Angela Kölling
‘In mass media, the figures of “talking heads” speak as agents of radically heterogeneous interests – corporate sponsors, administrative hierarchies, journalistic canons, market shares.’
(W.J.T. Mitchell, 20)
In June 2021 the regional German newspaper I buy when I visit my parents featured an article entitled ‘Vorerst kein Wassermangel zu befürchten’ (For the time being no shortage of water to be feared)[1] by Maximilian Gang. The title is misleading as the article elaborates in a half-page feature that ‘in recent years’ groundwater levels have been at a ‘historic’ low. The author closes with a quote about how the regional water management appreciates sensible use of drinking water in private households. The other half of the same page features a second article by Gang, ‘Finger weg vom Hydranten’ (Hands off the water hydrant), which presents several official rules and restrictions regarding the filling, maintenance, and emptying of private pools during droughts. It also mentions that extreme weather conditions in 2018 and 2019 already led to water usage restrictions in the region. As with the first article, the focus is on being sensible and turning on or off one’s private tap.
The back-to-back placement of the two articles is ideal to extract some of the contradictions readers are faced with when following contemporary public environmental discourse. On the one hand, the reader is told that ‘for the time being,’ there is nothing to worry about; on the other hand, the author points out that droughts are now a regular occurrence. Moreover, Gang’s articles are exemplary of a general bias in political narratives of our time, namely, the focus on individual short-term decision-making, which conveniently shifts attention away from necessary systemic changes.[2]
The focus on private water consumption and individual decision-making processes has led to a down-scaling of what is considered politically doable, or “machbar” in German. Captured in the aphorism Politik ist das was möglich ist (politics is that which is possible), Machbarkeit has been and continues to be instrumentalized by both the Left (Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Behndit) and the Conservatives (Angela Merkel). The term often plays a prominent role when decisions need to be justified that meet with concerted public resistance. In simple terms, it is a divide and conquer strategy that diffuses collective political action by shifting attention away from systemic problems to focusing on the individual as the scope of political responsibility. This is expressed, for example, in the (false) logic that it is impossible (nicht machbar) to ban plastic bags because individuals still buy them.
In the history of ideas political Machbarkeit draws on the concept of realpolitik. The term can be traced back to nineteenth-century writer and politician Walter von Rochau’s book Grundsätze der Realpolitick [sic] angewendet auf die staatlichen Zustände Deutschlands (Principles of Realpolitik Applied to the National State of Affairs in Germany, published 1853). Von Rochau conceives of realpolitik as a turning away from idealistically fraught politics. In the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and full-blown globalization, however, it has become a tool for politicians, corporations, and lobbyists to alter and control the perception of progressive environmental politics.[3] Therefore, a pressing problem for environmental activism today is how to tell, or re-tell, the narrative of possible actionable change.
A key to re-telling or re-branding change is addressing what I would call ‘scalar political illiteracy’. Timothy Clark identifies scale as the new locus of critical discussion on environmental discourse and argues that we need to pay attention ‘to the way the nature of an issue or situation alters according to the scale at which it is considered.’[4] Scale as a critical lens reveals that environmental problems are inherently multi-scalar. Spatial, temporal, and historical conceptualizations of our world often instrumentalize scale corresponding to particular political logics. This can be used both to concretize and to diffuse organized political activity. Scalar political literacy is the ability to deconstruct and analyze scale and to secure multi-scalar attention so that one is able to move between scales and identify diverse choices for political action.
Through a discussion of Frank Schätzing’s Was, wenn wir einfach die Welt retten? Handeln in der Klimakrise (What If We Simply Save the World? How to Act in the Climate Crisis), I will show that talking heads – not to be mistaken with public intellectuals – play a significant role in building scalar political literacy. ‘Talking heads’ are, as defined by W.J.T. Mitchell, mass media figures that ‘speak as agents of radically heterogeneous interests – corporate sponsors, administrative hierarchies, journalistic canons, market shares.’ (20) Schätzing’s non-fiction eco-thriller reveals environmentalism to be a market made up of many relations in which different players valorize and de-valorize certain concepts, including ‘the public,’ ‘realpolitik,’ and ‘responsibility.’ In my reading of Was, wenn wir einfach die Welt retten? I demonstrate that effective environmental branding depends on embodied practices that appeal to the senses through affective modes of communication. My proposition is threefold: 1) infinite exchanges between the individual and the communicative market produce crowds and thus opportunities for vanguard politics; 2) critical brand acts by way of social media, such as hashtags and common logos, are acts of curating crowds into an active citizenry; and 3) crossovers between critical academic practice and the communicative capitalist market expose translatorial skills through which the power of systems can be sought.
Brand Act 1: To Simply Save the World
Frank Schätzing is a Cologne-born author who gained worldwide recognition for his bestselling eco-thriller Der Schwarm (The Swarm), published in 2004. The book sold 2.4 million copies worldwide and was translated into twenty-seven languages. Additionally, it was adapted into a television series of the same name released in 2023. In 2006, Schätzing also published Nachrichten aus einem unbekannten Universum. Eine Zeitreise durch die Meere (Messages from An Unknown Universe. Time-Travel through the Oceans), a nonfiction book about oceanic science in which he extends the research that he undertook when writing The Swarm. Through this book Schätzing garnered further acclaim on account of his scientific knowledge. He also holds a degree in communication studies, is the co-founder of an advertising agency called Intevi, and regularly appears as an environmental commentator on TV and radio.
In 2020 Schätzing interrupted work on his next thriller in favor of writing, in his own words, a ‘non-fiction eco-thriller.’[5] Was, wenn wir einfach die Welt retten? came out in early 2021 and was promoted through many literary, environmental, and political platforms.[6] In July 2021, it was announced that Schätzing was the recipient of the Bavarian Book Prize’s Honorary Award (Ehrenpreis des Bayerischen Ministerpräsidenten). In the same month, the Ahrtal, a tributary of the Rhine south of Cologne, suffered catastrophic flooding that made world-wide news, cost 134 lives, and injured more than 700. The award was presented to Schätzing by Bavarian Minister-President, Markus Söder, a member of the Bavarian Christian Socialists (CSU). 2021 was a federal election year in Germany. The prize is the first accolade in Schätzing’s career that makes an explicit connection between his literature and politics.
Schätzing is an interesting case study because his background in marketing allows us to assume that he is a highly self-reflective agent in the environmental market. He employs a variety of brand acts that aim to change the way personal and public environmental politics are seen.
The first and most apparent brand act is Schätzing’s choice of title: Was, wenn wir einfach die Welt retten? The word einfach (simply) suggests that saving the world is simple or can be done simply. By mobilizing simplicity, Schätzing intervenes in both scientific and political valuation regimes. Politicians have often typecast scientific discourse as inaccessible, contradictory, and impractical. Scientific rhetoric reduces opportunities to translate for the public because it overemphasizes the need to understand everything before any action can be taken. Schätzing showcases instead that most of us understand enough of the science to take environmentally sustainable action. In other words, he downscales the intellectual barrier.
Another clever move Schätzing makes in his title is that he immediately claims a collective. The word wir (we) in Was, wenn wir einfach die Welt retten? taps into an imagined community that shares a common interest in saving the world. He reinforces this imagination by narrating diverse examples of how to make sustainable choices that many might have already made. In many cases, he also offers scalar options. For example, rather than advocating for strict vegetarianism or veganism he suggests that one might join in by having a couple of meat-free days a week – and reinvest the money saved into buying sustainable meat products.[7]
2. Brand Act 2: (Re-)Branding Realpolitik
The first brand act, the title’s narrativization of world-saving as simple, foreshadows Schätzing’s devaluing of realpolitik as it is narrativized by leading German government officials. The term realpolitik was heavily instrumentalized in an environmental context by Joschka Fischer before and while he was the leader of the Green Party (1981-2006), escalating the split of the party into Realos (realists) and Fundis (fundamentalists). In the wake of Fischer’s branding of Bündis 90 / die Grünen (Alliance 90 / The Greens), realpolitik became the leading narrative for environmental politics across party lines. Former German Chancellor and leader of the conservative Christian-Democratic party (CDU), Angela Merkel, defended the government’s disappointing ‘Green Paper,’ which was released in September 2019, with the words: Politik ist das was möglich ist (politics is that which is possible).[8]
Given the enormous number of disastrous climate-related events in Germany in 2021 and 2022, such as the aforementioned Ahrtal flooding in 2021, but also in 2022 the hurricane in the city of Paderborn, the drying up of the Mosel and Rhine rivers, and mass fish extinction in the Oder river, it is not surprising that there has been a concomitant increase in the number of critical voices that reveal how much the climate realpolitik narratives used by politicians are aligned with what is considered realpolitik by corporations and lobbyists. Schätzing addresses this in ‘Die Politik’ (The Politics) section in chapter five. He mentions, for example, that BP, Shell, Total, ExxonMobil, and Chevron spent 200 million dollars between 2010 and 2018 on lobbying the EU parliament.[9] The wealth of research on how media and science communication influences both environmental policy-making and the general public is now being translated by journalists, linguists, and sociologists into transformative outreach projects.[10]
Instead of trying to suggest that his readers confront the hordes of lobbyists in Brussels and elsewhere, Schätzing deconstructs the underlying narrative that bonds the economy and politics. He devalues realpolitik by calling it reine auf Sicht-Politik (pure drive-by-sight politics) [11], and again, he invokes scale as he argues that realpolitik is shortsighted in presenting an insular approach that hinders the global environmental movement.
If we accept Schätzing’s assessment, then contemporary German realpolitik has in fact become something that von Rochau set about to abolish.[12] Assuming that realpolitik is dependent on the zeitgeist, which he defined as a gesellschaftliche Kraft, meaning the critical mass of people that drive and feel driven by a certain concerted conviction, he wrote:
Die gesellschaftliche Kraft hat Anspruch auf eine ihrem Umfange entsprechende staatliche Geltung, und die Staatskraft selbst besteht lediglich aus der Summe der gesellschaftlichen Kräfte welche der Staat sich einverleibt hat. Damit also der Staat stark sei muß er vor allen Dingen die Einzelkräfte seiner Angehörigen zu pflegen und zu fördern demnächst aber auch sich dieselben anzueignen wissen. Jene Pflege und Förderung wird in der Regel vorzugsweise durch Gewährung möglichst freien Spielraums gegeben werden können, wogegen diese Aneignung nur durch organische Verbindung zu Stande kommt.[13]
The social force is entitled to state recognition according to its scope; and the state force itself consists only of the sum of the social forces which the state has incorporated into itself. In order for the state to be strong, it must above all cultivate and promote the individual powers of its members, but soon also know how to appropriate them. As a rule, this care and promotion will preferably be given by granting as much leeway as possible, whereas this appropriation only comes about through organic connection.
In other words, realpolitik is dependent on supporting and absorbing the political zeitgeist. Or, as Seeliger and Sevignani write: ‘Öffentlichkeiten tragen […] die zentrale Last für das Funktionieren der Demokratie; sie sollen Entscheidungen treffen und kontrollieren, Probleme erkennen und Lösungen für sie finden, sowie Meinungen inkludieren und bilden.’[14] (Publics carry the central weight for a functioning democracy; they are expected to make and control decisions, recognize problems and find solutions for them, as well as build and include opinions). Considering the lack of diversity in the Bundestag, it is worthwhile asking whose zeitgeist they absorb and whose power they promote. Only 30 % are female (in the German population the percentage is 50.7%), only 8% have an immigrant background (in the German population 22.5%), and only 1.8% are under 30 years old (in the German population 17%). Lawyers, economists and political scientists are overrepresented: 130 MPs have PhDs or professor titles, 30 are tradespeople, 10 members have an agricultural background, 30 members have a background in teaching, 9 are medical doctors.[15] So, along which social, economic, gendered and cultural lines do they scale the short-term, short-range realpolitik they construct in their narratives?
3. Brand Act 3: Multi-Scaling the Realpolitik-Narrative
The long historical view on the different brandings of realpolitik reveals that arguments for or against a certain understanding of realpolitik are themselves brand narratives. Their political relevance is determined by how many interpersonal relationships each brand narrative can create, if it can motivate concerted action, and also whether it is able to recognize itself and claim to be the current political zeitgeist.
A major challenge are digital media, as contributions to Seeliger and Sevignani’s Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit? (A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere?) show. The case studies draw attention to the shift from Öffentlichkeit (singular) to Öffentlichkeiten (plural) in social science discourse. This is a significant turn away from the problematic binary of multiculturalism – monoculturalism (and the polarizing debate that focused on the contested concept of German and European Leitkultur[16]) but still sees pluralization as problematic as it is set in proximity to the rise of intermediary digital platforms. Many of Seeliger and Sevignani’s contributors argue that digital political arenas enhance public fragmentation and polarization by way of acclamation processes, that is, through like/dislike feedback loops that increasingly replace political deliberation.[17] Continuous remediation of a disintegrating public through one-click feedback, and steered by ‘cybernetic control-logic’[18], disables the integration of a concerted political will or zeitgeist into the political system. Realpolitik itself can thus – more or/and less – be disabled. While I agree to some extent with this assessment, I would rather use it as a means to reevaluate the appropriateness of the scholarly tools with which the field of digital political arenas are approached than to dismiss the possibilities these arenas have to offer.
Realpolitik can more or/and less be disabled because it is hard to consider it in terms of more or less (only, as, in) digital space; more is often quantitatively more and qualitatively less at the same time. I will explain this in view of the rather successful political mobilization and inclusion of academic publics on Twitter in 2021. The German Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung / BMBF (Federal Ministry of Education and Research) published a video advertising the Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz (WissZeitVG), which is a law that sets the frame for fixed-term contracts for academics. In reaction to the video, Amrei Bahr, Kristin Eichhorn, and Sebastian Kubon launched the hashtag #IchBinHanna (I am Hanna). Within a few hours the hashtag became an outlet for countless German scientists, who revealed the destructive consequences of the precarious working conditions created by the WissZeitVG. The BMBF responded by reiterating its argument for the WissZeitVG, without addressing the issues the academics had raised. Soon the hashtag and the way the BMBF treated the critique made the news and shortly afterwards was taken up by the Bundestag. In 2021, the new government made it part of their coalition agreement to revise the WissZeitVG. A draft bill was published in June 2023 but met with further critique and concerted political action.[19] Any black-and-white-assessment of how digital media affects realpolitik thus seems unwise.
Given that digitalization is closely associated with commercialization and privatization, the question of how far academic political discourse might be biased towards or is implicit in critical marketing is worth further investigation (but would exceed the scope of this article).[20]
In Habermas’s original Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere), the disintegration of the bourgeois public sphere (der Zerfall der bürgerlichen Öffentlichkeit) is attributed to structural changes in cultural production and consumption. Habermas gave a negative valuation of the transformation of the private (and privileged) culture-reasoning (kulturräsonierend) public into an (all-too-inclusive, economically framed) culture-consuming (kulturkonsumierendes) public, something which occured together with the replacement of face-to-face meetings in public (Versammlungsöffentlichkeit) and publishing enlightenment periodicals by homosocial assemblies (Echokammern) algorithmically constructed (Filterblase) in electronic mass media .[21] While this may aptly describe the negative sides of digitalization, it does not properly engage with other digital political phenomena. Consider, for example, Tuvalu’s turn to the metaverse in an attempt to preserve its history and culture as rising sea levels threaten to submerge the Pacific Island nation. How appropriate is it to dismiss the digital space as politically viable?
Jodi Dean offers a less dismissive view. She distinguishes between social media platforms that dismantle the public in the way Habermas describes it – as arenas for communication without communication – and other platforms that offer communication with communication.[22] Or, rather, she argues that one can be transformed into the other.
Communication with communication does not so much refer to a semiotic concept, but rather describes the idea that the power of digital platforms is expressed by seizing their communication-organizing mechanisms. Dean’s discussion of digital crowds expands the critical discourse about the general public by exploring digital capitalism as a tool for science communication and critical diplomacy. She identifies ‘hashtags, memes, selfies and other common images’[23] as the tools through which a critical crowd can break out of the social media short-circuiting that occurs between the documentation of feelings and the sharing of them. Furthermore, ‘[t]he democratic element – people’s choice to use and forward – produces the inequality that lets some hashtags appear as and even be, for a moment, significant.’[24] Through providing structure to ‘the complex networks of biopolitical production’, platforms potentially bring forth a ‘vanguard party’ through establishing communication hierarchies, which sustain ‘victories and defeats, short and long-term alliances, new forms of cooperation, and advances in political organisation.’[25] Hashtags are thus a medium through which mere culture-consumption can be transformed into culture-reasoning. As Dean writes, ‘When local and issue politics are connected via a common name, successes in one area advance the struggle as a whole’.[26]
Caroline Koegler is another scholar who does not subscribe to a blanket condemnation of culture-capitalism. She understands branding as a situational market practice that “immediately reproduces and/or intervenes in social situations and valuation regimes” through the production of “even radical politics and ideas, bodies and texts.”[27] In Critical Branding. Postcolonial Studies and the Market, she maps contemporary scholarly branding into 5 zones that she calls brand acts: postcolonial studies as a market, branding – between text and body, self-branding, critical branding, and new materialism.[28] These acts are structurally similar to Dean’s theorisation of the hashtag. That is, brand acts also aim to consolidate individual embodied experience into regulated communication nodes. Koegler writes:
‘They [brand acts] indicate the transhistoricity of branding, not only in the sense that branding applies in different historical contexts, but also in the sense that powerful brand acts – those that turn whole valuation regimes upside down – will continue to engage, enrage, and energise, thus continuing in an unstoppable iterability to transform epistemologies and politics.’
Brand Act 4: From Individual to Party
Receiving the Bavarian Book Prize from the Bavarian Minister-President marked the completion of Schätzing’s crowd-to-hierarchies-to-party movement. As a best-selling author, he secured a top position in one of the most competitive fields of cultural production, in which actual producers generally hold very little symbolic or material capital. The literary field is furthermore marked by a wide gap between its top and bottom tiers. As Dean highlights: ‘Many novels are written. Few are published. Fewer sold. A very few become best sellers.’[29] However, research on prize-giving suggests that we are in a moment in which the field of cultural (and political) production absorbs critical energy.[30]
Schätzing’s prize-winning reveals that he has gained a brand currency that travels well between different imagined publics. This is particularly important in regard to maintaining communication hierarchies across the science-politics gap. Scientific institutions imagine an educated public (Bildungsgesellschaft); political institutions merely a crowd (Queerdenker).
Other examples of how writers have consolidated and transferred crowd energy to vanguard party platforms could also be cited. For example, Serdar Somunçu, a popular German comedian and satirist, became the top candidate for die PARTEI – Die Partei für Arbeit, Rechtsstaat, Tierschutz, Elitenförderung und basisdemokratische Initiative (Party for Labour, the Rule of Law, Animal Protection, Promotion of Elites and Grassroots Democratic Initiative) in the 2017 federal elections and received 7.2% of the first vote.
Die PARTEI he ran for is another example. Founded in 2004 by the editors of the German satirical magazine Titanic, this political group is generally known for its vanguard approach to politics. One of their most spectacular achievements was its Geld kaufen! (Buy money!) campaign, which was directed against the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The AfD sold gold bars to its members, taking advantage of the fact that at the time governmental party funding was based on revenue and not profit. This dramatically increased AfD’s federal funding. The vanguard Geld kaufen! campaign by Die PARTEI led to a successful revision of party financing laws, closing that loophole.[31]
The PARTEI’s crowd-to-party transfer is stylistically very different from Schätzing’s approach to individuals, politics, politicians, and the public. They draw on the aesthetics of satire, which is exclusive to those who can decode the allusions, exaggerations, and generally indirect but aggressive criticism. Satire imagines and brands an elitist public (as is clearly indicated by the E for Elitenförderung in the name of die PARTEI). Conversely, Schätzing imagines the public as a community of equals. Was, wenn wir einfach die Welt retten? rebrands realpolitik through rescaling the radius of action it imagines and through redirecting attention to the question of who is held by the environmental discourse to be responsible. ‘Klimarettung ist ein Menschheitsprojekt, doch die Frage geht hin und her, wer die Kuh vom Eis zu kriegen hat.’ (Saving our climate is a question for humanity, but the question goes back and forth, who should get the cow off the ice).[32] The following statement by Schätzing manifests the insight that due to social splitting, the public does not recognize itself as the proper respondent to climate change.
Ob du in einer 5 Grad wärmeren Welt im Massensterben endest oder weil dir dein Höhlennachbar eins über den Schädel zieht, kommt individuell aufs Gleiche raus, und die Menschheit besteht nur aus Individuen. Allerdings scheint uns der Blick dafür abhandengekommen zu sein, wer oder was Menschheit überhaupt ist. Wir sortieren uns in Kategorien: Erstweltler, Drittweltler, Politiker, Unternehmer, Wissenschaftler und Militär, Staat und Aktivist, Randgruppe, Minderheit. Die Verantwortlichen sollen handeln. Was heißt das? Dass alle anderen nicht verantwortlich sind?
Whether you die in a 5-degrees-warmer world as part of the mass extinction or because your neighboring cave-dweller hits you over the head, individually, leads to the same consequence – and humanity is made up of mere individuals. However, we seem to have lost sight of who or what, above all, humanity is. We sort ourselves into categories: people in the first world, people in the third world, politicians, businesses, scientists, and military, state and activist, periphery, minority. Those responsible should act. What does that mean? That all others are not responsible?[33]
Here, Schätzing echoes Dean as he identifies the disseminating force that deflects attention away from the actual issue. Dean explains that ‘Communicative capitalism feeds on multiplicity, confusion, indeterminacy, anything that can disperse the force of the crowd.’[34] Further in Schätzing, we read:
In anderen Regionen der Welt, die von Armut, Bürgerkriegen und Naturkatastrophen geschüttelt werden, reden die Menschen von Aufbruch und Zusammenrücken. In Europa, im Westen, reden wir von Spaltung und Ende.
In other regions of the world that are shaken by poverty, civil war, and natural disasters, the people talk about a new awakening and closing ranks. In Europe, in the West, we talk about the division of society and the end.[35]
Schätzing also addresses the embodied political paralysis that stems from this dispersion. He calls this the inner crisis (die innere Krise),[36] focusing on how this division finds bodily translation: ‘Der gefühlte Wegverlust. Gestaltungsmächtig geben wir uns dem Gefühl der Ohnmacht hin, Panik ist unser Normalzustand.’ (The felt loss of the path. With agency, the power to innovate, we succumb to the feeling of powerlessness; panic is our normal state of affairs.).[37]
Dean links the feeling of powerlessness to self-referencing diversity: ‘Singularised, rendered-unique, hyper-individuated persons find themselves confronting a setting that is utterly determining and outside their control.’[38] (174) The step beyond self-referencing critique thus is to give in to collectivity.[39] In Schätzing this is expressed also in bodily, albeit metaphorized, terms:
In einer Zeit, in der mehr geht denn je, erzählen wir einander, was nicht geht. Das ist lächerlich. Vielleicht sollten wir weniger Trübsal blasen und einfach lachend den Arsch hochkriegen, dem andern auf die Schulter schlagen und sagen: Let’s do it and have fun.[40]
In a time, in which more is possible than ever, we tell each other what is impossible. This is ridiculous. Perhaps we should mope less and just laughingly get off our asses, clap others on the shoulder and say: Packen wir’s an, mit Spass.
Rendering touch (a clap on the shoulder), here an encouraging symbolic gesture, and especially because it is pluralized (others), again invokes a ‘horizontal’ reading. What is more, Schätzing brands this movement as fun, drawing on branding slogans associated with mobility, sports, and health. ‘Let’s’ and ‘fun’ are both expressions that hold currency in popular consumer culture in Germany. At last, we receive the answer to the question in his title: just do it.
5. Brand Act 5: The world as Creative Non-Fiction
Schätzing turns the question about what humanity is away from an interest in individual existentialism – the fact that death will feel all the same, whether it is due to climate change or being hit by a neighboring cave-dweller – to an interest in changing norms and social life through focusing on embodied practical sociality: ‘Klimaschutz ist keine Ideologie, sondern Pragmatismus. Jeder bleibt sein eigener Anführer’ (Climate protection is not an ideology, but pragmatism. Everyone continues to be in charge of themselves).[41] His way of laying out how the individually non-labeled – non-politicians, non-businesses, non-scientists, and non-military – become ‘the responsible’ or the politically organized vanguard, consequently is not interested in theoretical constructs. Instead, he draws on the idea of swarm practice for humans, which he borrows from a physicist, Ranga Yogeshwar.
In the chapter ‘Die Aktivisten’ (The Activists),[42] Schätzing describes how he assisted Yogeshwar in an experiment with 200 people, which aimed to determine the tipping point of a group of people, meaning, they tried to determine how many people in the group needed to change their behavior so that everyone in the group would fall in line. They determined that the spill-over effect can be reached at approximately 10%. A condition for success was that the entire group was self-aware, meaning that it recognized itself as belonging to the same group.[43] Unfortunately, Schätzing does not address the difference between digital and face-to-face groupings, but he nonetheless deduces from the results of the experiment that the necessary collective behavioral change (kollektive Verhaltensänderung) needed to carry the environmental transformation of our society is not that hard to attain. This downscaling plays on the expectation that one needs to get 100% of the people on board. It is again a very effective way to invoke scale as part of his argument.
By sharing the results of his participatory research and other relevant science, Schätzing liberates environmentalism from the current political belief (and self-justification) that to act upon environmental consciousness needs to be sanctioned through politically assigned legitimacy. The ideas he incorporates in his self-branding as an environmentalist are charged with direct performative engagement, and he does not play down the fact that the ‘we,’ that is, the public, is a divided ‘we.’[44] Climate change leads to different conditions of mortality, finances, and politics for different populations, and Schätzing expresses this thought clearly when he states that we need to get ‘[r]aus aus der Mutlosigkeit, Unwissenheit, Ungerechtigkeit, raus aus dem fatalen Immer-mehr, das für viele ein Immer-weniger bedeutet’[45] (Out of the lack of courage, lack of knowledge, lack of justice, out of the fatal ever-more, which for many means ever-less). Nonetheless, responsibility is discharged from a moralizing, metaphysical politics and released to the public in the form of an ability to adopt new practices – which he outlines in a 94-page catalog addressing everything from food to investment banking – to become response-abled.
Another important practice Schätzing invokes is not only deconstructing dis-abling narratives of realpolitik but also taking the reader to the meta-level or level of self-reflective meta-fiction. At the beginning of Was, wenn wir einfach die Welt retten? he explains, for example, the difference between crime fiction and thrillers.
Anders als beim Thriller steht beim Krimi die Eskalation am Anfang. Jemand wird gemeuchelt, Verdächtige marschieren auf, wo waren Sie gestern Abend, die Schlinge zieht sich zu, Showdown, Fall abgeschlossen. […] Thriller funktionieren andersrum. Am Anfang steht Normalität. Heile kleine Welt. Familie, Nachbarn. Dann bricht etwas ein. […] Sicher geglaubte Strukturen zerfallen. Gewissheiten enden, Vertrautes wendet sich gegen uns. Thriller erzählen vom Kontrollverlust.
Different from the thriller, crime fiction begins with an escalation. Somebody is murdered, suspects march on stage, where were you last night, the plot thickens, showdown, case closed. […] Thrillers work the other way around. At the beginning is normalcy. Perfect little world. Family, neighbors. Then something erupts. […] Structures considered safe fall apart. Certainties disappear, the familiar turns against us. Thrillers talk about the loss of control.
According to this definition, crime fiction is the more comforting genre, although thrillers can provide release from tension in the real world – unless it comes too close to the real world – as he admits.[46] Schätzing then goes on to consider the veracity and effect of the daily news – two ideas that in the German language are captured in one word: Wirklichkeit. Schätzing writes: ‘In der echten Welt verdünnen sich Katastrophen auf ein ungleich größeres Maß an Normalität […] In der medialen Welt dissonieren dutzende Alarmglocken.’ (In the real world, catastrophes diminish into an disproportionally bigger scale of normalcy. […] In the media world, dozens of dissonant alarm bells go off).[47] The result of media-reality is that we live in a constant state of fear that exceeds our psychic and physical stress points, whereby a common and understandable coping strategy is to block them out. Illustrating his point, Schätzing refers to the pandemic and concedes that after a year of constant Covid-alertness, people were longing for something nice – ‘Das Netteste war Netflix.’ (The nicest thing was Netflix).[48] Post-pandemic, this has not changed much as multiple other crisis narratives have taken over.
Offering lessons in basic narratology, Schätzing unpacks the importance of storytelling as a strategy for coping with crisis. Decisions are made within the rules of genre. Based on which narrative one chooses (news, crime fiction, thriller) one might be kept in a state of inertia or become active. He draws on examples with a high recognition factor and does not moralize. Each narrative choice is equal, except some are more helpful in regard to saving the world. ‘Wie schaffen wir es, aus der Verdrängung zurück ins Handeln zu finden?’[49] (How can we find our way back from repression to action?) Schätzing’s answer is knowledge: ‘Nun, wenn Sie Thriller lieben, wissen Sie, was als Einziges gegen Bedrohungen hilft: sie zu verstehen.’[50] (Well, if you love thrillers, you know that the only thing that helps against threats is: to understand them). Schätzing’s style is not to explain, argue, or moralize; it is to educate.
The focus on narrative strategies is linked to the choice of characters. Schätzing casts his readers as characters in the eco-thriller we currently live in: ‘der Thriller, dessen Akteure wir sind.’[51] In part three, entitled ‘Thriller,’ Schätzing confronts us with physicists, politicians, fire-fighters, and activists who act as the imagined reader’s counterpart. The reader is represented as the formal personal pronoun Sie (you):
Aktivist (beugt sich vor): Ganz ehrlich? Mit dem, was da heute an Maßnahmen beschlossen wurde, werden wir kaum 2 Grad schaffen.
Sie: Kein Meilenstein also?
Aktivist: Eher ein Steinchen. Eines im Schuh.
Activist (leaning forward): Honestly? With the measures that were agreed upon today we will barely make 2 degrees.
You: Not a milestone then?
Activist: Rather a pebble. In the shoe.
Schätzing sets this scene in Paris, December 2015 during the UN climate conference. The implied reader (you) is asked to take on the role of a reporter collecting statements during the meeting where 196 states and the European Union unanimously agreed upon keeping global warming caused by humans at 1.5 degrees, if possible, and, in any case, not let it rise above two degrees. The dialogues create the impression that to argue with politicians, fire-fighters, scientists, and activists is not an actual response to the way out of the climate crisis, at least not for the we (or you) he imagines. At the end of part five, ‘Die Guten und die Bösen’ (Heroes and Villains), he writes:
Mit allen diesen Leuten schlägt sich die Klimaforschung herum. Tun Sie es nicht! Lassen Sie die Wirrköpfe stehen, vergeuden Sie nicht Ihre Kräfte. Es gibt so viel Sinnvolleres, das Sie tun können.[52]
With all those people climate science is in battle. Don’t do it! Leave the scatterbrains behind, don’t waste your energy. There are so many more sensible things you can do.
With these sentences, Schätzing leads the reader to the next part of his book: ‘Handeln’ (to act/action). In the sixth chapter, he describes a number of options for how individual choices can lead to a more sustainable life in the current economic and political situation. In chapter seven, ‘Wie wir wachsen / oder auch nicht’ (How we grow – or don’t), he upscales the narrative of individual changes to consider sufficiency, also known as eco-sufficiency, down/shifting and voluntary simplicity, presenting ideas and theories that develop an alternative to an economy of growth.
In part eight, ‘Science Faction’, Schätzing prepares his last narrative twist, offering readers the choice of an ending from a number of possible future scenarios for our planet. Remaining visionary (‘im Visionären zu bleiben.’[53]), he takes the reader on an inter-dimensional journey to 2050 – a parallel universe where the climate crisis is resolved. Others would perhaps describe it as speculative fiction, as it draws out what our world might look like if we follow certain ideas for an anthropocentric solution to the climate crisis. However, the point is not to find the right genre label, but rather to consider writing as remedial political work: ‘Politik ist die Kunst, das Unmögliche möglich zu machen’[54] (Politics is the art of making the impossible possible). By constantly crossing between fact and fiction, Schätzing reveals that whether we consider something possible or impossible depends on the roles we ascribe to ourselves in the stories we tell ourselves. Politics, in other words, is improved by art.
I feel I should disclose at this point that I picked Schätzing´s book for this analysis because it connects to the creative nonfiction genre. For my PhD, I studied the changing literary landscape in Germany and France in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I argued that the disenchantment with Left ideology led to literary alliances breaking up, which resulted in the dissolution of literary norms – a new literature was on the loose, a literature I identified as creative nonfiction.[55] I was very optimistic about the fact that a literary movement akin to Anglo-American New Journalism and the non-fiction novel of the 1960s and 1970s was on its way and I overemphasized the power of the individual writer and book due to a lack of knowledge about the global publishing industry and market.[56] Nonetheless, I believe that in principle my arguments were and are still timely – especially as the current ‘cultures of alternative facts’ and what Henry Frankfurt identified as ‘bullshitting’[57] add to the structural problems that impair independent, high-quality journalism. Creative nonfiction is an important literary and public platform as it invites readers to enter into a socio-political topic with an explorative focus. It creates curiosity and openness through literary finesse. The creative nonfiction agenda is the inquiry into the origins and consequences of one’s own storytelling in order to be able to assume responsibility for them and the world they create.
Schätzing’s Was, wenn wir einfach die Welt retten? is creative non-fiction in that sense. Combining good research and literary skill, Schätzing assumes the role of a talking head to show us how to navigate the heterogenous interests represented in mass media and how to renegotiate the delimitations drawn by the current realpolitik narratives. He lays out the genre options, what it means if we follow one or the other plot, and also what it means if we construct our own based on learned narrative patterns – but we can always choose a different ending. He reminds us that these narratives endings may not have the same outcome for everyone and that we, therefore, need to listen to many other narratives. Ultimately, his book is an argument for approaching the problem of scalar political illiteracy through teaching the general public how to become good readers and make informed choices about which narratives to buy into. In that sense, it is also a well-written brand narrative for Comparative Literary Studies.
[1] All translations from German into English are mine.
[2] As, for example, discussed in detail in Schurmann, S. Klartext Klima (Wien: Brandstätter Verlag, 2022).
[3] For a more detailed analysis see, for example, Klein, N. The Shock Doctrine (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2007); Mann, M. E. The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet (New York: Public Affairs, 2021).
[4] Clark, T. The Value of Ecocriticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 40.
[5] Schätzing, F. Was, wenn wir einfach die Welt retten? (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2021), 11.
[6] Schätzing, F. ‘Einfach die Welt retten’ (promotion website) https://www.einfachdieweltretten.com. Accessed 19 July 2023.
[7] Schätzing, F., 2021, 215-217.
[8] Also often translated as ‘politics is the art of the possible’. Schätzing, 2021, 135.
[9] Schätzing, F. Was, wenn wir einfach die Welt retten? (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2021), 173.
[10] Arbeitsgruppe Umweltpsychologie in der transdisziplinären Nachhaltigkeitsforschung, https://psychologie-und-nachhaltigkeit.de/; KLIMA vor acht e.V., https://klimavoracht.de/; The LINGCLIM research group: Language, climate and lifestyle https://www.uib.no/en/rg/lingclim. Accessed 19 July 23.
[11] Schätzing, F. ‘Frank Schätzing und sein neues Buch: Deutschlandpremiere auf radioeins vom rbb’ RBB Radio-Interview, 14 April 2021.
[12] Having said that, von Rochau’s nationalist ideas also brand realpolitik in a way that is neither politically nor environmentally sustainable.
[13] Von Rochau, W. Grundsätze der Realpolitick [sic] angewendet auf die staatlichen Zustände Deutschlands (Principles of realpolitik applied to the national state of affairs of Germany) (Frankfurt: Ullstein 1972 [1853]), 4.
[14] Seeliger, M. and S. Sevignani (eds.). Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit? Leviathan, Sonderband 37 (Baden-Baden: Nomos 2021), 458.
[15] Bierbach, Mara. ‘Who makes up the new Bundestag?’ https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-new-bundestag-who-is-who-in-parliament/a-41082379. Accessed 19 July 23.
[16] This was a heated debate in the 1990s, stirred in particular through the Syrian-born German political scientist Bassam Tibi and the publication of his book Europa ohne Identität: Die Krise der multikulturellen Gesellschaft. (Europe without Identity: the crisis of the multicultural society) (München: Bertelsmann, 1998).
[17] See contributions by Jarren and Fischer; Sevignani; Staab and Thiel; Beyes to Seeliger and Sevignani, 2021.
[18] See contribution by Machewski and Nosthoff to Seelinger and Sevignani, 2021.
[19] Bahr, A., Eichhorn, K. and Kubon, S., ‘#IchBinHanna’ https://ichbinhanna.wordpress.com/. Accessed 19 July 23.
[20] For more on the connection between digitalization, commercialization and privatization see, for example, Knoche, M. ‘Kapitalisierung der Medienindustrie aus politökonomischer Perspektive’ Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft, 49:2, 2001 and Imhof, K. Die Krise der Öffentlichkeit (Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, 2011).
[21] Habermas, J. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990), 261; Seeliger and Sevignani, 2021, 20.
[22] Dean, J. ‘Critique or Collectivity? Communicative Capitalism and the Subject of Politics,’ in Chandler, David and Christian Fuchs (eds.). Digital Objects, Digital Subjects: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Capitalism, Labour and Politics in the Age of Big Data (London: University of Westminster Press, 2019), 171-182.
[27] Koegler, C. Critical Branding. Postcolonial Studies and the Market (New York: Routledge, 2018), 1–17.
[30] See Moeran, B. and J.S. Pedersen (eds.). Negotiating Values in the Creative Industries: Fairs, Festivals and Competitive Events (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
[31] Schnurr, N. ‘Geld verkaufen war okay’ (Selling money was okay) Frankfurter Rundschau, 21.09.2017, http://www.fr.de/politik/bundestagswahl/die-partei-geld-verkaufen-war-okay-a-1355393. Accessed 13 October 2022.
[32] Schätzing, F. Was, wenn wir einfach die Welt retten? (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2021), 330.
[44] One of Schätzing’s most recent engagements as German ambassador for justdiggit.org, a Netherland-based organisation that runs several re-greening projects in Africa, reveals how brand-consistent he is in that way. The image in the press release shows him holding a green spade towards the viewer. Refer to ‘New German ambassador: besteller [sic.] author Frank Schätzing,’Justdiggit, 17 May 2022, https://justdiggit.org/news/new-german-ambassador-besteller-author-frank-schatzing/#, Accessed 13 October 2022.
[55] Kölling, A. Literature on the Loose. A reading of Florian Illies’s Generation Golf, Maurice G. Dantec’s Périphériques, Joschka Fischer’s Mein langer Lauf zu mir selbst, and Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World as examples of creative nonfiction Amsterdamer Publikationen zur Sprache und Literatur. 171 (Berlin: Weidler Verlag, 2012).
[56] Something I became acutely aware of working with literary translators. Kölling A. ‘“In and Out of Sight.” Translators, Visibility and the Networks of the Literary Translation Field: The Case of the Literary Translation Prize at the Leipzig Book Fair.’ Transfer: e-journal for Translation and Intercultural Studies, Revistes Cientifiques de la Universitat de Barcelona (RCUB), 2019.
[57] Frankfurt, H. On Bullshit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Angela Kölling is Professor of Anglophone Studies at the Faculty of Translation Studies, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. She is a teacher, researcher and academic developer with experience facilitating learning in various educational institutions and countries, including New Zealand, Samoa, Sweden, and now, Germany. Past projects include: “Visibility and Translation” (Imaginations 2020), “Crisis Translation – An Exit Game” (2022 – 2023), and “Eine Uni, ein Buch: The Whale Rider. An Exploration of New Zealand through Witi Ihimaera’s Novel” (2023). Kölling is book reviews co-editor of the Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies.