Thistles to the horizon? Everyone should get out – by hand!
Photo: dpa
The market is not exactly flooded with nature literature. In the 80s, nature poetry boomed in the West, and aging Beats also tried their hand at poems about jays and falcons. Climate change wasn’t an issue – or it was, it was just called something different back then. Then came private television, the Internet, globalization, “social” networks – and the forest did not die as predicted “in 20 years at the latest.” Apparently there will soon be no more bees. Yes, where do we live?
Today everyone is talking about climate change, but it doesn’t always sound good. The Slovenian author Nataša Kramberger has now published a book with the Verbrecher-Verlag in which the topic also appears. Since it is not a non-fiction book, it makes you sit up and take notice. It practically begins with a beech and a spruce falling from a slope and almost killing the author’s mother. As a result, we receive dry lessons. Tourists can’t stand the silence in the Slovenian countryside: “They can’t sleep because of the silence.”
In her early 30s, when she had already been living in Germany’s capital village of Berlin for twelve years, Kramberger took over a farm in Jurovski Dol, her birthplace, 1000 kilometers from Berlin. “Three hectares of land and one hectare of forest, an abandoned stable without a facade with a leaky roof and a house made of clay and straw from the 18th century.” The mother had bought the farm as an investment, but never managed it. Bought but not paid off. Unsurprisingly, an old bill collector shows up on Good Friday of the first season with a bunch of aggressive vibes under his arm. Then it gets rough.
“Wauerpfeffer” collects further reflections on Kramberger’s novel “Cursed Mistletoe” from 2021, in which she talked in detail about her move to the Slovenian farm and the difficult attempts to manage it. In general, she is interested in farming. Does she understand that? Can she follow the reader – or vice versa? These are the exciting questions in this book. Things get surreal, for example, when she plants “around two hundred seedlings of a wide variety of plum varieties” in the first year. You don’t read anything about tractors, implements or harvest workers. Not even from drones, without which hardly any organic farm can survive.
Nataša Kramberger portrays herself as a one-woman army, clearing thistle fields that stretch to the horizon with her bare hands. But she admits that she has no idea and that’s why she appreciates sowing calendars (which of course don’t work, climate change is to blame). A look at the sky (moon phases) would be enough. The rest is improvisation, intuition and a bit of luck.
The author’s writing about life out there in particular seems improvised. The balancing act between the self-chosen existence of a writer in the provincial metropolis and the self-chosen dream of digging in the earth in a valley in Slovenia often seems like an internal bullfight. Demand and enthusiasm for work remain alien to each other. Efficiency is frowned upon. The farmers around them don’t take them seriously at first. She comes without knowing anything, but that’s better. Perhaps not every field person understands that she is not “hibernating” but rather “winter writing” (in Berlin). There are no dialogues because this is not entertainment literature, but rather a patchwork of short essays.
Towards the end we learn that her father is a farmer, that agricultural machinery is involved and that she runs an eco-art collective called Zelena Centrala on her farm. Your new book is also an expression of a rural learning process. She doesn’t want to condemn the farmers for spraying their soil, but rather thinks about those who are really responsible for the ongoing ecological crisis.
The end of this book (which can only ever be a beginning) is the strongest, where Kramberger’s words almost become a post-anarchist pamphlet, poetry breaks through: “For all these names, the colloquial, popular, dialectal, funny, poetic, threatening, reminding, telling, rough, delicious, delicate, clear…, bear witness to a single, identical and unmistakable tradition of our earth: the art of survival. Of the noble and fruitful; unruly and combative. The one, common: holistic. Stonecrop.
Nataša Kramberger: Stonecrop. A.d. Slow. Liza Linde. Criminal Publishing House, 126 pages, br., 16 €.