GLOOM | GLORY
A (LITERARY) DEGROWTH WAY OF LIFE
Natalie Stypa
Literature is a space where radical thoughts can be tested; a space to explore, expose, and replace what we find to be wrong with non-fictive realities. I have no doubt that if Hans Henny Jahnn – an impressive but little known figure of 20th century German literature – lived today, he would be an ardent supporter of the degrowth movement. Degrowth and other post-growth theories seek to develop a narrative for our present and future that is focused on sustainability and the well-being of both people and planet as opposed to the accumulation of material goods that is central to our current economic and socio-cultural structures. The development of an elaborate concept of what it means to reject growth is what happens in the space of Jahnn’s novel Fluß ohne Ufer.
Fluß ohne Ufer consists of three parts, published successively between 1949 and 1961. It isn’t about politics or systemic change. It’s not about a society or even community trying to do things differently. It is about two people who want to emancipate themselves from a system that they view as cruel and unforgiving and live a new story of kindness and harmony. The novel is based on a provocation: the initiatory moment when Jahnn’s protagonists Gustav Anias Horn and Alfred Tutein leave the path that society would have them take lies in Tutein murdering Horn’s fiancée – and Horn accepting the inacceptable. Our indignation is intended; Jahnn employs the murder and its acceptance as symbolic rejection of social norms and values. From that moment on, the two men are what Jahnn calls ‘Abtrünnige’, renegades who will spend their whole lives together. The underlying idea is one of profound interconnectedness and the first aspect of Jahnn’s degrowth project. Rejecting separation and the feeling of not being responsible for what happens to the people around us, their unity becomes a stronghold against an unkind, alienating world. Rather than trying to change society, they create an exclusive couple-relation and try to minimise contact with the outside. Their symbiotic (never explicitly sexual) relationship goes so far that they perceive Tutein’s guilt for the murder as split between them. And even further: a blood transfusion that has half of Horn’s blood replaced with Tutein’s and vice versa signifies a mixture of symbolic and actual realisation of their desired symbiosis. The potential precariousness of their withdrawn life is eased by an inheritance that guarantees Horn a financially stable position. This leads us to economic growth, the second aspect of Jahnn’s degrowth project. Horn, reluctant to play by capitalism’s rules, decides to work as a composer. Art becomes a way to undermine those rules for art is understood as unnecessary, as not useful in the sense of producing monetary value. That Horn is conscious of his financially luxurious position is what I consider a strength of Jahnn’s novel: it doesn’t show naïve escapism but points at discrepancies between ideal and reality, at failed attempts to live according to one’s very own principles. When it comes to reproduction, the third aspect of Jahnn’s degrowth project, another discrepancy crops up. In the text’s logic, there is no difference between producing goods and producing the human resource. Analogous to art, homosexuality is presented as the ideal. Tutein murdering Horn’s girlfriend is the literal destruction of the (re)productive relationship and initiation of their lifelong companionship. But reality betrays the ideal when Horn fathers a child. His slip is corrected afterwards and the child left to live with the mother and the man she then marries. It won’t interfere with neither Horn’s art nor his relationship with Tutein. The fourth and final aspect of Jahnn’s degrowth project is the most unexpected. For once, the decay of a body after death is rejected for it is viewed as re-entering into the capitalist circle of production and consumption. The argument is that a body turning to earth produces the ground for new life to grow in. Yet secondly, death is the only possibility to achieve true unity. Only two bodies ‘decaying into another’ can transcendent individuation and achieve total symbiosis. This concept proves hard to realise. Tutein dies much earlier than Horn; by embalming his body and storing it in a big metal container inside an even bigger wooden box, Horn saves Tutein from becoming breeding grounds for new growth. While Horn himself is not spared this fate, at least he can decay into his animals who are buried with him: a last gesture of contempt for human society and its misguided priorities. As radical and bizarre as Jahnn’s degrowth project may seem at first sight – a second look reveals similarities to today’s movements. To the concept of ‘interbeing’, for example, developed by the American author Charles Eisenstein in his recent book The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (2013). Both Jahnn and Eisenstein want to shift priorities, to create a more loving environment, to replace the drive for wealth and growth with more kindness, compassion, and the concern for the well-being of others. The main difference lies in their take on systemic change. Jahnn’s protagonists have given up on society and thus restrict themselves to the individual.[1] Eisenstein, on the contrary, starts with the individual but clearly believes that change on a larger scale is possible. Other aspects of Jahnn’s degrowth project are likewise topical. In reaction to overpopulation and strained resources some people do in fact decide not to have children – regardless of their sexuality. As for the aspect of economic growth, ideas like revolutionising wage labour through basic income or living self-sustainably to dodge mass production and global supply chains are today not only widely discussed but practised by many, oppugning Fluß ohne Ufer’s pessimism regarding societal transformations.[2] Just like a literary reality is created, we have to create the realities we live in. At its best, literature can provoke, inspire, and help us to do so. Despite all pessimism, what I find extraordinary about Jahnn is his uncompromising commitment to more humanity (a term that tends to make us chuckle in slight embarrassment when used in all its unironic grandeur[3]). His narrative of a degrowth way of life can provide much food for thought for contemporary debates about the challenges we are faced with and the alternatives we envision. 1 Jahnn himself had a different and more hopeful stance: he was an active campaigner against nuclear power plants, environmental destruction, and for animal rights. 2 For basic income, view https://www.mein-grundeinkommen.de. For self-sustainable living, there is a plethora of blogs to be found on the internet. 3 Looking at metamodernism (one candidate for postmodernism’s successor) and its diagnosing a new bloom for sincerity, maybe Jahnn will find a new audience these days. |