Predators and Prey: Entanglements of Masculinity, Power, and Desire in Horst Stern’s Novella The Last Hunt

At a time when European status-focused, elitist, and masculinist trophy-hunting culture is clashing with Germany’s rising environmental movement, journalist and literary writer Horst Stern portrays in his Jagdnovelle (The Last Hunt, 1989) a hunter’s ambivalence toward a “sport” he used to be passionate about but whose detrimental impact on forest ecology as well as individual animals he can no longer ignore. Interweaving the myth of hunting goddess Diana, embodied in the hunter’s aristocratic ex-wife, with his protagonist’s shifting attitude toward shooting wild animals and growing awareness of the devastating damage to the forest from deliberate deer overbreeding, Stern mounts a biting critique of contemporary hunting practices, including hunters’ hypocritical environmental justification for their killing. The author exposes the erotic desire behind the drive to hunt, satirizes masculinist trophy-hunting rituals, and engages the myth of Actaeon, who was transformed from predator to prey, to track his protagonist’s increasing identification with prey animals. Narrating every second chapter from the perspective of the hunter’s quarry—a large old bear—evokes empathy and provides the reader insight into a wild animal’s life in an anthropogenically altered landscape. Eventually, this leads to a questioning of the still haunting Western dichotomy between human and more-than-human nature.