. Many of the concert locations are covered by the Shinkansen express train, which was only put into operation in 1964 and symbolises the fast and high-tech Japan.

At the same time, the visit of the musicians revolves around the events of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which took place just over two decades ago. Coltrane saw himself as a political artist who had already taken a musical stand in the anti-racism protests with songs like Alabama. Peace on Earth is the title of a twenty-minute piece that revolves around the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and was written exclusively for the Japan tour.

Literature and film are also at the point to dramatically change their means of expression. This evolution is also closely related to the first traumatic experiences with the new form of energy. In the late fifties, the young director Alain Resnais (1922-2014) pursues a documentary project about the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima. However, he soon changes his plans and decides to turn a feature film on the subject instead. He asks script writer Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) to write the scenario. In 1959, the film Hiroshima, mon amour premiers and becomes one of the strongest impulses of a cinematic revolution called the Nouvelle Vague. Among this new wave are the most famous directors of 1960s’ France and an equally imaginative and comprehensive unleashing of the artistic potential of cinema. At the same time, the trend is an open revolt against commercial storytelling as a far too linearly, aesthetically and psychologically simple format. Away from cinematic conventions and clichés, there is a great deal of experimentation with the artistic independence of film: these include editing techniques, camera work, the handling of soundtracks or film music and, above all, directing. It is not for nothing that one speaks of directorial cinema when it comes to describing a self-confident and free handling of the film medium.

From this perspective it is to be excused that the attempt to reproduce the plot of Hiroshima, mon amour is somewhat embarrassing. The 90-minute film grants the opportunity to follow two characters. They do not have names. She’s French, he’s Japanese: an architect and an actress. A random encounter, a budding love affair during shared walks and in hotel rooms in Hiroshima. Images of the earlier destruction of the city and of a rebuilt and repopulated Hiroshima alternate with intimate scenes.

While viewing, one becomes remarkably close to the two figures, follows the 'I' and 'you' of their dialogue and receives lasting impressions, but nevertheless they remain but the woman from France and the man from Japan. It is a story that is told emphatically yet remains very abstract at the same time. It unfolds in a very free pictorial context, characterised on the one hand by angular montages and jump cuts, and on the other by pauses and stretched shots. The story also displays another temporal and spacial facet by delving deeper into the past of the Second World War. Thus the woman takes centre stage, her youth in the French town of Nevers on the Loire, her social ostracism, which goes back to a love affair with a German soldier, what was called ‘horizontal collaboration’. It is quite obvious in all this how much global historical events and the most private sides of existence permeate each other. It is exactly this aspect that seems to be require new forms of expression and storytelling here in Hiroshima, mon amour. The film also shows that a large number of aesthetic conventions and narrative strategies no longer suffices and has to be reformulated under the conditions of a modern age that not least includes the experience of atomic energy and destruction.

The view of the arts and the artistic avant-gardes of the first post-war decades is - as the three examples show - a view of the beginning nuclear age. The fact that these artistic testimonies are by no means easily comprehensible or palpable, points not least to the fact that the atomic scenario has crossed the boundaries of portrayal and perception. Still, art remains like a key, an irreplaceable key that can open cultural or historical realms and make their inventories, events and life more understandable. Art accomplishes something very specific: it captures its time or present into thoughts, feelings and shapes.

Atomium. 1958, World Expo in Brussels. This Expo was an attempt to bestow a different, positive shape, a new narrative on atomic energy. This plan had its predecessors, particularly in the USA, which attempted to escape the shadow of the events of August 1945 under the auspices President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969). Eisenhower launched the campaign Atoms for Peace and initiated the foundation of the International Atomic Energy Organisation (IAEO). Thus the narrative of the peaceful and socially widespread use of nuclear energy also takes shape. Its most impressive architectonic reflection is found in 1958, at the very heart of Europe: the Atomium, a 102 metre high iron cristal, magnified 165 billion times.

Iron atoms as a model? Yes, the link to the radiant and fissile substances is not strictly drawn in Brussels, as the aim was to present the broad field of scientific and engineering innovations and also heavy industrial iron processing in atomic models and thus to "think nuclearly". Scientific historian Jochen Hennig notes that the Atomium "became the emblem of an apparently all-encompassing atomic age".

Thus it fulfilled its landmark function and in practice was a place for exhibitions, events and gastronomy; a bright, enlightened and spectacular place to help integrate the atomic age into the progress pattern of the industrial age: once again, a new, practicable and more powerful energy is emerging with the promise to solve the central supply problems of modern societies. On the one hand, however, nuclear technology had already become a mortgage that could no longer be settled; on the other hand, it became increasingly clear that progress towards controlling the world and nature is not a simple and linear process, but is double-edged and surrounded by complex side effects. The technical potentials may grow rapidly, but each generation must try to ensure responsible handling of them anew by correcting its technologies, concepts and mindsets. 

In the early 2000s, the demolition of the Atomium, which was now in great need of repair, was up for discussion, but in a specially held referendum, eighty percent of Brussels’ citizens were in favour of preserving and restoring the building. The former ideas and visionary promises of nuclear technology no longer played a significant role. The new century adopted the Atomium as an architectural marvel, an aesthetically pleasing monument. The ironic conclusion is that while technology changed, art remained young. Apparently because it succeeds more reliably in maintaining a link with the future, in making it tangible, perceptible and, in this case, accessible.

Literature, sources and texts for research

• John Coltrane footage at Newport 1966: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as1rTILOZDQ
• Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, in: SPECTACULUM. Texte moderner Filme. Bergman – Duras – Fellini – Ophüls – Visconti – Welles, Suhrkamp Verlag, hg. v. Enno Patalas, Frankfurt a. M. 1961.
• Jackson Pollock im Interview mit William Wright, in: Erika Doss, Benton, Pollock and the Politics of Modernism. From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1991.
• Alain Resnais, Hiroshima, mon amour, 1959.
• Jochen Hennig, „Das Atomium. Das Symbol des Atomzeitalters“, in: Gerhard Paul (Hrsg.): Das Jahrhundert der Bilder 1949 bis heute, Verlag Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2008, S. 210–217.
• Kat Kaufmann, „Wo spirituelle Visionäre ihren freien Fall vollziehen, gelten irdische Gesetze nicht“, in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 14. September 2018: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/emanon-von-wayne-shorter-wo-spirituelle-visionaere-ihren-freien-fall-vollziehen-gelten-irdische-gesetze-nicht-1.4128199
• Lewis Porter (Hg.), The John Coltrane Reference, Verlag Taylor and Francis, New York 2008.

Obviously, this mainly concerns the recurring formats, which were highlighted enough to make it into my long-term memory. Firstly, this includes those that the critical journalism and therefore part of the core inventory of democratic culture brought to the living room of the East. Iconic formats, partially with energetic theme songs and titles, which today still convey the determination of research journalism: Report, Monitor, Contrast, Panorama. A self-aware and critical ratio was propagating. It was a sibling of the progressive movements and thinkers that a few years later, in the nearby Plauen (in today’s Saxony), impressively succeeded in instigating a peaceful revolution and therefore free historical potentials for democracy and reform.

Secondly, in addition to the informative apparatus of the political magazines and investigative journalism, there was a machinery of fiction that ran with the same weekly cycle. This machinery, which brings us to the topic at hand, was oil-driven. There were two main periodicals: the television series Dallas and Dynasty. Because my young eyes kept falling shut and the subject matter of both prime-time soaps was pretty boring and slow-paced, the storylines intermingled and Dallas-Dynasty became a singular entity. Only a handful of names remained, which I could not with absolute certainty link to one series or the other: JR and Bobby Ewing, Sue Ellen, Alexis, Blake Carrington, Dex or Dexter, Fallon, Krystle, Miss Ellie, Cliff Barnes, Pam, Sammy Jo, April, Dusty Farlow, the Colbys.

These proper names and characters are the particles of an oil film, even though it actually concerned two oil dynasties, whose wealth and fortune were fed by oil, whose intrigues and adventures began and ended in the oil business. Dallas first aired in 1978 and was broadcast by the CBS network. In 1981, the ABC network stoked the fire with its own Dynasty. The pilot for Dynasty, which aired in 1981, had nothing but the raw material for its title and was therefore simply called: Oil. The fact that the prime-time soaps spun this huge visual web around the fossil raw material in a weekly cycle over many years fits seamlessly into the cultural-historical findings: one cannot help but strike oil at the basis of America’s twentieth century and the source of the generated wealth. The myth of the American Way of Life, a combination of adventure, heroism and clichés, with its wealth and opportunity, was a piece of oil poetry in the twentieth century; a narrative that inevitably led through prospering oil fields. In 1966, Merril Wilber Haas (1910-2001), then President of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, stated without the faintest doubt interfering with his self-conscious insight:

[Our] ‘American Way of Life’, the envy of most nations in the world is based largely on the energy and the products of the petroleum industry which are derived from our success. It is almost impossible to separate the good things of our life, which often make life worth living, from the petroleum industry.

Looking back, both soap operas appear to be remarkably successful narrative developments: the mass medium of television that brought the dynasties of the Ewings and Carringtons to life, also provided the energy sector with images, smart design and made it part of the cultural canon. Furthermore, the narrative’s global, border-crossing characters and the wages of those days are astounding. Both television series that dominated the eighties are two outrageously solid storylines about natural oil, which pervaded Western culture from the USA.

Against this background, it is easily explained that the reflection on the watching habits of my childhood described above so single-mindedly focuses on these stories. It was not least oil that illustrated and opened up the global and adolescent world to me in the 1980s in an East-German living room in the Vogtland. My first cultural lessons were for a large part learned in the circles of the Carringtons and Ewings.

Of course, I wondered whether, and if so, how this connection of raw material motives and socialisation continued. If I move a bit further along the autobiographic timeline, the road would probably lead eastward from Dallas and Denver, where I found a new focus for my imagination in sunny Florida. The road leads to the flashy and fascinating aesthetics of director Michael Mann’s (*1943) Miami Vice. At first sight, the crime series is not an oil story, ultimately most of the stories revolve around cocaine. Still, the imagery of Miami Vice is nothing if not a pure burst of energy. This is already apparent when one allows the fifty-six-second acceleration to take effect, with which the famous opening credits bring the individual episodes up to speed. A dynamic of the themes: low-flying shots of the sea surface, horse and dog races, agitated flamingos, women's bodies in rapid motion, motorboat races and the jai alai or pelota game, the fastest of all ball games. Having been brought up to speed, the visitor later discovers another icon that is at the heart of the series, next to investigator duo Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs: a white Ferrari Testarossa, which reflects the electric lights of nighttime Miami onto the asphalt in soft pastels. Images full of energy and tempo, arranged to the sound of a combustion engine. These twelve cylinders are perhaps injected with the oil from Texas or Colorado, from Dallas or Denver, to be mixed with the aesthetics of goods, the imagination, life plans and fashions on an enormous and, as of 1989, even limitless scale. Whoever reached adulthood in the 90s, became part of the manifold cultural manifestation of natural oil without even noticing, and certainly without questioning.

Bill McKibben, one of today’s most prominent US climate activists and author of books on climate change, speaks of Northern America as an 'oil-soaked continent’, a metaphor to describe the oil-drenched social-cultural sphere. His writings can easily be generalised with regard to the late fossil Western culture: ‘That oil has gotten into our brains and done much to make us who we are – it’s very useful to recognize that, so we can maybe do something about getting beyond it.’

Which realisation does this look on the history of television series and the approach to the subject of oil provide? First of all, it gives us insight into the media history of energy narratives. Dallas and Dynasty teach us that these stories received a mass-media and expansive format: week after week, raw material stories were broadcast across the television channels. In contrast, literature, as well as other artistic genres, appear as rather marginal media with little reach and power. This can be contrasted with an early observation by Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), which calls into question the literary, and especially dramatic, depiction of the petroleum complex. In On Materials and Forms (Über Stoffe und Formen, 1929), he already stated that the mental capacity and the presentation logic, based on clear distinctions, of classic forms of drama no longer suffice: petroleum, according to Brecht, “balks against the five acts”.

Of course, oil also plays a role in the American literature of the 20th century. Worth mentioning are Upton Sinclairs novel Oil!of 1927 and Edna Ferbers novel Giant from 1952. Nevertheless, these stories mainly garnered attention outside the world of literature as Hollywood productions. While Oil! was the template for There Will Be Blood (2007), in which both lead actors, Daniel Day-Lewis (*1957) and Paul Dano (*1984) captivate us with their portrayal of the physical and mental hardships of the early oil business, Edna Ferbers story found its way from the page to the silver screen much earlier. In 1957, George Stevens (1904-1975) adapted the story with Elizabeth Taylor (1932-2011), Rock Hudson (1925-1985) and James Dean (1931-1955). Here, the wasteland of the Texan desert became a region of transformation, where traditional cowboys first raised livestock before immense wealth was generated from oil. Cultural theorist Melanie LeMenager already sees the rise of a “genre of pro-oil propaganda” in the film adaptation of Giant. According to her, Dallas is another, later contribution to this propaganda.

The second insight concerns our present day; it is best demonstrated in the form of a thought experiment, an attempt to create a sort of blueprint: I imagine a similarly powerfully produced narrative, a fiction series that is as coherent as Dallas or Dynasty, based on the theme of renewable energy. The wide panorama, a sort of remake or adaptation, are conceivable: a company saga in the segment of major renewable power stations, an offshore wind farm or a solar power station. The title of the pilot could be as pointed and simple as the one for Dynasty, just three letters: Sun.

I am already laughing inside. I assume that it would quickly become apparent that many of the staples of the oil narrative no longer fit and would have to be dropped. They no longer “work” and cannot simply be transported to the modern age. Things would soon become funny: as much as the heroic characters and myths in the style of the American Way of Life are stereotypes, as used-up is the narrative coupling of the dynastic family model and the liberal-expansive way of life and business, as pretentious perhaps the entire concept, iconography and design. The thought experiment is a failure and no blueprint can be established that matches both energy eras.

By the way, the garish, almost grotesque aspects displayed in the two first seasons of the 2017 Netflix reboot of Dynasty confirm this suspicion. Carrington daughter Fallon even breaks the oil family’s business tradition by heavily investing in wind power. Still, this only happens in the margin of a jumble of storylines that mainly serves the excessive product placement of luxury goods and ends with the realisation that the consumption of oil amounts to a never-ending party. Decoration and extravaganza push the development of character and energy evolutions to the background. Perhaps the only interest of the series lies in its attempt to make the American billionaire into a new type of hero. It is reassuring that this is a failed attempt: the only thing that is highlighted are the usual clichés and ultimately a foundering, late fossil phantasmagoria.

Must narration and its arsenals, like forms of energy, first undergo a kind of modernisation? (This is a question that requires further consideration.) The fact that this has not happened yet and that a narrative project like Sun does not exist, however, also shows how small the share of renewable energies in our imagination and fiction still is compared to oil (or, as stated in another essay, compared to coal).

We are even crossing a narrative no man’s land, in which Oil can no longer be told and Sun cannot, as it seems, be told yet.

Literature, sources and texts for research

• Dallas, television series, CBS 1978ff.
• Dynasty, television series, ABC 1981ff.
• Miami Vice, television series, NBC 1984ff.
• Upton Sinclair, Oil! A novel, Albert & Charles Boni, New York 1927.
• Edna Ferber, Giant, Doubleday, New York 1952.
• Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood, 2007.
• Robert Stevens, Giant, 1957.
• Bertolt Brecht, “Über Stoffe und Formen”, in: Brecht, Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, vol. 21, p. 303.
• Stephanie LeMenager, Living oil. Petroleum culture in the American Century, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2014.
• Rüdiger Graf, Öl und Souveränität. Petroknowledge und Energiepolitik in den USA und Westeuropa in den 1970er Jahren, Verlag Walter de Gruyter, 2017.
• American Book Review, „Petrofictions”, Vol. 33, Nr. 3, 2012.

Footage shows the biologically dead river Mulde, pipelines for wastewater discharge, foam-covered oily, iridescent waters and accumulations of sludge, disused open-cast lignite mines that are being reused as toxic waste dumps and the city covered in soot and ash. The half-hour environmental documentary Bitteres aus Bitterfeld (bitter news from Bitterfeld) is born. At first, state security is able to prevent the first screenings planned in the DDR. The recordings were nevertheless distributed in the East when the ARD magazine Kontraste broadcast a ten-minute short version on 29 September 1988. Soon, Bitteres aus Bitterfeld is screened at West German and international documentary festivals, like Santa Monica and Parma. The film receives several awards.

State security intensively searches for the film crew, but in 1989, forces develop too quickly for the old powers to control. Environmental history becomes part of revolutionary history. The film crew was backed by an environmental organisation supported by the evangelical church, the Grün-ökologisches Netzwerk Arche (green-ecological network ark).

The exceptionally courageous Bitterfeld documentary shows a symptom of the 80s: energy and industrial sites are now increasingly being described and portrayed as a critical testimony and documentary record, as a plea for the facts and their dissemination. Ecological enlightenment and investigative-critical work serve to reveal the actual extent of the production processes and bring them into the public consciousness. What much more easily emerged in the West, now also starts in the East: the time of environmental protests, networks and movements. At the same time, speech finds new fora: modern environmental journalism is going at full speed, massively contributes to the creation of green counternarratives and publications and questions the established interpretive authorities in the energy and raw material debates. The people behind this new level of ecological information are the protagonists of journalist ethics that are now also displayed in literature.

Visits to Bitterfeld were already described in fiction around 1980. Flugasche (fly ash) is the debut novel of Monika Maron (*1941) that deals with the production sector of Bitterfeld and describes its dependency on fossil energy. In Bitterfeld, a lot of lignite with a high sulphur content is burnt. In addition to the flue gases, the emissions also include the fly ashes that settle down on the town and give the novel its title.

The protagonist is a young journalist, Josepha Nadler, who works for a weekly paper and sets out from Berlin with destination Bitterfeld for research purposes. The story enters areas that are strongly characterised by technology and explores energy infrastructures. At the same time, it is more than striking how single-mindedly the text unfolds a scene of emotions. Flugasche is a text full of surging feelings, illuminated perceptions and exchanges of perceptions. An approach that is explicit in terms of emotion, a force field of anger, sarcasm, idealistic devotion, emphatic approach, the experiences of inner and outer strangeness. Paragraphs begin with statements like the following: “For days, Josepha was mad with anger and impotence.” Or: “At the start, it appeared to her as if the events befell her like an accident.” This emotional round dance contains many shades of grey from the early 70s and even more pathos. Nevertheless, the novel always maintains its artistic integrity and does not fall back on stereotypes. On this scene of emotions, affections, conflicts of values and principles, Maron transposed the theme of an ecologically questionable energy production.

In Bitterfeld, lignite mining started in the 19th century, and in the first half of the 20th century, the small town became an important chemical industry site for the war effort. During the Cold War, the town, which for a long time had less than 50,000 inhabitants, saw the establishment of production sites for large parts of the periodic table of elements: chlorine chemistry, graphite and aluminium production, potassium and nitrate-based fertilisers, petroleum, plastics and photochemistry, pesticides and insecticides. Flugasche sarcastically mentions each one. An excess of chemical processes and an oppressed city. This correlation is described in the novel, in which Bitterfeld is only identified by the letter B., in the following, now famous, sentence: “B. is the dirtiest city of Europe.” Maron also writes:

And these fumes that could serve as a guide. Please go straight until you reach the ammonia, then turn left until you reach the nitric acid. If you feel a sharp pain in your throat and bronchial tubes, turn around and call the doctor, that was the sulphur dioxide.

The energy to support these production processes is supplied by a crumbling coal-fired power plant:

You can enter the old power plant. Look there, in the distance, those four chimneys, that’s it. That is where the muck comes from. We should have had a new one long ago, but for some reason there were never enough funds. Even when they were available, a power plant always broke down elsewhere. Then they got our new one, and we kept our old one. Now we finally get one that uses natural gas.

Nadler accepts the assignment to write about Bitterfeld and its power plant with double feelings: either she truthfully writes about what she has discovered here, or submits a story that is distorted but tolerated by the system and cannot live up to her own standards. Should the energy generated from lignite be described as an essential production sector that supports the state, as before? Or should it finally appear in the public debate with all its blatant ecological side effects, as an issue of waste and toxins? The novel essentially deals with this dichotomy. Energy production is therefore put side by side with another scenario: the demand for the production of text. How does one write, how can one write about energy in the conditions that controlled East Berlin and Bitterfeld around 1980? How do text and electricity, poetry and energy coalesce?

Josepha Nadler’s idealism gives birth to a heroic narrative: the young heroine composes a short but accurate text, in spite of all exterior resistance, that is set against the great narrative of socialist production and its leaders, that is as conformist as it is hollowed-out. This struggle with the truth is an ordeal for the heroine and brings all these strong emotions to the forefront. Ultimately, though, the figure gains more authority. Furthermore, the two production areas (text and energy) are aligned perfectly from a conceptual point of view: a poisoned, maddening production replaces work, while compromise and censorship cripple and replace language. In the end, Bitterfeld receives its clean natural gas plant, but Nadler loses her job because of her journalist ethics.

The publication history of this Bitterfeld testimony is once more a through-and-through German affair. In the DDR, the novel is not published. The intervention of the censorship offices in the text is too far-reaching, and the procedure is too arduous. A contact at the Leipzig book fair is the first step on the way to finally publish Flugasche in the West. The manuscript crosses the inner-German border in the briefcase of a correspondent for Die Zeit. The path leads to Frankfurt. Here, the text is first published in 1980 as a serialised novel in the FAZ, before being published in book form by S. Fischer Verlag in 1981. Flugasche, the novel about the filthy grey Bitterfeld and its dilapidated coal-fired power plant is an enormous success in the West. How so? Monika Maron later suspects that its success is owed to energy and environmental history backgrounds, but also to linguistic artifice: the book, hot off the press, is read in the year in which the protests against nuclear power reach their peak. On 28 February 1981, a major event took place in Brokdorf: the largest march ever, as well as the largest deployment of police forces in West Germany. The protesters were able to prevent the construction of a nuclear power plant.

Radical energy changes are times of heated debate, and Flugasche was therefore used creatively: Maron believes that the abbreviation of Bitterfeld to the letter B. made it possible for the East German energy narrative to reach farther and thus to be adapted to West Germany:

I always suspected that my book not least owed its success to the fight against the Brokdorf nuclear power plant. The city of B., which to me represented Bitterfeld, represented Brokdorf in the West. That my book concerned a lignite-fired power plant, probably didn't matter in the heat of the fight.

Almost thirty years after Flugasche, in 2009, Monika Maron presented the report Bitterfelder Bogen from which the excerpt above was taken. The reunification and the Treuhandanstalt are pages in Bitterfeld’s history book, the river Mulde and the air are a bit cleaner again, and mining sites have been restored to their original natural state. Bitterfelder Bogen was the profound attempt to write the long-time energy and industry site out of its depression. The reason for the report was the establishment of a new production site by solar company Q Cells under the self-conscious label Solar Valley. However, shortly thereafter, in 2012, the company filed for insolvency and was later acquired by the South-Korean Hanwha group. The result: the production of solar energy technology left Bitterfeld and only the departments for development, marketing and sales stayed behind under the name Hanwha Q Cells.

Nevertheless, if one reads Bitterfelder Bogen after Flugasche, it seems like a short testimony in which players have suddenly moved to Bitterfeld, cleverly dubbed “solar enthusiasts” by Maron, thirty years after Josepha Nadler and twenty years after the crew of Bitteres aus Bitterfeld.

Literature, sources and texts for research

• Rainer Hällfritzsch, Margit Miosga, Ulrich Neumann, Bitteres aus Bitterfeld, 1988.
• Bitteres aus Bitterfeld, segment from MDR Fernsehen, 2008, www.youtube.com/watch
• Monika Maron, Flugasche, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt 1981.
• Monika Maron, Bitterfelder Bogen, Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt 2009.
• Benjamin Bühler, Ecocriticism: Eine Einführung (an introduction), J.B. Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart 2016.

Luckily, there is a breath of fresh air in the form of a second protagonist: sculptor Kannabich, a springy, sometimes even manic character, who steers the story towards the early energy transition. The artist plans to build a wind turbine on the Jurassic slopes ‘that, no matter how much power it will generate, will be a great work of art.’ It is this character of the figurative artist that introduced the subject of renewable energy into the history of German literature thirty-five years ago. Today, half of it is still an art project: the energy transition.

Its name is also a creation from the south-west of the republic. In 1980, an interdisciplinary trio of authors of the Institute for Applied Ecology in Freiburg (Öko-Institut Freiburg), Florentin Krause, Hartmut Bossel and Karl-Friedrich Müller-Reissmann, publish a report with the title Energie-Wende. Wachstum und Wohlstand ohne Erdöl und Uran (Energy transition: growth and welfare without natural oil and uranium). This historical document, a small volume in bright orange, is testimony of an ecological and energy-technological counterculture that grew from the anti-nuclear rallies and the environmental movement, just like Härtling’s novel. However, the earliest aesthetic representations of these new forms of energy have to be looked for in the marches and sit-ins of this time: the art on protest signs and posters, or songs. Härtling also enters this sphere: the wind power project is forbidden in an authoritarian manner, the police is already marching when Kannabich is welding his wind turbine tower at a lofty height and a crowd of demonstrators gathers at its base to advocate the continuation of its construction. By using such a rare verb as ‘to sway’, the text is able to convey the enormous level of the emotional element: the ‘human chain began to move back and forth, to sway, to make movements, as if to an unheard beat... Some began to sing, first to each other, than with one another.’ This wind turbine performance strongly traces the symbolic forces that had to spread with the new forms of energy and at the same time lays bare that energy upheavals are also a matter of cultural expression and movements.

The zeitgeist of West Germany and the energy protests around 1980 are also the subject of a modern novel: in 2017, Nicol Ljubic’s (*1971) Ein Mensch brennt (a man is burning) offers a retrospective on the green resistance in its most radical form and once more travels to the south-west of the republic. He follows the story of Hartmut Gründler (1930-1977), a teacher from Tübingen and an environmental activist, who self-immolated on 21 November 1977 as an act of protest against the nuclear policy of the SPD government of the time. An ethical paradox is unfolded with precision and patience: Ljubic shows how a through-and-through philanthropic idea can harden and become the source of harrowing sorrow. He describes a moment of radicalisation and shows how the players can create spaces that are unreal and hardly accessible any more in terms of communication, even at the heart of the progressive green movement. Looking back on the late 70s from today’s perspective, he arrives at the same grim determination that could also emanate from Josepha Nadler, Monika Maron’s heroine from her 1981 novel Flugasche (fly ash).

Maron ‘s Bitterfelder Bogen of 2009 looks back on this time with an entirely different perspective. The literary report in which she follows the rise of the Q Cell company, finds its sympathetic protagonist in the founder of the company Reiner Lemoine, who died young (1949-2006). Here, Maron highlights Lemoine’s time as an energy pioneer in the early 80s on a few beautifully penned pages. He looked like John Lennon, studied in West Berlin at the technical university and founded the engineering collective Wuseltronik with like-minded spirits. Wuseltronik occupied a commercial complex in Berlin-Kreuzberg, where it made energy technology inventions. Wuseltronik was short for wind and solar electronics.

These were the years of major protests, teach-ins, sit-ins, marches and squatters. Lemoine and his friends, not only opponents of nuclear power, but also engineers, found that it was not enough to only be against things; one also needed to act. The name Wuseltronik testifies to both: the chaotic and joyful atmosphere of these years and the serious project (‘wuseln’ means ‘to bustle about’).

In passages such as these, Maron not only paints a portrait of the committed engineer, it also shows the young energy transition project as a cultural happening that encompasses and collects various areas of life. The view is directed towards a progressive energy culture; towards an emerging, inspiring time in which technology, art and new ways of life came together and inspired each other.

Lemoine apparently always kept a close eye on the connection and mediation of energy and society. When technical innovations became entrepreneurial success, when Wuseltronik became the solar companies Solon and finally Q Cells, he established the Reiner Lemoine Foundation. This happened shortly before his death in 2006, the start of a legacy that is connected to ethical interests in addition to the goal of ‘achieving 100 percent of renewable energy’. The foundation’s mission is one of educational and development support, spanning technology and culture. The pages of the foundation’s website not only feature these ideal principles, but also a short video about Lemoine. It is an entertaining document about the history of the engineer and engineering culture, which is well worth watching and in which not only Lemoine but also his comrades-in-arms and friends of the early Berlin years have their say. The words and pictures from about three decades are accompanied by a citation from Lemoine, which is rather unacademic, but in its unconventionality calls for nothing more than the recognition of technology and renewable energy as a cultural and social asset: ‘To hell with commerce, let’s do something right.’

While in the late 80s, impressed by the Chernobyl disaster of April 1986, a few more pivotal texts were published, like Christa Wolf’s (1929-2011) story Störfall. Nachrichten eines Tages, Gabriele Wohmann’s (1932-2015) novel Der Flötenton or Gudrun Pausewang’s (1928-2020) youth novel Die Wolke (all three texts were published in 1987), the energy and environmental theme later entered a literary lull. Two major events are certainly among the reasons: on the one hand, the reunification binds literary capacities, on the other hand the innovations of another technical area fascinate: literature discovers digital life. As the genre of the German pop novel shows, it remains mechanically oriented, but it enters the information age. One could consider the Techniktagebuch (technology journal) founded in 2014 by Kathrin Passig (*1970) and maintained since then as the culmination of this evolution. It is a web of texts, woven with collective energy, that currently has 7000 pages, filled with over 5000 contributions by some 400 authors. In 2019, the artistic community blog received the Grimme Online Award. It takes a while to outline its monumental character, but then one gazes upon an impressive testimony of life with digital artefacts. When asked which forms of energy and electricity flow through the devices that are mentioned, the search function of the online chronicle only provides the smallest text volumes.

As of 2010, we see the return of the literary preoccupation with energy. The 80s and their energy narrative, the pathos of the movements and the sometimes heroic gestures of their central figures will not be easy to follow. Bridging the gap between the artistic and technical avant-garde was easier in the early phase of the energy transition. An obvious explanation for this could be that literature and the technical-ecological alternative culture easily came together as system critics. The development of renewable energy has long since left behind the straightforwardness of this niche. The road, for example, led via Wuseltronik to Solon, to Q Cells and finally to Hanwha Q Cells; it led from the fictional wind turbine experiment in the Swabian Jura to the establishment of today’s living labs that test the technical, economic and regulatory scenarios; however, the road mainly led from concern about certain ecosystems and places to a confrontation with a climate crisis that can only be solved on a global scale.

Yet the fact that things are much more complicated today with regard to renewable energy ultimately indicates the success of the "energy transition" outlined around 1980: no longer a counterculture or niche culture, but a transformation event that encompasses all of society and is expressed in many different ways. 

Literature, sources and texts for research

• Peter Härtling, Das Windrad, Luchterhand Verlag, Darmstadt 1983.
• Nicole Lubic, Ein Mensch brennt, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlagg, München 2017.
• Florentin Krause, Hartmut Bossel, Karl-Friedrich Müller-Reissmann, Energie-Wende. Wachstum und Wohlstand ohne Erdöl und Uran, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1980.
• Monika Maron, Flugasche, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt 1981.
• Monika Maron, Bitterfelder Bogen, Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt 2009.
• Christa Wolf, Störfall. Nachrichten eines Tages, Luchterhand Verlag, Darmstadt 1987.
• Gabriele Wohmann, Der Flötenton, Luchterhand Verlag, Darmstadt 1987.
• Gudrun Pausewang, Die Wolke, Maier Verlag, Ravensburg 1987.
• Kathrin Passig und Autorenkollektiv Techniktagebuch, https://techniktagebuch.tumblr.com
• Jonas Torsten Krüger, „Unter sterbenden Bäumen“. Ökologische Texte und Prosa, Lyrik und Theater. Eine grüne Literaturgeschichte von 1945 bis 2000, Tectum Verlag, Marburg 2001.
• Benjamin Bühler, Ökologische Gouvernementalität. Zur Geschichte einer Regierungsform, Tanscript Verlag, Bielefeld 2018.

Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Freedom’ relates to a thick social novel covering over 800 pages. The realistic prose portrays the history of a family throughout American democracy. With the greatest elegance and impact, Franzen relates the historical and political integration of this family chronicle that comprises four centuries. The main story takes place in the decade following the turn of the 20^th century, under then President Bush. The novel invokes the great tradition of literary moral portraits and oeuvres and covers all its aspects: what is private is always political, today’s news is historical, and everything close to home must also be considered on a global scale.

A central place in Franzen’s social novel is given to a modern energy project: not one that generates green electricity but that promotes the use of coal in the Appalachian Mountains. This is all the more remarkable considering the hero of this coal tale, Walter Berglund, is an energetic and committed environmentalist who, as we already learn on the first pages, jumps on his commuter bicycle and leaves the car in the driveway, even if it is still snowing in February. Nevertheless, when it comes to coal, Walter is sceptic and is convinced that neither the supremacy of the US coal lobby can be beaten, nor that the climate crisis can be solved, as many people worldwide seem to think. The conclusion he draws upon from these convictions is his intensive commitment to the regional protection of nature and to the protection of endangered species in their habitat. In Walter Berglund’s case, this is a songbird: a small, light blue passerine bird species called the cerulean warbler (setophaga cerulea). To save this endangered bird, he sets up the Cerulean Warbler Trust, with the support of his colleague Lalitha. The trust arranges a deal, a trade-off if you will, with the coal industry: coal mining is approved by the environmental protection authorities under the condition that after exploitation, the area is returned to its original setting and the warbler population for future generations.

To help save the cerulean warbler, Walter said, the Trust was aiming to create a hundred-square-mile roadless tract [...] in Wyoming County, West Virginia, surrounded by a larger buffer zone open to hunting and motorized recreation. To be able to afford both the surface and the mineral rights to such a large single parcel, the Trust would first have to permit coal extraction on nearly a third of it, via mountaintop removal. [...] Mountaintop removal as currently practiced was ecologically deplorable - ridgetop rock blasted away to expose the underlying seams of coal, surrounding valleys filled with rubble, biologically rich streams obliterated. Walter, however, believed that properly managed reclamation efforts could mitigate far more of the damage than people realized; and the great advantage of fully mined-out land was that nobody would rip it open again.

This plan, which couples coal mining with nature conservation, is implemented and, of course, Walter's reputation as an environmentalist - even if he launches ambitious simultaneous campaigns, for example to raise awareness of the global population problem - is deeply tarnished.

The tragic part of the story can be found on at least two levels: on the one hand, it quite romantically lies in the so wonderfully and artfully woven story about Walter, his wife Patty and their two children, his friend Richard Katz and his colleague and later lover Lalitha; it can be found in the highs and lows that develop over time, in what is found, lost and found again. On the other hand, it lies where the novel deals with the great themes of civilisation: there, where energy transition and climate protection are de facto abandoned and narrative is used to diagnose our reality. In Walter’s own words: ‘Suffice it to say that we’re realistic about coal.’ (Cursive in the original text.)

Behind this approach of preferring regional nature conservation to global climate protection is a concept that Franzen adopted into one sentence in an essay published in 2015: Save What You Love. This essay, as like its 2019 follow-up, What If We Stopped Pretending?, assesses the climate crisis from a cultural perspective. Within the book, Franzen doubts that the civilisational project of lowering carbon emissions and respecting climate protocols stands a realistic chance. He thus positions himself in a climate policy discourse that centres around the terms mitigation and adaptation, whereby he clearly advocates concentrating existing forces on adaptation, since time has already elapsed for mitigation measures and no significant effect can be achieved.

In the expansion of renewable energies, Franzen sees little more than a business model that enables easy profits based on ecological thinking and climate awareness. This criticism of renewable innovations is translated back into fiction in Purity, the follow-up to Freedom from 2015. At the start of this story, we find the young female protagonist, a call centre agent, who tries to sell solar panels using the very unconvincing arguments provided by the author.

For the record: Franzen's position would be misunderstood if one wanted to see it as a denial of CO2-related climate change, a rejection of climate science expertise or even a populist position. It is in fact quite the contrary. Nevertheless, his position on climate protection is a thoroughly pessimistic one. According to Franzen, what is left undone instead of energy restructuring are, on the one hand, delimited initiatives of classical environmental protection. His plea is repeatedly directed against monocultural landscapes and speaks for projects that help to preserve a high level of biodiversity in the midst of species extinction, thus enabling complex ecological environments closely approaching untouched nature. On the other hand, this argument is most evident in his recent position on the subject, the much-discussed essay What If We Stopped Pretending?, if the focus is on securing civilisational standards and structures: the strengthening of democratic foundations and universalistic principles, the preservation of a supportive community and an independent press.

In short: adaptation in pure culture, will in turn result in the adjustment to the social consequences of climate change.

Even so, if one reads more closely and perhaps even reads Franzen in the negative, one discovers in his texts descriptions, analyses and narratives of a project culture that could well support innovative and environmentally friendly renewable energy projects. Why not? It would, therefore, be important to read Franzen's texts as test cases in organisational sociology. One then encounters narratives that describe the productivity and inventiveness of local initiatives. Initiatives that are well-integrated and participatory and that keep appearing in his texts: from Walter’s and Lalitha’s fictitious Cerulean Warbler Trust in Freedom to the actual nature conservation organisation Área de conservacion Guanacaste around Winnie Halbwachs and Daniel Janzen, about which he writes in Save What You Love. Here, one comes across theoretical and practically both clever and courageous inter- and transdisciplinary teams that perform on the social level and at the same time know how to involve state- and private-owned structures. One encounters legal experts, environmentalists, artists and public figures whose skills and emphasis complement and mutually reinforce one another, who support projects and make it possible to display effective commitment. Here, on the social level, Franzen talks about innovation. Here, the narratives of progressive cooperation are established and, last but not least, the sheer brilliance of his texts.

Does Franzen’s blanket dismissal of climate protection and energy transition measures, ‘because it’s simply too late anyway’, make sense? Only time will tell. For the time being, however, there is little to be said against discovering an opportunity for climate protection and energy transition in this distributed and cross-disciplinary model. This has been a long-running success pursued in the form of cooperative and civic involvement. Ultimately, towns and communities, like the wind power towns of Raa Besenbek or Sörup in windy Schleswig-Holstein, have long been cooperating with the energy industry from a reflective and independent standpoint, thus, demonstrating what is achievable. If there are forms of financial participation and participatory opportunities for planning, words such as "identification", "a sense of unity" or "community" are used at local level and in relation to wind power. These may be somewhat overused in sociological terms, but they nevertheless indicate that semantics and their focus are beginning to shift, from cool economic pragmatism to the realm of emotion, to the realm of what is close to one's heart and is emotionally charged: the wind, the own town and the green energy in Schleswig-Holstein. Technological innovation can take it from here. One town in the North of Brandenburg is able to demonstrate this: Nechlin. Here, a heat accumulator is charged with the wind power of seventeen local turbines that would otherwise go unused during wind peaks, to produce heat for the town’s homes and houses. This heat is extremely cost-effective and carbon-free. It is the result of a successful cooperation between energy company ENERTRAG and a community that consciously profiles itself as an energy-saving town, setting a progressive tone in a region that is quickly dismissed as being apparently structurally weak.

Such distributed and numerous initiatives, supported through knowledgeable and participatory involvement, offer great opportunities for the energy transition. Certainly, the energy transition is a major project that breaks the mould; however, it is characterised by very small-scale geographical and local factors. One should see this as its major advantage: resident know-how and socially rooted opportunities for organisation. If successful, energy projects are the result of community-based projects.

Let’s get back to fiction and make way for Michael Beard, the old and highly decorated physician who is the protagonist of Ian McEwan’s master work Solar. McEwan created Beard as his instrument for sceptical and satirical comments regarding the solvability of the climate crisis.

As a young scientist, Beard received the Nobel prize for physics. In the following decades, he let himself go, both intellectually and physically. And if that wasn't enough, Beard had also long since lost moral and intellectual integrity. We are introduced to a figure without social responsibility and academic aspirations, which is all the more devastating because Michael Beard, the head of a young research institute, the Centre for Renewable Energy, uses his position to rest on his earlier laurels for a considerable pay check. McEwan enters domains that are undeniably different from Franzen’s. At a glance, this only refers to the genre: Solar is a comedy, inciting loud laughs from the reader at each faux pas made by the stout Michael Beard and how he manages to awkwardly back out of each one with some ruse or other. McEwan uses the old trick of explicit physical comedy: Beard is often seen to be eating and piling on the weight, another allegory for the character’s constant and pointless funnelling of resources. However, the difference lies not only in the genres, but also the environments. For unlike Franzen, McEwan is concerned with highly developed academic structures, their hierarchical structure and their branching out into the world of third-party fund-raising and management. This goes hand in hand with unchecked exaggeration and black-and-white contrasts. With flashy comedy, McEwan draws a picture of bunged organisational processes that not only demonstrate inefficiency but also cause innovation to fail. The deflagration, the simple escape of creative energies in hierarchical structures is one of McEwan's central themes. And naturally, all of the above is very cynical: to sum up, one might assume that the world could be saved if the responsibility was not down to the responsibility of old fools.

The protagonist of Solar describes everyday life at the institute as follows:

Progress and delays were listed and Beard noted whatever was required of him, then toured the site. In an off-the-cuff way he had proposed right at the start that it would be easier to procure more funds if he could claim for the Centre a single eye-catching project that would be comprehensible to the taxpayer and the media. And so the WUDU had been launched, a Wind turbine for Urban Domestic Use, a gizmo the householder could install on his rooftop to generate enough power to make a significant reduction in his electricity bill. On town roofs the wind did not blow smoothly from one direction the way it did on high towers in open country, so the physicists and engineers were asked to research an optimal design for wind-turbine blades in turbulent conditions. Beard had leaned on an old friend at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough for access to a wind tunnel, but first there were some intricate maths and aerodynamics to investigate, some sub-branch of chaos theory that he himself had little patience with. His interest in technology was even weaker than his interest in climate science. He had thought it would be a matter of settling the maths for the design, building three or four prototypes and testing them in the tunnel. But more people had to be hired as related issues wormed their way onto the agenda: vibration, noise, cost, height, wind shear, gyroscopic precession, cyclic stress, roof strength, materials, gearing, efficiency, phasing with the grid, planning permission. What had seemed a simple wheeze had turned into a monster that was eating up all the attention and resources of the half-built Centre. And it was too late to turn back.

The failure that has percolated deep into the Centre is not only demonstrated by larger-than-life central figure Beard and his listlessly managed field of activities. It also demonstrates itself in each secondary character or antagonist that represents physical and engineering ingenuity and, therefore, concrete innovation potential. Tom Aldous, one of Beard’s young assistants, who quickly realised the hopelessness of the WUDU wind project, instead passionately works on his own ground-breaking solar research project around artificial photosynthesis. However, his ideas fall on deaf ears and he is struggling to find much-needed support for his niche ideas. And it doesn’t stop there, the lost and disoriented character starts an affair with Beard’s wife and dies bizarrely, dressed only in Beard’s dirty bathrobe, when taking a fall in front of his living room sofa. Tom Aldous, a lone figure, a disconnected character. These literary works present a clear diagnosis of the organisational and social environments of innovation projects: the diagnosis that innovations do not only require expertise and intelligence in the matter, but also adequate social environments.

In addition, however, it is precisely here and with the figure of the young physicist that the reference to a link between the two such different texts, between Solar and Freedom, appears. After all, one wishes young Tom Aldous, his commitment and his wealth of ideas, to be in the company of a team modelled on the same one that Jonathan Franzen devises when he tells the story of Walter Berglund and Lalitha. One wishes he and his wealth of knowledge would be part of dynamic, creative and distributed collaborations. Collaborations that are not bound together by hierarchies and cascades of individual interests, but instead by enthusiasm for the cause and mutual trust between the players. The two novels from the year 2010 have almost displaced the essential objectives and arranged them backwards, but in doing so they are surprisingly complementary towards one another: whereas Franzen brings back a dated, ecologically irresponsible form of energy technology in an innovative project, McEwan puts energy innovation in the shackles of an inefficient and obsolete organisation.

With this dilemma, both novels and their authors leave a strangely defiant image. Especially when taken into account that reality has long since begun to solve these tasks, e.g. in Schleswig-Holstein, in Sörup or Raa-Besenbeck or in Nechlin in northern Brandenburg.

Nevertheless, Franzen and McEwan were among the first to revive the literary discourse on the energy transition in 2010, tackling energy transition issues in the form of realistic narrative projects. Perhaps the achievement of Solar and Freedom is that they bring the discourse in the here and now and critically examine the present and its energy supply (instead of shifting the topic into the future and into the genre of science fiction). In other words: every current reflection on the connection between the energy transition and society finds a critical objection in these two texts, one that should not be simply overlooked but rather used to raise the level of reflection and awareness. 

Literature, sources and texts for research

• Jonathan Franzen, Freedom, HarperCollins Publishers, September 2010
• Ian McEwan, Solar, Random House, March 2010
• Jonathan Franzen, “Save What You Love”, in: Jonathan Franzen, The End of the End of the Earth: Essays, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Jonathan Franzen, What If We Stopped Pretending? The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it, The New Yorker, September 8, 2019
• Jonathan Franzen, Purity, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.
• Bürgerwindparks. Gemeinsam für mehr Windparks, Tagesschau contribution of 03/01/2020, https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/mehr-windraeder-fallbeispiel-101.html
• Windwärmespeicher liefert C02-freie Wärme für ein ganzes Dorf, press release, https://www.iwrpressedienst.de/energie-themen/pm-6601-windwaermespeicher-liefert-co2-freie-waerme-fuer-ein-ganzes-dorf
• Jesús Blanco Hidalga, Jonathan Franzen and the romance of community: narratives of salvation, Bloomsbury Academic, New York and other 2018.
• Evi Zemanek, “A Dirty Hero’s Fight for Clean Energy: Satire, Allegory, and Risk Narrative in Ian McEwan’s Solar”, in: ecozone, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2012, https://portal.uni-freiburg.de/ndl/personen/zemanek/dokumente/Zemanek%20A%20Dirty%20Hero/view

As a result, rural areas do not seem isolated, and describing them as sleepy, backward and provincial or as an idyll falls wide of the mark. The countryside is shaped by multifaceted, controversial and sometimes contradictory developments. First of all, there is the striking speed of techn(olog)ical innovation. Rural areas are criss-crossed by infrastructure. They are automated, digitalised, often networked and interwoven with hardware and software and provide a laboratory for autonomous logistics and for transport and delivery technology. This infrastructure would not exist if it had not been integrated into globalised economic cycles and neighbourhoods long ago. In the countryside, production and harvesting are highly mechanised, whether in fields or forests or in huge halls or indoor plantations illuminated by artificial light. Energy is harvested from wind, sun and biomass. In the midst of these production sites, renewable-energy farms, flora and fauna we find farms for servers and data centres. There, artificial intelligence can be developed or cryptocurrency produced – and in there somewhere, the lines you have just read will probably be stored, along with everything else under the sun.

However, all this technical wizardry does not necessarily show that rural life as such is prospering. The picture in this regard soon becomes inconsistent, but there are certain patterns. For example, we have seen the rise of metaphorical lighthouses and, in German, 'bacon belts' (Speckgürtel) – the former referring to large, strong economic centres, and the latter to the prosperous suburbs forming a ring around them (known as 'exurbs' in the United States). In Germany, randomly chosen examples would be Frankfurt am Main and the surrounding Maintal, and Berlin and Kleinmachnow. The metaphor of the 'bacon belt' is particularly self-evident in these cases. Abundance is clearly on show here: residents of these suburbs are amply catered for in terms of both material goods and culture: Tesla electric cars meander through the streets and these areas boast well-funded and well-stocked art associations.

Outside these agglomeration zones, though, the horizon widens to the periphery and, while the situation varies considerably depending on the region and, in Germany, the federal state (Bundesland), rural regions often emerge as problematic cases. The ecological burdens of mechanised and highly efficient space management are more clearly apparent here, with structural weaknesses, shrinking and ageing populations of villages and regions, social desertification and a cultural malaise, which are often picked up by those on the right-wing fringes of politics. There is a striking paring back of basic public services, i.e. a withdrawal of the State from its essential supply obligations (frequently referred to as 'services of general interest'). These areas often suffer from a lack of education and training, public administration, and medical and care facilities and resources. Rather than e-mobility pioneers, 'space pioneers' or 'spatial pioneers' are reviving the organisation of community and cultural life in the form of self-help and self-organisation. Their creative and committed engagement with crises in rural areas is creating important centres of attraction and moments of hope. However, as sociologists like Claudia Neu point out, it cannot be ignored that such concepts and initiatives are stepping in where the State has left the field and are masking a far more fundamental problem. Viewed from this angle, it is ironic that 'space pioneers', despite the positive narrative they represent, surrounded as they are with an aura of saviours for their local patch, are themselves a sign of the fatal hollowing out of rural communities.

Thus, in a rural setting it becomes clear that the radiant, potent metaphor of the lighthouse (probably unlike the more satirical image of the 'bacon belt') cannot be blindly trusted and instead is rather questionable. Neoliberal lighthouse politics, i.e. the idea that centres have a radiant impact on their surrounding regions and pull them up with them, has by no means become the reality across the board. Progress and stagnation continue to meet and intersect.

Such rural areas, permeated by heterogeneous developments, have long exercised a very wide range of scientific and creative disciplines and been examined by the most diverse fields of knowledge. For instance, a recent interdisciplinary manual on villages examines this broad palette of problems and collects and reflects the state of research, from, among others, historiographical, economic, sociological, planning and aesthetic perspectives. This compendium was edited by two literary scholars, Werner Nell and Marc Weiland, who in their foreword point out that the time has now come to take an interdisciplinary approach to looking at village character and the "experience and imagination of the village".

At almost the same time an equally encyclopaedic treatment of the topic appeared, in this case as a visitor attraction in an environment that could not be more urban. In February 2020, architect Rem Koolhaas (born in 1944) curated the exhibition Countryside, The Future at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The exhibition is designed as a general panorama providing an overview across the ages; it brings together a diverse array of the world's rural areas and combines the historical perspective, such as the ancient conceptualisation of rural leisure, with an interrogation of the future of rural regions in light of industrial wellness, sustainability and adaptation to climate change. The idea behind this full rotunda installation at the Guggenheim relates to a shift in focus that Koolhaas dates to the 2010s:

In the past decade, I have noticed that while much of our energies and intelligence have been focused on the urban areas of the world, the countryside has changed dramatically under the influence of global warming, the market economy, American tech companies, African and European initiatives, Chinese politics, and other forces. This story is largely untold [...].

This story of the countryside received its refrain back in 2014, when Koolhaas came up with this quote, much cited ever since, in an article for the architecture magazine ICON: "The countryside is now the frontline of transformation". This does not mean making it a playground for planners of a comprehensive modernisation, which turns old into new and covers all areas of life from technical infrastructure to material supply and culture. Standardising development narratives and dialectic oppositions (such as outdated and modern, near and far, town and country) have for a while now fallen short. Descriptions of rural transformation must encapsulate a wealth of complex dynamics and intrinsic logic. They bring together the temporally as well as spatially distant and bring out the unrelatedness of what is temporally and spatially adjacent. That "frontline of transformation" runs through a decentralised area where changes have started to happen and opens up the hugely varied dimensions of rural life. In one of these dimensions, literature and the energy transition also met in the 2010s.

Taking another step closer and zooming in further on the energy transition and its narrative, even the literature in the 2010s that takes up the issue of energy does not negotiate large and comprehensive narratives. Just in passing: the situation used to be strikingly different, as can be seen when you look back at, for example, Monika Maron's Flight of Ashes, a novel that revolved around two fixed points: the Berlin management headquarters where decisions were made and the central energy production facility at the industrial chemical site in Bitterfeld. What was decided or produced here was applicable and relevant to the whole of the socialist project and transformation zone that was the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), i.e. East Germany.

The narrated space has shrunk significantly in relation to that. As mentioned above, decentralisation is not just one of the trademark technical and infrastructural features of the energy transition, but indeed even characterises large swathes of its narrative. Given these narrative perspectives, you might expect a huge variety of narratives. Instead, quite the reverse tendency can be seen, namely the narratives' convergence on one particular genre, namely the thriller. Just looking at various German book titles, one might be forgiven for thinking that the energy transition heralded the emergence of a new mini genre, the wind-turbine/village thriller: Spiel mir das Lied vom Wind (Once Upon a Time in the Wind) (2009) by Carola Clasen, Der Wind bringt den Tod (The Wind Brings Death) (2012) by Ole Kristiansen, Wer Wind sät (Who Sows the Wind) (2012) by Nele Neuhaus (made into a 2015 film by German TV channel ZDF), Tod unterm Windrad (Death Under the Wind Turbine) (2014) by Michael Elsaß, Windtod (Wind Death) (2016) by Markus Palic and Windspiele (Wind Chimes) (2016) by Dirk Zandecki are all thrillers that have wind or wind power in their title and revolve around energy projects. To this list can be added Natascha Manski's Fanggründe (Fishing Grounds) (2012), Josef Kelnberger's Der Grenzer (The Border Guard) (2013) and Juli Zeh's Unterleuten (Unterleuten, or Other People) (2016), which all link injustice in village communities to wind power.

This may seem surprising at first, but it is not hard to work out the reasoning behind the systematic connection between fictional crime and wind power. It is mainly due to the fact that land is needed for the expansion of wind energy, prompting a re-evaluation of local land ownership. This is where the thriller genre comes in: with its need for appropriate sites, wind energy triggers a genuine reorganisation of rural areas or rural property relationships, providing ample fodder for intrigue, fraud, suspicion, bullying and the resurfacing of past conflicts or the emergence of new ones. The wind-power thriller always centres on the identification of old, for example inherited, assets and speculation for new sources of capital. Disputes arise over the question of land sale (through purchase or lease) or because of land potentially becoming more valuable compared with unprofitable land that is not suited to energy production because of its boundary lines, topography, wind physics or nature conservation. The positions of opponents and proponents of wind power, NIMBY ('not in my back yard') conflicts, nature and landscape protection concerns and local political positions are also always part of the mix.

By opting for a thriller, authors seem to be expressing a prejudgement on the staging of the energy transition, as in this genre the energy transformation is perceived as the catalyst for a radical shake-up of property relations and raises the always thorny issue of ordinary people's, and especially agricultural communities', real estate. They are stories about land with monetary value, and therefore revolve around hectares and square metres, demarcations and boundary stones, maps, property rights and notary appointments, i.e. fiction meets cadastre. Framed in a more literary style and with a hint of village colour, it is about areas of land with names like the "Pfaffenwiese", the "Schiefe Kappe" or the "Himberg". The question that arises here – which is also what leads to or intensifies criminal motives – is ultimately, in one form or another, 'yours or mine?'.

The literary discourse thus overlays an economic one, which makes its starting point the land required by the energy transition and pursues a path for the transformation that runs between agriculture and the energy sector. However, there is no ignoring the fact that the arrow of time often weighs heavily on such village affairs, as residents relate the story of the energy transition primarily to the past – i.e. to property histories – instead of to the future. Scant attention tends to be paid to the issues of ecological transformation and climate protection, while the annals of local history are plundered with great relish. When reading the village-based novels, it is hard to escape the impression (and this would certainly have potential for literary generalisation) that the boom in this type of fiction offers literature a stage for small-scale historical passions.

Part 2: Juli Zeh's Unterleuten (Unterleuten/Other People) and Alina Herbing's Niemand ist bei den Kälbern (Nobody is with the Calves)

An example of the genre is the social novel Unterleuten (Unterleuten/Other People), a 2016 bestseller. The author, Juli Zeh, one of Germany's leading contemporary writers, chose to set this work in Brandenburg in flat north-eastern Germany. It tells the story of a fictional village called Unterleuten, just too far away from Berlin and its surrounding affluent suburbs to enjoy any of its wealth. Here people in their everyday lives have to cope with major structural weaknesses. Unterleuten is one of those seemingly forgotten-about areas neglected by core public services. The police, for example, only come after hours – that is, if anybody thinks it is even worth calling them. The next test to face the village, and the one that the novel focuses on, is the establishment of a wind farm. Zeh creates a microcosm of disputes around this subject, encompassing all the individual characters in such a way that their positions and characteristics (such as criminal or blameless, moral or reprehensible, weak or influential) become increasingly blurred. In terms of form, this is narrated skilfully and effectively, with perspectives constantly displacing each other, producing a variety – a kaleidoscope if you will – of rotating versions. So anybody coming to the text with an expectation that as they read on, they will get a clearer overall picture of Unterleuten will be disappointed because each chapter shifts the perspective. No further light is really shed on Unterleuten's present or past.

The construction of the wind farm is linked to property conflicts dating back to the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and even the land-reform period, i.e. to the post-war GDR. The novel centres on the hostility between two men who have no compunction engaging in violence and turn the village into a place ravaged by criminality, where suspicions and rumours of old and new crimes run rife. And we are talking here about serious crime: contract killings, assaults, blackmail, night-time burglaries/robberies, drinking-water poisoning and child abductions. These problems running through the village are brought to light by the investigations of a young female journalist.

Against this historical backdrop, the energy transition turns out in fact to be a renewed development of spatial relationships, a kind of next-generation land reform, which is closely linked to the problematic history of land ownership and agricultural production in the GDR and post-reunification Germany. Zeh's narration is largely retrospective: it is an analysis of the GDR and the fall of the Wall. This is a narrative where East-West German history casts a long shadow and which, like many other works of contemporary literature, directs our gaze into this past. In Unterleuten, the present makes itself felt where the narrative plunges its finger into the wound of structural weakness (while at the same time still apparently revelling in its colouring). Only the future – as a blueprint, project, potential prospect or at least a moment to overcome – is unclear to the residents of Unterleuten. For them, it is all about enduring rather than developing.

While you have to take a rather theoretical approach to identify this void (a missing future blueprint or a missing future in general), two other thematic omissions from the narrative are more immediately noticeable. They certainly surprised me when I read the newly-published Unterleuten in spring 2016 and became particularly striking in the spring 2020 ZDF film Unterleuten: The Torn Village, directed by Matti Geschonneck.

Firstly, in the novel there is no mention of right-wing or far-right activity in the village. It thus cuts out the ugly side of politics and, not least, also raises the question of whether its images of a structurally weak provincial backwater and all the toing and froing between the summer scenes, such as the Märkischer Landmann (the village inn) and the Schiefe Kappe (the potential area for the wind-farm development on the outskirts), are not subliminally about colour. Politically speaking, Unterleuten is an idyll. Secondly, climate change is alluded to at most in asides, but not as a socially relevant phenomenon. It is a hot summer, but ecologically the world is completely intact. The seasons take their course and while the farmers have notoriously empty coffers, their fields produce abundant harvests. Against this backdrop, it is easy to extrapolate the energy transition as a simple business model. As mentioned above, it is a tale about the economy and not about the much more complex issue of ecology.

Four years passed between the publication of the book and the film being broadcast. This was an eventful period in which the Paris climate agreements were signed, climate activist Greta Thunberg became famous, the Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future movements were established, a remaining part of the Hambach Forest was preserved, the German federal government took the decision to phase out coal, the United States withdrew from the Paris agreements, Central Europe was hit by heatwaves and droughts, the first signs of desertification were observed in areas of Brandenburg, and forest fires raged, reaching new proportions in Jüterbog, California, Australia and the Amazon.

It would be easy to provide a list here highlighting the upsurge in right-wing resentment locally, nationally and globally between 2016 and 2020. In this context, it is worth pointing out that in Germany, climate protection and the energy transition have become the main targets of right-wing polemicists (coinciding with a reduction in the public focus on the reception of refugees). This strident discourse, featuring much discrediting rhetoric, has placed the 'climate lie' at the heart of the struggle with democratic social forces. So with the energy transition suddenly finding itself at the forefront of a huge cultural conflict in recent years, there is something incomprehensible and inappropriately artificial about this – in the guise of a major television event – being told once again as a village land-ownership intrigue and therefore almost being depoliticised. The book and its film adaptation leave out the central elements of the debate, with the film, set at the beginning of the new decade, in particular seeming even more detached from reality, especially as it slavishly replicates the novel's omissions despite otherwise demonstrating a lot of licence vis-à-vis the original work.

However, it is above all the strong cast of the TV version that reiterates that arrow of time which is so entrenched in the subject matter of Unterleuten. All the village protagonists are marked by old injustices they have suffered or meted out or by new ones that quickly become entwined in the old stories. What is happening in some way makes past scars visible and so the village residents carry their life stories around with them like badly healed wounds. (In this look back, you can even discern the spooky motif of the curse-laden house.) Unterleuten has a population whose lives have been shaped by the village and its surroundings, which continue to determine their actions, feelings and emotions. In this connection, the film adaptation – when it takes its time, as it often does – provides impressive, artistic images of characters stuck in their village lives and traumas.

Unterleuten is a village full of contaminated sites and ballast, full of injuries and madness. However, the removal of the key issues of our day means that the material is not so much a social narrative but a mannerist village drama about the wounds of the GDR and the time around the fall of the Wall.

In 2017, a counterpoint to the land-ownership intrigues surrounding villages and the energy transition appeared, with the publication of Niemand ist bei den Kälbern (Nobody is with the Calves), the debut novel by Alina Herbing (born in 1984), telling the story of a person with no property. This character is called Christin, is in her early twenties, has broken off an apprenticeship as a hairdresser and is working and now living on a dairy farm belonging to her boyfriend's family. The farm is in the village of Schattin, again in the structurally weak provincial backwaters of north-eastern Germany, and once more its geographical remoteness brings with it economic and social dependency. Dairy farmers are doing badly economically. Everyday life is made up of a series of arduous and unprofitable tasks. The village environment has something stale about it and entails a great deal of misery and little prospect of any self-improvement. The profits from the wind turbines surrounding Schattin do nothing to change this. In an aside we learn that this is connected to the individual situation of the land and some lease-related matters. We see all this with the protagonist Christin, whom we follow for a few weeks of a summer in Mecklenburg. The focus here is on how she perceives the situation: what do the summer landscape, the village monotony, being young, farm work, the grass and the clay soil under the wind-turbine masts feel like?

A plane takes off over Lübeck and flies straight into the sun. And I suddenly have the feeling that a chubby child is clinging to my back and wrapping its arms around my neck as tightly as possible. Sometimes I think every plane I see exists only to remind me that I am one of the most insignificant people in the world. Why else should I be standing in a half-mown field at this moment? Not even in a Nazi stronghold, not even at the Baltic Sea or at the Mecklenburg Lake Plateau, not even on the death strip, but just before it, next to it, somewhere in between. A place where there is actually nothing but grass and clay soil and a few sites decent enough to put wind turbines.

Land-ownership projects are not Christin's cup of tea, but she does have an encounter under a wind-turbine mast with Klaus, an engineer who maintains wind turbines and is based in Hamburg. For the young woman, the city not too far away holds some attraction, but her affair with Klaus fails to really create a breath of fresh air in her life in the village. What follows instead, as nothing remains a secret in the village, is a series of dramas and quarrels on the farm. Village life in Herbing's novel is again about enduring rather than developing, but Niemand ist bei den Kälbern is not just a narrative about a single point in time, because Christin's story moves towards a tension and a moment that will change the situation.

It quickly becomes clear that the book's central figure is a manifestation of a monumental character in provincial literature: Emma Bovary from the 1856 novel Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1820-1881). Christin is conceived of as the Emma Bovary of the wind-power age and its landscapes. However, unlike in Flaubert's book, there is no fatal climax with the woman's suicide, by poisoning, following her despair at village life and subsequent affair. And so Herbing's novel ends with the reader curious as to what will become of its protagonist. However, this subject matter does not have at its centre or its heart project figures such as Landerer, Kannabich, Nadler or Lemoine. Nothing progressive develops under the wind-turbine masts, just a sparse 'posthistoire'. It is not projects but simply emotions that determine the course of events. Or to put it another way, people have other things on their mind than the energy transition.

This realistic prose of windy landscapes from the 2010s is a critical stock-take, dealing with problems of desertification, collapsing public services, and unevenly or unjustly distributed wealth and prospects. Regions are described which are structurally too weak and culturally too diluted to reinvent themselves. However effectively such works of fiction have critiqued and staged structural weaknesses, they have remained blind to transformation issues, ecology and climate protection. What is weakened and endangered are structures, never the area as such. Transformation instead would mean inventing the appropriate structures for the endangered area, and so for our ecological situation. This in turn can only be expressed both culturally and technologically.

Literature, other sources and texts consulted during research

• Koolhaas, Rem, Countryside architecture, https://www.iconeye.com/architecture/features/rem-koolhaas-in-the-country
• Koolhaas, Rem, Countryside, A Report, Taschen Verlag, Cologne, 2020.
• Nell, Werner & Weiland, Marc (eds), Dorf. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, 2019.
• Carola Clasen, Spiel mir das Lied vom Wind, KBV-Verlag, Hillesheim, 2009.
• Ole Kristiansen, Der Wind bringt den Tod, DTV, Munich, 2012.
• Nele Neuhaus, Wer Wind sät, Ullstein Verlag, Berlin, 2012.
• Michael Elsaß, Tod unterm Windrad, Cocon Verlag, Hanau, 2014.
• Markus Palic, Windtod. Ein Energiekrimi, Tagungsgesellschaft Energie, Karlsruhe, 2016.
• Dirk Zandecki, Windspiele. Ein neuer Fall für Ben Ruste, Gmeiner Verlag, Meßkirch, 2016.
• Natascha Manski, Fanggründe, Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2012.
• Josef Kelnberger, Der Grenzer. Kommissar Wolf ermittelt, Kindler Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2013.
• Juli Zeh, Unterleuten, Luchterhand Verlag, Munich, 2016.
• Matti Geschonneck, Unterleuten: The Torn Village (original German title: Unterleuten – Das zerrissene Dorf), ZDF, 2020.
• Alina Herbing, Niemand ist bei den Kälbern, Arche Verlag, Zurich & Hamburg, 2017.
• Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, translated from the French by Eleanor Marx-Aveling, Project Gutenberg, s.l., 2000, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2413/2413-h/2413-h.htm
• ARCH+. Zeitschrift für Architektur und Städtebau (2017): Stadtland. Der neue Rurbanismus, 50(228).
• Neu, Claudia (ed.), Daseinsvorsorge. Eine gesellschaftswissenschaftliche Annäherung, VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden, 2009.
• Uhlig, Ingo, 'Raum und Figur. Beobachtungen zur aktuellen Energieliteratur', in: Kulik-Frölich, Maria & Langner, Sigrun (eds), Rurbane Landschaften. Perspektiven des Ruralen in einer urbanisierten Welt, Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, 2018, pp. 75-85.
• Uhlig, Ingo, 'Energien erzählen. Zum Aufeinandertreffen von Kunst, Literatur und Energiewende', in: Marszalek, Magdalena, Nell, Werner & Weiland, Marc (eds), Über Land. Aktuelle literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf Dorf und Ländlichkeit, Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, 2018, pp. 141-157.

You soon notice that the author has made a decision from the start that the novel will be focused on a protagonist who is not an exemplary decision-maker or creative force. Trössner may have once been somebody who adeptly rolled out major projects, overcame resistance and mastered the manager's behavioural repertoire, but he is clearly no longer that man. His strength and ability to get things done have ebbed away. His days of derring-do, if there ever were any, are over. In Rückwind too, there is no simple and straightforward narrative model of the energy transition and its players. Here again the current energy transformation is a complex and intertwined process that is also prone to chance encounters and unpredictable linkages. The specific starting point is a tragic break in this businessman's life, namely the sudden onset of personal misfortune: on a dreadful spring day preceding the station scene, Trössner's son and wife were killed in accidents, and he set fire to their shared home a few hours later in an act of desperation. His breakdown also spelt the end of the road for his company. This misfortune has clearly turned this energy-transition pioneer into a Job-like figure: a once brilliant personality with the Midas touch who seemed to have the perfect life in every way until he is suddenly, and brutally, confronted with a reality that is too horrific to control through narrative.

The religious theme brought out here is not the main point of the narrative. Instead, the tragedy raises questions of providence, blind fate, justification and theodicy. The plot also puts another loss front and centre: as a successful businessman, Trössner was first and foremost an excellent communicator, being an outstanding storyteller, speaker and mediator. Given the language-focused world inhabited and shaped by Trössner, it is no coincidence that his surname is reminiscent of 'trusses' or the German word for 'cables' (Trossen), as these themselves are in essence a connection, linkage, channel or line. Yet these are the very threads that are cut by his misfortune. The intimate relationship he previously had with language and communication – his talent at building stories, at using words to connect things and people – has deserted him.

In this light, obviously it is not Trössner who is the narrator leading us by the hand through the events of the novel. At the same time though, the book does not have an external narrator with a universal overview. Instead, Spinnen offers a third way: Trössner's alter ego. In this way we have a spiritual authority who accompanies our protagonist to Berlin and considers his actions as a second-order observer, reporting from a distance or sometimes providing a commentary full of precocious chatter. This alter ego is a floating narrative voice that has no body or spatial position and that hovers around Trössner – as you might perhaps imagine – like a mosquito or is connected to him by a thin thread. The result of this conceit is a main character who speaks with a curious plural. This means that Trössner can speak to himself and gives him opportunities for self-commentary and self-reflection, e.g. with therapeutic mildness or ironic distance: the alter ego is an advocatus vitae, a type of counsellor – it is the part of Trössner that has been advocating continuity and the will to live since the tragic events of the spring.

Since then, whenever necessary, I've been arguing for life to continue, albeit maybe without questioning its meaning. I have been and am set against brooding and pondering. I have been and am set against depression and especially against the suicidal mind game. I'm the spirit that always offers affirmation, sometimes with a raised index finger, sometimes with a pointed remark. At the same time I've given Trössner a new voice.

Another aspect of this second voice is that in passing, a new and literary linguistic ability emerges, as it is the alter ego, that talkative authority, who takes stock, thus setting out the biographical background and therefore also the narrative. At this point we already notice that this novel brings with it a highly elaborate poetic toolkit, and that it sets the stage for an intricate game of language levels and relationships. The question that hits the reader right at the start is: why are wind power and the energy transition chosen as the topics to be presented in such a strikingly complex linguistic construction? Why is there this meeting of engineering and language constructions, of technology and poetics? Only after about a hundred pages do we gain a first insight into the answer.

At this point the story moves back to the time of Trössner's childhood, thereby opening up two lines of development: the development of the character on the one hand, and on the other, the energy transition as a major project emerging in a Germany that was initially divided and then unified.

We find out that Hartmut Trössner himself did not set up the firm and instead inherited his role. In fact, renewables were initially by no means the core business of his father's company. Trössner's father headed up a firm that built sophisticated specialised machinery and in the 1970s began to build up a small, experimental wind-turbine division on the side. The young Trössner, growing up in a mildly patriarchal family setup, was pre-ordained to run the family business one day. As he got older, he became ever more uncomfortable with the prospect of building machinery. Like a centrifugal force, the desire to get away became stronger: he distanced himself from his father's sphere of influence, moving to the United States to study international management. But it was not studying business that interested him as much as his attraction to American English, drawing him to literary seminars, debate clubs and even cabaret appearances in 'Pennsylvania Dutch'! We see unmistakably here the development of a multilingual, well-read and eloquent figure, whose mobility in language is reflected, at another level, in his lack of inner definition and considerable indecisiveness about his future plans. A gifted child, he has no particular inclination, and certainly does not yearn, to commit to tinkering with specialised machinery.

However, when his father dies suddenly, putting the company in a difficult situation, the decision is made for him. The funeral even takes place on the company's premises of all places. Instinctively, the young Trössner wants to get back on the plane to the United States as soon as possible, knowing full well that he does not want to take on ownership of the company. But when the situation demands, he agrees to deliver a eulogy in front of his father's staff. In doing so, the young man is taken aback by the impact of his own eloquence. As he speaks, in his descriptions of his father's life and his overview of the company's history, he lends pathos and worth to the tradition that he actually wants to get away from. Spontaneity spawns arguments that ultimately and paradoxically change the mind of those who utter them. Out of a rhetoric that slips out of control, narrative flow and a fair dash of narcissism arise biographical commitment. Language has the potential to create new situations in no time:

[...] his sentences impressed even himself ... Trössner himself felt what he was managing to do there. This was a big gig – the first really big gig in his life. ... And now it was just a matter of bringing it to the best possible end, an end this gig deserved. And that is precisely why the 26-year-old Hartmut Trössner pledged at the end of his father's funeral eulogy to do everything he could to preserve this man's legacy as he would have wanted and to turn his dreams into reality. ... If he had just kept his mouth shut, he could have been back on the plane to America in a few days – somebody else would decide the company's fate on his behalf, and none of those affected would ever see him again. He would just sign a few documents and otherwise remain the boy nobody had expected anything from. Whether or not he ended up richer would have meant far less to him than the certainty of being rid of the company for good. And that was exactly what he had just lost. He was not so young and so inexperienced – nobody could be – that he did not notice when he was making sacred vows in front of hundreds of witnesses.

The hero talks himself into a predicament and brings about a turning point in his life: his boyhood is suddenly over. The speech marks his coming of age. Having thus suddenly found himself in the hot seat, Trössner continues to struggle with mechanical engineering and mechanical engineers, but makes friends with the workforce in the small wind-power department. It is the 1980s, and wind-power engineers are curious outsiders in the company – an attribute they share with their inexperienced boss. However, as well as the mutual sympathy arising between marginalised people, a clear and unshakeable insight re-emerges, another fixed point in his life, already affecting the hardware of energy production and the crystal-clear necessity of an energy transition:

His main perception was that while of course, as everywhere in business, it was about effort and efficiency, it was also about the vision of a new world that would no longer sate its hunger for energy by burning itself but would divert its natural forces to where they were needed. Wind turbines were not just any specialised machinery, one-trick ponies, hidden away in factories that nobody entered except their workforce. Instead, they were very special installations that could be seen from a distance and which could be used to maybe save the whole of humanity.

From that moment on, this link between economic and ecological rationality forms the basis for how Trössner uses and develops his talent. Wind turbines become the company's core business, primarily thanks to the Electricity Feed-In Act of December 1990 (the novel sometimes unfolds in close parallel with the actual story of the energy transition). With this the 'specialised machinery' activities become a thing of the past. Trössner capitalises on these developments, but what sets him apart, going far beyond this, is his unremitting, tireless diligence as a speaker and his work on convincing people – in the company, in the political arena and in society. When renewables become a profitable line of business in the years that follow, the gates open wider and a difficult corporate situation becomes a solvable task. The wind-turbine whimsy turns into a real option on the energy market. Trössner is passionate about expanding his rhetorical arsenal, pushing the limits, working with intensification and exaggeration, and mastering linguistic strategies to overwhelm his audience.

By now, Trössner could give off-the-cuff talks about wind energy delivered with something like a hidden religious undertone. Investing in wind energy was not just any old economic project but part and parcel of the Herculean task of freeing humanity from the techn(olog)ical follies in which it had entangled itself. Selling wind turbines was not about simply coming up with sound earnings plans; rather, they had to be sold as a just weapon – a just weapon aimed at the operators of nuclear and coal-fired power plants who have plundered raw materials, polluted the environment and littered the countryside with huge ticking time bombs. Trössner made a highly persuasive case in this regard, even though he had previously not been particularly interested in politics, and certainly not in any kind of protest movement.

The economic and poetic climax of this project was his company's listing on the stock market. This step is described as a dematerialisation of the economic, as a transformation of things into words and fictions. A linguistic structure emerges that ultimately resembles poetry and literature.

From one day to the next, the company no longer smelt of metal, although more of this than ever was bought, processed and resold. It was now a mental construct, a bundle of stories and a sum of promises. It could now, in the worst sense of the expression, be talked into the ground, but you could also talk about this with brio and finesse; you could continually reinvent it with words, and this was both Trössner's stock in trade and his passion. At each press conference where he presented the quarterly balance sheet, he discussed the company in a new and different way, and he did this with words and sentences between which the 'hard facts' fluttered like little birds through the branches of a tree whose crown soars into the clouds. Trössner's annual press conferences were an event, sometimes even attracting literary editors from national newspapers, who then penned pointed or smug comment pieces. You did not have to be a psychologist to see jealousy in what they wrote. Here was a poet, with a turnover of billions of euros at his back.

There may be plenty of improper language, covert marketing and commercialised speech to be found in these presentations. They are a performance, constantly teetering on the edge of exposure as a calculation and a pretext. But they also make clear that language creates reality rather than just depicting it, and this applies to business, politics and ultimately of course also society. There is a leitmotif running through the novel that could be dubbed a narrative-generating reality. Around this motif, the novel furnishes us with a wealth of knowledge about the relationship between infrastructure projects and language. It impressively makes clear that the expansion of renewables is largely based on the expansion of semantics – a semantics made up of ideas, beliefs and moments of fascination, and of the rational and the emotional. In their artificiality and exaggeration, the character and life story of Trössner serve as an illustration showing and making visible the fact that producing a narrative is part of infrastructure projects, and that such projects lead a double existence and are also implemented in the form of images and fictions, of arguments and discussions. In other words, the energy transformation is largely a matter of narrative fate. This fictional character Trössner is designed to make this apparent. And so we watch this figure as he ties the fabric of language around engineering and energy technology. Trössner represents what is in reality, in the history of the energy transition, a much more finely divided and polyphonic progression. He is, if you will, the rough line of this much more filigree cultural drawing; with his name and charisma he provides a face, voice and centre for a far more complex transformation. Even if you remove him from the equation, it still shows that the energy transition consists of a transformation of perceptions and modes of interpretation, that it ultimately represents a change in mentality.

For me as a reader, this educational text had a remarkable effect: turning your gaze from the book to a real wind turbine, you almost perceive a cloud or haze of words and sentences surrounding this hardware and which is partly responsible for its existence. The technical artefact then itself comes to embody stories, voices and ideas. Perspectives trained like this in language have dizzying effects, which – if you look a long way outside the box and over to philosophy – can be found in the metaphor-based doctrine of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) or in how French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) interprets the texts of Lewis Carroll (1832-1898). In his books Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll made Alice a literary 'parade horse' who shows what language is capable of. During her adventure, she learns that things are not only decided in the exhausting confrontation of the physical world, but they acquire their meaning, far more than is believed, on the surface, i.e. in the way they appear to us and make sense to us.

Such a view generally creates freedom, because you suddenly see the world that has come about and its cumbersome artefacts in a completely different way, namely as a fluid language, created in the pros and cons of 'soft factors'.

As I continue to look at the wind turbine, I am puzzled. What if you raise the stakes involved in this thought? After all, wind turbines (like solar farms or biogas domes) are old friends by now. You can also take the really new technology into account here, in other words smart energy solutions that have already been developed to application maturity in areas such as sector coupling, flexibility, storage and grid management, i.e. technology that already exists but is still awaiting its rollout in 'reality labs' or – less euphemistically – is stuck in the starting blocks. Here, anybody who has recently read Rückwind will think: if technical innovations only find their way into widespread use slowly and hesitantly, although obviously much more would be feasible, they will only be held up by barriers in the form of those soft factors. So there must be a further communications drive to overcome the canon of old beliefs and tough competitive semantics. Or framing this differently and in a more positive way, for many years now the level of technology has reached such a point that the speed of its success depends only on it being properly communicated.

Trössner has the self-confidence needed for such a project and its acceleration. He is sure of his case, which shows not least the need for robust rhetoric in handling fossil-energy programmes that "have plundered raw materials, polluted the environment and littered the countryside with huge ticking time bombs…". The question of the legitimacy of types of energy has long been decided here, and with it the question of what is the most sensible form of energy supply for our present and our future. But it doesn't hurt to say it again, to draw the comparison again, because cultural validity is a matter of staging and framing. In this respect, Trössner's linguistic structure does not grow out of nowhere, but rather acts as a powerful counter-narrative to the old energy systems. He draws hard comparisons, makes aggressive use of comparatives for put-downs that reveal how the positions of the small and the big, the whimsical and the realist, have already reversed. The legitimacy deficit and the lack of realistic insight do not affect the switchover but the next steps.

Part 2

Changing courses rather than burning resources

Back, then, to how the narrative takes its course: Trössner, this great success of a character, is portrayed as a heroic lone fighter only at first glance. (Just the ironic distance provided by the alter ego, the narrative 'mosquito' who presented the biographical report, is enough to deflate this charismatic image time and again.) Trössner is shown to be a collegiate person, as can be seen in the perfect bond between the energy-transition pioneer and an engineer called Karolus, who, acting out of firm ecological conviction, becomes a guide and mentor and also – crucially when it comes to legislation and regulations – takes care of lobbying. Then there is Trössner's one-time partner, Liane (another name alluding to cables and lines), a woman with an eye for externals who develops information and advertising channels in the early days of the internet. And there is an engineer called Rindfleisch (the German word for 'beef') with a keen interest in technical matters at the company. In other words, the glory days of Trössner's life story are not a tale of the lone genius but rather of a successful division of labour, whose players influence each other, play off each other and offer each other ways forward. With the arrival on the scene of a second female figure, the novel then visibly moves away from a full focus on the energy milieu. Burkhard Spinnen marries Trössner off to a successful television actress, and they have a son and (until the fateful day of the tragedy that befell them) are seen by the public as a power couple showcasing green success.

Trössner is by now also associating with television and media professionals, eventually – a few hasty narrative leaps further – making his debut as a co-producer of a socially engaged, educational series about the rise of a right-wing populist party. Narrative-generating reality, that leitmotif of the novel that already emerged in the energy plot, is now transferred to a different milieu, further developed and pushed to the extreme. This is because the eccentric punch line of the TV project is that parts of the media increasingly confuse the events in the series with real politics and its actors, especially Trössner's wife, with real politicians. The novel then reaches a crescendo with a mass of people protesting on Berlin's streets, for whom (like a crowd of tinfoil-hat wearing oddballs) fiction is the new reality. The principle of narrative-generating reality is thus brought to a head and driven beyond a populist tipping point: here reality is now at stake, losing its bearings. The result is a collective delusion that is likely to be short-lived but still demonstrates the susceptibility of cultural movements to suggestive power.

After reading Spinnen's novel, you close the book with a feeling of utter astonishment. The final twists and turns and the denouement pose all kinds of difficult puzzles. However, it is obvious straight away that this energy-transition novel from 2019 focused on two issues that did not feature in its 2016 counterpart: unlike Unterleuten, Rückwind addresses, on the one hand, renewables as part of the ecologically pressing climate-protection project, and, on the other hand, right-wing populist dynamics and problems in safeguarding democracy. This represents a new form of writing about energy after the village-based novels and field research at the "frontline of transformation". First of all, it is climate-conscious and more political. But the scale has also changed: the previous microscopic look at wind-farm sites has now made way for movements relating to social energy semantics. The focus is no longer on the turbulence in rural areas being used for energy purposes, but on changes in the energy discourse in Germany. Here the author even manages to incorporate something as brittle as the Electricity Feed-In Act into the novel. And here, in this sphere, the space opens up for a large-scale narrative of progress and success in the form of Trössner's life and his company history.

However, and this makes the situation more complicated, this plot line has already come to an end. Hartmut Trössner, the central renewables character, makes his appearance in the novel when his corporate success story is over. The story of this virtuoso energy-transition performer has been and gone by the time 2019 comes around and is told in the past. His work in the field of renewable energy is viewed only from a temporal distance and retrospectively. Instead, then, of fiction being used to put forward a thrilling and progressive presentation of the energy-transformation adventure or a 'projection figure' being taken who is as close and relevant to the reader as possible, a biographical report is set out that above all deals with the emergence of energy semantics and the issue of its cultural validity in recent history. The result is not a moving and robust epic, but a complicated – you could even say idiosyncratic – analysis.

This is a difficult outcome. However, in this way Rückwind does inspire an attempt to establish some historical order.

What is happening here? Perhaps the answer could be that, in the Trössner character, a second phase of energy-transition developments has found a kind of literary representative, a pseudo-figure of sorts. The first phase and its generation involved striking figures from the worlds of fiction and real life: Kanabich and Landerer, Nadler and Lemoine. They were part of a heroic discourse interspersed with bold actions from the pioneering and protest era of the energy revolution. We are captivated by these figures who criticised spreaders of venom and corrupt systems, such as renewables entrepreneur Reiner Lemoine, who said "To hell with commerce, let's do something right". In the midst of so much authenticity and idealism, it would seem at first that literature and the energy project come together. In Rückwind, incidentally, it is the character Karolus, an engineer and also rather an odd customer, who is unmistakably a child of this generation.

In terms of the cultural sovereignty of interpretation and established opinions, it is clear that such people were green enthusiasts, unworldly hippies or – as Burkhard Spinnen describes Karolus – "wacky nutcases". If you briefly outline this linguistic order, a realistic position is claimed here, so that disrespectful speech can be derived from there. A gradient arises: in Peter Härtling's Das Windrad (The Wind Turbine) we have, for example, "environmental preachers" and "half crazy people". The remarkable and pretty scandalous thing about this is how little it took for such verbal characterisations to be made, and the same probably still applies all too often. These are derogatory expressions and insults, and yet they do not really offend, probably even among the green 'nutcases' themselves. However, when it comes to differences in terms of respect, it might give you the urge to use 'fossil-fuel nutcases' as the term for those at the opposite end of the spectrum and see what happens then.

With Trössner, on the other hand, we are meeting a second phase of the energy transition, in which the major project is expanded from the 1990s onwards and wired into social systems. Here we see a figure emerge with much less idealistic clarity than in the first generation. As mentioned above, Trössner is not a pioneer, but somebody who jumps on board by chance, interweaving the new energy landscape with his own career and making his own dazzling mark on it. His way of doing things involves moments of vision and enthusiasm and can also be reconciled with democratic politics and society. Trössner is the face and mediator of the new energy landscape, striking the right tone with citizens and politicians, workers, alternative groups and capital. He is a link – somebody in whom the threads of major projects can come together, being always available and approachable, and always friendly and obliging. In addition, with Trössner's success, renewables have shifted to the centre of society, thereby substantially reducing the potential, for him at least, of becoming the target of verbal swipes. Trössner no longer fits the description of the green 'nutcase'.

Is it good or bad news when the key instigator and actor in the energy transition already appears to be so shut down and removed? What is to be made of the fact that literature dresses up success in recent ecological energy history in the grand form of a fictional novel, but then only looks at it analytically and retells it? Why set the scene like this? The novel itself does not give an explicit answer to this question. However, it might be deduced from this that charisma and vision are perhaps needed less urgently than is commonly assumed, because the core idea behind the energy transformation has long been obvious and can easily be encapsulated in a small, straightforward distinction: changing courses rather than burning resources. My favourite passages from the novel are already quoted above. They relate to that central insight of the young Trössner, right at the start of his career: "His main perception was that while of course, as everywhere in business, it was about effort and efficiency, it was also about the vision of a new world that would no longer sate its hunger for energy by burning itself but would divert its natural forces to where they were needed".

Yes, you can see here a vision and the great expectations of a 'new world', but even in this passage you can perceive a sign of distance: we are not talking about visionary enthusiasm here, but about a fundamental understanding of what things are all about, about internalising a rational core. It is as if somebody who knows the language so well has already allowed themself a slight reservation: a reservation about big visionary narratives. The reason for this is probably simple: they know their toolkit and can understand their instructions.

Such a detachment and what follows from it – discourse observation and metadiscourse, reflexive loops of procrastination and postponement of action – are generally of great value, as they allow us to clarify and orientate ourselves in the maze of discourse mechanisms. But with Trössner we look down from these levels of reflection to something that is necessary and also already feasible: changing courses rather than burning resources.

This is associated less with vision and enthusiasm than with something more durable, less sketchy and less vulnerable: the argument. Like Trössner, we can let ourselves be absorbed by this argument and defend it more naturally and less hesitantly, because, as we also learn from this novel, the world consists of language and much in it is decided in language. Trössner, the literary phantom from the second generation of the energy transition, has managed to turn the tide and reassign the speaking roles associated with renewable and fossil energy stocks: if you open your eyes, the roles of the 'nutcases' (test) and the realists are reversed. And it gets even better, because you can now finally ask about the new, third generation.

Literature, other sources and texts consulted during research

• Burkhard Spinnen, Rückwind, Verlag Schöffling & Co., Frankfurt am Main, 2019.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich, 'About truth and lie in the extra-moral sense', in: Nietsche's Seven Notebooks from 1876 translated from the German and edited by Daniel Fidel Ferrer, n.p., s.l., 2020, pp. 129-138, https://archive.org/details/nietzsches-seven-notebooks-from-1876/page/n3/mode/2up
• Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, W H Smith, s.l., 1991.
• Deleuze, Gilles, The Logic of Sense, translated from the French by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale and edited by Constantin V. Boundas, Columbia University Press, New York, 1993.
• Koschorke, Albrecht, Wahrheit und Erfindung. Grundzüge einer allgemeinen Erzähltheorie, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2012.

This one features not only Rezo but also many other YouTubers such as Mirella, Julian Bam, Luca and Anni the Duck. Central to both these videos is a warning of inadequate climate policies with a view to the approaching European Parliament elections on 26 May 2019. Both had before long garnered millions of clicks and could be classified as a stroke of genius. The lecture is captivating from the start and adopts an unusual tone. The critique involves as much heat as it does light. When it comes to the climate crisis, this means accusing the government of a policy failure insofar as its acknowledgement of the crisis as a real one has not been followed up with adequate political action. While the talk of 'destruction' might sound rather edgy and provocative, it is not meant to be an expression of populist emotions but rather objective and neutral, being the result of instructive research. This is how Rezo introduces the video:

OK, so this isn't going to be one of those boring political videos. This is really going to be a destruction video – not because I'm actively trying to destroy anybody, but because the facts and figures simply suggest that the CDU is destroying itself, its reputation and its election results.

So begins a lecture accompanied by lively hand gestures and filmed in quick cuts. It features a sequence of acceleration intervals, with minimal pauses in Rezo's speech, after which his words speed up again. However, his sentences, while following this rhythm, despite being sometimes imprecise and not entirely accurate in their grammar, communicate the content appropriately and transparently (thanks in part to a list of sources in a document given in a link in the description). And although this political analysis is accompanied by much ironic commentary, satirical exaggeration and plenty of 'LOL' language, its objectivity and avoidance of punchlines in favour of building up extensive lines of argumentation means that it steers well away from comedy formats or political cabaret. Continuing in this style, Rezo launches into his reflections on the climate crisis about five minutes into the video. He describes its causes and dangers before moving on from the precarious situation to the issue of the energy transformation by broaching the following question:

Can we still do anything about this? ... Yes, science says that it is all still achievable, but we just have to make very different policy decisions from before. Scientists have shown that we could switch to renewable energies much faster [than we currently are], and this could even be done worldwide.

[…]

Scientists agree [...] that we have to switch to wind, water and, above all, solar energy as quickly as possible and of course stop using coal, oil and all that rubbish as soon as possible. And when I say 'stop', I mean 'stop' – end of story! That stuff served humanity very well for a while, but that's it now...

But man, this is fantastic! It means we can do anything! We can make a real go of this change. Science has plenty of possible solutions up its sleeve and all that the CDU and SPD [i.e. the Social Democrats] really have to do is what the scientists say. Nice, right? Yeah, but the thing is ... they aren't doing it ... [laughs] ... it's so sad ...

This is followed by Rezo talking about the overly hesitant coal phase-out, the political clique of the "coal dudes" from energy company RWE, the imbalances in the structuring of the labour market between fossil-fuel-based energy sources and renewables as well as the untapped potential that could be provided by CO2 pricing. He incorporates into this discourse, among other things, recordings of energy scientist Volker Quaschning and political economist Maja Göpel, made at the time of the official presentation of Scientists for Future in March 2018. After about 20 minutes – in the 25th minute, to be precise – he then goes on to the next topic.

Its more than 18 million YouTube views at the time of writing probably make this lecture one of the best-known commentaries on the energy transition in Germany. All of this is provided by Rezo, a young man with an eccentric pseudonym who portrays himself as a garish and fidgety fictional character – a figure drawing on punk elements, such as his blue hair, while perhaps taking up the Gorillaz aesthetic of the comic artist Jamie Hewlett and performing a nervously accelerating zigzag movement that radiates expressionistic energy.

That same year, 2019, saw the publication of a non-fiction work called Vom Ende der Klimakrise. Eine Geschichte unserer Zukunft (From the End of the Climate Crisis – A Story of Our Future) by climate activists Luisa Neubauer (born in 1996) and Alexander Repenning (born in 1989). This too features precise argumentation and reveals the massive threats posed by inadequate climate protection policy. The question arises again and again: What can we still do? Where is the way out? This creates an interrogative focus in our reading, which, however, continually brings out a sense of possibility. Answers emerge from these questions. Proposals, blueprints and outlines for better practices make an appearance. The stance taken is 'let's finally get round to trying out clean energies, smart technologies, new forms of mobility and new food systems and having less social competition and more distrust of the idea that consumerism provides guaranteed happiness'. According to the authors, though, such ideas will not succeed if we put our trust in current policies or as the sum of individual actions and decisions (the question 'What can I do alone?' takes you down the wrong track). Instead, their success depends on being part of a collective movement that takes determined action and puts up resistance to fossil-capitalist systems' theft of the future (including through civil disobedience). This raises the question: What can we do together? The answer offered by protest movements is 'Build up pressure together!' These calls are interspersed with stories from the authors' lives and their development into activists. Neubauer's dismayed reports about meetings in the upper echelons of business and politics are particularly arresting.

In the midst of these antagonistic constellations, a new generation is emerging – one that has acquired a considerable level of sovereignty and for which simply continuing to plough the same furrow is out of the question. In terms of tone, a comparison with literary movements through the ages shows that some aspects here recall the gestures of pre-revolutionary periods, for example the German proto-Romantic Sturm und Drang movement, occurring roughly between the late 1760s and the 1780s, representing one of the brightest periods of the dawning modern age. At that time, too, there were young protagonists and storytellers whose patience was running out and who used polished arguments to express themselves on the older generation's territory but who, instead of a will to change, encountered dreary and calculating persistence. The younger generation had and still have authenticity on their side. And Neubauer and Repenning capture this well as they show, first, that a lot is at stake and, second, that a climate-neutral future will make our cities, towns, villages and countries more liveable.

Greta Thunberg (born in 2003) was the inspiration behind and the instigator of the international climate movement Fridays for Future. When she first started her activism in summer 2018, she was just a lone figure with a pile of leaflets and a placard reading Skolstrejk för klimatet ('School strike for the climate') in a pedestrian precinct near her home in Stockholm. The resulting school strike snowballed into a thunderous protest movement. Supported by the Friday demonstrations, the young woman did some straight talking as she confronted top politicians and big business in New York, Paris and Davos. The pictures of those appearances have left a lasting impression on our collective memory, from when she talked about our house (i.e. the planet) being on fire at the World Economic Forum in Davos, saying "I want you to panic", to when she indicated that it was fundamentally misplaced to exercise restraint through showing respect for contemporary elites, by challenging them with the words "How dare you?" at a UN climate summit.

In its coverage of these events, the media repeatedly tried to draw parallels between her and Joan of Arc (c. 1412-1431), who has been portrayed as a historical woman of iconic integrity and courage and who has, like almost no other figure, inspired artistic adaptations, especially dramas on the stage or screen – from, for example, Friedrich Schiller's 1801 tragedy The Maid of Orleans to Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 minimalist silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc and, more recently, Luc Besson's 1999 film The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc. However, we need to be cautious in the face of this voracious desire to make associations because clichés are never far away when it comes to comparisons between heroines. However, there is a thread that does indeed connect the climate activist to the activists in these dramatic productions, and not only at a superficial level. The link is that in each case ossified individual attitudes come to light because the fallaciousness of prevailing conditions has reached levels that can no longer be tolerated. Thunberg's strong criticism and active rejection of lazy compromise in favour of rational insight builds on the radiance that emerges, for example, from the lines of conflict in Schiller's classical dramas and also from the most fully fleshed-out treatises of critical philosophy, such as Negative Dialectics by Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969).

Broken down again, the critique could be formulated as follows: "You're doing the wrong thing and doing nothing to change it. We all know that. Well, I can't play along with that."  Nobody appearing on the big stage next to Thunberg and who is guided by logical argument and reason can really contradict this. While there has been no outbreak of 'panic' so far (i.e. dynamic action capable of tackling the crisis), strong alliances and forces are being formed in the political arena and in the scientific community. This is of course also due to the fact that Thunberg's demands have not been plucked out of thin air, but rather have their origins in internationally ratified agreements – the Paris climate treaties – and derive their list of challenges from there: decarbonisation, renewables, the mobility revolution, and so on. Indeed, Thunberg's use of low-carbon means of transport such as trains or a sailing boat became one of her trademarks.

Rezo, Luisa Neubauer and Greta Thunberg are some of the faces of the national and international climate protection movement. They are not mentioned here just for the sake of it so as to reiterate their high profile or their iconic status, but to showcase the breadth and most prominent elements in a discourse that is essentially one about energy systems. The demand for 100% renewable energies is becoming the leitmotif for a social awakening here – the driving force for a reformist or future-oriented project which draws its dynamism from the contemporary analysis that when it comes to the global climate, far too much is at stake to continue overlooking the dangers, and that changes in energy technology have long held out the tangible opportunity of a solar age. This is associated with a number of far-reaching ecological and social goals, relating to species protection, agriculture, waste avoidance and the socially just restructuring of existing societies. However, a recurring centre of gravity among these concerns is the transformation of the energy system in all its sectors, i.e. the non-fossil-based and decarbonised supply of energy to our societies.

These clearly audible voices document, first and foremost, how much the conversation about energy has changed, expanding and yet growing more intense and of course more controversial. An illustration of this from the here and now is provided by those working in the electricity sector, who these days are faced, often to their own irritation, with the fact that energy and they themselves have moved to the centre of political and cultural debate. That is why it is now high time to rebut the all-too-familiar observation that electricity no longer simply comes from a socket. Electricity and energy have gained new facets, becoming complex social issues: they have acquired new, increasingly visible communicative and social dimensions. They form, for example, part of a future movement.

However, reference is made here to the discourse icons of the climate movement also to identify and emphasise aesthetic aspects: the conversation about energy has not only changed insofar as it has become more politically controversial and intense. It has also become more image-laden, has been emotionalised and aestheticised, and has become rhetorically and symbolically charged. This has been superficially recognised, and certainly also reinforced, by the striking and memorable language of our climate heroes – an association which, as previously mentioned, is primarily inspired by Greta Thunberg, but which should be subject to the caveat that it falls short in fully describing these phenomena. Due to their virtually heroic character, they quickly become clichés and run the risk of treading the all too fine line between seriousness and comedy, tragedy and farce.

This brings me on to a different idea: it could instead be their decidedly future-oriented approach that leads these actors to adopt nuances, gestures and traits that are sometimes closer to aesthetic phenomena, art or fictional figures. Here real life and politics are doing something that modern art in particular has always done and that is the mark of its avant-gardism, namely turning away from a sclerotic and corrupted present to work for tomorrow. On closer inspection, art brings the same temporal preference into play, because it too acts as an advocate of future life possibilities. To put this even more clearly, it only succeeds if it can break free from the chains of its own times and speaks up for the future, standing up for a future society or, as might be said following painter and Bauhaus representative Paul Klee (1879-1940), for a still-missing people. And it is precisely this urge to move forward that allows it to invent a wealth of new, extraordinary shapes. A new vocabulary is created within the established languages, new images and stylistic features emerge – partly by first appropriating previous ones, using them in a new context and giving them new strength. In any case, anybody who visibly speaks for the future appears almost necessarily eccentric: the provocative thesis and the electrified zigzag of Rezo, the unyielding sense of possibility of Neubauer and Repenning, the tragic-imperative criticism of Thunberg.

And here, too, it is true that the energy discourse has entered into these diverse forms of expression and is represented in the poetic/expressive dimension of these movements.

It is hard to discern a uniform line or choreography among the various voices. However, an answer can be offered at this point to the question, posed at the start of these essays, of where in today's transformation narratives figures will emerge who recognise the ecological need to curb global warming and at the same time regard the necessary change as an opportunity to shape a future worth living in. Yes, these figures are visible and yes, they develop narrative formats, ethical attitudes and future plans that offer inspiration and direction for a broad movement. But they are less about fiction and more about progressively developing the political space: they are the activists and their movements who tell of the opportunities of a decarbonised era and demand that they be given the assistance they need to shape these.

* The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was in 2019 – and still is at the time of writing in early 2021 – the political party leading the German government.

Part 2

There are so many of us already                                                                                              

The thicket is no sacred grove.

                                                                                                              Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

It seems as though this reality has caught literary fiction rather off guard, given that in narrative projects that are realistic, i.e. close to the present-day situation, climate protection projects and the issue of resource transformation are left to a large extent undeveloped. They tend to play second fiddle to other elements, as in the most recent village-based literature. But even outside realistic narrative settings, the current transformation efforts tend to be associated with a more episodic narrative approach. This is shown by various climate dystopias, which now form a genre of their own called 'climate fiction', or 'cli-fi' for short. Here, spellbound authors or narrators report on future adaptations to a climate collapse that has already come to pass, and, on the fringes of this drama, look back on climate protection and resource transformation as failed or ineffective projects that were powerless to alter the climate's fate. For example, in Omar El Akkad's American War, dusty solar panels generate the bare minimum of electricity in the emaciated landscapes of the southern United States, and in Karen Duve's Macht (Power), the solar panels on Hamburg rooftops can no longer withstand the violence of surging hurricanes. Both are impressive tales of the devastation of our planet and the deeply regrettable need to deal with the climate disaster, portraying gloomy panoramas of climate change adaptation.

Literature's reluctance to engage with current opportunities for development in this regard has been analysed recently by Samuel J. Kramer (born in 1996), a poetry slammer and climate activist, who published an anthology entitled Poetry for Future. 45 Texte für Übermorgen (Poetry for Future. 45 Texts for the Day after Tomorrow) in 2020. In this anthology, Kramer brings together various authors, most of them from the poetry-slam scene – an artistic movement, incidentally, that is often a creative force in Fridays for Future or Extinction Rebellion campaigns in the form of climate slams.

The volume's title itself indicates the anthology will go on the offensive, and the cover shows a chlorophyll-green fist stretched upwards – a clear piece of manifesto-style iconography that evokes a strong will to transform and create and has a solarpunk feel about it. However, Kramer feels the need to state in his editorial that the collected texts only cohere to the limited extent that they in essence showcase the canon of climate fears:

Looking through the texts for this anthology, I also noticed that dystopian visions predominate while positive blueprints for the future are a rarity. I believe that one fundamental problem in this debate is that people often talk about how things can't go on like this – and yet fail to say how things should go on. Indeed, I don't absolve myself of having had difficulties in this regard.

At the same time, however, I believe that the literary preoccupation with negative feelings that our uncertain future triggers in us can be very valuable and constructive. We need a space or echo chamber for our fears, sadness and anger surrounding our destructive system.

Perhaps the reference to an echo chamber for our fears should be taken from this passage which fittingly captures a dimension that is currently a major feature of climate literature. There is the great sentimental discourse about climate losses and what we feel and will feel about them.

But that doesn't have to be all: perhaps Kramer is also right in saying that this echo chamber marks a dimension of the transformation process in which there is an aggregation of the many young, for example 'slammed', voices and a period providing an incubator for political and creative forces has begun. Much of this currently remains passive, but it may herald an era of transformative creativity: There are already so many of us. There is great potential and a great willingness to courageously and creatively face up to the huge challenges of our time.

Another publication from 2020 uses a lyrical word that seems to denote the same echo chamber, appearing as the title of a volume of poetry by Marion Poschmann, one of today's leading German-speaking poets: Nimbus, the name of a type of cloud, is the title of a book in which the Anthropocene becomes language, in which poems leave a feeling of sadness and record what is vulnerable and has been lost. Poschmann fits out this space with a climate inventory – Siberia's boreal forests, Greenland's glaciers, extinct species, fossil-fuel energy infrastructure – and poses the question of how we can rescue the situation. In fact, it is a dream poem that begins with the following lines:

Rettung des Weltklimas aus

dem Geist der deutschen Ode –

haben wir uns da nicht etwas

viel vorgenommen?

(Saving the world's climate from

the German ode's spirit –

haven't we taken on rather

a major challenge here?)

The role of literature in the climate crisis crops up again here. Not that much is expected of art – the distance or complexity separating the ode and the climate is apparently too great. Let's leave this alone... In addition, as I mentioned, we have here a dream world which the author lets this question blow into, which also reveals the all too self-referential character and sleepy nature of poetry: ... und ich immer in Denkerpose, ein Traumprotokoll der Innerlichkeit (and I'm always in a thinking position, a dream protocol of inwardness). The lyrical space appears strangely padded out here – this is about contemplation: productive as well as receptive.

But becoming aware of the defensive is a first step. And apparently something is stirring in this dream capsule, in this self-reference. There is a growing restlessness. The text is entitled Hypnopomp, referring to the semi-conscious images and states shortly before we wake up. This is meant to be a time for getting things in order in our head before waking up, a time for probing.

Following Kramer, this could also mean 'out into the day, into the sun, into photosynthesis'. And 'towards others'. There are already so many of us. This is not about affirmation, but about experimenting, and yes, not giving up on the issue of saving the global climate, but trying to do this with others.

To cast a sideways glance at a remarkable non-simultaneity within the arts and bring these thoughts to an end for the time being, it seems to be primarily the design-based disciplines – i.e. the visual arts – that have long been out here and have started to adopt a transformative approach in their work. Of course, the visual arts also create an echo chamber revealing ecological crises and the dangers of climate change. At the same time, though, a large number of works are presented that view both the necessity and the possibilities of an ecological transformation as an opportunity to experiment with great curiosity, to design alternative techniques and practices, to become progressive and creative. An ecological, aesthetic and cross-disciplinary thrust can be observed, leading to new practices, objects, materials and architectures and which has long taken art out of the self-referential sphere. Out here you can meet engineers, activists, craftspeople, hobbyists, cooks and scientists. Among them is, for example, Tomás Saraceno (born in 1973), the Argentine artist who has become famous for his spiders' webs, network-based architecture that people can climb into and low-carbon flight experiments. When talking about his perception of himself as an artist in an interview, he said: For me, art always means 'art in dialogue or in exchange with' … He continued:

We have to form new alliances and new ways of working to understand our world. The categories that exist today tend to separate us from one another rather than to unite us. It seems to me that art can help us in this process. Art has this ability, this generosity or this innocence. In art, you continue to search with childlike innocence, and it seems to me that that is exactly what can help us to see the world with other eyes.

Here again, art does not become affirmative because of this – not by a long way – but it does complement critique with the element of design, with a playful approach that has the self-confidence to be disruptive. In doing so, it turns inwardness and self-reference into a network of relationships; it works and reflects in the manner of an architect or planner. Ivory towers are considered to be just one environment within this creative space. While they continue to be a good place to undertake the relevant preparatory work, they are too spatially restricted and ultimately too isolated to shape things further.

And the energy transition is also taking place out here, with stakeholders from the technical fields in question having made it increasingly clear in recent years that the skills of engineers, supported by economists and lawyers, will probably not be enough to make this project a success. The energy transition has a cultural pulse, and that is why it should be given shape in this area – i.e. as culture – and be embodied as literature, images or action even more than it is now.

A sure bet for the future is that the resulting complexity will not be the problem, but rather represent a turning point.

Literatur, sources and texts consulted during research

• Harold Rosenberg, "The resurrected Romans", in: Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New, Horizon Press, New York, 1959.
• Rezo, Die Zerstörung der CDU (The Destruction of the CDU), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y1lZQsyuSQ (in German).
• Rezo et al., Ein Statement von 90+ Youtubern (A Statement by 90+ YouTubers), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpg84NjCr9c (in German).
• Gorillaz, The Lost Chord ft. Leee John (Episode Nine).
• Luisa Neubauer and Alexander Repenning, Vom Ende der Klimakrise. Eine Geschichte unserer Zukunft (From the End of the Climate Crisis – A Story of Our Future), Tropen Verlag, Stuttgart, 2019.
• Friedrich Schiller, The Maid of Orleans. A Tragedy, translated from German by Anna Swanwick, Project Gutenberg Ebook, s.l., 2006, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6792/6792-h/6792-h.htm.
• Carl Theodor Dreyer, The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928.
• Luc Besson, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, 1999.
• Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, translated from German by E. B. Ashton, Routledge, London, 1973.
• Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, translated from German by E. F. N. Jephcott, Verso, London and New York, 2005.
• Omar El Akkad, American War, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2017.Karen Duve, Macht (Power), Galiani Verlag, Berlin, 2016.
• Samuel J. Kramer, Poetry for Future. 45 Texte für Übermorgen (Poetry for Future. 45 Texts for the Day after Tomorrow), Satyr Verlag, Berlin, 2020.
• The Solarpunk Community, A Solarpunk Manifesto, http://www.re-des.org/a-solarpunk-manifesto/.
• Marion Poschmann, Nimbus, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2020.
• Tomás Saraceno, Floating into the Future, broadcast by Arts.21 – The Culture Magazine (Deutsche Welle) on 31 January 2021, https://www.dw.com/en/tomás-saraceno-floating-into-the-future/av-55044819.
• Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, translated from French by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, Verso, London and New York, 1998.