Everyone is drowning in German realistic literature.

Well, maybe not allBut in text after text, characters slip underwater – taken by rivers, floods or the sea – never to be seen again. All this drowning must symbolise something, but what?

Alexander Sorenson, lecturer in German and comparative literature at Binghamton University, puts together the puzzle of meaning in his new book. The Waiting Water: Order, Sacrifice and Decline in German Realism (Cornell University Press).

When Sorenson began reading German literature as an undergraduate, he was surprised by how often the characters drowned. No one seemed to know why, and his professor encouraged Sorenson to research the topic. His third-year paper eventually led to a dissertation that became the book.

“It’s more than just a motif that appears here and there; it’s not just a flourish,” he explained. “I suspected there must be something central.”

His analysis focuses on 19th-century texts by Adalbert Stifter, Gottfried Keller, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, and Theodor Storm, as well as material from earlier and later periods. In the course of his research, the interface between literature and the natural environment and the role of the environment in social consciousness became clear.

“It’s shocking how widespread it is and how unfettered water is as a symbolic resource,” Sorenson said. “It’s deliberately experimental.”

Law and sacrifice

In the 19th century, German-speaking countries experienced an industrialization which, like realistic literature, only began years after similar developments in England and France.

Compared to much of English and French realism, which often focuses on urban life, the natural environment plays a special role in German realist literature – not just as a setting, but as a character in its own right. The typical realist concerns of mass society and industrialism are there, but they play out in different ways, Sorenson said.

“There is definitely a link with the onset of industrialised capitalism,” he said. “The environmental impact was not as immediately obvious as in England, where the landscape had been changing since the 18th century.” Century and beyond.”

The theme of drowning occurs in English and French literature, but it often stems from a cultural fascination with the character of Ophelia from Shakespeare’s hamlet.

“Although Ophelia was present and played a role in the later part of the 19th century and especially in the early 20th century, it was more complicated,” he said of the German motif as a whole. “In the German literary tradition and particularly in realism, you can express it like this: all drowns. There are people of all ages, men and women, non-human beings. It’s really all mixed up.”

In German literature, however, young people seem particularly vulnerable to this fate; one of the earliest texts Sorenson examines is a novel by Goethe that deals with the death of a child. And female melancholy—as seen in the Ophelia trope—is not the only reason for the drowning of German literature, either.

Instead, the motif revolves around the dual concepts of order and sacrifice, Sorenson argues.

Sacrifice is traditionally seen as a violent or destructive process designed to appease a higher power and atone for individual or collective guilt. The ultimate goal is to restore balance between the earthly and divine worlds, he said. But that is not how the theme was presented in the texts.

“In addition to expanding on the sociocultural and gender dynamics of the drowning motif, I was surprised by the way sacrifice functioned and what it actually meant,” he said. “In the book, I ended up arguing that sacrifice in German realism is more of an ethical process; it’s about ethical and moral dilemmas of decision and choice, particularly about giving up or abandoning one thing in favor of another thing.”

It often involves the self being sacrificed for someone else or for a particular social good (sometimes the other way around). This concept is closely linked to questions of legitimacy.

In these stories, “this process ultimately takes place near or in the water. It surprises you as a reader and forces you to think anew about what law and sacrifice actually mean and what they look like,” he said.

These events almost always occur on the outskirts of communities, for example along rivers that separate a town from the wider countryside; being submerged means disappearing into the periphery of society.

In his current project, Sorenson continues to focus on nature in nineteenth-century poetry, theology, and philosophy, particularly the natural world as sacramental space. There, nature is seen as neither divine nor a mechanistic collection of forces and processes devoid of spirit, a view that became more popular with the Scientific Revolution.

“There is this fleeting space where nature becomes a point or zone of encounter between the material and the mechanical, the inanimate and the sacred,” he explained. “Nature is the place where these two things come into contact.”

It is a surprisingly modern message that seems to be of great relevance to today’s environmental movement, he said.

“I do the same literary, interpretive work, but I try to put it at the service of practical ways of thinking about nature today and translating that into behavior, habits and forms of engagement,” he said.