Ingo Uhlig is a humanities scholar with a passion for technology. He examines how art and literature address the topics of climate change and energy transition. In the WindNode project, among other things, he systematically recorded and prepared relevant works. In his current book “Telling the Energy Transition” he traces how the energy changes of the last 250 years have been reflected in stories.
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You have observed that “village wind thrillers” have developed into their own mini-genre in the 2010s – for example Under people by July Zeh. What is characteristic of these novels?
The energy transition is being discussed there more as an economic problem and not as an ecological one. The dispute is mainly about property and space, usually with a view to the past. You can find that sobering.
Ingo Uhlig studied philosophy and sociology. Among other things, he is a professor of German studies at the University of Halle-Wittenberg and works as part of the 50Hertz guest lectureship “New Energy Systems and Energy Cultures” at the TU Berlin.
(Image: Ingo Uhlig)
But this view is justified. Wind farms, for example, are easier to build if the village benefits from the proceeds.
In any case. These texts show where we should really keep an open ear if we want to advance the energy transition. And you get to know the structures that are not particularly innovative. But this lesson is learned relatively quickly. Often these stories make it quite easy for themselves because they do not ask the question of how we can design a just ecological future in villages. This is far more complex than the question of who owns a wind farm or who earns money from it.
A technologically optimistic genre called “solar punk” is currently developing internationally. Are people fed up with conflict and dystopias?
Solarpunk is a wonderful word that combines the verve and innovative power of punk with the topic of energy. But I don’t see that big stories are developing there. It seems to me that the label needs to be filled with more content. The epochal break is technically within reach, but the cultural pulse is too weak to ignite enthusiasm.
How could that work?
We can tell climate protection not only about fear, dystopia and crisis, but also about new life possibilities, opportunities and collaborations. There’s a lot going on at the moment – like “What if we just save the world” by Frank Schätzing and “Born for great opportunities” by Ullrich Fichtner. However, these are non-fiction books, not novels.
Are utopias perhaps simply too boring from a literary perspective?
Literature has always been fascinated by phases of departure. In the eighties, environmental issues had a certain prominence, for example with Peter Härtling or Monika Maron. Back then, the energy transition was really still a movement, but now it is a broad social event. This is probably not a particularly tempting subject for literary utopias. Things get interesting where such future plans build bridges, where they bring together the present and the future. This is absolutely a competence of artistic approaches – not only to mobilize the imagination, but also to look closely when there are deficits in justice, for example. I don’t see this synaptic moment so much in utopias, but rather in concepts of our present. But you are right: there is little to be found in the field of literature. I find that “tailwind” Burkhard Spinnen analyzed the narrative logic of the entire energy transition very well. But this isn’t a draft of the future, it’s more of an analytical novel.
Does the energy transition also suffer in real life because it is simply poorly told?
To some extent yes. But it also has a very massive counterpoint. There are still strong forces of inertia in the fossil world. Narratives thrive in relationships of power, no narrative without a counter-narrative. We saw this in the debate about the heat pump, but also after the outbreak of the Ukrainian war, when renewables were suddenly considered “free energy”.
(grh)
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