Nature, Condensed: Reading Paul Celan, Esther Kinsky, and Theodor W. Adorno in the Anthropocene

This essay explores a particular kind of German postwar aesthetics as a framework for thinking through the conceptual challenges of the Anthropocene. Focusing on the relationship between nature and history, the article reads Paul Celan’s “The World” from Speech Grille (Sprachgitter) together with Esther Kinsky’s 2013 volume Nature Preserve (Naturschutzgebiet) to trace how both authors intertwine commemoration of the Shoah with exact attention to the more-than-human world. These two aspects of their poetry are not merely complementary but mutually constitutive; together, they give shape to the ecological entanglements that Donna Haraway has referred to as naturecultures. Considered in relation to Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, both poets combine reflections on language, history, and the natural world in a way that remains conscious of its own mediation as a specifically human—and, as such, necessarily partial—form of expression. In this way, memory gives rise to a poetics of condensation, a form of literary expression in which history and nature, including human nature, emerge as interwoven in language.