@article {Buchholz102, author = {Paul Buchholz}, title = {Unlikely Escapes: Ecological Counterculture in Franz Krahberger{\textquoteright}s Humbolts Reise}, volume = {112}, number = {1}, pages = {102--126}, year = {2020}, doi = {10.3368/m.112.1.102}, publisher = {University of Wisconsin Press}, abstract = {Since the {\textquotedblleft}explosion{\textquotedblright} (Radkau) of environmentalist discourse on both sides of the Atlantic around 1970, primitivist fantasies of a {\textquoteleft}return to nature{\textquoteright} have played an ambiguous role in green movements. Even if grassroots and parliamentary green movements did not seriously advocate an exit from technological civilization, Arcadian visions nonetheless established themselves as a consistent feature of green thought. This article examines how the Austrian writer Franz Krahberger{\textquoteright}s experimental 1989 novel Humbolts Reise [sic] negotiates such an ambivalent attachment to primitivism, and considers how this negotiation resonates with Austrian and West German green activism of the 1970s and 1980s. Humbolts Reise, as a work of so-called Katastrophenliteratur that was typical in German-language letters of those decades, tells the story of a depressed Viennese intellectual who both grapples with a troubled personal life and ultimately transforms his urge to {\textquotedblleft}live outside technological civilization{\textquotedblright} into a mode of literary communication. (PB)}, issn = {0026-9271}, URL = {https://mon.uwpress.org/content/112/1/102}, eprint = {https://mon.uwpress.org/content/112/1/102.full.pdf}, journal = {Monatshefte} }