Narrating Disruptive Encounters in the Forest: Hunting, Animal Lives, and Ecology

Autori

  • Helga Braunbeck North Carolina State University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37536/ECOZONA.2024.15.2.5357

Parole chiave:

hunting, anthropomorphism, Felix Salten, Horst Stern, Peter Wohlleben

Abstract

Over the last century, three popular writers and media personalities have written bestsellers and created TV programs in order to alert the general public to the suffering of wild animals as well as the deleterious effects on young trees caused directly or indirectly by hunting and forestry practices. Austrian journalist and writer Felix Salten published Bambi: A Story of Life in the Woods (1923), using a baby deer’s perspective. German journalist and literary author Horst Stern shocked the nation with his TV program Remarks about the Stag (1971), which shows the brutality of hunting; his 1989 Jagdnovelle (The Last Hunt) weaves together a hunter’s perspective with his prey animal’s experience. In recent years, German forester Peter Wohlleben has shifted the focus from animals to plants by publishing a series of popular books about the forest, starting with The Hidden Life of Trees (2015). This essay examines how Salten, Stern, and Wohlleben all humanize their animal and plant characters, including through a form of “critical anthromorphism” (Mossner)—and are criticized for it. They also incorporate ethology, i.e. observations of animal behavior and the forest environment, as well as scientific knowledge, as they attempt to evoke their audience’s empathy for their nonhuman characters. Hunting pressure and the violent disruption of the lives of the animals leads to an “ecology of fear” instead of an “ecology of subjects” that would align better with changing perceptions of “nature” (Soentgen). Ethical questions concerning the mass killing of Europe’s largest mammals remain as it does not succeed in reducing deer overpopulation or damage to the forest ecosystem, perpetuing Germany’s forest/game conflict.

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Biografia autore

Helga Braunbeck, North Carolina State University

Helga G. Braunbeck è laureata in Letteratura e Linguistica tedesca e inglese presso l'Università di Tubinga, l'Università dell'Oregon, Eugene, e l'Università della California, Santa Barbara. È professoressa di studi tedeschi presso la North Carolina State University ed è stata anche direttrice degli studi internazionali e assistente preside per gli studi interdisciplinari. Ha pubblicato due libri: Autorschaft und Subjektgenese: Christa Wolfs Kein Ort Nirgends (1992) e Figurationen von Kunst, Musik, Film und Tanz: Intermedialität bei Libuše Moníková (2018). Il suo attuale programma di ricerca si colloca nelle discipline umanistiche ambientali, con particolare attenzione agli studi letterari e culturali contemporanei su piante e animali. Articoli pubblicati di recente si trovano nelle riviste Literatur für Leser:innen, Humanities e Gegenwartsliteratur e in varie raccolte. È coautrice dell’editoriale per un numero speciale di Green Letters su “Arboreal Imaginaries” (2022). I suoi articoli trattano argomenti come aspetti letterari e culturali del giardinaggio, alberi, licheni, estrattivismo della lignite, sorelle, il racconto Moos di Klaus Modick, Christa Wolf, Libuše Moníková, il romanzo Technophoria di Niklas Maak, caccia ed ecologia forestale e la poetica della terza natura nell'opera di Poschmann e Kinsky.

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Pubblicato

2024-10-30

Fascicolo

Sezione

Articles:Disruptive Encounters.Concepts of care and Contamination out of Control