Climatic Subjects

Who, or what, is the contemporary climatic subject? Addressing the climate crisis in thought, imagination, and in action requires a connection between scholars, artists, journalists, and activists. The contributors to this volume put such a cooperation into practice and present not only academic articles, but also interviews, short stories, poems, and political essays. Readers will encounter the -climatic subject- as an entity and as a historical force. But they will also hear the -climatic subject- posed as a question, a displacement of subjectivation under the condition of the climate crisis. Finally, they will find the -climatic subject- as a connector for new subjectivities yet to be embodied in cultural practice.

Martin Zähringer is a literary critic and climate cultures journalist based in Berlin. He writes documentaries and radio features with an international approach, often on climate crisis relations. He is one of the founders and art director of the CLIMATE CULTURES network berlin e.V., which tries to connect people from different professional branches and with interests in science, arts, journalism, literature, politics and activism - gathering global impressions of climate cultures bottom up and connecting them.

Simon Probst (Dr. phil.), born in 1993, is a postdoctoral scholar at Universität Vechta, where he works in the DFG-project "Natural-cultural Memory in the Anthropocene. Archives, Media and Literatures of Earth History" (2024-2026), which addresses cultural dimensions of planetary crises from the perspective of interdisciplinary memory studies. At the intersection of literature and knowledge, his work brings together cultural and literary theory with different fields of scientific knowledge such as climatology, earth system science, or ecosemiotics, developing planetary and ecological perspectives on German literature from the 18th to the 21st century.

Matthias Grotkopp is an assistant professor for digital film studies at the Seminar for Film Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. His research interests include the audiovisuality of the climate crisis and ecological disaster, genre theory and the relation of politics and poetics, the films of the so-called Berlin School as well as digital methods of film analysis.