Affective Disorder: A Reading of Recent Fiction by Juli Zeh Focused on Environmentalism

Few German intellectuals would deny that climate change is bringing about a deleterious impact on the environment and Juli Zeh is no exception. Critics have noted this trend, and it has been asserted that her novel Unterleuten (2016) exhibits a mourning for the loss environmental degradation of the natural world has brought about on a global scale. However, previous scholarship has largely ignored Zeh’s highly critical view of the politics of environmentalism on the part of business, media, and political elites. Unterleuten and her more recent novel Zwischen Welten (2023), co-authored with Simon Urban, show the disastrous impact of creating mandates putatively aimed at protecting the environment when there is no attempt to positively engage the active participation of rural communities in helping to create sustainability. The following essay draws on both affect theory and ecocriticism to show that in recent writing, particularly in the above-mentioned novels, Zeh (and Urban) portray the ecological movement, and leftists in general, as out of touch with rural Brandenburg citizens and their daily concerns. Zeh’s recent work evokes a broad disaffection with progressive politics on the part of this populace that might be ameliorated if the government, cosmopolitan business and media figures as well as leading environmentalists treated particularly farmers as mature citizens (“mündige Bürger” in Kantʼs sense of the term) rather than as an ignorant mass which must simply be manipulated into accepting sustainable energy and an ecofriendly approach to agricultural practices.