FAS literature special: The material that never runs out

The following is a brief overview of the titles of the season's new literary publications: “Plum rain”.

"Thunderstorm animals".

"Heat".

"News from the Fog".

"Like Snow we fall".

"Inner Weather".

"Harvest the storm".

"Sweetheart, there is a storm every day".

"My zodiac sign is the rainbow".

"Moon of crusty snow".

“Snow in winter, stars at night”.

Wherever you look, there is heaven, whether it is "Heaven a hundred years ago" or the English: "Heaven".

And then another English one: “Big Sky Country”.

Then there are the seasons: “Summer”, “In these summers”, “Winter”, also in combination with animals, one thing is certain in the book market: “My favorite animal is called winter”.

Tobias Rüther

Editor in the features section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.

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Literary criticism can still be so concerned that literature will lose the sublime due to sheer identity, discourse and representation: the weather and its unfathomable significance for the human soul can evidently be relied on when it comes to poetry and writing.

The American writer Jonathan Franzen has also started his new trilogy of novels about the Hildebrandt family, “Crossroads”, with a detailed weather report: “The sky pierced by bare oaks and elms, on which two front systems put their gray heads together, around New Prospect To bring a white Christmas was full of damp promise when Russ Hildebrandt drove to the bedridden and senile of the community in his Plymouth Fury station wagon, as he did every morning. "

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Regardless of whether it is raining or snowing: For centuries, weather reports have appeared as forecasts or diagnoses of the inner moods of invented characters.

In all languages ​​of world literature.

And it doesn't stop, and the need to talk is only increasing: The catastrophic rains of summer 2021 - whether very close, in the Ahr Valley, or far away, in Manhattan - have the debates about extreme weather conditions, climate change and what to do against it one and the other to do is stepped up again dramatically.

Weather has been a topic of literature for ages, climate change is only now.

Slowly but surely.

The Berlin writer Judith Hermann provided a prominent example of this in the spring: her novel “Daheim” tells of people in a drying up world.

And at least “Eurotrash” by Christian Kracht has made it onto the shortlist of this year's book prize and with it the most famous raincoat in literary history: the Barbour jacket made from “Fiberland”.

Low threshold.

Scary.

Splendid

Weather is the stuff that never runs out, not only for art, but also for the breakfast table, the supermarket checkout, for the bus, for talking over the fence. It seems to some that this was even stronger in the days of the lockdown. When we talk about weather, today, in the year 2021, we always draw from this abundant source of human communication: weather, that is low-threshold, always new, amazing, frightening, wonderful.

But today we're also talking about the physical expression of the far more complex phenomenon of climate change. The flood disasters of this summer, the droughts and forest fires in this country and in the rest of the world are deeply worrying, the questions of how they arise, how to prevent or prevent them continue to arise. The feeling of impending change is increasing, but these changes have long been underway. Or even completed. The drought has long been the new normal in California, and they are inventing new names for forest fires.

And when it comes to uncertain situations and predictions of the future, the human role within larger contexts that seem difficult to understand, the hour of literature strikes.

For the special edition for the Frankfurt Book Fair, the features section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung asked authors from all over the world to talk about the weather.

Contributions from John Green to Luisa Neubauer

Jenny Offill explains what novels can do against climate change, and circumnavigator Boris Herrmann explains how to read clouds on the sea. For John Green, air conditioning only testifies to the rule of white suit wearers over the office temperature. And for Mordecai Ogada, the weather is the great equalizer of the northern and southern world. Marcel Beyer watches snow on Norwegian television. And Hervé Le Tellier reads in a storm. Ronya Othmann tells of poetry in times of man-made natural disasters. And Michael Gamper about what literature knows about weather that meteorology cannot capture. Luisa Neubauer learned to care about the environment from her grandmother. And Nicola Kabel recognizes the material for generation conflicts in it.

Nava Ebrahimi is lost in the Greek rain.

And Paolo Cognetti fears the loneliness of the misty Alps.

Rutger Bregman has researched what the rising sea level will mean for the North Sea coast.

Peter Licht insults functional jackets.

And at the end, Jochen Schmidt looks again at historical weather reports from the GDR.

But when it comes to the weather, people are always looking ahead.

"Every evening before I go to sleep, I check the weather report," writes Katharina Volckmer.

“A look into the future, small numbers and symbols that promise me that there will be a new day.

Another week.

Sometimes even two.

It is a somewhat banal, but important source of certainty: there will be a tomorrow. "