Potsdam begins in Sanssouci Park

How easy it would be to talk about this festival theme through its shock potential. “Forward to nature” is the title of the 12th edition of the Lit:Potsdam literature festival. The heat of June, floods in Italy, forest fires in California are looming. The opening event took place in the palace theater in the New Palace, and here too, just around the corner, the consequences of climate change can be seen: Eighty percent of the trees in the Sanssouci Park have been damaged.

Instead of threatening scenarios, festival director Denis Scheck is counting on good humor and courage, despite everything. And reminds us that the motto is deliberately intended to distance itself from “back to nature” à la Rousseau. It should not go back, but forward. A bit like Kleist, whom Scheck will later paraphrase. Since paradise is apparently currently locked, shouldn’t literature become a helper in order to make the trip around the world and see “whether it might be open again somewhere at the back?”

The literary genre that is dedicated to this attempt is called “nature writing”. Two of the best-known representatives were invited to Potsdam. The British author Helen Macdonald, who became internationally known through her 2014 novel “H for Hawk”, read from the essay collection “Evening Flights”. More famous in this country is Judith Schalansky, who became known through “The Giraffe’s Neck” and whose “List of Some Losses” made it onto the longlist for the International Booker Prize.

“We only perceive something when we name it”

The authors met for the first time in Potsdam – long overdue, it seems. And so warmly that moderator Scheck praises himself at the beginning as a “Schadchen”: a matchmaker par excellence. During the conversation, the women often pass the ball to each other. Both describe nature writing as an attempt to bear witness. “We only perceive something when we name it,” says Schalansky. This is where literature comes into play.

Both authors discovered their closeness to nature through personal losses. MacDonald lost a twin brother at birth and later felt closer to animals than to her peers, who bullied her for her obsessive love of animals. “H for Hawk” is an autobiographical description of another way of dealing with grief: a university lecturer in Cambridge trains a hawk to get over the death of her father.

The loss of her biological father also plays a role for Schalansky. More important to her is the “fundamental feeling of belonging” that she finds in nature: the realization that this world is so amazing, beautiful and strange – “so much stranger than oneself.” Who could imagine belonging to a species with tens of thousands of genders? Mushrooms live like that.

Schalansky therefore only half-follows the Kleist idea put forward by Scheck. Why travel around the world in search of paradise? “The greatest adventure lurks in the street where we grew up – something we overlook all the time.” Schalansky shows how this can also be traced back to the linguistic level with the passage she read from “Swaying Canaries”, an essay from 2023. It is about early warning systems, both concrete and metaphorical. The latter includes the proverbial “canary in the mine”: miners in the 19th century took canaries underground with them. Because in the event of a lack of oxygen, they ran out of air 20 minutes before people did.

Are writers the canaries of our time? Scheck’s question remained unanswered. But Helen MacDonald ends by reporting on her own experience. The caged bird was released on an atoll near Hawaii. Freedom is good for it. The birds reproduce. They turn green again.