Wilhelm Lehmann: Nature Writing as a Behavioural Strategy

This exploration of the German novelist and poet Wilhelm Lehmann (1882–1968) as a nature writer situates his seminal writings within the broader cultural context of the Weimar Republic. The guiding hypothesis is that Lehmann developed, in response to the experience of World War I, literary exercises that resonated with the natural world. His systematic privileging of perception aesthetics over production aesthetics problematizes modernist tenets of Neue Sachlichkeit and offers an alternative to the dominant cultural habitus of cool conduct. The essay reads Lehmann’s aesthetic program of converging the observational skills of a naturalist with a writing practice of humilitas as an ethics of gift. It concludes with an attempt to interpret the interconnectedness of specific features in Lehmann’s writing as representative of a specifically German-language vein of nature writing: a phenomenological writing practice that is modeled on empirical observation, a nonsubjectivist literary expressionism, a reflection on the uncontrollable biological conditions of human life.