Melting ice and the paradoxes of Zeno: Didactic impulses and aesthetic distanciation in German climate change fiction

Although global warming has been a topic of American and British popular fiction since the 1980s, its literary representation has only recently become an object of academic enquiry. Perhaps a score of German novels on the subject have also appeared, and critical analysis of these is now called for. Following a general outline of the socio-political, philosophical, and ethical issues which climate change raises, and of the particular aesthetic challenges which writing about global warming poses, Ilija Trojanow’s 'EisTau' (Melting Ice, 2011) serves as a basis for discussion of the tensions between confessional and didactic impulses on the one hand, and recognition of the need for an aesthetic facilitating detachment on the other.