The Mines Matter—“Die Bergwerke” between Psychology and Anthropocene

“Die Bergwerke” portrays a world infused with strange forces that simultaneously manifest themselves externally (the mineral world) and internally (Elis’s visionary states). When in the mines, Elis experiences repeated unsettling mysterious visions, such as an old miner who appears to him while he is working “in dicke[m] Schwefeldampf gehüllt” (“wrapped in such sulphurous fumes”) (Bergwerke, 227/Mines, 163, translation amended). Given this demonic apparition, it is no surprise that Elis is shaken with fear: “Elis sah mit Entsetzen, wie er behende gleich einer Eichkatz’ die schmalen Sprossen der Leiter heraufhüpfte und in dem schwarzen Geklüft verschwand” (“Elis saw with horror how he scrambled up the narrow rungs of the ladder as nimbly as a squirrel and vanished in the black cleft”). Indeed, these mines “[bedünken] ihm . . . ganz unheimlich” (“seemed quite uncanny to him”) (Bergwerke, 229/Mines, 164). This uncanny experience reminds Elis that he is following in the footsteps of generations of miners; we might say that in the underground apparition of the old miner, Elis sees a spectral trace of previous anthropogenic geoactivity. Similarly, the discovery of Elis’s own imperfectly preserved body by a mining community that has long since forgotten him—and continued to mine the earth that killed him—at the end of Hoffmann’s story provides a similar uncanny human trace in the stones beneath their feet. These encounters of human and nonhuman forces in an inorganic nature constitute a fear-inducing, gothic experience of the Anthropocene.

These forces begin long before Elis arrives in Falun. The story starts with him having just returned to Göthaborg from sailing from the colonies to learn of his mother’s death. Thrown into melancholic introspection, Elis is approached by a mysterious old man, who it later emerges could only be the ghost of Torbern, a miner who was buried in an explosion in Falun more than a hundred years previously and about whom uncanny legends have developed (Bergwerke, 229/Mines, 164–65). Torbern capitalizes on Elis’s sense of alienation and his imaginative tendencies to tell him about the seemingly marvelous mines at Falun, putting Elis into a visionary state following which he decides to try his luck there instead (Bergwerke, 215/Mines, 154). Shortly afterward, Elis has a prevision not just of his later experiences in the mine but also of a mysterious mineral queen, a sensual but nonsexualized figure that fills him with awe: “in dem Augenblick leuchtete es auf aus der Tiefe wie ein jäher Blitz, und das ernste Antlitz einer mächtigen Frau wurde sichtbar. . . . Der alte hatte ihn umfaßt und rief: . . . das ist die Königin” (“Before Elis had time to be afraid, there was a sudden flash of lightning from the depths, and the solemn visage of a majestic woman became visible. . . . ‘Take care, Elis Fröbom. That is the queen’”) (Bergwerke, 217/Mines, 156–57). Inexplicably, Elis follows the miner out of the city and travels across the country to Falun. Riddled with skepticism once there, he spontaneously (“unwillkührlich”; Bergwerke, 224) pledges to stay and become a miner after meeting Pehrson Dahlsjö and his daughter Ulla. Dahlsjö owns an important local mine, and Elis is instantly infatuated with Ulla, later being allowed to marry her. Torn between the promise of material wealth and bourgeois family life aboveground and visions of the marvelous riches of the mineral queen in the mines below, Elis enters the mines on his wedding day and is crushed to death before his preserved corpse is found decades later.

Because of these binaries of fantasy–reality, underground–surface, sensuality–sexualization, supernaturalism–materialism, Theodore Ziolkowski has argued that Hoffmann’s mine, as in German Romanticism more generally, is “a mine of the soul, not a technological site,”4 and indeed this seems to be broadly accurate as a reading of “Die Bergwerke.” Starting with the traumatic experience of his mother’s death and finishing with his solipsistic, escapist vision of the mineral queen in opposition to the domestic reality of life with his fiancée, Ulla,5 the mines’ function as an allegorical representation of the unconscious layers of Elis’s subjectivity is clear. Elis’s behavior in Falun is readily visible as a process of repressing traumas, of sublimation, and of creating the neurotic substitute satisfaction of the mineral queen. Indeed, his prospective father-in-law, Dahlsjö, offers precisely such a “diagnosis” of his underground adventures: “Dem tiefsinnigen Neriker hat die Liebe den Kopf verrückt, das ist alles” (“Love has turned the head of the melancholy Neriker—that is all”) (Bergwerke, 236/Mines, 170).

I do not propose that we ignore such psychological readings of the story, but the conclusion of Hoffmann’s story should be a warning against reducing Elis’s fate to one of narcissistic introspection alone. After all, Dahlsjö’s “analysis” doesn’t help Elis in the slightest—he still goes off to his demise in the mines. In the self-reflexive irony of Hoffmann’s text, critics need to be wary of doubling such bourgeois, materialistic diagnoses in their modern interpretations by ignoring the technologies of global trade and the realities of metal extraction that frame Elis’s experiences in Falun. In fact, Hoffmann’s mine is remarkable by virtue of its very concrete depictions of the signs of destruction inflicted on the landscape through human extraction activity.6 Shortly after Elis’s arrival in Falun, we read:

Bekanntlich ist die große Tagesöffnung der Erzgrube zu Falun an zwölfhundert Fuß lang, sechshundert Fuß breit und einhundert und achtzig Fuß tief. Die schwarzbraunen Seitenwände gehen anfangs größten Teils senkrecht nieder; dann verflächen sie sich aber gegen die mittlere Tiefe durch ungeheurn Schutt und Trümmerhalden. In diesen und an den Seitenwänden blickt hin und wieder die Zimmerung alter Schächte hervor, . . . Kein Baum, kein Grashalm sproßt in dem kahlen zerbröckelten Steingeklüft und in wunderlichen Gebilden, manchmal riesenhaften versteinerten Tieren, manchmal menschlichen Kolossen ähnlich, ragen die zackigen Felsenmassen ringsumher empor. Im Abgrunde liegen in wilder Zerstörung durcheinander Steine, Schlacken—ausgebranntes Erz, und ein ewiger betäubender Schwefeldunst steigt aus der Tiefe, als würde unten der Höllensud gekocht, dessen Dämpfe alle grüne Lust der Natur vergiften. (Bergwerke, 220)

As is well known, the great entrance to the mine of Falun is about twelve hundred feet long, six hundred feet wide, and one hundred and eighty feet deep. The blackish brown sidewalls at first extend more or less vertically; about halfway down, however, they are less steep because of the tremendous piles of rubble. Here and there in the banks and walls can be seen the timbers of old shafts. . . . Not a tree, not a blade of grass was living in the barren, crumbled, rocky abyss. The jagged rock masses loomed up in wonderful forms, sometimes like monstrous petrified animals, sometimes like human giants. In the abyss there were stones—slag, or burned out ores—lying around in a wild jumble, and sulphurous gases rose steadily from the depths as if a hellish brew were boiling, the vapors of which were poisoning all of nature’s green delights. (Mines, 158, translation amended)

There is a disturbing realism and griminess to these images: the Falun that Elis encounters is a shocking place showing a wide-reaching transformation of the environment, producing dirt, slack, and noxious fumes. Elis may subsequently endeavor to overlook the damage done by mining, becoming enamored with a feminine vision of mineral riches, but the literary critic cannot afford to follow him down this particular mineshaft.

Most readings of “Die Bergwerke,” in particular psychological interpretations, build on a metaphysical and spiritual approach to nature represented by Torbern and Elis that contrasts with this ecological violence. Both men profess an alternative relationship to the earth that is not oriented toward extraction and commerce but is described as a disinterested and nebulous “wahre Liebe zum wunderbaren Gestein und Metall” (“true love for marvelous rocks and metals”) (Bergwerke, 230/Mines, 165). This holistic vision compares favorably with Elis’s employer and future father-in-law, Person Dahlsjö. For him nature is an external threat that needs to be conquered; otherwise, “die mächtigen Elemente, in denen der Bergmann kühn waltet, [werden] ihn vernichten” (“the mighty elements among which the miner reigns, will annihilate him”) (Bergwerke, 225/Mines, 161). Dahlsjö imagines a conceptual opposition between humanity and nature, which ecocritics such as Val Plumwood have identified as lying at the heart of the environmental violence of modernity’s progress myth.7 Dahlsjö stands in for an industrial mind-set that refers to the natural world as the material “other” of the agential human “self,” thus creating a construct of “nature” that is subordinate to a hubristic humankind and hence available for widespread use and abuse (Bergwerke, 225/Mines, 161). Torbern’s and Elis’s “true love” for the inorganic, by contrast, seems disinterested in such material concerns.

This opposition is open to deconstruction. On the day he dies, Elis is not running away from Ulla to the mineral queen; he is actually trying to unite what on the preceding pages is termed his “zwei Hälften” (“split in half”), the bourgeois quotidian and the “besseres, sein eigentliches Ich” (“his better, his true being”) (Bergwerke, 235/Mines, 169). Before leaving, he tells Ulla that the gems he is looking for will be his “Hochzeits-Gabe” (“wedding present”) to her (Bergwerke, 237/Mines, 170). In Elis’s ideal scenario, he would marry Ulla, have the mineral queen’s gemstones, and run the mine without any negative consequences, meaning that the materialistic and environmentally disastrous tendencies of the mining community segue into the vision of disinterested riches and wealth here. Just as Böhme and others have argued that the mineral queen is a symbolic sublimation of Elis’s displaced sexual desires,8 I am suggesting a parallel symbolic displacement of the materialist economic desires of his mining activities in the dream of the mineral queen and her gemstones. Elis’s mystical striving for the mineral world enables him to develop a programmatic blindness to the environmental price of extraction activities that filled him full of horror and abject disgust upon his arrival in Falun.

Far from being disinterested, Elis’s pursuit of gemstones is extraction capitalism of the worst kind—just another human–nature entanglement that reshapes and damages the earth while imagining a vision that purposefully conceals the networks of anthropocentric science, technology, and capital underlying it. Noting that “geology is a mode of accumulation, on one hand, and of dispossession, on the other” involving “instrumentation and instrumentalization” of nonhuman inorganic matter and those humans deemed to be inhuman in the pursuit of profit,9 Kathryn Yusoff has developed a powerful critique of the dirty work of precisely such a “geo-logics” of extraction as that advocated by Dahlsjö, Torbern, and, ultimately, Elis. She argues:

It is not just that geology is a signifier for extraction but that a transmutation of matter occurs within that signification that renders matter as property, that makes a delineation between agency and inertness, which stabilizes the cut of property and enacts the removal of matter from its constitutive relations as both subject and mineral embedded in sociological and ecological fields.10

Extraction capitalism’s generation of “a new geochemical earth” is a way of “world making that was for the few” rather than the many11 and delivers genocide, transplantation of people as slaves, the creation of “alien” ecologies of monocultures, and transformation of the ground beneath all our feet—but predominantly black feet—into a damaged, uninhabitable mass of poisonous caverns and slag heaps. There is no disinterested geological imagination.

The descent into the marvelous spaces of the mine in “Die Bergwerke” is not simply a descent into Elis’s unconscious; it is also an arrival into the economy and slow violence of the Anthropocene in which he is living. From the “dicker Dampf” (“thick mist”) rising over the lakes to “dem ungeheuern Höllenschlunde” (“the huge jaws of hell”) and “Anblick der fürchterlichen Zerstörung” (“the sight of the awful destruction”) that freezes the blood in Elis’s veins (Bergwerke, 219–20/Mines, 157, translation amended), from the “ewig betäubender Schwefeldunst” (“eternally stupefying sulphurous gases”) to the “ungeheurn Schutt und Trümmerhalden” (“monstrous accumulations of stones and refuse”) (Bergwerke, 220/Mines, 157–58), mining produces horrifying effects. “Die Bergwerke” reminds us that our reshaping of the planet is first and foremost caused by what we extract, showing us that the pollution “that now fills our atmosphere was released by the combustion of stuff” drawn from the material with which we live daily.12 The tale of Elis’s demise is very much earth-bound, highlighting human entanglement in the world around us.

(S)Cenes of Digging: Matter and Mind

If the economics of mining and marrying for money seem less divisible than critics have previously suggested, they also underestimate the profound knowledge of Romantic travel writing, scientific, geological, philosophical, and proto-psychological intertexts lurking beneath the surface of “Die Bergwerke.” From India to Falun, from gemstones to slag heaps, from the fascinating to the horrifying experience of human entanglement in and with nature, the world of Hoffmann’s text merges the different “(s)cenes” of the anthropogenic (re-)shaping of our world that has become known as the Anthropocene. Critical discourse on the Anthropocene has multiple -cenes and, by association, many scenes and timelines. These stretch from cities to farmland, from the Global North to the Global South, from the oceans to the skies, from prehistoric events of mass extinction to the present climate crisis via colonial expansion in the Early Modern period and the Industrial Revolution some 250 years ago. Similarly, as discussed in the Introduction to this book, disagreement as to the causation of these anthropogenic effects has produced different -cenic descriptors of these phenomena, prioritizing variously colonialization (Plantationocene13) or industrial capital (Capitalocene14) and even trying to undo and overcome the homogenizing, undifferentiated anthropocentrism implicit in the term Anthropocene in favor of alternative and more liberating models of coexistence (Chthulucene15). “Die Bergwerke” offers a remarkable coalescence of these various -cenes. On one hand, Elis’s previous occupation as a sailor engaged in the global trade of the East India Company frames the extraction processes firmly within the discourse of colonialist expansion of the Plantationocene, while on the other hand, the mining for copper and the anthropogenic effects this has on the landscape are framed within the industrial contexts of the Capitalocene. Likewise, Hoffmann’s story was published in 1819 and thus at the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Germany, but it is set around 1700, during the period in which the modern scientific idiom was established through which the Anthropos ruptured Himself from a performatively generated Nature,16 thus opening the earth up to exploitation in the manner embodied by Dahlsjö in Hoffmann’s story.

“Die Bergwerke” was written in a period of radical reform of mining sciences and practices in Germany that enabled the rapid industrial takeoff of the mid-nineteenth century, and these reforms produced a large body of literature in various disciplines and media.17 This discourse would have been immediately obvious to Hoffmann’s contemporary readership familiar with the Falun story from popular scientist Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert’s Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (1808) and other more literary sources, such as a competition in the literary journal Jason in 1809.18 Indeed, Schubert is name-checked by Ottmar in the discussions among the titular Serapion-Brethern that follow the tale (Bergwerke, 239–40). Hoffmann also draws on two further source texts from the burgeoning field of geosciences, Johann Friedrich Ludwig Hausmann’s Reise durch Skandinavien (Journey through Scandinavia), which is referenced in a footnote in the story itself (Bergwerke, 220/Mines, 158), and Ernst Moritz Arndt’s Reise durch Schweden im Jahr 1804 (Journey through Sweden in the year 1804). These accounts differ significantly. Hausmann—professor for mineralogy and mining technology at the University of Göttingen—is interested in documenting the technologically and scientifically notable discoveries he makes on his journey through Sweden and Norway. Arndt—a professor for history at the University of Greifswald and later in Bonn—focuses more on social and cultural developments, offering an optimistic appraisal of Sweden’s burgeoning industrial culture.

In keeping with his specialist scientific focus, Hausmann’s Reise durch Skandinavien records the names, history, and technical details such as depth, pressure, tools and machines, levels of ore production, and gross profit, with minute detail.19 He is clearly fascinated by the level of industrial extraction in Sweden compared with the more old-fashioned mines in his native Harz and Weserbergland mountains. He nevertheless notes the “schauerlichen Eindruck” (horrifying impression) that the vast slag heaps—the “schreckliche Bild einer durch Unordnung und Verschwendung herbeigeführten Zerrüttung” (the dreadful picture of a ruination produced by disorder and wastefulness)—leave on visitors.20 Such brief moments of shock do not stop him from moving swiftly on to describe the pumping and extraction systems that make such environmental destruction almost inevitable, however. Indeed, the lengthy historical accounts of the founding fathers and owners of these mines that punctuate his account swiftly turn the reader’s attention toward the captains of industry and away from a consideration of the environmental impact of their industriousness.21 With brief exceptions, Hausmann’s account of the mining and extraction industry generates an almost entirely uncritical progress narrative by banishing all signs of anthropogenic pollution to the margins.

Arndt follows a different approach. A historian, Arndt also studied natural sciences and geography, and his description vacillates between optimism about Sweden’s industrial future and unsubtle criticism of the environmental effects of Falun’s mining history. He describes the town’s appearance as “düster” (dreary), noting “Rauch” that “für die Gesundheit unmöglich gleichgültig seyn [kann]” and “Fremde, die hierher kommen, [werden] leicht mit Nasenbluten, Kopfschmerzen, Husten und Augenschmerzen geplagt” (smoke . . . which simply must have an effect on the health. . . . Foreign visitors are often easily plagued with nosebleeds, headaches, coughing, and sore eyes).22 The anthropogenic effects of the extraction industry and its by-products are palpable:

Der Kupferrauch hat alle Häuser braun gefärbt. Er hat aber dabei noch die Wirkung, daß er das Holz fast unverweslich und eisenhart macht. Dieser feine Rauch färbt Silber, Messing und anderes Metall oft dunkel, macht das Eisen rostig und die Fenster trüb. Er ist zum Teil so scharf, daß man ihn auf einige Meilen von der Stadt oft noch weiter merkt.23

The smoke from the copper has colored all of the houses brown. It also has the effect of making the wood as hard as iron and almost indestructible. This fine smoke often turns silver, brass, and other metals into a darker color, makes iron rusty, and darkens the windows. The smoke is so putrid that it can often be registered many miles from the city itself.

Such disturbing images of the environmental impact are clearly the source of Hoffmann’s fictionalized Falun, which is constantly shrouded in sulfuric smog.

In “Die Bergwerke,” Hoffmann uses Hausmann as a reliable source for the depictions of the mine, its workings, and the terminology with which to describe it. Where the text dwells precisely on those environmental effects that call Hausmann’s “progress” narrative into question, the story pivots closer to Arndt’s more critical viewpoint. When Elis learns that Torbern has long since died in a mining accident, only now to ghost around the text as a spectral reminder of man’s hubristic attempts to penetrate and control nature, the idea that extraction supports progress is firmly debunked. It is precisely the programmatic blindness toward the anthropogenic side effects of mining that is opened up to view first in Torbern’s death and then ultimately in Elis’s own demise. Both their deaths are quite literally Man’s arrival in the Anthropocene: crushed by the debris of human hubris that had earlier disgusted him, Elis (like Torbern before him) becomes a trace element in the lithic records of the mining industry’s environmental destruction. “Die Bergwerke” reveals a profoundly unsettling and self-damaging intimacy with the earth that we have transformed.

Like other German Romantic texts about mines, Hoffmann’s focus is on minerals and metals rather than fossil fuels, a sign perhaps of Germany’s comparatively late turn toward coal extraction compared with other European nations.24 As we have seen, however, the fact that “Die Bergwerke” engages with contemporary literature on mineralogy and metallurgy underlines the fact that the mines and their matter really do matter in Hoffmann’s story. While this is certainly true for the realistic depiction of environmental damage, the supernatural focus on Torbern’s ghost and the “mineral queen” also draws on contemporary scientific debates—namely, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert’s Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft.

Written in the wake of Friedrich Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, Ansichten was a version of a lecture series Schubert had held previously in Dresden in 1807.25 Schubert was a professor of natural science at Erlangen and Munich for many years and one of the most widely known natural scientists of the early 1800s in Germany. Far from an original thinker, Schubert saw himself as a scientist who made complex theories more widely accessible, and the spectacular topics with which he engages in the Ansichten underline this. The lectures document phenomena that appear to be diametrically opposed to the rational account of the natural world, arguing instead for the existence of an all-pervading worldly entanglement of energy and matter, the organic and inorganic, mind and body, spirit and substance. He outlines this in the fourteenth and final lecture, arguing for “eine innige Beziehung und Wechselwirkung” (an intimate relationship and interdependency) and “eine[n] genauen Zusammenhang” (a definite relationship) of “alle Glieder des Systems” (all components of the universe), irrespective of their organic or inorganic, material or immaterial, status.26 Matter for Schubert is not an inanimate assemblage; it is animated and agential by virtue of “eine Ursache” (one cause) behind all constituents of the “System.” Or put differently, matter (noun) is because it matters (verb). According to Schubert, this erstwhile holistic state is now, in the age of rational science, barely recognizable and no longer self-explanatory.

Following on from this principle, Schubert’s geological interests are focused on the presence of fossils in stones, which he views as evidence of the ability of organic material to become “sublimated” into the inorganic realm, and hence for materials to be capable of transmuting into other categories of materiality. Schubert “proves” these speculations by inserting a highly stylized story about a miner in Falun who disappeared and was later found preserved under the earth: “Auf gleiche Weise zerfiel auch jener merkwürdige Leichnam, von welchem Hülpher, Cronstedt und die schwedischen gelehrten Tagebücher erzählen, in eine Art von Asche, nachdem man ihn, dem Anscheine nach in festen Stein verwandelt, unter einem Glasschrank vergeblich vor dem Zutritt der Luft gesichert hatte.” (That strange, apparently petrified corpse of which Hülpher, Cronstedt, and the learned Swedish journals speak also crumbled in the same manner into a type of ash after it had been brought to the surface in a glass container in the dashed hope that this might protect it from contact with the elements.)27 It is this story that Hoffmann references in the discussion in the frame narrative of the Serapionsbrüder.

The actual origin of Schubert’s preserved Swedish miner was a report published in the journal Nye Tidender om lärde Sager in July 1720,28 and thus the period in which the modern, Enlightenment scientific episteme began to establish itself most clearly in Germany. As with Jeffery Jerome Cohen’s story about the Avebury man crushed by a megalith before it was discovered six hundred years later by Alexander Keiler,29 the Falun miner’s body is a source of amazement among journalists and scientists in its now seemingly fossilized form. It is worthwhile noting that the discovery of fossils in the late eighteenth century is typically seen as the dawning of a sense of “deep” time,30 and Schubert’s story about a human crumbling to dust excellently captures this feeling of the irrelevance of the human in the expansiveness of lithic time. Unlike the imperfectly fossilized remains of the miner, stone “conjures spans that transient humans cannot witness and yet are called upon, anxiously, to narrate.”31 In his historical gaze backward toward the intellectual origins of modern scientific inquiry, and in the trope of the crumbling human body in opposition with deep geological time, Schubert’s Ansichten indicates his rejection of this mode of scientific inquiry in pursuit of a less environmentally destructive Romantic Naturphilosophie.

Schubert’s metaphysical realism also offers us a model of entanglement of mind and matter that enables us to deconstruct the clear opposition of “psychological” and “realist” readings of Elis’s descent into the mines. As his preoccupation with phenomena such as somnambulism, mesmerism, and thought transference show, Schubert advocates a fluid transition between mind and matter, between psyche and substance. These ideas have their successor in contemporary ecological theory. Schubert’s appeal to an all-pervading, all-encompassing dynamic complexity of organic and inorganic, of mind and matter, has much in common with the “new materialism” of thinkers like Karen Barad and Jane Bennett, which stresses the complexity of all relations among people, people and things, and things in their own right without relying on distinctions or priorities of certain forms of agency. Following Bruno Latour’s deconstruction of agency as a demarcation between human and nonhuman nature,32 Bennett’s Vibrant Matter argues for “a vital materiality,” according to which all matter exists as life force in an interlinked, entangled (but by no means homogenously manifesting) material universe.33 For Ian Hoddard, entanglement allows broader ecological and historical critique of humans’ development of extraction technologies; Hoddard argues, “Human existence and social life depend on material things that are entangled with them.”34 Criticizing the “common belief that there is an inherent boundary between the ‘physical’ and the ‘metaphysical,’”35 Barad likewise posits “the universe” as “agential intra-activity in its becoming,”36 using the important prefix intra- to signal “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies.”37 Set against the background of Schubert’s Naturphilosophie, the idea that there can be a distinction between the interior and the exterior is misplaced. An ecological reading of “Die Bergwerke” cannot afford to distinguish, nor should it presume, a primacy of one over the other.

That, however, is where Schubert and Hoffmann part ways. While Schubert retains a quasi-religious belief in a benevolent form of entanglement with an animated nature, Hoffmann’s text undermines any such convictions. Although his relationship with Naturphilosophie is broadly sympathetic—visible especially in stories like “Der goldne Topf” (“The Golden Pot”)—Hoffmann’s response to these theories is not uncritical. Unlike other early German Romantics, Hoffmann’s engagement with Naturphilosophie was not particularly intensive, and although he read Schelling’s Von der Weltseele (On the world soul), his main source of knowledge was Schubert’s more accessible writing. As Monika Schmitz-Emans and Gerhard Kaiser have shown, however, Hoffmann tends to treat Schubert’s concepts as an “ästhetisches Spielmaterial” (material for aesthetic games).38 Thus, in his underground vision of a union with the mineral queen, we see a form of entanglement with the inorganic that is exciting and positive:

Sie erfaßte ihn, zog ihn hinab, drückte ihn an ihre Brust, da durchzuckte ein glühender Strahl sein Inneres, und sein Bewußtsein war nur das Gefühl, als schwämme er in den Wogen eines blauen, durchsichtig funkelnden Nebels. (Bergwerke, 232)

She seized him, pulled him down, pressed him to her breast, and there flashed through his soul a glowing ray—and his consciousness became little more than a feeling of drifting in a blue, transparent, sparkling mist. (Mines, 167, translation amended)

What Hoffmann’s fiction shares with Schubert here is the central idea that the rationally experienced quotidian world is merely one manifestation of the duplicitous “ambiguity” of all (natural) phenomena, behind which may lie the marvelous agency of nature. Unlike Schubert, there is no certitude of this, however. Hoffmann suspends “Die Bergwerke” in fantastic uncertainty, ambiguous as to whether Elis’s union with the inorganic world is the vision of a mentally ill man or genuinely the presence of the supernatural in nature. In a narrative repeatedly focalized through Elis, indicated by phrases such as “it seemed to him,” “as if,” or the ubiquitous “sensed,” the blending of subjective and objective reality frames most events as being potentially only imagined. In his fictionalization of Schubert, Hoffmann questions the metaphysical certitude of the scientist’s worldview. It is in this critical reappropriation, I will now argue, that Schubert’s version of the Falun story becomes “gothicized.”

Digging Up Dirt: The Gothic Anthropocene’s Uncanny Agencies

Contrary to Elis’s desires, he ultimately exerts little mastery over the stones and minerals he seeks, and there is no security about his having become successfully initiated in the language of nature in the manner both he and Torbern envisage. Indeed, this is a failure that is already prefigured in Elis’s first vision of the mineral queen following his encounter with Torbern in Göthaborg. This imagined encounter seems to be positive, consisting of a complete dissolution of his selfhood as he merges into the glistening inorganic nature around him:

Elis gewahrte neben sich den alten Bergmann, aber sowie er ihn mehr und mehr anschaute, wurde er zur Riesengestalt, aus glühendem Erz gegossen. Elis wollte sich entsetzen, aber in dem Augenblick leuchtete es auf aus der Tiefe wie ein jäher Blitz, und das ernste Antlitz einer mächtigen Frau wurde sichtbar. . . . Sowie nun aber der Jüngling wieder hinabschaute in das starre Antlitz der mächtigen Frau, fühlte er, daß sein Ich zerfloß in dem glänzenden Gestein. Er kreischte auf in namenloser Angst und erwachte aus dem wunderbaren Traum, dessen Wonne und Entsetzen tief in seinem Innern widerklang. (Bergwerke, 217–18)

Elis saw the old miner beside him; but as he stared at him, the miner changed into a gigantic shape, as if cast of glowing metal. Before Elis had time to be afraid, there was a sudden flash of lightening from the depths, and the solemn visage a majestic woman became visible. . . . But as soon as the youth looked down again into the majestic woman’s rigid face, he felt his being dissolved into the shining stone. He screamed in nameless fear and awoke from this marvellous dream, the rapture and terror of which resounded deep within his being. (Mines, 156, translation adapted)

This dissolution of the human subject into nature is a traumatic experience, not a joyous sense of release. “Die Bergwerke” maintains the entangled model of subjectivity and materiality found in the Romantic Naturphilosophie of Schubert, but rather than celebrating a benevolent, holistic vision of life in the Anthropocene, this entanglement of human and nonhuman, self and mineral world, is experienced as threatening and horrific.

This skeptical response to Schubert is most visible in the story’s conclusion. Elis not only dies as a result of his unfulfilled striving for a mystical union in nature; he ultimately fails to find this union with the mineral world at all, turning to dust rather than becoming stone. The coda to the story notes that his body only “appeared to be petrified” (“der versteinert schien”) (Mines, 171/Bergwerke, 239, emphasis added). Monika Schmitz-Emans has observed, “Anders als Schubert dämonisiert Hoffmann die Natur, um das Ich in seiner Hilflosigkeit zu zeigen” (Unlike Schubert, Hoffmann demonizes nature in order to show the subject in its helplessness).39 The helplessness of the human subject in Schmitz-Emans’s view is suggestive of a hostile external nature, but Hoffmann is more subtle than this. To demonize nature in the way Schmitz-Emans suggests merely reproduces the negative Othering of nature as a dangerous force to be feared, and therefore mastered, that defines characters like Dahlsjö and even Elis himself on the plot level. Elis’s failed union with the mineral world, like Torbern’s before him, was itself little more than a smokescreen for his striving after quite materialistic subterranean riches. I suggest instead that “Die Bergwerke” links the “demonization” of nature deliberately to human agency, and this is where we might identify a turn toward the gothic in Hoffmann’s narrative.

As the Introduction to the present volume makes clear, hostile nature can indeed be one articulation of the gothic in the Anthropocene: “as an entity that has always been under threat, always questioned, by the Gothic, the human takes up an endangered position in the Anthropocene.”40 What becomes of this threat, however, if this is a nature that is always already anthropogenically modified, in which human and nonhuman entanglement is all-pervasive? In gothic fictions, the desire to go digging around to unearth things—family histories, sexual desires, or untold riches—is one that is better ignored. In the Anthropocene, this is even more true: the age that was coproduced by humans digging in the dirt has caused irreparable ecological destruction that is now coming back to haunt us with a vengeance.41 As Jeff VanderMeer writes, “in the Anthropocene . . . hauntings and similar manifestations become emissaries or transition points between the human sense of time and the geological sense of time.”42 One instance of this in “Die Bergwerke” is Torbern’s spectral presence. When traveling to Falun, Elis sees Torbern’s shape: “wie er aus einer Schlucht, aus dickem Gestripp, aus dunklem Gestein plötzlich hervortrat . . . dann aber schnell wieder verschwand” (“he quite often saw the old man suddenly step from a ravine, or a thick copse or from behind some dark boulder . . . and then suddenly disappear again”) (Bergwerke, 219/Mines, 157). Just as the chemical, toxic legacy of extraction capitalism diffuses globally—indexed in “Die Bergwerke” by Elis’s work in the East India Company—we might say that Torbern’s itinerant ghost is the uncanny trace of humankind’s agency in the anthropogenic destruction of the environment—the result of a man-made explosion in the mines. This trace is uncanny because it is caused by an agency that had been banished from sight in an act of programmatic blindness that enabled modernity’s progress narrative, only now it both reappears in the mining community’s stories and—more worryingly—is offered up in the stones themselves. Torbern’s spectral traces in cliffs, abysses, stones, and finally in the mine itself are an uncanny chronotopical disruption between human time and geological time of man’s own making.

This is an uncanniness that characterizes the biological and geological intimacy that we experience in the Anthropocene,43 and as such, we can use Torbern as a starting point for understanding the gothic of and in the Anthropocene. Torbern’s story and the desire it awakens in Elis are suggestive of a risky biological and geological intimacy that we could call gothic rather than Romantic or naturphilosophisch: this is an ecology of fear and uncertainty rather than holistic conviction, and ultimately, the earth as a mineral body takes on threatening qualities.

Elis’s entanglement with the earth’s inorganic body is a similar source of terror. When his apparently fossilized remains are discovered decades after his disappearance, Elis’s contemporaries, with the exception of the now ancient Ulla, are all long since dead. Life in the mines has continued unabated, and Elis’s story—unlike Torbern—has been forgotten. Nobody tells any stories about his demise in the mines; the potential warning against the hubris of extraction goes unnoticed. When Elis’s preserved corpse is found in the mines and is brought to the surface, this lack of knowledge is challenged. At first, Elis’s corpse seems like a perfect example of a naturphilosophische union with nature: his untouched youthfulness contrasts diametrically with his former fiancée Ulla’s now decrepit state. Precisely who the spectral remnant is and who is alive is thoroughly confused: “Und damit kauerte sie neben dem Leichnam nieder und faßte die erstarrten Hände und drückte sie an ihre im Alter erkaltete Brust, in der noch, wie heiliges Naphthafeuer unter der Eisdecke, ein Herz voll heißer Liebe schlug” (“She squatted down beside the body and seized the stiffened hands and pressed them to her withered breast beneath the icy sheath of which, like a holy naphta flame, a heart filled with ardent love was burning”) (Bergwerke, 239/Mines, 172). Just as suddenly as it was found, and just as briefly as this uncanny embrace lasts, Elis’s body crumbles to dust while Ulla herself dies: “Man bemerkte, daß der Körper des Unglücklichen, der fälschlicherweise für versteinert gehalten, in Staub zu zerfallen begann” (“They noticed that the corpse of the unfortunate man, which they had thought was petrified, was beginning to turn to dust. The appearance of petrifaction had been deceptive”) (Bergwerke, 239/Mines, 172). It is the transience of human life in the face of the deep time of stones and minerals that is powerfully captured here.

For the spectators of this strange reunion, discovering the human remains of extraction capitalism in this way must be doubly shocking: these are the traces of man’s past hubris literally deposited on and in the stones, which they now target in their own hubristic extraction activities. Elis’s corpse, like Hoffmann’s story, highlights the negative and destructive experiences of nature as transformed by man. Like Torbern, Elis is a haunting, uncanny presence, a ghost that rises out of the global landscape to remind these latter-day benefactors of extraction capitalism of the violence they inflict on the landscape around them and which in turn engineers their own endangered modern lives. The place of the gothic in the Anthropocene, “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” suggests, lies not simply in the horrific experience of nature’s magnitude but also in gothic’s ability to deploy its central tropes and motifs like fantastic and monstrous figures, chronotopical disruptions, and experiences of frisson as a means to represent the distortions and illusions of dominant economic, political, and scientific discourse in modernity, such as the practices of extraction that make modernity possible at all.

Dawn of the Anthropocene

This chapter has analyzed “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” as a document from the dawn of the Anthropocene, when technology provided greater access to minerals, metals, and hydrocarbon sources of energy, thus expanding the influence of mining and allowing a literal reshaping of the world in a profoundly more intense form than ever before. I use the phrase “dawn” of the Anthropocene broadly, however. On one hand, this refers to the fact that Hoffmann’s story is written in a period of radical reform of mining sciences and practices in Germany that enabled the rapid industrial takeoff of the mid-nineteenth century. On the other hand, this refers to the actual origins of the Falun story in the period in which the modern, Enlightenment scientific episteme began to establish itself most clearly in Europe. Hoffmann’s immediate source, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, like many Romantic scientists, positioned itself critically to this tradition, making “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” an artifact not simply of the period in which the Anthropocene emerged in a palpable manner but also of nascent ecological insights that rendered its origins and dangers visible. Hoffmann’s story goes further than this, however. Although Elis’s death and uncanny return from the underground challenge the anthropocentrism of modernity’s narratives of progress, unlike the Naturphilosophie from which the novella emerges, “Die Bergwerke” offers no resolution and no reassuring counternarrative of empathetic initiation in the “book of nature.” That does not mean, however, that it advocates the materialist, capitalist, and scientific status quo, of course. As Heather Sullivan writes, “Hoffmann keeps our eye on the dirt of materiality” by fictionalizing—and ultimately collapsing—Elis’s attempts first to repress, then to sublimate in a mystical vision the awful destruction of nature in Falun.44 These nascent ecological insights can, and perhaps should, be the task and nature of the gothic in the Anthropocene.

Notes

1. E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Die Bergwerke zu Falun,” in Sämtliche Werke in 6 Bänden, vol. 4, Die Serapionsbrüder, ed. Wulf Segebrecht, 208–41 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker, 2001). English translations are from “The Mines of Falun,” in Tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, ed. and trans. Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 149–72, unless otherwise indicated. All further references are to these editions and will appear in the main body of the text with the abbreviation Bergwerke/Mines with the relevant page number.

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2. See Hartmut Böhme, “Geheime Macht im Schoß der Erde. Das Symbolfeld des Bergbaus zwischen Sozialgeschichte und Psychohistorie,” in Natur und Subjekt, ed. Hartmut Böhme, 67–144 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), and Theodore Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and Its Institutions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990).

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3. See Stefan Höppner, “Romantische Hohlwelten. Das Bergwerk bei Novalis, Schubert und Hoffmann,” in Hohlwelten. Les Terres Creuses. Hollow Earth, ed. Hartmut Fischer and Gerd Schubert, 99–104, 124–25 (Berlin: Lehmanns Media, 2009); Kate Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 140–56; Heather I. Sullivan, “Dirty Nature: Ecocriticism and Tales of Extraction—Mining and Solar Power—in Goethe, Hoffmann, Verne, and Eschbach,” Colloquia Germanica 44, no. 2 (2011): 117–21.

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4. Ziolcowski, German Romanticism, 28.

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5. See Friedrich Kittler, “Der Dichter, die Mutter, das Kind. Zur romantischen Erfindung von Sexualität,” in Romantik in Deutschland: Ein interdisziplinäres Symposion, ed. Richard Brinkmann (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978), 103; Detlef Kremer, E. T. A. Hoffmann. Erzählungen und Romane (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1999), 111 and 176–78.

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6. Sullivan, “Dirty Nature,” 118–19.

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7. Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993), 3.

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8. Böhme, “Geheime Macht,” 130–31.

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9. Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 16–17.

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10. Yusoff, 19–20.

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11. Yusoff, 26.

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12. John Philip Usher, Exterranean: Extraction in the Humanist Anthropocene (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 1.

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13. See Donna Haraway, Noboru Ishikawa, Scott F. Gilbert, Kenneth Olwig, Anna L. Tsing, and Nils Bubandt, “Anthropologists Are Talking—about the Anthropocene,” Ethnos 81, no. 3 (2016): 556–57; John L. Brooke and Christopher Otter, “Concluding Remarks: The Organic Anthropocene,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 49, no. 2 (2016): 281–302; Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes.

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14. See Jason W. Moore, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland, Calif.: PM Press, 2016); Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Capital and Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016).

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15. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016).

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16. See Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 10; and Haraway, Making Kin, 40–41.

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17. See Jason Groves, “Petrifiction: Reimagining the Mine in German Romanticism,” in Readings in the Anthropocene, ed. Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnstone, 247–52 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017); Kate Rigby, “‘Mines Aren’t Really Like That’: German Romantic Undergrounds Revisited,” in German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene, ed. Caroline Schaumann and Heather I. Sullivan (New York: Palgrave, 2017), 116–17.

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18. See Georg Friedmann, “Die Bearbeitungen der Geschichte von dem Bergmann von Falun” (PhD diss., Berlin, 1887); Rolf Selbmann, “Unverhofft kommt oft. Eine Leiche und die Folgen für die Literaturgeschichte,” Euphorion 94 (2000): 173–204.

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19. Johann Friedrich Ludwig Hausmann, Reise durch Skandinavien in den Jahren 1806 und 1807 (Göttingen: Johann Fr. Röwer, 1818), 5:96–102; all translations are my own.

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20. Hausmann, 96.

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21. Hausmann, 102–13.

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22. Ernst Moritz Arndt, Reise durch Schweden im Jahr 1806 (Berlin: G. A. Lange, 1806), 2:239; all translations are my own.

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23. Arndt, 231.

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24. See Groves, “Petrifiction,” 249–50.

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25. See Höppner, “Romantische Hohlwelten,” 115–24.

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26. Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaften (1808; repr., Dresden: Arnold, 1840), 373–74; all translations are my own.

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27. Schubert, 229.

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28. John Neubauer, “The Mines of Falun: Temporal Fortunes of a Romantic Myth of Time,” Studies in Romanticism 19, no. 4 (1980): 477.

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29. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 75–76.

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30. Noah Heringman, “Deep Time at the Dawn of the Anthropocene,” Representations 129 (2015): 56–85.

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31. Cohen, Stone, 85.

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32. Latour, Politics, 237.

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33. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), vii.

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34. Ian Hoddard, “The Entanglements of Humans and Things: A Long-Term View,” New Literary History 45 (2014): 19.

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35. Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 812.

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36. Barad, 818.

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37. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 33.

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38. Gerhard Kaiser, E. T. A. Hoffmann (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1988), 121; see also Monika Schmitz-Emans, “Naturspekulation als ‘Vorwand’ poetischer Gestaltung. Über das Verhältnis E.T.A. Hoffmanns zu den Lehren G.H. Schuberts,” Mitteilungen der Hoffmann-Gesellschaft 34 (1988): 67–83.

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39. Schmitz-Emans, “Naturspekulation,” 81.

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40. As the Introduction to the current volume states.

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41. Heringman, “Deep Time,” 57.

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42. Jeff VanderMeer, “Hauntings in the Anthropocene: An Initial Exploration,” Environmental Critique, July 7, 2016, https://environmentalcritique.wordpress.com/2016/07/07/hauntings-in-the-anthropocene/.

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43. Compare Heather Sullivan, “The Dark Pastoral: A Trope for the Anthropocene,” in Schaumann and Sullivan, German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene, 26–28.

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44. Sullivan, Dirty Nature, 128.

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