POETICS AND POLITICS OF CLIMATE: STURM UND DRANG AND ENLIGHTENMENT-ERA CLIMATE THEORY

This article investigates the ‘radicality’ of the Sturm und Drang in relation to Enlightenment-era climate theory. In the wake of Montesquieu's seminal De l'Esprit des Lois (1748), the notion of climate as a fundamental driver of human culture was popularised across Europe. It is argued that Sturm und Drang authors embraced this trend while at the same time developing their own radical climate discourse distinct from Enlightenment-era climate theory. The texts surveyed here – by Goethe, Heinse, Herder, Lenz and Schiller – reject universalist idealisations of the Mediterranean and contest colonialist arguments for the creation of a moderate world-climate. Against this historical background of colonialist climate control, the Sturm und Drang poetics of climate reaches beyond ethnological-nationalistic origin-myths and irrationalist mythologies of nature, amounting instead to a critical engagement with the purposiveness of climatic variety and a poetological attempt to unite Enlightenment ideals of freedom with the thinking of difference. In this way, the article rejects a prominent understanding of the Sturm und Drang as formative for the development of climate theory in the German context, and as politically reactionary in its climate discourse. Rather, the article sets out a radically Enlightened Sturm und Drang poetics of climate.