From Egocentrism to Ecocentrism: Nature and morality in German writing in the 1980s

In the late 1970s, the focus of the German environmental movement shifted away from rational, scientific efforts to control consumption and pollution, and a radical, holist eco-philosophy emerged. Myth, religiosity and aesthetics came to the fore, and ecology became a matter of morality. Four key prose works from the first half of the 1980s are examined as examples of the potential of creative writing to contribute to public debate on the ethics of our relationship with nature: Die Rättin, Kassandra, Die Wallfahrer and Moos. Günter Grass, Carl Amery, Christa Wolf and Klaus Modick represent literary standpoints of humanist anthropocentrism, progressive Catholicism, cultural feminism and New Age pantheism respectively.