The days preceding the September 11, 1881 landslides in Elm, Switzerland form the basis for Franz Hohler’s historical novella Die Steinflut. Like many of Hohler’s other works, Die Steinflut focuses on environmental issues. Yet unlike the novel Der neue Berg or the short story “Die Rückeroberung,” Die Steinflut has attracted little critical attention. My analysis places the work within the larger Swiss traditions of catastrophe literature and the novella. The disaster – the collapse of a mountainside – that destroys the village is man-made and largely unforeseen except by the narrator, a seven-year old girl. The anthropogenic nature of this catastrophe allows Hohler to demonstrate the threats the environment is facing from human beings and gives the text a relevance for the present day.

Haque, Kamaal. Franz Hohler’s Die Steinflut: The Lessons of Man-Made Ecological Catastrophe. Gegenwarts Literatur: Ein Germanistisches Jahrbuch / A German Studies Yearbook 19 (2020): 271-289.

Kamaal Haque is a professor of German at Dickinson College.

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