Plants, Places, and Power: Toward Social and Ecological Justice in German Literature and Film by Maria Stehle (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Plants, Places, and Power: Toward Social and Ecological Justice in German Literature and Film by Maria Stehle Joela Jacobs Plants, Places, and Power: Toward Social and Ecological Justice in German Literature and Film. By Maria Stehle. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2023. Pp. 186. Cloth $99.00. ISBN 9781640141254. Maria Stehle's Plants, Places, and Power tackles the complex intersection of land and belonging in the German context, which brings together the reverberations of the Nazi Blut und Boden legacy as well as European colonizer history with the critical urgency of the environmental future. By examining contemporary literature and film with feminist and anti-racist tools, the book aims to put forward intersectional models of relating to places that are both socially and ecologically just. In doing so, Stehle highlights topographies, the layers of history that shape places in myriad ways, and she emphasizes that place-making entails the resignification of such meanings. In other words, she shows how the figures in her primary sources both fail and succeed in inclusive place-making for themselves and others. While some of them fail because of their violent colonizer approaches or because they continue to center whiteness, others stubbornly hold on to new places after the loss of their home or defiantly make place for themselves despite repeated rejection and thus change who gets to belong. In Stehle's own words, "to make place is to form new kinds of interrelations" (160). The new alliances and ways of kin-making that go along with this process involve not just other people but landscapes, gardens, and forests, as well as parks, cemeteries, and greenhouses, which are summed up in the book's titular focus on plants in the plural. While this is not necessarily an approach to plants for their own sake or in their species specificity (with the fascinating exception of the pencil cactus in chapter five), it is a tool to read texts and people in and through nature toward both social and environmental justice. In practice, this can entail a historical or environmental analysis of background landscapes and rural spaces, or the cultural and aesthetic significance of flowers, fruit, or potted plants, while on other occasions, it involves the unpacking of pervasive metaphors of belonging such as roots and stem. In doing so, Stehle reminds us that plants are everywhere and worth paying attention to because they are productive lenses for analysis—and what's more, that plants can be political actors in relationships of care and collaboration. In addition to its combined methodological focus on social and ecological justice, the book's second stated goal is the expansion of the canon of German studies materials in antiracist, feminist, and decolonizing ways. The primary works Stehle analyzes are all composed by artists who identify as female, queer, of color, and/or [End Page 520] have experienced forced migration, and they range from Juli Zeh and Dörte Hansen, Valeska Grisebach and Jessica Hausner, Anna Sofie Hartmann and Vě Chytilová to Ilija Trojanow and Saša Stanišić, Mo Asumang and Sheri Hagen, Elliot Blue and Faraz Shariat, and Yō materials, the book brings together a variety of genres from literature and film (accompanied by many illustrations from the latter), and it additionally frames these works beyond their German-language context by connecting them to select contemporary US artists, places, and discourses. Such an interdisciplinary range requires theoretical frameworks from diverse contexts, and Stehle's active citation practices situate her work firmly in both US race and gender as well as Germanist film and literary studies. By bringing together aesthetics with social justice and environmental concerns with place-making, Plants, Places, and Power thus takes on a challenging intersection of discourses, materials, and histories that are bound to inspire further discussion in research and teaching. Joela Jacobs University of Arizona Copyright © 2023 The German Studies Association