Theodor Storm Gesellschaft: Conference 2024

The cats rule Bulemann’s house, the seagull flies to the harbour and the Rider on the White Horse plunges into the storm tide with his mysterious horse - there is no doubt that animals repeatedly play decisive roles in Theodor Storm’s work. Even if a number of research contributions have turned to this topic, it still calls for a new and comprehensive discussion today.

In recent years, cultural and literary animal studies have dealt with the basic question of literary modelling of the relationships between humans and animals in cultural-theoretical considerations and practical text analyses; Roland Borgards presented them in 2016 in his authoritative Handbook of Cultural Studies Animals. Beyond the interest in individual motifs and symbols, these studies have developed into an incredibly productive stimulus for literary and cultural studies. They concern us all, far beyond specialist debates, with a view to the pressing contemporary issues of control and destruction of the natural contexts of our living world.

Animal Studies examines, for example, how animals appear in texts as embodiments of an Other or as part of a continuum to which humans also belong, whether they function as projection surfaces or offers of identification, as animal individuals or templates. It makes sense to pursue these questions in Theodor Storm’s work in particular. After all, it is all about the coexistence of humans and animals, about struggles and symbioses, about life forms, power relations and the question of natural and ideal orders.

Storm was writing in an era in which popular works such as Brehm’s Animal Life focussed bourgeois educational interest on animals in a completely new way, in which Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution saw humans themselves as part of the animal kingdom and in which Storm’s compatriot Friedrich Hebbel interpreted the relationship between humans and animals as a continuing world war of species. In this contemporary context, Storm’s stories and poems create completely independent and idiosyncratic concepts. Texts that we thought we had known for a long time can be read in a surprisingly new way from the perspective of animal studies. They speak into the time of a global crisis in which we are struggling with how we should behave towards our environment, what we must do - or not do.

The lectures and discussions at the Storm Conference 2024 will examine canonical works such as Der Schimmelreiter and Bulemanns Haus, as well as works that have until now been on the fringes of readers’ interest, such as Der Amtschirurgus – Heimkehr. Invited speakers are ROLAND BORGARDS (Goethe University Frankfurt/M.), VERA THOMANN (University of Vienna) and HEINRICH DETERING (University of Göttingen).

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Storm has devoted astonishing and skilful attention to the most threatening, most ill-famed animal species that humans have lived with for centuries. Rats appear in his fairy tales, sagas and historical novellas, from Renate to the Fest auf Haderslevhuus, increasingly ambivalent as perpetrators and victims. Ultimately, he uses rat stories to develop the antithesis of a human society whose violence and cruelty he despairs of. In Amtschirurgus, this becomes the image of a coexistence of human outsiders and despised animals – a social and ecological utopia.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: We will be looking at Storm’s great animal novella, Der Schimmelreiter. However, the focus here is not on the usual protagonists, the grey horse, the dog, Trien’ Jans’ cat or Claus the seagull. Instead, it is about the remarkable diversity of species in Storm’s most famous animal tale. It's about larks, otters and sheep, but also about cows, mice and sandpipers.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Whether as an anomaly of nature, as an object for sacrificial rites or as a marker of standardisation in science: white animals are generally characterised by an ambivalence between conspicuousness (as individuals) and invisibility (in the collective), between being made and randomness, between the doomed and those in need of protection. While the white colour of animal figures in literature provides an individualising emphasis – well-known examples include Madame d’Aulnoy’s La Chatte Blanche, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick or Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit – a collective and cross-species functionalisation of white animals can be traced in Theodor Storm. My contribution is dedicated to this Stormian ‘animal model’ based on the hypothesis that the hypervisibility of the white animal figures significantly stabilises a ‘crisis of perception’ (Schwarz 1998, Strowick 2011) developed for Storm’s novellas. As will be shown with reference to Eine Halligfahrt, Ein Bekenntnis and Der Schimmelreiter, Storm’s animal figurations therefore do not represent a loss of form or a deformation of sensory impressions (cf. the ‘deformation of a tomcat’ claimed in Schimmelreiter, LL 3, p. 646). Rather, the white animals form a constant structural principle whose appearance, staging and movement between vitality and death follow a strict order and compensate for corresponding narrative instabilities in time, space and focalisation. Accordingly, Storm derives an animales sacrificium from the white animals, which is not only a motif but also has a regulatory effect on the structural level of the narrative.

The excursion leads – this time on Saturday evening, instead of Sunday as usual – to Hademarschen, where this year the premiere of the Schimmelreiter Festival will take place at Gut Hanerau under the direction of FRANK DÜWEL. The special atmosphere of the venue combines with Storm’s poetry to create a unique theatre experience: Theodor Storm’s powerful Deichnovella takes us into the rural world on the North Sea coast in the middle of the 18^th century.

We get to know the young Hauke as a loner who has no interest in cows or sheep, but in autumn, when the tides rise higher, he broods alone on the dyke, surrounded by the cries of seagulls and shorebirds, where the idea of a new dyke that better protects against the life-threatening floods grows in his mind. Hauke Haien is to marry Elke Volkerts, the daughter of the old dykemaster, and ascend to the great office himself. From the back of his grey horse, he relentlessly pushes through his new dyke against large sections of the village community, and soon there is talk that Hauke is in league with the devil. In the end, a great storm surge sets in to devour animals and people.

The conference will open on Friday evening with a reading by Husum writer DÖRTE HANSEN, whose three novels Altes Land (2015), Mittagsstunde (2018) and Zur See (2022) are among the most acclaimed works of fiction in the German-speaking world today.

Do you have to practise freezing if you come from a whaling family? Can the city redeem us from a village childhood – and vice versa? What does nature do to us, what do we do to nature? Personal imprints and social change, old orders and new freedoms – these are the topics that Dörte Hansen talks about and that the author would like to discuss with the audience afterwards.