Waldeinsamkeit

While the forest on the left is still somewhat populated, although by a French soldier lost in the German thicket, probably hiding from Lützow’s infamous hunt, the solitude of the spruce thicket on the right is complete. The spectator is on their own, confronted with sublime nature. The sketch for the “thicket” (the right picture) is from the same time as the left picture, the time of the Napoleonic War.

“Towards the midnight part of our little country Austria a forest brushes its dusky ranges to the west for about thirty miles, starting at the spring of the Thaia river, continuing to that three state corner where Bohemia runs into Bavaria and Austria.

There, like often seen with the needles of a crystal formation, a bustle of mighty mountain ridges and passes charged into each other, and pushed up a rough massif, that would then present its blue woods to the three countries, and send out wavy hills and gushing brooks in all directions.

At first, dense forest stands of monotonous spruce and pine lead up from the Moldau valley for hours, then follows timidly climbing out of the river Seebach, open land; - but it is a wild deposit of torn valley bottoms, consisting of nothing but pitch black soil, the dark death bed of a thousand years of vegetation, where many balls of granite are scattered, like pale skulls, standing out from the ground, as they have been washed clear by the rain, washed and rasped round. Here and there might lie the white bones of a fallen tree, and chunks washed up. The Seebach’s water is brown and full of iron, but so clear that in sunlight the sand glitters from the riverbed, like grains of gold reddishly flickering up. No sign of human intervention, pristine silence.

After an hour of hiking, a whiff of young spruce trees welcome us, and stepping out from the black velvet of its bottom, we stand at the even blacker surface of a lake. A feeling of deepest loneliness takes over irresistibly whenever I enjoyed climbing up to the fairy lake. It lies between the hard bluffs, seamed by dense bands of sprout trees, dark and sincere, whereoff some single trunk stretches, barren of branches, like a singe antique column.

He (God) has described everything so vividly, all the woods up there, too, vast and impermeable, so that our own appear like gardens in comparison. A black magic lake should rest in their centre, and miraculous rocks and miraculous trees stand around it, and a high forest surrounding it, in which no axe has been heard since creation. The hunter said that he would not yet have gone so far in to reach the water, but soon he would do it, and carry a blessed silver button with him, to shoot down the murderer and poacher, as soon as he would spot him, because they stand fast against lead.”

Adalbert Stifter, Hochwald (‘High Forest’, my translation).

During the Thirty Years War, Heinrich, lord of Castle Wittinghausen hides his two daughters Klarissa and Johanna from the approaching Swedes in a cottage, tucked away in the forests.

But there is no escape. The High Forest, written by Adalbert Stifter at the peak of romanticism, 1841/42, the years leading up to the revolution in March 1848, depict the Bohemian Forest so that Friedrich’s images are fitting illustrations.

Unfortunately, the story and its characters are so wood cut and full of kitchy piety as we too often find with Stifter (and Friedrich).

In the company of trees one is usually found in the forest. Living in community, -which is in biology ‘in symbiosis’- i.e. mutually depending. Mushrooms, fungi live communal with trees like that; which is well known. The mycelium socialises with the roots. When the tree dies, a fairy ring grows out of it …

Fungi -heterotrophic- cannot generate their calories on their own; they receive carbohydrates and other detritus from the tree to which they convey other nutrients in return. Humans -also heterotrophic- are seen on Friedrichs images, in community with trees, too.

Cities, however, in Friedrich’s time, are like islands in nature. They are seen from afar, from the safe distance of a hide-out, just like it is evoked in Stifer’s High Forest.

Cities are the result of the long struggle to bring spatial and psychological distance between humankind and the hardships of nature; the safety of the cities, which in Stifter’s time would started to be connected by safe railroad travel, becoming knotted together to grow into a single ecumenopolis. It is only then that the idea of nature could be tied to a longing for something that would stand outside this network, something other.

Giambatista Vico writes in 1725: “The order of human affairs progressed like this: at first there were the forests, then the huts, then villages, later the cities, and finally the academies.”

Throughout the occident we find a stable base system of emotions in relationship to the forest. The forest was never a habitat to people, only outcasts would dwell in the woods. This gives us the background for the attributions.

Since the emergence of villégiature, or Sommerfrische, leisurely walks and outings into the landscape, i.e. since the second half of the 19th century, most people in Western and Central Europe regard their forest in the sense of the classic commons, a space which serves the public for recreation, on which everyone has a claim. But this notion is so recent and has had so little impact on our allegorical repository, that it is worthwhile to look into the development of the forestal metaphors.

Until the rise of the early civilisations people could experience the forest only along the edges or at clearings and would almost completely stay out of the deeper woods. Greek antiquity could unfold a more differentiated image of the woods. There are the titanic primordeal forests, remaining in the dard, similar to other tabooed locations. There was, however, also the grove-often a holy place; and here we find already the dialectic of the forest that is so typical for European culture: The grove is a place where the chased creature can find refuge, even from the gods, like Daphne from Apollo-but also a place where the nymphs walk abroad, giving Ovid the plot for many of the unlucky Metamorphoses. It is a place where men have to pay due attention to “female nature” not to be lead astray by sad Echo.

Interesting is the construction of a German Identity from the forest in contrast to Roman civilasation, which Tacitus sketches already around 100 AD in his Germania. In the defeat of Varrus in the Teutoburger Wald, the realm of the arch-barbars, we find the genesis myth of the Germans as wild people of the woods. This allegorical connection of German with forest might also explain why the Baumfrevel, which is an actual German legal term which means ‘sacrilege against the tree’, and Waldsterben, the dying of the woods from pollution, hence committed by civilisation, have become even somewhat global terms.

Up to the end of the medieval times people had a primary exterminatory relationship to the forests: On clearings which the hoovers cut into the woods, hoof-shaped hides, piece by piece the Virgin Soil would be upturned. Forests contributed very little to people’s nourishment except for honey.

So the forests were mostly dreaded, mostly for losing ones way in it, and being the hideout for highwaymen and robbers. The holy grove of antiquity degraded into the dwelling for cobolds, schrats, and similar rabble.

During the renaissance the loss of cultural meaning becomes strikingly obvious. Christianity based on Mediterranean traditions that evolved from a rather arid climate would give little surface to link with forests; only the Cisterciens would on occasion reclaim forests for agriculture.

Problems with massive deforestation from ship building and heating houses, but also salines, gives rise to systematic forestry. The concept of Sustainability emerges from the direct experience of the silviculturists to balance their harvest into a dynamic equilibrium between culture and nature. In the baroque age the hunt becomes the cultural anchor of the court ritual.

And then, with the turn to modernity and the rapid growth of cities, urban culture forms the image of forests as complementary to culture; the night and the woods; beauty and the sublime, the dialectic of romanticism.

Adolf Levenstein published Questions concerning the worker (Die Arbeiterfrage) in 1912, a study based on empirical surveys of 8,000 workers. “What do you think when you lie on the ground in the forest?” he wanted to know. The written responses demonstrate how much the forest had already become the metaphor for the entire nature. A textile worker from Berlin, e.g. makes the attempt to express his feelings in the style of romantic poetry: “Yes. I lie on the moss and look up to the pure firmament. Nothing is moving, nothing bothers me, an endless, comfortable feeling streams through the chest. I feel becoming one with the vast, infinite universe.” (Quoted after Lehmann in „Der Bürger im Staat“, Nr. 51,1, 2000).

The woods as symbol of subjectiveness, inward looking, and secret tremble. Dusky woods and shady gorge in the rocks are most beloved panoramic images of romanticism. The hunt, the castle (sometimes on fire), the hermite (pilgrim, monk), the thunderstorm, the moonlit night, the window (maybe the gothic windows of a church ruin) as motive of desire and the longing for expanse, and furthermore the forest fire as eschaton. The forest encloses human settlements which by that get shifted to the centre of our world.

Refuge - who in a fairy tale is in distress, goes into the forest. The forest is the place for apparition, for jack-o’-lanterns. The myth puts things of the sublime (sun, moon, stars, forest) in relation to the mundane. In the forest this is done in expectation of witches, dragons, giants, dwarfs, even robbers, or in hope to run into a good fairy. The sublime is the complement to the beautiful. The sublime stands above us and our own helplessness.

In Gesellschaft von Bäumen, “In the Company of Trees”, is the title of the second book of Bottom’s Dream (Zettels Traum), Arno Schmidt’s longest typoscript novel, written 1963-1969. The four main characters spend a secluded summer weekend together to get into the right mood to begin their project: The translation of Edgar Allen Poe into German. They start the day before sunrise to go for a hike (or rather a long walk), starting on “The Field of Horrors” (Das Schauerfeld, i.e. rather the field of shivers …), which is an open patch of heath close to Schmidt’s actual home in Bargfeld, near Celle in Lower Saxony. From there they go on, into the woods (into the company of trees), to finally arrive at Dan’s Cottage, the fictional house of Schmidt’s alter ego. It is in this second book of Schmidt’s extremely voluminous work-a book that is a heavy read not only because it ways almost ten kilograms- we find the environment in a very romanticist way brought into context with the sublime. The four hikers in the forest make the attempt to put themselves “into the folds of the time of the 19th century”, as they begin to more and more see the world through the eyes of a contemporary to Poe. Blue pebbles at the wayside are transformed into ejections from volcanos on the moon, and finally Dan wishes to be struck dead by a meteorite to find a fitting egomaniac end. Mushrooms are foraged, while the stilted, even construed conversation circles around books that would frame Poe’s romantic mind.

A specific role comes here to an utopian novel, mostly forgotten today: Niels Klim’s Underground Travels by the Norwegian writer Daniel Holberg-still famous today not only because of Edward Grieg’s suite From Holberg’s Time (probably a long gone time for Grieg already …). In this satirical novel, a subterranean parallel world is discovered by the natural scientist Klim. In the reality of the 17th century, the astronomer Edmund Halley, comparing the masses of earth and moon, had deduced that the earth would have to be hollow inside. This triggered a whole fashion of hollow world stories. Casanova’s Iscameron is a contemporary example, but also the fairy tale of Regentrude by Theodor Storm or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carol, Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym, and of course Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth are testimony to the suggestive power which this idea exercised on the 19th century minds. And Holberg’s novel was one of the most popular of those visions, from the late 18th to the mid 19th century.

Nils Klim, Holberg’s hero, after a considerable time in free fall lands on a subterranean planet, in the middle of a group of trees, of tree-people, who dwell in the country of Potu in an egalitarian and liberal society without class boundaries, and with emancipated genders. Potu’s hierarchy is a res publica litteraria, a society of letters (hence of particular appeal for Schmidt who had written a novel Die Gelerhtenrepublik). This closes the loop within Vico’s cyclical order of the world, as mentioned above, which ends with the academies that for Holberg’s Potu already sit in the forests.

One of Holberg’s tree-people from an engraving of an early print of Niels Klim acts as the cover image for the first edition of Arno Schmidt’s Bottom’s Dream:

Der verirrte Jäger

Ich hab gesehn ein Hirschlein schlank
Im Waldesgrunde stehn,
Nun ist mir draußen weh und bang,
Muß ewig nach ihm gehn.

Frischauf, ihr Waldgesellen mein!
Ins Horn, ins Horn frischauf!
Das lockt so hell, das lockt so fein,
Aurora tut sich auf!“

Das Hirschlein führt den Jägersmann
In grüner Waldesnacht,
Talunter schwindelnd und bergan,
Zu nie gesehner Pracht.

Wie rauscht schon abendlich der Wald,
Die Brust mir schaurig schwellt!
Die Freunde fern, der Wind so kalt,
So tief und weit die Welt!“

Es lockt so tief, es lockt so fein
Durchs dunkelgrüne Haus,
Der Jäger irrt und irrt allein,
Findt nimmermehr heraus.

J. v. Eichendorff