A captivating search for clues uncovers ecological lines of development in Marx‘s writing that have often been overlooked: a new approach to a work of surprising timeliness
Ecological awareness has characterized Karl Marx’s work from the very beginning. It is not the result of a late change, but pervades his thinking from his early writings to his final years. Marx ties in with Romanticism’s idea of nature and turns it from a speculative standpoint to an empirical point of view. Regarding this endeavour Charles Darwin and Adam Smith, Ludwig Tieck and Goethe also play an important role. Poetic texts and writing styles permeate social and scientific discourses.
By combining a historical approach with close readings, Detering reveals the surprising topicality of Marx’s writings in our time, a time in which the different forms of Marxism have run their course whereas the survival of capitalism is conjuring up a global ecocide.
Heinrich Detering, born in 1959, is a literary scholar and poet living in Göttingen. In 2009, he received the ›Leibniz-Preis‹ from the German Research Foundation. In 2023, he was inducted into the ›Orden Pour le mérite‹, and in 2024, he was awarded the ›Niedersächsischer Staatspreis‹. His research focuses on ecology and literature from the 18th century to Günter Grass, literary history and social history of Marx and Engels, as well as German, Scandinavian and Anglo-American literatur of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Besides this Detering has published several poetry collections. Most recently, his studies »Menschen im Weltgarten« and »Holzfrevel und Heilsverlust« (2020) on the relationship between literature and ecology and the poetry collection »An der Nachtwand« (2023) were published.
