The Natural World Viewed:
Early German Images of the Anthropocene
Over the course of the past century, humans have rediscovered the Earth’s fragility multiple times over. This collaborative presentation focuses on one such moment and site of (re)discovery—early twentieth-century Germany—and the key role that nature films played in efforts to recalibrate humankind’s relationship to a pliable, but still foreboding, world. During this period, the consequences of industrialization and mass migration to urban centers prompted some of the earliest reflections on the destructive effects of modern civilization on humans, other species, and the broader ecology (a term coined by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel in 1866). Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany saw the foundation of a host of natural preservation societies including the Naturfreunde (1895), Bund für Vogelschutz (1899), and Bund Heimat und Umwelt in Deutschland (1904) as well as alpine and hiking societies such as the Wandervogel youth groups (1896).
Cinema played an important role in this context. The new medium served to educate audiences and to cultivate enthusiasm and care for endangered plants, animals, and landscapes, while also celebrating unspoiled nature. At a time of heightened concern that rare species and biotopes would soon vanish due to human civilization’s destructive power, film also served a crucial archival function, creating lasting records of the natural world for subsequent generations.
Assembling neglected works from the vast archive of Wilhelmine and Weimar nature films, this four-person presentation will offer a prismatic look into the relationship between early twentieth-century German cinema and environmental discourse. It begins with films by Hermann Hähnle, an industrialist and conservationist who started filming rare birds in their natural habitats around 1900. Building on Hähnle’s pioneering achievements, figures like Hubert Schonger, Arnold Fanck, and Heinrich Hauser established nature films (Naturfilme) as an essential part of German film culture in the 1920s.
While Hähnle’s films depict a fragile ecosystem in need of protection, nature filmmakers also joined ethnographic expeditions in search of extreme and untamed environments, among them Greenland and Western Ireland. The images of Greenland’s icy landscapes in the Ufa production Bilder aus Grönland (1929) articulate a majestic and sublime vision of nature. Heinrich Hauser’s unfinished Die Aran-Inseln (1928)—a notable precursor to Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934)—imagines the Irish climate as an elemental force, occasioning prosaic challenges for those who live on the geographic and economic margins.
Prefiguring the works of later directors—from Jean Painlevé and Jacques Cousteau to David Attenborough, Werner Herzog, and Luc Jacquet—early German nature films resonate with contemporary scholarship on animal studies, ecologies, and the Anthropocene in Cinema and Media Studies and the Environmental Humanities more generally. Not least, they pose urgent questions regarding the responsibilities and possibilities for human intervention into the planetary ecosystem at a time of species loss, melting ice sheets, and rising sea levels.
Films:
Naturschutz: Tieraufnahmen, Germany 1915–1920, dir.: Hermann Hähnle, Print: Haus des Dokumentarfilms, Stuttgart / digital copy from film print, 4’, silent
Die Aran-Inseln (fragment), Germany 1928, dir.: Heinrich Hauser, Print: Bundesarchiv, Berlin, 35mm, 375 m, 15’, silent
Not shown, but normally available
Bilder aus Grönland, Germany 1929, Print: Bundesarchiv, Berlin, 35mm, 377 m / digital copy from film print, 17’, silent (credit sequence is missing)
Bios:
Nicholas Baer is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He is the co-editor of The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933 (University of California Press, 2016) and Unwatchable (Rutgers University Press, 2019). Baer has published on film and media, critical theory, and intellectual history in numerous journals and collections, and his writings have been translated into six languages.
Katerina Korola is a PhD Candidate in Art History and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, specializing in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European photography and film. She is currently writing a dissertation on the conceptual, visual, and material problems that the contaminated atmosphere of industrial modernity posed for photographers, filmmakers, and aesthetic theorists in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany.
Katharina Loew is Assistant Professor of German and Cinema Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her writings on silent cinema and film technology have been published in New German Critique, Film Criticism, and several edited collections. Her monograph Special Effects and German Silent Film: Techno-Romantic Cinema is forthcoming from Amsterdam University Press.
Philipp Stiasny is a freelance film historian and curator based in Berlin. He teaches at Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf and is an associate of CineGraph Babelsberg and editor of the journal Filmblatt. His publications include Das Kino und der Krieg: Deutschland 1914–1929 (edition text und kritik, 2009) and articles on various aspects of German film history. Currently he is co-editing a volume on UFA’s international productions.